App for TLV part 2

[no_fastolfe]

User Name/Nick: Meredith
User LJ: Shiplizard
AIM/IM: Tejarik (AIM)/Shiplizard (Gtalk)
Email: Shiplizard at gmail dot com
Other Characters: N/A

Character Name: Vasilia Aliena
Series: Asimov's 'Caves of Steel' series (Caves of Steel through Robots and Empire)
Age: Late 290s. She appears in her early 30s.

From When? Some five years after the end of Robots and Empire. Her memory of R. Giskard has been recovered and she is searching for the robot R. Daneel

Inmate/Warden: Warden. Having faced her paranoia, racism, and somewhat patriarchal instinct towards AIs aboard the Barge, she returns a woman desiring the ability to make changes in her world and wishing to give the transformation she experienced to another inmate.

Abilities/Powers: No superhuman powers. Extended life expectancy in her natural environment. Genius roboticist and mathematician.

Personality: (adapted from original app, now with barge history) Vasilia was a misanthrope of the first water, her hatred for the rest of human race as hard
and finely shaped as diamond. She loathed humanity in general, Earthers specifically. Fellow Spacers she could interact on decent terms with, but Earthers and their spacefaring offspring, Colonists, are savages, infectious and mildly amusing at best. This was before the Barge and her exposure to the wide cross-section of humanity, both Earth-based and space-born. Her prejudices are still there but she identifies both the casual racism she learned culturally and the paranoia that makes all strangers her enemy and consciously fights this perception. In this, she is more open-minded than most Aurorans who have not met a non-Spacer.

She correctly identifies much of her social disfunction stemming from her treatment- well intended but misguided-- at the hands of her father, Han Fastolfe. Auroran society has no context for familial bonds; in trying to raise her in the romantic Earth tradition, he as a father and she as his daughter, he instilled an identity dissonance in her that distanced her from him and from Auroran society both. Having seen what is expected of an Earth-family bond, she can now see what he intended and where he failed. He is some years dead now and she has slowly managed to let her hatred die with him, although she keeps the name 'Aliena' as a token of her own established identity.

Unlike most Aurorans, she is not casually sexual. If she had not had an understanding warden aboard the barge, she would have gone on thinking both that Aurorans were hormone-driven morons and that she herself was fundamentally flawed. However, the introduction of the valid sexual identity 'asexuality' gave her a name and categorization for herself that eventually calmed her sense of alienation. She is not without her longing for romantic relationships but as of yet has not met the woman who can see eye to eye on her with her now somewhat radical views on Earther rights and Robot independence.

The only being she had anything like affection for was the robot Giskard, her companion when she was a child, and his death sent her into a spiral of depression and rage that was calmed aboard the barge when she developed her first new emotional attachments, significantly to Doctor Martha Jones and Dracula, as well as her two wardens Sherlock Holmes and Geharis Rhade. She does not have similar friendships at home; the political atmosphere of Aurora is not conducive to finding like minds.



History:
Prebarge history
Vasilia is a Spacer-- specifically an Auroran. Aurora was the first planet established and teraformed more than fifteen centuries ago, and the unofficial head of the movement that wound up severing ties with an over-populous Earth ten centuries ago. The Spacer movement embraced robotics where Earth rejected them, with the result that Spacer worlds have a low human population-- all screened for potential genetic abnormality before conception and for actual defect before birth-- and a high servant class robot population. (Earthers regard this as an appalling form of Eugenics; Spacers regard them as a bunch of filthy primitives who would breed indiscriminately if there weren't populations laws in place. The average Spacer is as racist and high-minded as any British colonial, differentiated only in that a Spacer doesn't go by your skin color, rather your genetics. For a supposedly scientific people they embrace an astonisthing amount of supersition and hearsay about Earthers.) Spacers embrace robot servants and robotics, safe in the unshakeable knowledge of the Three Laws:


1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.


Vasilia was born to genius roboticist Han Fastolfe and his wife at the time, that marriage long since dissolved and Vasilia quite properly having no knowledge of her female parent. Fastolfe is notable for being the inventor of and strongest opponent to the use of humaniform robots-- unthinkably, robots that could mimic humans in society (though they would not withstand medical examination or extreme observation). He was also notable for his romantic attraction to the customs of Earth, mined from old fiction and historical texts. He wanted a child in the Earth sense and decided that unlike the rest of her peers, Vasilia would be raised by a 'father' instead of as a group with specialized teachers. Academically, she neer suffered for his eccentricities-- she was raised adoring math and the study of robotics. Her dearest childhood friend was the robot he designated for her personal use, R. Giskard Reventlov; combination caretaker and guinea pig, Fastolfe would allow her to make certain modifications to Giskard's programming after carefully screening them to be sure that they would not affect Giskard's function. Only one modification she made without his permission-- a set of modifications she found so instinctually appealling that in her young mind she was sure that they couldn't harm her friend. In fact, they produced something like telepathy in Giskard, an ability to sense the emotions and intent of humans and robots around him-- and to affect them.

If her social upbringing had been as tranquil as her academic one, Vasilia would be as well-adjusted a Spacer as ever revolutionized robotics. Unfortunately, Fastolfe tried to instill his take on traditional Earther family values into her without accounting for the cultural and identity crisis that this would create in her living in a society with no concept of family and no incest taboo.

To make a long and painful story short, Vasilia-- young and just of the age when she was expected to take her first steps into sexual experimentation-- propositioned the member of the opposite sex who she felt the most trust and affection for. Fastolfe gave her no context or explanation for his horrified refusal and subsequent distance towards her. She was decades older before she understood the taboos that he had internalized and the (to a Spacer) unnatural parental relationship that he had wanted with her. She had no particular recourse for her self-hatred and the equally intense loathing she felt towards her father-- Spacers having assumed for generations that good genetics and an environment tailored towards human comfort could take the place of psychiatric care.

She has since strived to be an ideal Spacer-- becoming an unusual if not rare female roboticist, and one with the potential to rival Fastolfe, devoting her life to scientific pursuit and not-so-secretly to her own success above her colleauges (another fine Auroran value). She was left in relative peace, visiting Fastolfe's estate only to visit her childhood companion Giskard, until the arrival of Gladia Solaria. Gladia, an immigrant from sister Spacer planet Solaria, was young, and sweet, and lost; she craved the affection and companionship that her own planet had denied her and quickly became the daughter that Fastolf had dreamed of.

Vasilia, used to men who wanted their women to be pliable rather than intelligent, was still hurt. She cooperated with Fastolfe's rival, Kelden Amadiro, to mine the secrets of one of Fastolfe's humaniform robots-- one that he had assigned to naive Gladia, easily distracted by the attention of a suitor who Vasilia had turned down. The two women bore a more than superficial resemblance and Gladia was a far warmer creature; Vasilia's would-be swain was easily turned in her direction.

When Amadiro's interference caused a shutdown in Gladia's humaniform robot (and scandalously, lover), famed detective Elijah Bailey was brought from Earth to turn things upside-down and solve the case. Vasilia's part in the scheme was exposed, to her natural humiliation, and she allied staunchly thereafter with Amadiro and his anti-Earth faction.

Some hundred and fifty years later-- after her father's death (and after, unforgivably, he had given Giskard over into Gladia Solaria's care) - Vasilia remembered the changes she had made to Giskard and correctly deduced that Giskard was genuinely telepathic, and more, that his subtle mental interference in the service of Gladia and at the orders of Fastolfe and Bailey was the unseen force turnin gthe tide against Amadiro's cause, she confronted and attempted to reclaim him. She failed. Giskard knocked her unconscious and wiped what memories of his abilities he could without doing irreparable harm, and fled. She spent some time in hospitalization and one night, in the throes of a panic episode, slipped from Aurora and onto a ship called only 'The Barge'.

Barge and post-barge
Aboard the barge and out of her familiar environment, she experienced a meltdown in which paranoid attacks of rage and depression overwhelmed her. This culminated in what was to her unthinkable-- her already minimal immune system, compromised beyond protection by her stress, failed and she caught a common cold. Having never been ill before she could not identify the symptoms and did not seek treatment. Had she gone untreated she likely would have died of dehydration or side-effects from a raging fever, but Martha Jones of the infirmary correctly identified her symptoms and despite her protestations brought her in for treatment.

In the aftermath of this episode, exhausted and lost, Vasilia became more open to the support of others and began to make friends among the barge and settled into life there.

Her stay was characterised with missed opportunities for mayhem. She plotted to enrage Captain Beatty; she was thwarted by Flagg. She meant to murder the T-X terminator, the T-X's inmate made peace with it. She assisted in finding and destroying Pandora instead of muddying the waters. She wandered towards redemption, stumbling away from bad hebavior.

After her graduation, she returned to Aurora (after visiting some dear friends) different from everyone around her. No Auroran, even the liberals of Fastolfe's school of pro-Settler politics, had had such an personal association with Earthers. The one woman who had the ability to regard both Earthers and Robots as intimate partners (lovers, in fact) was both off planet and almost Vasilia's opposite; she could not make a friend of Gladia Solaria.

Instead, she began to study true free-will among her own household robots and sought out R. Daneel. She has been looking for five years and turns now to the Admiral to give her both the whereabouts to this elusive robot, and a solution for Robot/Human coexistance in the millenia to come.



As a warden:
Vasilia has feet of clay and is aware of it. She still suffers from paranoia and keeps this in check with intellectual coping mechanisms and discrete medical treatment. She cannot be too superior to an inmate, but she can be sympathetic to the struggle against instinct or mental illness. She believes fiercely in free will and has learned not to consider the human race superior.

She is brilliant, less easily manipulated than she was as an inmate, and very very good at electronic engineering and theoretical computing for inmates who would be more comfortable if their warden had a grasp of technology.

Sample Journal Entry
The contradiction of the human condition is that we desire both betterment of our circumstances, and routine. The one cannot bear the other, and so we seek that which terrifies us, the unknown that may prove better than the known... and we lapse into stagnancy, in turns.

I knew the barge would not be unchanged. But so many of you are strangers to me, and so many friends are lost. It cannot be as it was and the measured and structured days of Aurora are gone too. But this is necessary, if there is to be better.

For those among you who I know-- I have missed you. Please, I do not quite have my feet, have you a little time for me?


Sample RP: [3-5 paragraphs, 3rd Person POV]
Gameplay thread here.

Special Notes:
Vasilia has a depressed immune system--the result of thousands of years of breeding in a sterile terraformed environment-- she is uncommonly succeptible to the common cold, the flu, chicken pox, herpes, and other common virri and bacteria. Without treatment said conditions can and will prove fatal.