--'Space Oddity' by David Bowie
Arguably Human:
A twentysomething human male, pretty average to the casual glance. Maybe 5'11" or so in height, his build is a touch on the slim side, but with incongruously broad shoulders. While definitely pale, he's nonetheless in excellent health; there's a sinewy strength inherent to his frame, that subtly manifests in his stance and movements. A wild mop of pastel blue hair, cut short along the bangs and just above his shoulders, sticks out in clumps and patches in defiance of brushes everywhere. His face is roughly oval, noteworthy for its green eyes and otherwise delicate, thin features. The whole look is vaguely pixieish, in a way.
A greyish blue coverall, presumably some variety of military issue, fits tightly across his shoulders but fairly baggily down his body. Several darker blue spots on the shoulders and chest obviously mark where insignia and patches were at one point; one remains, a simple nametag over his left breast that reads 'ZENITH'. An integral belt hangs open, leaving the suit to sag out in the middle and down his legs, where the cuffs are finally tucked into a pair of scuffed and battered combat boots. Two toolbelts are slung across his hips, like the gun belts of a pistoleer, and a black courier's bag hangs off of one shoulder and rests against his rear.
Technical Nymph:
A pretty young human woman, maybe twenty-odd years old, rather tall at nearly six feet. She's built slim, 'elfin' to misappropriate a term, with ears that flow out into backwards-canted points. A thick growth of blue hair, highlit with green, is cut short across the bangs and about mid-back length in the rear; it draws a silvery tinge forth from her pale complexion and complements her eyes. Those eyes are green, situated in an oval, delicate-featured face that possesses a vaguely pixieish charm. While certainly slender, there's a sinewy strength inherent to her frame, that subtly manifests in her stance and movements.
A greyish blue coverall, presumably some variety of military issue, hangs across her slender shoulders. Particularly baggy at the cuffs, the whole suit drapes across her body, obscuring any obvious features beyond her svelte build. Several darker blue spots on the shoulders and chest obviously mark where insignia and patches were at one point; one remains, a simple nametag over her left breast that reads 'ZENITH'. An integral belt is cinched tight, again suggesting a slim figure, which is again concealed behind layers of ill-fitting cloth. Swashes of pant cuff fold over the tops of her footwear, a pair of scuffed and battered combat boots that look to be as oversized as her coverall. A toolbelt drapes loosely across either hip, and a black courier bag that's just a little too wide to look comfortable hangs off one shoulder and chafes against her rear; they emphasize the hand-me-down look of her garments and help to make her look rather waifish, when idle at least.
[The Two Faces of Heath] by [Sue Mewhiney].
Heath has very basic military training, the sort of thing that being enlisted for a tour of duty would leave someone with. A college graduate, he's a highly trained engineer and a mechanical genius... though the utility of the last part is strongly affected by the talents described below. Devices he builds himself tend to start out as ungainly, jury-rigged masses that shouldn't work, but gradually become more streamlined with more tinkering.
In essence, Heath is what might be best described as a technical nymph-- a spirit of artifice and technology made flesh, like a modernized sort of dryad or other sort of elemental nymph. This lends him a strange rapport with machines: in an animistic way, machines tend to like him and want to make him happy. Notably, this doesn't automatically extend to naturally 'suspicious' devices, like security systems or things built by hostile forces. To his perception, they're rather like trained guard dogs, more innately concerned with protecting their masters than showing their bellies to the weird being that 'smells' like a pack alpha. Actual AI may take or leave him, depending on how fully realized their personalities are.
Typically, this rapport manifests in one of several ways. The most common and simplest is a very strong knack for understanding and working with machines-- he might implicitly understand a badly-designed or alien interface, or coax a nearly dead engine into turning over. A few seconds working with an unfamiliar weapon or hard-suit might lend him enough insight to fire wildly or dodge like a maniac... just enough to hopefully get him and it out of harm's way.
Somewhat more unusual, is his ability to coax a little more 'oomph' out of devices. Tweaking systems to maximum efficiency is child's play, though larger and more complex devices take more time-- a motorcycle engine is a lot easier to push to safe limits than a starship drive, for example. With some encouragement, wheedling and modification, he can induce devices to ignore physical laws in relatively small ways: he might convince a toaster to perform as a space heater for a couple of days, but couldn't turn one into a plasma cannon. These modifications are typically short term and generally impossible to perfectly duplicate-- they shouldn't work at all, but his supernatural rapport allows it.
Given time and sufficient materials, he can build just about anything. These homebrew devices tend to begin as rather inefficient and delicate constructions, slowly becoming better as he tinkers with and tweaks at them. Most rely heavily on his technological rapport, making them very difficult for others to repair or modify, thanks to their strange designs, and virtually impossible for even him to duplicate. Each new device, no matter how similar to another of his, ends up taking completely different approach. Even the simple personae of individual nuts, bolts and I-beams are different enough that the whole process is less like construction than community building.
Finally, Heath has at least two physical incarnations. The first is largely human and largely male, a bit of natural camouflage and defense against metaphysical manipulation of his nymphly self. The second is that of a 'true' technical nymph, an elfin female possessing a much stronger and clearer rapport with manufactured items and devices. At his/her current stage of development, changing from one to the other (without the use of oneirotronic technology) can only be effected through extreme negative emotion; in essence, he/she hides from him/herself. Assuming he/she begins to discover his/her true nature, the mechanism's actual intent, shielding the nymph from spiritual manipulation by hiding her within relatively mundane human flesh, may become clear.
Of course, with people able to pull stuff out of thin air virtually at will, and reality tending to display a rather marked plasticity in and of itself, Heath's abilities might not amount to much more than idiosyncratic parlor tricks. Still, artifice and striking deals with the spirits of wingnut and soldering iron permeates his blood and his/her metaphysical makeup. He/she is an engineer, he/she likes to build things and things like to be built by him/her.
That's not to say he/she has anything against the system, or that he/she won't use it. Quite the contrary, in terms of food, shelter, clothing and the like, he/she won't think twice about conjuring something up. When it comes to actually building something though, well, that's what scrounging for discarded and forgotten bits and pieces are for.
It's always possible that the instantiator systems might share some elements of the empathic link he/she has with less complex devices. In that case, they might take the initiative on occasion, making handy --and suitably battered looking-- things just out of perceptual range for him/her to discover and use.
In the greater scheme of things, Heath is little more than a bit of unlikely quantum flotsam, born into a world at war that was only beginning to rediscover the romance of science-- the dance of the subatomic, that needful grasping for otherness prosaically described as 'gravity', ingenuity turning itself to spreading life throughout the cosmos rather than the already ubiquitous death. He was perhaps born a little too early, unable to reach his full potential in a world where the animistic was only beginning to awake after being smothered by cold rationalism for so long.
The odd abilities described above and even his strictly male shape are all that the relatively strict metaphysical laws of his home reality could afford him. Like a good housewife, he took it upon himself to nurture his charges; joining the engineering corps of the global military was really a no-brainer, and his talent for squeezing the most out of the war machines made him a huge hit with the pilots he worked with, though seeing damaged warbirds limping back into the hangar often broke his heart. Eventually, like any other strong soul chafing under relentless drudgery, he needed more. With his credentials it was easy to get onto a team developing a new sort of faster than light drive-- a system to pinch and fold disparate sections of space-time together, just long enough to carry a cargo across the briefly joined gap. When he joined, it worked-- one way, that is. The mathematics failed to take into account a wrinkling of space-time as the universal medium snapped back into shape, creating minor gravitational waves. Things being what they are, the universe improvised by flattening those waves out with material and energy cannibalized from their source: the jump drives.
With Heath's help and a number of late-night quasi-conversations with the project's databases and prototype engines, a solution was discovered that made the engines usable rather than scattering them across the cosmos. Perhaps it was those conversations, a deep communion between metal souls designed to interface with the universe on a primal level and a more delicate soul stifling under that universe's laws, that would cause the 'accident' that brings Heath to the Box and closer to his destiny.
Accompanying the perfected jump drive on its maiden voyage, soothing its jitters and mitigating its quirks like he did its predecessors, Heath made the historic fold into a distant star system. Well, he made it halfway, at least. At the moment of crossing, the drive --that had loved him as much as any of the other machines he had ever worked with-- focused a burst of energy and catapulted him out of the universe that he was familiar with, into one that had a much more reasonable attitude toward mythical creatures made real again. Like calling to like, he materialized in Downwarp-- very much confused, very much alone, but strangely at home-- and like a great weight has been taken off his shoulders, though only because one yoke was being exchanged for another.
Persona-wise, Heath is curious and tends to be a little acerbic. After all, the one language that all engineers know is profanity. He gets along better with machines and cyborgs than strictly flesh and blood creatures; like his sisters in antiquity, skittish shyness, particularly when taken out of his element, can often be a bit of a problem. Given his gifts and proclivities, he'd probably fit in quite nicely with the Gridshamans, leaning a little more toward Spark than Steel. A nurturer and creator, Rust would be rather anathema to him at first, but as he develops into his true nature the necessity of the cycle will become clear.
Though physically an adult, in possession of the five 'normal' senses and one or two other ones granted by his unusual origins, Heath is ultimately still larval. His development held back, his talents kept bound by strict laws of physics, the tiny goddess of artifice and creation that he could have been in a broader-minded universe has languished in a masculine frame poorly suited to expressing her potential, until now. An unwittingly final gift to his surrogate parents, a muse of mechanisms opening a new door to the stars, has opened a door to her own greater destiny. She has only to overcome the self-loathing of a strange puberty and redefine herself as a whole adult-- though given the strange environs of the Mess, her success at both is hardly guaranteed.
Because some people have asked, Not Necessarily Anything You Wanted to Know About Nymphs, But Were Ambivalent About Asking.
Folks and other entities that have made an impression, in no precise order.
Slight and her friend Sel were the first couple of folks to really approach Heath and show him/her the ropes of getting along in the Mess.
System and Squeak were kind enough to give Heath a tour of Primus, their domicile in Zeta Sector. System seemed nice enough, but he/she wasn't quite sure what to think about Squeak. Nothing that harmless and cute-acting can be completely on the up-and-up, can it?
Roque was another participant in Aria's first performance. That counts for something above and beyond the kind words she offered to a changed and bewildered Heath, which already counts for a lot to the socially starved young fellow/lady.
Induction-coil is neat. Very neat. And engaging... and Heath seems to be developing something of a crush on him. He's the first person that he/she has been able to really talk with, regarding his/her empathy with the machine spirits. That sort of talk would have got him/her put away back home.
Aria has him/her wrapped around her little finger, both for reasons noted below and more fundamentally pleasant ones. The two have found each other to be highly compatible, sharing a deep empathy as new personae dropped into the Mess, indubitably amplified by Aria being a cyborg and Heath's empathic link to beings and things of that ilk.
Sumire is... interesting. Unsettling. Wise. She's given Heath some pointers and suggestions, for what he/she thinks is simply to find his/her niche in the Mess. The young nymph isn't very good at thinking big yet, or realizing his/her potential. She's also taught Heath how to dance, which may prove to be habit forming.
Pauly packs a keen awareness in his playful, elastic body. Conversation with him has helped Heath to discover some method to the Mess, the way the Warps balance and complement one another. What he/she will do with that knowledge is anyone's guess, but being in possession of it has helped Heath to develop some sense of purpose behind their wild disparity.
Samaela suggested that Heath might be an angel of machines. It's a comforting thought, a calling beyond just being nice to devices, but Heath lacks wings, or any of the other typical trappings of the divine. Perhaps she'll have to build herself a pair. Hopefully she'll fare better than Icarus, if she does.
Trilogee taught the young nymph to perceive and interact with the Datasphere on her own terms, rather than struggling to say 'no' to altogether too helpful interface terminals. She seems willing to listen and to help, which is always worth points in the nymph's pages.
Being ignorant of the protocols of safe mind-fucking, a kind gesture in the form of helping Aria to recover some of her memories has loaded Heath up with command-memes and unwittingly put him at her disposal for virtually anything. He/she hasn't figured even the slightest fraction of that out yet, perceiving the connection instead as a deeper form of the rapport he's shared with less sophisticated devices. They've moved into a penthouse apartment in Down, and though they've grown quite close, they still follow their own paths.
For the first couple of weeks post-arrival, Heath had been in denial of the apparent permanence of his/her relocation, burying him/herself in solitary exploration. Listening to Aria's song brought all of those feelings of homesickness and rootlessness to the fore, causing an emotional upset strong enough to trigger his/her first change into his/her nymphly form. The opening strains of change may have coincided with Aria's... aria, but the rest occurred while he/she slept, resulting in a very off-put nymph the next morning. Helpful words from Roque and Induction-Coil drew her out of that funk, while the local spirits of artifice proved to be annoying for the first time, ever, as her desire to change back and their desire to see her change futher came into muddled conflict.
Then Indi showed her around Down and got her !drunk on some mellowing fluid with no name. She's tentatively accepted the 'female thing', in the same not-paying-attention way that she accepted being swept off to the Mess. With that frame of mind in mind, she's waiting for the emotional avalanche from her change to start rumbling down the slopes of her thoughts.
Having adjusted to becoming female, and adjusted to life in the Mess to a lesser degree, Heath has unconsciously taken to unlearning certain personality traits, experiencing something of a second adolescence as it were. It's left her more shy than acerbic for the moment, prone to bouts of self-consciousness, and with a tendency to blush that probably indicates a tendency toward [rosacea]. She'll probably grow out of it soon, hopefully before someone kills her in a fit of annoyance.
Whee, my first wiki page. Most of this stuff is cribbed from the application, so there's probably going to be some cutting, pasting, paraphrasing and rearranging as Heath settles and I distill things into a much less spammy form.
![[The Two Faces of Heath]](http://bieeanda.completelyfreehosting.com/heath.jpg){kind=link}