Savik'aasivak App for The Wake
Dec. 26th, 2013 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retired_monsterPersonal Information
Name: Seth (because my actual name is unpronounceable and Seth sounds cool, let’s just be honest, here)
Age: 22
Personal Journal: None. If it would help for me to make one, I could do that, though.
Email / AIM / MSN / Plurk: Email is sethqwinters@yahoo.com and Plurk name is WhiteCoffeeJettison
Current Character(s): None
Character Information
Name: Savik’aasivak, legally Savik’aasivak Kaivxuunaffaq, but his world rarely uses last names and his last name is only an indicator of his town of origin, not a family name.
Age: Roughly 15; his exact birth date is hazy.
Appearance: Savik is 5”6 in height, with brown eyes and an eternally serious if unremarkable face. His hair is dark brown, straight and somewhat shaggy. He isn’t pale, and if his world had races equivalent to ours, we could safely lump him in the ‘white’ category. He has no fashion sense or even an understanding of what that is and will dress in anything that fits, especially in the winter when it is cold. He rarely blushes, but when he does it shows up mortifyingly well. His eyebrows are somewhat thick. Although not handsome, he has no complaints about his appearance. His eyes are more expressive than his body language, and his expressions under duress are very telling.
Character history: Savik was born to Atqasalikqiku and Tutqiun-Tuvraqtu Raixiuq, a doctor and a maid, respectively. He was originally named Iakiak-. Living with his parents in the inland part of Uqallak, he was born just as the Uqallak War of Independence was reaching fever pitch. The war had been ongoing for two years, but at last there seemed to be a breakthrough, a chance of Uqallak winning. The Raixiuq family moved to the port city of Kaivxuun, where Atqasalik made more than a decent living working with both war related and civilian patients. When Atqasalik was a victim of a human bombing of the local hospital, Tutqiun was left to raise Iakiak on her own. Unable to find any other way of keeping her baby boy alive to see toddlerhood, she worked tirelessly at a power plant, using her electrokinesis to generate power even as the city ran out of resources to keep afloat. Everyone was convinced the war would be over soon, and Tutqiun was sure that after the war she and her son could go back to where her relatives lived and everything would be okay. The war continued and, when Iakiak was three, his mother died from a combination of overworking and untreated sickness.
The three year old, often left alone in a locked apartment room, only managed to get out when his thirst and lack of food made his body go into starvation mode, allowing for his powers to break the weaker part of the door, opening up a hole he could crawl out of. From there he swiftly found himself on the streets. There he survived off of the food strangers and older street kids provided, and rapidly found himself becoming part of that world. He fell in with a group of mutant kids who were in similar positions, and lived life without memories of his parents or his own original name. Uqallak won its’ independence and it didn’t make a noticeable difference in his life or his hand-to-mouth existence.
When he was six, however, the Pangean Civil War was kicking off along with the Mutant Supremacy movement, which the Uqallak government had decided to back. Although not officially involved in the war, Uqallak turned a blind eye to the Supremacist army taking volunteers for their cause. They also turned that same blind eye to recruitment of street dwellers, be they young or old. He was a starving, homeless little boy with telekinesis who was promised food, a place to sleep, and a way to fight the bad guys. He was told that he would help people, like a hero. One warm meal later, he willingly got on a plane to the Hikiqtabruk Islands, where he would live until he was cleared for combat. Most kids passed through fairly quickly. The fastest in and out were lost causes, people with weak powers or mutations that couldn’t be used effectively – cannon fodder, to put it bluntly. Sometimes just some nourishment and encouragement was enough to get powers to their full potential before someone went out into the fray.
For the boy they dubbed Savik (later Savik-aasivak) for his powers, they trained extensively. They needed to have reserves, for one thing, he needed to be old enough to follow orders, for another, but they also needed to desensitize him to the pain his power caused so he would be capable of killing as many people as possible out on the front. He spent several years there learning precision and control, and as his power grew to abnormal levels, was allowed an abnormally long training period. As Tsussain entered the war and it became purely about mutants versus humans, they finally sent out all their reserves into the battleground that was central Pangea.
At the age of nine, he first set foot on a battlefield. Savik had used his powers on animals before, so he knew how to aim and how to do exactly what he meant to and nothing more. A lot of that training failed right out of the gate because practice and actual combat are different. He killed his fair share of enemies, sure, but it was sloppy and unrefined. Only practice would get him back into the swing of things, and practice now came in the form of battles. A better word might be encounters, as while there were many legitimate fights against the actual human army, many times the troupe would come up a human town or community and simply wipe them all out. This was how Savik began getting back his precision – a disdain for torture meant he used his powers to produce quick deaths with minimal carnage, something that was noticed by his superiors. This unfortunately, after a while, landed him a position as an interrogator. He was taught on the job how to use his powers to cause maximum suffering without death, in order to get information.
This job as torturer was at first not routine. As the war’s tide shifted and mutantkind began really seeing that they could win if they did not let up, it became more and more common. It was over the course of several years; he started torturing people on an incidental basis at eleven, but by thirteen was doing it almost exclusively as a full time job within the armed forces. By the end of the war, he was back to simple fighting, the simple slaughter of everyone he was ordered to fight.
Once the war ended, he was, like all soldiers, given the option of staying with the army or leaving. He chose to retire despite having no place to go. He’d had enough of everything. With no other plans, he drifted through the Tsussain continent on foot, attempting to find a place to settle down and live a non-violent life.
Personality: Savik is not actively evil. This needs to be stated due to his position and his job. He has no hatred of humans at all, because he has no knowledge of what happened to his parents or even that he had parents. He does not root for the side of mutants or mutant supremacy. It’s not in his personality to get truly angry, it’s not who he is. The best way to describe his personality and what’s going on in his head at any given moment is that he is both burned out and determined to make it out of things alive.
He views things in purely military terms now. He sees threats, he assesses people’s potentially dangerous abilities, he tries to find the safest way to get through a situation. He will minimize casualties on the human side out of camaraderie towards his fellow soldiers and sympathy for civilians. He does feel sorry for humans, but he knows that to stick up for them in any way is pointless due to the nature of the war, the overwhelming support for said war, his low rank and his own lack of mutant powers. Sure, he’s outstanding at his own disturbing brand of mutant power, but he’s nothing compared to those around them. He knows it’s a tactical mistake to try anything. Tactical mistakes cannot be allowed as they will compromise his livelihood. He wants to live.
That rationale does not prevent him from regretting his torture and killing of human beings. It does not, contrary to TV Tropes, ‘get easier’ the more he does it. True, he doesn’t throw up and cry hysterically like when the ideas were being introduced to him and he killed his first humans. But being able to do a job is not the same thing as enjoying it or even making peace with it. Savik hates what he has done, what he has become, and the screams of his victims echo in his head every time he lays his head down to sleep. They haunt him as his he walks through the world and sees mutants who look like humans that he killed. He wanted to live to see the end of the war. He wanted to be set free so he could live a real life, and this desperate dream kept him motivated through the worst of it. Well, that and copious amounts of Allapitta.
Around the age of twelve, he was given his first dose of Allapitta by a well meaning fellow soldier named Kannuyaq, who assured Savik it would ‘make things easier’. And like any addictive substance, it does and it doesn’t. Savik may or may not be addicted to it. Allapitta induces a sort of dazed state of mind. Actions can be performed, even complex ones if the drinker is familiar enough with doing it in their right mind, but nothing registers, and many of the things done in this state are not remembered when it wears off. The worse the war got, the more Allapitta Savik consumed on a regular basis.
Around other people he tries to hold it together. He rarely displays emotion, be it laughter or tears, although he can express sadness and joy through body language well enough. He is polite, not to the ‘ma’am and sir’ level, but will apologize if he’s offended someone or he has upset them. He speaks in a very calm and even tone of voice for the most part. Although he doesn’t joke often, there were times of friendship and good moments with other soldiers, and he can look back of them with good humor and discuss them without problem if the subject comes up. He isn’t a chatterbox, but he doesn’t dislike talking to people by any means. He just gets tired of discussing the war and violence and shuts down when that topic comes up.
On the note of religion, although there are about fourteen major religions up and running in his world, Savik was never a believer in any of them. He could never reconcile the genocide they were all committing with the idea of any kind of higher power. It was just impossible for someone as beaten down and used as he is to ever put faith in a god, goddess or pantheon. What kind of deity would allow Jomai to become this mess of a planet? What kind of all powerful being would let violence against and by mutants and humans go on in such a horrific fashion for so long? No, he doesn’t believe in anything, not even superstitions. But in the same way many non-believers in our world will say ‘oh God’, Savik will invoke the northern Uqallak god of the stars, Tulok, when he is under stress or angry. He’s been known to say ‘Tulok, forgive me’ before or after a particularly atrocious act of violence. If there is a divine power, he’d put his bets on it being Tulok, and on Tulok very much not forgiving him at this point.
At the point where most of his military unit was composed of followers of Kimkik faith and they lost three soldiers in a battle, he attended a Kimkik funeral, obeyed all the traditions and rules of such a thing. Yes, he does not believe in your faith, but he will respect it. He will never be intolerant of the things that give people closure, comfort and motivation to keep going. Isn’t that, in a way, what they’re fighting for? The right to be people and be free in all meanings of the word? He is never going to criticize a person’s faith or beliefs. He may have questions, but life is hard enough without dividing amongst themselves over something like that.
Sexuality has never played a big part in Savik’s life. The army is not one-gender by any means, and men and women even bunk together, mostly because any man who even attempts rape knows the higher ups will do things much worse than that to them. So Savik has grown up around women and girls, views them as absolute equals, has been commanded by them and generally has the same regard for them as men. But the battlefield is not a place to find love. That’s not to say it didn’t happen to other people; of course it did. That’s not to say Savik didn’t have the standard wet dreams any teenage boy has. He did. The problem was and is likely always to be that he doesn’t have it in him to make deep, lasting connections with people. He doesn’t know how to open up properly and has issues connecting to others on even a deep friendship level. He is attracted to both genders. Attraction does not equal sexual interest or a desire to be with someone on that level or in that way. Sex is a distant dream. He figures when he’s left the military, run as far as he can into the farmlands of Tsussain, settled down into a job and town, then maybe it will happen.
Although he will take suggestions, advice and directions, now that he’s out of the military he is not taking orders. He allowed himself to be used in order to survive, so when circumstances improve to the point he can survive or make an attempt at it, no position of authority can order him to do something bad. Bad here is defined as harmful to others. He can respect that there are authority figures who have solid advice, there’s perfectly rational laws, and there is no reason to be rebellious if it’s stupid or endangers himself or others. But he will not take anything coming from a person who is corrupt, who is unknown enough to him not to be trustworthy, because he is through. Done. And so very tired.
That’s a good summary of Savik. He is very, very tired. He’s tired of the war, tired of violence, tired of surviving instead of living, tired of seeing horrible things, and so, so weary of this world. He’s not sure if he believes that the world will be better now that the wars are over, but he hopes so. He wants to believe, even as tired and worn out as he is, that things will not continue to be this way. From the depths of his exhaustion the only thing that keeps him going is that little candle in the dark that is the idea of a better future, a better life. He tries to be a realist. He tries not to hope for too much. Yet still, even as he lays down with a glass of Allapitta, there is a little bit of him that hangs onto the promise it will not always be this dark.
Powers and Abilities: Savik is telekinetic. In any other story this is the ‘lamesauce’ power, but it’s amazing what training for three years with said power will do to make this generic ability very, very dangerous. Telekinesis is the ability to move things with the mind, and most common depictions will stop at the idea that this means throwing things around. Creativity allows it to be much more than that, something Savik had already tapped into as a small child. When he was found on the streets at age six, he had used telekinesis to skin a rat and was trying to cook it. After all, the ability to move things with his mind didn’t mean moving the whole thing only. No animal or person is made up of one thing. Everything is made of parts. In order to make telekinesis more deadly, you need to simply realize this, and move the parts instead of the whole.
This is something that most telekinetics had to be taught, but due to desperation and the threat of death through starvation, he had learned this early. This isn’t to say he’s more talented naturally than any other mutant or telekinetic; necessity is the mother of invention. All mutants growing up on the streets had a marginal to sometimes great advantage over mutants who grew up in stable homes. The strain they were under to make it to see another day produced more frequent use of their powers and more creative uses. Practice didn’t make Savik a perfect or unstoppable mutant, but it put him on the higher end of the bell curve. So due to his already having basic command of an advanced skill, he was taken in and trained for three years in the most advanced telekinetic skills they had. This period of training may sound insanely long, but everyone knew mutantkind was in for a very long haul, a drawn out, hard won fight. Back ups and reserves were in training even up to the month before the war ended. There was no such thing as ‘too prepared’.
Over the years Savik learned how to separate layers of skin from bone, from other layers of skin and how to peel skin back, all with his mind. He learned how to pull skin apart to create lengthy and painful cuts. He learned how to remove things like fingernails, teeth, eyes and hair from people. It’s all about focus, about precision, and relative to the stillness of the target. While on a stationary target all of these things are easily done – he doesn’t even have to get up to do it by now – in the rush of in-person combat the precision drops. Except for ripping out eyes; he’s very good at that since they are relatively big compared to the tiny things he was first trained in, and very good at stopping an attacker or reducing them to an easy to execute enemy.
That said, rapid fire combat is a terrible idea. Remember, he know how to move a chunk of someone in addition to just throwing people around. That means he can dislocate your shoulder, snap your ankle, snap your neck, rip limbs clear off entirely, and get any weapons you have right out of your hands. True, he was trained to aid in interrogations. This doesn’t mean basic combat skills were neglected in any way. The fact telekinetic mutants in his universe don’t have to move to use their powers once they grow used to them means that at his current age, all he needs to do is be in range and have a clear view of his target and he’s utterly lethal and hard to counterattack. Thankfully, his range is a meager fifty feet in any given direction, which is very small compared to most telekinetics. This is why he was never promoted or put in a more important unit – he’s best at precision work, not at combat, and that means that for all his power, he’s a close-range combatant only and a liability in the age of guns and rocket launchers where he’ll not usually be in the position where he’s in range.
The degree of precision he’s capable of is breathtaking. If he has time, if someone is being particularly good at withholding information, he can contort individual muscles, he can fracture individual bones, slowly pull and twist fingers until they become too bruised and swollen to function. He can force someone to move against their will with some degree of accuracy – he once made a man shoot himself in front of his own wife. But his most agonizing technique that doesn’t even run the risk of killing others is what got him his name, what made him solidify his position in the military.
Human skin has seven layers. Seven. You will not bleed until all seven have been cut through. Due to how tiny these layers are, it is a very rare telekinetic who can tear off one or two layers at a time. Focus must be applied to the force – it takes training, takes practice, to learn how to use powers to push the rest of the skin down and pull the rest of it up. It’s a very taxing procedure; it’s very difficult to not slip up and apply too little or too much force. You need clean tears in order to make sure not to slip up and cause bleeding. ‘Savik’ is Uqajiq for ‘knife’. Savik was six when he learned to take the fur off of rats but not the skin so he could cook them over tiny fires made of newspapers and matches. When a mutant starts out with that basic principle down at age six, and is given three years of training in it? He is an absolute master of skinning people alive and leaving them in agony without killing them or even drawing blood from them at all.
Then there’s what he did to get the second half of his name. ‘Aasivak’ means ‘spider web’. It’s easy, using the above detailed principles, to put cracks in someone’s skin, layers of skin missing in patterns across the most sensitive of areas, carefully hitting nerve clusters. It’s easy to break skin and leave shallow cuts in patterns and dump vinegar or salt over them. It’s easy to do so on hands until they cannot grasp anything or move, it’s easy to weave patterns into someone’s scalp until their head swims and words bubble forth from their mouths willingly.
And all throughout this Savik’aasivak stood a silent punisher, a statue, silent by command unless instructed to ask questions. He was meant to be unnerving in his silence, his lack of expression, his seeming inability to care. But he did care, and perhaps that is the greatest of his abilities: to stay sentient and know that such things were wrong even as circumstances and psychological conditioning made him believe it was the only way to live.
World Summary: The world of Jomai started out like a hundred stories you’ve heard before: humans oppressing mutants. This went on for at least a thousand years, at first due to the scarcity of mutants. What little records there remain from before that (of the three continents, only Pangea had writing prior to that) there was a point mutants coexisted peacefully for potentially all of time prior to this. After the mutant oppression was started however, it took many forms, from slavery, to withholding medicines and basic services from mutants, to human families outcasting their own children for being ‘freaks’. In different religions throughout Jomai, mutants were viewed as being evil. Since many mutants were people of faith, the responses ranged from believing they deserved the treatment they were getting, to actively defying stereotypes by being good people, to suicides and humans killing their mutant offspring. Religious control combined with humans holding a stranglehold on most resources as time went on kept mutants ‘in line’ for hundreds of years.
This began to intensify as certain religions dominated the former many faiths and society progressed in technology. As nation after nation became part of the Tsussain Democratic Republic, the Pangean Empire, and the Uqallak Nation, it became increasingly easy to track mutants and get accurate statistics on them. The reigns were tightened on mutants gradually but surely as the governments gained more and more power. In Tsussain this took the form of withholding resources from mutants who didn’t obey. In Pangea this took the form of an increase in religious decrees and public shaming to make mutants too broken spiritually to mount a resistance. But in Uqallak, the mutant population had always been significantly bigger than in any other area, possibly due to their remoteness compared to other continents, and it was there the first signs of resistance began to form. Humans were never able to keep the tight leash on Uqallak they were able to maintain on the other two continents, even after three continent-countries were fully formed and running like clockwork.
About a hundred and fifty years ago, the tables started to turn. The mutant population began growing at a rate no one could have expected, and it wasn’t long before rallying forces started to stir up riots in major cities, in little towns, in places where mutants were realizing they had powers that could kill humans and they didn’t have to put up with this. There are too many leaders of this gradual revolution in too many areas to name; all it took was a charismatic mutant with a sense of justice and anger in their hearts to rally the people. At first towns and cities turned, then provinces. And then the mutant population absolutely exploded over the course of forty years, until there was an even number of mutants and humans.
The Uqallak War Of Independence, led by a mutant named Uvlaaq- Afaayuruq, led to the first formation of a well organized mutant army. And they worked hard to, over the course of ten years, wipe out every single human on their continent, province by province, bit by bit, with both sloppy riots, single mutants slaughtering their perceived oppressors in droves, and with army operations formal and well organized. Humans had the numbers and the technology but that technology was not designed to withstand the wrath of a hundred mutants with varying powers raining down upon them at the same time. When the continent of Uqallak was cleared of the ‘human sickness’, all Hell threatened to break loose on the other two continents.
It all finally devolved into a World War with the death of Khorkhoi Ovoul, a mutant who had been advocating for peace and equality. He had worked for twelve years to try to improve mutant-human relations in Tsussain, and his assassination by a rogue human was like lighting off a powder keg in the eyes of many mutants. Pangea became wracked by Civil Wars between states that had a high percentage of mutants and states almost entirely populated by humans. This led to events later known as the Pangean Massacres where mutants overran the human population entirely and left huge piles of bodies in the streets, gathered together and broadcast on every online video streaming service to show the world what would happen to humans now. The outrage in the human community in northern Pangea led to war with the south of Tsussain, who had done nothing to prevent the Massacres despite being the most technologically advanced place on the planet.
This war between remaining human forces weakened them more than they could afford, and mutant military leaders in Tsussain and Uqallak began to increase their military’s numbers through any means they could, including the recruitment of children. They were trained, taught to kill, then sent into the chaotic remains of the two other continents, who were so weakened by their miniature World War they no longer had the forces or coordination to fend off the mutants, who by now outnumbered them and had several generations of self righteous hatred to base their decisions on.
Within ten years, mutant forces from all three nations had cleared out every last human they could find. ‘Baseline’ humans born to mutants were killed. The religions of humanity died slowly with them. There were no more humans to run roughshod over their rights, to kill their families, to withhold supplies and necessities like food. The world was at half the population it once was, but the half that remained was finally without enemies. This won’t last, of course. Politics will march on and the people will divide again. But that’s the future, and this is the present situation.
How has this world impacted Savik, the app asks? It has made him. The military took him in at an extremely young age, they trained him, they disciplined him, they instilled a sense of duty to the cause and desperation to stay with them so he wouldn’t starve to death in an overpopulated ghetto in Uqallak somewhere. They created his life as he knows it. Without them there is no Savik’aasivak. His work for them shaped his personality, his worldviews, gave him a name, made him into a shell of a person, a weapon with moments of emotion. The world he lives in is all he is, in a sense. He lost his parents and his identity to the wars, to the humans, and to the mutants as well. He went from being a street kid to an army interrogator and soldier. He went from nameless to Savik’aasivak Kaivxuunaffaq. He went from nothing to something horrible and twisted, and he had no choice in the matter.
Samples
Network: Your network sample should be made as if your character were posting to a public network, such as Dreamwidth. It does not have to be their first post (ie, "OMG WHERE AM I?!"), but it does have to show that the character is perfectly aware of the fact that this is something that other people are likely to see. Please avoid excessive description in [action tags] here, as one would get in video posts - we're looking for your character's voice, the one they use for talking to others. Save the internal monologues for the third person sample.
[So this idea of video communicators is, surprisingly, actually growing on him. The ability to see some reactions instead of guess them based off of tone of voice is very handy. Certainly so given that people here act a lot more like civilians than military men and women.
The camera is focused on Savik in his room. He’s holding a book in his hands. His voice has zero shame in it, just sort of tentative tones, as if this is a really bold request.]
I don’t know how to read. School was something that people had to pay for and not a lot of us had that kind of money. It’s not as if we didn’t try to learn. I recognize some letters. I just can’t put them together the right way. And I know that fighting and bending training is critical and takes priority over this minor thing, but… I’ve always wanted to learn.
If anyone has time they’re willing to spare, I would be very grateful to have someone teach me. I don’t know how to make things yet, but I can work in return for the lessons. Contact me and we will work out an arrangement at your convenience. I will not neglect my bending practice or lessons for this.
[As a former soldier, he knows the value of establishing that.]
Thank you for your time. I appreciate everything everyone here has done for me.
[And he cuts the feed after that.]
Third Person:
Savik awoke from a nightmare and his first thought was that he needed a stronger dose of Allapitta before he went to bed next time. His gaze fell on his remaining stash. It wouldn’t be the first time someone overdid it and was out for a day. His telekinesis acted almost of his own accord, bringing the bag of crushed leaves to his hands as he sat up. The talk, bootsteps of other soldiers and birdsong of the komoinawa and shuuvu so common to Tsussain reached him. After a long moment of staring at the leaves, he put them away, back to where they were out of sight. Pulling his boots on, he glanced around the nearly empty tent where only Kita slept nearby; day shift had yet to start, but night shift was still finishing up before they came back in to sleep. On his way out of the tent, he stepped carefully around Kita’s sick, pale form, trying to be quiet.
As someone on the ‘omni shift’, someone who was on call at any hour when he was needed, it wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go in particular. Sleep was out of the question. Echoes of that man and his wife echoed in his head. ”I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t tell them anything!” “I know,” he’d sobbed with the gun Savik was making his hand clutch pressed against his table. “I love y-” BLAM! Not the worst thing he’d done, but the recent stuff was never easy to shake the night after. His eyes fell on the blood stains on his boots and his stomach churned. Still, breakfast provided other people. Other people would distract him just enough to get through to his next assignment.
The smell of rich nughas stew hit him like a punch to the gut. This was why he joined, right? Meals and a bed. If he had stayed in Kivxuun what would he be eating right now, grass, weeds, trash, rats? Whether or not it was worth it, the war was going to be over soon. Gathered around the radio, everyone ate quietly as they listened. He settled inbetween Qaqisaq and Uitchuq. All the voices of the military leaders, even the President’s, had long ago blended into one massive Military Voice he didn’t bother to keep track of. All he did was listen. This wasn’t like before, talking of years to come, long term strategies. The Aral Islands and Serekh province of Tsussain had been taken over and cleared of humans. There were only four more provinces to go.
He shut his eyes, breathing in a deep breath no one noticed. Four more. Four more, and finally, at long last, he would walk away. The screams would be relegated to dreams. He could lay in bed with Allapitta when the others were out celebrating the end of the war, and fall into a dreamless sleep. When he woke up, a whole world existed out there, waiting for him, and he would walk into the tall grass towards the Altan mountains until he was on their opposite side and this was all a life belonging to another man.
He didn’t smile, but his lips twitched upward, briefly.
As always, the chatter lifted up his spirits. His mental images of peeling back skin and watching pale porcelain giving way to an angry red were replaced with the latest stupid thing that Immaqtin had figured out how to do with water, spinning it into intricate shapes and making tiny, complex sculptures. When she got out of here she’d be an artist, she said, triggering the usual conversation these days. Once the tone of the mealtime words had shifted from worry about their next fight to the future, all of them had found a new power in themselves. Even though he had done things last night to humans that would be crimes if he’d done it to a mutant, it produced information. Information would get this war over with. Immaqtin would make art instead of freezing the water inside people and making it burst. Qaqisaq wanted to work at a power plant somewhere with his electrokinesis and have a big house. Uitchuq had it in his head he was going to use his military pay to go to school and be a doctor.
Savik… Savik was so tired. It was a deep seated exhaustion, one that permeated every inch of his mind, making thinking almost impossible and yet his thoughts were so heavy they could drag him down into a darkness he could never escape from. He felt weighed down by the events, not just of last night, but all the nights like last night, all the things that he had done. He couldn’t even remember most of their names or crimes or tactical importance. They were a blur of faces contorted in pain and voices begging for their lives. He didn’t know how he’d make it until the next four provinces were finished. They were on their way to the nearest war zone, undoubtedly. The end was near.
He should’ve felt triumphant. Good had won over evil, right? So why did he want to drink Allapitta until he fell into a sleep he never woke up from, why did four provinces seem like a million, why did dread settle over him as he knew it wasn’t over yet? Immaqtin turned to him, noticing how out of the conversation he was, and asked what he’d like to be when it way all over.
“Happy,” Savik replied without thinking about it. “And free.”
The conversation died after that.
Name: Seth (because my actual name is unpronounceable and Seth sounds cool, let’s just be honest, here)
Age: 22
Personal Journal: None. If it would help for me to make one, I could do that, though.
Email / AIM / MSN / Plurk: Email is sethqwinters@yahoo.com and Plurk name is WhiteCoffeeJettison
Current Character(s): None
Character Information
Name: Savik’aasivak, legally Savik’aasivak Kaivxuunaffaq, but his world rarely uses last names and his last name is only an indicator of his town of origin, not a family name.
Age: Roughly 15; his exact birth date is hazy.
Appearance: Savik is 5”6 in height, with brown eyes and an eternally serious if unremarkable face. His hair is dark brown, straight and somewhat shaggy. He isn’t pale, and if his world had races equivalent to ours, we could safely lump him in the ‘white’ category. He has no fashion sense or even an understanding of what that is and will dress in anything that fits, especially in the winter when it is cold. He rarely blushes, but when he does it shows up mortifyingly well. His eyebrows are somewhat thick. Although not handsome, he has no complaints about his appearance. His eyes are more expressive than his body language, and his expressions under duress are very telling.
Character history: Savik was born to Atqasalikqiku and Tutqiun-Tuvraqtu Raixiuq, a doctor and a maid, respectively. He was originally named Iakiak-. Living with his parents in the inland part of Uqallak, he was born just as the Uqallak War of Independence was reaching fever pitch. The war had been ongoing for two years, but at last there seemed to be a breakthrough, a chance of Uqallak winning. The Raixiuq family moved to the port city of Kaivxuun, where Atqasalik made more than a decent living working with both war related and civilian patients. When Atqasalik was a victim of a human bombing of the local hospital, Tutqiun was left to raise Iakiak on her own. Unable to find any other way of keeping her baby boy alive to see toddlerhood, she worked tirelessly at a power plant, using her electrokinesis to generate power even as the city ran out of resources to keep afloat. Everyone was convinced the war would be over soon, and Tutqiun was sure that after the war she and her son could go back to where her relatives lived and everything would be okay. The war continued and, when Iakiak was three, his mother died from a combination of overworking and untreated sickness.
The three year old, often left alone in a locked apartment room, only managed to get out when his thirst and lack of food made his body go into starvation mode, allowing for his powers to break the weaker part of the door, opening up a hole he could crawl out of. From there he swiftly found himself on the streets. There he survived off of the food strangers and older street kids provided, and rapidly found himself becoming part of that world. He fell in with a group of mutant kids who were in similar positions, and lived life without memories of his parents or his own original name. Uqallak won its’ independence and it didn’t make a noticeable difference in his life or his hand-to-mouth existence.
When he was six, however, the Pangean Civil War was kicking off along with the Mutant Supremacy movement, which the Uqallak government had decided to back. Although not officially involved in the war, Uqallak turned a blind eye to the Supremacist army taking volunteers for their cause. They also turned that same blind eye to recruitment of street dwellers, be they young or old. He was a starving, homeless little boy with telekinesis who was promised food, a place to sleep, and a way to fight the bad guys. He was told that he would help people, like a hero. One warm meal later, he willingly got on a plane to the Hikiqtabruk Islands, where he would live until he was cleared for combat. Most kids passed through fairly quickly. The fastest in and out were lost causes, people with weak powers or mutations that couldn’t be used effectively – cannon fodder, to put it bluntly. Sometimes just some nourishment and encouragement was enough to get powers to their full potential before someone went out into the fray.
For the boy they dubbed Savik (later Savik-aasivak) for his powers, they trained extensively. They needed to have reserves, for one thing, he needed to be old enough to follow orders, for another, but they also needed to desensitize him to the pain his power caused so he would be capable of killing as many people as possible out on the front. He spent several years there learning precision and control, and as his power grew to abnormal levels, was allowed an abnormally long training period. As Tsussain entered the war and it became purely about mutants versus humans, they finally sent out all their reserves into the battleground that was central Pangea.
At the age of nine, he first set foot on a battlefield. Savik had used his powers on animals before, so he knew how to aim and how to do exactly what he meant to and nothing more. A lot of that training failed right out of the gate because practice and actual combat are different. He killed his fair share of enemies, sure, but it was sloppy and unrefined. Only practice would get him back into the swing of things, and practice now came in the form of battles. A better word might be encounters, as while there were many legitimate fights against the actual human army, many times the troupe would come up a human town or community and simply wipe them all out. This was how Savik began getting back his precision – a disdain for torture meant he used his powers to produce quick deaths with minimal carnage, something that was noticed by his superiors. This unfortunately, after a while, landed him a position as an interrogator. He was taught on the job how to use his powers to cause maximum suffering without death, in order to get information.
This job as torturer was at first not routine. As the war’s tide shifted and mutantkind began really seeing that they could win if they did not let up, it became more and more common. It was over the course of several years; he started torturing people on an incidental basis at eleven, but by thirteen was doing it almost exclusively as a full time job within the armed forces. By the end of the war, he was back to simple fighting, the simple slaughter of everyone he was ordered to fight.
Once the war ended, he was, like all soldiers, given the option of staying with the army or leaving. He chose to retire despite having no place to go. He’d had enough of everything. With no other plans, he drifted through the Tsussain continent on foot, attempting to find a place to settle down and live a non-violent life.
Personality: Savik is not actively evil. This needs to be stated due to his position and his job. He has no hatred of humans at all, because he has no knowledge of what happened to his parents or even that he had parents. He does not root for the side of mutants or mutant supremacy. It’s not in his personality to get truly angry, it’s not who he is. The best way to describe his personality and what’s going on in his head at any given moment is that he is both burned out and determined to make it out of things alive.
He views things in purely military terms now. He sees threats, he assesses people’s potentially dangerous abilities, he tries to find the safest way to get through a situation. He will minimize casualties on the human side out of camaraderie towards his fellow soldiers and sympathy for civilians. He does feel sorry for humans, but he knows that to stick up for them in any way is pointless due to the nature of the war, the overwhelming support for said war, his low rank and his own lack of mutant powers. Sure, he’s outstanding at his own disturbing brand of mutant power, but he’s nothing compared to those around them. He knows it’s a tactical mistake to try anything. Tactical mistakes cannot be allowed as they will compromise his livelihood. He wants to live.
That rationale does not prevent him from regretting his torture and killing of human beings. It does not, contrary to TV Tropes, ‘get easier’ the more he does it. True, he doesn’t throw up and cry hysterically like when the ideas were being introduced to him and he killed his first humans. But being able to do a job is not the same thing as enjoying it or even making peace with it. Savik hates what he has done, what he has become, and the screams of his victims echo in his head every time he lays his head down to sleep. They haunt him as his he walks through the world and sees mutants who look like humans that he killed. He wanted to live to see the end of the war. He wanted to be set free so he could live a real life, and this desperate dream kept him motivated through the worst of it. Well, that and copious amounts of Allapitta.
Around the age of twelve, he was given his first dose of Allapitta by a well meaning fellow soldier named Kannuyaq, who assured Savik it would ‘make things easier’. And like any addictive substance, it does and it doesn’t. Savik may or may not be addicted to it. Allapitta induces a sort of dazed state of mind. Actions can be performed, even complex ones if the drinker is familiar enough with doing it in their right mind, but nothing registers, and many of the things done in this state are not remembered when it wears off. The worse the war got, the more Allapitta Savik consumed on a regular basis.
Around other people he tries to hold it together. He rarely displays emotion, be it laughter or tears, although he can express sadness and joy through body language well enough. He is polite, not to the ‘ma’am and sir’ level, but will apologize if he’s offended someone or he has upset them. He speaks in a very calm and even tone of voice for the most part. Although he doesn’t joke often, there were times of friendship and good moments with other soldiers, and he can look back of them with good humor and discuss them without problem if the subject comes up. He isn’t a chatterbox, but he doesn’t dislike talking to people by any means. He just gets tired of discussing the war and violence and shuts down when that topic comes up.
On the note of religion, although there are about fourteen major religions up and running in his world, Savik was never a believer in any of them. He could never reconcile the genocide they were all committing with the idea of any kind of higher power. It was just impossible for someone as beaten down and used as he is to ever put faith in a god, goddess or pantheon. What kind of deity would allow Jomai to become this mess of a planet? What kind of all powerful being would let violence against and by mutants and humans go on in such a horrific fashion for so long? No, he doesn’t believe in anything, not even superstitions. But in the same way many non-believers in our world will say ‘oh God’, Savik will invoke the northern Uqallak god of the stars, Tulok, when he is under stress or angry. He’s been known to say ‘Tulok, forgive me’ before or after a particularly atrocious act of violence. If there is a divine power, he’d put his bets on it being Tulok, and on Tulok very much not forgiving him at this point.
At the point where most of his military unit was composed of followers of Kimkik faith and they lost three soldiers in a battle, he attended a Kimkik funeral, obeyed all the traditions and rules of such a thing. Yes, he does not believe in your faith, but he will respect it. He will never be intolerant of the things that give people closure, comfort and motivation to keep going. Isn’t that, in a way, what they’re fighting for? The right to be people and be free in all meanings of the word? He is never going to criticize a person’s faith or beliefs. He may have questions, but life is hard enough without dividing amongst themselves over something like that.
Sexuality has never played a big part in Savik’s life. The army is not one-gender by any means, and men and women even bunk together, mostly because any man who even attempts rape knows the higher ups will do things much worse than that to them. So Savik has grown up around women and girls, views them as absolute equals, has been commanded by them and generally has the same regard for them as men. But the battlefield is not a place to find love. That’s not to say it didn’t happen to other people; of course it did. That’s not to say Savik didn’t have the standard wet dreams any teenage boy has. He did. The problem was and is likely always to be that he doesn’t have it in him to make deep, lasting connections with people. He doesn’t know how to open up properly and has issues connecting to others on even a deep friendship level. He is attracted to both genders. Attraction does not equal sexual interest or a desire to be with someone on that level or in that way. Sex is a distant dream. He figures when he’s left the military, run as far as he can into the farmlands of Tsussain, settled down into a job and town, then maybe it will happen.
Although he will take suggestions, advice and directions, now that he’s out of the military he is not taking orders. He allowed himself to be used in order to survive, so when circumstances improve to the point he can survive or make an attempt at it, no position of authority can order him to do something bad. Bad here is defined as harmful to others. He can respect that there are authority figures who have solid advice, there’s perfectly rational laws, and there is no reason to be rebellious if it’s stupid or endangers himself or others. But he will not take anything coming from a person who is corrupt, who is unknown enough to him not to be trustworthy, because he is through. Done. And so very tired.
That’s a good summary of Savik. He is very, very tired. He’s tired of the war, tired of violence, tired of surviving instead of living, tired of seeing horrible things, and so, so weary of this world. He’s not sure if he believes that the world will be better now that the wars are over, but he hopes so. He wants to believe, even as tired and worn out as he is, that things will not continue to be this way. From the depths of his exhaustion the only thing that keeps him going is that little candle in the dark that is the idea of a better future, a better life. He tries to be a realist. He tries not to hope for too much. Yet still, even as he lays down with a glass of Allapitta, there is a little bit of him that hangs onto the promise it will not always be this dark.
Powers and Abilities: Savik is telekinetic. In any other story this is the ‘lamesauce’ power, but it’s amazing what training for three years with said power will do to make this generic ability very, very dangerous. Telekinesis is the ability to move things with the mind, and most common depictions will stop at the idea that this means throwing things around. Creativity allows it to be much more than that, something Savik had already tapped into as a small child. When he was found on the streets at age six, he had used telekinesis to skin a rat and was trying to cook it. After all, the ability to move things with his mind didn’t mean moving the whole thing only. No animal or person is made up of one thing. Everything is made of parts. In order to make telekinesis more deadly, you need to simply realize this, and move the parts instead of the whole.
This is something that most telekinetics had to be taught, but due to desperation and the threat of death through starvation, he had learned this early. This isn’t to say he’s more talented naturally than any other mutant or telekinetic; necessity is the mother of invention. All mutants growing up on the streets had a marginal to sometimes great advantage over mutants who grew up in stable homes. The strain they were under to make it to see another day produced more frequent use of their powers and more creative uses. Practice didn’t make Savik a perfect or unstoppable mutant, but it put him on the higher end of the bell curve. So due to his already having basic command of an advanced skill, he was taken in and trained for three years in the most advanced telekinetic skills they had. This period of training may sound insanely long, but everyone knew mutantkind was in for a very long haul, a drawn out, hard won fight. Back ups and reserves were in training even up to the month before the war ended. There was no such thing as ‘too prepared’.
Over the years Savik learned how to separate layers of skin from bone, from other layers of skin and how to peel skin back, all with his mind. He learned how to pull skin apart to create lengthy and painful cuts. He learned how to remove things like fingernails, teeth, eyes and hair from people. It’s all about focus, about precision, and relative to the stillness of the target. While on a stationary target all of these things are easily done – he doesn’t even have to get up to do it by now – in the rush of in-person combat the precision drops. Except for ripping out eyes; he’s very good at that since they are relatively big compared to the tiny things he was first trained in, and very good at stopping an attacker or reducing them to an easy to execute enemy.
That said, rapid fire combat is a terrible idea. Remember, he know how to move a chunk of someone in addition to just throwing people around. That means he can dislocate your shoulder, snap your ankle, snap your neck, rip limbs clear off entirely, and get any weapons you have right out of your hands. True, he was trained to aid in interrogations. This doesn’t mean basic combat skills were neglected in any way. The fact telekinetic mutants in his universe don’t have to move to use their powers once they grow used to them means that at his current age, all he needs to do is be in range and have a clear view of his target and he’s utterly lethal and hard to counterattack. Thankfully, his range is a meager fifty feet in any given direction, which is very small compared to most telekinetics. This is why he was never promoted or put in a more important unit – he’s best at precision work, not at combat, and that means that for all his power, he’s a close-range combatant only and a liability in the age of guns and rocket launchers where he’ll not usually be in the position where he’s in range.
The degree of precision he’s capable of is breathtaking. If he has time, if someone is being particularly good at withholding information, he can contort individual muscles, he can fracture individual bones, slowly pull and twist fingers until they become too bruised and swollen to function. He can force someone to move against their will with some degree of accuracy – he once made a man shoot himself in front of his own wife. But his most agonizing technique that doesn’t even run the risk of killing others is what got him his name, what made him solidify his position in the military.
Human skin has seven layers. Seven. You will not bleed until all seven have been cut through. Due to how tiny these layers are, it is a very rare telekinetic who can tear off one or two layers at a time. Focus must be applied to the force – it takes training, takes practice, to learn how to use powers to push the rest of the skin down and pull the rest of it up. It’s a very taxing procedure; it’s very difficult to not slip up and apply too little or too much force. You need clean tears in order to make sure not to slip up and cause bleeding. ‘Savik’ is Uqajiq for ‘knife’. Savik was six when he learned to take the fur off of rats but not the skin so he could cook them over tiny fires made of newspapers and matches. When a mutant starts out with that basic principle down at age six, and is given three years of training in it? He is an absolute master of skinning people alive and leaving them in agony without killing them or even drawing blood from them at all.
Then there’s what he did to get the second half of his name. ‘Aasivak’ means ‘spider web’. It’s easy, using the above detailed principles, to put cracks in someone’s skin, layers of skin missing in patterns across the most sensitive of areas, carefully hitting nerve clusters. It’s easy to break skin and leave shallow cuts in patterns and dump vinegar or salt over them. It’s easy to do so on hands until they cannot grasp anything or move, it’s easy to weave patterns into someone’s scalp until their head swims and words bubble forth from their mouths willingly.
And all throughout this Savik’aasivak stood a silent punisher, a statue, silent by command unless instructed to ask questions. He was meant to be unnerving in his silence, his lack of expression, his seeming inability to care. But he did care, and perhaps that is the greatest of his abilities: to stay sentient and know that such things were wrong even as circumstances and psychological conditioning made him believe it was the only way to live.
World Summary: The world of Jomai started out like a hundred stories you’ve heard before: humans oppressing mutants. This went on for at least a thousand years, at first due to the scarcity of mutants. What little records there remain from before that (of the three continents, only Pangea had writing prior to that) there was a point mutants coexisted peacefully for potentially all of time prior to this. After the mutant oppression was started however, it took many forms, from slavery, to withholding medicines and basic services from mutants, to human families outcasting their own children for being ‘freaks’. In different religions throughout Jomai, mutants were viewed as being evil. Since many mutants were people of faith, the responses ranged from believing they deserved the treatment they were getting, to actively defying stereotypes by being good people, to suicides and humans killing their mutant offspring. Religious control combined with humans holding a stranglehold on most resources as time went on kept mutants ‘in line’ for hundreds of years.
This began to intensify as certain religions dominated the former many faiths and society progressed in technology. As nation after nation became part of the Tsussain Democratic Republic, the Pangean Empire, and the Uqallak Nation, it became increasingly easy to track mutants and get accurate statistics on them. The reigns were tightened on mutants gradually but surely as the governments gained more and more power. In Tsussain this took the form of withholding resources from mutants who didn’t obey. In Pangea this took the form of an increase in religious decrees and public shaming to make mutants too broken spiritually to mount a resistance. But in Uqallak, the mutant population had always been significantly bigger than in any other area, possibly due to their remoteness compared to other continents, and it was there the first signs of resistance began to form. Humans were never able to keep the tight leash on Uqallak they were able to maintain on the other two continents, even after three continent-countries were fully formed and running like clockwork.
About a hundred and fifty years ago, the tables started to turn. The mutant population began growing at a rate no one could have expected, and it wasn’t long before rallying forces started to stir up riots in major cities, in little towns, in places where mutants were realizing they had powers that could kill humans and they didn’t have to put up with this. There are too many leaders of this gradual revolution in too many areas to name; all it took was a charismatic mutant with a sense of justice and anger in their hearts to rally the people. At first towns and cities turned, then provinces. And then the mutant population absolutely exploded over the course of forty years, until there was an even number of mutants and humans.
The Uqallak War Of Independence, led by a mutant named Uvlaaq- Afaayuruq, led to the first formation of a well organized mutant army. And they worked hard to, over the course of ten years, wipe out every single human on their continent, province by province, bit by bit, with both sloppy riots, single mutants slaughtering their perceived oppressors in droves, and with army operations formal and well organized. Humans had the numbers and the technology but that technology was not designed to withstand the wrath of a hundred mutants with varying powers raining down upon them at the same time. When the continent of Uqallak was cleared of the ‘human sickness’, all Hell threatened to break loose on the other two continents.
It all finally devolved into a World War with the death of Khorkhoi Ovoul, a mutant who had been advocating for peace and equality. He had worked for twelve years to try to improve mutant-human relations in Tsussain, and his assassination by a rogue human was like lighting off a powder keg in the eyes of many mutants. Pangea became wracked by Civil Wars between states that had a high percentage of mutants and states almost entirely populated by humans. This led to events later known as the Pangean Massacres where mutants overran the human population entirely and left huge piles of bodies in the streets, gathered together and broadcast on every online video streaming service to show the world what would happen to humans now. The outrage in the human community in northern Pangea led to war with the south of Tsussain, who had done nothing to prevent the Massacres despite being the most technologically advanced place on the planet.
This war between remaining human forces weakened them more than they could afford, and mutant military leaders in Tsussain and Uqallak began to increase their military’s numbers through any means they could, including the recruitment of children. They were trained, taught to kill, then sent into the chaotic remains of the two other continents, who were so weakened by their miniature World War they no longer had the forces or coordination to fend off the mutants, who by now outnumbered them and had several generations of self righteous hatred to base their decisions on.
Within ten years, mutant forces from all three nations had cleared out every last human they could find. ‘Baseline’ humans born to mutants were killed. The religions of humanity died slowly with them. There were no more humans to run roughshod over their rights, to kill their families, to withhold supplies and necessities like food. The world was at half the population it once was, but the half that remained was finally without enemies. This won’t last, of course. Politics will march on and the people will divide again. But that’s the future, and this is the present situation.
How has this world impacted Savik, the app asks? It has made him. The military took him in at an extremely young age, they trained him, they disciplined him, they instilled a sense of duty to the cause and desperation to stay with them so he wouldn’t starve to death in an overpopulated ghetto in Uqallak somewhere. They created his life as he knows it. Without them there is no Savik’aasivak. His work for them shaped his personality, his worldviews, gave him a name, made him into a shell of a person, a weapon with moments of emotion. The world he lives in is all he is, in a sense. He lost his parents and his identity to the wars, to the humans, and to the mutants as well. He went from being a street kid to an army interrogator and soldier. He went from nameless to Savik’aasivak Kaivxuunaffaq. He went from nothing to something horrible and twisted, and he had no choice in the matter.
Samples
Network: Your network sample should be made as if your character were posting to a public network, such as Dreamwidth. It does not have to be their first post (ie, "OMG WHERE AM I?!"), but it does have to show that the character is perfectly aware of the fact that this is something that other people are likely to see. Please avoid excessive description in [action tags] here, as one would get in video posts - we're looking for your character's voice, the one they use for talking to others. Save the internal monologues for the third person sample.
[So this idea of video communicators is, surprisingly, actually growing on him. The ability to see some reactions instead of guess them based off of tone of voice is very handy. Certainly so given that people here act a lot more like civilians than military men and women.
The camera is focused on Savik in his room. He’s holding a book in his hands. His voice has zero shame in it, just sort of tentative tones, as if this is a really bold request.]
I don’t know how to read. School was something that people had to pay for and not a lot of us had that kind of money. It’s not as if we didn’t try to learn. I recognize some letters. I just can’t put them together the right way. And I know that fighting and bending training is critical and takes priority over this minor thing, but… I’ve always wanted to learn.
If anyone has time they’re willing to spare, I would be very grateful to have someone teach me. I don’t know how to make things yet, but I can work in return for the lessons. Contact me and we will work out an arrangement at your convenience. I will not neglect my bending practice or lessons for this.
[As a former soldier, he knows the value of establishing that.]
Thank you for your time. I appreciate everything everyone here has done for me.
[And he cuts the feed after that.]
Third Person:
Savik awoke from a nightmare and his first thought was that he needed a stronger dose of Allapitta before he went to bed next time. His gaze fell on his remaining stash. It wouldn’t be the first time someone overdid it and was out for a day. His telekinesis acted almost of his own accord, bringing the bag of crushed leaves to his hands as he sat up. The talk, bootsteps of other soldiers and birdsong of the komoinawa and shuuvu so common to Tsussain reached him. After a long moment of staring at the leaves, he put them away, back to where they were out of sight. Pulling his boots on, he glanced around the nearly empty tent where only Kita slept nearby; day shift had yet to start, but night shift was still finishing up before they came back in to sleep. On his way out of the tent, he stepped carefully around Kita’s sick, pale form, trying to be quiet.
As someone on the ‘omni shift’, someone who was on call at any hour when he was needed, it wasn’t as if he had anywhere to go in particular. Sleep was out of the question. Echoes of that man and his wife echoed in his head. ”I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t tell them anything!” “I know,” he’d sobbed with the gun Savik was making his hand clutch pressed against his table. “I love y-” BLAM! Not the worst thing he’d done, but the recent stuff was never easy to shake the night after. His eyes fell on the blood stains on his boots and his stomach churned. Still, breakfast provided other people. Other people would distract him just enough to get through to his next assignment.
The smell of rich nughas stew hit him like a punch to the gut. This was why he joined, right? Meals and a bed. If he had stayed in Kivxuun what would he be eating right now, grass, weeds, trash, rats? Whether or not it was worth it, the war was going to be over soon. Gathered around the radio, everyone ate quietly as they listened. He settled inbetween Qaqisaq and Uitchuq. All the voices of the military leaders, even the President’s, had long ago blended into one massive Military Voice he didn’t bother to keep track of. All he did was listen. This wasn’t like before, talking of years to come, long term strategies. The Aral Islands and Serekh province of Tsussain had been taken over and cleared of humans. There were only four more provinces to go.
He shut his eyes, breathing in a deep breath no one noticed. Four more. Four more, and finally, at long last, he would walk away. The screams would be relegated to dreams. He could lay in bed with Allapitta when the others were out celebrating the end of the war, and fall into a dreamless sleep. When he woke up, a whole world existed out there, waiting for him, and he would walk into the tall grass towards the Altan mountains until he was on their opposite side and this was all a life belonging to another man.
He didn’t smile, but his lips twitched upward, briefly.
As always, the chatter lifted up his spirits. His mental images of peeling back skin and watching pale porcelain giving way to an angry red were replaced with the latest stupid thing that Immaqtin had figured out how to do with water, spinning it into intricate shapes and making tiny, complex sculptures. When she got out of here she’d be an artist, she said, triggering the usual conversation these days. Once the tone of the mealtime words had shifted from worry about their next fight to the future, all of them had found a new power in themselves. Even though he had done things last night to humans that would be crimes if he’d done it to a mutant, it produced information. Information would get this war over with. Immaqtin would make art instead of freezing the water inside people and making it burst. Qaqisaq wanted to work at a power plant somewhere with his electrokinesis and have a big house. Uitchuq had it in his head he was going to use his military pay to go to school and be a doctor.
Savik… Savik was so tired. It was a deep seated exhaustion, one that permeated every inch of his mind, making thinking almost impossible and yet his thoughts were so heavy they could drag him down into a darkness he could never escape from. He felt weighed down by the events, not just of last night, but all the nights like last night, all the things that he had done. He couldn’t even remember most of their names or crimes or tactical importance. They were a blur of faces contorted in pain and voices begging for their lives. He didn’t know how he’d make it until the next four provinces were finished. They were on their way to the nearest war zone, undoubtedly. The end was near.
He should’ve felt triumphant. Good had won over evil, right? So why did he want to drink Allapitta until he fell into a sleep he never woke up from, why did four provinces seem like a million, why did dread settle over him as he knew it wasn’t over yet? Immaqtin turned to him, noticing how out of the conversation he was, and asked what he’d like to be when it way all over.
“Happy,” Savik replied without thinking about it. “And free.”
The conversation died after that.
