exsilium | application

[haigyi]

» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: aaron
Current AGE: n/a
Player TIME ZONE: PST
Personal JOURNAL: caffemisto
IM & SERVICE: brewmegently @ aim
Player PLURK: brewmegently
Current CHARACTERS: n/a

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Irisa Nyira (Irisa Nolan)
Canon & MEDIUM: Defiance | TV Show
Canon PULL-POINT: end of episode 10, after the plague in Defiance is dealt with
Character AGE: approximately 22
Character ABILITIES: Irisa is highly skilled with hand-to-hand combat and use of knives, either for throwing or as a hand-held weapon. She is also comfortable with use of gun-type weapons, and is able to drive.
Due to the device planted inside her, she has been capable of having visions of the past, present, and future. Generally these are short flashes of vision that she has to piece together herself, though when guided in a ritual, she is capable of more extensive exploration of her visions. She is only recently coming to realize that what she sees are visions rather than PTSD or seizures, as her adopted father has told her since she was young (he was unaware of their true nature), and she is still unaware of the source of the visions.
Character HISTORY:
http://en.defiance-wiki.com/wiki/Irisa_Nyira - Irisa @ Defiance Wiki

Irisa is an Irathient - one of the seven alien races (collectively known as the Votan, after the Votanis solar system they came from) that settled on Earth after inadvertently terraforming it to fit their needs. The Irathients, as a race, are generally looked down upon by the other Votan.

http://en.defiance-wiki.com/wiki/Votan - Votan @ Defiance Wiki
http://en.defiance-wiki.com/wiki/Irathient - Irathient @ Defiance Wiki

Irisa, however, was born on Earth. When she was 7 years old, however, her parents were taken in by a cult that claimed she was the "Devouring Mother" - a special girl who needed to be tested. During a cult ritual she was tortured partially through use of snakes and had a mystical Votan device (the Kelevar) implanted into her body at the small of her back. Before the ceremony was entirely complete, it was broken up by the military unit Joshua Nolan belonged to, and all the adults except Irisa's main torturer, including her parents, were killed. After she ended up in a refugee camp, she was later rescued by Nolan and, despite the tensions between their races, raised her as his own daughter.

The two subsisted by doing odd jobs and living a nomadic lifestyle, until they had finally settled on traveling to Antarctica, which had become something of a tropical paradise in the terraforming of Earth when the Votan arrived. It was during this particular journey that they looted a fallen Votan ship, found a terra-sphere, a source of incredible power. However, after being attacked by a group of Irathients called the Spirit Riders and being robbed, the two were left without their vehicle, and with Irisa shot in the leg. Nolan wore himself out trying to get her to safety after she finally succumbed to the wound and fell unconscious, and eventually the two were found by Lawkeepers from Defiance, a town not allied with any of the alien groups and attempting to integrate the various races in one town.

After Nolan decided to stay, attracted to the philosophy the town is founded on, Irisa very strongly disagreed with the desire to help. When Nolan decided to use the terra-sphere to help the town fend off an attack by a violent alien species, the Volge, Irisa fought with him and left to join the Spirit Riders for a short time, before having a change of heart and leading them back to aid in the fight. After that, she tentatively accepted Defiance as her home, despite being uneasy with the concept of towns in general and preferring her nomadic lifestyle, and became a Deputy Lawkeeper along with Nolan, who took over a position as Lawkeeper in Defiance after the previous one died.

Irisa is a major character in Defiance, and she is particularly key as a piece in the larger overarching plot of the series because of the device implanted in her back, which is a key that many of the series' antagonists are pursuing. She participates, however, in many smaller events throughout the series as a Lawkeeper and in her course of both learning to function in a town like Defiance and her struggle between her Irathient roots and her human upbringing. She helps to stop a Castithan ritual that involves torture and captivity to atone for cowardice.

Later, when a fellow Irathient, Rynn, uses Hellbugs to kill the people who murdered her parents, Irisa learns that she is able to see visions - something that Nolan had told her was PTSD and seizures. After being guided by Sukar, the leader of the Spirit Riders, through an Irathient ritual, she uses this ability to track Rynn down and bring her to justice. This is one of the first fights in the series she has with Nolan regarding his exclusion of Irathient culture from her upbringing and the first time she sees Sukar as a father figure as well as Nolan.

The next important moment for Irisa is when she recognizes a Castithan man, Daigo, as the man who led her torture as a child. She kidnaps him, and uses some of his own torture methods on him to extract a confession - Tommy, another Deputy Lawkeeper, tracks her down, tries to stop her, and then, when Daigo confesses and tells them that he wants Irisa to kill him to complete the ritual, snaps and almost kills Daigo. After stopping him from doing it, Irisa frees Daigo to wallow in his failure, and she and Tommy end up making love, which initiates a complicated and very awkward relationship.

Irisa's connection with Sukar is affected again when she has a vision of him dying in razor rain - a situation in which pieces of destroyed Votan ships rain down on Earth, causing destruction. She wakes up in a panic and goes to see the Spirit Riders, only to find that her vision was true. During Sukar's funeral rite, however, he wakes up fully healed, tells Irisa that he's on a quest for Irzu, an Irathient god, and goes on something of a rampage with her, gathering pieces of a device that he puts together. Nolan confronts the two of them, claiming that the device will cause a large piece of a Votan ship to fall that will destroy the town, and when he fights Sukar to try to stop him, he mortally wounds him. Irisa, betrayed by Nolan's actions and hurt over Sukar, engages the device anyway, believing in his quest from Irzu. The device ends up being intended to divert the same piece of a ship away from the town, and it is discovered that Votan technology is what awakened Sukar from death and sent him on his quest - however, Irisa still believes it was a quest from Irzu. She is then forced to decide whether to let Sukar die again or to keep him in a 'deep sleep' - a coma from which he will never wake. Unable to sentence him to death and still grieving, she opts to keep him alive.

Finally, right before her arrival in Exsilium, there is an outbreak of a plague in Defiance that Votan are immune to but carry, and which humans are quickly killed by. Irathients, who are by nature carriers - they will carry and spread a disease while very rarely actually becoming sick themselves - are suddenly the villains in the eyes of many residents. After a vote by the town council, the Irathients are rounded up against their will and, along with Irisa, are imprisoned in the mines. When the humans guarding them take offense to their praying, one of Irisa's Irathient friends is shot to death by a female miner who attacked him, and she is infuriated. After Nolan retrieves the cure for the disease, after several more Irathients are killed while trying to barter for the freedom of their people with the captured medicine, Irisa is set free and united with Nolan, who she makes amends with because he refused to let her down.

Character PERSONALITY: Irisa is a powerful, headstrong young woman - an excellent fighter, independent, and opinionated, she also struggles with fitting in with society, finding her place in the world, and deep-seated traumas from her past that have made it difficult for her to trust.

She is a force to be reckoned with - intelligent and tactically-minded, she's an expert at hand-to-hand combat both armed and unarmed, and has been shown to take down multiple grown men when at her best. Her strength and power extends from the physical to the mental and emotional as well. While she may find it hard to trust others, once she does learn to accept a person she is fiercely loyal, protective, and will forgive that person a great deal - this is primarily shown in the series with Nolan, her adopted father, who she has forgiven for multiple 'betrayals' that hurt her deeply. Irisa also has no problem fighting for those who need help - she's a passionate defender of the underdog, regardless of who that underdog might be, regardless of race or age or appearance. She has a firm sense of justice that she passionately defends, regardless of what others expect of her - if she can be convinced that she is fighting for the greater good, for what is right, she doesn't care what society thinks of her, and this tendency to not care what society thinks is one of her greatest strengths as well as one of her greatest faults.

Irisa is opinionated and headstrong, stubborn in her beliefs about the world around her, and while she is adaptable enough to change her points of view, to give in and go along with what others require of her, she needs to have a very good reason to do so. As her Irathient father figure told Nolan, her adopted father, one doesn't command an Irathient child to do anything. Irisa learns things for herself, and when she relents and does as told, it's because she chose to, because she had good reason to believe in the value of what she was asked to do, and on her own time. She has no fear in making her reasons for doing things very clear, however much she might hold back on her own deeper motivations or the traumas of her past.

Despite how stubborn and headstrong she can be, however, Irisa is often unstable and inclined to think with her heart rather than her head when making important decisions, primarily due to the strange circumstances of her upbringing. Being Irathient and thinking like one but raised primarily by a human, she struggles with finding her place between the two. The main source of her confusion is her strong belief in the Irathient gods - a belief that Nolan doesn't share. This has been a major cause of stress in her personal life as she tries to find the balance between blindly believing in the religion of her people or the science that backs up many of the more mystical aspects of her character. Exploring her Irathient side is new, a recent development sparked by her meeting of the Irathient Spirit Riders and Sukar, who has led her to explore her 'gift' of visions, calling her touched, chosen by the god Irzu, and while she has often found herself rebelling against Nolan's wishes and those of society to support these Irathient beliefs, she has not found herself to be wrong when making that choice, and so the struggle between her learned human behavior and the science that backs it up and her natural Irathient behavior and its mysticism continues.

Finally, Irisa is also extremely vulnerable. While she presents herself as hard and emotionless, violent and aggressive, she is also a very troubled young woman with a traumatic past. She suffers from nightmares and night terrors related to the torture she endured as a child, and the device placed inside her (which she is still canonically unaware of at this point). She dislikes being tied down, or seeing others tied down, she feels an intense bitterness toward her birth parents, and when she feels let down or neglected and left behind, she's very quick to cut people off, even if she later forgives them. As hard as she may be, she also has no problem crying when provoked in the right way, though they are often angry tears as she lashes out verbally at the person who hurt her. She is sensitive and emotional, keenly so, and has adapted her strength to survive.

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: Since Irisa is already very competent with her knives and various guns, and would be more than capable of retrieving or finding new knives if she loses hers, I'd be interested in allowing her to keep her ability to have visions as her 'weapon' in the context of Exsilium. Her ability is rather unpredictable, but it allows for investigation and advantages in battle if she utilizes a mild level of precognition.

I imagine it would start out similarly to how it is in the show near the beginning - unpredictable and never exactly much help, with only a bit of insight if she thinks about it. Over time, it would develop into something that gave her more clear insight into the situations she's in, with visions of the past and present that allow her to see things more clearly and deeply and to understand the people around her more. As she reached the highest levels of development, she would be able to consciously 'travel' into her visions after performing a chant and painting herself on the forehead - her body would present as unconscious or seizing during this, however, even at her strongest, and she would need to be physically protected while she's doing it. At this high level she would also gain a sort of sixth sense in battle on occasion that might help her react more quickly.

Regardless of level, the ability would hit at random (at higher levels, when she doesn't trigger it consciously), cause night terrors and seizures that leave her helpless, and generally be completely useless a decent amount of the time just as it is in canon.

Character INVENTORY: Her jacket, a sweater, her pants and boots. Her knife holsters, which strap across her back and have many, many knives for throwing or other uses, as well as a whetstone to sharpen them. She also has hip and leg holsters that contain a few larger knives and a charge pistol, as well as a few clips for the charge pistol.

» PREVIOUS GAME INFORMATION ( IF APPLICABLE )
n/a

» SAMPLES
First PERSON:

[The entry is in audio only - she's new here, and she might've read all the information they were given, but that doesn't mean she's going to be completely comfortable baring her face to a bunch of humans. Not after what just happened at home. For now, her voice will have to do.

And the sound of a blade being drawn over a whetstone, slow and rhythmic. At first she speaks calmly, if in a clipped voice.]

Exsilium, huh? Fancy name for something that's a glorified prison camp.

[Another slow stroke of the whetstone.]

I don't like cities, I barely cared to stay in the place I came from, and this one gives me a bad feeling. I don't like it.

[She hisses, low in the back of her throat as she strokes the whetstone again, then speaks a few quiet, angry sentences in Irathient, a gutteral tribal-sounding language.]

There is no one who can convince me this shtako is any of my business or responsibility. This is wrong.

Third PERSON:

It was one thing to stay in a city because of Nolan, surrounded by the filth of other people, the tense situations she didn't have the capacity or desire to deal with, the lack of independence. It was another thing entirely to be kidnapped from her father's side, from the Spirit Riders, and thrust into a war that wasn't hers, that she couldn't even bring herself to try caring about.

She wanted to go home.

Of course, that didn't seem like an option, not now, not for who knew how long. There was no amount of reassuring herself that this might just be a part of Irzu's path she hadn't considered, no amount of trying to convince herself that she might be of use in this place that could make her settle with it. She'd barely settled with Defiance. This place was something else entirely.

Frowning, she stalked through the marketplace with the hood of her jacket up, the bag with her 'allowance' (and even that made her angry - she wasn't a child to be handed money just for existing) tucked away in coin in the inside pocket of it, heavy against her chest. She was looking for more knives, her eyes attuned to the glint of sharp blades that she could add to the collection, that she could practice with on the mandatory training days she still felt were a waste of her time. This whole situation made her sick.

She stopped beside a booth selling some blades, her fingers sliding over the lengths of metal, picking out which ones were little more than decorative, and which were honed to a fine point, intended for violence. She was about to pick one, a short, sharp throwing knife that looked as deadly as it was when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a child crying. She spun, putting the knife back down, seeking out the source of the sound. It didn't take long to find, a little girl just up the street, missing part of a left arm - an old wound, or something she'd been born with, perhaps - and raising what remained of it to a woman nearby, crying 'mama' and asking to be held.

She stood still, eyes trained on the mother and child, that missing part of an arm, and remembered where it had said on the computer they'd given her that the United Earth didn't allow such 'damaged goods' inside their fancy cities. She spun on her heel, turned her face away, and closed her fingers around the grip of the knife she'd chosen.

"I'll take this one."

Maybe it was time to look into the missions. After all, it might be the only way to get home.

» ADDITIONAL NOTES
Anything else you feel is necessary.