Jedao (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deuceoftears) wrote2022-03-27 03:56 am
deuceoftears) wrote2022-03-27 03:56 am
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User Name/Nick: Ilse/Isabelle
User DW: If applicable.
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: na
Character Name: Jedao Two
Series: Machineries of Empire
Age: Chronologically, he’s 2 years old, but he is the imperfect soulclone of a ~400 year old ghost of a man who died at 45. Although infused with an inconsistent scatter of Jedao prime’s memories, he instinctively assumed himself to be 17 when he awoke in Revenant gun, and his maturity through the book reflects this fairly well. It’s been a few years since then, since I’m taking him from after the Gamer’s End short story dated nebulously later, so he’s mentally 19.
From When?: Post-series, and post-Gamer’s End, but pre-Glass Cannon. I’d also like him to retain hazy, vague, dreamlike memories of coming to the barge during a past face replacement event - for him, it will have been a few months since then.
Warden Justification: Hilariously, Jedao is literally a special Ethics Instructor at Shuos Academy Prime. More importantly, he has both a truly profound capacity for empathy and insight, and fierce moral convictions. “Torture is bad” may seem like a low bar, and “the ends don’t justify the means” is one of his explicit canon lessons in a very “do as I say, not as I do” kind of way, but the fact remains that Jedao cares desperately about making his world better. He is less ground down and cynical than original Jedao, jumping straight from teenage “maybe society has problems” to “holy shit this is so many war crimes” without the slow boiling-frog middle of Jedao Prime’s military career. He’s not that much less traumatized, but he’s a lot less warped by and calcified in his reactions to his trauma. He’s capable of drawing a line in the sand that Jedao prime, when he first arrived at the barge, was not. Or as Kujen describes him - “Idealistic as ever.”
He hasn’t always been on the right side of that line, but the times he wavered, from uncertainty or desperation or due to being horribly manipulated, comprise his greatest regrets. Jedao is someone who understands making terrible, irrevocable decisions and having to live with them, as well as being in terrible situations at the mercy of people very much without his best interests at heart.
Jedao as a warden will be able to understand inmates from a wide variety of situations, and empathize with making plenty of terrible choices, but he also will not accept rationalizations or self-serving excuses. He’s capable of being a harsh, incisive moral wake-up call for someone who needs that. He has an extremely keen sense of duty to people he considers his responsibility. He’s also a brilliant strategist with great instincts for dealing with both crises of all stripes, some experience with mind games that will help him duel with manipulative inmates, and physically is more or less indestructible. Whatever an inmate throws at him, Jedao can probably handle it. Possibly not very gracefully, but he will handle it.
Item: The deck of playing cards Kel Talaw gave him. The art will change for a death, while he’ll need to do space tarot readings to get location information.
Abilities/Powers:
Jedao Two is a voidmoth, which means he:
- has the ability to sense the mass of objects around him, to an unspecified distance that is definitely larger than the barge, and to a degree of precision high enough to mess with circuitry, although he can't always map easily between unseen masses and what the visual of them would be
- does not age and is immortal/indestructible. It’s been speculated that throwing him into a star MIGHT kill him. His regeneration can put him back together after point-blank shots disintegrating his head, but this level of reconstruction happens on the order of hours or days, not minutes. Smaller repairs happen quicker, and he's able to keep going for a while through numerous should-be-fatal wounds, but he will eventually lose consciousness. Additionally, if he hasn't been eating enough, using his regenerative ability will make him desperately, mindlessly hungry, and he can devolve into a mass of ravenous, writhing black tendrils. He won't regain his human mind or human shape until he's eaten.
- he has the ability to move things through space by "grabbing onto the spacetime weave" although this hurts and is difficult for him to do. He can commit acts of minor telekinesis which only hurt a bit, or pull himself to "fly" rapidly, which makes it feel like all his bones are on fire, especially if he's pulling someone else along with him.
- he can talk mind-to-mind to other voidmoths through spacetime/gravity waves/quantum harmonics or something. This isn't really applicable to anything since there aren't any other voidmoths on board, but if another eldritch-y flavored character wants to be able to chat with him like this, I'm down. In addition, when I played him in the replacement event years ago, the A-team approved him being able to get vague feelings from the barge itself, just like Iris's bus does. I'd love if this detail could be kept, but I get if it's weird for a now-mod character to have that kind of privileged information; if you don't want him to have it, Iddy, I fully trust your judgement.
Additionally,
- like Jedao One, he is a tactical genius. Unlike Jedao One, he does not have dyscalculia. He's not quite a mathematical genius on the level of Kujen or Cheris, but he's quite good.
- although he doesn’t remember his training, he has a lot of muscle memory and instincts from Jedao One that make him extremely good at various kinds of violence (brawling, sniping, dueling, etc), and sometimes he gets instincts about trade-crafty things
- he's also taken numerous Shuos Academy courses in his 2 years of imprisonment. he can hack, and stuff.
- he has an 'augment' in his arm - basically a computer implant. the augment can connect to other technology as well as save files and run calculations for him, but it has limited space and no privileged access or overrides for other tech
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies: Failure modes first: that fierce moral idealism means that Jedao also has the potential to be highly judgmental, and he’s not quite as skilled at or inclined to hiding it as his predecessor. With a truly sadistic/self-satisfied/power-hungry inmate, there’s also a risk of Jedao simply refusing to engage; even if it’s possible for them to improve on some measures, he might decide the world is better off without them regardless. If they want to sulk and cause trouble until they disappear/die, that’s fine, he’s patient. He loved Kujen, due to some extremely twisted emotional abuse tactics and unique circumstances, and killed him anyway, so it’s theoretically possible for him to be emotionally attached to a similar personality and make a different choice, given the different stakes on the barge - but also possibly not.
His more likely failure mode is simply overdoing it: going too hard, too fast, and too unilaterally with moves that otherwise comprise a solid wardening strategy very much in line with the general barge environment: creating situations and pushing his inmate to make choices that matter (or seem to), the way he does for his student in Gamer’s End: setting up a scenario where she has to decide between sacrificing something of huge strategic value - allowing the Citadel of Eyes and all its secrets to fall into enemy hands - and a moral event horizon, protecting the information by crashing the station into the planet below and dooming its entire population.
He’s going to be less about long insightful talks and more about weird challenges - try to write a file for the person you hate most in the world, give three people anonymous gifts that they like, etc. Actions that either help him understand how they think, or push them to consider others in small, concrete, actionable ways rather than debating philosophy. He’s creative and lonely and loves games, and is also a nerd who always does his homework, and he’ll take the time to figure out what kinds of incentives are important to his particular inmate.
Deal:jailbreak him like an iphone Jedao wants to have control over his own body/physiology/powers rather than being locked into the shape & limits Kujen made him with, and for using his powers not to hurt so damn much.
History: Jedao wakes up in a strange, luxurious room wondering if it’s a prank. He promptly meets Hexarch Nirai Kujen, who explains that he’s needed for his tactical brilliance as a general. Jedao, a 17-year-old cadet, laughs in his face. Slowly, he comes to realize it’s not a joke. He’s extremely shaken when he finds out that he grew up to be an infamous mass murderer. By comparison, learning that it’s been 400 years and everyone he knew must be dead bothers him a more reasonable amount. His crew are compelled to obey him but hate him, and his only ally besides Kujen is his mysterious aide.
His first battle is for control of a mothyard - strategically valuable for growing the euphemistic “biological components” of mothdrives, the engines of all Hexarchate warships. As the battle begins, he hears the voice of his own ship, the Revenant, speaking in his mind. Revenant begs him not to destroy the mothyard, mentioning that some of “the mothlings” are very young. Jedao responds that he’s willing to spare the yard if he can, but that he has to put the swarm - his own soldiers - first.
When the battle commences, Revenant also asks him not to use his trump weapon, the shear canon, because “It hurts me”. Jedao responds “I need a reason.”. When he fires the shear canon, the gravitational disturbances it produces cause crippling pain for Jedao himself as well. When he tries to negotiate the enemy’s surrender to control rather than destroy the mothyard, Kujen relieves him of command, and he’s escorted down to a cell while his second in command, Commander Kel Talaw, has orders to destroy the mothyard.
He threatens to give himself a concussion or worse, slamming his head into the cell’s commode, until the door opens; after quite a lot of scrambling around he tries to get back to the command center to persuade her otherwise, but is ultimately stopped by a security squad putting several bullets into his head and chest. He discovers that while this hurts a great deal, it doesn’t put him down; in the shock, he staggers into the command center and convinces Talaw to retreat and take prisoners rather than obliterate everyone. Then he passes out.
He wakes four days to discover that the Mothyard was still destroyed. Furthermore, his fear and self-disgust at discovering that he’s definitely something alien rather than a clone (“an inhuman walking corpse,” in Talaw’s words) is somewhat interrupted when he finds out that while they did take prisoners, those prisoners are being ceremonially tortured in “remembrances” as part of calendrical warfare, a system that shifts what kinds of “exotic effects” - basically scifi magic - will work in a region of space. Jedao goes to the remembrance hall and tries to fight with the save the prisoner being tortured, only for the torturer to kill him before Jedao can save him.
At this point Kujen takes him aside for a little heart to heart, explaining that he is the one who invented the remembrances, but claiming it to be for the best, to give the Hexarchate the power to create a world where no children go hungry. He uses a lot of manipulative/emotionally abusive tactics on Jedao, making it clear that Kujen is the only person who will never be shocked or disgusted by Jedao, either in terms of his checkered amoral past, or in terms of his alien physiognomy. This point is particularly driven home when Jedao, lonely and desperate and overwhelmed, tries to kiss Kujen, and the still-conscious body that Kujen’s ghost inhabits - Nirai Mahar - flatly refuses to be party to such a tryst, citing his revulsion at “that thing”. Jedao spends the next 11 days trying to come up with something - anything - he can do to change the situation without tipping Kujen off.
Then Kujen comes to him with his next assignment: to conquer Terebeg 4, which Kujen says is the capital of the Compact, the rival faction in the ongoing war that threatens to destroy Kujen’s High Calendar. In fact, this is both a lie (Terebeg is the capital of the Protectorate, the side which maintained the high calendar after the destabilizing events of the first two books), and accidentally true, because the leader of the Protectorate chose to join forces with the Compact and adopt their calendar upon learning that Kujen was still alive and seeking to reestablish power. More importantly, the anniversary of the first Jedao’s infamous massacre at Hellspin Fortress, in which he killed over a million people including most of his own troops, makes a perfect opportunity for a “calendrical spike” - a victory that creates a decisive change in the calendar for a huge swathe of area. In order to effect the spike, they will need to mimic that victory - to use the previous Jedao’s signature terrifying weapon, threshold winnowers, and to ultimately destroy most of his own swarm. With no clear other options, for the moment, Jedao pretends to agree.
While struggling to find some way to sabotage Kujen’s plans, Jedao kisses his aide, Dhanneth, using the intimacy as cover to communicate in Kel drum code, something like morse code, in its ability to use only long-short pulses or touches. Dhanneth reveals that he was the previous general of the swarm, that he fought Kujen and was reprogrammed for it. He also tells Jedao the truth: that Jedao himself is literally a voidmoth. Jedao sends Dhanneth away and tries to deal with this; Kujen summons him again. He shows Jedao a recording of Dhanneth looking at Jedao’s unfinished, half-eldritch body of writhing tendrils, and Dhanneth making very effort to stab him to death in his creche. Kujen emphasizes once again that no one will ever love Jedao - will ever even not hate him, except for Kujen himself - but that’s okay, because Kujen promises that once the High Calendar is repaired they can live together, forever, in unending luxury, as his voidmoth-style body - and another one being grown to house Kujen, plus spares - is functionally immortal.
Jedao manages to talk to the Revenant again, and eventually makes a bargain with the Revenant and some of the servitors - sentient robots that are a crucial part of the Hexarchate infrastructure - to escape together into the void, if Jedao can help free it from the harness that makes it serve humans, a harness that depends for its function on the high calendar. Jedao doesn’t expect to actually be allowed to go with them - he expects to die, or be imprisoned for the rest of his life after he surrenders, if he can betray Kujen somehow, but he does hope he can find a way to set the Revenant free.
Dhanneth, meanwhile, comes to Jedao and begs him to “let me be something to you.” Jedao argues that his loyalty is only a product of Kujen’s psych surgery, but he’s 17, terrified, horny, and desperately lonely. Dhanneth has also been chosen by Kujen to be laser-targeted at Jedao’s desires. When Dhanneth counters that “no one chooses who they love,” Jedao succumbs. They begin a sexual relationship that involves a lot of dangerous kink, with Jedao being restrained and hurt. In Glass Canon it’s revealed that Dhanneth once accidentally choked him to death. Jedao’s head is not in a good place here: it’s unclear where the line between genuinely erotically being into knifeplay ends and where suicidal self-loathing and body dysmorphia self-harm by proxy begins. Nevertheless, Jedao is simultaneously very dumb and smitten about it; he wishes he could give Dhanneth chocolates, or presents.
The upcoming assault on Terebeg is actually a trap designed to draw Kujen in close enough to be permanently killed by specific exotic effects created by maneuvers of large numbers of Kel (“formation effects”) which he has always assiduously avoided before, but in the chaos of battle, it’s an extremely difficult trap to spring. Before they arrive, Ajewen Cheris, a rogue former Kel who ingested a lot of the memories that young Jedao is missing, infiltrates their ship planning to assassinate Jedao, causing a small local calendrical spike, and use that to pin down and kill Kujen. Because Jedao is impossible to kill just by shooting at him, this plan goes awry. However, Cheris has to leave one of her allies behind: the small snake-shaped servitor Hemiola, who makes contact with Jedao when he fails to report its involvement to Kujen. Jedao risks trusting Hemiola in turn, and Hemiola explains to him some of the ways Kujen can be made to permanently die. Kujen worries about the infantry Kel performing the formations that can kill him, but Jedao figures out ways to use the ship Kel formations to focus effects inward. When the battle actually commences, Jedao lands his troops on the surface of the planet to perform the maneuvers, and lures Kujen into joining him in the command center, supposedly safe. Kujen is severed from the body of Nirai Mahar and tries to take over Jedao’s body, telling him it’s not too late for them to be together forever, to do anything Jedao wants. Jedao loves him: he’s brilliant and beautiful and terribly broken, and being mind-to-mind with him is harrowing and awe-inspiring. Kujen also taunts Jedao by revealing that Dhanneth always hated him, and that part of him was aware of it the whole time. Jedao doesn’t let up, though, and Kujen dies for good with the parting shot that “no one else will ever love you.”
Then, as Jedao prepares to surrender, his ship turns on him. Furious at the prospect of being captured or caged, the Revenant’s servitors proceed to kill its entire crew with lasers, while the Revenant releases a toxic disabling gas that cripples everyone aboard except Jedao himself (who doesn’t even really need to breathe) and Dhanneth, who had a severe reaction to the last release of the gas as a security measure during Cheris’s asssassingation, and still has anti-toxin meds in his system. The Revenant explains that with his original’s history of murdering his own command staff at Hellspin Fortress, everyone will blame Jedao for this, although they have agreed to spare his life as thanks for getting rid of Kujen. Jedao uses his body as a shield and desperately tries to save someone, anyone. He and Dhanneth carry Commander Talaw to the escape pods. Dhanneth reveals that he did, indeed, hate Jedao from the beginning - then he orders Jedao to live, shoves him into an escape pod after the unconscious Talaw, and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head, just after hitting the button to launch the pods.
Jedao manages to pull himself and Talaw and their capsules free of the thickest firefighting as various other ships fire on the Revenant as it flies off, piloted only by its own friendly servitors. Then Jedao passes all the way out.
After numerous interrogations, Shuos Mikodez, one of the leaders of the compact, and the only surviving Hexarch, makes Jedao an offer. He’ll be a prisoner in Mikodez’s headquarters - not least because he could start another war with the panics that would be caused by him running around loose, and partly because several other players want to figure out a way to kill him - but he’ll be treated fairly. In exchange, Mikodez says he wants Jedao to design an ethics curriculum for new Shuos cadets, because they have to figure out better ways of doing things if the fragile new Compact is actually to survive wars with its opportunistic neighbors and the depredations of time against the people holding it together. What Mikodez really wants is for Jedao to heal a little and eventually reveal what happened when the Revenant went rogue, but Jedao has assiduously kept the moths’ and servitors’ secrets. Finally, in his own perfectly nice instructor’s quarters, Jedao finds out that Hemiola also escaped the Revenant’s flight. It chooses to stay with him, secretly, as a friend.
The next two years are much less eventful. Gamer’s End shows Jedao using horrifying lethal tactics to convince a senior cadet that the moral event horizon scenario he presents them with is real, and recommends them for promotion to the front when they refuse to sacrifice a civilian world. He also privately learns to use his moth powers a little bit more, although very far from everything about them.
Sample Network Entry: Baby Warden has a poll
Sample RP: Forever meeting people who knew Jedao One
Special Notes: I would like for this Jedao to not only get an offer from the Admiral, but a visit from my own retired character Shuos Jedao/Jedao One, who very much intended to come see him after graduating once he learned of his existence. However, Jedao’s feelings about Jedao One are extremely complex, and he chooses to take the Admiral’s offer before making any decisions about whether to listen to Jedao One or not.
User DW: If applicable.
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: na
Character Name: Jedao Two
Series: Machineries of Empire
Age: Chronologically, he’s 2 years old, but he is the imperfect soulclone of a ~400 year old ghost of a man who died at 45. Although infused with an inconsistent scatter of Jedao prime’s memories, he instinctively assumed himself to be 17 when he awoke in Revenant gun, and his maturity through the book reflects this fairly well. It’s been a few years since then, since I’m taking him from after the Gamer’s End short story dated nebulously later, so he’s mentally 19.
From When?: Post-series, and post-Gamer’s End, but pre-Glass Cannon. I’d also like him to retain hazy, vague, dreamlike memories of coming to the barge during a past face replacement event - for him, it will have been a few months since then.
Warden Justification: Hilariously, Jedao is literally a special Ethics Instructor at Shuos Academy Prime. More importantly, he has both a truly profound capacity for empathy and insight, and fierce moral convictions. “Torture is bad” may seem like a low bar, and “the ends don’t justify the means” is one of his explicit canon lessons in a very “do as I say, not as I do” kind of way, but the fact remains that Jedao cares desperately about making his world better. He is less ground down and cynical than original Jedao, jumping straight from teenage “maybe society has problems” to “holy shit this is so many war crimes” without the slow boiling-frog middle of Jedao Prime’s military career. He’s not that much less traumatized, but he’s a lot less warped by and calcified in his reactions to his trauma. He’s capable of drawing a line in the sand that Jedao prime, when he first arrived at the barge, was not. Or as Kujen describes him - “Idealistic as ever.”
He hasn’t always been on the right side of that line, but the times he wavered, from uncertainty or desperation or due to being horribly manipulated, comprise his greatest regrets. Jedao is someone who understands making terrible, irrevocable decisions and having to live with them, as well as being in terrible situations at the mercy of people very much without his best interests at heart.
Jedao as a warden will be able to understand inmates from a wide variety of situations, and empathize with making plenty of terrible choices, but he also will not accept rationalizations or self-serving excuses. He’s capable of being a harsh, incisive moral wake-up call for someone who needs that. He has an extremely keen sense of duty to people he considers his responsibility. He’s also a brilliant strategist with great instincts for dealing with both crises of all stripes, some experience with mind games that will help him duel with manipulative inmates, and physically is more or less indestructible. Whatever an inmate throws at him, Jedao can probably handle it. Possibly not very gracefully, but he will handle it.
Item: The deck of playing cards Kel Talaw gave him. The art will change for a death, while he’ll need to do space tarot readings to get location information.
Abilities/Powers:
Jedao Two is a voidmoth, which means he:
- has the ability to sense the mass of objects around him, to an unspecified distance that is definitely larger than the barge, and to a degree of precision high enough to mess with circuitry, although he can't always map easily between unseen masses and what the visual of them would be
- does not age and is immortal/indestructible. It’s been speculated that throwing him into a star MIGHT kill him. His regeneration can put him back together after point-blank shots disintegrating his head, but this level of reconstruction happens on the order of hours or days, not minutes. Smaller repairs happen quicker, and he's able to keep going for a while through numerous should-be-fatal wounds, but he will eventually lose consciousness. Additionally, if he hasn't been eating enough, using his regenerative ability will make him desperately, mindlessly hungry, and he can devolve into a mass of ravenous, writhing black tendrils. He won't regain his human mind or human shape until he's eaten.
- he has the ability to move things through space by "grabbing onto the spacetime weave" although this hurts and is difficult for him to do. He can commit acts of minor telekinesis which only hurt a bit, or pull himself to "fly" rapidly, which makes it feel like all his bones are on fire, especially if he's pulling someone else along with him.
- he can talk mind-to-mind to other voidmoths through spacetime/gravity waves/quantum harmonics or something. This isn't really applicable to anything since there aren't any other voidmoths on board, but if another eldritch-y flavored character wants to be able to chat with him like this, I'm down. In addition, when I played him in the replacement event years ago, the A-team approved him being able to get vague feelings from the barge itself, just like Iris's bus does. I'd love if this detail could be kept, but I get if it's weird for a now-mod character to have that kind of privileged information; if you don't want him to have it, Iddy, I fully trust your judgement.
Additionally,
- like Jedao One, he is a tactical genius. Unlike Jedao One, he does not have dyscalculia. He's not quite a mathematical genius on the level of Kujen or Cheris, but he's quite good.
- although he doesn’t remember his training, he has a lot of muscle memory and instincts from Jedao One that make him extremely good at various kinds of violence (brawling, sniping, dueling, etc), and sometimes he gets instincts about trade-crafty things
- he's also taken numerous Shuos Academy courses in his 2 years of imprisonment. he can hack, and stuff.
- he has an 'augment' in his arm - basically a computer implant. the augment can connect to other technology as well as save files and run calculations for him, but it has limited space and no privileged access or overrides for other tech
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies: Failure modes first: that fierce moral idealism means that Jedao also has the potential to be highly judgmental, and he’s not quite as skilled at or inclined to hiding it as his predecessor. With a truly sadistic/self-satisfied/power-hungry inmate, there’s also a risk of Jedao simply refusing to engage; even if it’s possible for them to improve on some measures, he might decide the world is better off without them regardless. If they want to sulk and cause trouble until they disappear/die, that’s fine, he’s patient. He loved Kujen, due to some extremely twisted emotional abuse tactics and unique circumstances, and killed him anyway, so it’s theoretically possible for him to be emotionally attached to a similar personality and make a different choice, given the different stakes on the barge - but also possibly not.
His more likely failure mode is simply overdoing it: going too hard, too fast, and too unilaterally with moves that otherwise comprise a solid wardening strategy very much in line with the general barge environment: creating situations and pushing his inmate to make choices that matter (or seem to), the way he does for his student in Gamer’s End: setting up a scenario where she has to decide between sacrificing something of huge strategic value - allowing the Citadel of Eyes and all its secrets to fall into enemy hands - and a moral event horizon, protecting the information by crashing the station into the planet below and dooming its entire population.
He’s going to be less about long insightful talks and more about weird challenges - try to write a file for the person you hate most in the world, give three people anonymous gifts that they like, etc. Actions that either help him understand how they think, or push them to consider others in small, concrete, actionable ways rather than debating philosophy. He’s creative and lonely and loves games, and is also a nerd who always does his homework, and he’ll take the time to figure out what kinds of incentives are important to his particular inmate.
Deal:
History: Jedao wakes up in a strange, luxurious room wondering if it’s a prank. He promptly meets Hexarch Nirai Kujen, who explains that he’s needed for his tactical brilliance as a general. Jedao, a 17-year-old cadet, laughs in his face. Slowly, he comes to realize it’s not a joke. He’s extremely shaken when he finds out that he grew up to be an infamous mass murderer. By comparison, learning that it’s been 400 years and everyone he knew must be dead bothers him a more reasonable amount. His crew are compelled to obey him but hate him, and his only ally besides Kujen is his mysterious aide.
His first battle is for control of a mothyard - strategically valuable for growing the euphemistic “biological components” of mothdrives, the engines of all Hexarchate warships. As the battle begins, he hears the voice of his own ship, the Revenant, speaking in his mind. Revenant begs him not to destroy the mothyard, mentioning that some of “the mothlings” are very young. Jedao responds that he’s willing to spare the yard if he can, but that he has to put the swarm - his own soldiers - first.
When the battle commences, Revenant also asks him not to use his trump weapon, the shear canon, because “It hurts me”. Jedao responds “I need a reason.”. When he fires the shear canon, the gravitational disturbances it produces cause crippling pain for Jedao himself as well. When he tries to negotiate the enemy’s surrender to control rather than destroy the mothyard, Kujen relieves him of command, and he’s escorted down to a cell while his second in command, Commander Kel Talaw, has orders to destroy the mothyard.
He threatens to give himself a concussion or worse, slamming his head into the cell’s commode, until the door opens; after quite a lot of scrambling around he tries to get back to the command center to persuade her otherwise, but is ultimately stopped by a security squad putting several bullets into his head and chest. He discovers that while this hurts a great deal, it doesn’t put him down; in the shock, he staggers into the command center and convinces Talaw to retreat and take prisoners rather than obliterate everyone. Then he passes out.
He wakes four days to discover that the Mothyard was still destroyed. Furthermore, his fear and self-disgust at discovering that he’s definitely something alien rather than a clone (“an inhuman walking corpse,” in Talaw’s words) is somewhat interrupted when he finds out that while they did take prisoners, those prisoners are being ceremonially tortured in “remembrances” as part of calendrical warfare, a system that shifts what kinds of “exotic effects” - basically scifi magic - will work in a region of space. Jedao goes to the remembrance hall and tries to fight with the save the prisoner being tortured, only for the torturer to kill him before Jedao can save him.
At this point Kujen takes him aside for a little heart to heart, explaining that he is the one who invented the remembrances, but claiming it to be for the best, to give the Hexarchate the power to create a world where no children go hungry. He uses a lot of manipulative/emotionally abusive tactics on Jedao, making it clear that Kujen is the only person who will never be shocked or disgusted by Jedao, either in terms of his checkered amoral past, or in terms of his alien physiognomy. This point is particularly driven home when Jedao, lonely and desperate and overwhelmed, tries to kiss Kujen, and the still-conscious body that Kujen’s ghost inhabits - Nirai Mahar - flatly refuses to be party to such a tryst, citing his revulsion at “that thing”. Jedao spends the next 11 days trying to come up with something - anything - he can do to change the situation without tipping Kujen off.
Then Kujen comes to him with his next assignment: to conquer Terebeg 4, which Kujen says is the capital of the Compact, the rival faction in the ongoing war that threatens to destroy Kujen’s High Calendar. In fact, this is both a lie (Terebeg is the capital of the Protectorate, the side which maintained the high calendar after the destabilizing events of the first two books), and accidentally true, because the leader of the Protectorate chose to join forces with the Compact and adopt their calendar upon learning that Kujen was still alive and seeking to reestablish power. More importantly, the anniversary of the first Jedao’s infamous massacre at Hellspin Fortress, in which he killed over a million people including most of his own troops, makes a perfect opportunity for a “calendrical spike” - a victory that creates a decisive change in the calendar for a huge swathe of area. In order to effect the spike, they will need to mimic that victory - to use the previous Jedao’s signature terrifying weapon, threshold winnowers, and to ultimately destroy most of his own swarm. With no clear other options, for the moment, Jedao pretends to agree.
While struggling to find some way to sabotage Kujen’s plans, Jedao kisses his aide, Dhanneth, using the intimacy as cover to communicate in Kel drum code, something like morse code, in its ability to use only long-short pulses or touches. Dhanneth reveals that he was the previous general of the swarm, that he fought Kujen and was reprogrammed for it. He also tells Jedao the truth: that Jedao himself is literally a voidmoth. Jedao sends Dhanneth away and tries to deal with this; Kujen summons him again. He shows Jedao a recording of Dhanneth looking at Jedao’s unfinished, half-eldritch body of writhing tendrils, and Dhanneth making very effort to stab him to death in his creche. Kujen emphasizes once again that no one will ever love Jedao - will ever even not hate him, except for Kujen himself - but that’s okay, because Kujen promises that once the High Calendar is repaired they can live together, forever, in unending luxury, as his voidmoth-style body - and another one being grown to house Kujen, plus spares - is functionally immortal.
Jedao manages to talk to the Revenant again, and eventually makes a bargain with the Revenant and some of the servitors - sentient robots that are a crucial part of the Hexarchate infrastructure - to escape together into the void, if Jedao can help free it from the harness that makes it serve humans, a harness that depends for its function on the high calendar. Jedao doesn’t expect to actually be allowed to go with them - he expects to die, or be imprisoned for the rest of his life after he surrenders, if he can betray Kujen somehow, but he does hope he can find a way to set the Revenant free.
Dhanneth, meanwhile, comes to Jedao and begs him to “let me be something to you.” Jedao argues that his loyalty is only a product of Kujen’s psych surgery, but he’s 17, terrified, horny, and desperately lonely. Dhanneth has also been chosen by Kujen to be laser-targeted at Jedao’s desires. When Dhanneth counters that “no one chooses who they love,” Jedao succumbs. They begin a sexual relationship that involves a lot of dangerous kink, with Jedao being restrained and hurt. In Glass Canon it’s revealed that Dhanneth once accidentally choked him to death. Jedao’s head is not in a good place here: it’s unclear where the line between genuinely erotically being into knifeplay ends and where suicidal self-loathing and body dysmorphia self-harm by proxy begins. Nevertheless, Jedao is simultaneously very dumb and smitten about it; he wishes he could give Dhanneth chocolates, or presents.
The upcoming assault on Terebeg is actually a trap designed to draw Kujen in close enough to be permanently killed by specific exotic effects created by maneuvers of large numbers of Kel (“formation effects”) which he has always assiduously avoided before, but in the chaos of battle, it’s an extremely difficult trap to spring. Before they arrive, Ajewen Cheris, a rogue former Kel who ingested a lot of the memories that young Jedao is missing, infiltrates their ship planning to assassinate Jedao, causing a small local calendrical spike, and use that to pin down and kill Kujen. Because Jedao is impossible to kill just by shooting at him, this plan goes awry. However, Cheris has to leave one of her allies behind: the small snake-shaped servitor Hemiola, who makes contact with Jedao when he fails to report its involvement to Kujen. Jedao risks trusting Hemiola in turn, and Hemiola explains to him some of the ways Kujen can be made to permanently die. Kujen worries about the infantry Kel performing the formations that can kill him, but Jedao figures out ways to use the ship Kel formations to focus effects inward. When the battle actually commences, Jedao lands his troops on the surface of the planet to perform the maneuvers, and lures Kujen into joining him in the command center, supposedly safe. Kujen is severed from the body of Nirai Mahar and tries to take over Jedao’s body, telling him it’s not too late for them to be together forever, to do anything Jedao wants. Jedao loves him: he’s brilliant and beautiful and terribly broken, and being mind-to-mind with him is harrowing and awe-inspiring. Kujen also taunts Jedao by revealing that Dhanneth always hated him, and that part of him was aware of it the whole time. Jedao doesn’t let up, though, and Kujen dies for good with the parting shot that “no one else will ever love you.”
Then, as Jedao prepares to surrender, his ship turns on him. Furious at the prospect of being captured or caged, the Revenant’s servitors proceed to kill its entire crew with lasers, while the Revenant releases a toxic disabling gas that cripples everyone aboard except Jedao himself (who doesn’t even really need to breathe) and Dhanneth, who had a severe reaction to the last release of the gas as a security measure during Cheris’s asssassingation, and still has anti-toxin meds in his system. The Revenant explains that with his original’s history of murdering his own command staff at Hellspin Fortress, everyone will blame Jedao for this, although they have agreed to spare his life as thanks for getting rid of Kujen. Jedao uses his body as a shield and desperately tries to save someone, anyone. He and Dhanneth carry Commander Talaw to the escape pods. Dhanneth reveals that he did, indeed, hate Jedao from the beginning - then he orders Jedao to live, shoves him into an escape pod after the unconscious Talaw, and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head, just after hitting the button to launch the pods.
Jedao manages to pull himself and Talaw and their capsules free of the thickest firefighting as various other ships fire on the Revenant as it flies off, piloted only by its own friendly servitors. Then Jedao passes all the way out.
After numerous interrogations, Shuos Mikodez, one of the leaders of the compact, and the only surviving Hexarch, makes Jedao an offer. He’ll be a prisoner in Mikodez’s headquarters - not least because he could start another war with the panics that would be caused by him running around loose, and partly because several other players want to figure out a way to kill him - but he’ll be treated fairly. In exchange, Mikodez says he wants Jedao to design an ethics curriculum for new Shuos cadets, because they have to figure out better ways of doing things if the fragile new Compact is actually to survive wars with its opportunistic neighbors and the depredations of time against the people holding it together. What Mikodez really wants is for Jedao to heal a little and eventually reveal what happened when the Revenant went rogue, but Jedao has assiduously kept the moths’ and servitors’ secrets. Finally, in his own perfectly nice instructor’s quarters, Jedao finds out that Hemiola also escaped the Revenant’s flight. It chooses to stay with him, secretly, as a friend.
The next two years are much less eventful. Gamer’s End shows Jedao using horrifying lethal tactics to convince a senior cadet that the moral event horizon scenario he presents them with is real, and recommends them for promotion to the front when they refuse to sacrifice a civilian world. He also privately learns to use his moth powers a little bit more, although very far from everything about them.
Sample Network Entry: Baby Warden has a poll
Sample RP: Forever meeting people who knew Jedao One
Special Notes: I would like for this Jedao to not only get an offer from the Admiral, but a visit from my own retired character Shuos Jedao/Jedao One, who very much intended to come see him after graduating once he learned of his existence. However, Jedao’s feelings about Jedao One are extremely complex, and he chooses to take the Admiral’s offer before making any decisions about whether to listen to Jedao One or not.