Iman Asadi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
etherthief) wrote2014-09-08 03:39 am
etherthief) wrote2014-09-08 03:39 am
Entry tags:
Applesauce Application
The Player
Name: Ellis
Age: 26
Pronouns: he/him and/or she/her
Contact: woodironbone (AIM)
Currently Played Characters: Johnny Truant, Bee, Aziraphale, Gus Fring (retired)
The Character
DW Account:etherthief
Name: Iman Asadi
Alias: Truthmaker, Planckbender, Starfucker, Etherthief
Age/Birthdate: 18 December 1981 (32 yrs old)
Species: Human
Canon: Original
Canon Point: that's not a thing
Played By: Nazanin Boniadi
Icon:
History:
Gonna put this first because it's sort of crucial to understanding the rest of her...
Iman Asadi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981 to a fairly affluent family of academics. Throughout her childhood her family moved from city to city, mostly flitting around Europe as her parents followed work. Iman got most of her formal education in England and then did a graduate program in Switzerland. After that she made the fairly perplexing decision to move to New York City, despite there being a far greater wealth of career options in the European area. Her expertise and skills were highly renowned even at the time of her graduation, but she lacked the taste for academia, wanting to get more out into the world.
Iman's universe is almost identical to ours, with some major exceptions. Scientific laws and capabilities are quite different, to the point where most people who would describe themselves as scientists seem a little more like what we might call superheroes. Learning a field often means learning how to bend its rules, often to the point of altering matter/reality.
Iman has two primary fields: empirical alchemy and dimensional physics.
A brief comprehensive definition of alchemy as we know it: Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).
In Iman's world, the practice of alchemy experienced an early paradigm shift which resulted in it becoming an accepted field of science with many variant branches. The focus became less about achieving perfection, and more about the 'liberation of elements'. Alchemists from Iman's world seek to separate previously inseparable substances, objects, and even concepts.
Empirical alchemy is highly conceptual. Skilled practitioners are able to transmute information - aurally/visually recorded, digitally encoded, manually written, and in some very specific cases spoken or thought (though rewriting/obfuscating speech or thoughts without the involved parties' consent is hellaciously illegal). The academic applications of empirical alchemy are largely research-oriented. Professional practitioners often apply it to computer programming or repair, various kinds of editing, or shady government business. Iman isn't into any of that. Her alchemical work is all about unwriting falsehoods, which she does not rely on any established bureaucracy to define. She's walking the line of being a rogue alchemist because of this.
Dimensional physics is comparable to particle physics and M theory, except in Iman's world the question is not so much how to prove the existence of other dimensions, but how to access them. Breaking down the fields between realities is an imperfect art, though it has been accomplished before, sometimes even without catastrophic incident. Iman is currently working on her own method of crossing the field, which, true to form, is innovative, jankety, badass, brilliant, and not 100% above-board.
Unfortunately for her, the first time it works is also the last time.
Abilities:
Truthmaker: A semi-derogatory term for non-professional empirical alchemists. Iman can hack into computers and other devices, rewrite documents, obfuscate identification papers... pretty much anything written or coded, she can adjust as she sees fit. She does this with a combination of intent and touch: the electric impulses of her focused intentions act in conjunction with the implants in her prosthetic hand, allowing her to exert her will on the object or substance when touched. This requires massive amounts of cognitive energy, and if she attempts to do too much of it within a certain period of time she will become disoriented and exhausted. She is skilled enough to alter the thoughts and speech of others, but unless expressly asked or forced by extreme circumstances, she would never, ever do this.
Planckbender: Iman is developing a method of crossing between dimensions with a highly sophisticated form of empirical transmutation, essentially altering various universal constants to allow her passage - what some undergroundies call 'Planckbending'. Once she passes through the Rift, this ability is rendered almost entirely defunct, much to her immense frustration. It does however allow her to manipulate dreamspace extensively.
Starfucker: A science underground slang term for a person who is trying to rewrite their own perceived destiny. Usually this has to do with achieving immortality or prolonged youth. Iman is specifically trying to attain quantum immortality via crossing into other dimensions, positing that if she unsticks herself from her own universe, she might also unstick herself from time. The experiment comes quite abruptly to a halt when she discovers she cannot actually get back out of this new dimension she's come into. Which of course makes her absolutely livid.
Etherthief: 'Ether theft' is a taboo technique used within alchemy subculture. Not strictly an academic practice, it refers to the casual reappropriation of essences and substances on a broad scale, as opposed to a specific transmutation with a set goal. This ain't your grandma's base metal into gold/water into wine style alchemy - this is changing the texture and give of the earth, or the thickness of water, or even temperature/humidity of the air, usually for one's own personal motives. It's limited to whatever's within an approximate six foot radius of Iman, and, post-Rift, all changes are temporary.
Other: She is fluent in English, Farsi, and several cipher languages. She has a good grasp of self-defense and can defend herself pretty well in a fair fight. She knows how to fire a gun.
Contact the player for more info on any of these abilities or fake sciences.
Appearance:
Iman is 5'4 and slender, with long, fine black hair and dark eyes. She wears a green patterned hijab and dull-colored but fashionable street clothes, always with a pair of high-top chucks. She has very taut posture, always alert, focused, and interested in what is happening around her. She makes solid eye contact, rarely fidgets, and speaks precisely.
Because modern alchemy requires physical contact with the object or substance, most alchemists have organic modifications made to one of their hands, but Iman has a prosthetic left arm that starts at the elbow. She lost the limb in an lab accident, so she designed herself a new one, sidestepping the need for genetic engineering. The limb looks almost indistinguishable from an organic hand, though it feels slightly warmer than the rest of her, and the fingers can actually open to reveal a series of highly complex tools. That's super weird and creepy to people who aren't expecting it, so she doesn't do it in mixed company too often.
Personality:
Fiercely smart, wildly ambitious, intense, stubborn, and often intimidating. People have been telling her all her life what she can/cannot and should/should not do, and she will not hear about it.
When at work she enters a state of intense focus and shuts out pretty much everything else, which can make her seem standoffish or unfriendly, or even dangerous (she might throw something at your head if you try to disturb her). When she's relaxed, by contrast, she is outgoing, talkative, and often flirtatious. Sometimes her intelligence leads her to overcorrect or underexplain; her wit can be sharp and esoteric. As much as she can be charming and fun, she can just as easily seem aloof or inaccessible, having a tendency to forget that not everyone is as knowledgeable as she, or forgetting to explain the mental leaps she makes, leaving people in the dust or making them feel inferior.
The thing that keeps her moving in life is the desire to know and learn as much as she can; her biggest fear is a lack of fulfillment, or that she'll die before she can finish. She combats this by crowding as much as she can into her life, both in terms of work and play. She loves to learn, read, research, and experiment just as much as she loves to eat, drink, smoke, fight, and fuck.
Writing Sample:
Almost got it now.
She's been working at this for days. Several unanswered calls from CERN and the empiricist groundy riding her ass about unfucking whatever documents she fucked. Not important right now. Not important potentially forever. That was a little joke. Ha, ha.
Dimensional strata aren't at all difficult to locate, it's narrowing in on each particular field that gives her trouble. She can practically see this one now, shimmering just a little out of her focus, if she lets her eyes wander a bit, she can just barely see it, and see beyond it. Like looking lazy-eyed through a screen door.
The Park beyond it looks almost identical, which is moderately encouraging. She's not looking for too massive a culture shock here. The field is much stronger here than it was at her lab, she's discovered, which seems strange. Something to do with the magnetic fields of that Earth, maybe? She hadn't really anticipated the stratum to be uneven, but it is significantly more visible in Central Park than anywhere else she's checked. Fascinating. Perhaps something is happening on the other side.
Well, in a moment, either she'll be able to ask someone, or she'll still be here, sitting in the grass.
She adjusts her hijab and raises her left hand to brace it along the invisible barrier. She can feel the clicks and whirrs of instruments and circuitry moving within the digits of her prosthetic. A soft hum that travels up the arm to the elbow, where silicone meets flesh. Soothing. She lets her eyes flutter closed, a bit of a romantic gesture, as though there were anything remotely spiritual about this process. She splays her fingers slowly, waiting for the alchemical reaction, the infinitesimal brushing of molecules across her carbon fiber skin. There it is. There it is.
She transmutes. Thinking carefully, intensively, about the universal constants that separate one world from another, splitting them, expanding them. Digging out a little hole, just for her. It's a tedious mathematical process, and she allows her thoughts to cradle every step of the formula. This is as close to meditation as she'll ever get.
There's the shift. A little tremor runs through her arm, and she sucks air through her teeth. Easy. Easy. This is it, don't get too excited but also don't fuck it up. She exhales a steadying breath and parts the field delicately, and then lets herself slip through.
It's very different from the test runs and the other times she's tried it and halfway succeeded. There's a sudden sucking force, expanding and contracting roughly, like someone's pulling from the other side. She feels all the air go out of her and gasps in a moment of panic, her reach and concentration shaken. She's supposed to let herself in gently, not like this, with all this force and undertow.
And then it's over, just like that. She's right where she was, but where she was (is) has changed. It's New York, but it's not her New York.
Fuck. Yes.
A little shaky on the dismount, but it all worked out fine. She's not glowing or anything. Nobody's freaking out about her sudden arrival. She can run figures and see what caused that hiccup later. She gets to her feet and brushes off her skirt, then looks up to survey her surroundings proudly. New universe. All right then.
Better find someone to talk to.
The Game
How did you find out about Big Applesauce?
Can't stop won't stop
What interests you about the game, and your character's place in it?
Iman is going to do SCIENCE TO THE RIFT and it is going to be GREAT
Anything else?
Name: Ellis
Age: 26
Pronouns: he/him and/or she/her
Contact: woodironbone (AIM)
Currently Played Characters: Johnny Truant, Bee, Aziraphale, Gus Fring (retired)
The Character
DW Account:
etherthiefName: Iman Asadi
Alias: Truthmaker, Planckbender, Starfucker, Etherthief
Age/Birthdate: 18 December 1981 (32 yrs old)
Species: Human
Canon: Original
Canon Point: that's not a thing
Played By: Nazanin Boniadi
Icon:
History:
Gonna put this first because it's sort of crucial to understanding the rest of her...
Iman Asadi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981 to a fairly affluent family of academics. Throughout her childhood her family moved from city to city, mostly flitting around Europe as her parents followed work. Iman got most of her formal education in England and then did a graduate program in Switzerland. After that she made the fairly perplexing decision to move to New York City, despite there being a far greater wealth of career options in the European area. Her expertise and skills were highly renowned even at the time of her graduation, but she lacked the taste for academia, wanting to get more out into the world.
Iman's universe is almost identical to ours, with some major exceptions. Scientific laws and capabilities are quite different, to the point where most people who would describe themselves as scientists seem a little more like what we might call superheroes. Learning a field often means learning how to bend its rules, often to the point of altering matter/reality.
Iman has two primary fields: empirical alchemy and dimensional physics.
A brief comprehensive definition of alchemy as we know it: Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).
In Iman's world, the practice of alchemy experienced an early paradigm shift which resulted in it becoming an accepted field of science with many variant branches. The focus became less about achieving perfection, and more about the 'liberation of elements'. Alchemists from Iman's world seek to separate previously inseparable substances, objects, and even concepts.
Empirical alchemy is highly conceptual. Skilled practitioners are able to transmute information - aurally/visually recorded, digitally encoded, manually written, and in some very specific cases spoken or thought (though rewriting/obfuscating speech or thoughts without the involved parties' consent is hellaciously illegal). The academic applications of empirical alchemy are largely research-oriented. Professional practitioners often apply it to computer programming or repair, various kinds of editing, or shady government business. Iman isn't into any of that. Her alchemical work is all about unwriting falsehoods, which she does not rely on any established bureaucracy to define. She's walking the line of being a rogue alchemist because of this.
Dimensional physics is comparable to particle physics and M theory, except in Iman's world the question is not so much how to prove the existence of other dimensions, but how to access them. Breaking down the fields between realities is an imperfect art, though it has been accomplished before, sometimes even without catastrophic incident. Iman is currently working on her own method of crossing the field, which, true to form, is innovative, jankety, badass, brilliant, and not 100% above-board.
Unfortunately for her, the first time it works is also the last time.
Abilities:
Truthmaker: A semi-derogatory term for non-professional empirical alchemists. Iman can hack into computers and other devices, rewrite documents, obfuscate identification papers... pretty much anything written or coded, she can adjust as she sees fit. She does this with a combination of intent and touch: the electric impulses of her focused intentions act in conjunction with the implants in her prosthetic hand, allowing her to exert her will on the object or substance when touched. This requires massive amounts of cognitive energy, and if she attempts to do too much of it within a certain period of time she will become disoriented and exhausted. She is skilled enough to alter the thoughts and speech of others, but unless expressly asked or forced by extreme circumstances, she would never, ever do this.
Planckbender: Iman is developing a method of crossing between dimensions with a highly sophisticated form of empirical transmutation, essentially altering various universal constants to allow her passage - what some undergroundies call 'Planckbending'. Once she passes through the Rift, this ability is rendered almost entirely defunct, much to her immense frustration. It does however allow her to manipulate dreamspace extensively.
Starfucker: A science underground slang term for a person who is trying to rewrite their own perceived destiny. Usually this has to do with achieving immortality or prolonged youth. Iman is specifically trying to attain quantum immortality via crossing into other dimensions, positing that if she unsticks herself from her own universe, she might also unstick herself from time. The experiment comes quite abruptly to a halt when she discovers she cannot actually get back out of this new dimension she's come into. Which of course makes her absolutely livid.
Etherthief: 'Ether theft' is a taboo technique used within alchemy subculture. Not strictly an academic practice, it refers to the casual reappropriation of essences and substances on a broad scale, as opposed to a specific transmutation with a set goal. This ain't your grandma's base metal into gold/water into wine style alchemy - this is changing the texture and give of the earth, or the thickness of water, or even temperature/humidity of the air, usually for one's own personal motives. It's limited to whatever's within an approximate six foot radius of Iman, and, post-Rift, all changes are temporary.
Other: She is fluent in English, Farsi, and several cipher languages. She has a good grasp of self-defense and can defend herself pretty well in a fair fight. She knows how to fire a gun.
Contact the player for more info on any of these abilities or fake sciences.
Appearance:
Iman is 5'4 and slender, with long, fine black hair and dark eyes. She wears a green patterned hijab and dull-colored but fashionable street clothes, always with a pair of high-top chucks. She has very taut posture, always alert, focused, and interested in what is happening around her. She makes solid eye contact, rarely fidgets, and speaks precisely.
Because modern alchemy requires physical contact with the object or substance, most alchemists have organic modifications made to one of their hands, but Iman has a prosthetic left arm that starts at the elbow. She lost the limb in an lab accident, so she designed herself a new one, sidestepping the need for genetic engineering. The limb looks almost indistinguishable from an organic hand, though it feels slightly warmer than the rest of her, and the fingers can actually open to reveal a series of highly complex tools. That's super weird and creepy to people who aren't expecting it, so she doesn't do it in mixed company too often.
Personality:
Fiercely smart, wildly ambitious, intense, stubborn, and often intimidating. People have been telling her all her life what she can/cannot and should/should not do, and she will not hear about it.
When at work she enters a state of intense focus and shuts out pretty much everything else, which can make her seem standoffish or unfriendly, or even dangerous (she might throw something at your head if you try to disturb her). When she's relaxed, by contrast, she is outgoing, talkative, and often flirtatious. Sometimes her intelligence leads her to overcorrect or underexplain; her wit can be sharp and esoteric. As much as she can be charming and fun, she can just as easily seem aloof or inaccessible, having a tendency to forget that not everyone is as knowledgeable as she, or forgetting to explain the mental leaps she makes, leaving people in the dust or making them feel inferior.
The thing that keeps her moving in life is the desire to know and learn as much as she can; her biggest fear is a lack of fulfillment, or that she'll die before she can finish. She combats this by crowding as much as she can into her life, both in terms of work and play. She loves to learn, read, research, and experiment just as much as she loves to eat, drink, smoke, fight, and fuck.
Writing Sample:
Almost got it now.
She's been working at this for days. Several unanswered calls from CERN and the empiricist groundy riding her ass about unfucking whatever documents she fucked. Not important right now. Not important potentially forever. That was a little joke. Ha, ha.
Dimensional strata aren't at all difficult to locate, it's narrowing in on each particular field that gives her trouble. She can practically see this one now, shimmering just a little out of her focus, if she lets her eyes wander a bit, she can just barely see it, and see beyond it. Like looking lazy-eyed through a screen door.
The Park beyond it looks almost identical, which is moderately encouraging. She's not looking for too massive a culture shock here. The field is much stronger here than it was at her lab, she's discovered, which seems strange. Something to do with the magnetic fields of that Earth, maybe? She hadn't really anticipated the stratum to be uneven, but it is significantly more visible in Central Park than anywhere else she's checked. Fascinating. Perhaps something is happening on the other side.
Well, in a moment, either she'll be able to ask someone, or she'll still be here, sitting in the grass.
She adjusts her hijab and raises her left hand to brace it along the invisible barrier. She can feel the clicks and whirrs of instruments and circuitry moving within the digits of her prosthetic. A soft hum that travels up the arm to the elbow, where silicone meets flesh. Soothing. She lets her eyes flutter closed, a bit of a romantic gesture, as though there were anything remotely spiritual about this process. She splays her fingers slowly, waiting for the alchemical reaction, the infinitesimal brushing of molecules across her carbon fiber skin. There it is. There it is.
She transmutes. Thinking carefully, intensively, about the universal constants that separate one world from another, splitting them, expanding them. Digging out a little hole, just for her. It's a tedious mathematical process, and she allows her thoughts to cradle every step of the formula. This is as close to meditation as she'll ever get.
There's the shift. A little tremor runs through her arm, and she sucks air through her teeth. Easy. Easy. This is it, don't get too excited but also don't fuck it up. She exhales a steadying breath and parts the field delicately, and then lets herself slip through.
It's very different from the test runs and the other times she's tried it and halfway succeeded. There's a sudden sucking force, expanding and contracting roughly, like someone's pulling from the other side. She feels all the air go out of her and gasps in a moment of panic, her reach and concentration shaken. She's supposed to let herself in gently, not like this, with all this force and undertow.
And then it's over, just like that. She's right where she was, but where she was (is) has changed. It's New York, but it's not her New York.
Fuck. Yes.
A little shaky on the dismount, but it all worked out fine. She's not glowing or anything. Nobody's freaking out about her sudden arrival. She can run figures and see what caused that hiccup later. She gets to her feet and brushes off her skirt, then looks up to survey her surroundings proudly. New universe. All right then.
Better find someone to talk to.
The Game
How did you find out about Big Applesauce?
Can't stop won't stop
What interests you about the game, and your character's place in it?
Iman is going to do SCIENCE TO THE RIFT and it is going to be GREAT
Anything else?