Rau le Creuset (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eschatological) wrote2023-01-02 07:44 pm
eschatological) wrote2023-01-02 07:44 pm
Entry tags:
neon requiem app
OOC:
Player Handle: Em
Contact: PM + skycrawler@plurk
Pronouns: She/Her
Invite/Current Player: Invite Link
Other Characters: N/A
IC:
Character Name: Rau le Creuset
Age: 25, physically closer to 30
Canon: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED/Etc.
Canon Point: “To An Endless Future”
CRAU: N/A
History: There’s an unreasonably long Wiki page, but let’s hit some key points, because Rau is very much shaped by his setting.
In the future, humanity began colonizing space and learned how to alter genes to produce quasi-metahumans who are as strong/smart/healthy as the human genome can support, called “Coordinators.” These developments brought out the worst in everyone: jealous and fearful people murdered Coordinators in the street, increasingly paranoid Coordinators fled to space and started agitating for colonial independence. Because this character makes zero sense without stressing it: this is setting is a shit-show characterized by out-of-control transhumanism in the name of “progress,” a military-industrial complex run amok, powerful people being absolute assholes, widespread reactionary fear and envy, and sci-fi genetic bigotry.
Against this backdrop, a wealthy narcissist decided that he was suuuuch a perfect specimen that it would be wrong for his toddler son (tainted by his wife’s genes!) to inherit his fortune. Instead, Mr. Narcissist decided to cheat death by funding a sketchy scientist’s personal research project (to create the most perfect Coordinator) in exchange for getting an illegal clone of himself. Unfortunately that clone was a walking identity crisis with accelerated aging who killed Mr. Narcissist, burned down everything around him, and walked out into an awful world on his own as a kid.
And that’s how you get Rau le Creuset: dying and suffering excruciating cellular degeneration in his twenties from an imperfect cloning process, completely aware that he’s a vanity project, in an absolutely awful world. And Rau decides: humanity on the whole keeps choosing insatiable desire and hate, what they really want is to be handed the means to wipe each other out, and as a sort of living product of weird human selfishness he’s entitled to facilitate that annihilation. So he joins the colonial militia and rises through the ranks so he can nudge people into the destructive decision-making necessary for his long-term goal of letting humanity mercy-kill itself with superweapons. (To be clear, Rau doesn’t think that the entire world is bad or that all people are bad -- he’s perfectly cognizant that there are very good people out there! He has met them and seen them in action! But he views technological progress and negative emotions as spiraling beyond the counterbalance of positive impulses, such that people will never make enough good decisions to make tomorrow better than today.) Along the way, Rau broke tiny clone Ray za Burrel out of a lab and handed the kid off to Gilbert Durandal, the scientist treating Rau’s cellular degeneration; Rau’s inability to shut up accidentally inspired these two to eventually try making the world less awful through a genetics-based benevolent-ish dictatorship, oops.
As the main storyline starts, Rau is the commander of a colonial special ops team of teenagers with giant robots pursuing the Earth-faction protagonists across space. Rau eventually leaves the teenagers to their own drama and embarks on a sub-plot in which he is nominally the very respectful and hyper-competent right-hand-man to the leader of the colonial armed forces, but is secretly giving away military secrets in a way which escalates the conflict, eliminates moderate voices, and pushes warmongers into leadership positions. Eventually, Rau engineers a situation in which the genocidal leader of the Earth forces is pointing nuclear weapons at the space colonies and the equally genocidal leader of the colonial forces is pointing a superlaser at the Earth. Rau laughs his way through a final giant robot fight with the protagonist (not-so-coincidentally, the successful product of that perfect-Coordinator project), cheerfully calling annihilation inevitable and hope pointless, and then gets impaled next to an exploding superlaser and dies as the protagonists just barely avert mass destruction.
Personality:
This guy seems quirky but nice! In the vast majority of his interactions, Rau is courteous, reasonable, and apparently helpful. To his subordinates, he’s thoughtful, supportive, and even sympathetic; to his superiors, he’s respectful and efficient. Though he’s relentless in pursuit of enemy targets, he saves a terrified enemy teenager from certain death and reassuringly promises to protect her, and saves a sobbing little kid from a life as a lab rat. In a world of angry shouting bigots, Rau stands out as the breeziest and most unflappable person in almost any room, and treats almost everything thrown at him as amusing or interesting. (Although if he overreaches and gets himself into real danger, Rau will promptly and shamelessly bail.) There are certainly hints that something is off with Rau from his earliest appearances -- he’s slightly theatrical, drops occasional bizarre comments about dead people, likes to toy with cornered enemies, gets a lot more energetic and enthusiastic when dogfighting his long-time nemesis, and straight-up wears a mask all the time. But on the whole, Rau spends most of his time being calm and smiling.
The politeness is real, but the helpfulness is… usually not. But as noted above, Rau has given up on humanity as a whole and is deliberately escalating a war. Although his polite tendencies are genuine (a deliberate rejection of his genetic donor’s arrogant and belittling personality), most of Rau’s superficially-helpful interactions turn out to be manipulative shit-stirring in hindsight: sympathetic conversations with conflicted subordinates are testing if they can be goaded into killing their childhood friends, deference to superiors hides that he’s nudging them to make increasingly terrible decisions, that rescued teenager is a tool to pass superweapon plans. (And the adorable lab rat dying in a nukes-versus-superlaser showdown is acceptable so long as the rest of humanity goes at the same time.) Rau isn’t actively or personally malicious on a day-to-day basis, so he’s completely functional for a game setting -- in the short- and medium-term (his mutual-destruction plan plays out over years), he works well with others, will follow instructions, and really will keep a team safe if only because he expects them to be useful later. But most of his apparent helpfulness has ulterior motives.
Under the metaphorical mask there are a lot of depressing thoughts about human nature! Rau tends to be personally secretive because he’s hiding a lot -- that he’s a clone, that he’s not a Coordinator, that he’s dying, that he’s committing fifty kinds of treason, and that he’s trying to end the world. But with the miniscule set of people he can be open with, Rau has long, thoughtful, amused conversations about human nature and the futility of wanting to make the world a better place. When the series finally reaches the point where Rau thinks nothing can stop him, his theatrical tendencies come out in full force and he goes on delighted gloating rants about his sole right to judge humanity. Rau tends to wax philosophical even in superficial interactions, but he doesn’t share his depressing conclusions widely until it seems too late to stop mutual destruction.
What’s with the non-metaphorical mask though? Rau wears a mask just because his face is the same face as the man he’s cloned from, and he hates that guy.
Also worth noting: this dude is incredibly nosy. Putting aside the politeness and omnicide, Rau is defined by being hands-on and curious. He personally handles intelligence hand-offs in everything from classy bars to rural markets, ditches his command role to scope out new weapons or go ddogfighting, and runs around enemy military bases in the middle of massive attacks to ransack databases. He is distinctly not a public-facing or leader-type antagonist; he lets other people take those roles and whispers in their ears. Rau is smart, inquisitive, daring, intuitive, patient, and relentlessly hard-working, and he’s channeling all of those should-be-positive traits towards annihilation.
Abilities
Inventory: Mask and gun.
Eternal Reward: If rewards are first “recorded” at the initial case worker meeting (or any time after the train ride, because this reward is driven by getting a tl;dr of the sequel series during the TDM), then Rey not being dead. Rau’s big goal in life was nudging the world to end -- but people were supposed to destroy themselves; ending humanity as a magical reward would miss the point. And if yappy protagonists are going to keep saving the world, then tiny clone might as well live his inexplicably optimistic life. If rewards are first “recorded” prior to the train ride, then Rau’s initial reward would be “1v1 dogfight with Mu in machines with equal specs,” and he’ll change to the Rey-reward fairly quickly.
Goals/Ideas: Rau is (1) really really into thinking about human nature, the point of life and wanting things, and the inevitability of negative emotions spiraling out of control, (2) superficially a hyper-competent employee, and (3) actually a hyper-competent nosy provocateur. He’s going to be just fascinated by ghosts and monsters as physical manifestations of escalating negative emotions, the idea of a continued struggle to “live” after death, and what the deal is with Niesha’s change in behavior. Short- and medium-term, he’ll be genuinely helpful to some faction while learning the lay of the land and gathering information for his own use. Really really really long-term (and depending on how metaplot progresses and on the playerbase and mod team’s appetite for player plots, not looking to step on toes), he might try to enable wide-scale destruction to shake up the status quo on the theory that a quick end is more humane than letting souls linger indefinitely.
Samples: Sample (cross-canon/new CR) + Sample (canon CR)
Secret Code Phrase: “My curse is my redemption.” (as of 1/2/24)
Player Handle: Em
Contact: PM + skycrawler@plurk
Pronouns: She/Her
Invite/Current Player: Invite Link
Other Characters: N/A
IC:
Character Name: Rau le Creuset
Age: 25, physically closer to 30
Canon: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED/Etc.
Canon Point: “To An Endless Future”
CRAU: N/A
History: There’s an unreasonably long Wiki page, but let’s hit some key points, because Rau is very much shaped by his setting.
In the future, humanity began colonizing space and learned how to alter genes to produce quasi-metahumans who are as strong/smart/healthy as the human genome can support, called “Coordinators.” These developments brought out the worst in everyone: jealous and fearful people murdered Coordinators in the street, increasingly paranoid Coordinators fled to space and started agitating for colonial independence. Because this character makes zero sense without stressing it: this is setting is a shit-show characterized by out-of-control transhumanism in the name of “progress,” a military-industrial complex run amok, powerful people being absolute assholes, widespread reactionary fear and envy, and sci-fi genetic bigotry.
Against this backdrop, a wealthy narcissist decided that he was suuuuch a perfect specimen that it would be wrong for his toddler son (tainted by his wife’s genes!) to inherit his fortune. Instead, Mr. Narcissist decided to cheat death by funding a sketchy scientist’s personal research project (to create the most perfect Coordinator) in exchange for getting an illegal clone of himself. Unfortunately that clone was a walking identity crisis with accelerated aging who killed Mr. Narcissist, burned down everything around him, and walked out into an awful world on his own as a kid.
And that’s how you get Rau le Creuset: dying and suffering excruciating cellular degeneration in his twenties from an imperfect cloning process, completely aware that he’s a vanity project, in an absolutely awful world. And Rau decides: humanity on the whole keeps choosing insatiable desire and hate, what they really want is to be handed the means to wipe each other out, and as a sort of living product of weird human selfishness he’s entitled to facilitate that annihilation. So he joins the colonial militia and rises through the ranks so he can nudge people into the destructive decision-making necessary for his long-term goal of letting humanity mercy-kill itself with superweapons. (To be clear, Rau doesn’t think that the entire world is bad or that all people are bad -- he’s perfectly cognizant that there are very good people out there! He has met them and seen them in action! But he views technological progress and negative emotions as spiraling beyond the counterbalance of positive impulses, such that people will never make enough good decisions to make tomorrow better than today.) Along the way, Rau broke tiny clone Ray za Burrel out of a lab and handed the kid off to Gilbert Durandal, the scientist treating Rau’s cellular degeneration; Rau’s inability to shut up accidentally inspired these two to eventually try making the world less awful through a genetics-based benevolent-ish dictatorship, oops.
As the main storyline starts, Rau is the commander of a colonial special ops team of teenagers with giant robots pursuing the Earth-faction protagonists across space. Rau eventually leaves the teenagers to their own drama and embarks on a sub-plot in which he is nominally the very respectful and hyper-competent right-hand-man to the leader of the colonial armed forces, but is secretly giving away military secrets in a way which escalates the conflict, eliminates moderate voices, and pushes warmongers into leadership positions. Eventually, Rau engineers a situation in which the genocidal leader of the Earth forces is pointing nuclear weapons at the space colonies and the equally genocidal leader of the colonial forces is pointing a superlaser at the Earth. Rau laughs his way through a final giant robot fight with the protagonist (not-so-coincidentally, the successful product of that perfect-Coordinator project), cheerfully calling annihilation inevitable and hope pointless, and then gets impaled next to an exploding superlaser and dies as the protagonists just barely avert mass destruction.
Personality:
This guy seems quirky but nice! In the vast majority of his interactions, Rau is courteous, reasonable, and apparently helpful. To his subordinates, he’s thoughtful, supportive, and even sympathetic; to his superiors, he’s respectful and efficient. Though he’s relentless in pursuit of enemy targets, he saves a terrified enemy teenager from certain death and reassuringly promises to protect her, and saves a sobbing little kid from a life as a lab rat. In a world of angry shouting bigots, Rau stands out as the breeziest and most unflappable person in almost any room, and treats almost everything thrown at him as amusing or interesting. (Although if he overreaches and gets himself into real danger, Rau will promptly and shamelessly bail.) There are certainly hints that something is off with Rau from his earliest appearances -- he’s slightly theatrical, drops occasional bizarre comments about dead people, likes to toy with cornered enemies, gets a lot more energetic and enthusiastic when dogfighting his long-time nemesis, and straight-up wears a mask all the time. But on the whole, Rau spends most of his time being calm and smiling.
The politeness is real, but the helpfulness is… usually not. But as noted above, Rau has given up on humanity as a whole and is deliberately escalating a war. Although his polite tendencies are genuine (a deliberate rejection of his genetic donor’s arrogant and belittling personality), most of Rau’s superficially-helpful interactions turn out to be manipulative shit-stirring in hindsight: sympathetic conversations with conflicted subordinates are testing if they can be goaded into killing their childhood friends, deference to superiors hides that he’s nudging them to make increasingly terrible decisions, that rescued teenager is a tool to pass superweapon plans. (And the adorable lab rat dying in a nukes-versus-superlaser showdown is acceptable so long as the rest of humanity goes at the same time.) Rau isn’t actively or personally malicious on a day-to-day basis, so he’s completely functional for a game setting -- in the short- and medium-term (his mutual-destruction plan plays out over years), he works well with others, will follow instructions, and really will keep a team safe if only because he expects them to be useful later. But most of his apparent helpfulness has ulterior motives.
Under the metaphorical mask there are a lot of depressing thoughts about human nature! Rau tends to be personally secretive because he’s hiding a lot -- that he’s a clone, that he’s not a Coordinator, that he’s dying, that he’s committing fifty kinds of treason, and that he’s trying to end the world. But with the miniscule set of people he can be open with, Rau has long, thoughtful, amused conversations about human nature and the futility of wanting to make the world a better place. When the series finally reaches the point where Rau thinks nothing can stop him, his theatrical tendencies come out in full force and he goes on delighted gloating rants about his sole right to judge humanity. Rau tends to wax philosophical even in superficial interactions, but he doesn’t share his depressing conclusions widely until it seems too late to stop mutual destruction.
What’s with the non-metaphorical mask though? Rau wears a mask just because his face is the same face as the man he’s cloned from, and he hates that guy.
Also worth noting: this dude is incredibly nosy. Putting aside the politeness and omnicide, Rau is defined by being hands-on and curious. He personally handles intelligence hand-offs in everything from classy bars to rural markets, ditches his command role to scope out new weapons or go ddogfighting, and runs around enemy military bases in the middle of massive attacks to ransack databases. He is distinctly not a public-facing or leader-type antagonist; he lets other people take those roles and whispers in their ears. Rau is smart, inquisitive, daring, intuitive, patient, and relentlessly hard-working, and he’s channeling all of those should-be-positive traits towards annihilation.
Abilities
- Quasi-metahuman and metahuman
- Peak-human genetics generally. Rau is the clone of a man who, for all his pathological narcissism, really did hit the genetic lottery. Rau is able to fake being a Coordinator (stronger, faster, smarter) because his capabilities are naturally (well, via cloning) just that good. This isn’t meta-human, but it’s right on the borderline.
- Cluster of low-grade psychic abilities. First, Rau has quasi-metahuman spatial awareness, which mostly manifests as an extraordinary ability to control multiple attack drones while also dodging incoming fire in a space combat environment. Second, he has a low-grade psychic ability that manifests as a little flash of awareness when certain types of other psychics are around (the ping is always mutual) and sometimes provides a split-second of foresight that an attack is coming. Third, Rau gets intuition/hunches -- that an attack has to happen now or it won’t work, that between two potential courses of action an enemy will take the less conventional course. He can’t read Bob’s mind to learn Bob’s name or figure out how Bob is feeling, but if he’s following Bob and has to choose between the two equally-likely scenarios that Bob went right or left, he’ll probably choose correctly. On the whole, these related low-grade psychic abilities are mostly just useful to give an edge in attacking/dodging in three-dimensional combat and to keep chase plots moving along.
- Normal
- Small arms training and other military training. Competent to break in and out of places, and shoot anyone who gets in his way. He’s been in charge of special ops and intelligence task forces in space and on Earth.
- Piloting. Rau’s giant robot piloting skills are final boss-tier. If there is ever a laser tag event he will be a menace.
Inventory: Mask and gun.
Eternal Reward: If rewards are first “recorded” at the initial case worker meeting (or any time after the train ride, because this reward is driven by getting a tl;dr of the sequel series during the TDM), then Rey not being dead. Rau’s big goal in life was nudging the world to end -- but people were supposed to destroy themselves; ending humanity as a magical reward would miss the point. And if yappy protagonists are going to keep saving the world, then tiny clone might as well live his inexplicably optimistic life. If rewards are first “recorded” prior to the train ride, then Rau’s initial reward would be “1v1 dogfight with Mu in machines with equal specs,” and he’ll change to the Rey-reward fairly quickly.
Goals/Ideas: Rau is (1) really really into thinking about human nature, the point of life and wanting things, and the inevitability of negative emotions spiraling out of control, (2) superficially a hyper-competent employee, and (3) actually a hyper-competent nosy provocateur. He’s going to be just fascinated by ghosts and monsters as physical manifestations of escalating negative emotions, the idea of a continued struggle to “live” after death, and what the deal is with Niesha’s change in behavior. Short- and medium-term, he’ll be genuinely helpful to some faction while learning the lay of the land and gathering information for his own use. Really really really long-term (and depending on how metaplot progresses and on the playerbase and mod team’s appetite for player plots, not looking to step on toes), he might try to enable wide-scale destruction to shake up the status quo on the theory that a quick end is more humane than letting souls linger indefinitely.
Samples: Sample (cross-canon/new CR) + Sample (canon CR)
Secret Code Phrase: “My curse is my redemption.” (as of 1/2/24)