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[an_execution]

User Name/Nick: Maniette
User DW: maniette
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: maniette
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Arthur Lester, The Knight, Doug Eiffel

Character Name: The Convict / Simon "the Butcher" IronLung
Series: Iron Lung
Age: Early-mid thirties at most
From When?: End of the film (378 EC)

Inmate Justification: Simon is a broken, frustrated, volatile man who needs to be able to survive outside of survival mode and contribute to a life that is worth living, rather than singularly for the greater good and performing whatever atrocities he can justify requiring him.

Arrival: After his death in the Blood Ocean.

Abilities/Powers: An otherwise mundane human. His general education appears to be minimal at best, but his knowledge of CO2 scrubbers, black boxes and at least basic engineering capabilities suggests that from a young age his education was geared more or less solely towards necessarily survival skills for maintaining the spaceship he grew up on. He's hyperspecifically technologically literate and that's about all that can be said.

Inmate Information: Simon knows he is a bad person who has done awful things in the name of survival. He is also someone who will continue doing awful things to survive, because he comes from a world where the entire rest of reality, every planet and star, disappeared with no rhyme or reason, the sky has been slowly emptying as the ghostlights expire, and less than a thousand extant humans remaining, and he was personally involved with the deaths of at minimum sixty-two, plus whatever unknown number was required to try and feed the Last Tree - so we immediately understand that he will go to extreme lengths to keep his own head from the chopping block. That being said, his successes there, and his actions on the sub, suggest he's a genuinely resourceful person who's a quick learner, able to apply rapidly developed skills with proficiency, and shows obvious pride in himself when he does do something right.

He is extremely good at justifying his own actions, and although sometimes it's clear even to him how flimsy his excuses are, he's not completely amoral: he comes from a world where survival was a hopeless, thankless task, but he still hates unnecessary harm. He's clearly a person who carries the weight of his sins heavy on his shoulders, but as long as he can justify it as being for some greater good (or at least for keeping his own head off the chopping block), then he'll readily, unhappily, do it.

He's also spent the greater portion of his life in prison (spending roughly 16 in years in some form of incarceration), and so there's some definite trauma from isolation and punishment that presents in subtler ways; he talks to himself constantly, often just small mutters, he personifies things in small ways to have someone to talk to (apologising to the control console for punching it, for example, or talking to a mysterious object in the ocean conversationally). He comes across as desperate for a connection that doesn't hinge on him being useful, but he's also short-tempered, lashes out quickly when ignored or frustrated, and generally displays an emotional maturity that flicks wildly between an adult and a traumatised child. A lot of this might well be attributed to the circumstances of canon, but in the moments when he manages to calm himself down, we do see them crop up regardless.

Path to Redemption: The first thing Simon's going to need to do is realise that he is safe on the Barge. You know, relatively. Which is going to be difficult for him to accept at all; even before his time in the SM-13 fractured his sanity almost completely, he came from a space station where survival was completely conditional, and spent his whole life spurred by the desperate need to be the one who stays alive. That if he wasn't alive and useful enough, then a way would be found for him to be more useful dead. After that, it will be that he does have agency in his own life, and that the choices he made for his own survival were still choices.

It will be difficult for Simon to trust any promises, given how pretty much every deal he has ever made in his life resulted in people's deaths, or was crossed by someone else in power to entrap and exploit him. Helping him to understand that promises are supposed to matter and be upheld, not used to fuck him over, will be a significant milestone in getting him to trust someone in a position of authority. And he's honestly going to have a lot of difficult trusting wardens as a collective in general, due to his incredibly loaded history of authority figures manipulating him. He will be obedient in the short term, while he expects his warden/s to be unreasonable turnabouts, but it will take a while for him to be comfortable standing up to any wardens sincerely.

It will also be difficult for anyone overly authoritative to get through to Simon, because he will default to deference and distrust. But at the same time, someone too soft might not get enough respect to earn his genuine respect. And anyone distinctly nonhuman will not get an immediately positive reaction, due to his incredibly recent trauma. The Barge itself is going to be a weird mix of familiar and unfamiliar - while he's familiar with spaceships, having grown up entirely on them without ever being planet-side, the Barge's unorthodox design will fly in the face of his survivalism and be incredibly fucking confusing.

History: Wiki page! The stars are gone. The planets have disappeared. Only individuals aboard space stations or starships were left to give the end a name — The Quiet Rapture. After decades of decay and crumbling infrastructure, the Consolidation of Iron has made a discovery on a barren moon designated AT-5. An ocean of blood.

But before that, there was Simon. At a very young age he was moved to Eden, a massive space station orbitting a habitated Mars. The Quiet Rapture happened when he was a little older, maybe ten to early teens (357 EIC in the game), and so the majority of his living memory has been surviving the aftermath and watching the stars all quietly fade out of existence. While most of his backstory is left largely vague, a few things are made clear: that there was a cult-like patriotic pride centred around the Last Tree after the Quiet Rapture, which he was forced to become part of; the leader of said cult, known as the Father, was using their limited resources to feed the tree human bodies to try and keep it alive (or, eventually, to try and bring it back to life); and that Simon was forced to assist with this, to the point of being not only actively complicit in but earning a reputation for cold-blooded murder and the title 'Simon the Butcher'.

In 362 EIC (16 years before the game is set) In the following years, tensions rose between Eden and the Consolidation of Iron (a group of four space stations and two spacecrafts) enough that one of the stations, the Filament Station, was invaded by Eden, and the nine-day battle resulted in the blowing up of Filament Station and more than 60 direct deaths. Simon was on Filament during the battle - it's unclear what his direct involvement was, but he didn't want to actively destroy the station and actively surrendered to the C.O.I. along with his surviving companions; however, he seems to have been left to rot in prison for quite a long time afterwards.

While it's unclear what happened between then and now, it's likeliest that Simon spent the whole time in prison, only being brought out as part of the Conviction Realisation program, and used effectively as prison labor, to be welded into the SM-13 submarine (because to go to the required depths not welded in would make the sub spontaneously decompress almost immediately), without as much as his name being given to the team welding him in.

Immediately the journey is perilous and claustrophobic, with the only way to view and explore the outside world once the front shield is up being a speciased camera - that Simon doesn't realise is a modified X-ray machine until he blasts an unsuspecting tech with it and gives him instantaneous radiation poisoning. Simon suffers from heat exhaustion, cabin fever, increasing levels of radiation poisoning, and eventually the reveal that the blood ocean is sentient and malevolent, and once it makes its way into the ship, attempts to kill him to ensure he can't send the black box he'd retrieved to the other remaining humans; however, Simon chooses to sacrifice himself to ensure the black box's safety, and in doing do destroys the blood ocean's ferocious sea monster and allows the box to float to the surface in the life jacket he strapped to it, ensuring his efforts and pain didn't go to waste.

Sample Network Entry:

[It's not like he's not used to communicators of some description - it was a necessity in Eden, at the very least, given how large the station was - but that didn't mean having a new kind dumped on him, one that he wasn't used to whatsoever and had to learn to navigate with one fucking hand, was an easy feat.

Then again, neither was navigating the sub, and he thinks he did that pretty fucking alright. He didn't crash it.

Everything else happened to it.

And he's not so technologically illiterate (he can use a fucking phone) that he does something as fucking dumb as turning the video on without realising.

...instead he's just had the microphone on for long enough that he realises he's quietly disocciated trying to work out what to say.]

...fuck this.

[And he hangs up.]

Sample RP: TDM post!

Special Notes: