Character foo: daemons.
Oct. 5th, 2014 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI should be posting an EP or something at the moment, but I'm tired and I'm at my parents' and I'm thinking no, let me screw around some with my existing characters and others I've got floating in my head.
Gordon Freeman's daemon is a tardigrade named Sati. She lives in a borosilicate glass marble half-lined with moss that he carries with him, or a flat-sided borosilicate glass test tube that he wears under his shirt/HEV suit. Like real tardigrades, Sati is very nearly unkillable. Also like most tardigrades, you need a magnifying glass to see her, or possibly lab equipment. Gordon was asked not to visit his grandfather in the hospital in a daemonverse AU because the tall skinny kid with no visible daemon gave rise to rumours of the Angel of Death.
Adrian Shephard's daemon is a small swarm of honeybees that think and act as one organism. While they are female, they use the name Imre, for reasons of their own. I originally only intended him to have one bee, but the first time I posted him into a daemonverse AU and mentioned buzzing, the person he was interacting with interpreted it to mean multiple bees. I decided to run with it, since it fed into his personal dedication to being part of something much larger than himself.
Ellen's daemon is a northern grasshopper mouse named Saoshyant, who is about four inches long and adorable but also perfectly capable of killing and devouring centipedes and scorpions significantly larger than himself. This is a standard feature of all grasshopper mice. So is howling to claim territory and generally being terrifying on the small furry creatures scale. Ellen had the acute misfortune of having to leave him behind on the alien ship during the brief spacewalk in Mothership Zeta, but fortunately he was able to ride the teleport over to her as soon as she activated it. She does not talk about this incident. EVER.
Stacker Pentecost's daemon is an osprey named Yemoja, and part of the reason he was not sent into the worst parts of the justice system after he burned down his father's killer's club at age twelve was that she was still visibly changing; the court had a hard time comparing his action and decision to an adult's in the face of that. I realize the screenwriter has said she's a tiger, but I like the osprey better.
Edward Kenway's is a jackdaw, which seemed reasonably obvious to me, but hell if I know her name.
Santo's is a jaguar named Bahlam, and the question of her form giving away his maskless identity is irrelevant, because she settled permanently as a jaguar the moment he put on the mask.
Varric's I have never been entirely clear on; Varric is from a world where every sapient species except dwarves goes into the spirit realm in their dreams, which inclines me to think that in a daemonverse AU, dwarves' daemons would not be external to their bodies. If they were, his would be a vixen, and her name would be something complicated in the Dwarvish language as spoken in old Orzammar.
Medic's is... I think she's a lammergeier. I don't know her name. It is not considered particularly unusual for the RED and BLU team guys to be able to separate from their daemons, though, because the respawners bring the dead back to life before the daemon can dissolve. The more times you've been killed on the battlefield, the farther you can separate before the pain starts.
Fawkes the supermutant's daemon is a hippo named Ennoia, although that was not her original form when he first went into Vault 87. The mutants there tend to shove people and their daemons into the FEV vats at the same time. This almost never ends well. Fawkes' daemon went back to shape fluidity for a long time until he managed to pull himself together and rebuild his own sanity.
Mordin, should salarians turn out to have externalized daemons, has something not unlike a peacock mantis shrimp; she has a salarian name and lives in a tank that follows him around the Normandy thanks to the wonders of eezo technology enabling small item levitation via mass effect fields.
Ellen's father has a bronze-backed snake named Nehushtan, which probably would have tipped people off to what her final form was likely to be if anyone was left alive in his neck of the woods who knew the original text of the Bible to any great degree. But oh well.
... I'm still trying to figure out Roger Maxson's. I strongly suspect that if I really do intend to write him as a Blackfoot who joined the Army because it represented his best chance at a better life than what a Fiftiesesque government offered to Native Americans, I'm going to need to pick the animal based on its meanings and implications in Blackfoot stories, so I may not have an answer on this one for a while.
Quinn Abercromby's is probably something small and clever but nonetheless from a species that tends to end its life on the wrong end of something larger's claws.
Ray Stantz's is a perpetually half-grown, puppyishly gangly and massively overenthusiastic black Lab. I don't know her name, alas.
Sheriff Simms' daemon in the Falloutverse is either a large peccary or smallish version of some other wild pig, and she takes absolutely no guff from anyone. I have several Fallout folks' daemons sorted out for background material actually; pretty sure the Overseer of Vault 101 had a rabbit daemon, among other people, and that when Harkness turned to the Railroad to get him somewhere out of reach of the Institute's Reclamation Bureau, the first thing they did was build him a small, moderately intelligent, realistic-looking robot scorpion to follow him around and maybe ride on his shoulder. (No lasers in the tail, alas.)
Gordon Freeman's daemon is a tardigrade named Sati. She lives in a borosilicate glass marble half-lined with moss that he carries with him, or a flat-sided borosilicate glass test tube that he wears under his shirt/HEV suit. Like real tardigrades, Sati is very nearly unkillable. Also like most tardigrades, you need a magnifying glass to see her, or possibly lab equipment. Gordon was asked not to visit his grandfather in the hospital in a daemonverse AU because the tall skinny kid with no visible daemon gave rise to rumours of the Angel of Death.
Adrian Shephard's daemon is a small swarm of honeybees that think and act as one organism. While they are female, they use the name Imre, for reasons of their own. I originally only intended him to have one bee, but the first time I posted him into a daemonverse AU and mentioned buzzing, the person he was interacting with interpreted it to mean multiple bees. I decided to run with it, since it fed into his personal dedication to being part of something much larger than himself.
Ellen's daemon is a northern grasshopper mouse named Saoshyant, who is about four inches long and adorable but also perfectly capable of killing and devouring centipedes and scorpions significantly larger than himself. This is a standard feature of all grasshopper mice. So is howling to claim territory and generally being terrifying on the small furry creatures scale. Ellen had the acute misfortune of having to leave him behind on the alien ship during the brief spacewalk in Mothership Zeta, but fortunately he was able to ride the teleport over to her as soon as she activated it. She does not talk about this incident. EVER.
Stacker Pentecost's daemon is an osprey named Yemoja, and part of the reason he was not sent into the worst parts of the justice system after he burned down his father's killer's club at age twelve was that she was still visibly changing; the court had a hard time comparing his action and decision to an adult's in the face of that. I realize the screenwriter has said she's a tiger, but I like the osprey better.
Edward Kenway's is a jackdaw, which seemed reasonably obvious to me, but hell if I know her name.
Santo's is a jaguar named Bahlam, and the question of her form giving away his maskless identity is irrelevant, because she settled permanently as a jaguar the moment he put on the mask.
Varric's I have never been entirely clear on; Varric is from a world where every sapient species except dwarves goes into the spirit realm in their dreams, which inclines me to think that in a daemonverse AU, dwarves' daemons would not be external to their bodies. If they were, his would be a vixen, and her name would be something complicated in the Dwarvish language as spoken in old Orzammar.
Medic's is... I think she's a lammergeier. I don't know her name. It is not considered particularly unusual for the RED and BLU team guys to be able to separate from their daemons, though, because the respawners bring the dead back to life before the daemon can dissolve. The more times you've been killed on the battlefield, the farther you can separate before the pain starts.
Fawkes the supermutant's daemon is a hippo named Ennoia, although that was not her original form when he first went into Vault 87. The mutants there tend to shove people and their daemons into the FEV vats at the same time. This almost never ends well. Fawkes' daemon went back to shape fluidity for a long time until he managed to pull himself together and rebuild his own sanity.
Mordin, should salarians turn out to have externalized daemons, has something not unlike a peacock mantis shrimp; she has a salarian name and lives in a tank that follows him around the Normandy thanks to the wonders of eezo technology enabling small item levitation via mass effect fields.
Ellen's father has a bronze-backed snake named Nehushtan, which probably would have tipped people off to what her final form was likely to be if anyone was left alive in his neck of the woods who knew the original text of the Bible to any great degree. But oh well.
... I'm still trying to figure out Roger Maxson's. I strongly suspect that if I really do intend to write him as a Blackfoot who joined the Army because it represented his best chance at a better life than what a Fiftiesesque government offered to Native Americans, I'm going to need to pick the animal based on its meanings and implications in Blackfoot stories, so I may not have an answer on this one for a while.
Quinn Abercromby's is probably something small and clever but nonetheless from a species that tends to end its life on the wrong end of something larger's claws.
Ray Stantz's is a perpetually half-grown, puppyishly gangly and massively overenthusiastic black Lab. I don't know her name, alas.
Sheriff Simms' daemon in the Falloutverse is either a large peccary or smallish version of some other wild pig, and she takes absolutely no guff from anyone. I have several Fallout folks' daemons sorted out for background material actually; pretty sure the Overseer of Vault 101 had a rabbit daemon, among other people, and that when Harkness turned to the Railroad to get him somewhere out of reach of the Institute's Reclamation Bureau, the first thing they did was build him a small, moderately intelligent, realistic-looking robot scorpion to follow him around and maybe ride on his shoulder. (No lasers in the tail, alas.)
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Date: 2014-10-07 01:44 am (UTC)Oh hey, if that was you in the Half Life 'verse with all the excellent NPCs, what's Dora's? :)
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Date: 2014-10-07 04:20 am (UTC)And that was me and Leesha, yeah. I was in a weird mood that day and cast several of our rebels with characters from Dora The Explorer, which is why we not only had Dora but a medic whose nickname was Boots, plus two NPCs named Ying Ying and Sami, who were analogues to Swiper the Fox in different countries (on the show Ying Ying was a weasel in China, Sami was a hyena in Tanzania). Dora Marquez's daemon would probably be a spider monkey, but since I already had a human named Boots I would have to pick a more highfalutin' name for the daemon in that scene.
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Date: 2014-10-15 12:11 am (UTC)I always loved those rebels! :) Them, and the other Resistance NPCs running around. Hey, if Dora Marquez has a spider monkey, then what would Sonia... hmm. Part of me is remembering that 'with a badger?' exchange between her and Floyd Mason, and cackling like a fool at the idea of her with a badger daemon. And Joaozinho
Abreu... oh now I'm just going to end up pondering over your whole cast of NPC's in a daemonverse. Whoops.
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Date: 2014-10-15 01:53 pm (UTC)... I may stuff references into things at the slightest provocation. Don't mind me.
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Date: 2014-10-17 02:14 am (UTC)I did remember that Sonia was a nod to Maria's actress, which frankly makes me go a little splutter-y, since it makes me think of Maria swearing and--uh, no. The only animal I readily associate with either Maria or Luis is a house cat, specifically Gatita the rescue kitten they found while on their honeymoon - remember? Oddly enough, I connect the kitty more with Luis, but a cat could work for Sonia. Hmm. You get the final call there, obviously.
Now I'm trying to think of daemons for Sariel's parents, and some of her fellow shipmates. Hmm and hmm.