2.) How much thought went into the character’s appearance? Does that mirror how much the character thinks about their appearance?
I spent a lot of time thinking about Iphe’s design, actually. She was supposed to be a little uncanny, the eyes a little too large and too blue, the hair a not-naturally-occurring shade of red, the freckles and dimples as a weird bit of implied sweetness against the emotional and physical violence of her personality. She was supposed to look like a synthetic/synthesized person. Spent a million years mix-and-matching armor pieces to get her a catsuit I loved, too.
I feel like that’s kind of required with agents, though. Or maybe I’ve been reading too much about Karanan’s Roscoe, do ho ho ho.
4.) What’s your favorite thing about the character?
Iphe has a ridiculously exhausting journey through an emotional nightmare; sometimes it’s too much for even me to engage with, and I’m the idiot who wrote it. That said, I’m pleased with the progression of her personality and ability to interact with people, and the gradual discernment of which pieces of her life she chooses to keep.
A shorter answer is I love having Iphe troll other agents. Or just people in general.
8.) Did you come up with a lot of details for this character at the outset, or did you make stuff up as you went along?
Iphe was pretty fully formed initially: a eugenics experiment with no ability to empathize, built and programmed to look sweet and harmless and kill those who sympathized with her. Then she started meeting people and it got a lot worse.
Leto and Iphe's happy AU, aka the It Stays Better AU, involves Leto as a Nick Fury-esque head of the SIS, with Iphe as his second-in-command/shadow/confidante/only person who gets to see him unconscious/totally not girlfriend. It hurts my soul almost as much as it makes me happy because the contrast with what happens to them in canon is too much.
Daemon, usually. He often tries to pull Iphe back when she’s doing something crazy, citing the rules or common sense. Generally Iphe just kisses his cheek, ‘Oh Daemon you’re so cute’ and does it anyway.
11. What’s the most incomprehensible inside joke they have?
Whenever he’s attempting to track down Tahiri, Iphe reminds him to pack a spare set of clothes.
Most of their inside jokes are at Daemon’s expense, though he doesn’t mind. Much.
EDIT: 2 weeks later, browsing through Daemon's tag I realize I don't know how to count OTL better late than never, yes?
12. How long have they been friends? How long do you think it will last?
Since their first assignment together, when Iphe decided that this blue fellow was particularly amusing and wanted to keep him around and Daemon had no protest. They will probly be friends until they die.
Nickname: Iphe, Red, Little Miss Science Project, Intelligence’s Latest Failure
Class/Role: Agent/ Operative (dps)
Relationship Status: seriously messed up by a dead half-droid sullen dick of a chiss
Relatives Genetic Donors: Captain Ophera, Keeper/The Minister of Intelligence. Eventually she was all-but-formally-adopted by Loren Fidelis Luz. Loren Luz II considers her to be his half-sister.
Friends and allies: Leto Kallig [it’s complicated], Circe Kallig [best friend], Cae’Sera and Idare Ulally [godmother to their children], Daemon Kraspen, Cyrus Hargrave, Kthira'Vel'Nuruodo
Iphe was designed to look like a victim: thin frame, large blue eyes, freckles, dimples. She spent the first five years of her life entirely in an ImpInt lab, being trained, monitored, and surgically corrected – she was in and out of modification surgeries so often she spent more time sleeping in kolto tanks than in a bed.
The researcher in charge of Iphe’s development turned out to be an SIS plant gathering information on ImpInt’s genetics program; she was the only person who used Iphe’s name and spoke to her outside of regular tests. When the time came for her to be extracted, she took a risk and tried to bring Iphe away with her. She couldn’t bear to leave the little lab rat behind, knowing what Intelligence had in store for her. When she took Iphe out of her tank and offered to take her away, Iphe understood that the agent was a traitor. So she quietly palmed the scalpel from the nearby lab table and killed her when she reached for a hug.
For Iphe, it was the choice between the cold but familiar or the terrifying unknown of the world outside Imperial Intelligence. The loss of the one person who connected with Iphe on an emotional level broke something inside her; Iphe was able to read emotions and manipulate them due to her training, but she lost the ability to connect on an emotional level. Her curiosity about the wildly fluctuating emotions of those around her and her desire to observe emotionally-functional sentients were the main reasons she continued to serve Intelligence. They gave her the opportunity to interact with and mimic the people she was sent to undermine and destroy.
That unintentional test of loyalty convinced Intelligence that it was time to start taking advantage of Project I and getting her some training outside the lab. Iphe was sent to areas of insurgency and placed in foster care or war orphanages. She operated as an observer and sabotage agent, spying on and betraying her caretakers and, when necessary, setting explosives or assassinating resistance officers.
Project I’s efficiency in the field exceeded expectations but was also… deeply unsettling. When she came back from her latest infiltration at age nine, she was taken back to the lab and had a kill switch bomb implanted in the base of her skull. The switch was given to Keeper, and if he failed to reset the switch within the one month time limit, Iphe would lose everything neck-upwards. The switch contained a gene-scanner that prevented Iphe from resetting it herself, hopefully stemming any attempts to steal the switch, seeing as she had no friends or contacts outside of Intelligence to whom she could pass it.
Iphe continued to make great strides as an operative, slicer, and assassin. As a preteen, she learned a great deal from fellow Imperial Agent Daemon Kraspen, who was her co-agent on several missions. Thus began a long ongoing trolling where Iphe relentlessly prodded at the slightest emotional reaction from Daemon. At the age of fourteen she became the go-to agent and tech specialist for the young Sith Idare Ulally, who quickly became extremely fond of her. She found his concern amusing, and teased him about it relentlessly, poking and prodding at all his displays of affection.
During her teenage years, as Intelligence began falling into confusion and disarray, Iphe took advantage of the situation to begin hunting down her kill switch. She gathered information slowly over the years, but could only make so much progress without alerting her superiors. To that end, she eventually made contact with a defected Imperial Agent turned master of Port Nowhere, Leto Kallig.
Iphe offered the information broker insider info on ImpInt, and in turn he helped her narrow down her search for the kill switch. They were an unstoppable pair of stealth operatives and slicers. But Leto was a walking emotional disaster after the trauma he endured as an Imperial Agent, all thinly hidden under an abrupt, stoic veneer. Iphe couldn’t resist reopening those old wounds – he was fascinating to her for all the wrong reasons. At the same time, Leto found some terrible comfort in lashing out at a person he could not actually emotionally scar. Iphe’s taunts turned into a cruel form of flirtation, and things escalated. Basically, Leto found new ways to get her to stop talking.
Eventually, they managed to steal Iphe’s kill switch. Iphe gave it to Leto. He angrily told her that he wanted nothing to do with it – but kept it, and faithfully reset the switch every month to keep her alive. Iphe was gradually realizing that she had a strange fondness for Leto that she didn’t understand. Instead of just observing him, she found herself wanting specifically to see him smile, or laugh, or sleep peacefully for once. But she kept it under wraps, knowing that Leto would not respond well to any sign of tenderness on her part. She stepped between Leto and an SIS scattergun blast during a mission, and carried the spiral puckered scar for the rest of her life. Leto’s gaze would drift to it from time to time, though neither wanted to talk about it.
During the search for her kill switch, Iphe encountered Loren Luz II, who had heard rumors that Imperial Intelligence used his mother’s genes to produce something that could vaguely be defined as his sister. He wanted to make her a part of the family; she found his knife phobia adorable and his emotional investment in her well being to be ridiculous. But endlessly amusing. Unfortunately, Loren II’s knife wounds were brought to the attention of Guileta Luz, who was far less forgiving. The Jedi Master intervened to keep Iphe from harming their brother again.
In their confrontation, Guileta used the force to throw a bevy of emotions at Iphe – regret, repentance, sorrow, and longing – so that she could understand what Loren II was feeling every time he looked at her. What Guileta didn’t realize was just how unprepared the agent was for the sudden influx of feelings she had not had access to for her entire adult life.
Iphe promptly stumbled back, vomited, and ran from the scene, laughing and crying at the same time.
She returned to Port Nowhere and Leto patched up her physical injuries, but everything had changed and they both knew it. Iphe stayed with Leto for a time, realizing she loved him and hoping he didn’t come to the same conclusion. But after one too many tender moments, he sent her away. For her own good, or so the story went.
In her new emotional state, Iphe found herself reliving much of her previous life in her sleep – moments of cruelty she now understood, times when she had ended lives or betrayed marks or what have you, all while finally comprehending the pain she had caused.
Her main sources of comfort during this time were her old friends – Cae’Sera and Idare, and Daemon Kraspen (who eventually defected and became a member of the Luz family). She also eventually reconciled with Loren II. Later, she sought out Loren Fidelis Luz – and he [as he so often did] practically adopted her.
She continued to love Leto from a distance, even as he slowly replaced his limbs with cybernetics and withdrew further and further into his agent games. She tried to call him back from the edge several times, but he never quite heard her. Eventually he got involved in a deadly competition with SIS Agent Cyrus Hargrave, and in the end he lost his life.
Iphe returned to Port Nowhere and made herself at home again while she waited for her killswitch timer to tick down the last days of her life. But when the day arrived, instead of dying, she received a posthumous message from Leto, set to play if he failed to check in on her switch. He informed her that he had modified the switch so it no longer required the regular check in to keep her alive, but by that point it had become habit. So he turned it into his deadman switch instead. The last words on the recording were: “You are free now to live as you please. … And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
And she responded, alone on Port Nowhere, “For what it’s worth, I’m not.”
Iphe returned to the Ulallies and continued being a devoted ‘Aunt’ to their young children. She also tracked down and eventually befriended Cyrus Hargrave and his mentor, the outlaw Velessar. She made her living as an expert slicer and phantom operative, spending only as much as she needed to maintain her physique and equipment and giving the rest to her loved ones and god children. Eventually, at the age of 35, she was cut down while defending Cae’Sera and Idare’s children from a sith attack on their home.
Personality: In the early years of her life and career, Iphe’s personality was driven almost entirely by detached and amoral curiosity. She had little to live for other than her own amusement, and was known to poke and prod at any emotional wound a poor slob left exposed. Wickedly clever but untouched. She was fascinated by emotional pain and turmoil, and when she couldn’t find it naturally occurring, she wasn’t above causing it.
Iphe’s personality took a dramatic turn after Guileta force-fed emotions directly to her brain. She became sharply aware of the pain of others and spent long nights reliving all the misery she had caused before she knew what she was doing. She became a somber but far gentler woman, withdrawn, quiet, careful. She still showed sparks of her old humor, but with lines of care in her face that spoke of knowledge hard earned through suffering and repentance.
Other Facts:
Project I initially had no set name – the name Iphigenia was given to her by Keeper, after he discovered that he was perhaps the closest thing she had to a father. He may have also leaked certain information about her kill switch to Leto Kallig, in the hopes that Iphe would find the switch and escape the brutal and cold environment that had created her.
Though Iphe didn’t feel or completely understand emotion herself, she was a talented mimic and manipulator. Her big blue eyes and sweet dimpled smile ingratiated her to many eventual assassination targets.
After Leto’s death, Iphe slowly began to act more and more like him: more ghostly, more silent, more withdrawn. This was in some respects a part of her coming to terms with the things she had done in Imperial Intelligence, and partially a means of staying close to him after his death.
Iphe and Leto were both devoted to the Ulally children, and every life day they used to participate in the play the three kids had written. Generally the Ulallys used this as an excuse to try to Parent Trap the two into getting together, for maximum awkwardness on both sides.
When Leto died, Iphe knew that he was the more cunning agent – which meant that, for whatever reason, Leto had chosen to die rather than killing Cyrus Hargrave. She went and found the man who had killed Leto, befriended him, and kept him alive in honor of that choice.
