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TLV Application
Jul. 16th, 2024 10:57 amUser Name/Nick: lookashiny/Lydia
User DW: Link
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: Plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Elim Rawne, Thomas Blanky
Character Name: Cheradenine Zakalwe
Series: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (a Culture novel)
Age: 230/120 (lived 230 years, 120 of them awake)
From When?: Cheradenine comes from the very end (minus the pro/epilogue) of the book, where he is dying of a cerebral hemmorage. Despite being operated on by an advanced robot, the book ends before he is healed. In my headcanon, he does not survive.
Inmate Justification: Cheradenine Zakalwe needs redemption for a lot of things, the chief being his decision to turn his foster sister's body into a chair to force his foster brother to kill himself.
Arrival: He was brought against his will.
Abilities/Powers: Cheradenine has near-complete immortality and improves strength and reflexes. His strength and reflexes have been brought down to normal.
Inmate Information: The thing at the heart of Cheradenine Zakalwe is that he is not Cheradenine Zakalwe. He is Etheliomel, the Chairmaker, the man who did the worst thing he could possibly do, to push the real Cheradenine to suicide. He succeeded in that, though he also damned himself.
His most serious crime is the Chairmaking, when he arranged for his foster sister's death and, after her death, made her body into a chair. Its the thing that cannot be forgiven, the thing he's spent his entire life burying under wars and missions and attempts at poetry. His work for the Cutlure is his attempt to make up for what he did, even though every mission just adds to the number of people he's killed.
Diziet Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw, his handlers in Special Circumstances, view him as a dangerous psychopath, mostly because his skill at fighting. He is ruthless and will use whatever weapons at hand, be it conventional or not, to will once he decides he needs to. Besides the Chair, he turned a battleship into a fortress by drydocking it and surrounding it with concrete and nearly turned an antiquated spaceship into an improvized bomb.
He wants to be a better person, at least occasionally, he just doesn't have a real idea of what that is or how to achieve it. He thinks that being a poet is the opposite of being a warrior (and the only other thing a man can be), but he's not a good poet. He reacts to threats with violence, because that's how he's been trained to react. He needs to be shown that there's more options for him, that he can change if he's in the right environment, as long as he puts in the effort.
He knows how to be charming, if mostly superficially. He has also convinced himself that all his positive feelings are superficial. He did love Shias Engin, truly, he just thinks that he convinced himself of it because that avoids any hurt feelings he might have. He sees himself as a weapon, as a soldier, and anything that isn't useful for that isn't worth examining deeply. Flirtation, conversation, sex, all of it is for an end. He lacks solid connections with other people.
At the end of the book, he has hit a point where he can't run anymore. He gets embroiled in a war that the Culture doesn't want him to win and, instead of winning anyway, he suffers a breakdown, shaves his head, and wanders out into the path of fire. He refuses treatment on the way to see Livueta, the one other person who knows what he's done. By the time he gets to see her, he's alive, but actively dying. Whatever reaction he expected to get from her, he got rejection, which made him panic, have a seizure, and pass out. This carries over into his feelings on the Barge. His desire to change has reasserted itself, he just has no idea how to do that.
Path to Redemption: First, to be redeemed and graduate, Cheradenine has to believe that it's possible for him to be redeemed. He's long since written himself off as irredeemable, too burdened with sins of his time as the Culture's weapon (and before that) to ever erase them. Redemption is for other people. After he's managed to realize that he can be redeemed, then he has to figure out how to atone for all the people he's killed and things he's done.
He doesn't want to be on the Barge. He expected to die, had gone to meet his foster sister wanting to die, and is both confused and irritated to be alive. He doesn't want to fit in, he doesn't want to get better, he just wants to bring an end to things.
Cheradenine will be very resistant, at first, to having a warden. He'll resent any who try to make him think about graduation or think about the things he's done. He just wants to be left alone. A more sociable temp warden might get him to open up a little, but for the first few months, at least, he's not going to want to do much.
A warden with a military or spy background would be the best bet to get him to open up. If he thinks they'll understand why he did the things he did (well, most of them), he'll talk to them and listen to them. Conversly, a warden who is too cryptic about things or who came from too different a background will make him clam up and ignore them.
What he really needs to hear is that he can come back from his worst crime. That he is redeemable. But he needs to have a bond of trust with his warden before he will believe that. Of course, he needs a bond of trust with his warden to even admit to his worst crime, to begin with.
He also needs to work out his emotional range, to be a full person, not just a soldier, not just a weapon. He needs to form connections with other people, on an even standing, not just having either a handler or a pawn in whatever game he's playing. He will treat his warden like a handler, at least at first. To really work well with him, they need to discourage that.
History: The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was born Elethiomel and taken in by the Zakalwe family as a child, along with his mother. He grew up with the Zakalwe children, Cheradenine, Livueta, and Darckense. When they were all still children, they snuck out into the garden of their estate, intending to fire a gun they found. Instead, they interrupted an assasination attempt and Darckense was injured. A chip of her bone lodged in Elethiomel/Cheradenine's chest, near his heart.
When they were adults, Elethiomel and Cheradenine were on opposite sides of a civil war. Elethiomel fought against the established government. He took a battleship, Staberinde, into a drydock and made it into a fortress. He took Darckense hostage. Then, when it looks like he might lose, perhaps (this part of the book is from the real Cheradenine's point of view), something happens, Darkense dies, and Elethiomel makes a chair of her bones. When he sends it to Cheradenine, he kills himself.
Elethiomel takes the name Cheradenine Zakalwe sometime after fleeing his planet and spending a century or so on a sleeper ship. It is under that name that he joins the military on an ice planet and gets shot in the head by officers after he discovers a coup. After he seems to recover from that, someone tosses him out into the snow and Diziet Sma rescues him and recruits him into Special Circumstances.
His first job for the Culture was a short one, just bringing a kid across a desert to take the throne. Zakalwe doesn't understand why he's doing it, since the kid is demonstrably unfit to be a leader. Afterwards, he finds out that the Culture knows the kid won't have heirs, thus bringing down the system he's the head of. This is his first clue that the Culture does things that don't, on their face, make sense.
He takes a vacation, next, and tries to become a poet, out of the idea that men can be either warriors or poets and he wants to be not a warrior, at least for a while. His idea of being a poet is odd, though, and he doesn't write much before he accidentally destroys a nest of eggs when chasing after an animal. That puts an end to his vacation.
After an unknown mission, he spends a long time in a caldera, remembering his childhood and hallucinating. Then he fights on one side of a war on a planet where it rains a lot. He captures an enemy assassin and ties her to a chair, but doesn't do much else.
Then he takes time off, again, and lives with a poet for a while. Her name is Shias Engin. He loved her (though he tells himself he only thought he loved her, later). She is a poet and, though he manages to piss her off the first time they meet, they start a relationship anyway. She, without doing it on purpose, helps him forget his traumas and lessens their impact on him. How it ends isn't explained, though it wasn't badly. He just left.
Then he had an easy mission, representing the Culture at a funeral, after which he crashed on a planet called Fohls. The people there thought he was an offering, meant to be sacrificed and managed to cut his head off before he was rescued. His immortality meant that he survived the experience, but he got a new body grown for him. While he's recovering, Skaffen-Amtiskaw brings him a hat.
He tries to live a peaceful life, again, near a place where people live nomadically and create towns where they meet up. He tells his story to a woman he sleeps with, knowing she can't understand him. He gets accused of the rape and murder of a young woman and has to leave, again. Then he goes on one last (he thinks) mission for them, acting as a mercenary to protect some nobles in a besieged palace. After that, he breaks away from the Culture and tries to change things on his own, selling the secret of immortality (reverse-engineered from his own) to the leaders of one planet, then killing some of them (including the Ethnarch) when they keep being assholes after they promised him they wouldn't.
Then Diziet Sma brings him back for another job, to contact Tsoldrin Beychae on Vorenhutz and convince him to stop a war from happening. The only thing he wants as payment is to meet Livueta Zakalwe He goes to the planet and, after nearly getting killed, he succeeds in contacting Beychae. They get away from the planet, but Zakalwe gets his cover blown and he gets imprisoned. Beychae goes to do what he needs to do while Zakalwe gets picked up by the Balzeit Hegemonarchy. Sma tells him to win the war, which he sets out to do.
Then she tells him that he's been doing too well and he can't help them win. He nearly gives the order to destroy the enemy leadership with a spaceship turned into a bomb, but he doesn't. Then he goes outside and walks through where the enemy is invading. He gets shot several times, but he manages to create a "Z" on the top of the walls, so he can be picked up.
He goes into low-metabolism sleep until he can meet Livueta. He's alive, if barely, when they arrive at the planet. They visit the Saberinde, then the hospital where Livueta works. He panics, then has a brain aneurysm. Livueta reveals that he's Elethiomel.
Sample Network Entry: Link
Sample RP:
Who: Zakalwe and OTA
When: The month
Where: All over the ship
What: Mapping/Exploring
Warnings?: Potential violence
Zakalwe is healed enough to walk around the Barge without feeling lightheaded and having to sit down and he's making the best of it. He swiped some paper and pencils from the art gazebo and he's going to map this place out. Perhaps, then, he will be able to understand it. Perhaps, then, he will be able to find where this Admiral lives. So he can... have a chat.
He paces along the halls, counting out the strides and marking the distances between doors, between lounges, from one end of the hallway to the other. He notes the doors on each level, though he doesn't try to open any. He can inspect people's cabins later. The Admiral doesn't live there.
He pays more attention to the common areas, though after one glance in, he avoids the lounge and the dining hall both. They make him shiver, minutely, with their ranks of chairs. The greenhouse captures his attention, though, and he wanders there for a while, creating a sub-map of what grows where. The Enclosure stymies him until he realizes he needs a warden to get in, then he tries to find the nearest one to charm into opening the door.
He overestimates his energy, though, and has to sit on the floor in a hallway and take deep breaths lest he pass out. He's got a stack of papers beside him and his eyes closed, but he's not as unaware of his surroundings as he may seem.
User DW: Link
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: Plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Elim Rawne, Thomas Blanky
Character Name: Cheradenine Zakalwe
Series: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks (a Culture novel)
Age: 230/120 (lived 230 years, 120 of them awake)
From When?: Cheradenine comes from the very end (minus the pro/epilogue) of the book, where he is dying of a cerebral hemmorage. Despite being operated on by an advanced robot, the book ends before he is healed. In my headcanon, he does not survive.
Inmate Justification: Cheradenine Zakalwe needs redemption for a lot of things, the chief being his decision to turn his foster sister's body into a chair to force his foster brother to kill himself.
Arrival: He was brought against his will.
Abilities/Powers: Cheradenine has near-complete immortality and improves strength and reflexes. His strength and reflexes have been brought down to normal.
Inmate Information: The thing at the heart of Cheradenine Zakalwe is that he is not Cheradenine Zakalwe. He is Etheliomel, the Chairmaker, the man who did the worst thing he could possibly do, to push the real Cheradenine to suicide. He succeeded in that, though he also damned himself.
His most serious crime is the Chairmaking, when he arranged for his foster sister's death and, after her death, made her body into a chair. Its the thing that cannot be forgiven, the thing he's spent his entire life burying under wars and missions and attempts at poetry. His work for the Cutlure is his attempt to make up for what he did, even though every mission just adds to the number of people he's killed.
Diziet Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw, his handlers in Special Circumstances, view him as a dangerous psychopath, mostly because his skill at fighting. He is ruthless and will use whatever weapons at hand, be it conventional or not, to will once he decides he needs to. Besides the Chair, he turned a battleship into a fortress by drydocking it and surrounding it with concrete and nearly turned an antiquated spaceship into an improvized bomb.
He wants to be a better person, at least occasionally, he just doesn't have a real idea of what that is or how to achieve it. He thinks that being a poet is the opposite of being a warrior (and the only other thing a man can be), but he's not a good poet. He reacts to threats with violence, because that's how he's been trained to react. He needs to be shown that there's more options for him, that he can change if he's in the right environment, as long as he puts in the effort.
He knows how to be charming, if mostly superficially. He has also convinced himself that all his positive feelings are superficial. He did love Shias Engin, truly, he just thinks that he convinced himself of it because that avoids any hurt feelings he might have. He sees himself as a weapon, as a soldier, and anything that isn't useful for that isn't worth examining deeply. Flirtation, conversation, sex, all of it is for an end. He lacks solid connections with other people.
At the end of the book, he has hit a point where he can't run anymore. He gets embroiled in a war that the Culture doesn't want him to win and, instead of winning anyway, he suffers a breakdown, shaves his head, and wanders out into the path of fire. He refuses treatment on the way to see Livueta, the one other person who knows what he's done. By the time he gets to see her, he's alive, but actively dying. Whatever reaction he expected to get from her, he got rejection, which made him panic, have a seizure, and pass out. This carries over into his feelings on the Barge. His desire to change has reasserted itself, he just has no idea how to do that.
Path to Redemption: First, to be redeemed and graduate, Cheradenine has to believe that it's possible for him to be redeemed. He's long since written himself off as irredeemable, too burdened with sins of his time as the Culture's weapon (and before that) to ever erase them. Redemption is for other people. After he's managed to realize that he can be redeemed, then he has to figure out how to atone for all the people he's killed and things he's done.
He doesn't want to be on the Barge. He expected to die, had gone to meet his foster sister wanting to die, and is both confused and irritated to be alive. He doesn't want to fit in, he doesn't want to get better, he just wants to bring an end to things.
Cheradenine will be very resistant, at first, to having a warden. He'll resent any who try to make him think about graduation or think about the things he's done. He just wants to be left alone. A more sociable temp warden might get him to open up a little, but for the first few months, at least, he's not going to want to do much.
A warden with a military or spy background would be the best bet to get him to open up. If he thinks they'll understand why he did the things he did (well, most of them), he'll talk to them and listen to them. Conversly, a warden who is too cryptic about things or who came from too different a background will make him clam up and ignore them.
What he really needs to hear is that he can come back from his worst crime. That he is redeemable. But he needs to have a bond of trust with his warden before he will believe that. Of course, he needs a bond of trust with his warden to even admit to his worst crime, to begin with.
He also needs to work out his emotional range, to be a full person, not just a soldier, not just a weapon. He needs to form connections with other people, on an even standing, not just having either a handler or a pawn in whatever game he's playing. He will treat his warden like a handler, at least at first. To really work well with him, they need to discourage that.
History: The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was born Elethiomel and taken in by the Zakalwe family as a child, along with his mother. He grew up with the Zakalwe children, Cheradenine, Livueta, and Darckense. When they were all still children, they snuck out into the garden of their estate, intending to fire a gun they found. Instead, they interrupted an assasination attempt and Darckense was injured. A chip of her bone lodged in Elethiomel/Cheradenine's chest, near his heart.
When they were adults, Elethiomel and Cheradenine were on opposite sides of a civil war. Elethiomel fought against the established government. He took a battleship, Staberinde, into a drydock and made it into a fortress. He took Darckense hostage. Then, when it looks like he might lose, perhaps (this part of the book is from the real Cheradenine's point of view), something happens, Darkense dies, and Elethiomel makes a chair of her bones. When he sends it to Cheradenine, he kills himself.
Elethiomel takes the name Cheradenine Zakalwe sometime after fleeing his planet and spending a century or so on a sleeper ship. It is under that name that he joins the military on an ice planet and gets shot in the head by officers after he discovers a coup. After he seems to recover from that, someone tosses him out into the snow and Diziet Sma rescues him and recruits him into Special Circumstances.
His first job for the Culture was a short one, just bringing a kid across a desert to take the throne. Zakalwe doesn't understand why he's doing it, since the kid is demonstrably unfit to be a leader. Afterwards, he finds out that the Culture knows the kid won't have heirs, thus bringing down the system he's the head of. This is his first clue that the Culture does things that don't, on their face, make sense.
He takes a vacation, next, and tries to become a poet, out of the idea that men can be either warriors or poets and he wants to be not a warrior, at least for a while. His idea of being a poet is odd, though, and he doesn't write much before he accidentally destroys a nest of eggs when chasing after an animal. That puts an end to his vacation.
After an unknown mission, he spends a long time in a caldera, remembering his childhood and hallucinating. Then he fights on one side of a war on a planet where it rains a lot. He captures an enemy assassin and ties her to a chair, but doesn't do much else.
Then he takes time off, again, and lives with a poet for a while. Her name is Shias Engin. He loved her (though he tells himself he only thought he loved her, later). She is a poet and, though he manages to piss her off the first time they meet, they start a relationship anyway. She, without doing it on purpose, helps him forget his traumas and lessens their impact on him. How it ends isn't explained, though it wasn't badly. He just left.
Then he had an easy mission, representing the Culture at a funeral, after which he crashed on a planet called Fohls. The people there thought he was an offering, meant to be sacrificed and managed to cut his head off before he was rescued. His immortality meant that he survived the experience, but he got a new body grown for him. While he's recovering, Skaffen-Amtiskaw brings him a hat.
He tries to live a peaceful life, again, near a place where people live nomadically and create towns where they meet up. He tells his story to a woman he sleeps with, knowing she can't understand him. He gets accused of the rape and murder of a young woman and has to leave, again. Then he goes on one last (he thinks) mission for them, acting as a mercenary to protect some nobles in a besieged palace. After that, he breaks away from the Culture and tries to change things on his own, selling the secret of immortality (reverse-engineered from his own) to the leaders of one planet, then killing some of them (including the Ethnarch) when they keep being assholes after they promised him they wouldn't.
Then Diziet Sma brings him back for another job, to contact Tsoldrin Beychae on Vorenhutz and convince him to stop a war from happening. The only thing he wants as payment is to meet Livueta Zakalwe He goes to the planet and, after nearly getting killed, he succeeds in contacting Beychae. They get away from the planet, but Zakalwe gets his cover blown and he gets imprisoned. Beychae goes to do what he needs to do while Zakalwe gets picked up by the Balzeit Hegemonarchy. Sma tells him to win the war, which he sets out to do.
Then she tells him that he's been doing too well and he can't help them win. He nearly gives the order to destroy the enemy leadership with a spaceship turned into a bomb, but he doesn't. Then he goes outside and walks through where the enemy is invading. He gets shot several times, but he manages to create a "Z" on the top of the walls, so he can be picked up.
He goes into low-metabolism sleep until he can meet Livueta. He's alive, if barely, when they arrive at the planet. They visit the Saberinde, then the hospital where Livueta works. He panics, then has a brain aneurysm. Livueta reveals that he's Elethiomel.
Sample Network Entry: Link
Sample RP:
Who: Zakalwe and OTA
When: The month
Where: All over the ship
What: Mapping/Exploring
Warnings?: Potential violence
Zakalwe is healed enough to walk around the Barge without feeling lightheaded and having to sit down and he's making the best of it. He swiped some paper and pencils from the art gazebo and he's going to map this place out. Perhaps, then, he will be able to understand it. Perhaps, then, he will be able to find where this Admiral lives. So he can... have a chat.
He paces along the halls, counting out the strides and marking the distances between doors, between lounges, from one end of the hallway to the other. He notes the doors on each level, though he doesn't try to open any. He can inspect people's cabins later. The Admiral doesn't live there.
He pays more attention to the common areas, though after one glance in, he avoids the lounge and the dining hall both. They make him shiver, minutely, with their ranks of chairs. The greenhouse captures his attention, though, and he wanders there for a while, creating a sub-map of what grows where. The Enclosure stymies him until he realizes he needs a warden to get in, then he tries to find the nearest one to charm into opening the door.
He overestimates his energy, though, and has to sit on the floor in a hallway and take deep breaths lest he pass out. He's got a stack of papers beside him and his eyes closed, but he's not as unaware of his surroundings as he may seem.
