[Approved]Zero's Tajaran App.

[ZeroNetAlpha]

BYOND Key:ZeroNetAlpha

Character Names:James Huff, Borgs of the X-8 Line

Species you are applying to play: Tajaran

What color do you plan on making your first alien character (Dionaea & IPCs exempt): Hharar Taupe (RGB 72, 60, 50)

Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yes

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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: Honestly? TAJARAAAAAAN SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED. Joking aside, I've wanted to make a medical character for a while and a Tajaran EMT just sounds like it needs to be a thing. With the right backstory and setup, I think the Exodus (And Aurora II) could have a new Kitter CMO one day.

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

A few things make Tajaran RP different than human. For starters there are a few mechanical differences imposed upon all tajaran characters in game such as overheating faster, seeing better in dark places, and not being able to wear standard issue gloves or boots. There's also the more subtle IC undertones of racism one could expect (But let's be honest, how many humans are truely racist here on the server without being shouted at by other xenophilic morons?)

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Character Name: Mikeel Ka'best

Please provide a short backstory for this character, approximately 2 paragraphs

Mikeel Ka'best started life as a doctor's son in the Adhomai Capital city of Nal'Tor with his Father, mother, and two siblings. Even as a Hharar Tajaran, his family was known for producing good doctors. Growing up he watched both of his older siblings be conscripted and invariably come home with postmortem honors. Hoping to avoid this fate, Mikeel acted out in an attempt to seem unstable and avoid conscription. His father, however, saw through this ruse and was a devout supporter of the PRA and nipped this behavior in the bud before it could cause too much danger.

Mikeel's father was a doctor and taught him the basics of medicine and first aid. It wasn't until Mikeel was conscripted into the Republican Army that he truely started his own medical career. While serving the glorious army as a corpsman, Mikeel took every spare chance he could get to better himself and progress further along his chosen path in life. Day in and day out when he wasn't patching up the wounded he was learning more and more, even going so far as to learn some basic Human and Skrell anatomy and physiology. All seemed to be going well for him. For a while during his service he enjoyed a relatively comfortable position behind the front lines. Though as anyone who's been a soldier knows, the lines of war are constantly shifting.

On a day that seemed like any other on the battlefield, the ALA devised a terrible plot. Using rudimentary fragmentation mines coupled with an unexpected ambush, soldiers of the Adhomai Liberation Army managed to inflict serious casualties upon a column of PRA troops with a small medical detatchment. Unfortunately for Mikeel, this was only the first stage of the plan. Having managed to evade injury during the main ambush, Mikeel and the other medics of this particular group of soldiers set up a triage point and started moving all of the wounded they could in for assistance. Meanwhile an ALA mortar crew had zeroed in the triage point and sat in wait for the moment when they could inflict even more damage upon the wounded soldiers and the medics taking care of them. When stage two of the ALA attack began, nobody understood what was going on. Suddenly the medics had stopped responding to nearly all hails and requests to retrieve injured soldiers. Nobody was getting any help suddenly and the triage point had exploded. Mikeel had been "lucky" as he wasn't immediately within the concussive kill radius of the mortar shells. However that was where his luck ended as one of the detonating shells flung hot metal shards in every direction, peppering everyone and everything nearby. For Mikeel this meant that his left side was rendered pretty much unusable by the fragmentation damaging his arm and leg. He had mere moments to tie a tourniquet around his leg and arm before blacking out.

When Mikeel woke up he was no longer in the field. No, he had woken up in a vaguely familiar setting. It took him a few moments to realize what was familiar. Was it the architecture? The paint? The skyline. He was in the hospital his father worked in. The first time he tried to move was quite a shock for him as his left arm and leg no longer responded to his commands properly. Using his right arm to remove the covers from his left side he was horrified to find that he no longer had his original arm and leg. The doctors explained to him that they had to remove them due to the sheer amount of damage and shrapnel that had injured him. The good news was he had a medical discharge waiting for him should he choose to accept it. While literally learning how to walk again, Mikeel found himself with a whole lot of free time on his hands having decided to accept the discharge. Having been taught from a young age to always strive for improvement he decided to try learning a new language. Most of the humans he'd seen always spoke this odd foreign language so what better way to work on improving self than learning what they spoke?

Another thing done out of sheer boredom while in rehabilitation was applying for any and every medical job he could find an application for, even one for a company called NanoTrasen. This application was mostly filled out as a joke due to the location of most of their facilities. It was this application that bore fruit however as once Mikeel was out of Rehab, NanoTransen offered him a job as a medic based on his experience as a medic in the army.

What do you like about this character?

Well, I don't really know yet. I tend to get attatched to my characters as I play them and not having been able to play Mikeel yet hasn't offered me the opportunity to develop quirks and such for him. I guess if I had to pick a thing it would be the backstory so far, I guess

How would you rate your role-playing ability? 4/10. After years and years of roleplaying, I'm still pretty bad at it. I tend to rely too much on in game mechanics.

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Notes:(edited)

[Butterrobber202]

James Huff is alright, enough so to give him a +1. I'm sure he'll handle Catbeast RP well.

[Bygonehero]

Huff is a great character. Please take this +1 as payment to keep Huff alive!

[DatBerry]

James huff is one of the few engineers who are not snub nosed, I've never noticed anything bad from them, during antag or whatnot interactions.

I dare say he's one of the few if not the only non-snowflake engineer main around lately.

+1 from me.

edit: while the reason to play them seems more towards mechanical benefits than lore, and that's bothering me a bit; I haven't noticed any powergaming done by huff.

Edited June 14, 2017 by Guest

[Mofo1995]

I will be ruling on this tomorrow night, EST. Sorry for the long wait. I see you have some feedback, thats great! It should make this much easier.

[ZeroNetAlpha]

edit: while the reason to play them seems more towards mechanical benefits than lore, and that's bothering me a bit; I haven't noticed any powergaming done by huff.

 

It's partly that, and partly because I'm nervous about making characters in other departments. One character that I retired, Aleksander Jakobs, was an absolute shit scientist and I'm nervous about learning more than one department at a time. Now that i've got the hang of engineering and read basically all I can about medical I'm looking to branch out.

[Coalf]

I remember Jakobs, yes he was shit.

Yet still I remember Huff and I remember Huff much, much more and in the positive light.

Although he likes to huff and puff he's still one of the actually VERY capable engineers that doesn't blindly lead a crossbow and spear charge against every antag he finds, just on that I'd give you a +1.

The thing is I planned to bitch about a backstory, but really, I suprisingly found nothing to bitch about, everything seems to actually fit and although as previously mentioned your reasons seem to be more mechanical than lore-related it's clear you have actually read the lore.

Although I'd question where a Tajara hospital got access to such advanced prosthetics besides them being imported.

Otherwise I have no issue with this, good work.

[Mofo1995]

I'm a fan of Punished Mikeel "Venom" Ka'best. I'm reminded of another story of a medic who was blown up and filled with shrapnel. Does he harbor a grudge against the Adhomai Liberation Army who took half of his body? Does he feel like their ambush played him like a damn fiddle?

He applied to a lot of medical jobs, and Adhomai is currently facing a manpower shortage with a high need for highly trained personnel, such as doctors! Is there any reason he chose NanoTrasen over jobs in his local market? It is worth noting that NanoTrasen would undoubtedly pay far more, which would be the obvious choice, but I'm interested if there are others such as wanting to escape the war. His father wanted him to become a doctor, or at least the story gave me that vibe, so how does he feel about him getting the job? Happy that he's following in his footsteps or disappointed that he's leaving his homeworld behind?

Mikeel seems like a well rounded character, and the thread is teeming with praises for your capabilities so I have faith that you can bring good roleplay to the table with a passing understanding of Tajaran lore. His hobbies in studying the physiology of humans and skrell particularly strike me as interesting. But I wouldn't mind hearing about what he likes to do for fun outside of his professional life.

Once my questions have been addressed, I'll be more than happy to finish my judgement of this application!

[ZeroNetAlpha]

Alright, let's take this from the top, shall we? Yes, he definitely harbors a grudge against the liberation army and its sympathizers. However his disdain is not enough to cause him to lash out at known rebel scum. Physically that is. He's always ready to tell some revolutionary to go shave themselves and go for a long walk off a short dock. On the flip side of that coin, while Mikeel wouldn't take any sort of direct action against a sympathizer or even a former enemy combatant he is more than willing to refuse to render aid, be it emotional, monetary, physical, and even medical to said person. Unlike some others who might become disillusioned with the People's Republic after such a lapse in tactical awareness, a youth full of propaganda and even parental influence guides his anger towards those that launched the attack and only resents the officers in direct command of him for not being as prepared for something like this to happen.

Playing the tune of his rather shotgun approach to finding a job, NanoTrasen paying more was definitely a deciding factor in why he chose to go to work with them and to that extent why his application was more of a shot in the dark than the others he filled out. Having effectively completed his term of service for the Army, escaping the war was less of a driving force than wanting to see some of the universe that he'd heard stories about. Mikeel's father wholeheartedly supports his decision to leave Adhomai for the universe at large, and is in no small part actually somewhat jealous of his son being able to do something like this. His father also acknowledges the fact that by leaving, their family line stands a better chance of surviving as it becomes harder to conscript people that are off world and beyond.

As for the question about his hobbies outside of work I've honestly got half a mind to say "find out icly" in a non-ironic and non-sarcastic way. However in the interest of actually answering the question I won't. Mikeel prefers more sedentary past-times like reading and even watching holovids as opposed to more energetic tasks like he would perform at work. He's always eager to learn more and can usually be found in a library on his time off. Part of his more relaxed off-duty enjoyments stems from his prosthetics. Despite them being imported to Adhomai from elsewhere in the galaxy (And being of better quality than anything the Tajarans could produce at this moment), they can't stop what psychologists describe as Ghost-pain or Phantom-pain. Such pain derives from a cruel trick that traumatic amputations can pull on the brain, causing it to think the limb is still there and in severe pain. Most people have their own way of dealing with this, and plenty more don't even have such pain. Mikeel however has found that by taking a load off and reading a good book, he can distract himself enough to not be plagued by it.

[Mofo1995]

I shiggy dig it. Mikeel ka best is da best. I'm trapped in a store since I got caught in a rainstorm, but when I get home I'll close this app and add your whitelist.

Approved!

[ZeroNetAlpha]

Awesome, thank you very much. Also, Congratulations on your One Thousandth post.