[ Female | 26 | Pink | Martial Arts and Gadgets]
Ω Carnelian Douglass looks like a Nice Young Lady at first glance. She even sounds like one if your conversation remains in the area of small talk, or the latest innovations. Charming, well-spoken, and a snappy dresser within the limits of her fashion budget. She loves science and technology, and believes they can and should be harnessed to break the chains of poverty and drudgery. In fact, one of her goals in life is to literally
invent a way to peacefully liberate humankind from poverty and injustice. After all, new technologies like radio and the automobile are coming into acceptance, and no one has to overthrow the newspapers and carriage manufacturers. She hopes that perhaps something like an integration of the concentrated solar power devices of Augustin Mouchot, the products of George Washington Carver's agricultural practice and applied chemistry, architecture designed to minimize the need for heating and cooling, and liberal employment of labor-saving devices, it will be possible to create a human community that works like a forest: a rich diversity of interrelated nature and function, all working together with no rulers, no bosses and no slave-masters, no coal mines and no systemic poverty, all thriving on sunlight and soil.
Except...that kind of gentle patience is not really Carnelian's strong suit. Spend more time with her, especially if there should happen to be a protest or strike going on, and you'll find that she is a Revolution in sensible shoes. Her childhood hero was Frederick Douglass. Her current role models are Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman. If you should need a fiery speech made, a picket line defended, or someone who's not afraid to stand her ground in the middle of a riot, Carnelian is your girl. She is a passionate Anarchist. Not the bomb-throwing kind though; throwing punches and kicks Wing Chun style, and wielding any handy stick or staff with the techniques of Jogo do Pao is more her style.
She tries to be the calm, calculating mastermind planning ten steps ahead because the oppressors hold all the cards and have to be outsmarted before they can be outfought. Until she sees one too many hungry children, endures one too many insults to her race and gender, until she can't stand the thought of wealthy men extracting their splendor from the misery of countless thousands. Then, her mouth, her fists, or both will get her into trouble. She just can't help it. Her rage never comes out in angry shouts, but in
action. It can emerge in a rousing speech or essay, or expressed gracefully with martial arts. If you see Carnelian behaving like an emotionless robot, that's when you know she's absolutely
furious, and the targets of her hate are about to feel it.
Carnelian does not have an ordinary social life. The demands of long work hours, activism for the Anarchist cause, and her passion for learning and invention leave her no time for it. The only exception to this rule (pre-Agency, if she's not allowed to leave the Facility) happens on Sunday mornings, when she attends a Progressive church as one of its more devout members. She is open-minded when it comes to the differing currents of thought within the Leftist and Progressive movements, advocating solidarity over ideological purity.
She will do her best to work together with the other members of Omega Squad, to the point of acting as peacemaker between them when necessary. As for the upper leadership though, the ones responsible for creating the high-tech slave manacle of neck-implanted bombs? She would slit their throats personally if given half a chance, and calmly watch them die at her feet. So she tries to avoid direct encounters with them whenever possible. Because, how long can she hold herself back, even if her life depends on it?
Sawback is perhaps the most difficult person for Carnelian to figure out. On the one hand, she respects, even admires his strength and honor and the way he seems to want to fight for freedom. But can't he see that he's on the wrong side? That he's being turned into an Overseer for a new, even more total kind of slavery? That the post-Reconstruction United States has stopped being the country Lincoln died for, that the Confederacy has since turned defeat into victory? Will he wait until the Capitalists are implanting neck-bombs into child laborers before he sees that nations and flags are just one more way for the rulers to keep the working class at each other's throats instead of uniting?
Not that she's any easier for Sawback to deal with...
Ω History:
Carnelian was born a poor Black child. So poor in fact, that she didn't even have a last name at birth. Her parents were sharecroppers and former slaves who lived and worked on a plantation outside of Cordele Georgia. She was their seventh and youngest child. During her early childhood, her parents struggled to provide their children with the means to escape the sharecropper's life. Their pride and joy was Carnelian's eldest brother Abraham, who was accepted into
Oberlin College when Carnelian was four years old.
She was a bright and inquisitive girl who took to school like she was born for it. It was a poorly-funded rural school for Black children, and she tore through the contents of its small collection of books and textbooks by the time she was seven. Among them were
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
My Bondage and My Freedom, and
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. The great man's eloquence and fire, and the story of his life inspired Carnelian with a burning passion to be like him even when she still had to struggle with the bigger words in his writings.
For her seventh birthday, her father gave her an unusual, yet precious gift: a tattered newspaper front page dated on the day of her birth, which he had salvaged from the garbage. It featured a drawing of a strange "airship" that had been sighted in the night when her mother was in labor, a part of the Mystery Airship flap of 1897. He had not seen the object himself as he had remained by his wife's side through her labor, but it had become the talk of the town the next day. Eyes alight with joy, Carnelian read the story to him, and for the first time he found out what the newspaper actually said.
From then on, Carnelian took every opportunity she could find to get access to books,
any books, old magazines and newspapers, especially anything to do with science or new inventions. Her mother volunteered to be a cleaning lady at the Carnegie library in Cordele, and brought books and periodicals home for her children whenever she got the chance. Sometimes she was able to write letters to Abraham, and get letters back. Her letters were filled with questions about science and nature. To her great delight and wonder, she found out that even the
White folk didn't know anything to speak of about the airship in the newspaper that was now her most prized possession. Sometimes, when Abraham could afford it, he'd buy a book or periodical and send it home. Carnelian was the most passionate of his younger siblings about books and learning, so most of them tended to be about subjects that interested her. The work of George Washington Carver, the lectures of Nikola Tesla, the solar energy collectors of
Augustin Mouchot, ongoing efforts by inventors working to build practical airships and flying machines...
When the opportunity presented itself, Carnelian's father and older brothers would go fishing as a way to supplement the family's meager diet. Sometimes Carnelian would accompany her father or a brother to help out, and clean the fish. Carnelian was a keen observer of nature. She was struck by the way trout were able to hold position in fast-moving currents while exerting almost no visible effort. When a letter to Abraham failed to yield an answer to the mystery from men of learning, she resolved to figure it out herself. Dripping berry juice into the water in an attempt to observe its flow only spooked the fish, so she whittled a trout-shaped form out of wood and used it for her "experiments." Careful dissections of trout heads resulted in anatomical drawings of their mouths and gill systems that became more accurate as Carnelian grew. She came to believe that trout generated thrust by forcing water through their gills, and that the Coanda Effect helped generate a counter-force to currents as water flowed across the tapered shape of their bodies.
She began to envision an airship built with similar streamlining, utilizing a "turbo-propulseur" similar to the one Coanda used for his
Coanda-1910 aircraft, except that her design called for air to be driven by pistons and forced through the shroud under pushing pressure rather than using an impeller, as she believed that would produce a smooth, non-turbulent airflow and more accurately mimic the effect of water squeezed through a trout's gills. Her plan called for hot air lift, utilizing the waste heat of the craft's engines to heat the air. Of course, building a model to test her hypothesis was far, far beyond her capabilities. She also lacked the mathematical skills and equations necessary to accurately model such a vessel's performance, or even find out for sure if it could "perform" at all.
When Carnelian was 14 years old, tragedy struck. Her brother Abraham came home, diploma in hand and full of dreams of a bright future. The sight of a confident,
educated young Black man was too much for the local Whites, especially when Abraham went to confront his family's landlord for cheating them out of their pay. He didn't come home. Pa went to go find him, and returned with his broken and bloodied body. While her family burst into anguished sobs, Carnelian silently turned, went into the kitchen, and returned with a carving knife. Standing stiff as a statue, she said one word: "Who?" Horrified, Carnelian's mother slapped her, then hugged her fiercely. "Don't you think it, girl! Don' even
think it!"
Later that night, her father came for her, handed her a fishing stick, and took her to the river. Her family didn't go night-fishing very often, but then, nothing was normal about her father's behavior. How could it be? They fished in silence for awhile. Carnelian had not said a word since her query for the names of her brother's murderers. Finally, there was a tug on her line, and she pulled out a big catfish. Any other night, she might have smiled with pride, grateful to God for the food the fish would provide; not on this night.
"That's a mighty good catch girl," her father said, finally speaking. Carnelian nodded solemnly. "Here now, let me see it." Carnelian handed him the line and watched as her father unhooked the fish and threw it onto the ground.
"C'mere and look at this," her father instructed. "I'm gonna show you somethin'...your grandpa showed me. Somethin'...I shoulda paid mind to. If'n I had...my boy'd still be livin'. So you
look, an' you larn it
good! Carnelian did as told, peering down at the fish. It flopped about, its mouth and gills opening and closing, trying to catch the night air. "In them waters," Pa said, "this catfish be right at home. He can swim all he likes. He can eat as he pleases. He can raise a family. The waters is his home. And that there's freedom. You understand?"
Carnelian's face stayed taciturn, with only a hint of a question in her brows. "But look at him now," her father went on. "He out of his home. He done wandered where he shouldn't be. He can't swim. Can't eat here. Can't raise no family. Can't even breathe." Carnelian listened. The fish's glassy eyes caught the pale moonlight, seeming to stare back up at her. The opening and closing of its mouth looked as if it were trying to utter a plea for help. A wave of pity swept over her, and she started to reach for it to pick it up and throw it into the water, but Pa shoved her back.
Suddenly, her father grabbed a heavy rock and brutally bashed the fish's head, again and again and again, until there was only gobbets of flesh and smashed bone. A single eye, like a glass marble, still hung loosely in the remains of a socket torn from its ruined head, accusing her as it started to slowly glaze over. Carnelian was shaking now, eyes riveted on the spread of gore. Her father bent down and grabbed the fish by the tail, then held its ruined body up. He remained at eye level with Carnelian, his face serious and grim.
"Girl, dis fish just like you an' me. And this is what happens when we try to leave our home, looking for things that don't concern us. Dat's why they killed our Abe. 'Cause...'cause I di'in't have the sense to...to keep him on de farm...to keep him in 'is
place. If I'd kept him here on the farm he woulda been all right. We has got to larn dat we ain't like white folks, and never will be, and no amount o' eddycation can make us be, and dat when we gits outten our place dere is gonna be trouble.
"When we go home, we gon' throw out your books an' all. An' you gon' grow up an' find a good man to love, an' raise you some li'l boys an' girls. Whenever you think 'bout readin' or learnin' 'bout stuff that ain't fo' us, or think 'bout fightin' the White folk...you think of yourself as this fish. And what we just did to it, is what White folks do to Negroes. You remember that in life, and it'll serve you best."
Carnelian stared in horror for a moment at the pained resignation in her father's face, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then her expression hardened, and she shook her head.
"Papa...fish don' leave they
place. That ain't why he's dead. Folk come for 'em 'cause they
hungry. An' take 'em
out o' they
place, an' eat 'em, whenever they decide to.
That's what White folk do to us. Ol' man Boatwright keeps th' knuckles of a man he helped lynch right there in th' front window o' his shop, an' ever'body jus walks on by, or goes in t' buy a cut o' meat. If'n I 'stay in my place,' he gon' jus' keep 'em there, an' his son an' his son an' his. An' it ain't
never gon' stop. They ain't
never gon' stop the killin' long as nobody
makes 'em. 'Cause they
hungry.
"It weren't Jethro put Emma in a fam'ly way. He jus'...took the blame so's they could marry an' she don't gotta live in shame. It was th' McCallister boys, an' they friends." Pa's eyes widened in horror. "She told me...when I aks her why...why some o' the White men
look at me the way they do. Like they's
hungry." She looked back down at the fish. "I'll
die 'fore I'm their
meat. I ain't gon' make no baby--
no baby--'till I can make a world where ain't
nobody gon' tell him, tell her where they
place is!" she said, shaking with rage.
After some discussion and argument at home, it was decided that the family would save whatever money they could, going without food as necessary, until they could send their children North one by one, to look for work in the factories. And any money the kids could save, would to toward helping pay the next one's way. Carnelian would go first, even though she was the youngest: none of the others' first thought upon seeing Abraham's body had been to go get a weapon. Pa washed Abraham's bloodied head, dressed him in his best suit, then buried him. Carnelian struggled to hold her hate in, keep her head down, and mind her 'place' until her family could scrape together enough money for a train ticket.
After what seemed like an eternity, Carnelian was put on a train for Chicago with only a spare dress and her small handful of books, one more drop in the tide of the
Great Migration of African Americans headed North. Her resolve to fight injustice had not ebbed in the least, but at this point in her life she resolved to adopt a strategy that reconciled her parents' pleas and orders to stay out of trouble with the revolutionary zeal that burned hot within: she would keep her head down as her parents wanted--until she could develop a thoroughly thought-out, careful
plan.
In Chicago Carnelian found to her dismay that the "free" North had its own system of oppression,
industrial style. She found work in a garment factory: long hours of relentless drudgery in exchange for a pittance. Yet, she also found something she hadn't expected: a mass movement of
allies, led by a new hero and role model,
Lucy Parsons. Carnelian joined the International Workers of the World. When she wasn't working or pursuing her scientific interests, she started to attend rallies and hand out Anarchist literature. Luckily, she was able to stay a step ahead of the cops and avoid arrest.
A little more than a month into her new life, she received an envelope in the mail, sent from Georgia. Expecting a letter from her family, she tore it open and drew out the contents. Inside was a newspaper print of a photograph...of her mother, father, and siblings, all hanging from trees amidst a gathering of well-dressed townspeople in their Sunday best. There was no letter or note, only the picture. She would never know if it had been sent to inflict pain, or warn her against visiting her home.
Carnelian would not allow herself to cry. It was time to learn how to
fight. From among the workers she rubbed shoulders with at the IWW, she sought out anyone who could teach her fighting skills. From a Portuguese immigrant who worked on the docks, she studied Jogo do Pao, a European martial art of the staff. From workers in a Chinese laundry, she learned Wing Chun. She even found an old professor of history from Germany, desperate for work due to anti-German feeling during the War, who was something of an expert on Sigmund Ringeck's early-Renaissance swordsmanship manual,
The Knightly Art of the Longsword.
Years passed. The Great War came and went. Carnelian worked, contributed articles to Parsons' magazine,
The Liberator. Taking the surname Douglass in honor of Frederick, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the Anarchist and Labor movements. Though she dreamed of going to college to study science, tuition was far beyond her means. Furthermore, her goal of creating a patient plan began to give way to wanting the Revolution, and wanting it
now. Carnelian practiced her skills in writing and oratory, gradually eliminating the poor Southern Black patois from her speech. Thanks in part to her martial arts training, she developed poise and grace. She was not ashamed of her sharecropper heritage, and had no qualms about including it in her speeches and articles. It was just a cold, hard fact: people like Frederick Douglass, Lucy Parsons, W. E. B. DuBois and George Washington Carver were able to stand against the tide of racism and even gain a degree of admiration from White folk through articulate speech and upper class dress and mannerisms; people like her family remained beneath contempt.
Class was the invisible prison designed to keep all but a few toiling in squalor forever. To have a chance at freeing the masses, Carnelian would first have to free herself.
Despite her best efforts though, the dream of a working class united against the powerful remained elusive. Black migrants like herself were forced into competition with the local Irish community for jobs and housing, resulting in rising ethnic tensions.
For my White brothers in the Proletariat, I beg you to think on this one question: Whose interest is served when White working men turn their hate toward Negro working men, and Negro working men turn their hatred toward Whites? I can tell you this: it is not the interest of working men! Take a moment and imagine what would have come to pass if somehow, we Negroes were able to find fair work for fair pay in the South, and not a one of us had come North. Do you think the bosses would not simply bring in Italians, or Slavs, or Chinese, or even greater numbers of Irishmen, so as to place you in your present desperate state of fighting over the crumbs from their tables? Of course they would! That is their interest: cheap labor, as cheap as they can get it. As Spartacus knew, the other gladiator thrown into the ring with him was not his true enemy. Rather, it was the men who put gladiators in rings who were the mortal enemies of both. So it is for us as well.
--Carnelian Douglass, "If There Were No Negroes," The Liberator, July 1, 1919
Ethnic tensions came to a boil during the
"Red Summer" of 1919. Caught in the middle of the
Chicago Race Riot of 1919, Carnelian was forced to put her combat skills to use in street battles with ethnic gangs and the police. She was arrested on charges of assault and incitement to riot. The police searched her flat, finding among other things, her most recent design drawings for her airship, and other invention ideas. A military intelligence investigator was brought in. Her interrogators demanded to know how she'd stolen what had to be sensitive military secrets, and where she'd stolen them from. Despite a brutal interrogation, she insisted that she'd created them herself. She was finally allowed to demonstrate that the drawing style was hers, as was the handwriting in the descriptions. Copies of the drawings were sent "upstairs," but no one knew of any secret project that corresponded to the designs. However, the inquiry did bring Carnelian to the attention of the Agency.
The authorities decided that a public trial of an articulate and charismatic young woman could prove to be an embarrassment if the press took her side, or worse, make a martyr of her. With the airship drawings as "evidence," they arranged to have her quietly committed to an insane asylum instead. Surely, a young Negro woman
had to be insane, if she thought she could surpass men like Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin! There, her virginity was taken from her by a psychiatrist experimenting with the idea of "therapeutic" rape as a way to "restore a gentle and pliable spirit of femininity" to women who manifested psychological "imbalances" such as "shrewishness" or "unnatural mannish behaviors."
It was not long though, before exceptionally muscular men in eerily identical black suits came for her, and removed her from the asylum. Induction into the Omega Squad proved to be an even greater horror for Carnelian than the asylum. What terrified her most was the implantable explosives. Not only did she find herself reduced to a new kind of slavery more total than what her parents and ancestors endured, she fears that the implantation process might someday be perfected and used en masse on the working class, creating a permanent tyranny forever safe from the threat of Revolution. This nightmare did come with a consolation prize, however: a chance to study, and interact with the astonishing technologies of the A'vi. Furthermore: who else in the Anarchist movement was in anything remotely resembling a position to do anything about the threat and promise of A'vi science and technology?
After passing certain aptitude tests, Carnelian was given a new identity, and sent to Oberlin College to receive an education in the scientific knowledge of humanity, so that she might have something to contribute to the study of the A'vi and perhaps put her inventive talents to work integrating A'vi and human technology. Three and a half years later, she was brought back to the Facility to begin her service with Omega Squad.
Ω A'vi Crystal:
Ω Suit:
Ω Abilities:
Combat Precog: This is a limited form of precognition that gives Carnelian an ability to dodge and deflect attacks including incoming bullets because she has an intuitive sense that the attack is coming, and what response to make before it comes. It does not give her warnings about anything further in the future (i.e., an attack coming next week), and it can be overwhelmed by weight of fire or continuous rapid attacks that exhaust her.
Enhanced Combat Speed: Carnelian is able to make combat maneuvers at enhanced speed. She cannot use this to
travel, only to increase the number and power of her punches, kicks, and melee weapon attacks per second, and the speed and dexterity with which she can dodge incoming attacks. It can make the
start of an acrobatic combat maneuver faster. For example, if she jumps into a backflip to avoid an attack, the jump is faster, but normal physics kicks in as she starts into the backflip, so that she can't blur-backflip across a room.
Touch of a Feather: This is an ability to alter her effective mass, kinetic energy, and friction in close proximity to other matter. She can use this to do things like bound up through thin tree branches and leaves as if they could support her weight, run up walls or bound back and forth from wall to wall, or drift safely down from a great height so long as she is able to hold a hand no more than two inches away from a wall, column, thick tree trunk or other source of mass. The "borrowings" and exchanges of kinetic energy, mass, and friction must be "repaid" on a fairly short time scale. This means that Carnelian can run several steps up a wall before needing to make a new bound, but she cannot "spider-climb" or hang in place.
Ω Armament:
Scepter of Might: This is a rod, about the size of a relay race baton that attaches to her belt. When she draws it and enters a combat stance, it rapidly transforms into the appropriate melee weapon or weapons. It can become any non-mechanical martial arts weapon: staff, longsword, rapier and main gauche, dual arming swords, spear, javelin, and so on. It cannot become a projectile weapon or mechanical weapon like a chainsaw.
- Kinetic energy bonus: When Carnelian strikes with her weapon, it hits as if it is wielded by someone of much greater strength. As a staff, it can knock an opponent across a room, smash through wooden (or comparable) walls, batter through brick (this may take more than one hit depending on the thickness, strength, etc. of the wall), and so on.
- Sharpness and lightness: in bladed configurations, the blades are composed of the A'vi crystalline material employed in Elric's wings, so that the blades are exceptionally sharp, quick, and nimble in the hand.
- Vaulting: If she is using a polearm weapon (staff, spear, halberd, etc.), Carnelian can use her kinetic energy bonus to launch herself through the air and rapidly close distance to an opponent, make a quick getaway, or make a superhuman high jump.
Laser Pistol and Stun Knife: Carnelian is equipped with the standard laser pistol and stun knife.
Ω Special Equipment:
Grappling Hook: An ultra-compact glove-mounted grappling hook with a cable woven from carbon nanotubes. The cable is thin enough and strong enough to function as a garotte, or string across a road to "clothesline" a pursuing opponent.
Omni-Tool: This is how the A'vi would make a Leatherman multi-tool. Using the same technology as her Scepter, the Omni-Tool can transform into any handheld tool, including power tools (drill, screwdriver, Dremel, grinder, saw). The power tools are fairly modest in size and power, i.e, they can cut through a chain or padlock, but not through a construction-grade I-beam or suspension bridge cable (not in a reasonable period of time, anyway).[/hr]
