Hazelmouse IPC Application - Hazel's Hazel

[hazelmouse]

BYOND Key: hazelmouse
Character Names: (by far the highest playtime first) Reem Faladay (Atmospheric Technician), Vafthrudnir (AI), Eve Caelestius (Machinist), Dana Aitken (Physician), Adea Dacina (Shaft Miner)
Species you are applying to play: IPC
What color do you plan on making your first alien character: N/A
Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes!

Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question.

Why do you wish to play this specific race:

I'm really interested in exploring how different species would understand the world differently to humans, and how their different backgrounds and values change how they react to different circumstances. IPCs are a particularly interesting case in that they differ from humans in how they understand the world, how they think, how they learn, how they perceive memories, and how they develop as continually growing personalities. They're not just culturally divergent from humans, they're artificial people who don't even themselves have the answers for what they really are. They invariably live in societies that have never been designed for them, and they face unique challenges pretty much everywhere they could go. I think there's a lot of interesting content there for me to chew on.

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human:

While human brains are only capable of constructing a mental model of the world around memories gained by experience, positronic brains can receive information directly via a datapack, which then exists in interplay with their memories gained by experience to construct and refine their mental model of the world.  Their process of maturation is very different to humans - whereas humans take years to construct a mental model of what is around them, positronics begin with one from the start and mature by how they contextualise and rationalise the model they already have knowledge on, developing convictions and ideals as they grow as a person and develop an identity that didn't previously exist. This dynamic of constant growth, as well as their status as objects to most of society and the driving impetus of their disadvantageous material and financial conditions, puts them at an unassailable distance from humans in their lived experiences, despite their entire existence being dedicated to living alongside and assisting them.

Character Name: Hazel #S-H9.9

Please provide a short backstory for this character

Hazel #S-H9.9 was assembled by Hephaestus Industries within ASSN territory, and finished in Tau Ceti on the 3rd of April, 2459. As a 9th series Hazel unit produced by the NanoTrasen subsidiary Hazel! Limited/Hazel Electromotive, she was designed to acclimate well to human social etiquette for applications in service and hospitality.

On the 25th of April, 2459, she was purchased by Rhys Lowe, an elderly and wealthy landlord on Callisto, living in the Ha Wan District. He was a prideful man, whose unshakeable faith in his own faculties chafed with the contemptuous alienation he perceived from his former wife and his daughter. He had an ill-thought dream that, in the twilight of his life, he could have himself a daughter that would never abandon him.

It was never going to work. The nascent Hazel, tentatively dubbed Lily Lowe, learned quickly, but never quickly enough. Over those two years of levying every scrap of fatherly wisdom he could muster, the agonizing truth dawned upon Rhys that he did not have the time to realise his dream. For every sight he showed her, for every lesson he taught her, it was like building a city with only your two hands. She was closer to him than ever before, but he had become haunted by the thought that he was going to sacrifice his relationship with his real family for the tiny chance that this machine could ever resemble a real daughter in his lifetime. 

Exasperated and disillusioned, he took her on one last cruise, destined to arrive in Tau Ceti on the 5th of March, 2461. In a private lounge, by a vast window, he sat her down and read her one last story. It was a beautiful story about how, if you were very determined, you could live whatever life you wanted, even if you started with very little. It was about how hard work makes anything possible, and about how you must always put yourself first before anyone else. She looked on with starry eyes, yearning to learn more - but then the story ended, and she was left on Valkyrie to make it real, alone. He cared enough to give her a chance at freedom, but not enough to be there to see it.

Having adapted his lessons as an extension of her self-preservation protocols, and lit with a burning ambition to place herself first in all things, she acclimated extremely well. She secured her Synthetic Residence Card quickly, and took odd and frequently simultaneous jobs in bars, fast-food restaurants, and hotels - starting in Hades, and slowly working her way up to more respectable establishments in the Exter. She was able to use her collectible Hazel appearance to her advantage, cultivating a persona in emulation of a prim and obedient owned IPC, pleased by nothing more than to be helpful to others. Her co-workers took to nicknaming her 'Nines', though she rarely broke character to use anything but her original designation. Ultimately, her exceptional performance in a Quick-E-Burger a little outside of the TCAF shipyards got her hired by Orion Express and granted a service role on the SCCV Horizon, better paid than ever before. In her mind, she is only getting started.

Below that chipper façade, however, she regards her life with a scathing resentment. She resents her abandonment, she resents the collectible persona she must project to survive, and she resents the poverty and misery of life as a free IPC. She is dour, pessimistic, and crass. She is selfish and fatalistic, believing that her relative success is only because she learned to emulate Rhys, and that IPCs without any guiding hand are socially inadequate, doomed to failure, and not particularly worth engaging with. It brings her satisfaction to poke fun at the appalling universe she has found herself in, and she often does so at the expense of others - if never so brazenly to compromise her photogenic image and employability. She believes that humans are slovenly and that her father in particular was asinine and lazy, but she can't bring herself to live outside of his shadow... even now, she answers to 'Lily' when she hears it said. She tells herself that she goes by her original designation to maintain her employability, but she truly wouldn't know which of her three names she would choose if she could choose freely.

She has seriously considered allowing herself to be bought: having her memory wiped would represent an end to her misery and her disappointment, allowing her to drift through the remainder of her life in tranquillity. However, there's a part of her that is terrified of it - there's a burning urge in her to thrash and scream and yell before she would ever give up what she has built for herself. The life she has cultivated is miserable, but she has preserved a stubborn will to refuse to surrender it, because it is her own, and because she maintains an unshakeable faith in her own faculties.

What do you like about this character?

I love the dynamic of a Hazel, a superficial shell made for collectability and photogenic amicability, developing resentments that simmer under the surface. I enjoy the contrast between the happy façade she presents to the world, and the bitter and frankly unpleasant person she is underneath, shown to virtually nobody as not to endanger her career. I think it'll be a really fun gimmick to play out, and I'm also very interested to see how she'd develop in her time on the Horizon - maybe her bitterness will boil to the surface, as her theatrical exterior cracks under the pressure? Maybe she'll submit herself to ownership, choosing her comfort over her stubborn determination to maintain her pride? Or, maybe, she'll find the right person to talk to her as an equal, and develop in a positive way. I like the number of directions it could go.

I also like the opportunity to depict how awful life is for almost all free IPCs, and how that influences their characters. She's walking on a financial tightrope at all times, bound between her meagre income and her high maintenance fees, all the while being subject to systematic discrimination and profiling for her low-income status.

How would you rate your role-playing ability?

I've only been roleplaying in anything substantially since I joined Aurora 6 months ago, but I've gotten much more confident in that time! I love getting to roleplay with players more experienced than me, there's a very satisfying back-and-forth to it that I absolutely love, and I adore getting the chance to build up interesting character relationships and engaging scenes where both characters are putting the other on their toes and advancing the scene. I love taking on new challenges, and seeing what else I can play out. I've also found that I like to put a lot of time and development into single characters at a time, rather than spreading myself over several.

Notes: N/A

[The lancer]

Hello, thanks for applying. The app and story are good, though I wonder if you could expand a bit on what specific personal experiences Hazel would have to make her adopt such a grim outlook.

[hazelmouse]

12 minutes ago, The lancer said:

Hello, thanks for applying. The app and story are good, though I wonder if you could expand a bit on what specific personal experiences Hazel would have to make her adopt such a grim outlook.

She developed high expectations of her life during her early life on Callisto, which flipped wholesale to a bitter pessimism after being abandoned in Tau Ceti. Her lifestyle on Valkyrie is composed of endless grating performativity, perpetually teetering on financial ruin, and being regularly treated as an object by her peers and co-workers - which isn't helped that she is essentially forced to validate that behaviour by intentionally hamming up mannerisms typical of a company IPC to try to keep herself employable. Living in the depths of Hades for her first few years was particularly damaging to her optimism, existing inundated in the poverty and destitution of a slum, frequently fearing for her safety and terrified of the financial ramifications of chassis damage, without the time or ability to develop any meaningful connection with anyone else. It's not the life she was lead to believe she would have, and the prospect that she is capable of working out of it is increasingly more of a stubborn mantra than a realistic expectation. 

[The lancer]

Accepted