[App take II]

[heavensreader]

Player Information

Name: Jax
Age: 32
Contact Info: plurk at lightsarestars
Other Characters: Beckett (bookofnope)

Character Information

Name: Kesara Freamon
Canon: Original
Age: 11
Gender: Female
Inventory: Kesara comes dressed in 1840s Afghan native garb, including a long shirt and undershirt, long baggy trousers, overcoat, a large sash around her waist, and over all that a pretty huge sheepskin coat meant to endure winter nights on the steppes. She also has a large Russian style felt hat with ear-flaps, thick wool gloves, and tall boots. Actually pretty Snowhell-ready!
On her, mostly stashed in that sash, she has:
1. A notebook full of scribbled Chinese and Tocharian characters, and charcoal sticks to write in it
2. Surveyor's compass, 1840 style
3. A wooden begging bowl
4. A rosary of Buddhist prayer beads, made of wood
5. The Book of Heavenly Names, a bit travel=tattered, spattered with some blood
6. A tiny marble statue of the bodhisattva Tara in the Greco-Buddhist style, found in the Tocharian ruins


World Description:
Kesara's world is very much similar to "our" world circa the 1840s, with some tweaking around historical edges, and one massive fantasy-historical conceit that the characters only become aware of later on. On the surface, her story takes place primarily in Central Asia, which in her world is usually called Serindia, referring to the lands enclosed between China, Persia, India and Siberia. In some respects the political situation is as it was in real-world 1840 - the British rule India through the East India Company, and are fighting a cold war of sorts with Tsarist Russia across Central Asia, a match of diplomacy and espionage commonly called the Great Game. Though formally at peace, both empires consider the other an expansionist threat - the British being sure that the Russians have their eye on India, and work in a variety of ways to curtail each other's influence and occasional moves towards gaining territory. A recent move in that "game" at the time is the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (the historical First Anglo-Afghan War.)

The important tweaks take place further East, where two major things are going on. Thing the first is the continued, historically-not-quite-accurate isolation of China. While historically 1840 saw the first Opium War, in Kesara's world this has not happened and the situation is closer to the first years of the 19th century, with the China trade being extremely limited and Indian opium not yet introduced in force. China remains almost entirely closed to foreigners, and uninterested in most of the rest of the world. The second tweak, which is about the one thing that China is interested in, is the rebellion led by adventurer-general Yaqub Beg in Xinjiang, China's westmost territory, which he established as the Muslim kingdom of Kashgaria. Historically this happens in the late 1860s; in Kesara's world, it happened about a year prior to the beginning of the story. Those changes are historically significant, but don't do much to the essential nature of the world otherwise.

Then there's the big one. In Kesara's world, Serindia's trade routes, the Silk Roads, were dominated until about the 7th century by a single nation - the Tocharians (a real historical people, though I'm really just borrowing their name and cultural flavour - they haven't existed for 1400 years so I don't think they'd resent it.) While other peoples and their occasional kingdoms came and went within their territories, they were the mercantile, and thus essentially political rulers of the vast heart of the Euroasian continent. They were able to maintain this power through the magic of their language and writing. Tocharian writing, when placed on an appropriate vessel such as a foundation stone or a stele, can be used to give magical names to places (cities, kingdoms, buildings), geographical features (rivers, wells, mountains), and routes. These names were assembled in annals called Books of Heavenly Names, and those who could read the books, could hold an absolutely accurate, constantly updating mental map of the places named in them, including everything from weather, to the mood of the local people. This complete knowledge and control of the terrain and of military, political and popular goings-on through their territory allowed the Tocharians to exercise absolute control of it for hundred of years, through the jealous guarding of two secrets: the Books themselves, and the fact that they could only be "used" by people who have learned Tocharian as their first writing system. The language needed to set itself into the reader's mind. Anyone whose mind has been conditioned to another writing system first could still read the Books of Heavenly Names, but only as books, without any of their magical effects.

In the mid 7th century, the Chinese Sui dynasty managed to get its hands on a Book of Heavenly Names, and learn the secret of the Tocharian place-name seals. The Sui proceeded on a concentrated effort to destroy and conquer the Tocharians. The mercantile empire was overwhelmed and dismantled, and its people were reduced to living as a tribe within what was now Chinese territory, around their original homeland in the east of Xinjiang. As the Tang dynasty ousted the Sui, Tocharian knowledge was mostly wiped out, and their memory began to fade. The Sui, the Tang, and following them all Chinese and other rulers of the Tocharians' new country, imposed a harsh law to prevent the tribe from ever rising again - the Tocharians were, and are, strictly prohibited from literacy. Reading and writing are both forbidden, and books of all sorts, in any language, are banned in the country. Twelve hundred years later, while the modern Tocharians themselves - now knowing themselves only by their Chinese name, the Yuezhi - are confined to their bookless land, all that's left of the Tocharians' empire are the occasional place-name seals, found all across Serindia and fascinating the Western scholars starting to bring the "new science of archaeology" to the Central Asian steppes. The memory of an empire of magical writing is completely gone.


Background:
Kesara's story rightly begins with the story of her mentor, Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, who came to Calcutta while neither a dame nor a doctor, as a young woman with her Company finace, and ended up parting from him in favour of dedicating her life to exploration and Orientalist research. In Calcutta, the still young Ariel came to employ a servant named Isaiah Freamon, who had no education, but a natural knack for languages. They would be trusty companions on the road for a number of daring journeys of exploration that built up Ariel's expertise and reputation as a scholar-explorer. By the time they were both thirty, Ariel - now Dr. Ariel Stein - was only just getting started, but Isaiah's health had suffered in the service of exploration and he was ready to settle down. He retired to Simla, where he married a local woman of mixed Nepali and Punjabi heritage, and within the year the couple had a daughter, whom they asked Dame Ariel to name - Kesara.

Kesara's father was determined to raise her British, despite her mixed origins, and his and his wife's employ as servants to a British officer in the developing hill station helped. Kesara spent her earliest years within the British settlement famous for its high society and growing political importance, but there was stopping the curious, lively child from absorbing some of her mother's native culture as well - most especially, her mother's language. By the time Kesara was four, she was speaking her father's English, her mother's Punjabi and Nepalese, and Hindi. This was when Dame Ariel, visiting between one of her expeditions, first met the girl, and was astounded by her talent.

Over the next two years, Dame Ariel and Isaiah went back and forth, as she tried to persuade him to hand Kesara over to her for an education. Isaiah was reluctant - on top of remembering the hardship of his own life as an explorer, he also remembered the particular difficulty of being an explorer's servant, with no chance of ever winning any of his own credit. Kesara had not only her race to complicate things, as he had, but also her gender. What decided matters was that Kesara, herself, had quickly and obviously attached herself to Dame Ariel, who treated her with awe and fascination, but also with seriousness, not like the little child she was. Six years old, Kesara was packed off to Calcutta, to live in Dame Ariel's household as both a maid and a student.

A major problem revealed itself almost at once. For all her linguistic aptitude, and the high intelligence that made itself quickly known, Kesara just couldn't seem to master reading and writing. She tried hard, constantly, furiously; if at first Dame Ariel - a strict and demanding teacher - accused her of sloppy studying, even she had to eventually admit that something more essential was wrong. Kesara was already known for embellishing the truth even then, and it was hard for her elders to believe when she claimed that the letters just wouldn't stay still for her, that she could just see them mixing up on the page until they couldn't possibly make sense. Doctors were called in, but no one found a solution.

But even a seven years old, a defeated exile back to Shimla was unacceptable to Kesara, and her talent prevailed over her "defect". She devoted herself entirely to her studies, figured out memory tricks and techniques to compensate for her continued illiteracy, made herself useful in other ways when questions came up of her continued presence in the household. Dame Ariel had no particular gift for languages, herself, which could be a serious problem for an explorer; Kesara stepped in naturally to fill the space that her father had vacated. When she was nine, Dame Ariel took her along for a small scale expedition, travelling up the Indus into the Punjab, towards the mountain passes of the Lesser Himalayas. This was not real exploration - not what Kesara got to do, at least, as she didn't get much further out from Peshawar. But she learned a great deal among the porters, cooks and animal handlers, the soldiers and the body servants, and proved herself invaluable as an interpreter. The expedition sealed things as far as Dame Ariel was concerned. Kesara was staying, and coming along everywhere she would go.

The next bit of "everywhere" was Kabul, two years later. After the occupation of Afghanistan, Dame Ariel was invited to the city by one of her oldest friends, Lady Frances Gavin, wife to a senior British officer in the city and herself an Oriental scholar, who, on the side, played translator, coordinator and local informant for the Queen's agents in the Great Game - though Kesara didn't know this at the time. Kesara adored Kabul, and spent her time there learning Urdu and Farsi, as well as Russian from Lady Gavin, and coming to the slow and horrifying realization that she was going to be twelve in no time. She was swiftly growing into womanhood. And she had never forgotten what her father warned her of before leaving Shimla - that for anyone who was not Dame Doctor Ariel Stein, womanhood meant the end of ambition. Time to become civilized, marry and settle down. Kesara was not ready to settle down.

She was not destined to. Six months after her arrival in Kabul, Lady Gavin recruited her, along with Dame Ariel, into a scheme. Lord Gavin's men has captured a smuggler carrying something priceless: a page from a manuscript in Tocharian, Chinese and Sanskrit. If the manuscript could be recovered, it could be the key to unlocking the mysterious language that Dame Ariel had been researching for years. But the smuggler was naturally unwilling to talk to her British captors. Lady Gavin and Dame Ariel hoped to use Kesara, with her skill at languages and lying, to pose as a fellow captive and win the smuggler's trust.

However, once Kesara was in the cell, the smuggler, a Yuezhi woman named Roksann, quickly turned the tables on her. Seeing through Kesara's ruse, she instead played on the girl's empathy, telling her the story - the true story - of how the motive for her smuggling was to get books into her homeland, where all reading and writing were forbidden. Kesara was instantly fascinated by this strange and heroic woman, and Roksann easily got her to settle close - close enough to snatch the gun that Dame Ariel had given Kesara to hide on her person, and use it to hold her hostage and demand her own release. This may not have worked had there not at the same time been a mob gathered around the British mission house, demanding the release of the supposed local women that the British were supposedly holding captive. Lord Gavin was grudgingly persuaded to release Roksann, on the condition that Kesara slip out with her and follow her movements, which was easy to do as Kesara quickly made herself useful to the smuggler, who didn't speak Farsi, as a translator.

She was taken by Roksann back to the caravanserai, and to the smuggler's partner, the Chinese scholar and polyglot Lao Dian, who quickly figured out her connection to Dame Ariel - whose work he knew and admired. He got the amazed Kesara to reveal her original purpose in following Roksann. All Roksann herself cared for was getting her treasure back, and she was willing to trade the knowledge of where she had obtained it for the thing itself, but Kesara warned her that Dame Ariel would never deal with a mere criminal. Instead, she was able to persuade the two smugglers that her mentor would be most inclined to parley with a fellow scholar - Lao Dian.

The meeting, which started tense and difficult, ended on a note beyond all Kesara's dreams. Lao Dian revealed that he and Roksann already held the book from which the page had been taken - a full document in three languages, the Book of Heavenly Names. The two scholars struck a deal. Dame Ariel agreed to provide funding for the two smugglers in their effort to return to Roksann's homeland in Sinkiang with their forbidden merchandise, and they agreed to let her join them on the search back for the origin of the Book, which Lao Dian himself was eager to discover. Making good on her promise to Kesara to take her everywhere she would go, Dame Ariel allowed the girl to join the expedition. Five set out: the two smugglers, Kesara and Dame Ariel, and Ali Qadir Ghilzai, a Kabul man in the service of the British serving as armed escort.

The party's first destination was to be the independent khanate of Bukhara, and during the three-week journey there, Kesara had made a fantastic discovery. While watching Lao Dian and Dame Ariel begin to decipher and translate the Book of Heavenly Names, she realized that the Chinese and Tocharian idiomatic characters, unlike the English alphabet, stayed still and solid. She could focus on and remember them (Note: this is not a magical fix - people with language-specific learning disability are a real thing!) Trying to keep this a secret for Dame Ariel, hoping to surprise her, she asked Lao Dian to teach her, and he was only happy to agree. Her genius for languages quickly asserted herself, and she made swift progress in her studies, as well as becoming more and more involved in the efforts to translate the book. Without her knowledge, the lost language of the Tocharians began working subtle changes on her mind.

The small party journeyed, through some excitement and adventure, from Bukhara to Samarkand, and from there to Tashkent, where Kesara became unknowingly involved in a ploy engineered by Lao Dian to pit Dame Ariel directly against her Russian competitors for the origins of the Book. Through his machinations, Kesara first unwittingly then deliberately played double agent as the two parties worked to frame each other as political agents to the khan, and entirely unwittingly managed to maneuver Lao Dian into a corner and get him to reveal to her his own ulterior motives: his involvement in political ferment in his own country and search for allies outside of it. In the end, Dame Ariel got the better of the Russian party, she had to offer hers and Kesara's life to the khan in order to keep the Book; though Kesara had herself been willing, she was shaken by the affair, and agreed to keep Lao Dian's secrets - both his ploy and his politics - from Dame Ariel, cementing the bond between them.

The party's trail led them further East and into Sinkiang, the contested province on China's Western frontier ruled by the brutal adventurer-king Yakub Beg. There, just as they were able to make contact with the man who bought the Book from its original finder, they met deadly intrigue: Ali revealed his own secret motives. He was the son of Dost Mohammad Khan, the emir of Afghanistan dethroned by the British, and had come to Sinkiang to make an ally of Yakub Beg to free his country. Fleeing for their lives, the reduced party escaped into the dreaded Taklamakan Desert. For a while they traveled lost, until they were able to put together the clues from the book merchant, and, in the heart of the wilderness, found Tocharian ruins.

That was the greatest moment of Kesara's young life, and really that of her companions', as well. First they were ecstatic, then shocked: the ruins contained, among other unbelievable things, a magnificently detailed and accurate map of Eurasia, far outstripping anything modern. Kesara didn't quite know it, but the map was the final piece in the change that had been building in her: the power of the Tocharian language. Even as she and Lao Dian tried to make sense of what was happening to her, their pursuers caught up. The group had to escape, but Dame Ariel hesitated too long in leaving the ruins. Kesara saw her mentor shot down before her eyes.

She has little memory of the hours, the days that followed. As she fled into the desert again with Roksann and Lao Dian, in deep traumatized shock, something else took over. Without knowing how, she used her new ability to lead them safely through the Taklamakan to Lop Nor, the sanctuary city of the Yuezhi, Roksann's people.

They had time to recover there, but not much. Revelation followed revelation. Seeing their culture and language, Kesara realized that the Yuezhi were in fact the descendants of the Tocharians. Roksann became entangled again in the struggle for her people's freedom from the Chinese that she had initially left, and on hearing this discovery, declared that the ruins and their riches and secrets belonged to them and that she meant to claim them; this made the still deeply shaken Kesara both furious for Dame Ariel's sake, and afraid as she was beginning to realize the ruins had somehow changed her. Lao Dian attempted to talk Roksann down, but she only became angrier and finally broke with him. Even as he tried to persuade Kesara to flee to China with him, news came that an army was marching on Lop Nor. Yakub Beg's men have also found the ruins, and were coming for the people they believed held their secret.

The Yuezhi knew the fight was hopeless, but Lao Dian had a plan. Thanks to Kesara's new gift, he was able to learn everything about the army, its path, the people it had in it, and that Ali was among its leaders; Ali who knew how devious and dangerous the old smuggler was. Lao Dian therefore lifted a page from Chinese military history and played the Empty Fort gamble: opening the gates, decorating and city, and pretending perfect unconcern. Fearing what power Lao Dian might have already found with the Yuezhi, Ali was fooled into turning his army around.

Not hours into the resulting celebration, just as Kesara and Lao Dian attempted to reconcile with Roksann, news came again. Another invader was coming: the Chinese, not an enemy Lao Dian could possibly trick. It's this moment of despair that Kesara is taken from.



Personality:
At the basis of Kesara's character is probably her high intelligence. She isn't a prodigy as such, except with languages, but she is a very, very smart kid, with a particular talent for rote memorization that helps a lot with compensating for her learning disability. She isn't only book-smart either, but is perceptive and quick to take stock of situations - her best thinking is on her feet, and while she isn't exactly happy under pressure, that is usually when she's at her most competent. Her thinking tends to be structured, especially due to the structured and strict education she'd received, so that she isn't always as imaginative and off the wall as many kids her age, but tends to be more analytic and logical, and straightforward in her conclusions. Her mental and emotional ages are pretty out of sync: she's very articulate, but full of bounce and energy, and prone to quick boredom and even sulking when she feels she's treated like too much of the kid she is. She can argue like a scholar and keep her head like a pro in a crisis, but when it's over she'll probably be blubbering in a corner. She's not great with games and doing things for fun; the whole concept is pretty lost on her. When she's in the company of other kids, she usually ends up semi-bullying them into much more complex endeavours than they ever wanted.

Kesara can be very astute, but is still naive in some ways. At this point, after her ordeal on the journey, she can be best described as overcompensating. She knows herself to be prone to powerful, almost overwhelming empathy, where it's the easiest thing in the world for her to imagine herself in another's place. So instead, she tries to be suspicious of everyone, take nothing for granted, and plot far ahead for cases of betrayal. She's not very good at this, if better than she used to be: overthinking things, looking for ulterior motives where there are none, and constantly questioning her own judgement of people are probably her greatest weaknesses as a spy-in-training. She's also been working quite hard on squashing her instinctive morality and viewing people more in the abstract as disposable chesspieces in her Great Game.

She is, however, brilliant at fitting in and working with people who either are genuinely friendly, or don't suspect her of anything. She actually does have a spy's natural flare for melding right into a crowd, mimicking people's styles and following their habits, talking back to them the way they talk to her. She enjoys it. This skill, her high empathy, her immense talent for languages, and her fascination with stories are all part of the same thing - Kesara is good with other people's lives. Her now intense closeness with the scholar-smuggler Lao Dian, who is similarly skilled and motivated, was built on this interest, and he has very much shaped her dreams of how she might use it as either scholar a secret agent (or both!) She loves the feeling of mattering, of changing the story somehow, and now she's tasted how this can be done for both good or ill she's thirsty for more. If anything, her frequent moments of terror and helplessness on the road have spurred on her a greater and growing need to feel powerful and able to change people and circumstances.

Kesara is tremendously ambitious. Her wits are more than matched with, perhaps even outmatched by, her determination to use them to make herself great. She's keenly aware of the disadvantages of her circumstances: her gender, her race, her young age, and she is set to defy them all. She wants to be at least a great a scholar as her mentor Dame Ariel - and hopefully greater, though she'd never consciously linger on such a treacherous thought. She very much hungers for fame and fortune, to be known, celebrated and, indeed, powerful. Her idea of exploration and discovery has matured somewhat since the beginning of her adventure: she understands danger much better and has a much more cynical view of the people she might meet along the way, though she's still far from anything resembling a hardened professional. If anything her pendulum has swung too far to the other side. Lao Dian's machinations, Ali's betrayal, and Roksann's anger, have each left a scar, and Dame Ariel's apparent death shattered her completely for a while. She is still hurt and unbalanced, defensive and reluctant to let anyone in.

Nonetheless, Kesara is normally good with difficult realities. She's very pragmatic, not given to complaints, and largely unbothered by unpleasantness, hard work, mess and dirt, or even death when it isn't likely to be her own. Young as she is, she has been through a thing or two (though at a greater distance than she'd like people to know) and while she isn't cynical - she has far too much empathy for that - she's also very good at telling apart the things she can and cannot change and thus should or shouldn't worry about. Her upbringing has made her very much aware of more down to earth, material concerns, and she is materially greedy to a degree - she likes money and likes good food and interesting trinkets - but also casual, even stoic about physical hardship. Stiff upper lip. It's the bold British explorer way.

The final essential of Kesara's life is her genius for languages and her love for stories. The former is well and truly exceptional: not supernatural, but somewhere in the peak of human ability. At elven years old, she's fluent in eight languages and a number of regional dialects, a talent that stuns everyone she knows and is at the heart of her ambitions and hopes. She had made her peace with the fact that she can't, and possibly could never read or write, and saw it as a kind of trade-off - at least until she learned that there are languages she can master, at which point she became absolutely sure - with a child's unshakeable certainty - that she is destined to play a key role in the historical achievement of solving the mystery of the Tocharians. Her love of stories and storytelling is all-encompassing - any story. Legends, literature, personal stories and anecdotes, historical narrative, just gossip, she'll take everything as long as it has some kind of beginning, end, and meaning. When Kesara lies, which is reasonably often, that's what she sees it as - telling stories, making up a more interesting, useful, or meaningful reality than the one at hand. How can that hurt?


Flavor Abilities: Holds a perfect detailed map of alternate 19th century Eurasia in her mind I GUESS? In Norfinbury her language superpower basically becomes a flavour ability. Naturally she wouldn't be able to use it to make new place-name seals even if she knew how, which alas she does not.

Suitability: Although young, Kesara has some experience with physical hardship, hostile environments, and constant danger - the Central Asian deserts may not be quite Norfinbury-awful, but they can get pretty close. She's plenty practical and sensible enough to adjust with reasonable speed, and it'll be interesting to see how she takes to the aspects of the world that are vastly different from her own, such as the advanced technology (I have a huge Thing for characters-out-of-time, okay.) She should be all about Exploration and Mystery, and it should also be neat to play with her thirst for stories and others' experience around the variety of people you get in a multifandom game.


RP Samples:

Network:

[About as soon as Kesara figured out the tablet, she'd set it to always be recording video. Anything else seemed like a horrible waste of the most ingenious method of communication. If they had such things back home, in Calcutta or Kabul, by golly, the things they would do! But here and now, the best use of the tablet is that it allows her to record all her explorations better than writing in a diary ever could, and the whole network by now should be used to a small girl appearing with a very serious face, narrating her daily findings.]

Today's site appears to be a family home. One of the children was very interested in dragons. At least, I think they must be dragons. I don't know why this particular dragon is so very fat.

[She turns the tablet to carefully record a view of a child's room, full of pictures of toys of what she lacks the knowledge to identify as dinosaurs. The video lingers on the apatosaurus comforter on the bed. That is, indeed, a very fat dragon.]

I also found a book. [The view moves, so that said book is revealed - a children's book, which Kesara opens to show the large letters and dinosaur illustrations within, She sighs in longing at words she can't read.] It must explain everything. Would someone read it to me? I want to know if they're meant to be real.


Action:

She is cold, abominably cold. And used to the cold, of course; how much worse is this, really, than the great Karakum? But this cold has sharper, meaner teeth. It has intent. It is determined.

Kesara knows it isn't true. The cold is just the cold, it doesn't have any of these things - teeth, or intent - and thinking that it does only makes things worse. But it's a whole different story, being cold in the desert, and in an abandoned city. A city looks like it ought to be warm. She trudges through the snow and looks at all the windows, and pictures the drapes that should be hanging in them, and the foods people inside should be eating. None of that in the desert, and that makes things much easier.

But there is also what the desert doesn't have, like her tablet, always to hand. She walks and shivers, but sometimes she stops and listens to what it tells her. Very kind, how it reads things out. It should be hard to believe that there are people on the other side, speaking through it, but she knows that they are. The way they talk is real. The things they say about where they came from are real - she knows she can fall for a good lie, but when people tell their stories it's different. Listen to more than what someone says, Lao Dian had taught. Listen to how and when and why and everything around it. She's always been a diligent student. Everyone here is real.

It's good to stop under the remains of a roof - there was a house once, but all that's left is half a room, only close to winds that come from a certain direction - and listen to people, even if she has to fiddle with the tablet and call up the still difficult knowledge of how to go back and - play, that was the word, play things again that she's already heard. It doesn't make her less alone, but loneliness doesn't bother her by itself, as long as she can listen. Today someone is talking about how to mix chemicals together to make something that cleans, and that's one of the best sorts of talk. She listens and she learns. And there's to the cold, that wicked old toothy thing.

She listens for a while. When she hears a voice that don't come from the tablet, she doesn't realize it at first. The penny only drops when she realizes that the voice is calling her, and her head bobs up from the tablet, eyes and mouth wide with excitement. Not her name, her - what was that word? Username. Someone is mispronouncing it. "Siaok!" someone's calling, which is wrong, but she's willing to let it pass considering how long it has been since her last encounter with someone in the flesh.

She hugs the tablet to her chest and breaks into a run, heading for the voice. Listening can replace most things, but people are only warm in person.