OOC: Making Tracy Work Hard For The Money
Aug. 26th, 2010 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
onlymistakenAKA everything you never wanted to know about Cally, a character from an obscure BBC sci-fi series that went off the air before most of you were born, and weren't afraid to ask!
Where/when/whatevertheheck does she come from?
Umpty-tumpty hundred years into the future (or "the 3rd century of the 2nd calendar" if you prefer the meaningless technobabble version) in a galaxy not far away at all, because it's this one. Blake's 7 isn't like Star Wars at all, so there, despite the fact that there's an evil galacticempire Federation and our heroes run around fighting against it. Just ignore the episode with the space cantina where Cally dresses exactly like Leia but with more leg, and the fact that the show started in 1979, smack dab between New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. On a less sarcastic note, psychic powers are rare, as are non-humanoid aliens, and the Terran Federation is a giant military bureaucracy with no one single creepy dude cackling at the center of it. Also, the CGI sucks, the good guys aren't all that good, the bad guys are never fully defeated, the show has the single most depressing ending in tv history before Forever Knight came along, and they have glowy guns that look like vibrators instead of glowy swords that look like someone's overcompensating for something.
The Federation has explored and colonized most of the Milky Way, but not ventured beyond, because the government is too busy being thoroughly corrupt and spreading the somehow-still-existent British accent to every planet including the ones populated by isolationist aliens because it's a BBC show now shut up and enjoy your popcorn - to perfect the level of FTL travel that would let them cross intergalactic space. Those in charge spend most of their time scrambling for power, money, and technology, oppressing and drugging the citizens, attempting to take over any remaining independent planets of any value, and using all sorts of things the Geneva Convention frowns on to make any dissidents recant or disappear.
One of those dissidents is Roj Blake, a guy with +10 to all Charisma rolls, who gets sentenced on trumped-up child molestation charges, collects a bunch of escaped convicts in a stolen ship, and somehow turns them into a galaxy-famous resistence group, even though he has Greg Brady's perm and can't always properly count to seven. Huzzah, off they go into the wild black yonder in their newly-named ship, the Liberator, to be freedom fighters! Except for the fact that Vila the thief isn't keen on the 'fighter' half of that title and Avon the computer-genius embezzler thinks a) the only freedom is a lot of money, a safe place to hide, and a quick way to get there and b) Blake is a complete fucking loon. Nonetheless, everyone sticks around for their own reasons, some more mercenary than others.
Who the frak is Cally, then, and why are you using BSG curses for a show that predates it if you don't count the original series?
Because B7 doesn't have any nifty cusswords of its own, though it does have the lovely "ten-credit touch" if Fandom ever needs new ways to say cheap whore.
...Fandom always needs new ways to say cheap whore.
Anyway. Once Blake and his mighty band of four escaped criminals fly off in their stolen ship, their first priority is to contact other resistance cells. During their initial attempt, they instead find a wiped-out base and one remaining member planning a suicide mission to get revenge for the brutal way the group was massacred: a telepathic woman from the planet Auronwith Greg Brady's dress sense but it was the 70's and everyone had Greg Brady's dress sense named Cally. Blake and his people de-suicide the mission and win the kewpie doll: their first member who hasn't actually been convicted of anything.
Despite being an alien, Cally looks completely human: tall, skinny, long-faced, with curly brown hair. From certain angles she might qualify as weird-hot, but a beauty she is not.
As mentioned above, she's a telepath; as not mentioned above, she comes from a society of telepaths, who can project to anyone but (supposedly) can only receive direct thoughts from each other. Thanks to side-effects of advanced cloning, natural psychic gifts in the population were increased to the point where everyone in Cally's generation is telepathic. This informs everything about her life; what's best for the community is supposed to be what's best for individuals, and the worst curse a child of Auron can throw at someone is "May you die alone and silent." Cally's not only a part of that larger community, she has a clone-twin named Zelda with whom she's even closer and has 'optimum telepathic affinity' -- they've been shown to reach each other over deep-space distance in an emergency.
Though we don't get much background on their childhood besides mention of legends and children's stories and the fact that at one point they did have parents (who are dead by the time we meet Cally as an adult), the overwhelming impression is of a people who frown on individualism when it's not dedicated to improving their own society. This worked out just fine for Zelda, who grew up to stay at home, specialize in genetics, and care deeply for all of the clone-infants created in the replication plant; Cally... not so much.
Though just as empathic and kind-hearted as her sister, she couldn't stand the fact that her people were only interested in protecting their own well-being. 'What's best for the community' included complete political isolation from other planets (so much that by Cally's generation, most of them have no natural resistance to non-local pathogens). This meant Auron not only didn't join the Federation (a good thing), they wouldn't make alliances with other neutral planets (though a few individuals tried to negotiate those) or come to the aid of those trying to resist. Cally rebelled against that policy, leaving Auron to join the human resistance against the Federation.
For this -- partly through their disapproval of her and partly due to her own survivor's guilt when her rebel compatriots were killed and she considered herself a failure -- she was exiled from her world and her people. For a telepath like Cally, used to 'true communication, mind to mind' which could only be achieved with her own race, this was the loneliest existence imaginable. Even with the crew of the Liberator, most of whom share her ideals about freedom from the Federation, she's quietly friendly but isolated, partly by nature as the only alien, partly through her own loneliness and missing her home.
The isolation is her one weak point, and boy, does it get exploited again and again, by every psychically-developed enemy that comes along. Though she's emotionally tough enough for guerrilla warfare and withstanding expert torture, tell Cally she's always going to be alooooooooooone and then offer her a way out of it, and her initial resistance tends to fold like an origami crane. On the plus side, she always manages to fight her way back from that, usually by reaching out to her friends (including, shockingly, Avon, with whom she's got some never-resolved UST) for connections.
Or the singing alien cacti, whichever. (I shit you not. However, in the show's defense: 1. 1979, 2. It really isn't much of an emotional leap from Avon to alien cacti.)
As time passes and Blake's ideals turn more towards fanaticism, Cally is one of the voices who tries (not always successfully) to keep him in check. While Avon will argue from a practical standpoint that this is going to get them all killed, Cally is the one concerned with collateral damage and what Blake's plans will do to the people they're supposedly trying to help. When Blake disappears halfway through the series, this concern gets transferred to the rest of the crew, and the fierce fighter who vowed that "there will be companions for my death" finally ends up being one of the most peaceful members of the crew, speaking up against pointless revenge and occasionally leading them right into a trap due to her difficulties with turning down missions of mercy.
She's quick, quiet, snarky when the situation calls for it but generally friendly, and pretty good at balancing practicality and conscience -- though conscience will usually win.
So that's who the frak is Cally. Except none of that has happened to her yet and won't for years, if ever. Now, she's 16, she's still living on Auron, and while flying a shuttle around one of her planet's moons, unexpected one-way portal to Fandom is unexpected.
Woe. Aloooooone...
Can haz powerz?
Ye-es, but not the kind that require Ye Olde Permission To Read Your Character's Mind OCD. Cally can't do that. What she can do is project her mental voice into the minds of others - the same way Jono Starsmore communicates. Since she has a mouth and a chest, though (albeit not much of a chest), she can also talk the regular way. Unless it's //formatted like this//, assume she said it out loud.
Supposedly only another Auronar can project to her, but this gets proved questionable on at least three occasions when non-Auron aliens both speak into her head and/or take her over. For the purposes of RP and filling plotholes the size of Cally's shoulderpads in that outfit I deliberately didn't make any icons from, I'm going with the supposition that her people have never met non-Auronar telepaths before, so that's just their mistaken assumption. (During the entire run of the show, we never see a human telepath, so it seems plausible.) Thus at FH, Cally can in fact receive messages from other telepaths, if they're deliberately sending to her.
She also has a grab bag of other vague psychic/empathic sensitivities at the speed of the plot. In canon she's been known to feel someone else's pain when he got a broken arm re-set just as she was trying to project to him, owe the Skywalkers royalties on having Bad Feelings (TM) about stuff, and be able to sense the difference between human and nonhuman entities... sort of. (Is it human? Yes... no wait, no. Which turned out to be accurate because it was a sentient virus using a dead human body as a meat-suit.)
The handwavy power-boundaries are lovingly made up for by her status as the Galaxy's Most Possessible telepath, three years running. Cally's internal shields are awesome - she's never going to be accidentally leaking thoughts or emotions at you - but her defense against external forces sucks. She never learned to have defenses; she grew up with everybody in everybody else's head all the time and it was all very polite, naive and guaranteed to get them killed if they wandered offworld for very long. She's also lonely without her people around and that makes her doubly vulnerable to anything that feels like a familiar connection.
So this is a permissions post standing on its head: Cally's not going to be picking up anything about anyone at FH (emotions, Bad Feelings About This, humanity or lack thereof) without permission, but I'll ping you to ask about it if it comes up, rather than go crazy with the What Can She Know About You OCD now. If you feel like having your telepathic character mess with the girl at some point, yay. Just poke me and we can dream up a plan.
Where/when/whatevertheheck does she come from?
Umpty-tumpty hundred years into the future (or "the 3rd century of the 2nd calendar" if you prefer the meaningless technobabble version) in a galaxy not far away at all, because it's this one. Blake's 7 isn't like Star Wars at all, so there, despite the fact that there's an evil galactic
The Federation has explored and colonized most of the Milky Way, but not ventured beyond, because the government is too busy being thoroughly corrupt and spreading the somehow-still-existent British accent to every planet including the ones populated by isolationist aliens because it's a BBC show now shut up and enjoy your popcorn - to perfect the level of FTL travel that would let them cross intergalactic space. Those in charge spend most of their time scrambling for power, money, and technology, oppressing and drugging the citizens, attempting to take over any remaining independent planets of any value, and using all sorts of things the Geneva Convention frowns on to make any dissidents recant or disappear.
One of those dissidents is Roj Blake, a guy with +10 to all Charisma rolls, who gets sentenced on trumped-up child molestation charges, collects a bunch of escaped convicts in a stolen ship, and somehow turns them into a galaxy-famous resistence group, even though he has Greg Brady's perm and can't always properly count to seven. Huzzah, off they go into the wild black yonder in their newly-named ship, the Liberator, to be freedom fighters! Except for the fact that Vila the thief isn't keen on the 'fighter' half of that title and Avon the computer-genius embezzler thinks a) the only freedom is a lot of money, a safe place to hide, and a quick way to get there and b) Blake is a complete fucking loon. Nonetheless, everyone sticks around for their own reasons, some more mercenary than others.
Who the frak is Cally, then, and why are you using BSG curses for a show that predates it if you don't count the original series?
Because B7 doesn't have any nifty cusswords of its own, though it does have the lovely "ten-credit touch" if Fandom ever needs new ways to say cheap whore.
...Fandom always needs new ways to say cheap whore.
Anyway. Once Blake and his mighty band of four escaped criminals fly off in their stolen ship, their first priority is to contact other resistance cells. During their initial attempt, they instead find a wiped-out base and one remaining member planning a suicide mission to get revenge for the brutal way the group was massacred: a telepathic woman from the planet Auron
Despite being an alien, Cally looks completely human: tall, skinny, long-faced, with curly brown hair. From certain angles she might qualify as weird-hot, but a beauty she is not.
As mentioned above, she's a telepath; as not mentioned above, she comes from a society of telepaths, who can project to anyone but (supposedly) can only receive direct thoughts from each other. Thanks to side-effects of advanced cloning, natural psychic gifts in the population were increased to the point where everyone in Cally's generation is telepathic. This informs everything about her life; what's best for the community is supposed to be what's best for individuals, and the worst curse a child of Auron can throw at someone is "May you die alone and silent." Cally's not only a part of that larger community, she has a clone-twin named Zelda with whom she's even closer and has 'optimum telepathic affinity' -- they've been shown to reach each other over deep-space distance in an emergency.
Though we don't get much background on their childhood besides mention of legends and children's stories and the fact that at one point they did have parents (who are dead by the time we meet Cally as an adult), the overwhelming impression is of a people who frown on individualism when it's not dedicated to improving their own society. This worked out just fine for Zelda, who grew up to stay at home, specialize in genetics, and care deeply for all of the clone-infants created in the replication plant; Cally... not so much.
Though just as empathic and kind-hearted as her sister, she couldn't stand the fact that her people were only interested in protecting their own well-being. 'What's best for the community' included complete political isolation from other planets (so much that by Cally's generation, most of them have no natural resistance to non-local pathogens). This meant Auron not only didn't join the Federation (a good thing), they wouldn't make alliances with other neutral planets (though a few individuals tried to negotiate those) or come to the aid of those trying to resist. Cally rebelled against that policy, leaving Auron to join the human resistance against the Federation.
For this -- partly through their disapproval of her and partly due to her own survivor's guilt when her rebel compatriots were killed and she considered herself a failure -- she was exiled from her world and her people. For a telepath like Cally, used to 'true communication, mind to mind' which could only be achieved with her own race, this was the loneliest existence imaginable. Even with the crew of the Liberator, most of whom share her ideals about freedom from the Federation, she's quietly friendly but isolated, partly by nature as the only alien, partly through her own loneliness and missing her home.
The isolation is her one weak point, and boy, does it get exploited again and again, by every psychically-developed enemy that comes along. Though she's emotionally tough enough for guerrilla warfare and withstanding expert torture, tell Cally she's always going to be alooooooooooone and then offer her a way out of it, and her initial resistance tends to fold like an origami crane. On the plus side, she always manages to fight her way back from that, usually by reaching out to her friends (including, shockingly, Avon, with whom she's got some never-resolved UST) for connections.
Or the singing alien cacti, whichever. (I shit you not. However, in the show's defense: 1. 1979, 2. It really isn't much of an emotional leap from Avon to alien cacti.)
As time passes and Blake's ideals turn more towards fanaticism, Cally is one of the voices who tries (not always successfully) to keep him in check. While Avon will argue from a practical standpoint that this is going to get them all killed, Cally is the one concerned with collateral damage and what Blake's plans will do to the people they're supposedly trying to help. When Blake disappears halfway through the series, this concern gets transferred to the rest of the crew, and the fierce fighter who vowed that "there will be companions for my death" finally ends up being one of the most peaceful members of the crew, speaking up against pointless revenge and occasionally leading them right into a trap due to her difficulties with turning down missions of mercy.
She's quick, quiet, snarky when the situation calls for it but generally friendly, and pretty good at balancing practicality and conscience -- though conscience will usually win.
So that's who the frak is Cally. Except none of that has happened to her yet and won't for years, if ever. Now, she's 16, she's still living on Auron, and while flying a shuttle around one of her planet's moons, unexpected one-way portal to Fandom is unexpected.
Woe. Aloooooone...
Can haz powerz?
Ye-es, but not the kind that require Ye Olde Permission To Read Your Character's Mind OCD. Cally can't do that. What she can do is project her mental voice into the minds of others - the same way Jono Starsmore communicates. Since she has a mouth and a chest, though (albeit not much of a chest), she can also talk the regular way. Unless it's //formatted like this//, assume she said it out loud.
Supposedly only another Auronar can project to her, but this gets proved questionable on at least three occasions when non-Auron aliens both speak into her head and/or take her over. For the purposes of RP and filling plotholes the size of Cally's shoulderpads in that outfit I deliberately didn't make any icons from, I'm going with the supposition that her people have never met non-Auronar telepaths before, so that's just their mistaken assumption. (During the entire run of the show, we never see a human telepath, so it seems plausible.) Thus at FH, Cally can in fact receive messages from other telepaths, if they're deliberately sending to her.
She also has a grab bag of other vague psychic/empathic sensitivities at the speed of the plot. In canon she's been known to feel someone else's pain when he got a broken arm re-set just as she was trying to project to him, owe the Skywalkers royalties on having Bad Feelings (TM) about stuff, and be able to sense the difference between human and nonhuman entities... sort of. (Is it human? Yes... no wait, no. Which turned out to be accurate because it was a sentient virus using a dead human body as a meat-suit.)
The handwavy power-boundaries are lovingly made up for by her status as the Galaxy's Most Possessible telepath, three years running. Cally's internal shields are awesome - she's never going to be accidentally leaking thoughts or emotions at you - but her defense against external forces sucks. She never learned to have defenses; she grew up with everybody in everybody else's head all the time and it was all very polite, naive and guaranteed to get them killed if they wandered offworld for very long. She's also lonely without her people around and that makes her doubly vulnerable to anything that feels like a familiar connection.
So this is a permissions post standing on its head: Cally's not going to be picking up anything about anyone at FH (emotions, Bad Feelings About This, humanity or lack thereof) without permission, but I'll ping you to ask about it if it comes up, rather than go crazy with the What Can She Know About You OCD now. If you feel like having your telepathic character mess with the girl at some point, yay. Just poke me and we can dream up a plan.
