I am the best.
Oct. 25th, 2016 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
geekandthreequartersUser Name/Nick: Siobhan
User DW:fiercebadrabbit
AIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Hardison, Chime, Toad
Character Name: Nadayki di'Berinango
Series: Confederation of Valor
Age: 21
From When?: Toward the end of An Ancient Peace, instead of being successfully rescued along with the rest of the grave robbers, Nadayki is caught outside the shuttle while fleeing H'san guardians and is made short work of.
Inmate: Nadayki is a selfish little shit with a complete absence of empathy, no respect for the lives, wellbeing, or property of others, and a strong tendency to admire and emulate casual cruelty. From a rough childhood at the bottom of the social barrel, he grew up both convinced that everyone and everything was unfairly stacked against him and his greatness and pretty sure that might made right. How did the ruling families get so important if not by squeezing resources and power out of everyone else. Proving that he was as smart as they were, especially after being rejected from the more traditional out for a kid from a lousy background, lead to three completely pointless deaths. He treats that as a punchline or a boast depending on his audience. The lives lost and destruction wreaked by piracy? Cost of doing business, and not one of the major costs. Surviving on a fluke when his thytrins were killed? Just makes him feel pretty clever (or so he insists). Violent, ugly deaths among the crew of weapon-smuggling grave robbers he ran with? Kinda funny, and he got to take their weapons. He's not very good at being bad—most of his damage done is impersonal and incidental, but he's far from good. Even his few redeeming features are ultimately selfish and petulant. Being an excellent tech just feeds his ego and offsets his insecurity, not to mention using it to commit whatever crime he's told by someone impressive. His sweetness toward the few people he does care about is all about him, making sure they like him, pay attention to him, are impressed by him.
Arrival: He is an involuntary inmate, though not too upset about it. He was going to prison anyway.
Abilities/Powers: As a hacker, programmer, and general tech, Nadayki's very nearly as good as he thinks he is, capable of breaking into everything from an alien species' ancient tomb-traps to military grade encryption locks. That is the sum total of his skill, however. He doesn't even do hardware repairs if he can help it.
As a species, di'Taykan are not particularly hardy, but they do have sharper senses than a human and withstand extreme cold much better. Heat, however, is a killer, and their bones are a bit light, their immune systems not especially impressive. Their vision is adaptable to low-light conditions and focuses on contrast and detail even at a distance. Scent is focused on biological markers and they can recognize things like gender, age, and general health as well as a species identity. They also produce hormones which, on other di'Taykan, signal social cues and sexual readiness, but which most other organic species encounter as the equivalent of very powerful aphrodisiacs. It's legally mandated that di'Taykan use a pheromone masking device around other species, but it can be turned down or off. What appears to be di'Taykan hair is actually a very sensitive sensory organ that reads pressure, atmospheric conditions, balance, and pheromones, and is very painful if damaged.
Personality: Nadayki is an insecure egomaniac. He's a brilliant technician with the brains of a rock. A member of a species famed for raw sexuality, effortless grace, and natural sophistication, he's a spindly nerd who trips over his own feet and can't figure out how flirting works. It's not so much that he's complicated as that he's an incompetent twit with very little sense of self that isn't wrapped entirely in surface and entitlement. He's a brilliant programmer who deserves recognition and attention, preferably in the form of a devoted vantru and lots of money and people acknowledging his importance. Maybe naming him progenitor? He won't be qui'Taykan for years, but it's always seemed like a pretty boring stage in life, especially for a male, and it's good to have plans. Preferably plans other people drop into his lap because he's great.
Nadayki grew up poor, neglected, and noticed only when he was in trouble enough to be worth swatting or shouting at. The adults in his family were mostly petty thieves, con artists, and, rarely, honestly but not particularly gainfully employed. There were few qui'Taykan, and childbirth strained already tight resources, so he had few close thytrins. That worked out in his favor, really, leaving Almon and Dysun without anyone else to fasten onto. They were tougher, meaner, naturals at the sorts of things di'Taykan were supposed to be, but he had the stronger personality. They followed his lead and let him dictate their loyalties. They let him solidify his idea of himself as the best and brightest star, and the world around them, the struggle to even eat enough, let alone handle school and work and not getting noticed by the children of better families, dug the chip into his shoulder that let him explain away every failure as the deck being stacked against them. He had to admit to his own awkwardness, the ways his inabilities to play di'Taykan games worked against him, but he could even explain that away as him just being smarter than they were, better able to focus. Rejection by the military and the private sector despite clear evidence he was better than any of their current programmers left him utterly set in his various convictions by the time of the murder-graffiti incident. He was as determined a little shit as there'd ever been in the universe.
One of the biggest problems is that he's almost as smart as he thinks he is. Security crumbles when he says so, and when he's working, he's as close as he really gets to happy. He can work for hours, completely blocking out the irritating, uncooperative world outside, the world where he's awkward and clumsy and trash, and fall into numbers and pathways and patterns. If people just worked like that, he could understand them, Could be what a di'Taykan is supposed to be. His fingers twitch in his sleep sometimes, tracing the slates and control panels where the universe makes sense.
His successes feed his ego, but that means he needs to cling to only successes. He hasn't learned anything really new in years. Expanding his skillset would mean not being the best at things. (And he's a bit lazy.) And taking responsibility for the parts of his life that exist outside computers is one of those new skills. Just talking to people about anything that's not hacking is too hard. Flirting is impossible. Staying on top of his own needs, needs for contact and comfort and sex, that's what other di'Taykan do. That's what Al and Dy managed for him, and what Sujuno tormented him with, and what he's completely lost now. (Nadayki's been touch starved long enough for the effects to be dangerous, not unlike the effects of solitary confinement on a human.) Knowing what to say, what to do, even keeping track of things like eating, all those priorities are someone else's problem.
Thytrin are bound by history and family and affection, and Nadayki's were unusually loyal. Their loss hit him hard despite noisy public claims that he's just glad he was smart enough to get out. But even with them, he only ever thinks of Dy and Almon in terms of himself. He's never thought about what they might have had ahead in their own lives, what death by cutting laser and armory explosion might have been like, how they might have felt about being ignored all through their last days alive while he worked on those stupid locks. When he cries for them at night, it's because he's alone, because he can't have them, not for their own sakes. And they were the only people in a big universe he loved at all. Socially maladapted as he is for a di'Taykan, lacking grace or intuition or even much awareness of pheromones and sex, he might not be responsible for all his clueless unkindness, but it's mostly on him. Everyone else he treats with either disdain or obsequiousness, equally artless and ill chosen, needy and clingy if he thinks they have something he wants, impressed by force and cruelty and noise, drawn to intelligence but threatened if it overlaps too much with his own. He brags about whatever comes to mind and scoffs at any topic of conversation he didn't pick. He shows off shamelessly, needing not so much to be valued and useful as to be important and have everyone know about it. If someone does strike him as worth following, he's loyal insofar as it serves his purposes and no further. If someone's worth keeping, which doesn't happen often, he might be able to make space for them. He's protective, involved, even sweet. But it's still about him. Pay attention to how great he is, look after him, banter with him so he feels like the cleverest person in the room, fuk him on command, cuddle him until it stops hurting, and your reward is... getting to dote on Nadayki di'Berinango.
Barge Reactions: Nadayki has lived in space for years, which is actually going to make it harder to adjust. The barge doesn't feel like a space ship, doesn't follow the laws of physics that a ship would have to, and it's full of humans but no other Confederation species. Just its existence is enough to set his teeth on edge. The mix of species itself won't bother him too much, just the fact that he doesn't already know them. He'll have a much harder time with characters from fantasy continuities or any worlds that don't follow his idea of the laws of reality, and possibly go around offending them and confusing himself.
Events like floods and breaches will scare the hell out of him but, like all sincere emotion, inspire him to act super cool and maybe a little amused until he completely breaks down, because emotional intelligence is not a strength of his. Ports at least will break the monotony. His response to being in prison won't be terribly powerful, though, since he was already headed to one when he died.
Path to Redemption: Nadayki needs two major adjustments. The poisonous mix of runaway ego and pathetic insecurity that fuels his nastiness needs to be tempered, and he needs to learn other people have value and feelings and are not just accessories to the cool and important story of Nadayki and how everyone is mean to him. And being away from both murdering space pirates and the pressure of Taykan social strata for a bit can only help. While his fundamental selfishness is an obstacle, and he's impressed by violence and cruelty, he doesn't have much real aggression to him, just spite, and he does have the capacity to care about people, just in clingy, annoying, ultimately self-absorbed ways. Teasing out the very suppressed good in him and smothering the serious meanness will be a challenge, and replacing his pirate's attitude with some kind of actual morals will make some poor warden's life very difficult, but it's doable. It helps that he's young. And fragile. And incredibly needy. And really, all those things ought to be fixed, too. Later.
History: While membership in the Confederation was supposedly contingent on moving to a merit-based system, the Taykan homeworld has been slow to give up its aristocracy. Naming traditions are still strong, for instance. Powerful families have very short names. With nine letters, any member of the Berinango family was never going to have an easy time. Legal options included low-tier maintenance work, sucking up to rich people who'd sneer at you for your trouble, and leaving. Illegal options weren't much better. Slightly more profitable, much more dangerous. So from a very early age, Nadayki assumed he'd leave. And the army was the way to do it. Someone had to fly into deep space and get shot at by the Others, and if you were smart enough to not die in your first contract, you'd have enough of a decent start to head somewhere no one cared about the family name.
He focused on that for his entire adolescence, feeding his own particular awkwardness and inability to read basic social cues by spending all his time studying. A gutter brat like him would need fabulous grades, not just talent, to be considered for the kind of position he deserved. He relied on his two closest thytrins (rough translation, cousin, though the blood relationship didn't have to be that near and the social expectations were quite different) to keep him from getting his ass kicked. They'd all go off to the navy together and it wouldn't matter anymore.
The navy turned him down. In desperation he even tried the marines, though he had about as much interest in infantry as shoveling shit on some farm in the boonies. Apparently the recruiting offices talked. He blamed it on the five- and six-letter names of the recruiters, and his thytrins agreed, and he never bothered to examine whether his attitude might in fact be a factor. They agreed not to go since he couldn't, of course. What did Dysun and Almon have to do that wasn't following their brilliant Nadi's lead?
But without his escape plan, his options were fukking limited. He knew computers. No one was going to pay trash like him for tech work, especially not trash who'd been rejected from the clubs where your main job was being killed by aliens. He made a few good faith (well, mostly good) attempts and was laughed at each time. Finally, he turned his skill on the planetary defense satellite and used its laser function to carve all nine letters of his name into the Prime Progenitor's lawn. The fact that there were a couple people on the lawn at the time didn't bother him all that much, but did make him a little more eager to run for it. With his devoted thytrins in tow.
Work wasn't that hard to come by if you were talented, unethical, and desperate enough to be easy to pay. Nadayki's hacking, Dysun's piloting, and Almon's cheerful enthusiasm about hurting things got them a berth on a pirate ship that mainly antagonized CSOs, snatching legal salvage once the hard work of picking it out had been done. When they picked up a marine corps armory, though, the captain decided to mix things up. He kidnapped a CSO and forced him to help Nadayki break the seal, expecting the kind of payoff that'd set them up for life. And it almost worked. Sure as hell wasn't Nadayki's fault it didn't. He broke both the seals with barely any help from stupid Craig. And was ushered away from a weird and confusing fight by stupid Craig, which happened to leave him trapped on the station when the ship tried to escape from Craig's terrifying ex-sergeant girlfriend and got reduced to space dust. Dy and Al onboard.
He was the smart one, getting away. The fact that he'd never hear their voices again, smell their hair, sleep between them after they'd worn themselves out with sex and bickering and bad takeout and sex and bragging and sex... Well, that was the universe's too damn bad. He managed to dodge most of the destruction of the station, wasn't important enough a criminal to be anybody's prime target. He bummed around a bit, making his way as a willing bedwarmer and freelance hacker, and his considerable skill got him picked up for a very specialized crew. Their assignment? To break into a hidden necropolis on a dead planet and dig out the weapons buried there a millenium before by a race that was now all sweetness and pacifism. The crypts were full of traps and maddening security systems, all of which were no problem for Nadayki's brilliant mind and flawless technique. The several members of the expedition who died on the way in just weren't smart enough.
A few tendays on a creepy dead planet trying to kill him, while weird, might not have had too much effect on Nadayki on its own. His life was already a twisted mess and his emotional state beyond the point where being spooked would have done extra damage. But he was in deep mourning, not helped by denial, and the makeup of the crew was not good for his psyche. Anyone in the Confederation could have identified di'Taykan as the most sexually indiscriminate species in known space. Only another di'Taykan could understand that it went a lot deeper than the fun part. There was no Taykan language with less than seventeen words for touch, all with their own shades of meaning, all culturally and emotionally necessary. Touch starved was a medical diagnosis, not just a handy description. Sex could make up for some of what as missing, and a trusted friend of another species might be made to understand, but Nadayki had no one to trust and only hostile, bored, going through the motions sex to tide him through. And he had Major Sujuno.
She was di'Taykan, too. She should have understood. She did, whether she admitted it or not. He could smell the rise and fall of her moods and pheromones. She radiated desperate and twisted and wrong, but she radiated warmth and familiarity and comfort, too. And refused him all that, rejecting even the simplest, slightest comfort touch. He couldn't bury his need in regular sex with krai and humans with her there, and she went out of her way to make sure he never forgot she was shunning him, looking down her nose from her education and money and four letter name. Over the course of horribly stressful tendays, closeness and underground terrors and death, the effects of touch starvation started to show on him. He couldn't focus, found himself centimeters from glomming onto even assholes like Dion whenever they didn't overtly case him away, found himself unable to even go through the motions of work and talking and paying attention. Dreams turned sour and snuck into the edges of his life.
When they were trapped by the electronically animated corpses of a H'san army, it didn't feel that much worse. When they were rescued by stupid Craig and hs dumb murderer girlfriend, he couldn't make himself care too much. And when the Major decided exterminating the things instead of taking an escape got him snatched by one of the things, well, that seemed pretty fair.
Sample Journal Entry:
[The face on the screen is a little odd—thin and a little too pointy, high cheekbones and narrow nose just a little beyond the normal human range, eyes lacking anything that could be called a pupil, exactly, just darker spots in the green. In that particular green. The eyes are a pretty, jewel-like shade, the skin a sort of shimmery pastel, the hair like ill-advisedly lime-flavored cotton candy. Someone apparently dipped an elf in a vat of Easter Egg dye.]
Right, I decided I only feel like doing this one time.
[The face is hard to read, a little too weird to peg things like age, but the voice is decidedly petulant.]
Why there's a bunch of fukking humans and not a single other Federation species is... Beside the point, I guess. I'm di'Taykan. Don't touch my masker—
[He taps a thin metal ring around his neck.]
Or my hair. It's not actually hair. ...Well, don't touch it without asking.
[A pause, then an awkward twist of the mouth that sort of looks like a smile. Humans are the only sentient species that thinks showing teeth is a good thing. He attempts a wink. It's supposed to be playful. It's more painful.]
Everything else is fair game.
[He meant to say something else, he's pretty—Oh.]
Nadayki di'Berinango. I hack stuff. And look better than you doing it.
Sample RP: Elves in space
Special Notes: Nadayki is from a species that communicates partially in pheromones. Normal levels for a di'Taykan that would communicate mood, health, relatedness, etc. in addition to sexual availability tend to just his every arousal button at once in the brains of most other species. While he's generally wearing his legally mandated masker, and much prefers life with it, there's a lot of potential for weirdness and mayhem.
User DW:
fiercebadrabbitAIM/IM: blitztsunami
E-mail: israfel1030@gmail.com
Other Characters: Hardison, Chime, Toad
Character Name: Nadayki di'Berinango
Series: Confederation of Valor
Age: 21
From When?: Toward the end of An Ancient Peace, instead of being successfully rescued along with the rest of the grave robbers, Nadayki is caught outside the shuttle while fleeing H'san guardians and is made short work of.
Inmate: Nadayki is a selfish little shit with a complete absence of empathy, no respect for the lives, wellbeing, or property of others, and a strong tendency to admire and emulate casual cruelty. From a rough childhood at the bottom of the social barrel, he grew up both convinced that everyone and everything was unfairly stacked against him and his greatness and pretty sure that might made right. How did the ruling families get so important if not by squeezing resources and power out of everyone else. Proving that he was as smart as they were, especially after being rejected from the more traditional out for a kid from a lousy background, lead to three completely pointless deaths. He treats that as a punchline or a boast depending on his audience. The lives lost and destruction wreaked by piracy? Cost of doing business, and not one of the major costs. Surviving on a fluke when his thytrins were killed? Just makes him feel pretty clever (or so he insists). Violent, ugly deaths among the crew of weapon-smuggling grave robbers he ran with? Kinda funny, and he got to take their weapons. He's not very good at being bad—most of his damage done is impersonal and incidental, but he's far from good. Even his few redeeming features are ultimately selfish and petulant. Being an excellent tech just feeds his ego and offsets his insecurity, not to mention using it to commit whatever crime he's told by someone impressive. His sweetness toward the few people he does care about is all about him, making sure they like him, pay attention to him, are impressed by him.
Arrival: He is an involuntary inmate, though not too upset about it. He was going to prison anyway.
Abilities/Powers: As a hacker, programmer, and general tech, Nadayki's very nearly as good as he thinks he is, capable of breaking into everything from an alien species' ancient tomb-traps to military grade encryption locks. That is the sum total of his skill, however. He doesn't even do hardware repairs if he can help it.
As a species, di'Taykan are not particularly hardy, but they do have sharper senses than a human and withstand extreme cold much better. Heat, however, is a killer, and their bones are a bit light, their immune systems not especially impressive. Their vision is adaptable to low-light conditions and focuses on contrast and detail even at a distance. Scent is focused on biological markers and they can recognize things like gender, age, and general health as well as a species identity. They also produce hormones which, on other di'Taykan, signal social cues and sexual readiness, but which most other organic species encounter as the equivalent of very powerful aphrodisiacs. It's legally mandated that di'Taykan use a pheromone masking device around other species, but it can be turned down or off. What appears to be di'Taykan hair is actually a very sensitive sensory organ that reads pressure, atmospheric conditions, balance, and pheromones, and is very painful if damaged.
Personality: Nadayki is an insecure egomaniac. He's a brilliant technician with the brains of a rock. A member of a species famed for raw sexuality, effortless grace, and natural sophistication, he's a spindly nerd who trips over his own feet and can't figure out how flirting works. It's not so much that he's complicated as that he's an incompetent twit with very little sense of self that isn't wrapped entirely in surface and entitlement. He's a brilliant programmer who deserves recognition and attention, preferably in the form of a devoted vantru and lots of money and people acknowledging his importance. Maybe naming him progenitor? He won't be qui'Taykan for years, but it's always seemed like a pretty boring stage in life, especially for a male, and it's good to have plans. Preferably plans other people drop into his lap because he's great.
Nadayki grew up poor, neglected, and noticed only when he was in trouble enough to be worth swatting or shouting at. The adults in his family were mostly petty thieves, con artists, and, rarely, honestly but not particularly gainfully employed. There were few qui'Taykan, and childbirth strained already tight resources, so he had few close thytrins. That worked out in his favor, really, leaving Almon and Dysun without anyone else to fasten onto. They were tougher, meaner, naturals at the sorts of things di'Taykan were supposed to be, but he had the stronger personality. They followed his lead and let him dictate their loyalties. They let him solidify his idea of himself as the best and brightest star, and the world around them, the struggle to even eat enough, let alone handle school and work and not getting noticed by the children of better families, dug the chip into his shoulder that let him explain away every failure as the deck being stacked against them. He had to admit to his own awkwardness, the ways his inabilities to play di'Taykan games worked against him, but he could even explain that away as him just being smarter than they were, better able to focus. Rejection by the military and the private sector despite clear evidence he was better than any of their current programmers left him utterly set in his various convictions by the time of the murder-graffiti incident. He was as determined a little shit as there'd ever been in the universe.
One of the biggest problems is that he's almost as smart as he thinks he is. Security crumbles when he says so, and when he's working, he's as close as he really gets to happy. He can work for hours, completely blocking out the irritating, uncooperative world outside, the world where he's awkward and clumsy and trash, and fall into numbers and pathways and patterns. If people just worked like that, he could understand them, Could be what a di'Taykan is supposed to be. His fingers twitch in his sleep sometimes, tracing the slates and control panels where the universe makes sense.
His successes feed his ego, but that means he needs to cling to only successes. He hasn't learned anything really new in years. Expanding his skillset would mean not being the best at things. (And he's a bit lazy.) And taking responsibility for the parts of his life that exist outside computers is one of those new skills. Just talking to people about anything that's not hacking is too hard. Flirting is impossible. Staying on top of his own needs, needs for contact and comfort and sex, that's what other di'Taykan do. That's what Al and Dy managed for him, and what Sujuno tormented him with, and what he's completely lost now. (Nadayki's been touch starved long enough for the effects to be dangerous, not unlike the effects of solitary confinement on a human.) Knowing what to say, what to do, even keeping track of things like eating, all those priorities are someone else's problem.
Thytrin are bound by history and family and affection, and Nadayki's were unusually loyal. Their loss hit him hard despite noisy public claims that he's just glad he was smart enough to get out. But even with them, he only ever thinks of Dy and Almon in terms of himself. He's never thought about what they might have had ahead in their own lives, what death by cutting laser and armory explosion might have been like, how they might have felt about being ignored all through their last days alive while he worked on those stupid locks. When he cries for them at night, it's because he's alone, because he can't have them, not for their own sakes. And they were the only people in a big universe he loved at all. Socially maladapted as he is for a di'Taykan, lacking grace or intuition or even much awareness of pheromones and sex, he might not be responsible for all his clueless unkindness, but it's mostly on him. Everyone else he treats with either disdain or obsequiousness, equally artless and ill chosen, needy and clingy if he thinks they have something he wants, impressed by force and cruelty and noise, drawn to intelligence but threatened if it overlaps too much with his own. He brags about whatever comes to mind and scoffs at any topic of conversation he didn't pick. He shows off shamelessly, needing not so much to be valued and useful as to be important and have everyone know about it. If someone does strike him as worth following, he's loyal insofar as it serves his purposes and no further. If someone's worth keeping, which doesn't happen often, he might be able to make space for them. He's protective, involved, even sweet. But it's still about him. Pay attention to how great he is, look after him, banter with him so he feels like the cleverest person in the room, fuk him on command, cuddle him until it stops hurting, and your reward is... getting to dote on Nadayki di'Berinango.
Barge Reactions: Nadayki has lived in space for years, which is actually going to make it harder to adjust. The barge doesn't feel like a space ship, doesn't follow the laws of physics that a ship would have to, and it's full of humans but no other Confederation species. Just its existence is enough to set his teeth on edge. The mix of species itself won't bother him too much, just the fact that he doesn't already know them. He'll have a much harder time with characters from fantasy continuities or any worlds that don't follow his idea of the laws of reality, and possibly go around offending them and confusing himself.
Events like floods and breaches will scare the hell out of him but, like all sincere emotion, inspire him to act super cool and maybe a little amused until he completely breaks down, because emotional intelligence is not a strength of his. Ports at least will break the monotony. His response to being in prison won't be terribly powerful, though, since he was already headed to one when he died.
Path to Redemption: Nadayki needs two major adjustments. The poisonous mix of runaway ego and pathetic insecurity that fuels his nastiness needs to be tempered, and he needs to learn other people have value and feelings and are not just accessories to the cool and important story of Nadayki and how everyone is mean to him. And being away from both murdering space pirates and the pressure of Taykan social strata for a bit can only help. While his fundamental selfishness is an obstacle, and he's impressed by violence and cruelty, he doesn't have much real aggression to him, just spite, and he does have the capacity to care about people, just in clingy, annoying, ultimately self-absorbed ways. Teasing out the very suppressed good in him and smothering the serious meanness will be a challenge, and replacing his pirate's attitude with some kind of actual morals will make some poor warden's life very difficult, but it's doable. It helps that he's young. And fragile. And incredibly needy. And really, all those things ought to be fixed, too. Later.
History: While membership in the Confederation was supposedly contingent on moving to a merit-based system, the Taykan homeworld has been slow to give up its aristocracy. Naming traditions are still strong, for instance. Powerful families have very short names. With nine letters, any member of the Berinango family was never going to have an easy time. Legal options included low-tier maintenance work, sucking up to rich people who'd sneer at you for your trouble, and leaving. Illegal options weren't much better. Slightly more profitable, much more dangerous. So from a very early age, Nadayki assumed he'd leave. And the army was the way to do it. Someone had to fly into deep space and get shot at by the Others, and if you were smart enough to not die in your first contract, you'd have enough of a decent start to head somewhere no one cared about the family name.
He focused on that for his entire adolescence, feeding his own particular awkwardness and inability to read basic social cues by spending all his time studying. A gutter brat like him would need fabulous grades, not just talent, to be considered for the kind of position he deserved. He relied on his two closest thytrins (rough translation, cousin, though the blood relationship didn't have to be that near and the social expectations were quite different) to keep him from getting his ass kicked. They'd all go off to the navy together and it wouldn't matter anymore.
The navy turned him down. In desperation he even tried the marines, though he had about as much interest in infantry as shoveling shit on some farm in the boonies. Apparently the recruiting offices talked. He blamed it on the five- and six-letter names of the recruiters, and his thytrins agreed, and he never bothered to examine whether his attitude might in fact be a factor. They agreed not to go since he couldn't, of course. What did Dysun and Almon have to do that wasn't following their brilliant Nadi's lead?
But without his escape plan, his options were fukking limited. He knew computers. No one was going to pay trash like him for tech work, especially not trash who'd been rejected from the clubs where your main job was being killed by aliens. He made a few good faith (well, mostly good) attempts and was laughed at each time. Finally, he turned his skill on the planetary defense satellite and used its laser function to carve all nine letters of his name into the Prime Progenitor's lawn. The fact that there were a couple people on the lawn at the time didn't bother him all that much, but did make him a little more eager to run for it. With his devoted thytrins in tow.
Work wasn't that hard to come by if you were talented, unethical, and desperate enough to be easy to pay. Nadayki's hacking, Dysun's piloting, and Almon's cheerful enthusiasm about hurting things got them a berth on a pirate ship that mainly antagonized CSOs, snatching legal salvage once the hard work of picking it out had been done. When they picked up a marine corps armory, though, the captain decided to mix things up. He kidnapped a CSO and forced him to help Nadayki break the seal, expecting the kind of payoff that'd set them up for life. And it almost worked. Sure as hell wasn't Nadayki's fault it didn't. He broke both the seals with barely any help from stupid Craig. And was ushered away from a weird and confusing fight by stupid Craig, which happened to leave him trapped on the station when the ship tried to escape from Craig's terrifying ex-sergeant girlfriend and got reduced to space dust. Dy and Al onboard.
He was the smart one, getting away. The fact that he'd never hear their voices again, smell their hair, sleep between them after they'd worn themselves out with sex and bickering and bad takeout and sex and bragging and sex... Well, that was the universe's too damn bad. He managed to dodge most of the destruction of the station, wasn't important enough a criminal to be anybody's prime target. He bummed around a bit, making his way as a willing bedwarmer and freelance hacker, and his considerable skill got him picked up for a very specialized crew. Their assignment? To break into a hidden necropolis on a dead planet and dig out the weapons buried there a millenium before by a race that was now all sweetness and pacifism. The crypts were full of traps and maddening security systems, all of which were no problem for Nadayki's brilliant mind and flawless technique. The several members of the expedition who died on the way in just weren't smart enough.
A few tendays on a creepy dead planet trying to kill him, while weird, might not have had too much effect on Nadayki on its own. His life was already a twisted mess and his emotional state beyond the point where being spooked would have done extra damage. But he was in deep mourning, not helped by denial, and the makeup of the crew was not good for his psyche. Anyone in the Confederation could have identified di'Taykan as the most sexually indiscriminate species in known space. Only another di'Taykan could understand that it went a lot deeper than the fun part. There was no Taykan language with less than seventeen words for touch, all with their own shades of meaning, all culturally and emotionally necessary. Touch starved was a medical diagnosis, not just a handy description. Sex could make up for some of what as missing, and a trusted friend of another species might be made to understand, but Nadayki had no one to trust and only hostile, bored, going through the motions sex to tide him through. And he had Major Sujuno.
She was di'Taykan, too. She should have understood. She did, whether she admitted it or not. He could smell the rise and fall of her moods and pheromones. She radiated desperate and twisted and wrong, but she radiated warmth and familiarity and comfort, too. And refused him all that, rejecting even the simplest, slightest comfort touch. He couldn't bury his need in regular sex with krai and humans with her there, and she went out of her way to make sure he never forgot she was shunning him, looking down her nose from her education and money and four letter name. Over the course of horribly stressful tendays, closeness and underground terrors and death, the effects of touch starvation started to show on him. He couldn't focus, found himself centimeters from glomming onto even assholes like Dion whenever they didn't overtly case him away, found himself unable to even go through the motions of work and talking and paying attention. Dreams turned sour and snuck into the edges of his life.
When they were trapped by the electronically animated corpses of a H'san army, it didn't feel that much worse. When they were rescued by stupid Craig and hs dumb murderer girlfriend, he couldn't make himself care too much. And when the Major decided exterminating the things instead of taking an escape got him snatched by one of the things, well, that seemed pretty fair.
Sample Journal Entry:
[The face on the screen is a little odd—thin and a little too pointy, high cheekbones and narrow nose just a little beyond the normal human range, eyes lacking anything that could be called a pupil, exactly, just darker spots in the green. In that particular green. The eyes are a pretty, jewel-like shade, the skin a sort of shimmery pastel, the hair like ill-advisedly lime-flavored cotton candy. Someone apparently dipped an elf in a vat of Easter Egg dye.]
Right, I decided I only feel like doing this one time.
[The face is hard to read, a little too weird to peg things like age, but the voice is decidedly petulant.]
Why there's a bunch of fukking humans and not a single other Federation species is... Beside the point, I guess. I'm di'Taykan. Don't touch my masker—
[He taps a thin metal ring around his neck.]
Or my hair. It's not actually hair. ...Well, don't touch it without asking.
[A pause, then an awkward twist of the mouth that sort of looks like a smile. Humans are the only sentient species that thinks showing teeth is a good thing. He attempts a wink. It's supposed to be playful. It's more painful.]
Everything else is fair game.
[He meant to say something else, he's pretty—Oh.]
Nadayki di'Berinango. I hack stuff. And look better than you doing it.
Sample RP: Elves in space
Special Notes: Nadayki is from a species that communicates partially in pheromones. Normal levels for a di'Taykan that would communicate mood, health, relatedness, etc. in addition to sexual availability tend to just his every arousal button at once in the brains of most other species. While he's generally wearing his legally mandated masker, and much prefers life with it, there's a lot of potential for weirdness and mayhem.
