Post by xxKrows. on May 2, 2010 5:49:15 GMT -5
The Character
Name: It's just An. Now, I know Ayn sounds like acronyms. That's because it is. More on that later, though.
Age: I think I'm seventeen, eighteen – around there.
Gender: Oops, forgot you can't read densities. Well, that's the good thing about being a Zubat 'morph. I'm male.
Pokemorph: I think I'm going to start laughing. Nope, I'm quite obviously a full-blooded earthworm.
…
Yes, I am a Zubat.
Appearance:
→ General
Basically, if you took a good look (or echo, depending on what kind of creature you are) at me, your first thought would be somewhere along the lines of "Now just how did they mess up that badly?" And you'd be forgiven for it too.
I stand at six feet tall. Six feet and small change – of course, not counting my ears, which'd boost me up to seven feet in all. Yes, those are some big ears. My wingspan comes in at about sixteen metres, fully expanded, I hear, and even that is considered a serious fail by the people who made me, because it's entirely too small. More on that later, though. I'm around sixty-five kilograms in weight, mainly because I get to have hollow bones. Not because I'm anorexic or anything.
Also, I haven't any proper arms or legs.
Ouch.
I am quite obviously a mix between a Zubat and a human. I get to have a roughly human shape, with the added benefits of wings and echolocation, which is kind of a good thing, but without any useful arms and no eyes at all, which is very definitely not a good thing. My legs are well enough in appearance, but they're only useful for locking onto tree branches for roosting at night. I can walk, but it tires me out to run. They are good for jumping, though, since that's about the only way for me to spring into flight short of launching myself off a nearby tall building.
→ Head
There's the ears. I'd try to talk about the more normal parts first, but there's no way I could divert attention from those fucking ears. Sheesh. They're about more than a foot tall, and they originate somewhere normal human ears would come from. They look like seashells. Or hollow loaves of bread. They've got a little flap in front that helps me with echolocation – I don't know their names, traggers or something like that? They're very flexible and can turn from fully forwards to almost fully backwards. They're the best things on earth, ever, because I can hear everything, everything, within a ten-metre radius. Breathing sounds. Wind ruffling through leaves. That Caterpie crawling up your arm – no, no, that's a joke. I don't even need to echolocate while doing that. It just comes to me. Yeah, pretty cool.
Then of course, when I choose to echolocate, I open my mouth and start, well, squeaking. Don't laugh, it's true. The people who made me are very nice; they gave me a separate voice box to emit those high frequencies. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but basically, I can alternate between sensing small details – like the floating of a leaf from a tree branch, if it's at a close enough range – or getting large, general soundscapes. I can also echolocate while talking, but that's a lot less precise than normal.
I haven't eyes, and frankly, I'm not seeing the need for them – geddit? Heh! In any case, there's just smooth, unbroken skin where my eyes are supposed to be. It freaked out quite a few people, so nowadays I keep that area covered by my hair. My hair's purple, but I don't know what purple is. I don't know what colour is. Anyway. It's supposed to be smooth, but it gets tangled most of the time because I'm afraid of water. It's kind of stupid, really, but I digress. It falls down my back and doesn't get cut, mostly because I can't use scissors anyway, and in front it covers up to my nose.
I have a nice nose, people say.
→ Body and limbs
Where does one start? People say that I have bluish, greyish, weirdish skin. I give them a shrug when they say that. I've been compared to fish, to zombies, and most often, to Zubats, before. I am part-Zubat, after all, and you really can't blame them. All I know is that apart from having a slightly thicker spread of hair across my body than other people, I'm not so much different in terms of skin.
But, well, apart from that, there's basically not much else that's the same.
My torso looks like that of a human one, but it's slightly longer. I've got thick muscles, but instead of being all lumpy and tumour-like, they're more compact and wiry. I need them, too, to be able to fly (more like glide, actually. More on this later.). I have a flexible ribcage that goes out pretty far when I breathe in, because I need a lot of oxygen to flap those wings.
Wings. Yup. They are… very big, by human standards, but very small, by bat standards. There's elastic membrane stretching between my shoulder and the front of my wrist, between my each finger (and they're long fingers!) and from my fourth digit to my back, where it merges into my flesh. I have two useable fingers – the thumb and the first digit – a compromise between the Zubat wing and the human hand. The longest digit touches the ground if I stand straight with my arms stretched as if in flight.
I can't fly for long distances on them, because they just can't take my weight. The best I can do is to fly from one building to another, lower one in the Complex (I think it's about fifteen metres) if I use the standard bat-flapping, but if I go all-out and move my entire forearm, I'll end up with twenty metres, two very tired arms, and possibly painful red streaks where the membranes connect to my back. So I go with my standard flapping of the fingers like my Zubat cousins do, and I make sure to eat and rest a lot before and after any rare bouts of flight. Friends died before. I should know the risks.
I can glide pretty well on them, though, because while they aren't big enough for sustained flight, they're more than capable of functioning like a hang-glider. I'm really too big for me to have the same dexterity as my Zubat cousins, but I can bank sharply and navigate around trees without falling out of the sky. If I catch my wings on something sharp, they tear, but the hole'll grow back in an hour, if it's small – smaller than a, I don't know, a normal human fist. If it's any bigger, it'll take more time, of course. This regenerative ability extends somewhat to the rest of my body, though of course I won't recover from a broken spine. I don't scar as much, that's all.
That's all for my wings, I guess. Oh, they say that the membrane has a purple tinge, which is another colour-thing that I don't much care about.
My legs, are, well, not fully legs. I did mention them before. They are fine enough for standing and I can wear pants, which is good enough for me. I can't run, and I can't walk long distances. They have a tendency to cramp up if held straight for too long a time – say, more than two hours. They have this nifty locking mechanism; I can curl them around a branch and they will stay curled, even if I fall asleep. I don't have full-formed feet, though. They are roughly shaped like human feet, but there're no toes. Sin – Sin-something, I remember the scientist-people saying. But I was too young, then, to memorise those big words – but I digress.
I move about by gliding and walking slowly, and taking a lot of rests by sitting on the ground or hanging upside-down. I also sleep upside-down, by the way. It freaks people out, sometimes, because you see this batlike creature with no eyes and scary long hair hanging from a tree – or, at least, that's how a few of my friends have described to me. (I'm nocturnal, thankfully, because otherwise it'll be a batlike creature with no eyes and scary long hair hanging from a tree at night.) My legs are that flexible.
→ Clothing
I don't wear any shirts. Come on, you try to fit a pair of wings into a T-shirt. So, yes, I go about bare-chested – or, well, as bare as it can be, given the fuzz of fur all across my body. I wear a scarf; it protects my neck and thus my precious, precious echolocation chords. It's getting a little ratty now, having been by my side for about seven years, but I am emotionally attached to it. It's my safety blanket, of sorts. It's, according to my friends, stark scarlet with eye-smarting blue stripes, but I can't tell. In any case, it feels good and is useful. I wrap it loosely around my neck and dangle the tails behind my back, where they have the least chance of snagging onto something. Still, the ends are ragged and holey.
It gets cold during the later parts of the year and I hate the cold, so I wrap myself up with more scarves and sit with my wings around my body mostly, trapping the heat. Chiro helps to bundle myself up, and I find any excuse I can not to go outdoors. So I guess you can say that for the later months, I actually do wear something, even if that something's just… an assortment of towels.
I wear pants, though, as you can see. I can manoeuvre my arms about to pull on some jeans, and they have to be either jeans or cargo pants, because otherwise my claws will just puncture and tear the cloth. I am said to have very bad taste in clothing, but hey, I can't help it! I can't see. I don't wear shoes, because they make landing and roosting difficult, though for a time back in the Complex I wore boots with leg braces to help me walk. (They took them off, though, to train my stamina. Good point there.) Now my feet are calloused, and they rarely get pierced.
Personality:
Oh, my personality? Heh, I get embarrassed talking about myself, so I guess Chiro's going to do it for you. I'm just going to wander away now…
That's right. Don't mind him. He's a good guy, just plain stupid. I'm Chiro; that's Kai-ro for you.
→ Optimistic, that's him. An's the sort of person who'd see the bright side to everything. Don't mind the metaphor. He doesn’t get knocked down by the circumstances; he'll bounce right back. I guess it's got to do with living like this. I remember someone once saying that if you cope with difficulties by either laughing or crying, and for An, he chooses the former.
→ You could call him weak-willed, I suppose. He is very easily persuaded, that airheaded bat. It doesn't take much to convince him to do something, be it running an errand around the Complex, or volunteering for the Beta Testing, which is precisely what he has done. And, of course, I get to follow him as he goes about his capers. That fool.
That's easygoing, okay? I mean, sure, I get coerced into everything, but that doesn't mean I'm… stupid or anything! I am just agreeable!
Hey. Let me handle this, nitwit.
… Fine.
In any case, if you put across a request in polite enough terms (and sometimes not even that), he will accept it happily and proceed to fulfil that request. It gets us into… sticky situations. Literally.
→ He has low self-esteem, to a certain extent. He's too happy to be the overly-emotional, self-loathing sort, but he gets too embarrassed to talk about himself, and he constantly worries about putting people off due to his appearance. Still, it doesn't seem to much impede his social relationships and his general outlook on life.
→ WIP!!
In case you didn't know that:
→ I have only four teeth in all. I can't chew, so I eat by Leech Life-ing. Kinda. I suck the juices out of anything with juices, or energy out of anything without juices. Chemical potential energy, that's what I eat, heh. Or, if I feel up to it, porridge and soup.
I love soup.
→ I am nocturnal, as mentioned above. It's not that I fear the light or some such bullshit. It's just in my genes or something. I feel better at night. I can't tell if it's day or night since I can't see, but I can feel the temperature differences and make a pretty accurate guess. Chiro can help, too.
→ You could say I'm bi-curious, I guess. It's not that I'm openly gay or anything, but I don't see – ahem, recognise the importance of sticking to your opposite gender. Sure, you can't make babies, but since no-one'd want to do that with me anyway, I don't much care.
→ I am not literate, rather obviously. I know my grammar and all that, but I can't read (heh) or right (heh again). Good old Chiro does that most of the time. She can become a Porygon and surf the net for a while, but it tires her out and it hurts if she goes too far from me, even metaphysically.
History:
Well, I don't know much about what happened before I could start remembering things, so I'm afraid I can't help you much on that—
Hold on. I've been to the computers in the lab before. The scientists have foolishly left their correspondences unencrypted, though even if they were, it'd be just a matter of seconds for me to decrypt them anyway. Now step aside, An, and you, listen up.
D:
Shoo. Now, here're the documents pertaining to the APHGAR project. May we access that laptop of yours? Thank you.
Arullia:
Yes! Today we've properly made the breakthrough that I've been telling you for weeks about. Yesterday it was just speculation, but right now everything makes sense. The beauty of the scheme lies in its simplicity: no need to extract and culture stem cells, no possibility of rejection, no chance for faulty transcription to occur! But I won't bore you with the details. Remember EPHGAR? Embyronic Pokémon-Human Genetic Aspect Recombination?
Well, now it's been improved upon. Meet APHGAR – Adult Pokémon-Human Genetic Aspect Recombination! We don’t have to wait for ten, fifteen years for the subjects to mature. We can perform this procedure on an adult, any human adult, and it'll be successful. Guaranteed successful. We just need sustained injections for the first three months, and then another one a decade later. It wouldn't be reversible, but who'd want to go back to being a boring old human when you could fly, or dive deep, or grow beautiful tails? It's really, really awesome.
We won't be just grabbing people off the streets, you know. We'll be starting with the orphans and abandoned children – Arceus knows there's enough of them over here. ):
Need to go now! Talk to you later!
P.S. Don't tell anyone about it! It's a trade secret, you know!
Love,
Rayden
Sent August 6, 2238
That was the letter from a young scientist to his sister. He was the only one foolish enough to describe the procedure in such detail.
APHGAR is, in essence, a procedure developed by scientists of the MorphTech Medical Group. They weren't the most ethical company out there: they first developed organs for sale and transplantation, then Pokémon-human hybrid tissue – such as lung tissue of a Pigeot-human transgenic, or the muscle tissue of a Primeape-human transgenic – and eventually Pokémorphs. They depended on embryonic stem cells for most of their experiments up to the Pokémorph stage, but it was obvious that the time taken before results could be satisfactorily seen was too long. Then a serum was perfected: it allowed for adult stem cells to be targeted and modified. There was no longer need for blastocysts; a human child would do. Ultimately they intended to further perfect the serum for full human adults, but for now, MorphTech was satisfied that it would be effective.
Their first target group was the orphans and abandoned babies. There was no shortage of them in our region. MorphTech was unscrupulous, true, but not to the point where they would risk a public exposure to obtain subjects for the First Wave. The scientists were not infallible, cold machines: they did not want to take in innocents with an already-established life and influence. Rather, they chose the infants for the fact that they had yet to leave an indelible imprint on the world.
Darker reasons dictated their actions as well: the infants' bones were not yet as set as the adults' were. They could take changes better than their grown counterparts. Worse yet, if the experiments failed, nobody would question the disappearance of two dozen or so of orphans aged between two months and five years.
This much I gained from the electronic records and from my own perceptions, but I do not know what followed. It can be assumed that the targets were located and extracted from one of the shadier orphanages, where I presume the both of us came from. I set our age, at that time, to be no more than four months old. Then the researchers must have made preliminary tests on our tissue samples to ascertain compatibility – those with the O+ blood type were the most receptive to the serum, it appeared. The rest of the pre-injection procedures are not known to me.
However, I do know that the scientists had no control over which Pokémon's genes we were introduced to.
EX. REPORT 0000024081
CODE 53: UNSATISFACTORY IDENTIFICATION
DD37-2208 FAILURE
From what I understand, it states that a crucial batch of purified Pokémon genetic material was mislabelled; the computer was unable to scan and identify the exact Pokémon species the DNA came from. They could tell that it was roughly mammalian, came from Kanto, had evolution potentials – but that was it. As a result, nobody could accurately predict which child received which Pokémon's genes. They had twenty-four children and more than four hundred phials of genetic material. For some it could be an intelligent deduction; for others, a wild guess.
We were the fourteenth pair in Batch A; we were named A/N.
Yup! That's where I got my name!
A stupid origin, if I may say so.
In any case, the injections were performed on us. We survived. Two others – A/J and A/T did not. I suspect that those two were congenially defective in their immune systems. We do not remember anything during those days, but I have echoes of pain and delirium that may hint to the trying nature of the changes we, or more specifically An, sustained.
I did not have a name at that point in time. It seemed that I only gained one after our human – or as human as they were, before the injections – counterparts displayed their new Pokémon traits. I was named Chiro: a short of Chiroptera, the order of bats, in honour of the Zubat genes An received.
Hey, ahem, could I please narrate now? It's getting a little boring. It is, after all, my story.
Carry on. Be aware that I will cut in, should I note that you have left out pertinent periods.
Fine.
Right, so we were somewhere like one year old. I can't remember much of what happened, but I do recall most of the sounds – machine beeps, human voices. They all talked about how some experiments failed and others succeeded, how to improve. There were a series of tests. Crawling, which I think I seriously failed. Sitting up. Rolling over. That was pretty problematic. I'm still surprised they haven't euthanized me.
Er, that's a joke. I'm very grateful they haven't euthanized me.
So, well, we grew up, I guess. All the baby things you don't want to know. They're kind of embarrassing. Anyways, I got attached to a scientist-person. You can't avoid it. They're the people who feed you, clean you, talk to you, play with you, comfort you when you get hurt.
At this point I would like to state two words: Stockholm Syndrome.
… That's not it, Chiro.
You'd have expected the people MorphTech asked to work for them to be the cold-hearted, ruthless, ethically-undefined people, but they're not, really. Most of them are like your normal -WIP-
Career:
See, being sent on Alpha Testing really doesn't give me many choices. Apparently they're monitoring me to make sure I survive well enough in an actual, human-interaction-filled world, so I have to be a Trainer. But it's okay. I can't do much else apart from that.
Though maybe breeding would be nice... Sigh. I'll have to drop by that Something Academy someday for that, I suppose.
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