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jacksonian〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Hope!
AGE: Old enough
JOURNAL: n/a
IM / EMAIL: asyndeton at gmail
PLURK: asyndeton
RETURNING: I play Kitty Jones here at MoM.
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: At the moment, he has none, but family naming tradition in the Vorkosigan family - which he might or might not be a part of - assigns him the name "Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." For the purposes of this app and administrative stuff, that's what he'll be referred to as.
CHARACTER AGE: 17
SERIES: The Vorkosigan Saga
CHRONOLOGY: Taken from just before the start of the novel Brothers in Arms.
CLASS: Hero...sort of. He's working on it.
HOUSING: I'm good with whatever!
BACKGROUND:
The strange origin of Mark Vorkosigan begins many, many years before his birth, when a burgeoning planet-empire called Barrayar decided to invade and conquer a neighboring planet called Komarr in order to control its space wormhole routes. Standard stuff - Komarr, years earlier, had taken a payoff to allow its wormholes to be used to invade Barrayar, and it was charging outlandish tariffs on all imports and exports to Barrayar, and so the Emperor decided to conquer its neighbor out of a combination bloody-minded revenge and economic pragmatism. Overall, it was a pretty good invasion. Smart commanders on both sides. There would have been a very minimal loss of life if not for a really phenomenal fuck-up.
This fuck-up was called the Solstice Massacre. The leaders of Komarr - the oligarchs who controlled its government - had been gathered together after their surrender, and had been promised safety and protection by the commander of Barrayar's forces, Aral Vorkosigan. Unfortunately, the political officer working under him decided that it'd actually be far more advantageous to murder all these fine upstanding men and women. Vorkosigan, in a fit of rage over this massacre, strangled his political officer to death there and then, and so managed to simultaneously find disgrace on his homeworld for this extralegal execution and earn a galactic reputation as the secret architect of this slaughter (who then killed his accomplice to keep the secret, natch). Had the massacre not happened, the conquest of Komarr would have been comparatively neat and tidy. Instead, the bloodshed bred more bloodshed, with the surviving Komarran forces leading a years-long guerrilla-style revolt against their Barrayaran Imperial overlords.
It was put down in time. But as resources and troops dwindled, some of the more fanatical revolutionaries hatched a somewhat, slightly, possibly completely insane plot to get revenge. Brace yourselves. What they would do is this: they would clone Miles, the crippled son of Aral Vorkosigan; surgically and chemically alter that clone to look identical to Miles; train him as an assassin; switch the clone out for Miles; murder Miles; have the clone-assassin murder Aral (lingeringly) and the Emperor (efficiently); take the throne of the Barrayaran Imperium, where he would free Komarr; open Barrayaran airspace to Barrayar's age-old enemy Cetaganda who would then attack Barrayar or maybe not, maybe Barrayar would just be torn apart with a civil war far more devastating than what Komarr had suffered while the Komarrans got to sit back sipping champagne and laughing heartily. Or something.
Yeah, sort of...slightly...insane, all things considered.
And so out of this baroque nonsense, the clone who eventually would be named Mark was born from a pilfered tissue sample. He was raised by a clone-rearing company on the libertarian hellscape that is a planet called Jackson's Whole, where anything's legal if you can pay enough. In his childhood, he was surrounded by clones being raised for life-extension - a practice in which rich, monstrous people had themselves cloned so that they could transplant their brains into younger versions of themselves when they got old. He knew that he was very different from the other clones. For one, he was educated, taught to read, something not necessary for the others. More than that, while the others underwent surgeries to make them more beautiful or healthier or stronger, this one was being injected constantly with drugs to hinder his growth, undergoing surgeries to cut him down, being forced into painful braces that twisted his limbs - all, unbeknownst to him, to make him the perfect twin of Aral's real son, who had been exposed to a vicious toxin in the womb and had grown up with major birth defects. And all the while, he saw his clone-siblings being shipped off, not knowing for sure that it was to their deaths, but...Well, they all suspected.
So it was one of the best moments of his life when the Komarrans came back for him. He was fourteen, then, and they sat him down and told him that he wasn't going to his death, but instead being raised for a glorious purpose. He was going to free an entire planet. And that was, understandingly, intoxicating: far from being some disposable thing, a body with a brain to go in the trash compactor, he had a glorious destiny laid out for him. It made everything that followed almost bearable.
But only…almost. Because what followed was truly brutal. The man in charge of this whole plot, Ser Galen, was apparently as insane as the plan itself was. He taught the clone certain skills - he trained him to be an assassin, armed and unarmed, trained him in Barrayaran culture, and most of all trained him in the art of being Miles Vorkosigan. Every mannerism had to be studied and copied. Every bit of knowledge that Miles possessed was to be acquired by the clone. And failure was met with a brutal beating - except when it wasn't, because Ser Galen was both vicious and completely unpredictable. It was impossible to know when his handler/trainer/foster-father's temper would flare. Certain things would set him off with predictability - the clone overeating, because he had a metabolism that was out of pace with his own surgically cut-down size; the clone trying to get away; reminders of Aral Vorkosigan, like for example the clone's simple physical appearance. Otherwise, the anger came in waves that were impossible to predict. All of this was either a manifestation of real mental illness on Galen's part, or it was a calculated attempt to break the clone so that he was unhinged and violent by the time he got on the throne of Barrayar, so that he would cause even more devastation by ruling badly.
Yet this awful life didn't shake the clone's loyalty to the Komarran cause. He'd never known anything else, so he didn't know that he deserved better. It wasn't until they started to pursue Miles Vorkosigan, and failed to find him, that doubt started to come. He'd had a good four years of being filled with stories about the glory of their cause, the glory of Komarr's future, his status as the messiah of a planet reborn, the decisive blow they would strike. And then he got to watch the architects of their glorious cause bumbling across the galaxy like the Keystone Cops. This blatant incompetence shook his faith in the cause, to say the least. So did their travels across the galaxy, which exposed him for the first time to people with their own independent views, to news sources not controlled and edited by his handlers, to different cultures and ideas. If they'd found Miles Vorkosigan immediately, the clone would have killed him without a second thought and accepted his destiny without hesitation, as willing to go to his death as an assassin as the clones who gave their bodies for brain-transplant. But the conspirators' failure to successfully track Miles gave him time to think about things and to question. It's when he's forced to undergo another unnecessary surgery, replacing his perfectly healthy leg bones with synthetic bone, and has an agonizing recovery period, that he decides he's really fucking done with this whole plan.
But he doesn't know any other life. So where else can he go? The conspirators finally catch up to Miles when the clone himself figures out what the conspirators never could, that Miles has a secret second identity as a mercenary admiral. They make the swap, with the clone taking Vorkosigan/Admiral Naismith's place - but things don't go exactly as planned, thanks to a clever subordinate of Miles' tracking him, and thanks to Miles' own ability to read the clone's insecurities and desires, and Miles' genuine and loving desire to accept the clone as a brother into their family. Miles escapes the plan to kill him, the conspiracy is broken apart, and the clone escapes...and comes up with yet another trap for Miles, kidnapping Miles' cousin to lure him out. Yet when at the inevitable final confrontation, Ser Galen orders the clone to kill Miles, the clone turns the gun on his tormentor instead of on his would-be brother. He kills Galen and saves Miles.
And then he runs the fuck away for four years because family is scary as hell. And then he makes lots of bad decisions that lead to really really bad things. But those are outside the scope of this app, so screw 'em!
PERSONALITY:
Mark Pierre Vorkosigan is a curious study in nature versus nurture. He's drawn from identical genetic stock as his progenitor, so he's genetically inclined to follow that original archetype, and he was also given a similar education and taught to imitate his progenitor's way of thinking, so knowledge-wise he ought to resemble his brother. Which is why it is goddamn amazing how little like Miles he turns out to be, because Mark is so contrary that he's gonna flip the bird at nature and nurture alike and be exactly who he is, which is a self-interested, mercenary, ruthless, courageous, righteous, proudly weird little asshole.
At this point in the canon, he's still a shadow of who he ends up being. He's still obedient(ish) to his comrades/captors, and they want him to act like Miles. So this means that the surface act that he shows to nearly everyone is identical to that of his progenitor - bright, energetic to the point of being hyper, smart, garrulous. Underneath the act is a frightened, angry, intermittently defiant kid who desperately wants something to be a part of even as he desperately wants to know who he really is - but who doesn't ever get the chance to be himself. And he's not going to risk trying to be himself, either, because of his genuine fear. He's a victim of intense abuse designed to make him suppress his personality, and so he suppresses, and like lots of abuse victims he guards himself very tightly against any and all intimacy in the belief that it'll be some sort of entrapment. On the surface he's Miles; when that slips, he's an angry paranoid. And at the moment that's all he lets show.
But there's obviously much more, clear in the way he blossoms later on. He thinks, in the early books, that he's nothing except some shadow of Miles Vorkosigan - that the Komarrans, in their plot for revenge, killed the person he could have been without their conditioning. But that person was just dormant, and time and experience wake up that sleeping person. Mark, the real Mark, is hard and ruthless - he considers himself culturally Jacksonian, which means he thinks that there's no higher form of agreement than a well-negotiated deal. He's also smart, in a very different way from the way in which his clone-brother is smart: whereas Miles is good at improvising, Mark takes a very long view of things, planning very far ahead into the future. He's prescient, which (combined with his Jacksonian business sense) gives him a unique and powerful genius for investing and business in general. His hard pragmatism is married to an intense hunger for justice: his experiences, coupled with his native personality, foster a very intense hatred of the clone life-extension business and other abusive practices. He also grows into someone intensely defiant: whereas Miles, in many ways, bows to conventions and traditions and works with them, Mark just proudly barrels through them, refusing to hide himself (indeed, he deliberately gains several kilos of weight both to differentiate himself from his brother and to just make himself obvious). He says things that are weird, makes reference to his insane past, and enjoys others' reactions to him.
He's also impossibly resilient. He survived fourteen years of constant surgeries and torturous medical procedures, then another four of mental, emotional, and occasionally sexual abuse with his sanity intact. He endured endless conditioning to become someone else and nevertheless came out of it with a personality that was strong, if dormant for a while. He later endures incredible torture by an enemy of his clone's, during which he spontaneously develops a sort of split personality as a coping mechanism - and later, when he's recuperating, embraces this split personality as part of him and a valuable thing that kept him alive. He has a life that would have destroyed most people and - with considerable help - not only overcomes it, but transcends it: he has to fight and falter, but in time he becomes a happy (if mentally non-normative) man in a stable relationship, a savvy businessman whose businesses are working to economically undermine the clone life-extension industry, and a loving brother who derives almost as much pleasure from his progenitor's successes as he does from beating the pants off him in their many (many) quiet, rivalry-charged competitions.
So, in short: Mark is a man who has a lot of potential to develop into someone really formidable, and will, as soon as he's given the opportunity. It's pretty much inevitable. He's too tough to do otherwise.
POWER:
Mark will come in with the following powers:
Business sense. Mark will have a supernatural sense for which businesses will turn a profit and which businesses won't. This'll prove an incredible asset on the stock market - he'll be able to turn significant profits on penny stocks and other high-risk investments.
Physical manipulation. He'll be able to adjust his own weight to resemble Miles more or less, depending on whether or not he wants to pass as his clone-brother.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ The young man on the screen looks a hell of a lot like Admiral Miles Naismith, or (a bit less) Dr. Hermann Gottlieb - he's clearly small like Miles, just from the angle of the camera and the proportions of the chair in comparison to him. But he's also very recognizably different. He's fatter, to begin with - not a whole lot, but enough that he wouldn't be mistaken for them. And he's dressed much differently: black, expensive clothes, black tie over a black shirt under a black suit jacket, not exactly tasteful but pricy. Hair slicked back. The kid is trying hard to look cool, and he's poured almost enough money in to accomplish it. ]
Hello.
[ This is a Businessman Smile that he flashes at the camera. ]
My name is Vincent Price. I'm very grateful to the imPort community for being very helpful when I arrived last month - [ And he pronounces that very smugly, because he wants everyone to be impressed by his conspicuous wealth having been accumulated in only a month. ] And so I'm going to offer you all an opportunity. And I wouldn't recommend that you pass it up.
Price Investments, a full-service investment company, has officially been declared a corporation. My doors are now open. And I'm willing to take all of you on as clients.
What am I offering? I'm guaranteeing you at least an eighteen percent return on investment. [ Which is really good, though he looks a little disgruntled when he says that. He could do much more, but...he'd sooner that it not be really obvious that he's been cheating. Sooner not deal with the SEC... ] All I ask for is a five hundred dollar initial minimum and a year guaranteed commitment. Which is low and generous. I'm going to be asking for much more from non-imPorts. [ When he's built up enough of a reputation to actually be able to pitch things to non-imPorts. This is less charity, more desperate nosing around for clients. ]
Contact me if you're interested in getting in on the ground floor of this incredible opportunity. Or understand that within two months, you're going to be kicking yourself. Hard.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
It's been a day, and nothing has happened yet.
The first ten hours, the clone had thought for sure. For sure. That something was going to happen that would bring this to a swift end. The phone (old-fashioned and strange) would ring and Ser Galen would be on the other end instructing him where to meet. Or if not Ser Galen, then someone else. Or he'd feel a hand closing around his arm, jerking him around to demand to know why he's done this and tried to run away, even though he had not wanted this to happen, even though he'd been completely obedient. Or he'd feel the cold muzzle of a Barrayaran nerve disrupter pressed against the back of his head…
So the first ten hours, he had tried to take advantage of this freedom. Or, well…The first hour had been spent in obedient stillness, waiting, and then the next nine hours he'd realized the response wouldn't come immediately and so he'd tried to take advantage of his extremely temporary liberty. Gone into a malt shop and drunk down milkshakes till his stomach ached. Sat down with a comconsole, or the primitive equivalent of a comconsole this planet had, and read the news. Read history. Read everything on the net about this fiction (if it is a fiction? really?) of transportation to the past, to another dimension. Tried to condense it into something useful. Galen would want a full report, after all. Ate again. Read the file they had on him with a bit of disdain, everything clearly taken from the Jacksonians except for the weird lie about superpowers.
Spent an hour sitting in a park doing nothing except watching some ducks.
It was this last thing, which happened between hours nine and ten, that made him realize that something was very seriously wrong. He'd never been allowed this much time on his own except for when he was sleeping. Always he'd had to spend it on training, exercising, reading, cramming, or recovery...But a full hour, sitting stationary, doing nothing except watching nature and dreading the discipline that would surely be comimg for being away for so long. Counting the hours and thinking about how much worse it'll be than it ever was before. Then at the end of that tenth hour, he looks at his phone, and he sees no calls, no messages, no texts, and he realizes that it's not coming. That they're not coming. That Galen really truly isn't here. That the Komarrans really truly aren't here.
And so hours ten through ten point five are spent struggling to breathe in the face of a panic attack. Fighting against the terror, sweating and shaking, as he thinks about the fact that he might be free. That he might be free from them. That without even trying to run away he might...have gotten loose from them. That he's not looking at a few hours of wandering around on his own. That there might be an entire planet without minders, without handlers, without Galen. That he might have a day of making his own choices. Or that he might have a full lifetime of it -
That last thought makes him sick in a stand of bushes, just off the pathway. He feels better after he's sick. Flees the park before anyone finds that pile of puke and asks him about it and makes him clean it up.
A feverish night is spent in the house they assigned him. Comfort taken by the fact that it was assigned - not that helpful, though. The next morning, he wakes up, opens his eyes. Lays there for an hour. Then another hour. Two hours unmoving in bed. No response. His choice, and no response at all. He's free, for the time being at least he's free, and he doesn't know whether that makes him want to cry or laugh.
He does both.
FINAL NOTES: Obviously, Mark's history is a pretty nasty/triggery one, so I'll have an opt-out post for him!
NAME: Hope!
AGE: Old enough
JOURNAL: n/a
IM / EMAIL: asyndeton at gmail
PLURK: asyndeton
RETURNING: I play Kitty Jones here at MoM.
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: At the moment, he has none, but family naming tradition in the Vorkosigan family - which he might or might not be a part of - assigns him the name "Mark Pierre Vorkosigan." For the purposes of this app and administrative stuff, that's what he'll be referred to as.
CHARACTER AGE: 17
SERIES: The Vorkosigan Saga
CHRONOLOGY: Taken from just before the start of the novel Brothers in Arms.
CLASS: Hero...sort of. He's working on it.
HOUSING: I'm good with whatever!
BACKGROUND:
The strange origin of Mark Vorkosigan begins many, many years before his birth, when a burgeoning planet-empire called Barrayar decided to invade and conquer a neighboring planet called Komarr in order to control its space wormhole routes. Standard stuff - Komarr, years earlier, had taken a payoff to allow its wormholes to be used to invade Barrayar, and it was charging outlandish tariffs on all imports and exports to Barrayar, and so the Emperor decided to conquer its neighbor out of a combination bloody-minded revenge and economic pragmatism. Overall, it was a pretty good invasion. Smart commanders on both sides. There would have been a very minimal loss of life if not for a really phenomenal fuck-up.
This fuck-up was called the Solstice Massacre. The leaders of Komarr - the oligarchs who controlled its government - had been gathered together after their surrender, and had been promised safety and protection by the commander of Barrayar's forces, Aral Vorkosigan. Unfortunately, the political officer working under him decided that it'd actually be far more advantageous to murder all these fine upstanding men and women. Vorkosigan, in a fit of rage over this massacre, strangled his political officer to death there and then, and so managed to simultaneously find disgrace on his homeworld for this extralegal execution and earn a galactic reputation as the secret architect of this slaughter (who then killed his accomplice to keep the secret, natch). Had the massacre not happened, the conquest of Komarr would have been comparatively neat and tidy. Instead, the bloodshed bred more bloodshed, with the surviving Komarran forces leading a years-long guerrilla-style revolt against their Barrayaran Imperial overlords.
It was put down in time. But as resources and troops dwindled, some of the more fanatical revolutionaries hatched a somewhat, slightly, possibly completely insane plot to get revenge. Brace yourselves. What they would do is this: they would clone Miles, the crippled son of Aral Vorkosigan; surgically and chemically alter that clone to look identical to Miles; train him as an assassin; switch the clone out for Miles; murder Miles; have the clone-assassin murder Aral (lingeringly) and the Emperor (efficiently); take the throne of the Barrayaran Imperium, where he would free Komarr; open Barrayaran airspace to Barrayar's age-old enemy Cetaganda who would then attack Barrayar or maybe not, maybe Barrayar would just be torn apart with a civil war far more devastating than what Komarr had suffered while the Komarrans got to sit back sipping champagne and laughing heartily. Or something.
Yeah, sort of...slightly...insane, all things considered.
And so out of this baroque nonsense, the clone who eventually would be named Mark was born from a pilfered tissue sample. He was raised by a clone-rearing company on the libertarian hellscape that is a planet called Jackson's Whole, where anything's legal if you can pay enough. In his childhood, he was surrounded by clones being raised for life-extension - a practice in which rich, monstrous people had themselves cloned so that they could transplant their brains into younger versions of themselves when they got old. He knew that he was very different from the other clones. For one, he was educated, taught to read, something not necessary for the others. More than that, while the others underwent surgeries to make them more beautiful or healthier or stronger, this one was being injected constantly with drugs to hinder his growth, undergoing surgeries to cut him down, being forced into painful braces that twisted his limbs - all, unbeknownst to him, to make him the perfect twin of Aral's real son, who had been exposed to a vicious toxin in the womb and had grown up with major birth defects. And all the while, he saw his clone-siblings being shipped off, not knowing for sure that it was to their deaths, but...Well, they all suspected.
So it was one of the best moments of his life when the Komarrans came back for him. He was fourteen, then, and they sat him down and told him that he wasn't going to his death, but instead being raised for a glorious purpose. He was going to free an entire planet. And that was, understandingly, intoxicating: far from being some disposable thing, a body with a brain to go in the trash compactor, he had a glorious destiny laid out for him. It made everything that followed almost bearable.
But only…almost. Because what followed was truly brutal. The man in charge of this whole plot, Ser Galen, was apparently as insane as the plan itself was. He taught the clone certain skills - he trained him to be an assassin, armed and unarmed, trained him in Barrayaran culture, and most of all trained him in the art of being Miles Vorkosigan. Every mannerism had to be studied and copied. Every bit of knowledge that Miles possessed was to be acquired by the clone. And failure was met with a brutal beating - except when it wasn't, because Ser Galen was both vicious and completely unpredictable. It was impossible to know when his handler/trainer/foster-father's temper would flare. Certain things would set him off with predictability - the clone overeating, because he had a metabolism that was out of pace with his own surgically cut-down size; the clone trying to get away; reminders of Aral Vorkosigan, like for example the clone's simple physical appearance. Otherwise, the anger came in waves that were impossible to predict. All of this was either a manifestation of real mental illness on Galen's part, or it was a calculated attempt to break the clone so that he was unhinged and violent by the time he got on the throne of Barrayar, so that he would cause even more devastation by ruling badly.
Yet this awful life didn't shake the clone's loyalty to the Komarran cause. He'd never known anything else, so he didn't know that he deserved better. It wasn't until they started to pursue Miles Vorkosigan, and failed to find him, that doubt started to come. He'd had a good four years of being filled with stories about the glory of their cause, the glory of Komarr's future, his status as the messiah of a planet reborn, the decisive blow they would strike. And then he got to watch the architects of their glorious cause bumbling across the galaxy like the Keystone Cops. This blatant incompetence shook his faith in the cause, to say the least. So did their travels across the galaxy, which exposed him for the first time to people with their own independent views, to news sources not controlled and edited by his handlers, to different cultures and ideas. If they'd found Miles Vorkosigan immediately, the clone would have killed him without a second thought and accepted his destiny without hesitation, as willing to go to his death as an assassin as the clones who gave their bodies for brain-transplant. But the conspirators' failure to successfully track Miles gave him time to think about things and to question. It's when he's forced to undergo another unnecessary surgery, replacing his perfectly healthy leg bones with synthetic bone, and has an agonizing recovery period, that he decides he's really fucking done with this whole plan.
But he doesn't know any other life. So where else can he go? The conspirators finally catch up to Miles when the clone himself figures out what the conspirators never could, that Miles has a secret second identity as a mercenary admiral. They make the swap, with the clone taking Vorkosigan/Admiral Naismith's place - but things don't go exactly as planned, thanks to a clever subordinate of Miles' tracking him, and thanks to Miles' own ability to read the clone's insecurities and desires, and Miles' genuine and loving desire to accept the clone as a brother into their family. Miles escapes the plan to kill him, the conspiracy is broken apart, and the clone escapes...and comes up with yet another trap for Miles, kidnapping Miles' cousin to lure him out. Yet when at the inevitable final confrontation, Ser Galen orders the clone to kill Miles, the clone turns the gun on his tormentor instead of on his would-be brother. He kills Galen and saves Miles.
And then he runs the fuck away for four years because family is scary as hell. And then he makes lots of bad decisions that lead to really really bad things. But those are outside the scope of this app, so screw 'em!
PERSONALITY:
Mark Pierre Vorkosigan is a curious study in nature versus nurture. He's drawn from identical genetic stock as his progenitor, so he's genetically inclined to follow that original archetype, and he was also given a similar education and taught to imitate his progenitor's way of thinking, so knowledge-wise he ought to resemble his brother. Which is why it is goddamn amazing how little like Miles he turns out to be, because Mark is so contrary that he's gonna flip the bird at nature and nurture alike and be exactly who he is, which is a self-interested, mercenary, ruthless, courageous, righteous, proudly weird little asshole.
At this point in the canon, he's still a shadow of who he ends up being. He's still obedient(ish) to his comrades/captors, and they want him to act like Miles. So this means that the surface act that he shows to nearly everyone is identical to that of his progenitor - bright, energetic to the point of being hyper, smart, garrulous. Underneath the act is a frightened, angry, intermittently defiant kid who desperately wants something to be a part of even as he desperately wants to know who he really is - but who doesn't ever get the chance to be himself. And he's not going to risk trying to be himself, either, because of his genuine fear. He's a victim of intense abuse designed to make him suppress his personality, and so he suppresses, and like lots of abuse victims he guards himself very tightly against any and all intimacy in the belief that it'll be some sort of entrapment. On the surface he's Miles; when that slips, he's an angry paranoid. And at the moment that's all he lets show.
But there's obviously much more, clear in the way he blossoms later on. He thinks, in the early books, that he's nothing except some shadow of Miles Vorkosigan - that the Komarrans, in their plot for revenge, killed the person he could have been without their conditioning. But that person was just dormant, and time and experience wake up that sleeping person. Mark, the real Mark, is hard and ruthless - he considers himself culturally Jacksonian, which means he thinks that there's no higher form of agreement than a well-negotiated deal. He's also smart, in a very different way from the way in which his clone-brother is smart: whereas Miles is good at improvising, Mark takes a very long view of things, planning very far ahead into the future. He's prescient, which (combined with his Jacksonian business sense) gives him a unique and powerful genius for investing and business in general. His hard pragmatism is married to an intense hunger for justice: his experiences, coupled with his native personality, foster a very intense hatred of the clone life-extension business and other abusive practices. He also grows into someone intensely defiant: whereas Miles, in many ways, bows to conventions and traditions and works with them, Mark just proudly barrels through them, refusing to hide himself (indeed, he deliberately gains several kilos of weight both to differentiate himself from his brother and to just make himself obvious). He says things that are weird, makes reference to his insane past, and enjoys others' reactions to him.
He's also impossibly resilient. He survived fourteen years of constant surgeries and torturous medical procedures, then another four of mental, emotional, and occasionally sexual abuse with his sanity intact. He endured endless conditioning to become someone else and nevertheless came out of it with a personality that was strong, if dormant for a while. He later endures incredible torture by an enemy of his clone's, during which he spontaneously develops a sort of split personality as a coping mechanism - and later, when he's recuperating, embraces this split personality as part of him and a valuable thing that kept him alive. He has a life that would have destroyed most people and - with considerable help - not only overcomes it, but transcends it: he has to fight and falter, but in time he becomes a happy (if mentally non-normative) man in a stable relationship, a savvy businessman whose businesses are working to economically undermine the clone life-extension industry, and a loving brother who derives almost as much pleasure from his progenitor's successes as he does from beating the pants off him in their many (many) quiet, rivalry-charged competitions.
So, in short: Mark is a man who has a lot of potential to develop into someone really formidable, and will, as soon as he's given the opportunity. It's pretty much inevitable. He's too tough to do otherwise.
POWER:
Mark will come in with the following powers:
Business sense. Mark will have a supernatural sense for which businesses will turn a profit and which businesses won't. This'll prove an incredible asset on the stock market - he'll be able to turn significant profits on penny stocks and other high-risk investments.
Physical manipulation. He'll be able to adjust his own weight to resemble Miles more or less, depending on whether or not he wants to pass as his clone-brother.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ The young man on the screen looks a hell of a lot like Admiral Miles Naismith, or (a bit less) Dr. Hermann Gottlieb - he's clearly small like Miles, just from the angle of the camera and the proportions of the chair in comparison to him. But he's also very recognizably different. He's fatter, to begin with - not a whole lot, but enough that he wouldn't be mistaken for them. And he's dressed much differently: black, expensive clothes, black tie over a black shirt under a black suit jacket, not exactly tasteful but pricy. Hair slicked back. The kid is trying hard to look cool, and he's poured almost enough money in to accomplish it. ]
Hello.
[ This is a Businessman Smile that he flashes at the camera. ]
My name is Vincent Price. I'm very grateful to the imPort community for being very helpful when I arrived last month - [ And he pronounces that very smugly, because he wants everyone to be impressed by his conspicuous wealth having been accumulated in only a month. ] And so I'm going to offer you all an opportunity. And I wouldn't recommend that you pass it up.
Price Investments, a full-service investment company, has officially been declared a corporation. My doors are now open. And I'm willing to take all of you on as clients.
What am I offering? I'm guaranteeing you at least an eighteen percent return on investment. [ Which is really good, though he looks a little disgruntled when he says that. He could do much more, but...he'd sooner that it not be really obvious that he's been cheating. Sooner not deal with the SEC... ] All I ask for is a five hundred dollar initial minimum and a year guaranteed commitment. Which is low and generous. I'm going to be asking for much more from non-imPorts. [ When he's built up enough of a reputation to actually be able to pitch things to non-imPorts. This is less charity, more desperate nosing around for clients. ]
Contact me if you're interested in getting in on the ground floor of this incredible opportunity. Or understand that within two months, you're going to be kicking yourself. Hard.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
It's been a day, and nothing has happened yet.
The first ten hours, the clone had thought for sure. For sure. That something was going to happen that would bring this to a swift end. The phone (old-fashioned and strange) would ring and Ser Galen would be on the other end instructing him where to meet. Or if not Ser Galen, then someone else. Or he'd feel a hand closing around his arm, jerking him around to demand to know why he's done this and tried to run away, even though he had not wanted this to happen, even though he'd been completely obedient. Or he'd feel the cold muzzle of a Barrayaran nerve disrupter pressed against the back of his head…
So the first ten hours, he had tried to take advantage of this freedom. Or, well…The first hour had been spent in obedient stillness, waiting, and then the next nine hours he'd realized the response wouldn't come immediately and so he'd tried to take advantage of his extremely temporary liberty. Gone into a malt shop and drunk down milkshakes till his stomach ached. Sat down with a comconsole, or the primitive equivalent of a comconsole this planet had, and read the news. Read history. Read everything on the net about this fiction (if it is a fiction? really?) of transportation to the past, to another dimension. Tried to condense it into something useful. Galen would want a full report, after all. Ate again. Read the file they had on him with a bit of disdain, everything clearly taken from the Jacksonians except for the weird lie about superpowers.
Spent an hour sitting in a park doing nothing except watching some ducks.
It was this last thing, which happened between hours nine and ten, that made him realize that something was very seriously wrong. He'd never been allowed this much time on his own except for when he was sleeping. Always he'd had to spend it on training, exercising, reading, cramming, or recovery...But a full hour, sitting stationary, doing nothing except watching nature and dreading the discipline that would surely be comimg for being away for so long. Counting the hours and thinking about how much worse it'll be than it ever was before. Then at the end of that tenth hour, he looks at his phone, and he sees no calls, no messages, no texts, and he realizes that it's not coming. That they're not coming. That Galen really truly isn't here. That the Komarrans really truly aren't here.
And so hours ten through ten point five are spent struggling to breathe in the face of a panic attack. Fighting against the terror, sweating and shaking, as he thinks about the fact that he might be free. That he might be free from them. That without even trying to run away he might...have gotten loose from them. That he's not looking at a few hours of wandering around on his own. That there might be an entire planet without minders, without handlers, without Galen. That he might have a day of making his own choices. Or that he might have a full lifetime of it -
That last thought makes him sick in a stand of bushes, just off the pathway. He feels better after he's sick. Flees the park before anyone finds that pile of puke and asks him about it and makes him clean it up.
A feverish night is spent in the house they assigned him. Comfort taken by the fact that it was assigned - not that helpful, though. The next morning, he wakes up, opens his eyes. Lays there for an hour. Then another hour. Two hours unmoving in bed. No response. His choice, and no response at all. He's free, for the time being at least he's free, and he doesn't know whether that makes him want to cry or laugh.
He does both.
FINAL NOTES: Obviously, Mark's history is a pretty nasty/triggery one, so I'll have an opt-out post for him!
