Sapient Earth (Call for interest, OOC)

[ardaron]

I'm battling writer's block at the moment, so I've decided to try to get a roleplay of my own started to maybe help turn the battle in my favor.  En garde, you cubic heathen! 

This idea's been rolling around in my head for a while now; it's somewhat vaguely inspired by DMFA, but it wound up pretty different.  Tell me what you think.  Let's see . . . maybe about four people would be good to start with?


The year was 2039.  A revolutionary discovery was made; a complete mapping of the human genome.  The genes were found that control such things as weight, body shape, intelligence, and everything else.  This turned out to be much more than just a scientific breakthrough, as people were willing to pay good money for ways to fine tune their own genetics; finally, there was an effortless way to be smart, beautiful, and whatever else a person could possibly wish to be!

It seemed like a wonderful idea.  Find the genes that controlled posture, body shape, intelligence, perfect hair, and attractive voices, and mass-market it with a genetic bonding agent that would attach the new DNA to a person's genome.  The stuff was dubbed "Perfection", and it sold by the ton to almost anyone who could afford it, despite its cost.  Critics were few; Perfection seemed to have no side-effects of any sort, and it was shown conclusively not to be dangerous in any way.  The bonding agent the scientists found, being a virus, was completely organic; there was no risk of environmentally hazardous leaks, because it didn't affect anything except humans.

Or so it was thought.

As it turned out, there was, in fact, a dangerous flaw in the so-called "Perfection."  It was activated by a specific section of "trigger DNA" that was supposedly unique to humans.  Anything that did not have this trigger DNA would be completely unaffected by the virus.  But what the designers of Perfection didn't foresee was that some small percentage of animals would, by the random chance of genetic mutation, have the trigger DNA somewhere in the sections of their genome that didn't code for anything.  The virus, after a series of supposedly harmless spills, began to find its way to these animals, with frightening results.

These animals, until then having been ordinary, unintelligent creatures, found themselves with human intellect, and an animalistic mockery of human form.  With only a few exceptions, unaffected animals rejected their mutated kin; even mothers abandoned their now-alien young.  Many of these altered animals continued to live in the wild until they were found by humans; the lucky ones (usually the cuter, younger ones) were found by kind families who raised them in the ways of humans and taught them to speak language, but many were not so lucky.  Many were feared for their half-human, half-animal forms, but as more and more of the creatures appeared and were found, it was realized that these were not isolated incidents.  Termed "sapients", these creatures were eventually found to result from the Perfection virus.  Official production of Perfection was halted immediately, but black-market suppliers continued to manufacture the virus illegally.

Now it is the year 2070.  Sapients have become an undeniable part of society.  They face some amount of the prejudice that any novel social group goes through, in this case augmented by the fact that they express varying degrees of humanity, both in form and personality.  Some are almost more animal than human, and most still retain much of their animal instincts.  Sapients typically look like anthropomorphic versions of whatever animal they were, ranging from mammals to reptiles to birds, all the way down to invertebrates.  Occasionally the Perfection virus interacts in weird ways with an animal's coloring, so it's not unknown to see sapients with color patterns that aren't found in nature.

In an attempt to clean up their own mess, many of the scientists who formerly worked on Perfection are now looking for a sapient 'cure.'  Some progress has been made, but no fully functioning, permanent sapient-to-human treatment yet exists.  There are medications that will temporarily alter a sapient's appearance to human, but they have to be taken daily, and they can have severe side-effects.  Progress on a more workable cure is slow, because there is so much variety among sapients, and there isn't enough human DNA present for most cures to latch onto.

Much more frightening is the idea of a cure that works the other way.  They were animals once, why not turn them into animals again, the reasoning goes.  The reverse-cure would be much easier from a technical standpoint, and a more palatable option to most anti-sapient racists.  Of course, nearly all sapients are very firmly against such an idea, so heated debates rage.

As with any form of prejudice, there are always people on both sides.  Not all humans want to turn sapients back into animals; in fact, most of them are only mildly creeped out by them, if at all.  And, of course, there are the people at the other end of the spectrum from the racists.  Several sapient-rights activists (and a few general eccentrics) have found ways to alter their appearances (either genetically or otherwise) to appear as sapients themselves.  Some claim that it's a form of anti-prejudice protest, but others say that they simply wish to emulate their chosen animal.  Sometimes jokingly termed 'pseudo-sapients' or 'anibees' (a conjugate of 'animal' and 'wannabee'), these people usually identify more readily with sapients than with humans.

Thanks to lingering traces of the Perfection virus in the environment (despite clean-up efforts), new sapients will still occasionally appear now and then, and are typically met with a good deal less fear than a few years ago; most new sapients are able to eventually find good adoptive families.  Some sapients have also come into being as the children of existing sapients, but this is rare, as sapients cannot interbreed with any other species of sapient other than their own, nor with humans.

Notes:  Possible characters for this roleplay should be limited to humans, perfects (those humans who were altered by the Perfection virus), sapients, and pseudo-sapients.  Humans are logically the most common, followed by perfects (perfects are relatively rare because the Perfection virus was never cheap, and then production was stopped; perfects make up about 15% of the population, and are almost exclusively upper-class), and sapients (they make up about 10% of the population).  Pseudo-sapients, like perfects, usually have to be upper-class to be able to afford the genetic treatments, but some lower-class citizens have found other methods of self-alteration.  Altogether, pseudo-sapients make up less than 1% of the population.


I'm not sure exactly where the roleplay should take place, although I'm leaning towards "mall" for some reason.  But I'm open to suggestions.

[ardaron]

I know that double posting is terrible and awful and bad, but may the double-post-smiting-lords have pity on me, for I have a good reason (I think).  I wanted to post my character bio, and I didn't want to add it to that first post because the first post is already so ungodly-ly long that I think it may be scaring people away.

That said, here's my character.  Don't hurt me.


Name:  Caedris
Species:  Sapient (rough-scaled bush viper)
Age:  38 (snake 10, sapient 28)
Appearance:  Caedris has tannish brown, rough scales with no particular markings.  He's fairly tall, and of about average build; not skinny, but not incredibly buff either.  His tail drags on the ground, and he usually only lifts it up when he's surprised or angry.  His eyes, which have slitted pupils, are a bright green color.  His face protrudes like a snake's, making him look more like a snake than like a human, and he has no hair.

History:  Caedris was one of the sapients who has kept his name from his animal days.  He lived the first part of his life in a tiny glass tank in a zoo; a boring existance.  When the Perfection virus affected him, the changes came slowly, enough so that he was removed from his tank before he outgrew it, and was sedated and rushed to an animal hospital.  After all, the zoo-keepers saw their snake growing arms and legs; obviously, something was horribly wrong with it (this was before animal-sapient transformations had become a very common phenomenon).  Caedris was out cold throughout his transformation, but when he woke up, everything was different.  He had arms, legs, and most bizarre of all to him, a sense of self.  He was awake, those were his arms and legs.  It might have been like waking up from a lifelong dream, but Caedris was a creature who had never before dreamed.

Once the zookeepers figured out what had happened, they took care of Caedris and raised him to fit in with humans, teaching him to speak english and all that.  Even though they were kind to him, he seemed incapable of returning their kindness.  Emotions were something so foreign to the viper that he seemed to resent everything that his caretakers did for him.  As he grew older, he struck out on his own at the first chance he had.

Personality:  Caedris does not like humans.  It isn't really clear why, but that much is fact; it may have been something that happened to him as a snake, or maybe he's seen one too many instances of prejudice, or, most likely, he simply finds humans and their propensity for emotion as 'creepy' as most humans find him.  He doesn't particularly like mammalian sapients too much either, but he tends to be ever-so-slightly nicer to them than to humans.  Other reptilian sapients are the only group he's at all considerate to, because at least some of them know what it's like to be a solitary reptile in a social mammals' world.

Other:  Caedris had his venom glands removed shortly after he turned sapient (perhaps another reason to resent the humans?), so, although it is still rather instinctual for him to lunge at certain threats, his bite is harmless.

Caedris is one of the few sapients who is not dead-set against a reverse-cure.  He isn't particularly in favor of it, he's just undecided.  He can see the merits of either way, from his own standpoint.  He is, however, set against a normal cure.  He does /not/ want to become a human.

Caedris is actually only semi-cold-blooded.  His temperature fluctuates more than your average human's, but it tends to stay within safe bounds unless the outside temperature is really extreme.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Double-posting as a GM in an OOC thread - or an IC thread, for that matter - in this board is allowed.

Provided you don't go too far overboard, and all. :-)


After all, the GM has to be able to halt the play, or push it onwards, or query things, etc... The other time we'll not frown on double-posting is when there's a significant delay between the posts - it's more a guideline than a rule, per se...

[Dezdemona Thanatos]

I'd like to join in on this. The plot sounds very intriguing. =^.^=



Name:  Kara
Species:  Sapient (Sugar Glider)
Age:  27 (Sugar Glider 5, Sapient 22)
Appearance:  She has long silver hair and fur with black streaks, a long bushy tail and can stretch the skin between her legs and arms out far enough to be able to glide with. Normally that's not too visible though. She has solid black eyes and her face is still shaped like a sugar gliders and less like a humans. She also small. She stands at roughly four and a half feet tall.

History:  When she was still young the truck that was transporting her to a petstore crashed and she was set loose in the wild. She spent quite a few years out in the wild before she came across one of the spills. Slowly she started changing and eventually she got the shape that she has now. She made her way to a city and was taken in by a kind family. She has since set out on her own.

Personality:  She's not as extroverted as many sugar gliders are and tends to keep to herself a bit. That's mostly due to the fact that she lived most of her life without being around other sugar gliders. She's a very warm and caring person however. Once she gets to know someone she tends to be more outgoing with them.

Other:  She is in fact a marsupial and as such does have a pouch. It's not visible however and she doesn't often mention it.