Character History/Overivew
Mar. 20th, 2021 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pupp3tBorn in Harbin, Pan Xiaohu was a little girl born with a combination of rarities: she had unnaturally good reflexes and agility, but also with eyes that could shift in color to red in moments of intense physical stress, something which caught the eye of a passing stranger. The man, who introduced himself as Lam Jun, said that he represented a private school of sorts that specialized in training children like Xiaohu. After all, the incredible inhuman strength and other, rarer abilities displayed by such people could make their lives difficult if they had to manage it on their own. With the government's official statements being that such people didn't exist, there was no help coming from there - wouldn't it be for the best to let Xiaohu get help where she could, rather than waiting for things to become unmanageable and risk attracting official attention?
Pan Yaozu, Xiaohu's father, said no. He got a very bad feeling from this, the underlying sense that this was too good to be true, coupled with the very obvious flaw in this, that if something happened to his daughter while she was far away, she would have no way to communicate with her family and tell them. That fear of exploitation and underlying sense that something was rotten in the deal was entirely well-founded. Though Lam appeared to take their decision in stride, he immediately contacted his superiors, and they began to plan for the kidnapping of the child immediately.
When Xiaohu tries to remember that night, all she recalls is fire, and the sound of breaking glass. Then there's a gap in her memory that lasts years upon years. She was seven when she was taken. She was thirteen the first time she snapped out of her conditioning enough to start forming new memories.
During that gap, the organization that had taken her, the Order of the Heavenly Creatures, began systematically wiping her memory, gaslighting her, conditioning her and training her. I'll spare the graphic details here, since a lot of that veers into the territory of abuse and torture, but eventually something within her snapped under all the trauma. Her mind blocked out everything that came before the Order. It was a way to cope with the present, and it was something the Order had experience instilling in their captured Creatures, which is what they refer to those they kidnapped by. There are six others who were forcibly taken, each renamed something more common, each trained to be merciless and unfeeling, all taken as children. With these Creatures, the Order hopes to be able to do two things. Firstly, they want to slowly acquire as much power as possible by taking out the competition against their planted politicians. Secondly, they're amassing massive amounts of money through assassinations carried out by the Creatures, money which is then invested in several businesses so as to continue generating cash. Wealth is access to power, after all.
What they want to do with that potent mix of money and power is simple: the Order is run by aliens passing as human, and their goal is to put enough of their plants in power via fake populism that when the Order's people make official contact with humans, it'll be easy to convince humans to be loyal to them, and not to their own governments. For this reason, Creatures like Xiaohu are used to sow chaos and disruption and silence opposition to help allow the plants, titled Uniters within the organization, to ascend to power. The endgame goal is a long ways off; this plan has been at least forty years in the making and it's active in twenty nine countries, but humanity is still not yet fully primed for takeover. Soon, though, they will be. Humanity is being made desperate, and in their desperation they are hungry for a savior.
Xiaohu, renamed Ya-Jing, is so conditioned that she can't yet break free of the organization. She's shaken it off enough to want to help humanity hold onto its' own planet, but she does not have the power to leave. If she did, she knows her violent impulses and reactions means she's a danger to other humans and would be easy to track down. Any and all indications that the conditioning is breaking is also met with reconditioning. Reconditioning is torture. So she keeps her head down as she slowly works her way out of the merciless, violent mindset they instilled in her, dreaming of tigers and mountains, snow and ash, and the nagging sense that it might be too late for her and worse, might be too late for humanity itself.
There are seven Creatures now, but once, there were nine. One escaped. The other died trying and regretted nothing, laughing as she laid dying that the Order had finally lost, because if the Creatures can break free of their conditioning, that means one will eventually break free and make it out to safety, to tell the world what's happening. "You can't kill us, because you need us, but we can kill you, because we don't," she laughed, even as the blade was driven inbetween her ribs.
Ya-Jing was the one to kill her. She murdered the best friend she'd been allowed to have in captivity, because that was what the Order had made her into, a murderer and a monster, a Creature, and yet Fa Yunru, as she lay dying, simply touched her cheek and told her, "It's alright. I understand. It's okay, Yaya."
The touch set off a memory in Ya-Jing's head. Not a major one, not to other people, but enough of a spark to call into question the lie she'd been fed that her parents abandoned her, that she'd always lived with the Order because no one else wanted her. She remembered someone, a parent, maybe, leaning down and wiping at her face with a napkin. No one in the Order would have done that. It had to be from before, and that meant there was a before, and that meant the Order lied. And if they lied about this, everything could be a lie. The heavy conditioning the Order put their Creatures through was supposed to keep them from remembering, and when she tries, she gets sick. Her head hurts, her anxiety spikes, it's agony, but she keeps trying when she can. There is still a lot that she doesn't know and might never know.
She knows her old name. She knows she is being lied to. And she knows humanity is worth saving.
Maybe that's enough.
The foundation of brainwashing has been cracked. The dehumanization is wearing off. Now, it's up to her what she'll do with the fragments of her old self that she's acquired. She's biding her time, maintaining model behavior while stowing away things in her room, preparing for something, though even she doesn't know what she's preparing for.
All she knows is that she doesn't want to keep living this way forever. And she won't.
Pan Yaozu, Xiaohu's father, said no. He got a very bad feeling from this, the underlying sense that this was too good to be true, coupled with the very obvious flaw in this, that if something happened to his daughter while she was far away, she would have no way to communicate with her family and tell them. That fear of exploitation and underlying sense that something was rotten in the deal was entirely well-founded. Though Lam appeared to take their decision in stride, he immediately contacted his superiors, and they began to plan for the kidnapping of the child immediately.
When Xiaohu tries to remember that night, all she recalls is fire, and the sound of breaking glass. Then there's a gap in her memory that lasts years upon years. She was seven when she was taken. She was thirteen the first time she snapped out of her conditioning enough to start forming new memories.
During that gap, the organization that had taken her, the Order of the Heavenly Creatures, began systematically wiping her memory, gaslighting her, conditioning her and training her. I'll spare the graphic details here, since a lot of that veers into the territory of abuse and torture, but eventually something within her snapped under all the trauma. Her mind blocked out everything that came before the Order. It was a way to cope with the present, and it was something the Order had experience instilling in their captured Creatures, which is what they refer to those they kidnapped by. There are six others who were forcibly taken, each renamed something more common, each trained to be merciless and unfeeling, all taken as children. With these Creatures, the Order hopes to be able to do two things. Firstly, they want to slowly acquire as much power as possible by taking out the competition against their planted politicians. Secondly, they're amassing massive amounts of money through assassinations carried out by the Creatures, money which is then invested in several businesses so as to continue generating cash. Wealth is access to power, after all.
What they want to do with that potent mix of money and power is simple: the Order is run by aliens passing as human, and their goal is to put enough of their plants in power via fake populism that when the Order's people make official contact with humans, it'll be easy to convince humans to be loyal to them, and not to their own governments. For this reason, Creatures like Xiaohu are used to sow chaos and disruption and silence opposition to help allow the plants, titled Uniters within the organization, to ascend to power. The endgame goal is a long ways off; this plan has been at least forty years in the making and it's active in twenty nine countries, but humanity is still not yet fully primed for takeover. Soon, though, they will be. Humanity is being made desperate, and in their desperation they are hungry for a savior.
Xiaohu, renamed Ya-Jing, is so conditioned that she can't yet break free of the organization. She's shaken it off enough to want to help humanity hold onto its' own planet, but she does not have the power to leave. If she did, she knows her violent impulses and reactions means she's a danger to other humans and would be easy to track down. Any and all indications that the conditioning is breaking is also met with reconditioning. Reconditioning is torture. So she keeps her head down as she slowly works her way out of the merciless, violent mindset they instilled in her, dreaming of tigers and mountains, snow and ash, and the nagging sense that it might be too late for her and worse, might be too late for humanity itself.
There are seven Creatures now, but once, there were nine. One escaped. The other died trying and regretted nothing, laughing as she laid dying that the Order had finally lost, because if the Creatures can break free of their conditioning, that means one will eventually break free and make it out to safety, to tell the world what's happening. "You can't kill us, because you need us, but we can kill you, because we don't," she laughed, even as the blade was driven inbetween her ribs.
Ya-Jing was the one to kill her. She murdered the best friend she'd been allowed to have in captivity, because that was what the Order had made her into, a murderer and a monster, a Creature, and yet Fa Yunru, as she lay dying, simply touched her cheek and told her, "It's alright. I understand. It's okay, Yaya."
The touch set off a memory in Ya-Jing's head. Not a major one, not to other people, but enough of a spark to call into question the lie she'd been fed that her parents abandoned her, that she'd always lived with the Order because no one else wanted her. She remembered someone, a parent, maybe, leaning down and wiping at her face with a napkin. No one in the Order would have done that. It had to be from before, and that meant there was a before, and that meant the Order lied. And if they lied about this, everything could be a lie. The heavy conditioning the Order put their Creatures through was supposed to keep them from remembering, and when she tries, she gets sick. Her head hurts, her anxiety spikes, it's agony, but she keeps trying when she can. There is still a lot that she doesn't know and might never know.
She knows her old name. She knows she is being lied to. And she knows humanity is worth saving.
Maybe that's enough.
The foundation of brainwashing has been cracked. The dehumanization is wearing off. Now, it's up to her what she'll do with the fragments of her old self that she's acquired. She's biding her time, maintaining model behavior while stowing away things in her room, preparing for something, though even she doesn't know what she's preparing for.
All she knows is that she doesn't want to keep living this way forever. And she won't.
