[Atlas] [OOC] Application

[dendarii]

[OOC]

Your Name: Rho
Contact: katoptron @ plurk!
Are you at least 16 years of age or older?: YEP
Current Characters(s): N/A

[IC]

Is this a re-app?: No
Character Name: Miles, Naismith Vorkosigan
Journal: dendarii
Canon: Vorkosigan Saga
Canon Point: Mid Mirror Dance, shortly after his cryorevival and subsequent seizure.
Species: Human
Age: 28

History: Miles has a lot of canon spread out over 16+ books and novellas. So apologies in advance, because there’s really no way to make this any shorter than what I’ve got laid out in the app. The books that need covering as of Miles canon pull point:

Barrayar

Miles is a fetus throughout most of this book, but there’s important history that affects him directly. Important points:

• Miles’ mother, Cordelia Naismith (Vorkosigan), is a raging badass and should not be underestimated in the slightest, despite Barrayar being a backwards feudal space Russia that doesn’t think women are people.


• Miles’ father, Aral Vorkosigan, is the Lord Regent while Gregor is still bitty due to Gregor’s grandfather entrusting the position to him before his death.


• Early on in the regency, Aral is forced to uphold an ancient law punishing duel attempts with death; failing to do so would have undermined his leadership. This results in the lord father of said capitally punished dueler to get revenge: attempted murder of Aral and Cordelia via soltoxin. Fortunately soltoxin has an antidote that can be administered quickly for a complete recovery. Unfortunately, said antidote has the side effects of decalcifying fetus’ bones. Miles’ bones.


• Cordelia is given an emergency c-section and Miles is transferred to a uterine replicator (exactly what it sounds like) to continue gestating with the help of doctors to try and give him some kind of body structure above gelatinous baby cube. Barrayar has an unfortunate prejudice against possible mutations, however, and Miles’ grandfather is not pleased with the possibility of having a mutant for a grandson and heir. He encourages an abortion - and then attempts to force one after Cordelia and Aral refuse. This is not the first time he will try to kill a young Miles. Obviously, this deeply fractures Miles’ grandfather’s relationship with Aral and Cordelia.


• Meanwhile, during all this, a dickhole named Lord Vordarian decides that Aral shouldn’t be regent and that he ought to be the Emperor in truth, with Gregor firmly under his thumb (or better, dead). The head of security shows up on the Vorkosigans’ doorstep with a tiny Gregor and promptly dies; they have to protect the Emperor and wrest control of the Empire back from Vordarian. Thus begins the Vordarian Pretendership.


• Miles’ uterine replicator is taken captive along with many other family members of Aral’s political group/resistance/rightful government. Cordelia manages to get to the Imperial Palace, rescue Miles, and then come back with Vordarian’s head in a bag. Pretendership over.


• Miles is eventually born, but the whole “getting kidnapped” thing interrupted his treatment badly. He is born with extremely fragile bones and significant developmental delays in general. There’s a ton of surgery in this kid’s future.

The Warrior’s Apprentice

• Miles is 17 now, preparing to take the exams to get into the one career he’s wanted all his life: to serve in the Imperial Military. He aced his regular tests but unfortunately failed the physical at the very first wall due to shattering his legs upon landing. His grandfather dies that night, presumably disappointed at his grandson not getting in.


• With his life already over, he decides that the best thing to do is skip off to Beta Colony (his mother’s ultra-liberal homeworld) and at least try and make his childhood crush, Elena Bothari, appreciate him a little more. His goal is to figure out who Elena’s real mother is and present the information to her. His bodyguard (and Elena’s father) Sergeant Bothari comes along too.


• He ends up accidentally recruiting a depressed jump pilot and a deserter from the Imperial Service, buys a ship, and involves himself in smuggling just to try and pay off the ship in one go.


• Smuggling job doesn’t go as planned. Smuggling jobs never go as planned.


• They wind up taking over the mercenaries that jump their ship, then accidentally joining up with the resistance they were supplying, and things begin to … snowball from there.


• At some point in the middle Miles also finds Elena’s mother, and makes the mistake of presenting her to Elena in front of Bothari. Elena’s mother had been raped by Bothari during a previous war; her mother then shoots and kills Bothari. Miles takes it hard.


• In the end Miles ends up taking over the entire Oseran Free Mercenary Fleet by disrupting their payroll, making instead into the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet.


• Elena marries the deserter; Miles has to get over his first real crush. And then he has to go home and defend himself from charges of treason and/or building an army. All in a day’s work for Miles.


• He also gets into the Imperial Service Academy after all (as a “punishment” to keep him from going back to the mercenaries).

The Mountains of Mourning (Novella)

• Miles is 20, after having recently graduated from the Imperial Service Academy.


• A woman from his district asks for the Count’s help in resolving an infanticide case for a little girl who’d been born with a defect; Aral sends Miles to take care of it instead.


• Miles finds himself learning more about the hill folk in his district - and more importantly, figuring out why he’s doing all this military stuff in the first place. As someone perceived as a mutant, he has to help make sure the world is one that he (and people like him) can live in.


• He finds out that the person who killed the infant was the infant’s grandmother; he rules that the grandmother should be left alive but completely at her daughter’s mercy.

The Vor Game

• Miles is 20; the book starts within a few weeks after Mountains of Mourning.


• He gets his first real assignment: six months on a horrible, frigid ImpMil base in exchange for getting placed on the Enterprise newest, shiniest flagship the military has to offer.


• Because Miles is Miles, things go wrong. Nearly drowns in frozen mud, pisses off the base commander and assists with mutiny that results in a massive public incident.


• Base commander (Metzov) gets discharged; Miles gets taken in by Imperial Security (the spy branch) because no other branch of the military will take him. Cue months of boredom while he’s kept out of the public eye to make it look like he’s being punished too.


• ImpSec finally lets him go on a spy mission but Miles is forbidden from using his Admiral Naismith persona. Take one guess what he ends up doing.


• Well before that he does manage to make a mess with his assigned persona, including getting thrown in jail. There he runs into Gregor, who attempted suicide and then ran the fuck away from being Emperor for a while.


• Miles understandably panics, because very abruptly he’s the only ImpSec who has the slightest idea where Gregor is, and if anyone else finds Gregor it’s going to be a galactic incident.


• They make their way to Vervain, where they stumble into two things: the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet (taken back over by Oser), Commander Cavilo (the woman who’d gotten Miles arrested to begin with, and also running a rival group of mercenaries), and Metzov (the crazy base commander Miles had pissed off).


• Cavilo’s true purpose is to draw the Cetagandans into the system and start an intergalactic war. And then Gregor falls in her lap, and she decides to do all that PLUS become the Empress of Barrayar.


• Gregor, fortunately, is too smart for this. And so is Miles. Between the two of them, they manage to pull Gregor out and shut Cavilo down.


• Unfortunately the Cetagandans are still coming … so Miles has to retake his mercenary fleet using nothing but his own wits again and hold off the much larger army until Gregor can come through with actual reinforcements.


• A war is averted, Miles’ mercenaries are restored to his control, and Admiral Naismith is made into one of Miles’ permanent personas. They carry out missions too dangerous or too politically delicate for the Barrayaran military service to handle directly.

Cetaganda

• Miles and his cousin, Ivan, are sent to the heart of the Cetagandan Empire, Barrayar's longtime enemy, on a diplomatic mission. Which is to attend a funeral and not fuck with anything.


• Guess who immediately fucks with something.


• It's Miles.


• Basically, Miles accidentally foils a Cetagandan plot to pin a theft of a massively important Cetagandan artifact (a digital key to their massive genetic codebanks) on Barrayar. Thus he ends up with a fake copy of the artifact and a big ol' mystery to try and sort out for what this thing is and why they have it now.


• Miles quickly becomes embroiled with the Haut, a genetically engineered upper class of women who are trying to determine the next Empress (who died, hence the funeral that Miles is here to attend.)


• One of the planetary governors had been trying to steal the gene banks and the key but had screwed up in doing so. With Miles help, they unravel the plot and allow control of the Cetagandan gene database to be returned to their rightful owners.


• Miles gets a medal from Cetaganda. Too bad Barrayar hates Cetaganda. So it’s mostly going to sit in his drawer and collect dust.

Labyrinth (Novella)

• A mad scientist wants to defect to Barrayar, but only if the Dendarii can retrieve a set of genetic samples from Jackson’s Whole. Which is dangerous. Of course.


• Surprise #1: The samples are in the thigh of a genetically engineered monster.


• Surprise #2: The monster is actually a young woman who’s been genetically engineered to be a super soldier.


• Miles discovers #2 when a failed extraction attempt gets him thrown into the basement level where the super soldier is being held.


• Miles quickly allies with her - and also sleeps with her - before naming her Taura.


• They escape and also blow up the Jacksonian baron’s gene samples on their way out. This probably won’t bite him in the ass later. Definitely not a plot point in a later book. Yep.


• Taura joins the Dendarii; Miles gets his first of two girlfriends.

Ethan of Athos

• Is not getting linked because Miles is barely in it, and also it sucks.


• Elli Quinn (one of Miles’ subordinates and also his second girlfriend) discovers a telepathic experiment made by the Cetagandans; she helps get him to safety and also delivers Miles a sample of the telepath’s genes.


• Hooking up with Elli Quinn goes somewhere in here offscreen.

The Borders of Infinity (Novella)

• On another Dendarii mission, Miles goes to the Marilac POW camp on Dagoola IV to free the leader of the Marilacan resistance in an effort to a) piss off Cetaganda (see previous notes re: Barrayar and Cetaganda hating each other) and b) prolong/overturn Cetagandan occupation of Marilac.


• Miles has to go in as a prisoner, and he immediately gets stripped and beat up due to being tiny and fragile.


• He quickly discovers that his original mission is impossible due to the leader he’s after being pretty much dead already.


• Also the POW camp is under a massive force field dome that barely lets in light, dousing everything in a maddening sort of twilight.


• So instead he decides to go for the spirit of the mission: get the ENTIRE resistance out of this POW.


• He does this under the guise of reforming their ration distribution system, which was a Hunger Games style free-for-all previously.


• Instead he gets them to take back their camp AND simultaneously drill them for a shuttle evacuation.


• When the rescue does finally come, most of the prisoners are rescued.


• Except for once of the new resistance leaders, who falls out of a shuttle that Miles is riding in - he reaches for her hand but barely misses her.


• This experience will haunt Miles for years to come.

Brothers in Arms

• So it turns out the Cetagandans didn’t like that whole “rescue ten thousand people out from our POW camp” thing


• Miles finds himself desperately in need of time to lie low, make repairs, get paid, and generally try not to get himself murdered on Earth.


• This involves joining the Barrayaran Embassy as Lord Vorkosigan and immediately failing to lie low. The Cetagandans on Earth are slowly closing in as the line between his two personas becomes paper thin.


• Meanwhile, the money to repair his fleet - having gone through official Barrayaran channels - continues to not show up, eventually prompting Miles to send one of his mercenaries in person to track them down.


• Everything comes to a head when Miles gets an offer too tempting to refuse: a job for “Admiral Naismith” to kidnap “Lord Vorkosigan.” Easy money AND easy intel.


• Except when he goes to deliver his “captive” … a group of Komarran terrorists kidnap him for real and replace him with Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, his clone brother.


• Miles spends days in captivity, as his mercenaries can’t tell the difference between his clone and himself. Meanwhile he tries to convince Mark to break with the terrorists and give himself away.


• His mercenaries eventually catch on and rescue Miles, prompting Mark to flee.


• However, the terrorists are determined to get Miles killed one way or another, and kidnap Miles’ cousin Ivan (also on Earth) in an attempt to lure him out.


• The Cetagandans also come out in pursuit of Admiral Naismith, complicating thing further.


• In the end Mark is persuaded to their side (sort of), the Cetagandans are reconvinced of the line between Vorkosigan and Naimith (with Mark’s help as playing a literal clone to Miles), and the Komarran terrorist group is dismantled.


• Miles returns home, and Mark goes off into the universe alone.

Mirror Dance

• Miles’ role is somewhat limited in this book, despite its importance to his life.


• Two years after their previous encounter, Mark poses as Miles to take control of the Dendarii Mercenaries and use them to rescue other clones like himself. Specifically the clones raised just to be brain transplant bodies.


• Since this is still ostensibly a Miles adventure, everything goes to shit immediately.


• Miles catches wind of his brother’s antics and rushes to catch up with the fleet to try and mitigate the damage.


• He arrives a hairsbreadth too late - the operation has already failed, with Mark (and a good portion of the Dendarii) captured.


• He succeeds in rescuing his brother and his people … at the cost of his own life.


• So this is a book where Miles is dead for most of it.


• Fortunately, he’s placed in a cryorevival pod to be retrieved later; unfortunately, his pod is lost pretty much instantly, having been shipped to the Duronas for revival without telling anyone knowing that’s where he’s gone.


• He reawakens much later to find that he is being slowly pieced back together.


• In addition to cryoamnesia (temporarily having forgotten everything about himself as a side effect of the revival process), Miles also finds himself prone to periodic seizures, which will plague him for the rest of his life.


• Far from the Dendarii and lacking most of his memories, Miles now needs to piece himself back together in more ways than one…

Personality:
Miles is a young man who has spent his life bashing his head against the limitations set for him. Fortunately for him he’s wildly intelligent, with a strategic mind unparalleled by anyone except maybe his father. Miles spent (and continues to spend) most of his energy in stubbornly proving himself capable of doing anything anyone says he can’t do. Putting a wall in front of him is like waving a red flag in front of a bull - his immediate instinct is to run headlong into it. It’s part of why he first decided he was going to join the Imperial Military Service in the first place, despite his physical limitations. Everything in his life told him that he wouldn’t manage it without severe nepotism (as had been traditional for Vor lords like him previously), so he insisted on making it in just like everyone else. And failing at it, only to come back with a mercenary army instead. Telling Miles Vorkosigan not to do something is the quickest way to get it done.

Much of this stems from the fact that Miles had to fight just to survive in Barrayar’s culture. Many people on his planet - including his own grandfather - viewed anyone with physical defects as being less than human and unworthy of using up Barrayar’s resources. His own grandfather tried to kill him at least twice, with a possible third incident prompting Miles’ parents to keeping their son accompanied by a bodyguard at all times. Miles is someone who has had to prove, over and over again, that he is worthy of existence. That leaves a mark after a while, in the form of some crippling self-worth issues. Of course, his parents were as supportive as possible, never laying expectations on him that they thought he couldn’t meet and giving him enough space to find whatever life might make him happy. But everyone else … Miles is so used to being on the defense that he’s made it all into a grand offensive strategy: strike first, make himself completely unable to be ignored, make himself into a hero that can buck the expectations people have for him. He has a lot of issues with not ending up as the monstrous, hunchbacked figured from Barrayaran fiction. Miles is fundamentally a good person, and twists himself around backwards to prove it sometimes.

Miles’ limitation-busting tendencies is another reason why Miles is as good of a strategist as he is. Having been surrounded by tumultuous politics and people who are likely to start out with negative prejudices towards him, Miles has a very acute sense of whether someone is trustworthy or not. He's an excellent judge of character - mostly, with a few exceptions - and moves to surround himself with talented people as quickly as he can. If Miles can’t do it, he’ll find someone who can. Make it happen anyway. And if he still can’t win, then it’s time to shift the battlefield onto ground that he can hold.

Unfortunately, when you’re used to thinking of everything as a battlefield, then everything you do become a battle tactic. Miles really isn’t used to making normal friends. He’s used to collecting people, or growing up with them; he feels the need to trick or trap people into wanting to be close to him. Completely ignoring the thought that he might just be worthy of friendship all on his own merits, without any of the manipulation. Miles likes to make his goals and his friends’ goals just happen to align to keep them as close as possible. This backfires SPECTACULARLY on more than one occasion. It’s ultimately the cause of Sergeant Bothari’s death in Warrior’s Apprentice: Miles, trying to impress his crush, puts Bothari face to face with the woman he raped, with drastic consequences. Later he tries to manipulate his future wife into spending time with him, also with drastic (but less fatal) results. This is the ugly side of Miles Vorkosigan: manipulative because he can’t quite trust himself to be a real person.

It probably comes as no surprise by now that Miles is a person of extremes. Wild, manic upswings are balanced out by massive downturns. Miles-the-twenty-eight-year-old is at the peak of his Admiral Naismith phase: after this he will decline, but for now he’s deep in the throes of all this. When he’s up, he’s pacing and throwing himself at wild goose chases, with no thought as to where that road is going to lead him. Pursuing the Atlas (and other game plots) are both going to fuel this urge as well as give him quite a lot of trouble because of it. If he makes a mission for himself, he’ll hurl himself into it with all his might; without it, he’ll be massively unhappy and spin his wheels. Probably some mixture of the two will be how he handles things in practice. Having the Dendarii in the game with him (namely Taura and Bel) will help focus him, thankfully. They will be his top priority, with everything else radiating outward from there.

The downswings, though, are deeply unpleasant. The downside of being a master strategist means that Miles takes his all of his mistakes exceptionally hard, no matter how difficult they would have been to prevent in the moment. See Dagoola and failing to grab one of the resistance leaders, despite the fact he would definitely have fallen out of the shuttle too if he’d managed to grab her hand. Enough guilt weighing him down and Miles goes into a tailspin that takes a very long time to recover from. Sometimes the two sides of his personality mix in alarmingly destructive ways. When Miles was younger, he reacted to rejection by his peers by going out, riding the wildest horse he could, and having the worst accident he possibly could. Other incidents have prompted suicide attempts of varying severity. Miles can be keenly self-destructive when he wants to be. His saving grace is that he rarely wants to drag anyone else down with him; wanting to save others is what often what drags him back up out of his funks. In game, wanting to guide the Dendarii is going to be his saving grace. He will also extend that to other people as they enter his social orbit.

Miles takes oaths and loyalty incredibly seriously. Part of this is due to the Vor culture, which is based on oaths of fealty; a Vor’s word is binding. Vorkosigans take particular pride in that, so a promise made by Miles is a promise made unto death. This does not mean Miles won’t find loopholes … His reports back to Gregor and his superiors as a member of ImpSec have a number of very interesting omissions most of the time. But never an outright lie. (Until a later book, anyway, and that is an unmitigated disaster.) He also shows exceptional loyalty to taking care of the people he’s responsible for. His first concern after a successful mission with the Dendarii is to make sure medical expenses are paid for - up to and including a new face for a soldier who’d had her face melted off during one of his missions. He’ll be a good count one day. After he’s done being the little Admiral, anyway…

Both Lord Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith are vitally important aspects of himself. Vorkosigan, Miles’ desire to be a productive part of his society and ultimately make it better for people like himself; Naismith, Miles’ expansive and limitless potential, pushed beyond all reasonable limits. Those around Miles comment that being Naismith is being more of himself than Vorkosigan normally allows himself, and that’s true. Naismith is all the extremes of Miles’ normal personality dialed up to eleven. Naismith is also a personality that is permitted to take all the risks that Vorkosigan usually can’t. It’s an adrenaline rush that Miles finds addicting - and will eventually lead to some very bad decisions in later books.

For now, Miles will favor the Naismith aspect of himself heavily not only due to his canon point, but also due to the fact that he’s going to spend the first few weeks of his time in Atlas recovering from cryorevival amnesia. He will still show much of his personality - and more will come back the more he remembers - but the delicate nature of his recovery process will also make him susceptible to suggestion. And with fellow Dendarii members here, who either do not know about his Vorkosigan side (Taura) or will actively hide it from him in the name of safety (Bel), Miles will latch onto his Naismith identity very firmly indeed. He may even begin to disbelieve his Vorkosigan memories if Naismith’s grip on him is too tight. In the meantime, he will be a slightly more subdued version of himself while he’s still regaining his balance. Having to deal with periodic seizures (another side effect of his cryorevival) is also going to put the brakes on some of his worse antics … until he gets too bored to function and wanders off, as he is wont to do.

Powers & Abilities: To put it bluntly, Miles is fucking brilliant. He’s had to be, given his physical frailties; failure to be as bright as possible would have been a death sentence on Barrayar. He is particularly gifted at leading and convincing people to do what he wants. And after talking a whole mercenary fleet into joining up with him, there’s really not much he can’t talk himself into (or out of). This in no way makes him infallible. Hell, the series is as much about him fucking up as it is about him being an amazing admiral. He is just very, very intelligent - and sometimes that backfires spectacularly.

In game, Miles will be constrained by the limits of the scenario itself as well as his poor health (and amnesia) in the wake of his cryorevival. It will take him a while to get back up to really talking to people, and even then, who knows? He will likely end up a strong figure in whatever power dynamics emerge, but not a dominating one.

… in other words, not really a power, exactly, but this is Miles’ special thing that he is especially good at.

Misc: Nothing to speak of!

Sample: http://theatlas-ooc.dreamwidth.org/5986.html?thread=12642#cmt12642 <— Miles and Bel
http://theatlas-ooc.dreamwidth.org/5986.html?thread=177506#cmt177506 <- Miles and Bones