>> OPEN LEE YANI’S FILE …
:// AGE — 25 :// OCCUPATION — drug runner :// CLASS — elysium native
>> LOADING DEVELOPMENT ...
:// MAGIC —
on the point of biochemical magic, yani is a newcomer to the science. to the art. it’s a lost talent in so many ways, and one that she had no exposure to as a child. maybe things would have been easier, if she had. but yani has always had books, the promise of the old, of sprawling forests and wild grown gardens. yani has always had a deep, near spiritual connection to the biological, the natural, almost in defiance of her mechanized and austere surroundings. since beginning to work with apollo, she’s become adept at the hydroponic arts as much as the magical, becoming a provider of materials, grown in test tubes and under stark lights, recreating heirloom plant varieties and hunting down long lost seeds, attempting to scientifically and magically recreate the germination process, propogating long lost flora in modified greenhouse boxes, imbuing them with the enchantments that apollo has shared with her.
:// MODIFICATIONS —
moderate reflex enhancement system - wired in under the skin, implanted in her neural network, yani has taken on the physical advantage of an enhanced reflex system, programmed to anticipate danger signs in order to systematically avoid those clients who might attempt to take advantage of her. this was implanted after her time with apollo began, necessary for her to efficiently complete her jobs for him.
microscopic eyes - she has implanted natural appearing visual enhancements that allow her to more accurately pinpoint potential issues with her crops, machinery, and so on. alongside her enhanced reflexes, this allows her the ability to work more successfully and precisely with her hydroponics, in terms of creation and maintenance of both biological and mechanical components.
cranial bomb - in order to ensure her discretion as a runner and apprentice to apollo, she’s had a cranial bomb installed, designed to specifically target the section of her brain storing information relative to the enterprise. should she attempt to start her own business, short apollo in general, or share relevant industry secrets, the bomb will detonate. while she won’t die, she’d be assuredly damaged, lose the relevant secret information, and be incapacitated requiring hospitalization for an indeterminate period.
>> LOADING BIOGRAPHY ...
“i taught you to fight and to fly. what more could there be?”
lee yani is born to elysium like a peter pan is born of neverland. perhaps as soon as she existed, the city welcomed her, open armed, it’s cavernous maw yearning and open, eager to take in one of its own.
her mother dallied amid late night suitors with full enough pockets, her father a footnote left forgotten. and in time yani too was forgotten, with a pat on the head and the instruction to come back by supper.
and so the city raised her. slick streets and neon lights her playground, the dull slick of the rain on her cheeks companion to the dreary concrete structures she made her home. hours spent honing clever fingers and making use of childish winsomeness to fill her stomach and her mind. crushed into the back corner of cramped school rooms, overworked teachers that didn’t notice if she was there or not, didn’t notice if she snuck into the classes of older children, if she stole textbooks from the cluttered shelves, dusty and unraveling at the bindings.
and when she returned one day to find her mother absent, she took this new reality in as much stride as anyone can. it’s a common scenario in the slums of a slum, after all. people go missing. and when she appeared there was a spark of enthusiasm and cheer, but there was also a changing that had occured, an acceptance of individuality and independence. a trust that had died.
and so when her mother did disappear, for good that time, she wasn’t all that surprised.
“they have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.”
raised by the city, she thrives in it. it’s not the sort of thriving that comes with full pockets or a full stomach, but she survives. she adapts and overcomes. it’s a band of them in the end, a tangle of lost children who carve out a home for themselves in a dark world, under the glare of the lights.
but she feels.
she’s a creature of emotion, from one to the next in record time and impossible intensity, a signal flare in the dying light of a burned out city, a beacon. it brings people to her, it draws them in. they turn a blind eye to her half empty pockets, they keep her just above the edge of destitute. let her take the empty back room of the basement as a makeshift home, and someone leaves a spare space heater for her. it’s broken but she fixes it, discovers a knack for the mechanical.
a knack for survival.
she’s a young girl forced to grow up too soon, and there’s a spirit of youth she holds onto. a wild intensity and an innocent selfishness. she eschews the benefits of implantations and augmentations, at first for the sake of finances and later for some misplaced integrity. retains a strange purity of body that leaves a rosy flush to her cheeks and a lingering youthfulness to her expression, some gleaming promise of what innocence and beauty might once have been. like a rose in a case, a relic of a lost time.
“sometimes, though not often, she had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of others.”
she’s a ringleader, though she doesn’t know when it happened or how. there’s something innate to it, a kind of charm that is lost on many and loved by few. but those who respond to it, they pull into her thrall. she steals her way through life, a mix of odd jobs and slight of hand to get where she’s going, to take what she needs. and usually not much more. she’s got a bit of a moral compass- just a little. its an old book that takes her by surprise, a biology textbook, a botany grimoire, one that offers up knowledge of long lost materials, plants and flowers and herbs that she’s never been able to imagined, more than she can fathom. she becomes obsessed, reclusive, fascinated with the promise of greenery, lushness, the garden of eden calling out to her in siren song. she devours information, collects samples, and they wither under her hands, left unable to master something with one piece of the puzzle missing.
that’s when she finds him, apollo, and his concoctions. whispers of a magic that calls out to her, sings it’s song siren to some secret part of her soul that is yet unexplored. she hears of it and it sounds right. it feels right. she gets her hands on a potion and when it hits the tip of her tongue she knows.
she just knows.
the formula plays itself out in her mind, a catalogue of herbs and adjustments, a latticework of molecules and modifications that she only partly comprehends. it rattles around in her head, a buzz of information on overload. and like a child she is obsessed, fascinated, begins to try to piece it together, attempts to recreate the drug on her own time, her own turf. it’s a herculean task for a girl without resources or training, and as she goes about stealing and purchasing and chasing down ingredients, she draws attention to herself, at first unwanted.
when she’s hauled into apollo’s backroom, she wakes strapped to a chair with an unfamiliar face sneering down at her. the whirr of a mechanical arm rearing back for a slap is the first precursor to the pain that erupts next, has her spitting a mouthful of blood to the floor.
they want to know what she knows and they want to know who told her.
and in the end, it takes hours before they acknowledge that, perhaps, she’s telling the truth. that the knowledge came from within. this is what earns her an audience with the sun himself.
“ you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
its as good as medicine, as bright as the sun. salvation in a bottle. she salivates for want of knowing, and when he offers her apprenticeship with strings she leaps first and doesn’t look back.
its not until she’s on the table that she thinks she might have made a mistake. she’s strapped down to cold metal and pinned beneath instrumentation. they craft her to the task, lay implantations in her eyes and a wiring through her nerves, snaking along the lines of her bones and in the fibers of her muscles.
they offer her the chance for cosmetic upgrades- wild hair or holographic tattoos, multicolored eyes or jeweled implantations, but she denies.
and as she learns those secrets, as she trains in endless hours of bent heads and hyperfocus, she is reminded of that excruciating trade she has made. of how they’ve opened her skull, fingering the line of a scar that runs beneath short shorn hair, growing back slow where it was shaved for surgery. a failsafe, a modern non-compete clause, a cyanide pill hidden in her teeth to keep her silent, remote detonated and programmed, hopefully, not to kill. but it’s an illegal technology and as always, your mileage may vary.
but she trades in secrets and magic now, and such a failsafe is to be expected, insurance of her trustworthiness in this wholly untrustworthy world.
“and thus it will go on, so long as children are innocent and heartless.”
what does it mean to be too much? to feel too much, to love too much, to hate too much. she is a creature of absolutes, she is all or nothing, she is all and all and all and all. erratic and wild, like hebe she is a force of life, she is a wild thing that breathes youth into those around her. feeds ambrosia to the miserable and uplifts the fallen, a creature of excess and of gladdening, cupbearer to the broken. and, oh, there are many. she has too much heart for elysium, for a girl born into its clutches, too much want and too many dreams for a world long barren of hope or promise. anachronistic and native to the landscape of elysium, she is an impossible creature of contradiction. she is as much beholden to the hedonism of elysium as she is the desire for the purity of long past times, at odds fascinated and enamored with the progress of neo seoul and disgusted with the opulence and austerity of olympus. she dreams of impossible things, lush gardens and the promises of eden, and lives eternally unsatisfied, selfishly chasing after her own longings.
