Libertas - Dr. Adrian Nephram

DEMOGRAPHICS
Name: His human name is Dr. Adrian Nephram

Age:  The doctor himself is roughly 42 Terran years old; his host body is 26.

Gender: The host body is male, so Adrian identifies as male for simplicity's sake. "He" doesn't actually know "his" gender yet, as larva of his kind are notoriously hard to differentiate. He would be more confused than upset if someone called him by female pronouns.

Species: Adrian is a Mo'an, the parasitic larval form of a species called the Naj'ma. He is living within a human host body. More on that below.

Primary Language: Adrian typically speaks the language of Terran Sector Two (the former USA), which is English. His native tongue is Rim'a're, and he speaks a few other Terran languages (Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin) though not fluently.


APPEARANCE

Height: The host is 5'9"; Adrian himself is around three feet long when uncoiled.

Weight: The host probably weighs somewhere between 150-160 lbs; the parasite weighs around 5 lbs, give or take.

Build: Fit, but not exactly athletic. Healthy and average, I suppose. That goes for both host and parasite, though the latter is more on the squishy side.

Skin: Adrian's host is Caucasian; Adrian is pale grey, his slowly dissolving exoskeleton almost translucent, and he's very slimy.

Hair: The host has black hair which is mostly left to its own devices, only tucked behind an ear when it gets in the way. Thankfully it doesn't do anything too crazy, since it's mostly straight, but it has grown just past the shoulders. The Mo'an himself doesn't have any hair, and in fact that would look ridiculous. This is probably why he enjoys having so much of it on his host.

Eyes: All Mo'an have four sightless, filmy, yellow eyes, and this coloration extends, due to chemical changes, to the eyes of the host. They used to be hazel, now they're a strange combination of hazel and amber.

Other traits: This is probably a good place to describe Adrian's actual form in detail. Mo'an look mostly like unsettlingly large, bleached shrimps, but with longer, more dextrous legs in the front and an almost serpentine tail in the back. The first pair of limbs are hooked, needle-like claws (kinda like a praying mantis sort of?) used for poisoning potential hosts, and the second pair are pincers for burrowing into flesh. The rest are shorter, and used for locomotion (they are adapted to water). The main body is insectoid in shape, and covered with a hard exoskeleton that disintegrates over time spent inside a host. The insides are made up of a startling amount of nerve tissue with small organs tucked inside. Kind of like an egg roll. Extending from the rear of this is the spine-like tail, which makes up 2/3 of the creature's length. Mo'an that are implanted in host bodies grow tendrils of extremely sensitive nerve tissue which connect them to the host's nervous system and essentially turn them into puppet masters. Other appendages extending from the parasite's abdomen connect it to the host's digestive, respiratory, and circulatory systems. Basically, the Mo'an has turned his host into a giant life support system/flesh-robot exoskeleton. Eventually he will begin metamorphosis and emerge as a juvenile Naj'ma from his host. It will be nasty. For the time being, he's sitting in the host's chest cavity, in front of the spine but behind the heart and lungs. As for any unusual features on the host body itself, there is only one: a vertical scar down the length of the breastbone.

Clothes: Technically Adrian is wearing a stupid man suit human body, but we won't get into that. He does dress his host, as he wouldn't really blend in otherwise (much less be allowed to pursue a doctorate). He tries to keep it semi-formal, since he is in fact a doctor, but he simply can't resist the pull of jeans. Pockets are just so darn convenient. On that note, he's usually wearing a lab coat. Even more pockets! My goodness does he love pockets. Plenty of room to keep things in that you just find lying around.  And labcoats are also convenient for looking important, which he likes to do so that people don't question him when he acts strangely. Important people are always eccentric, right? So basically: jeans, button-up shirt (it's light blue), tie (gray), lab coat, sneakers (also gray).



PHYSICALITY

Demeanor: Due to the long period of time he has spent perfecting it, Adrian's movement is not the jerky, unwieldy sort that one might expect from a parasite controlling a being 20 times its size. His motions are, in fact, rather fluid, almost too fluid. Sometimes he does forget a little that his host is not serpentine like he is, but on the plus side, he's quite flexible. He can control things as complex as the host's facial expressions, though they don't change as quickly as they probably should. His motor skills are advanced enough that he can do things like write and draw, though his penmanship is terrible (but that's okay because he's a doctor). As for posture and gait, Adrian is almost never guarded, and he walks with a slight kind of bounce to his step, like a child. His body posture is very open, and he smiles easily. He likes to talk with his hands, a throwback to the fact that his native language is made up partially of hand signs. So sometimes his gesticulations will make sense (flapping a hand for a bird), other times they won't (making a wavy motion for the color yellow).

Speech patterns: Adrian loves to talk, so he does it quite frequently, even to himself. He can go on and on about a particular subject or get distracted and go off on tangents before eventually getting back to the original point... or forgetting what it was. He usually sounds fairly excited and happy to be there, and his more somber, chastised, or frightened tones have the raw emotional quality of a child's. His vocabulary is theoretically massive, but he often can't find the word he's looking for and will either make something up ("it's that big drivey-trash-picky-uppy thing") or use a word from another of the languages he knows. He tries not to code switch mid-sentence, so it only happens very rarely. His voice is a mid-range for a human male. (Mo'an don't actually have a vocal apparatus, so the most his real body could do is make clicking sounds.)


PERSONALITY

Overview: Adrian is what some might call "eccentric", which is just a polite way of saying "he's nuts, seriously" about someone who isn't quite bad enough to be committed. Of course, this "eccentricity" is mostly just a misunderstanding; what humans see as a grown man acting like an immature child is really an infant acting like a surprisingly mature child. Adrian is, after all, just a larva. Much of the time he is excitable, friendly, and upbeat. He loves to learn things, especially languages and customs, and easily attaches to people who show him positive attention or, especially, to those who teach him something. Speaking of learning, he does it very quickly, and this is perhaps not surprising considering how much of his body is made up of nerve and brain tissue. Unfortunately, despite his ability to pick up facts quickly, he still hasn't gotten the hang of... people. He isn't that great at reading moods or taking hints, and he can be very naive. He also doesn't seem to grasp the concepts of personal space and private thoughts, and his bluntness can come off as rude, even if it's not intended to be so. He has little in the way of tact. He doesn't always understand morality; it's debatable whether or not he truly knows right from wrong. Killing people is the only thing he knows for sure is wrong, and that's only because it's been drilled into him by human society. Of course, that does create some cognitive dissonance for him, all things considered. Thankfully, his tendency to be good-natured and optimistic keeps him from treading in those slippery gray areas most of the time. Adrian hides and projects very little. He's a terrible liar, but most of the time he doesn't even try. He wears his emotions in plain sight, and is pretty easy to read. He seems to have no sense of shame unless chastised. He is constantly consumed by an insatiable curiosity.

Strengths: Adrian is one smart parasitic cookie. He might be naive, but he's not an idiot. He can come up with clever, creative solutions to problems, and his mental processing speed is incredible. He learns and adapts quickly. He's also so childish that he's very hard to hate, so there's that. His intimate knowledge of animal, human, and alien physiology might come in handy, as it can be applied to new species he encounters. He is inspired to work better when there's a (mental) challenge or something to be learned from the situation.  Physically, he has few advantages. Well, other than his ability to jack into other beings' nervous systems and survive grievous wounds to his host body. It's relatively easy to injure him, but, say, decapitating the host body won't actually kill Adrian right off the bat. In fact, since he's located below the neck-line, he could still probably control the body for a short time. Gross.

Weaknesses: Adrian's trusting nature is probably his biggest mental fault. Unless he already knows better or it's super obvious, he tends to fall for things pretty easily and goes along with things unless they're very blatantly wrong. And of course, his definition of "wrong" is a little different. He's also easily distracted. He tends to assume that he can reason with someone, and it takes him a bit to realize when they're serious about hurting him or someone else. When he is injured, he tends to suffer a very childlike breakdown. Not a tantrum, but perhaps a lip-wibbly sobfest. This probably has its roots as a defense mechanism, but he really does have a low pain tolerance. He also tends to take risks in the name of "science" and doesn't always consider the consequences of his actions. There's also his relative inability to judge people; his default assumption is that people are good. His greatest physical weakness is his own nature; though it might be difficult to get at his main body, the nerve tendrils that connect him to his host (they're basically everywhere under the skin) are hypersensitive and damaging them can cause him to lose control of the host's functions and ruin the whole operation. Electricity is not his friend. He also needs the host to survive, so disabling it will, if he can't find a new one, eventually kill him. If the host can't eat or breathe, neither can he. If somehow removed from the host, he is nothing more than blind, half-deaf, and still overly sensitive to pain. Unless he can poison or otherwise control the person holding him, there's not much he can do.

Primary Desire: There are two things that Adrian wants most of all: to learn everything he can, and to validate his own right to exist. I guess he can't really "accomplish" the first one, as it's an ongoing process, but the second one is more important anyway. He wants to somehow prove that, despite his inherent nature as something that must kill to survive, he is still worthy of life. This might just be something he wants to prove to himself, but he wants to show other people that he's not a bad person, too.

Quirks: Goodness, where to start? He has an odd tendency to re-name/nickname people. He also has the habit of asking uncomfortable questions, such as the nature of one's reproductive processes or how smoked cabbage makes one feel. He doesn't understand when people get offended by some of his questions, because he's really just trying to be empirical. He also talks about "touchy" subjects without shame. His organizational skills are nonexistent. He sometimes talks to non-sentient beings as if they can understand everything he says. He is constantly picking things up and putting them in his pockets. Shiny rocks, feathers, bones, dead bugs, anything and everything he thinks is "interesting". When he thinks hard about something, he sticks his right forefinger in his mouth and chews on the nail. When he meets someone/something that he's never encountered before (a new species), he gets incredibly excited and more than slightly resembles a kid in a candy store. Speaking of kids, he likes them better than adults, and tends to gravitate towards them more.


HISTORY

Homeworld: Adrian was born on the swampy planet of Rim'ar, but he has resided on Earth (more commonly known in his time as Terra) for about the past twenty years. Obviously, he is from a future time in which long-distance space travel is not only possible, but very commonplace, and in which many alien species have made contact with and now regularly interact with humans. In this time period, Terra has now come under the rule of a single united government (the New Democratic Republic of Terra, or NDRT). There's also a very old, now-independent colony on Mars (old enough that Martian-human physiology is slightly different from Terran), though Luna is currently off-limits due to an unexplained "accident". He might mention these things, so I figured you should know about them.

Family/Friends: Adrian doesn't have "friends" so much as he has colleagues. Most of the other researchers in his lab find him somewhat uncomfortable to be around for one reason or another. There is, of course, some xenophobia involved. The one human he would consider a friend is a woman by the name of Milliarmis Ranel. She doesn't work in the same field as he does (she works in biotechnology; he works in xenobiology), but they work for the same university. As for family, the Naj'ma are notoriously bad parents, and Adrian has never met another one of his kind.

History: Adrian was born on Rim'ar, a planet rather distant from Earth with a jungle-like climate on most of its surface. Its most advanced species is the Rim'a're, a race of mammal-reptile-like creatures roughly the shape of quadrapedal velociraptors and roughly eight feet tall. These beings were, according to their mythological history, once dominated and enslaved as meat puppets for a race called the Naj'ma, which roughly translates to "bad god" (the root word "Naj" meaning deity/divine, the suffix "ma" denoting serious negative feelings; you might find the suffix "ma" attached to words for pestilence and disasters). After a period of several thousand years, the Rim'a're decided they'd had enough and rose up against their oppressors. There was a fierce genocidal war, and at this point in time the Naj'ma are rare enough that humans thought them to be a mythological creature when they first encountered the Rim'ar stories. No one has a very specific description of what these beings look like in their mature form, but they seem to be vaguely terrifying and possibly capable of flight.

Adrian himself was born like all of his kind are, as an egg implanted in a hapless Rim'a're that wound up in the wrong part of the forest. Once he hatched, he set about doing what every young aspiring alien parasite does: making his host brain dead so he could take it over. From then on he lived on the fringes of actual Rim'ar society, as getting too close was rather dangerous. For one, his host had the trademark yellow eyes of an infectee. This actually didn't matter because the Rim'ar are colorblind, but still, he had a tendency to act a little out of the norm and didn't want to draw suspicion. When he was about twenty or so, childhood still for a larval Mo'an, he met a Terran envoy on their way to trade and barter with the Rim'ar. This was a stroke of fortune for him, as he had recently been discovered by a local village, and the usual Rim'ar policy for Mo'an infestation is death. Luckily the Terran envoy intervened and brought him back to Earth as a curiosity. They soon realized that they had more on their hands than an animal when he began picking up English just by hearing them talk.

Scientists on Terra spent years studying him, and he spent the same amount of time studying them. They eventually concluded that they had a sentient creature on their hands, and NDRT law prohibits the confinement and involuntary study of such beings. He wasn't allowed to live alone, seeing as how little was known about his kind and how they would fare, so the university that studied him provided for his care. In a somewhat strange turn of events, his first order of business as a Terran citizen was to go to school; he earned a doctorate in xenobiology in only a few years. It was during this time that his Rim'a're host body wore out; his current host is an organ donor who became brain dead in an accident. These days, able to blend in far easier, Adrian spends his time teaching at the university and "doing science", as he puts it.


SKILLS

Primary Skills: "Being smart" is probably his primary skill. He can solve puzzles in a jiffy, and he has intimate anatomical knowledge of half the species in the galaxy (his field is xenobiology, after all). He can speak several languages, though he is only truly fluent in two: English and Rim'ar. He can memorize things very easily. He knows his way around medical equipment, and despite not being a doctor doctor, he could probably do something about most types of injuries if given the proper supplies.

Combat: He can't fight, really. He can run away, I guess, and hide behind things, but that's provided he realizes he's in danger fast enough. If he had absolutely no choice, he'd probably improvise a weapon and just try to gain distance by whacking whatever/whoever was after him. He'll try to reason with people before he'll take action. I guess he could try to override someone's nervous system, but that requires that they stand still and in skin-skin contact with him for a span of thirty seconds, so...

Weapons/Gear: The pockets of his clothing are always full of little things, and this case is no different. He has on his person: a phone (it's basically a lighter-sized device with a holographic display that projects above it), pens and pencils, various feathers, small animal teeth, bones, and claws, some leaves, a few rocks, spare change, a couple small specimen jars, and his keycards.

Unusual Abilities: Adrian doesn't have any supernatural abilities, but he has recently discovered that he can do some things that humans certainly cannot. For instance, beyond just controlling his host body, Adrian can extend his nerve tendrils beyond his current form (through the skin) and into the bodies of others. This allows him to, if he can establish a bond, control the functions of another living being. If he does it to a brain, he can even access that being's memories. So far he's only managed to do this to lab animals, but it's theoretically possible to do it to larger beings as well. Of course, this requires that said being stays still long enough (about half a minute). He believes that this trait was once used by his kind for communication and to more quickly learn about their environment to facilitate blending in. Sadly, it has something of a detrimental effect on those he uses it on, resulting in anything from muscle twitches to permanent brain damage. Though he can extend the tendrils through open air, it would be vastly preferable to make skin-skin contact, as the nerve fibers are very sensitive and delicate.


EOS SPECIFIC

What was the low point in their life before being pulled to Eos?: After a misunderstanding with his only human friend, Adrian was once more forced to confront the fact that people still think of him as "other".

Does your character miss their homeworld?: Certainly. He'd love to learn all he can about this new world (especially all the beings in it), but it's actually pretty scary so he'd prefer to leave it.

Team: Update: Apparently his team now consists of the Warped, Drenalis (the Laughing Man).

Are you okay with other tournament entrants KILLING your character in their tournament writing?: If you have to in order to tell a good story, sure, though I can't imagine what Adrian could do to deserve it. Just make sure it matters, and that he isn't just dying because you can.

Are you okay with other tournament entrants using your character in their tournament writing?:  Sure! Go nuts.


Other: Someday Adrian will emerge from his host body in a gory, terrible mess, but he hasn't yet reached that point in his life cycle (that usually occurs after about 50 years), so it won't be happening during this period. Basically: don't worry about it.


OVERVIEW

1. Adrian is literally a child in an adult body

2. He is eternally curious about the world around him

3. He is naive, but smart