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player information
Name: Tricks
LJ: parametric
Age: 22
Contact: fail hero @ AIM (friends only)
Current character(s): n/a

character information
Name: Sollux Captor
Age: 13 sweeps/around 28 human years
Canon: Homestuck
Timeline: Some time after being captured by the Empire and forced to be the auxiliary Helmsman for the Battleship Condescension

Suitability: n/a
Appearance: n/a

History: Once upon our time, before our universe was created, there was the universe that seeded ours. And in this universe there was a little planet called Alternia. Now, this universe had been restarted once; on its first time around, Alternia had been peaceful, near idyllic. Too peaceful, as when the time came to destroy the universe and seed a new one in its ashes, the heroes chosen from this planet's ranks were too pacific to do what had to be done. Sweaters are rumored to have been involved. (Very comfortable sweaters.) The failed heroes restarted their universe to allow for an environment more conducive to creating heroes, and consigned themselves to living in their planet's past, forgetting their old lives contributing their genetics and mission to the new group that would arise this time.

Alternia turned out really, really different this time, as the heroes hadn't realized they had been making something of a Faustian Bargain. This time trolls were stratified by ranks of blood color, or hemocaste, with the long-lived purple and blue-bloods at the top and the psychically gifted yet weaker, short-lived and susceptible "rustbloods" at the bottom. Naturally, this being a rather unhappy arrangement for most, rebellions broke out quite a bit, but one was marked by being led by a former failed hero, who had somehow remembered Alternia as it was, and decided he didn't like the bargain and would try to change things. We won't dwell on this much, dear readers, but one of the bosom companions of this would-be messiah was a powerful telekinetic mage called the Psiioniic. By a happy not-so-coincidence, he was another failed hero, and though he never remembered their previous lives he believed his friend's teachings fervently. And then the rebellion was put down, and he was captured, and then became the Helmsman, forced to turn himself into a biological machine telekinetically flinging the Empress's flagship far through space. The Helmsman, but not so much of a chance, also happened to be the ancestor and progenitor of one Sollux Captor, Our Subject Of Today.

Centuries passed, Sollux and his fellow heroes-in-waiting were born- and here, something went wrong in the mechanics of the universe. The meteors delayed, never came; Sollux never wrote the game that would get him and his friends through the destruction of their planet. Instead Alternia went on, and as it did the trolls approached maturation. Sollux had been happy in his childhood to simply dismiss everything, wrap himself up away from the world in codes and machinery, tell everyone to go fuck themselves (particularly after the unfortunate death of his friend Aradia, after which he determined never to go near the ruins she'd been fascinated by again). Now, though, they were rapidly approaching the point where they would be expected to serve the Empire, as adults. Sollux knew the fate laid out for telekinetics of his kind, and moreover, he knew that his closest friends - possibly more than friends - Karkat and Feferi were prime candidates for culling instead of enlistment. Karkat was of the same mutant shade as the ancestral messiah Sollux's progenitor had followed, and as heir to the imperial throne Feferi would be murdered the instant the Empire got her away from her monstrous lusus. Sollux would be safe, if enslaved; they would be cruelly murdered and their bodies strung up as examples for the crime of existing.

So Sollux devised a plan. Stupid, self-sacrificing, and taking up his mind to the point of being all-consuming; in other words, typical Sollux. He built a spacecraft, hacked the current Rebellion with much toil and found coordinates to go to, and worked feverishly to the point of near-destroying his health and sanity. He was working against a time limit, he didn't dare to stop. With just a few days to spare before the arrival of the enlistment officers - and Imperial Drones to collect the first helping of the new adults' genetic material for a new generation - he completed his project, convinced his friends to go with him, and blasted off at full tilt in their light, sleek and very fast little cruiser.

Even with that, the Empire caught up to them fast. Dodging shots and piloting frantically, Sollux told Karkat and Feferi to get to the escape vessels and wait for him while he programmed the autopilot to divert the attention of the ships chasing them. That done, he hooked himself into the miniature Helmsman system he hadn't told either of them about, programmed their little pod with the correct coordinates to the Rebellion this time, and with some sleight of hand and clever masking of what he was doing flung them off on their way as his own little empty ship kept dodging and weaving. Stupid, yes, but he'd known he would never escape without the Empire coming after him, and this way he'd know his friends were safe. He thought it was worth the trade-off. Probably.

Sollux was captured, of course, and with his talents so exposed by his daring escape attempt, was brought to the Empress as a prize. He was installed in her ship as an auxiliary Helmsman to increase the speed of the Battleship Condescension, and the scientists talked of designing a light and speedy attack ship for Her personal use with him as the pilot when he wasn't assisting the primary Helmsman. Sollux, meanwhile, discovered what had become of his ancestor - and the life they both were expected to live, even worse than he'd imagined. They were both the Empress's playthings, now, when they were resting from their light-jumps and drifting through space, and she expected to be well entertained.

If not for the other Helmsman, Sollux would probably have gone insane like that, forced to expand an empire he did not believe in and suffer the whims and desires of a cruel woman he despised. But the former Psiioniic encouraged him and kept his spirit alive. They were not allowed to communicate directly on matters not related to their functions without being disciplined, but Sollux soon realized that coded in the "junk data" produced as an offload from their biomech-integrated brains were messages from his ancestor, and since they were working at the pace of computers they could end up having conversations at only a slightly slower rate than normal once he caught on to how to do it. Through his ancestor Sollux learned how to cope with the stress and horror of his situation, and eventually even partitioned his mind, one part performing its Helmsman function with the other, the core personality, overseeing and thinking to itself independently. Through Sollux, the older Helmsman learned of his old friend's descendant, and the imperial heiress seemingly determined to carry on their revolutionary ideals.

As the sweeps wore on the primary Helmsman became determined to help his descendant escape the life he'd been doomed to; Sollux, though dubious of whether it could succeed, went along with it, and in the closed-off sections of his mind tried to work on finding some way to contact the Rebellion. They'd learned that Feferi and Karkat were alive and part of the Rebellion, and that gave Sollux hope, but even then, even if they managed contact, wasn't it a hopeless cause trying to get him out of the fastest, most heavily fortified battleship in the universe?
Personality: Sollux is...complicated. Extremely complicated, and with good reason. On the surface he seems to be a very chill guy with awesome hacking skills and a pair of sweet-ass shades, with a healthy side of being kind of a dick to people. He deals with others relatively calmly, with a few lazy insults thrown into the average conversation and an edge of "you're kind of an idiot, but whatever." Even the people he genuinely likes get this treatment. On the other hand, that's just Sollux - if he really doesn’t give a damn about you or just doesn't like you, he probably just won't talk to you. For example, in the canon timeline, when given the opportunity to talk to the human kids who created the “scratch” (you know, that thing that made the trolls' game completely FUBAR) later in the timeline, he flat-out refuses and continues to do so every time the other trolls ask him about it. So yeah, he’d rather tease you if he likes you or ignore you if he doesn’t - sounds like a pretty together sort of guy, right?

Wrong. That calm exterior is only his outward personality. On the inside, Sollux has...issues. Lots of them. During his first conversations in Hivebent it becomes abundantly clear that despite his calm demeanor he's actually very sensitive and emotional. Karkat even bitches about how Sollux tends to get upset about certain things in their very first conversation, which admittedly Karkat is wont to do anyway. Related to his "bifurcated" theme, Sollux also tends to have intense mood swings, becoming sad, angry, depressed or overconfident by turns, and when his friends try to talk to him about it he gets very sensitive and asks to avoid the subject, which he says he's been working on. Despite his aloof manner, he also cares about others deeply - not only is he willing to get himself and his friends killed to save Alternia despite displaying a deep resentment of how troll society works, but he even puts the importance of his own life to save their princess, though they've never met before, and is willing to die in agony as a result. In this AU he is so devoted to his friends, in fact, that he sacrifices himself to the fate he's most afraid of - that of an enslaved Helmsman for the intergalactic fleets - for the sake of helping the people he cares for most, Karkat and Feferi, avoid being killed. He might act like a distant, uninterested asshole, but Sollux has a lot of emotions boiling under the surface, and they mess about with his life quite a bit.

Why such a mess of emotions, though? Upon peeling back another layer - Solluxes are like onions! - we discover another mess that makes Sollux's life hell, and in fact even affects his grip on his sanity. See, Sollux has mind powers. Scary mind powers. And as a result of this, he hears the voices of the dead and imminently deceased, as well as having horrible visions and nightmares that not even sopor slime can ease entirely (it's a troll thing). This understandably makes him prone to occasionally flipping his shit. His psionic freakouts are bad, too, really bad, like leveling surrounding architecture bad. Add to this the fact that one of the other trolls in Homestuck previously took control of his mind and forced him to murder his presumably then-girlfriend Aradia with his powers (...she got better, kind of) and...well. Suddenly his fit of rage when one of the other characters attempts to communicate with him inside his mind becomes quite a lot more understandable. To make things even more amazingly terrible for him, Sollux's psychic powers make him a prime target to be enslaved and turned into basically a living computer and navigation system, forced to help the Empire go out and conquer in all directions. Basically, his powers guarantee him a shitty life any way you slice it - he's pretty much earned a good freakout or twenty.

So, when viewed in the context of his crazy psychic freakouts, a lot about Sollux becomes clear. He's irritable and a bit of an ass because he has these voices and powers pestering him in his head all the time and wearing down his patience with everything else; he tends to act calm-natured because he wants to keep his emotions and thus his tendency towards psionic destruction under wraps. Maybe without all that he'd be more open about himself, who knows.

Buuuut despite this soft fluffy interior, at some point even Sollux has to give up, and at his current canon point that time seems to have come. After all, he's now been a captive of the Empress for a very long time, now approaching four sweeps (about nine years). He's been beaten down, used, abused, with barely a hope left of things getting better, and he's become accustomed to it as a fact of his life. His ancestor tries to encourage him, but even then Sollux has seen how the Psiioniic's life has gone for himself, and it makes him rather despairing of his own situation.

It's okay, he'll get better. We hope.

Powers & Abilities:
-Psionics: telekinetic abilities, which can also be focused into actual energy such as eye lasers or a charge for machinery; obviously this will be weakened since he could fling the whole station lightyears through space if he felt like it otherwise
-Hacking: apeshit bananas with every kind of machine and programming and encryption ever, and if he meets something new figures it out very quickly; canonically he can write code that alters the universe
-Genius: again, he hacks all the things within five minutes of meeting them and writes code that alters the universe canonically. He's also basically configured his brain to be a computer during his time as a Helmsman.
-Beekeeping: ....beehives are computers to him. He's good at bees.
-Connecting to computers: he's built for getting wired into machinery these days, so he can probably hook into some things.
-Navigation: good at figuring out stars and space from his time as a Helmsman/navigator/engine
-Hermaphrodite: ...Not exactly an ability, but might as well note it down. Please also note that Sollux and his ancestor are unique in this in his continuity.
-Extended life: The effects of this will fade eventually since he's away from the Condesce, but for the moment Sollux ages much more slowly, and in fact still looks to be around nineteen or twenty.

Is there anything from your character's home that you would like to exist here?
Possibly Sollux's beehives? They are manned by special psychic bees and serve as computers, and produce a substance called mind honey.

posting samples
Third-Person Sample:


what the fuck is this. where am i. i
fuck its her its Her isnt it
this isnt the ship they found out im going to die im going to worse than die im going to



must want something it must want something
fuck this is a simulator they're trying to get something out of me
did they figure it out
is the old man here fuck did they take him away did they hurt him fuckfuckfuck



they want whats in my head then
fuck them fuck all of them
they cant get Me
ive fooled them sweeps i can do it longer
maybe im lucky
maybe this is just tests for that new stupid ship She wants
let them do whatever the fuck they want they wont get Me



no they know they cant know nonono they cant get it
they cant get it
please
cant

And then there is nothing.

First-Person Sample:

Helm2man 2tatu2 2atii2factory
proce22or2 operatiing at normal capaciity
unable two detect 2y2tem: Battle2hiip Conde2cen2iion
query: purpo2e of 2iimulatiion?

[ He doesn't dare to speak openly, even in what he assumes is a simulation. He's supposed to be broken. Instead he codes his real message deep within the data of the transmission, readable only by the most skilled hackers. ]

hey, old man, you iin here two?
what'2 2he planniing for u2 thii2 tiime?
or do ii not even want two know.
fuck 2he'2 probably bored agaiin.
ii hate when Her IImperiiou2 Paiin iin the A22 get2 bored, 2he get2 two creatiive.

helloooooo earth two priimary helm2man wake up a22hole quiit daydreamiing and check the fuck iin
ii 2wear iif you're not iin here ii am goiing two kiick your a22
metaphoriically
2ome 2hiit liike that





fuck, ju2t tell me you're ok.
ii really hope 2he diidn't 2iingle me out for thii2.
ii have a hard enough tiime wiith iit when you're here.

Links:

Heyo, leave your crit on Sollux here.

Also, permissions post - if you'd like me to not tag you in trolltext or not phonetically spell out the lisp in his speech with you, feel free to ask.