Auslosen App
OOC:
player name: Ceti
player age: 27
player contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
heliel
current characters: Lana Rivera:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flickeringreflection
ac link: N/A
who invited you: Remibutts
CANON IC INFORMATION:
character name: Ethan Travers/FlickerFox
canon & medium: OC
species & appearance: Human. Ethan is roughly average height, with a very pale complexion and bright green eyes. His hair’s kept dyed a greenish-white, and he dresses like a tech geek. He has twelve pieces of tech implanted in his body – EntraDermaLinks, or EDLs, which are largely hidden beneath clothes.
age: 19
world info: Earth, year 3414. Tech is highly-advanced, relying on integrated paneling and (mostly) solar and water power. There’s a single networking mesh that defines the entirety of the internet and all data flow, and physical crime has become a smaller (and more unacceptable) course, compared to cybercrime.
history: Ethan Travers wasn’t much of note, in his early years. Certainly, he was found to have incredible abilities as a techie early on, but that didn’t set him aside from the rest of the world. After all, technology was equivalent to life where he grew up.
By the time he was ten, Ethan had started on the path that would take him to where he is today – being a weak-bodied young man, he was frequently hospitalized for injuries and sickness. In the hospitals, he started to experiment with their network, learning how to dig into protected files and eventually getting caught due to his ID chip. After that embarrassment, it was somewhat like child’s play for him to learn how to scramble said ID, and by the time he was thirteen, he was delving into things most adults couldn’t dare to reach.
It kept his family in a good position, of course, as he was careful how he used it. The data he brought back was never kept where one of them could be implicated, and he never sold it. Instead, he supported his family almost by himself when he started creating integrated HUD designs and technological advancements.
At thirteen, he learned about Persilico Dolvaa and the RIPPER program. More specifically, the CEO invited him to join the company as an information-runner, explaining to him what it is RIPPER does and why. Ethan hardly had to search to dig up the hidden facts, and almost immediately thereafter, he signed on with RIPPER. In order to keep his anonymity as strong as possible, he designed a HUD and setup that would allow him to use a computer-generated voice in place of his own, and so (in conjunction with his feminine avatar) most people actually assume he’s a woman. Even in person, if he’s speaking in an official capacity with a coworker or employer, he uses that same audio tech to speak with.
Since then, he became one of the largest assets of the foundation, creating most of the individualized HUDs each agent uses by hand. At first, he was little more than the premiere information reaper – he refused, at that time to do “hardware” jobs (essentially the assassination jobs RIPPER takes on, because Dolvaa is of the belief that some crimes are unforgivable and some people simply need to be taken out of the equation).
After a year, the corruption of their world hit him hard. His parents were lost in an accident – which, when he dug a little deeper, was no accident at all. It hardened him some, but his sister – Lilly – kept him grounded. Getting angry, she always said, wouldn’t help him to uncover things. He shouldn’t give himself up because they were retaliating. He retreated into the kindness of her words, and the music he’d always been partial to. It was then that his case of Logic Amalgam started to come to bear; his mind stopped processing things in the most human manner and began overlaying them with the pure logic of a machine, almost.
So it was, until he was sixteen. He’d gained notoriety, in the form of his Avatar – the virtual-net body he pilots, given the name FlickerFox – and that had gained him quite the number of enemies, especially within the companies he stole information from. They used his abilities against him, implanted a virus of a sort in the data he was carrying, and used that to find him.
More specifically, they found his home and kidnapped his sister. Then they contacted him and forced him to watch her murder, knowing he could never get anyone to believe it was. Without her as an anchor, he became more and more jaded – and more accepting of Dolvaa’s idealism that some people just didn’t deserve to live. He also became reckless, and convinced Dolvaa to agree to experiment on him to learn the limitations of the human body when accepting EDLs. Some would expect that Dolvaa stopped implanting – after twelve installs and the second time Ethan developed a case of Calamity Trigger – only because he didn’t want to lose a valued employee, but the man was, in fact, legitimately worried about him. Ethan himself, on still being alive after all of it, was somewhat embarrassed by the sheer amount of metal that now stuck out of his body.
Ethan’s reputation only became more fearsome in the three years that followed, as FlickerFox became not just an information risk, but a physical risk as well. Where once was a careful, balanced threat, they now faced an angry enemy with nothing left to lose. GRAFT, a company opposing RIPPER, sent many agents out against him (and indeed, against most RIPPER agents), but only one could even come close to his skill and ferocity. That remains true even now, and typically PistolPanic is the reason behind any improvements Ethan makes, to both himself and his avatar.
powers:
- As with most people who can operate EDLs, Ethan has the strength of will to share his mentality/consciousness with his created virtual avatar.
- Ethan’s mental capacity is almost superhuman, to the point that operating all twelve of his EDLs (the highest publicly known number of them installed in one person is 4) simultaneously is taxing, but not impossible.
- He can, similarly with RIPPER/GRAFT agents, use his force of will to manifest his avatar into real space in a pinch. Because of his frailty, this is somewhat more taxing than it is on others.
- He understands people in something of a musical way – the actions of others present themselves in a specific sort of pattern. IE: someone like BellWraith feels like their personality is staccato, whereas he viewed his sister as having a personality more like a serenade.
personality: Calling Ethan a quiet individual is a bit of an understatement. Even if you were to ignore the fact that he basically never speaks directly, what talking he does is often simple and to the point. At least, when it doesn’t encompass a lot of technical jargon. “Words often fall short in the course of action” is how he explained it once, to Persilico Dolvaa himself. Still, he knows the value of them, and will speak lightly and calmly in appropriate instances. His views seem skewed, to some, but none can truly pinpoint why nor discredit the validity of them.
There aren’t many that he puts his faith in, either. Outside of the close circle of his family, Ethan is courteous but distant to most. In order to get close enough for him to start to trust (and subsequently get him to admit things to)someone, they have to prove above and beyond that their interest is honest and true. Some would say this requires every ideal they have to be in line with his – he would disagree, because in his mind, there isn’t a single person who truly agrees with everything any other person says. “It’s in what we can reconcile in others that determines their position within our circle.” That’s been his view since long before he lost his family and became jaded.
In work relationships, though, there are few who share more loyalty than Ethan. Even at the cost of his personal health, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect his allies and the work he does. That’s a seemingly unchangeable trait in his life, and he has taken – more than once – excessive damage in order to get an ally out of the fray safely. This persists despite any personal reservations he has toward an ally – there have been occasions when he’s worked with BellWraith, who is brutal to the point of actively triggering Fox into a near panic attack, where he’s nonetheless stayed behind to ensure none of the faster, stronger avatars could interfere with escape or acquisition.
Outside the digital world, when he *does* form attachments, he forms them strongly enough that he would risk everything for them. This extends almost exclusively to Dolvaa and a very select group of RIPPER agents, though he hasn’t met the latter in person thus far.
He’s also prone to bouts of quiet reflection and brooding. Because of the way he thinks, this is somewhat troublesome – there are times where his human emotions clash with his logical thinking, like when he’s upset that an ally has been injured. He doesn’t believe that humanity has much good left in it, and so he’s usually looking for something to pick out of his daily interactions to solidify that idea.
Similarly, perhaps because he’s seen so much in his life, Fox is very slow to anger. His anger starts as a quiet irritation, a roiling beneath the surface that many miss thanks to the fact that he doesn’t speak, and it takes a lot of prodding in order to make any reaction deeper than that. When he does move past irritation, he tends to lash out with expressions even before words. Though he’s got a decent grip on expressing his emotions as a whole, his face in particular has many subtle, unconscious changes that indicate his mood at any given time.
AUSLOSEN IC INFORMATION:
character name: Ethan Travers
appearance: Ethan appears largely the same as his canon data, with the exception of the missing EDLs. His complexion is very slightly less ashen, since he lacks the experimental installs that further strengthen his harrowed look.
age: 19
history: Ethan Travers was a nobody for the first sixteen years of his life. It wasn’t a particularly good beginning, but it was serviceable enough. Born to a computer engineer mother and software programmer father, it was perhaps the obvious reaction for Ethan to grow into his computer-related hobbies.
Of course, that was only true if you ignored the fact that he surpassed both of his parents in engineering and programming before he was a teenager. In a place like Auslosen, that should have made him both a commodity and a high-profile individual. Thanks to his own efforts to keep his anonymity, though, he went largely under the radar and the name he used as a front got all the attention. Which was all the better, since it was a dangerous world out there for anyone talented.
At fifteen, he was scouted by a large-scale company as – originally, anyway – an IT professional. He’d taken their entire system and basically turned it upside down, after all, breaking it in every single way he could think of and proving the only one who could put it back together and make it function was him. That was his life, subtly working his way up the ladder into designing their entire infrastructure and the defense programs that kept it safe.
Safety had a cost, though. Even beyond his salary – less than he deserved but more than enough to maintain his somewhat indulgent lifestyle – having a secure database meant you were more noticeable to hackers. More interesting, more *profitable*. He saw these facts, and brought them up to his employers more than once. Whenever things got out of hand, he would rewrite code and strengthen it himself.
And then it happened. ‘It’ was a prestigious hacker, one who went by the name PistolPanic. Ethan didn’t know then, doesn’t even really know *now* what would make someone choose such a bizarre name, but that wasn’t really the important part. PistolPanic proved to be the one person who could worm his way into every failsafe Ethan had designed. It didn’t matter how intricate, how subtle and delicate the keys. Hell, it didn’t even matter when he was *there* to provide countermeasures himself.
When the data was confirmed stolen, Ethan got pulled into a meeting. He knew what it was for, of course. His mainframe, his reputation. It didn’t matter. “No mainframe can be completely safe.” He’d said. “We can’t possibly predict the moves and abilities of every person on the planet.” That didn’t matter, either. The fact was this: they had Ethan’s work now. They knew how to make it work, on a base level, and that there was only one person who had hacked it? That meant it worked well enough that it would keep out enough people to provide for them.
He was told none of that, of course. Even when they fired him, it was because of his failure to prevent the break-in. They kept his framework and he went home with a measly severance check and a whole lot of spite. Two years of working at that company, and one person – one lousy asshole whose name he didn’t know and face he couldn’t *find* - had taken it all away.
In the two years that followed that, Ethan has adjusted his actions. He now supports himself largely on freelance security gigs. Specifically, he takes any gig that makes him believe he’ll come close to PistolPanic, such that he might get his revenge. Every time, he’s come up just short and had to regroup. It’s practically a grudge by now, hidden behind the handle “Foxhunt”. If PistolPanic knows *who* keeps tailing him, Ethan doesn’t know.
personality: Ethan is largely the same as he once was, with a few major exceptions. He still has his family, and lacks a lot of the blatantly jaded qualities of his former life. As a result, Ethan is a much happier individual in Auslosen.
He’s also facing the unique reversal of his role with PistolPanic, where he’s the one constantly a step behind. This makes him somewhat sore on the subject of the hacker, and he lashes out with considerable anger when it’s brought up – especially by someone who isn’t family.
Additionally, he keeps in touch with his family pretty regularly. It’s not a risk, in his mind, because no one can connect his name to his online handle, and even if they could… Ethan’s family is the most important thing in his life. Lilly especially.
job: Freelance Infrastructure Security Officer
fix: Music composition. Ethan retains his former self’s obsession with music. Though he doesn’t see people as a certain type, at least at this time, he’s obsessed with *creating* music he feels represents people and, often, sharing it with the world. As such, he won’t balk at being asked to write a piece for someone any more than he would at writing one for his own entertainment.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES:
third person:
One, two, three, four… Ethan smiled to himself as he marked in another handful of music notes, humming the tune slightly. It’d been a while since he’d last managed to find the time to compose, and he was feeling a bit… irritable because of it.
It wasn’t that he’d had any shortage of ideas, mind. That was a rare case indeed for the teen. It was more accurate to say he had too *many* such ideas, and many of them clashed and fought for his highest attention. What broke the dam open varied, of course, as with any individual with a creative talent.
He’d called his sister, this time. For a couple of weeks, he’d been busy online, fighting against PistolPanic and slipping just one step behind. It was closer than usual, and that drove him crazy. Lilly had commented that it was just like him – “Ethan,” she said, “you have to let yourself calm down from this, or your emotions are all going to flood over the page at once.”
As he finished the third page of his symphony, Ethan considered that. It had been automatic, when he’d started, the way the notes flowed on the page. Of course that was it. How could it be anything less? Music, emotion… tumult resulted in a jumble, so if he calmed down and wrote it out logically… the third page – the third movement – was full of syncopation and frenetic energy. It wasn’t a pretty sound, not the way he heard it in his head.
That was alright, though. This song wasn’t meant for others; he probably wouldn’t even put it up for anyone to stumble on. This was his own tumult, a symphony for him alone.
first person:
It seems we’re in a bit of a bind, with these phones.
[The audio here is… odd, even with those around who’ve relied on text-to-speech software. It’s more refined than the straightforward readout of a screen reader, but there’s a faintly static quality that indicates it’s not someone speaking directly into the phone.
The voice is feminine, but still deep.]
To date, I’ve found no less than forty ways to break these phones, including attempting to power up without an SD card, attempting to transfer data to and from said SD card, and attempting to create a connection port for keyboards or monitors.
Minor modifications to the exterior of the phone seem to be acceptable, and the materials used to make them are all available with some digging around.
player name: Ceti
player age: 27
player contact:
current characters: Lana Rivera:
flickeringreflectionac link: N/A
who invited you: Remibutts
CANON IC INFORMATION:
character name: Ethan Travers/FlickerFox
canon & medium: OC
species & appearance: Human. Ethan is roughly average height, with a very pale complexion and bright green eyes. His hair’s kept dyed a greenish-white, and he dresses like a tech geek. He has twelve pieces of tech implanted in his body – EntraDermaLinks, or EDLs, which are largely hidden beneath clothes.
age: 19
world info: Earth, year 3414. Tech is highly-advanced, relying on integrated paneling and (mostly) solar and water power. There’s a single networking mesh that defines the entirety of the internet and all data flow, and physical crime has become a smaller (and more unacceptable) course, compared to cybercrime.
history: Ethan Travers wasn’t much of note, in his early years. Certainly, he was found to have incredible abilities as a techie early on, but that didn’t set him aside from the rest of the world. After all, technology was equivalent to life where he grew up.
By the time he was ten, Ethan had started on the path that would take him to where he is today – being a weak-bodied young man, he was frequently hospitalized for injuries and sickness. In the hospitals, he started to experiment with their network, learning how to dig into protected files and eventually getting caught due to his ID chip. After that embarrassment, it was somewhat like child’s play for him to learn how to scramble said ID, and by the time he was thirteen, he was delving into things most adults couldn’t dare to reach.
It kept his family in a good position, of course, as he was careful how he used it. The data he brought back was never kept where one of them could be implicated, and he never sold it. Instead, he supported his family almost by himself when he started creating integrated HUD designs and technological advancements.
At thirteen, he learned about Persilico Dolvaa and the RIPPER program. More specifically, the CEO invited him to join the company as an information-runner, explaining to him what it is RIPPER does and why. Ethan hardly had to search to dig up the hidden facts, and almost immediately thereafter, he signed on with RIPPER. In order to keep his anonymity as strong as possible, he designed a HUD and setup that would allow him to use a computer-generated voice in place of his own, and so (in conjunction with his feminine avatar) most people actually assume he’s a woman. Even in person, if he’s speaking in an official capacity with a coworker or employer, he uses that same audio tech to speak with.
Since then, he became one of the largest assets of the foundation, creating most of the individualized HUDs each agent uses by hand. At first, he was little more than the premiere information reaper – he refused, at that time to do “hardware” jobs (essentially the assassination jobs RIPPER takes on, because Dolvaa is of the belief that some crimes are unforgivable and some people simply need to be taken out of the equation).
After a year, the corruption of their world hit him hard. His parents were lost in an accident – which, when he dug a little deeper, was no accident at all. It hardened him some, but his sister – Lilly – kept him grounded. Getting angry, she always said, wouldn’t help him to uncover things. He shouldn’t give himself up because they were retaliating. He retreated into the kindness of her words, and the music he’d always been partial to. It was then that his case of Logic Amalgam started to come to bear; his mind stopped processing things in the most human manner and began overlaying them with the pure logic of a machine, almost.
So it was, until he was sixteen. He’d gained notoriety, in the form of his Avatar – the virtual-net body he pilots, given the name FlickerFox – and that had gained him quite the number of enemies, especially within the companies he stole information from. They used his abilities against him, implanted a virus of a sort in the data he was carrying, and used that to find him.
More specifically, they found his home and kidnapped his sister. Then they contacted him and forced him to watch her murder, knowing he could never get anyone to believe it was. Without her as an anchor, he became more and more jaded – and more accepting of Dolvaa’s idealism that some people just didn’t deserve to live. He also became reckless, and convinced Dolvaa to agree to experiment on him to learn the limitations of the human body when accepting EDLs. Some would expect that Dolvaa stopped implanting – after twelve installs and the second time Ethan developed a case of Calamity Trigger – only because he didn’t want to lose a valued employee, but the man was, in fact, legitimately worried about him. Ethan himself, on still being alive after all of it, was somewhat embarrassed by the sheer amount of metal that now stuck out of his body.
Ethan’s reputation only became more fearsome in the three years that followed, as FlickerFox became not just an information risk, but a physical risk as well. Where once was a careful, balanced threat, they now faced an angry enemy with nothing left to lose. GRAFT, a company opposing RIPPER, sent many agents out against him (and indeed, against most RIPPER agents), but only one could even come close to his skill and ferocity. That remains true even now, and typically PistolPanic is the reason behind any improvements Ethan makes, to both himself and his avatar.
powers:
- As with most people who can operate EDLs, Ethan has the strength of will to share his mentality/consciousness with his created virtual avatar.
- Ethan’s mental capacity is almost superhuman, to the point that operating all twelve of his EDLs (the highest publicly known number of them installed in one person is 4) simultaneously is taxing, but not impossible.
- He can, similarly with RIPPER/GRAFT agents, use his force of will to manifest his avatar into real space in a pinch. Because of his frailty, this is somewhat more taxing than it is on others.
- He understands people in something of a musical way – the actions of others present themselves in a specific sort of pattern. IE: someone like BellWraith feels like their personality is staccato, whereas he viewed his sister as having a personality more like a serenade.
personality: Calling Ethan a quiet individual is a bit of an understatement. Even if you were to ignore the fact that he basically never speaks directly, what talking he does is often simple and to the point. At least, when it doesn’t encompass a lot of technical jargon. “Words often fall short in the course of action” is how he explained it once, to Persilico Dolvaa himself. Still, he knows the value of them, and will speak lightly and calmly in appropriate instances. His views seem skewed, to some, but none can truly pinpoint why nor discredit the validity of them.
There aren’t many that he puts his faith in, either. Outside of the close circle of his family, Ethan is courteous but distant to most. In order to get close enough for him to start to trust (and subsequently get him to admit things to)someone, they have to prove above and beyond that their interest is honest and true. Some would say this requires every ideal they have to be in line with his – he would disagree, because in his mind, there isn’t a single person who truly agrees with everything any other person says. “It’s in what we can reconcile in others that determines their position within our circle.” That’s been his view since long before he lost his family and became jaded.
In work relationships, though, there are few who share more loyalty than Ethan. Even at the cost of his personal health, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect his allies and the work he does. That’s a seemingly unchangeable trait in his life, and he has taken – more than once – excessive damage in order to get an ally out of the fray safely. This persists despite any personal reservations he has toward an ally – there have been occasions when he’s worked with BellWraith, who is brutal to the point of actively triggering Fox into a near panic attack, where he’s nonetheless stayed behind to ensure none of the faster, stronger avatars could interfere with escape or acquisition.
Outside the digital world, when he *does* form attachments, he forms them strongly enough that he would risk everything for them. This extends almost exclusively to Dolvaa and a very select group of RIPPER agents, though he hasn’t met the latter in person thus far.
He’s also prone to bouts of quiet reflection and brooding. Because of the way he thinks, this is somewhat troublesome – there are times where his human emotions clash with his logical thinking, like when he’s upset that an ally has been injured. He doesn’t believe that humanity has much good left in it, and so he’s usually looking for something to pick out of his daily interactions to solidify that idea.
Similarly, perhaps because he’s seen so much in his life, Fox is very slow to anger. His anger starts as a quiet irritation, a roiling beneath the surface that many miss thanks to the fact that he doesn’t speak, and it takes a lot of prodding in order to make any reaction deeper than that. When he does move past irritation, he tends to lash out with expressions even before words. Though he’s got a decent grip on expressing his emotions as a whole, his face in particular has many subtle, unconscious changes that indicate his mood at any given time.
AUSLOSEN IC INFORMATION:
character name: Ethan Travers
appearance: Ethan appears largely the same as his canon data, with the exception of the missing EDLs. His complexion is very slightly less ashen, since he lacks the experimental installs that further strengthen his harrowed look.
age: 19
history: Ethan Travers was a nobody for the first sixteen years of his life. It wasn’t a particularly good beginning, but it was serviceable enough. Born to a computer engineer mother and software programmer father, it was perhaps the obvious reaction for Ethan to grow into his computer-related hobbies.
Of course, that was only true if you ignored the fact that he surpassed both of his parents in engineering and programming before he was a teenager. In a place like Auslosen, that should have made him both a commodity and a high-profile individual. Thanks to his own efforts to keep his anonymity, though, he went largely under the radar and the name he used as a front got all the attention. Which was all the better, since it was a dangerous world out there for anyone talented.
At fifteen, he was scouted by a large-scale company as – originally, anyway – an IT professional. He’d taken their entire system and basically turned it upside down, after all, breaking it in every single way he could think of and proving the only one who could put it back together and make it function was him. That was his life, subtly working his way up the ladder into designing their entire infrastructure and the defense programs that kept it safe.
Safety had a cost, though. Even beyond his salary – less than he deserved but more than enough to maintain his somewhat indulgent lifestyle – having a secure database meant you were more noticeable to hackers. More interesting, more *profitable*. He saw these facts, and brought them up to his employers more than once. Whenever things got out of hand, he would rewrite code and strengthen it himself.
And then it happened. ‘It’ was a prestigious hacker, one who went by the name PistolPanic. Ethan didn’t know then, doesn’t even really know *now* what would make someone choose such a bizarre name, but that wasn’t really the important part. PistolPanic proved to be the one person who could worm his way into every failsafe Ethan had designed. It didn’t matter how intricate, how subtle and delicate the keys. Hell, it didn’t even matter when he was *there* to provide countermeasures himself.
When the data was confirmed stolen, Ethan got pulled into a meeting. He knew what it was for, of course. His mainframe, his reputation. It didn’t matter. “No mainframe can be completely safe.” He’d said. “We can’t possibly predict the moves and abilities of every person on the planet.” That didn’t matter, either. The fact was this: they had Ethan’s work now. They knew how to make it work, on a base level, and that there was only one person who had hacked it? That meant it worked well enough that it would keep out enough people to provide for them.
He was told none of that, of course. Even when they fired him, it was because of his failure to prevent the break-in. They kept his framework and he went home with a measly severance check and a whole lot of spite. Two years of working at that company, and one person – one lousy asshole whose name he didn’t know and face he couldn’t *find* - had taken it all away.
In the two years that followed that, Ethan has adjusted his actions. He now supports himself largely on freelance security gigs. Specifically, he takes any gig that makes him believe he’ll come close to PistolPanic, such that he might get his revenge. Every time, he’s come up just short and had to regroup. It’s practically a grudge by now, hidden behind the handle “Foxhunt”. If PistolPanic knows *who* keeps tailing him, Ethan doesn’t know.
personality: Ethan is largely the same as he once was, with a few major exceptions. He still has his family, and lacks a lot of the blatantly jaded qualities of his former life. As a result, Ethan is a much happier individual in Auslosen.
He’s also facing the unique reversal of his role with PistolPanic, where he’s the one constantly a step behind. This makes him somewhat sore on the subject of the hacker, and he lashes out with considerable anger when it’s brought up – especially by someone who isn’t family.
Additionally, he keeps in touch with his family pretty regularly. It’s not a risk, in his mind, because no one can connect his name to his online handle, and even if they could… Ethan’s family is the most important thing in his life. Lilly especially.
job: Freelance Infrastructure Security Officer
fix: Music composition. Ethan retains his former self’s obsession with music. Though he doesn’t see people as a certain type, at least at this time, he’s obsessed with *creating* music he feels represents people and, often, sharing it with the world. As such, he won’t balk at being asked to write a piece for someone any more than he would at writing one for his own entertainment.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES:
third person:
One, two, three, four… Ethan smiled to himself as he marked in another handful of music notes, humming the tune slightly. It’d been a while since he’d last managed to find the time to compose, and he was feeling a bit… irritable because of it.
It wasn’t that he’d had any shortage of ideas, mind. That was a rare case indeed for the teen. It was more accurate to say he had too *many* such ideas, and many of them clashed and fought for his highest attention. What broke the dam open varied, of course, as with any individual with a creative talent.
He’d called his sister, this time. For a couple of weeks, he’d been busy online, fighting against PistolPanic and slipping just one step behind. It was closer than usual, and that drove him crazy. Lilly had commented that it was just like him – “Ethan,” she said, “you have to let yourself calm down from this, or your emotions are all going to flood over the page at once.”
As he finished the third page of his symphony, Ethan considered that. It had been automatic, when he’d started, the way the notes flowed on the page. Of course that was it. How could it be anything less? Music, emotion… tumult resulted in a jumble, so if he calmed down and wrote it out logically… the third page – the third movement – was full of syncopation and frenetic energy. It wasn’t a pretty sound, not the way he heard it in his head.
That was alright, though. This song wasn’t meant for others; he probably wouldn’t even put it up for anyone to stumble on. This was his own tumult, a symphony for him alone.
first person:
It seems we’re in a bit of a bind, with these phones.
[The audio here is… odd, even with those around who’ve relied on text-to-speech software. It’s more refined than the straightforward readout of a screen reader, but there’s a faintly static quality that indicates it’s not someone speaking directly into the phone.
The voice is feminine, but still deep.]
To date, I’ve found no less than forty ways to break these phones, including attempting to power up without an SD card, attempting to transfer data to and from said SD card, and attempting to create a connection port for keyboards or monitors.
Minor modifications to the exterior of the phone seem to be acceptable, and the materials used to make them are all available with some digging around.