Teilo Embry Aisling | Twenty Four; Survivor
House: Brink Security Class: 1 Status: Uninfected Alignment: New Age Rebels Name Pronunciation: T-eh-lo / Ash-ling
The Aisling family was an Ivy league legacy and a name spoken among strangers. Teilo Embry was the proverbial middle child, and with the twins born before him, he had not one, but two quintessential standards to model himself after—more if one counted his father, and his father before him.
Teilo’s father was a prosecutor in criminal law for many years, and the Aislings came from a long line of Yale alumni. Now, Grigor Aisling was also a professor at the university, and his notoriety on campus was regarded with both intimidation and awe. Naturally, Yale is where Teilo’s older brother, Arlo, attended. A high achiever in athletics as well as his studies, Arlo rowed for the Yale Heavyweight Crew and was majoring in Medicine.
Arlo’s twin, Nesta, went North, instead, pursuing her BFA at Concordia, in Montreal. She’d said she’d wanted to go for the art and culture that the famous city was known to have, but Teilo was fairly sure she’d just wanted to avoid having her parents breathing down her neck. He couldn’t blame her for that, he supposed, but getting away from his parents wasn’t the reason he accepted Harvard’s offer, rather than that of Yale. His decision to break away from tradition was more built on a desire to escape his predetermined legacy, rather than his parents themselves. He wanted his accomplishments to be his own, and to avoid any postulation that he was receiving special treatment.
In fact, he was somewhat sullen to leave his mother’s devoted coddling behind. He even often missed his father’s dry and drawling jokes, his impossible dedication to being the cleverest man in the room. Which happened to be a difficult task ‘round a table of over-achievers. Needless to say, family dinners were less like a meal and more like a round of double jeopardy.
And then there was Brenin—Teilo’s younger brother, and the youngest of the family of four kids. Brenin was easily the quietest of the lot of them, but perhaps not the softest. Three years junior to Teilo, he had his sights set on studying anthropology, perhaps with a minor in linguistics. With each of his siblings, Teilo had a dramatically different relationship. He shared his creative nostalgia side with his sister, his almost boyish sense of humour with Brenin. But it was Arlo he looked up to. Arlo, who would challenge him to the end of days with a guileless battle of wits. Arlo, who inspired Teilo’s work ethic, his commitment to making something of himself.
In the September of his first year at Harvard, the smell of cedarwood and lemongrass greeting him in the main hall like a long-awaited welcome home, he knew this would be the beginning of the best years of his life. Anticipated six long years of sweat, blood and tears and was looking forward to every, agonizing second of it.
Unfortunately, as it would turn out, he was barely fated to half that. After spending two years on his undergraduate studies, he was midway through his first year as a graduate student, when best laid plans became of no consequence.
On the far East Coast of the states, Harvard and the surrounding areas faced mostly secondary debris falling during D-Day. Damage to the city was palpable and chaotic, of course, but over the years, Harvard and other high profile institutions had become relatively equipped for emergency procedures. Bunkers provided shelter during the worst of the falling, and its high towers were a refuge in waiting out the initial floods of first impact.
But as a campus as huge as Harvard, with so much security and resources all in one place, it quickly became the long-term refuge of survivors within a five mile radius. It also became the second Colony to rise, (at least as far as official documentation was concerned), shortly after Colony 1, at MIT—a facility so equipped with labs and scientific resources that within the first year post D-Day, it became a housing unit for much of what would eventually become the intensive research and study of the new world’s evolutions.
For a few months, there was no way to be sure what had happened to his family, but launching himself into an unpredictable landscape to embark on a blind hunt for them, seemed too illogical and irresponsible for Teilo to justify. It wasn’t that he wasn’t willing to risk himself, but logically and mathematically speaking, keeping where he was, with a connection to some facet of civilization, was his best bet at finding them.
As it would turn out, when contact was reestablished with pockets of survivors in surrounding areas, Teilo found out that his sister, Nesta, was indeed alive, but was having issues finding means of crossing the border and travelling particularly treacherous impact damage, especially by herself. His parents, and his brothers, who were still back in Connecticut, had also survived but were living among other clans. At the time, interstate transportation wasn’t especially plausible, nor was it particularly safe. And so the Aisling family, having at least confirmed each other’s safety, resigned to their continued separation for the time being. With the exception of Arlo, who left New Haven as soon as he could, to try to get to Nesta in Montreal, since she couldn’t get to them.
The thing about residing in Harvard after the apocalypse was that after a few years, for Teilo and other students like him, life arguably wasn’t that different from what it had been before. Or at least, it had an illusion of consistency—a kind of comfort in the known that survivors could cling to for at least some semblance of stability and solace. Of course, everything had changed about the world, how they could navigate through it, and what their places in it were. But as far as their day to day surroundings, the lives of Teilo and his fellow ivy league students, were disrupted on less absolute terms. Unlike people in private residential homes, campus residents were the safest remaining where they were. Of course, only 50-60% of the campus remained safely habitable but that being said, they had access to state of the art security—whatever the depleted resources could still power, that is—and could press on into the darker days with a body of people that had formed long before that fateful day in 2157.
This is how one of the largest Colonies in North America would see its beginning. Harvard’s Colony 2 formed naturally, and its citizens were less like fish washed up on strange shores, but rather bees imprisoned to a hive. They had a tendency to like to look busy, feel busy, be busy. Of course, as a population of high achieving academics, this wasn’t exactly a surprise. And so Teilo was not alone in his restlessness, nor in his desperation to cling to his status as a law student, maybe one day even lawyer—if there was ever again a law to protect.
When the NWRF rose, they did so out of Colony 1—the first Colony to see the likes of the Reformist regime, and the place that would soon become the home to the NWRF Headquarters. But in the beginning, the NWRF’s influence was slow, patient and mostly unthreatening. It was something being talked about in gossip, but never got enough ground for it to be cause for concern. No one expected it to have the surge in power that it did.
As an Uninfected, Teilo was hardly affected by these rising rumours, but after the Second Falling, when his best friend Sid became one of the newly Infected, the whispers were hitting closer to home. As the NWRF grew, and their impending government rise became a very real inevitability, Teilo and Sid knew it would soon become a matter of fight or flight. If Teilo had only had himself to worry about, he might have stayed. Tried to reconnect with his family. But with Sid as an Telekinetic, the stakes were higher. Teilo wasn’t willing to risk his best friend’s safety and so together, they chose flight.
They left in the middle of the night, trading stolen resources from Harvard (food, technology, Power chips, Echo Chips) to buy their way onto a Merchant ship heading East across the Atlantic. Their hope was that the Reformists would become a thing of the Americas, but that the status divide wouldn’t manifest the same way in other countries, cultures. Teilo knew better than anyone that American culture had a deeply sutured superiority complex.
Leaving Harvard was more difficult for Teilo than he cared to admit, even to himself. He took nearly everything with him, much to Sid’s dismay. Nearly all of his survived belongings—which was basically everything. That which he did have to part with, he made a gigantic fuss about. Because Teilo had always been nostalgic, and was raised material; he had an immeasurable affinity for his tailored suits, fine leather Oxfords, and cap toe boots. He also had a collection of vintage casette tapes he couldn’t bring himself to part with, and truck loads of hardcover books he’d read and reread a hundred times—many of which he’d written notes in the margins. And then there was his Star Wars paraphernalia, because beyond being a bookworm and a academic addict, he was a bit of a closeted nerd.
And these things of his, they were his identity. They were the meat from whence he came. They reminded him of home, of his mother, of his dreams and ambitions—and they were what made him who he was, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t give a fuck if the world had ended. So long as he was still here, these things were his and they were allowed to still matter to him. He was still allowed to give a shit about this stuff, even though most people seemed to disagree.
Sid, unfortunately, was both a victim and a reluctant supporter to this. It was one of Teilo’s many frustrating idiosyncrasies, and arguably part of his charm. So despite how inconvenient (to put it lightly) it was to lug around three suitcases, two mailbags and a briefcase on their trip to God knew where, Sid seemed to put up with it, for the most part, for which Teilo appreciated him all the more. Of course, he’d pressured Teilo to leave more behind, and there were times Teilo was sure Sid was finding ways to sell off some of Teilo’s books from under his nose in order to lighten the load, but otherwise he was probably more patient with Teilo than he deserved.
It had been two months of travelling by the time they arrived at Colony 22, and most of that had been aboard the crowded lower decks of Merchant ships, making friends with the rodents and gambling with wastelanders and vagabonds. Unfortunately, for these two Ivy League boys, however, their arrival at Colony 22 was met with the ugly discovery that though they had succeeded in putting thousands of miles between themselves and NWRF Headquarters, the Reformists had beat them to the punch. NWRF Reps were already in place at Colony 22, and in the time it’d taken Teilo and Sid to get there, the purging of the wastelands had begun, something which hadn’t even started when they’d left Harvard.
As a young man who spent so much of his life committed to the law and to justice, Teilo doesn’t feel he can just stand by and watch a corrupt government disregard people’s rights. The law and the state may be in disarray since D-Day, but basic human rights remain in tact. As far as he’s concerned, someone needs to be doing something about protecting those rights—regardless of status. The Radical Movement, however, is not Teilo’s idea of progress. Their actions are impetuous, irrational and impulsive—none of which will earn them any long term success. And the Rebels? Well, they are even more infuriating. Though their hearts are arguably in the right place, Switzerland never saved any lives. The time is now and the conflict is real and Teilo believes that the New Age Rebels need to have a stronger voice, need to step up and take responsibility and contribute to this fight for justice by being active participants, rather passively preaching peace but doing nothing to provoke change.
Teilo still thinks about his family regularly, and does what he can to keep in touch. He feels the most angst about being apart from his mother, and the most guilt about having left Brenin behind. Arlo may have been Teilo’s role model, but Teilo had been Brenin’s. He misses their time together, as infrequent as it had been after he’d gone to Harvard.
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