RE: The Sleeping Orange (Signups Open!)
02-12-2013, 02:43 AM
Name: Dr. Mariela Guzman, Psy.D.
Race: Human
Gender: Female
Color: Nicotine and caffeine dream
Biography: From the time someone first imagined mechanical men, humanity dreamt of being enslaved; from the first inkling of life beyond Earth, humanity feared superiority and annihilation. Generations were raised on these stories, and great minds pondered the questions they raised for centuries before either scenario was possible. Societies continued their gradual crawl toward enlightenment, scrabbling and fighting every step of the way, and humanity eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to prevent the various apocalypses it had created for itself from becoming reality was through understanding, and the study of xenopsychology was born.
Artificial intelligences came well before non-human life was found, which was probably fortunate; it’s much easier to understand how something thinks when you can look at a map of its entire personality. The discipline was well established before extraterrestrial intelligence ever appeared, hundreds of thousands of theories and models and thought experiments and papers proliferating in the void of actual empirical evidence. But then First Contact finally came, then Third, then Dozenth, and humanity was ready.
These days, xenopsychologists are typically attached in advisory capacities to military and ambassadorial programs if they’re not academicians or business consultants; Dr. Guzman was the former, spending most of her career bouncing around the galaxy and developing a reputation for keen insight and quick thinking. As often as she was in potentially-dangerous positions and in the middle of political turmoil, she thought it was only prudent to undergo some combat training so that at least she wouldn’t end up the useless tagalong civilian from every action movie she’d ever seen; as a result, she’s spent enough time on the gun range to pretty reliably hit an unmoving hologram from fifty feet, and enough time in self-defense classes to at least break a headlock, but she’s never seen combat or even been in more of a fight than shouting matches with her family.
Eventually, the stress of constantly moving around and forever being involved with intrigue this and complicated power play that got to be more than she was interested in doing forever. It had been a good career, but it was time for a change. She settled down on a little predominantly-human frontier planet, renewed her counseling certifications, got psychopharmacotherapy credentials; she opened up a practice, met her future husband, and happily resolved herself to a quiet life of treating mundane cognitive distortions and reading journals about all the things she used to be on the forefront of. It was a quiet and pleasant few years.
That’s when the death threats started coming.
They were mostly just threatening messages, but some days she’d find every lock in her house undone or her possessions smashed on her front step. Automated surveillance would always be deactivated, and as long as someone was watching her house or business, the threats would simply stop; law enforcement could never find any real evidence, and neither she nor they had the resources to keep her under constant protection. She eventually left the city, but she was followed; it wasn’t long before she left the planet entirely, but that wasn’t enough either.
She began running, constantly becoming more paranoid and frantic; her marriage fell apart under the constant stress and her own reactions to it. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape whoever her tormentor was; eventually she couldn’t afford to keep fleeing and made ground again, this time in a bustling and established metropolis. The threats didn’t stop, and her apartment seemed to be just as pregnable as her house had been, but she had neither the energy nor the funds to hide again. The terror subsided gradually to a numb, derealized horror; she never came to any harm, but the constant knowledge that she was at the mercy of someone who ostensibly wanted her dead was too much to live with. Eventually, she relented and bought a stun baton.
The exhilaration of exercising that tiny bit of agency was practically narcotic, and it quickly became a pattern. She’d receive a thread, buy herself a defensive weapon to calm herself down, the threat would escalate, and so would her purchases. She’s fully aware of the ridiculous and compulsive nature of fetishism like this, but it’s the only way she has left of feeling even a fragment of safety for a moment. After she woke up one day to find half her wardrobe shredded and piled at the foot of her bed that she finally bought a lethal firearm.
Shortly thereafter, she disappeared; this time, it’s almost certain she won’t be followed.
Weapons/Abilities: On her person and in the briefcase she carries are near-uncountable variably-unobtrusive weapons and weaponlike trinkets, from the decorative keychain fob that fits over her knuckles to the brooch that briefly projects a force field if her adrenaline spikes too quickly all the way up to the gun she keeps holstered under her coat. She’d be able to take on a veritable squadron of muggers if muggers operated in squadrons and wouldn’t have simply shot her when they realized she fairly bristled, to say nothing of the stacks of sprays and deterrents and cudgels that line her apartment, most of them unopened. The firearm is a miniature coilgun that recharges itself gradually by gathering static and rather more quickly through a piezoelectric generator built into the strap on its holster; it carries a clip of ten magnetic rounds that are built to reshape themselves after impact, and can fairly reliably get four shots out before needing a full recharge.
Also in her briefcase is a small personal computing device, equipped with an omninet transponder, a number of useful or amusing applications, and an artificial intelligence she’s named Diego; it has an essentially-infinite battery life, but could become rather worrisome if the battery’s shielding was ever somehow compromised. There is also a pad of paper and a few pens, a pair of wireless earbuds, three electronic cigarettes with a number of differently-flavored cartridges, and a cheese-and-pickle sandwich on top of a compact first-aid kit.
It also contains several bottles of tranquilizers and sedatives that were prescribed to her in a legally- and ethically-sound fashion. She has documentation.
Description: Mariela stands at an average-for-the-time 2.1 meters. She has the gaunt, slack look of someone who has lost too much weight too quickly, and her lustrous black hair has started going white in streaks (although to be fair, that started happening before the threats did). She still tries to present the image of a confident and educated professional with well-tailored and -maintained clothes and a meticulously-subdued hairstyle, but the defeated slouch, darting eyes, and dark bags give her more the look of an addict on the verge of relapse, contributed to in no small part by the fact that she smokes like a chimney whenever she’s not at the office.
She’s long since left twitchy and jumpy behind in favor of resigned fatalism and distrustful brusqueness. Fatalistic and afraid, she prefers not to interact with the outside world at all when not acting in a professional capacity. Only her long-standing atheism and pragmatism have stayed her hand from the suicide she has frequently contemplated over the years, and most of her once-outgoing and -empathetic personality has been replaced by cynicism and fear.
While her degree wasn’t enough to stave off her descent into substance abuse, ritualism, and the occasional magical thinking, she is still trained in the ins and outs of all manner of sapient thought; she’s qualified to diagnose and treat dozens of species and has studied quite a few more. Even among those she’s never encountered or even don’t exist, the core of xenopsychology has always been an ability to quickly develop schema for communication and understanding, and though it’s been some time since she’s been on the forefront of new-alien discovery and integration, it’s still practically second nature to her.
Race: Human
Gender: Female
Color: Nicotine and caffeine dream
Biography: From the time someone first imagined mechanical men, humanity dreamt of being enslaved; from the first inkling of life beyond Earth, humanity feared superiority and annihilation. Generations were raised on these stories, and great minds pondered the questions they raised for centuries before either scenario was possible. Societies continued their gradual crawl toward enlightenment, scrabbling and fighting every step of the way, and humanity eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to prevent the various apocalypses it had created for itself from becoming reality was through understanding, and the study of xenopsychology was born.
Artificial intelligences came well before non-human life was found, which was probably fortunate; it’s much easier to understand how something thinks when you can look at a map of its entire personality. The discipline was well established before extraterrestrial intelligence ever appeared, hundreds of thousands of theories and models and thought experiments and papers proliferating in the void of actual empirical evidence. But then First Contact finally came, then Third, then Dozenth, and humanity was ready.
These days, xenopsychologists are typically attached in advisory capacities to military and ambassadorial programs if they’re not academicians or business consultants; Dr. Guzman was the former, spending most of her career bouncing around the galaxy and developing a reputation for keen insight and quick thinking. As often as she was in potentially-dangerous positions and in the middle of political turmoil, she thought it was only prudent to undergo some combat training so that at least she wouldn’t end up the useless tagalong civilian from every action movie she’d ever seen; as a result, she’s spent enough time on the gun range to pretty reliably hit an unmoving hologram from fifty feet, and enough time in self-defense classes to at least break a headlock, but she’s never seen combat or even been in more of a fight than shouting matches with her family.
Eventually, the stress of constantly moving around and forever being involved with intrigue this and complicated power play that got to be more than she was interested in doing forever. It had been a good career, but it was time for a change. She settled down on a little predominantly-human frontier planet, renewed her counseling certifications, got psychopharmacotherapy credentials; she opened up a practice, met her future husband, and happily resolved herself to a quiet life of treating mundane cognitive distortions and reading journals about all the things she used to be on the forefront of. It was a quiet and pleasant few years.
That’s when the death threats started coming.
They were mostly just threatening messages, but some days she’d find every lock in her house undone or her possessions smashed on her front step. Automated surveillance would always be deactivated, and as long as someone was watching her house or business, the threats would simply stop; law enforcement could never find any real evidence, and neither she nor they had the resources to keep her under constant protection. She eventually left the city, but she was followed; it wasn’t long before she left the planet entirely, but that wasn’t enough either.
She began running, constantly becoming more paranoid and frantic; her marriage fell apart under the constant stress and her own reactions to it. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape whoever her tormentor was; eventually she couldn’t afford to keep fleeing and made ground again, this time in a bustling and established metropolis. The threats didn’t stop, and her apartment seemed to be just as pregnable as her house had been, but she had neither the energy nor the funds to hide again. The terror subsided gradually to a numb, derealized horror; she never came to any harm, but the constant knowledge that she was at the mercy of someone who ostensibly wanted her dead was too much to live with. Eventually, she relented and bought a stun baton.
The exhilaration of exercising that tiny bit of agency was practically narcotic, and it quickly became a pattern. She’d receive a thread, buy herself a defensive weapon to calm herself down, the threat would escalate, and so would her purchases. She’s fully aware of the ridiculous and compulsive nature of fetishism like this, but it’s the only way she has left of feeling even a fragment of safety for a moment. After she woke up one day to find half her wardrobe shredded and piled at the foot of her bed that she finally bought a lethal firearm.
Shortly thereafter, she disappeared; this time, it’s almost certain she won’t be followed.
Weapons/Abilities: On her person and in the briefcase she carries are near-uncountable variably-unobtrusive weapons and weaponlike trinkets, from the decorative keychain fob that fits over her knuckles to the brooch that briefly projects a force field if her adrenaline spikes too quickly all the way up to the gun she keeps holstered under her coat. She’d be able to take on a veritable squadron of muggers if muggers operated in squadrons and wouldn’t have simply shot her when they realized she fairly bristled, to say nothing of the stacks of sprays and deterrents and cudgels that line her apartment, most of them unopened. The firearm is a miniature coilgun that recharges itself gradually by gathering static and rather more quickly through a piezoelectric generator built into the strap on its holster; it carries a clip of ten magnetic rounds that are built to reshape themselves after impact, and can fairly reliably get four shots out before needing a full recharge.
Also in her briefcase is a small personal computing device, equipped with an omninet transponder, a number of useful or amusing applications, and an artificial intelligence she’s named Diego; it has an essentially-infinite battery life, but could become rather worrisome if the battery’s shielding was ever somehow compromised. There is also a pad of paper and a few pens, a pair of wireless earbuds, three electronic cigarettes with a number of differently-flavored cartridges, and a cheese-and-pickle sandwich on top of a compact first-aid kit.
It also contains several bottles of tranquilizers and sedatives that were prescribed to her in a legally- and ethically-sound fashion. She has documentation.
Description: Mariela stands at an average-for-the-time 2.1 meters. She has the gaunt, slack look of someone who has lost too much weight too quickly, and her lustrous black hair has started going white in streaks (although to be fair, that started happening before the threats did). She still tries to present the image of a confident and educated professional with well-tailored and -maintained clothes and a meticulously-subdued hairstyle, but the defeated slouch, darting eyes, and dark bags give her more the look of an addict on the verge of relapse, contributed to in no small part by the fact that she smokes like a chimney whenever she’s not at the office.
She’s long since left twitchy and jumpy behind in favor of resigned fatalism and distrustful brusqueness. Fatalistic and afraid, she prefers not to interact with the outside world at all when not acting in a professional capacity. Only her long-standing atheism and pragmatism have stayed her hand from the suicide she has frequently contemplated over the years, and most of her once-outgoing and -empathetic personality has been replaced by cynicism and fear.
While her degree wasn’t enough to stave off her descent into substance abuse, ritualism, and the occasional magical thinking, she is still trained in the ins and outs of all manner of sapient thought; she’s qualified to diagnose and treat dozens of species and has studied quite a few more. Even among those she’s never encountered or even don’t exist, the core of xenopsychology has always been an ability to quickly develop schema for communication and understanding, and though it’s been some time since she’s been on the forefront of new-alien discovery and integration, it’s still practically second nature to her.