Duplicity Application [ReApp]
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Name: Snow Age: 35 Contact: Timezone: EST Other Character(s): Currently play Tennalhin Halkana ( ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small} readandreject), Rhys is a reapp with previous app here. |
Name: Rhys Dashasa Door: Submissive per previous designation Canon: Bel Dame Apocrypha Canon Point: God's War, middle of Chapter 17 Age: 25 (canon), 29 with in-game experiences Appearance: Black, delicate hands, very pretty-boy, with long lashes and brown eyes, moves with a certain grace due to his past work as a dancer. Relatively unblemished skin due to the fact that he's never done manual labor and the fact that he tends to go about with many layers to protect him from the two suns of Umayma (and due to good care from good magicians when he has been injured). History: Umayma is a planet with two suns, a day is twenty-seven hours long and a week is nine days. It was settled three thousand years ago by a group of Muslims, the First Families. After that, more people arrived, but the two main countries -- Nasheen and Chenja -- both come from that initial settlement. Their religions share the exact same book, but past that there has been little they've been able to find in common. They've mostly stopped trying, and have been at war for over three hundred years. In Nasheen, any full-blooded Nasheenian male who lives to be old enough to be drafted is. They donate their genetic material and head to the front, where they either live to forty and return behind the lines to a world almost as brutal as the front itself, or they die. Nasheen is a country run by women. In Chenja, first-born sons are exempt from the draft. Men tend to have multiple wives, and women and men both follow strict rules of modesty, although the women more so. Rhys was born Rakhshan Arjoomand in Chenja, the only son of a mullah, a wealthy man. He had spent time as a dancer at the Chenjan Imam's court, and he hadn't learned to fight. At seventeen, his father decided that three generations of his family was too long to go without sending a boy to war. He ordered Rhys to go. Rhys refused, and he ran. Giant security bugs dragged him back to his father, and the man smashed Rhys' hands with a metal pipe. Rhys ran again, this time with the help of one of his sisters, and he made it across the border, into Nasheen. He'd passed through the front, been infected and injured by it, but hadn't fought there, and when he arrived in Faleen he had been taken in by magicians. They saw that he had talent for their work -- talent he'd hidden because it would have got him sent to the front, even without his father's demand -- and they healed him. Rhys' life in Nasheen wasn't easy, and life outside the magician's gym was dangerous. Nasheenian women would jeer at him, or beat him, or worse, when they saw him in the streets (since he could easily be picked out by the color of his skin and the tone of his accent). Rhys wasn't even used to being around women who would look him in the eye. Still, once Rhys learned that he didn't have the talent necessary to be a magician for a First Family, he still wasn't content to stay where he was safe. He left Faleen to visit other parts of Nasheen, where the only job he could find was working at a restaurant as he continued to look for some kind of job having to do with magic that wasn't the one he'd left in Faleen. One night, when he was walking to the mosque after a late shift, three Nasheenian women set on him for being a Chenjan man. They beat him, cut his clothes off and then cut him with their knives. After that, Rhys made his way to the nearest magician's gym and they helped him return to Faleen. Once back, Rhys returned to his old job as magician's assistant, until a former bel dame (a Nasheenian role, responsible for cutting the heads off of boys who tried to flee the front, mostly) turned bounty hunter hired him for her team, partly because she needed a magician and could afford his rates where she couldn't afford someone better's, partly to piss off the magician Rhys had been working under, and partly because Nyx likes his hands. Rhys has worked under Nyx for the last seven years, taking care of the bugs needed to run her business and helping do other aspects of the bounty hunting business that don't involve fighting people. When Nyx gets a note directly from the Queen of Nasheen, offering a reward for services that could be rendered, she takes Rhys rather than any of the other members of her team (which are Anneke and Khos as fighters and Taite as comm tech) because even though he's Chenjan, he's still better-educated and better-mannered than anyone else she has available. The mission the Queen gives Nyx is to track down a missing alien, who is visiting Unayma to learn about their bugs and magic, and who could help tip the war between Nasheen and Chenja in favor of the former. Rhys was originally from a canon point just after this meeting. CR AU (Optional): His time in Duplicity was difficult, as might be expected. Many things were easier than his life before Duplicity. As a submissive he could enter into contracts with people who would take care of him and there was much less violence in his day-to-day life. But as judgemental and concerned as he is about sex, the easy way that most people have it in the city was something he resisted and pushed against, arguing with people that they were giving in too easily. He fought his own desires as well, frequently ending up in SLUT due to a lack of meeting quota even when he had steady partners that he enjoyed having sex with. His first dominant in the game was Cullen, who respected Rhys for the way he was, who offered him space and grew into one of his first friends. Rhys only slept with him a couple of times, their friendship and contract staying mostly non-sexual. One of the times he slept with him under event effects he also slept with Dorian. Dorian left the game, and returned without memories, but something about his personality appealed to Rhys, who reached out and decided to sleep with him. This initial seduction set their relationship off-kilter, with Rhys torn between his attraction and want for a relationship with Dorian and his own recriminations on the matter. When Dorian's designation was swapped to Dominant it seemed an easy solution to sign with him, but their relationship never got less complicated. Rhys pushed away from him as often as he went to Dorian, he was jealous of the ease with which Dorian slept with other men and he longed for a relationship that he could feel more comfortable with, that wouldn't be as against his religion. Dorian, for his part, feared that Rhys would leave him for a woman, and dealt with Rhys frequently throwing his words in his face and picking fights when Rhys got too uncomfortable with his own actions. His time in Duplicity changed Rhys, and he reached a degree of happiness that he didn't quite trust. It was delicate and he frequently challenged it to see if it would hold against his own resistance but he was contracted with Dorian Pavus, a man he was very much come to love, and he worked in Haven, in a job he felt halfway respected in. He had made some friends, Johnny and Detective Loki among others, had people he could talk to if he was ever willing to talk. Rhys was still quick to argue and quicker to judge, but he had softened some. History (More Canon): After agreeing to help find the alien, Rhys and Nyx leave the palace. Nyx decides that they need to go to Chenja to follow leads there, a decision that grows firmer after Nyx discovers the murdered body of her sister. Rhys knows he's a dead man if he returns to Chenja and is discovered by his family or the authorities there, but he agrees to go when Nyx admits she needs him, that she needs a magician at her side for this mission. The plan is to smuggle them both back in body bags with the dead Chenjans whose bodies are being repatriated after being killed in the war. He climbs into a body bag, and the next thing he knows he's back in Duplicity. Personality: Positive Trait: Sophisticated Rhys has a finely-acquired sense of beauty. In addition to thinking the Kitab is the most beautifully written work there is, Rhys also makes the time to read poetry. Nyx's claim that beautiful things make people weak is met with a scoff. Beauty, in Rhys' mind, helps them transcend their weakness, it doesn't make them more vulnerable to it. Rhys is well-educated and well-read, and doesn't change that after spending seven years working for a woman who got kicked out of the state school for not being able to learn to read at all, and he doesn't change it even though in the world of bounty hunters that he lives in, being able to shoot a pistol is worth far more. He hasn't so much changed his core self in order to survive in Nasheen as he has added layers, outer ones that work to protect him from living in a hostile country. In Duplicity some of that sophistication had the chance to flourish. Dorian and others encouraged him to be poetic when he wished, and tried to encourage Rhys to see beauty where he could accept it. Negative Trait: Self-Righteous "I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it," Rhys said. "Perhaps Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness." In this quote, Rhys is responding to a woman who boxes for a living, who makes a habit out of directing violence for its own sake. While Rhys is technically protected by his own role, he still takes a risk to bait the woman this way, and he does it as much to show that he can as because of his belief that he is, in fact, better than a Nasheenian. He takes the same attitude to the Queen of Nasheen, questioning her when in an audience for a completely different matter, on how she can justify barring men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. Rhys has a limited sense of self-preservation, past that he's spirited, feisty, and he hasn't let what he's been through grind that down. This remained the case in Duplicity, where he frequently told other people that they were wrong to think or act as they did and was uninterested in hearing why they thought their approach was valid. He didn't want to talk about sex, going so far as to tell people not to bring it up when making network posts. Sometimes in the city his self-righteousness became hypocrisy, but Rhys judged himself more harshly than he judged anyone else. Negative Trait: Stubborn If someone is open and emotionally vulnerable with Rhys, he tends to react fairly well, even if he doesn't feel comfortable doing the same himself. But if he faces resistance or argument it tends to get his back up, and Rhys is not someone who backs down easily. He's ready with a verbal quip and he becomes more convinced to continue an argument the longer it goes. This happens multiple times in canon - when Nasheenian women jeer at him or Nyx tells him to do something he disagrees with - and it was also a very prevalent part of his life in Duplicity. Rhys stubbornly refused to cooperate with the city, going to SLUT treatment multiple times after missing quota even when he's afraid of the consequences. He also argues with many people, both random people on the network and the people he deeply cares about. His relationship with Dorian was riddled with arguments and fights, with Rhys refusing to back down even when he knew that he'd never be able to convince Dorian to be monogamous, among their other disagreements. Negative Trait: Dependent: While Rhys vocally values his independence, what Rhys most wants in his life is someone to protect him. He has a prickly pride that tells him he should be able to go at it alone, but when women in Nasheen threaten him and Nyx is there to tell them that he is 'hers' the possessiveness both grates and is a relief. If someone else is willing to fight to protect Rhys, then it matters less that he won't fight himself. This isn't wholly seen as a weakness in Duplicity, where he's categorized as submissive and expected to get protection from his Dominant, but it is certainly something that Rhys fights with himself over, something where he thinks he should submit only to God. His desire to be dependent is one of the main things that makes Rhys lash out at those he likes, when he realizes he's giving in too much to it. It also means that he struggles when those he's cared about have left the city, been unable to recover without turning to someone else to help him. Powers and Abilities: On Umayma, some people (called magicians) are born with the ability to alter pheromones and effectively reprogram insects at the cellular level. Rhys describes it as "examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do". A good magician can use insects for anything from lighting a room, sensing magnetic fields, communicating across large distances, undoing locks, using them as security cameras, and reattaching or regrowing entire limbs (as well as more minor injuries). Rhys is a bit of a shitty magician, and the bugs in Duplicity are not engineered for his purposes. Therefore, while he can control bugs and command them, he can use them for light (with fireflies), seeing over some distances, undoing locks (if the bug can fit inside the lock) and sensing magnetic fields. He can diagnose illness without the bugs, by touching people, and with the stuff of bugs he can perform small acts of healing. Outside of his magic, he has a very good eye for detail, is a good shot with a pistol, and has a fair amount of medical knowledge and training. In game he acquired a variation on a Jorogumo form, which is a sort of a spider centau - maintaining human genitalia. For powers when in this form: the ability to generate webs, and Rhys already can do pheromone manipulation with regards to insects, perhaps when transformed he has the ability to do some mild pheromone manipulation (making himself seem more attractive or less of a threat - nothing that couldn't be overcome with willpower) that would apply to humans. Inventory: Kitab (holy book), prayer rug, and pistol. Samples: Thinking: [ He’s always been a coward, run from his fears instead of facing them. But he can’t exist in this city for a moment longer than he has to not knowing if Dorian is still around or not. So the instant he gets a hold of his device he finds the contact information for Dorian. He knows it doesn’t mean anything, because it could be some different Dorian who doesn’t remember him. He practices the words out loud until his voice is steady, and then he hits the call. ] Peace be with you, Dorian. [ And then he waits, forcing himself to breathe and praying to a God he knows has never cared about him, to let Dorian remember him. ] Communicating: TDM link |