![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
infosheet;
|
"The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes; it doesn’t lie."
|
|
"But what's happened as happened, the poisons poured into the sea cannot be drained out again."
Nen was born in the 800s of Japan, the Nara period, in a very small seaside village. He was the product of a relationship between a human man and a woman that the mortal had thought to be a spirit. His guess was close enough. Nine months later, he had a baby on his doorstep. He shared his tale, and the villagers were conflicted. The child could be a trickster. But no one could conscience killing a child, so they kept him. Nen's human life was spent in a house with children who had been orphaned by the sea. A couple, both devout Buddhists, raised all of them with as much care as they could, using contributions from the village. It's a chicken-egg question, whether Nen first stood himself slightly apart or if he was seen as slightly different, but the separation was subtle in the years of his childhood. He had friends. He played. As he got older, Nen became harder to get along with. He went into building boats because he had a knack for it, but that knack turned into a hardheaded certainty about ideas and concepts that were new and disconcerting. He as soon regarded as unteachable. In a village where harmony was extremely important to the social order, he blew up most of his bridges in the space of a year. The only one who would buy one of his bizarre boats was Haruko, a widow and mother of two, ten years his senior, and just as stubborn. Quite predictably, he fell in love with her. She was doubtful of his advances because he was a weirdo, but eventually assented to marry. Why not? He was handsome, despite a vaguely un-Japanese shape to his face, young, and he could work. He was so terrible at talking to people, she was sure he would become reliant on her. He was also good with children and keeping house. They had two years fishing and building boats together, before Nen's mother came for him. She descended over the house on a flying craft the likes of which he had only dreamed before, and told him it was time. He had heard many stories of spirits and gods, and despite all of his ego and resolution as he had shown the village, this turned in another universe. He went. Haruko told him he was a coward, and he supposed she hadn't heard enough stories. Hundreds of years passed. Nen learned of vampires, time-travelers, goblins in nations across the sea, murderous witches who held counsel with kings, shapechangers who ate children, and healers who lived their whole lives in fear. The line between humans and the supernatural had always been blurry for him, when he lived on a remote island surrounded by the excruciating beauty of nature that united them all. But the multitudes of diversity were confusing and strange, from the cruelty between humans to the indifference of the supernatural monsters. Mostly, he learned how to run the sea. He discovered he came from a line of legends— the little people, the wise men, the artisans and tinkerers that can build something out of anything. However, it might be more accurate to say that the legends had come from his line. Long-lived creatures with technology that allowed them to open doors into empty air or solid mountainsides, to shine light into the bones of animals or the brains of humans and find and kill illness without ever opening a wound. Their machines answered only to them. The programming language was a thing of intuition and magic, lying somewhere between codefied speech and reality manipulation. Nails, cogs, and bits of wood would do for them like they would for no one else, and there was somehow always enough energy to balance out the equations. Nen was apprenticed to his mother specifically to care for the ocean. He took to it well. He liked to monitor coral shoals, watch the successive generations of fish grow stronger and bigger. He'd mourn the mess left by an undersea volcano, but rejoice when life in starfish and minute bacteria and massive whales reclaimed it. He wasn't really supposed to pick a side, but he sided with life. It wasn't hard. The sea worked itself out in the end. Human peoples and the other supernatural were interesting to play with in the interims of leisure time. His mother eventually stepped down. This was also the natural course of things: just as human minds begin to drop fragments of memory or the tensile flex of creativity, she had begun to lose her grip on their subtle power. Bickering with the machines, getting lost mid-build. Even the chamber that locked their age and health in time was beginning to lose its grip. She still looked no older than thirty, but she had blisters sometimes. Headaches. She explained that eventually, the grey and the wrinkles would come. She wasn't afraid; it was only death, and she had been here for a very long time. Everything changed when his family died. The human one. He'd kept track off-and-on. He'd missed it when Haruka passed, but saw she had remarried again-- that there were four children by the end. He saw the children have children and move off the island and into Japan proper, saw them struggle in poverty and the cruelty of others, carried through by stubborn perseverance sometimes and luck others, always learning, building, miserable one year and elated the next. Nen wondered how long it would take them to cross the sea. He didn't intervene much-- he was with his legacy much as he was with the sea. But one day, he looked to his odd clocks and small monitors, and could not find them. He could not find any of them. In a bizarre coincidence, World War II had taken them all by 1946. It was then-- possibly a coincidence, probably not— that Nen also began to notice the sea filling with poisons, that mankind was truly changing the face of the world with their sawblades and pipe systems and talentless, haphazard experiments. His spite deepened in the bleak years afterward, as he ventured around the world, raising rabble with the kobolds and the kami. They saw what he saw, albeit with less rage. They all saw shit everywhere. As the decades hardened his heart, he resolved that it was no longer acceptable to stand by and watch humans fuck up everything between themselves and the earth that sustained them. He resolved that he would take the ocean, if they didn't appreciate it. One problem: he was getting old. He had no successor, and even if he could build something to gather the sea, it would require time and dedication to keep her safe and well, to find somewhere else. Perhaps merely to wait out the death of humankind. He built a machine then to help him choose, knowing that the craft might be his last: a mechanical gull with a sharp eye for intelligence, for judgment, for righteous spirit and interesting flaws. The gull flew the world and found Rodrigo. |
|
"We plant trees for those born later."
Do you really want to destroy humankind, or are you just mad? Why can't it be both? Kübler-Ross theorized that there were five stages to grief, including denial, anger, and bargaining. It wasn't until later in her life that she suggested that the experience of loss can be very different for everyone, and some people experience all of the stages, others in different sequence, and some individuals may never go through a given one. This applies to Nen mostly because he's super mad and intends to stay that way until he dies, which should be in approximately two hundred years at this rate. Nen's rage is quite impressive in proportion and cold in temperature. He is a ruthless liar and prospective mass murderer! Because his family died and his life's work— the maintenance of the ocean-- has begun to deteriorate, he's basically written off mankind as garbage. He wants to take the ocean away, in full knowledge that it would lead to catastrophic deaths worldwide. If he accomplished this today, he would experience little in the way of guilt; his heart is hard, his philosophies and sensibilities cold after watching the circle of life come around and around for a thousand years. To be fair, he's less worried about most animals, forests, ecosystems, because they have similar "keepers" like him to prepare and maintain them. It's humankind, really, that he sees as a problem, short-sighted, short-lived, confused, pointless, toxic. He hates them, and he only has to crack open a given history book to reinforce his reasoning. Mankind does fuck up something awful. But peek under the hood, and Nen is considerably more human than he initially appears. Mankind is an easy target, but on some level, he blames himself for the loss of his human legacy and there's a grain of truth to that. He had been reticent and accepting of his fate with the supernatural instead of fighting to be with his wife. He had let his generations and the generations after run their own risks and take their own chances in the world instead of using his power to pave the way for them. He feels so guilty for having stood by, he's vowed now and forward to take decisive action. Despite his internal drama, Nen outwardly conducts himself tidily and with precision, carefully moderated degrees of emotion, a scientist's logic. He likes to study and examine and analyze and debate. He loves ideas and creativity, but always framed in purpose and usefulness. He has both the confidence of a thousand-year-old creature and the obstinacy of a twenty-year-old man, but his respect can be won, and he enjoys being entertained as much as the next person. On the surface, he appears extremely reasonable. Sort of. He's very bossy, until he arrives at a topic where doesn't care. Nen has a weakness for all things oceanic, funny kids, black coffee, ladies in kimono and men who can't back down from an argument. He is considerably gentler and more tolerant with his fellow supernaturals than he is with mankind, even when those supernaturals tend to be more human in demeanor or habits. He doesn't need a great deal of companionship, but when he has it, he appreciates the reprieve from the centuries of solitude he had spent before. He can become quite protective of his young charges, and all the ways they might come to harm, including their own stupidity. He exerts a shitton of subconscious effort to avoid having to reconcile his apocalyptic ambitions with the small precious moments of teaching and day-to-day life that he does enjoy exactly as they are. |
|
"You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting."
All of the Seakeeper's abilities are based on an underlying ability of mechanical insight that allows him to see into the fundamental 'code' of reality and produce anything from odd MacGuyver solutions to advanced or even unnatural technology. They are effectively the brownies and tinkerers of old stories, the cobblers and dreamsmiths, but considerably more advanced than alleged, and in a deity role. Nen thinks of everything as machines, including the natural world-- which just so happens to be a machine that he knows how to operate... if only humankind would stop screwing it up. The most common uses of his technology are as follows: LIFE SUPPORT ( THE BODDY OF BUDDHA ) Once every few months, Nen and his kind must enter a chamber that will fortify their being. It generally improves their health, heals existing injuries, and fortifies their resilience, and has some de-aging effects as well. Because of these machines, their people are extremely long-lived, and are at peak human condition (their physical proportions allowing). Even without using the chamber, they also heal at a double-accelerated rate, though only when at rest. Notably, the chamber stops being effective after 1000 years, the effectiveness gradually fading away. Due to neurological and other deterioration, the keepers are effectively human after that. TRACTOR BEAM ( COME WITH ME ) Bracers strapped to his wrists underneath his clothes, effectively producing telekinetic ability. The maximum dead lift is 2 tons, allowing him to raise a car. However, it is intended more for fine motor control, such as crafting or even writing. TELEPORTERS ( HAVE MAGIC, WILL TRAVEL ) Teleporters come in varying shapes and sizes and with a variety of special effects. Some seem to open glowing doors in the air, allowing a fixed gateway that others can then follow through. Others only wink one individual out of sight and bring them back into the world a mile or less froom where they started out. In all cases, it is very important that the user know the target destination, otherwise horrific injuries may be incurred from matter colliding with matter. SURVEILLANCE ( I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE ) Typically used to keep the natural world running, Keepers have the power to create what are basically camera, listening, and other monitoring (pH, radiation, X-ray, sonography, etc.) devices, the theme typically consist with their element of choice. These are often robotic in nature. Nen particularly favors fish, seabirds, biting flies, but he does have a spy whale that he is very fond of. Due to the gradual deterioation of his abilities, Nen's machines have begun to take on quirks and the beginnings of 'intelligence' of their own, usually functions of his own personality. They do not always do what he wants them to do. HEALING ( LET'S SEW YOUR GUTS BACK IN ) Not quite as advanced as the chamber science that only works on his own kind, Nen nonetheless typically goes about with the equipment of a state-of-the-art hospital on his person. Small implements are capable of laser-suturing wounds, adjusting and resetting bones, and metabolically stimulating the healing process. He usually lacks the patience to see a severe injury through to proper healing, and prefers to send them off to the experts. However, he would be capable of it, what with bodies presenting to him with the logic of machines. |
coding credit: ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
proverbially
proverbially