phantasmods | APPLICATIONS

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

IC Information

Character name: Saturn
Character canon: Heaven Will Be Mine
Canon point: Post-Ares missions; Memorial Foundation route
Physical Description: Tan skin, short, dark hair in bangs over one eye, chunky but ripped and busty; mind-machine interface plugs on her neck and down her spine (implied but not shown canonically); ratty torn Celestial Mechanics t-shirt and bomber jacket, track pants and sneakers, boyshorts and sportsbra. Has a bag with one strap over the top of her chest (this is probably actually strapping her to her chair but the boob bracket is too iconic not to include in her Look).
About the Character:

We open up futures, while closing our pasts. - Celestial Mechanic's motto.

Insufferable horror creature. Forward all complaints to Mercury. - canonical chatroom description

It’s January 30, 1981.
They don’t name it because naming it gives it power, but not naming it gives it more.
It must be in every corner. Behind every door. Far, far away, in the spaces between stars. It is defined and categorized in every human culture and it is deliberately omitted from explicit naming conventions by Memorial Foundation in favor of a euphemism less captivating to the imagination such as "Existential Threat" rather than a specific word that would stimulate the imagination. But a trick like this will not work: in the euphemism is a hollow void that can hold all fears and all possibilities.
Through gravity, humans decide what is real and what is not. But "what is not" does not stop existing. And it, like humans, can decide. It’s the kiss of inverse, everything that humans can imagine, but can’t become. The shortcut to attaining it is to forsake everything that humans already are.
If a bunch of idiots get tricked into going there, it would make a very convenient enemy for Earth. That’s their real fear.
Before that happens, I will tell you a little secret.
Ready?
—Saturn, Celestial Mechanics Test Pilot, right before the final mission

Saturn is one of the three viewpoint mecha pilots in the often esoteric but always turboqueer visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine; she's described in interviews with the writer Aevee Bee as part manufactured doll like Rei Ayanami and part insufferable hotshot like the other famous mecha-piloting Rei, the one from Universal Century Gundam.

Born in a test-tube to pilot a mech, she's rude, crude, insubordinate and desperately horny to the point that I routinely call her "gay space baby Jailbreak." Saturn was rejected as the pilot of the "existentially hideous" selfship String of Pearls for being too willful and impossible for her creator, creepy old white man Iapetus, to control - and she immediately proved him right by, well, just watch the first 22 seconds of her route.

Saturn is a fucking useless ADHD lesbian disaster whose first act on having ex-pilot Mercury reassigned as her ~~Anchor~~ handler was to ask about "any cute pilot girls who can shoot me out of the sky" and who knows all of her rivals by name and romantic history from the Lagrange-Point 5 Academy days during a Cold War fought against things that go bump in the night. While she might have been taking the piss just a little bit regarding her motives for stealing the String in case Iapetus was listening, it is true that she's more interested in rivals Pluto and Luna-Terra as possible love interests rather than as military and political rivals.

(Though it must be noted that it's unheard of for mecha fights in Heaven Will Be Mine to be lethal - by design; shipselves were, in universe, a way to make war ceremonial, even conversational, without doing physical violence to the pilots. It's a horrifying plot point when the fascist Memorial Foundation uses unmanned p-beam drones to kill pilots in the back end of the story. )

Not to say that her place in the faction calculus was a mistake. She's with the transhumanist conspiracy Celestial Mechanics, named for the esoteric grand unified theory that in her 'verse marries Physics and Culture; the one it's founders created to explain the difference between Earth and a hypothetical Terra not shaped by the consensus reality of the humans who live there, between the red dead rock of Ares and the dream pilot Pluto fights for of a terraformed inhabited planet Mars.

Like all of CM, Saturn seeks to become more, and less, than human - but unlike their leadership, Saturn and Mercury fight to humanize the alien, to make the unthinkable human, to shift an Overton Window to a kinder place - rather than to simply use the Other as a weapon against the Culturally imperialist Memorial Foundation that seeks to return all spacenoids to the crushing Gravity and Culture of Earth. At the end of a Celestial Mechanics route, she succeeds beyond her wildest dreams.

This is why she tends to conflate gravity with magic in the TDMs, by the by: HWBM physics are fucking weird, idealistic in a philosophical sense. Willpower and metaphor shape reality just as powerfully as cold hard equations, and where Gravity and Culture can bend you into a shape that doesn't fit you the microgee of space, while dangerous, can let you become who you really are.

(If this sounds like the experience of coming out of the closet or transitioning to you, congratulations: you are able to understand basic literary symbolism. They even make it explicit, with Pluto assuring LT that "(she'll) cut your deadname out of the story like I did to mine!" on the LT/Cradle's Graces path. Saturn may be the only ciswoman viewpoint character of the three. Maybe.)

I headcanon her as 25-26 years old and scarred by being a teenage Cold Warrior; her vitriolic and teasing friendship with Mercury reminds me of Discord channels I have known, and it seems to match the timeline and her attitude.

Character abilities:
Saturn is a hot-shit pilot, which is probably irrelevant outside of combat reflexes - and a serious hacker, which likely will come up. She hijacked a military-grade mecha control system without blowing herself, the String of Pearls, or the vast majority of her carrier group up and at the end of her route hacks the single best anime reference in the entire VN (and that shit's hella weeby) into attacking the man who created them. Her custom virii can make short work of most passwords and she WILL try to hack the station's computers just to see what she finds and who notices.

She is also well versed in the particular bulldada "celestial mechanics" her faction was named for, which has a lot of hilariously irrelevant to her new universe magical thinking informing a solid grounding in astrophysics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology and math. This is like the equivalent of a double major in astrophysics and sociology.

Saturn was born and raised in a lab in Cronus orbit (that is to say, orbiting what our universe would call the planet Saturn.) She is not used to constant 1G acceleration and will need to acclimate; she may have shitty hollow bones and be susceptible to breaking them because of it. Her neck will certainly make their grievances loudly known in the morning.

She has limited ability to sense psychic meddling and to project her thoughts such that others might mistake them for their own, represented in the VN by her taking over for the usual narrator (who might actually be Pluto, who is the acknowledged canonical master of this meta bullshit). She isn't the greatest at this and her technique is cruder and more noticeable than Pluto's attempts.

She has no other supernatural powers but ingame will have affinity for magic related to gravity, desire, communication, and cultural understanding.

She is also really good at making bad pickup lines sound endearing.

Inventory:
The clothes on her back,
Maybe an emergency kit (with some space MRE's, flashlight, a first aid kit, sidearm, knife hull patch, and emergency transponder).
That's it!

Samples:
Current TDM
TDM 006
With a birdbrain

Edited 2018-10-27 10:18 (UTC)

Due to a lack of detail in your application, we'd like to see additional information on the following:

-> We'd like to see more detail about Saturn's personality, her motivations and why she has the views that she has.

Please respond to this comment within 72 hours with these changes!

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