Lost without a Canary | Ciruk's Tajara Application

[Cirukcaller]

BYOND Key: Ciruk
Character Names:

Robert Draper (Martian, Human-Baseline)
Dro'von Omeruk (Aut'akh, Arakhania-Unathi)
Jan-riiuk Daha'kaar (Kir’gul-ite, Axiori-Skrell)
Ibn'ahm Dothrekiq (Suurka-lite, Xiialt-Skrell)

Species you are applying to play: The Tajara.
What color do you plan on making your first alien character: Chocolate
Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: I have, yeah

Why do you wish to play this specific race: I'd like to begin this statement by saying that I want to play all the races. I want to devote myself to Aurora as an individual, as I very much adore the community and it is one I often find myself coming back to in spite of the coming years. But this application is for Tajara, so here ends the preface to this.

With the danger of sounding cloying and even trite, I'll admit that the Tajara speak to me specifically because of their lore. While I have no particular dislike or like about their physiognomy, as to me they're just another race, it is their background and their recorded history that just pulls at my hearstrings. It is one rife in conflict, and because of it, full of opportunities for romanticized and sorrowful concepts packed with tales of loss, of resurgence in spite of all odds, and the artificial uplifting of a people by a meddling species. (IE, Humanity)

It is a tasteful combination that, as someone who enjoys stories very much, I cannot overlook it. 

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: Humans are established. Humans have branched out into many different paths and purposes, they've established colonies, they've tripped over the same stone and they've broken their noses as a people more than a hundred thousand times. They know the stories, they recognize all metaphors and analogies, they know what doesn't work and are still finding new ways to ruin it for everyone in an attempt to make the galaxy more bearable. (For themselves)

Tajara, instead, haven't quite made the same mistakes. Relatively new to the galatic scene, they enter its fields at a clear disadvantage, but proving themselves at every turn just as sharp, as able and capable as many of their uplifting counterparts. I also enjoy the connection to generational tradition they possess, especially the Zhan-Khazan, relating it in some level to Unathi's strong values and principles that border on being deterring to their goals. I'm all about that.


Character Name: Nasir ibn-Khairan

Please provide a short backstory for this character:  Nasir was bled free from a Zhan-Khazan mother beneath the canopy and in the darkness of a cave leased out by the New Kingdom of Adhomai to an interstellar corporation.  He was born to the sound of picks whailing as their metal met stone. To the huffs, to the puffs of working Tajara bending their spines and their paws to the bone in the name of a contractor they would never meet, a benefactor that would never avail them from life in the dark. Since child he grew accustomed to find his way around in the pitch-black by the sound of others, developing a sense for locating himself off of the movement of entities beyond his vision until his gaze developed its natural capacity for distending black-and-white shapes from no-light environments.

This acted opposite to his development, being that he used his hands to navigate the rocky caves far too much, his starved body never found the need to walk on its two paws for far longer than it was acceptable. One of the many disorders he'd have to contend with through his infant life. But he, nor his parents, did complain. That was life in the Zarr'jirah Mountains ever since his family was shipped there — or a portion of it — to work the corporation's mines. In those days, he didn't even know their name, but he'd come to learn of it as Nanotrasen later in life.

His family had arrived at a once-village of hunters that now experienced a boom from a nearby mine full of resources, them willing to be exploited by Nanotrasen. They had been shipped in and sold from a previous foreman and owner within the Kingdom, and used to labour in the name of a foreign power to enrich a corporation that didn't work for the benefit of his people. But Nasir, at the time, he didn't know this. He'd come to learn this later in life. Instead he worked as soon as his arms could lift the pick, he worked once his legs could withstand the overbearing weight of Phoron-encrusted rock. He worked, and he bled, and even as he saw his family waste away under the unforgiving conditions of mine, after mine, he didn't complain.

Instead, Nasir worked.

Work was all he knew, and he was never the smartest. He heard tales of chance and enterprise by his peers, cousins and the like, finding themselves shipped Stars-way to some city in a far-flung planet that he couldn't even comprehend. Couldn't conceptualize. When he still played with wrenches and welders, they forged their destinies in the stars. These were just dreams to him, nothing more than ghost-stories. To think them real made him afraid. He was a coward in those days. 

And still, Nasir worked. In his hole, in his mine, surrounded by many like-minded Zhan-Khazan like him, kept in the dark, kept as workforce under false pretensions of doing it for themselves. Until a fateful night, an incident with a trolley and a particularly weighted crate of Phoron came crashing down upon the head of a miner just beside him, killing him in an instant. He was witness first-hand of their death, but because they were not Zhan-Khazan, but a Highlander instead, many of the workers there that shared his ethnicity didn't care. With bláse continuity, they resumed their work. He watched in silence, as the body was scooped, bagged, and hauled out. He watched the days without incidents number — thirteen at the time — be scratched off to a grim zero.

Wiping the grime—adding more grime to it really—from his box-like muzzle, Nasir understood the previously understated: it was time to go. He finally approached the funny, squat human from "Tau Ceti," and buried his pickaxe in a ditch. The Legion, it was called, or was all he understood from the translator. He received an understanding he could barely comprehend: if he would fight, he'd be free. Nasir was never a violent Tajara, he loved his family, but they were dead; he loved his co-workers, but so many had cycled away, been traded off, or died that it was not the same anymore.

With nothing to live for, and the choice to waste away in a ditch or make something for himself, Nasir became a stowaway of a Bieselite shuttle and arrived at Mendell the most ignorant Tajara the city had ever seen. With barely a grasp of Ceti Basic, little to no knowledge of interplanetary physics and scientifics, and a body ply for explosive physical work, he joined the Tau Ceti Foreign Legion through the vague suggestions of a translator as a reservist and underwent his year-by education to learn (poorly) more of the language, and through it, a tutelage in the Horizon paid for by Biesel. He was a Space-Tajaran now.

A part of him feels he should be thankful, but half of the time he doesn't even know what is going on.

What do you like about this character?: He is a very humble, very slow Tajara who is more used to the honesty of hard work and self-sacrifice than the use of words, the use of station, and other, more intellectual aspects. He is a Tajara who has been exploited his whole life, and doesn't even know that he has been. He is ignorant to many things, never presumes to know anything at all really, and is very happy, very content in seeing simple tasks entrusted to him done and the mastering of them. I like this a lot.

He isn't dumb, but can easily come across as such. Instead he's ponderous, thinking things deeply and slowly, seeing through subjects with a studious perspective to things from a very analytical, but also painfully patient mind. I tend to play characters that intend to seem eloquent, or witty, or always possessed of answers. He is not that.  In a way, he will be a challenge to me as a writer, if I have the chance to play him. Something new that I hope to explore and, as much as I did making them, enjoy playing.

How would you rate your role-playing ability?: I think I'm okay, it's a matter of perspective imo

Notes: I noticed that, sometimes, other applications focus on a background that is more "matter-of-factly" in structuring the character; I.E, they talk about where they were born, what religion they follow, using raw and self-evident Tajaran terms to let you know they were very lore-analytic. I decided for a more anecdotal approach, I wanted the character to feel alive more than documented, if that makes sense? But I can do that other thing too, if it's necessary.

Anyway, thanks for reading

Edited September 7, 2022 by Cirukcaller

[Alberyk]

Some details:

Phoron only exists in the region around Tau Ceti, so no one would be mining it in Adhomai, but that does not really affect the character's background.

The New Kingdom only came to existence in 2450, so anyone born under it would be too young to work in the horizon. In your character's case, he would likely have to be born some years after its uprising.

Now, some questions:

What does Nasir thinks of the PRA and the DPRA?

What religion does he believe in?

How did the Second Revolution affect his life?

[Cirukcaller]

2 hours ago, Alberyk said:

Some details:

Phoron only exists in the region around Tau Ceti, so no one would be mining it in Adhomai, but that does not really affect the character's background.

The New Kingdom only came to existence in 2450, so anyone born under it would be too young to work in the horizon. In your character's case, he would likely have to be born some years after its uprising.

Now, some questions:

What does Nasir thinks of the PRA and the DPRA?

What religion does he believe in?

How did the Second Revolution affect his life?

Great! Thanks for visiting my app. Let's see, down to brass tax...

What does Nasir thinks of the PRA and the DPRA?

So, as I've come to explain the nature of the character, they are very adverse to being overtly-opinionated or possessed of much conviction. Because of that, I'd say that he would be very influenced by the New Kingdom of Adhomai's propaganda and hearsay amidst its people (Given how inoculated from the outside world it is) to think of them as being a lesser version of the NKA. Essentially rebels, and those who he blames for the woes and troubles of today, even though he may not be able to explain why. In the same sense someone believes in an entity they have never seen: that sort of belief. Blind, and painted as common sense in their thought-process.

Maybe some day this perspective will morph into believing them as nothing more than corporate tools weaponized against their own people, but he hasn't read enough books yet. 

What religion does he believe in?

He believes in the Ma'ta'ke Pantheon, and in an idealized version of Mata'ke as a Zhan-Khazan, much like himself. I feel as though this is the most fitting ideology I could think of for someone as sheltered as him, given his work conditions as being lesser-than-dirt, so to speak.

How did the Second Revolution affect his life?

I'd say that, on account that he was never a fighter, a warrior to any degree, what changed at first was who he mined for. Perhaps some derisions from compatriots who treated him as lesser for refusing to pick up a weapon, citing personal, if spiritual reasons. In truth, he was simply scared. The shortages of food and the stockpiles that rationed his meals certainly brought about a certain bit of personal unrest, and he had to scrape by on bare minimums to make it. What did he had to show for it after all the struggle? They traded his pickaxe for a shovel, and was given the honorable duty of digging out old, forgotten mines scattered across the mountain passages around Zarr'jirah. 

But I'd say that, even then, given the personality in question here, he probably didn't complain. Aloud. 

Notes: Hope that suffices, and thanks for reading!

[Alberyk]

Application accepted.