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User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vibishan
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Other Characters: Shuos Jedao, Kahl
Character Name: Mort(e)
Series: The War With No Name, by Robert Repino
Age: he's uhhhhhhhhh probably like 20 something chronologically but the first decade-ish was in cat years (judging by the Martini children's ages) followed by another decade of war. Mentally he's a grumpy middle aged man.
From When?: Some time after the end of D'Arc (Book 2), after the new dam is completed and he's itchy for more work.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Mort(e) is kind of an implacable bastard, but ultimately he is driven by deep love. There was a time when that love was only for Sheba, and it drove him in a very selfish way, through a very brutal war. But by the end of D'Arc, Mort(e) has chosen to save the entire world even though he believes he has lost her (and been kind of an asshole about it). He does this partly by disabling the satellite weapon, but also partly by sharing his understanding of the worth of life and love with Taalik while the latter is psychically interrogating him, and forcing Taalik to reassess everything he believes and the path of zealotry he has been on since he gained sentience. Mort(e) still has a lot of "fuck the world" in him, but he doesn't let that corrode a strange and sincere moral core, and he would be particularly good for revolutionary or vengeance-driven inmates who needed to reconcile those principles with more compassion for an unjust world.
Item: The Saint Jude medallion.
Abilities/Powers:
1) he's an anthro cat. He's short for a human but real tall for a cat. He has hands (including opposable thumbs) but the first joint of every finger is missing as a result of being declawed before the Change. He still has a cat's sense of balance and much better night vision that a human. His sense of smell is not quite as good as it used to be, but also much stronger than a human's.
2) he was notorious soldier in the War With No Name, second in command of the commando unit the Red Sphinx, and is a highly accomplished warrior and strategist, especially concerning asymmetric and urban warfare. Survival skills, marksmanship, etc.
3) as a translator user, Mort(e) has highly unreliable mental access to all the accumulated knowledge of Hymenoptera Unus. Sometimes he is able to Just Know things, but this is a) limited to his own world, which HU was able to observe, or those coincidentally exactly like it until the Change, and b) far too much information for his mind to process or hold onto, so bits of it come to him in dreams with no conscious control or general access. I will never use this ability to infomod people unless they actively want to plot with someone who can just know secrets. I may very *rarely* use this to give him scientific, historical, or cultural knowledge.
Personality:
All joking aside, Mort(e) is both very constitutionally grumpy, and very quintessentially feline. Two or three days after gaining sentience in the Furry Uplift Apocalypse orchestrated by the ants, Mort(e) is already a dedicated jaded loner, fatalistically traversing the wastes in search of the one friend he ever had, whom he greatly suspects, but cannot accept, to be dead. He starts off as basically Max Rockatansky, if Mad Max were an orange tabby. Characters he meets later think that Mort(e)'s brusque, reserved demeanor and thousand yard stare are the result of his years of warfare, and while he absolutely disengages and compartmentalizes during and after his time with the Red Sphinx, it's actually not much of a change from his original laconic, cynical, persevering personality.
One reviewer compares him to an old-school noir hero; he's a confirmed pessimist, who doesn't believe the world can be fixed or saved, but he keeps on trudging through it, with his own small quest and his own odd sort of honor. His pessimism is both a symptom of traumatic repression/disengagement, but also allows him a certain amount of insight, because he is never taken in by propaganda or compromised by his devotion to lost causes. Mort(e) spends most of a decade fighting a war he doesn't really care about, and becomes very, very good at it - but Mort(e) is the first character to suggest that the uplifted animals aren't actually any different than humans they're exterminating, and that they will likely make all the same mistakes as their predecessor civilization. When he figures out that the bioweapon EMSAH is actually religious belief, he says "I don't have EMSAH. Actually, I think I'm immune." He doesn't believe in anything: not any of the human versions of God, not death-life (an afterlife, which will be awkward for him on the barge, not that he'll admit it), but also not in the Queen's desolate vision of a better perfected world without humans or their foibles, regardless of her demonstrated power.
Mort(e) is, in many ways, Chaotic Neutral. He has a cat's aloofness and independence. This can be a moral strength, refusing to bow to the convenience of complicity without even considering it. But it can also function as extreme self-absorption He has his own priorities, the few people he cares about, and the few things he decides to focus on, and no other concerns or authority can sway him. He tells Taalik "You can tell her no. I did." Even though Hymenoptera Unus is an ancient, powerful mind of nearly unlimited knowledge and bitterness with direct access to both their subconsciouses, is the source of their own sentience, and the sole mind behind the apocalypse. He doesn't care about her vendetta, or about her armies of ants, or about turning on the cause he fought for for years. He cares about his friend Sheba, and the promises he's made her, and he cares that the Queen is so lost in bitterness that she will eventually wipe out the surface animals, too. So he tells her no.
When his commanding officer Culdesac says he'd kill Mort(e) and his friend Tiberius for trespassing on a quarantined town, Mort(e) goes anyway, because he decides that he needs to find out the truth for himself, basically daring Culdesac to follow through. Mort(e) is the only person who ever really survives confronting Culdesac like this, and it's precisely his complete absence of fucks to give that wins him the brutal bobcat's respect. When the humans are airlifting him from being eaten by giant ant soldiers, he refuses to come and be the Messiah they think he is if they don't save his friend Wawa as well, even though it means the human who saved him has to sacrifice his own life - the weight of all three of them is too much for the tethers. When he finally sees Michael Martini again, he immediately mercy kills him, despite knowing full well that Michael's status as "the prophet" meant it would lead immediately to bloody civil war, and almost certainly Mort(e)'s own execution. He swore to protect Michael when he was still an animal, and Michael was suffering in front of him, so Mort(e) did something about it.
Conversely, when the badgers ask him to help deal with Gulaga, he adamantly tells them no. He can't win their fight for them, and he's retired. He finally has Sheba and a patch of sunlight and a peaceful life. He wants to stay on his ranch. He wants, despite everything he does and goes through, to be a normal person, building a quiet life, with someone he loves to cuddle with. He's a deeply pragmatic legendary soldier - and he's still, at heart, a house cat.
But when Sheba/D'Arc decides to go help them without him, he sighs and figures out a plan that will actually work - and also bring comeuppance to some of the beaver leaders who caused the problem in the first place. There's a cold streak to Mort(e), but also an insightfulness and deep capacity for concern, even if that most often manifests as pessimism. He realizes that the animals are really no better than humans, and doesn't hate either of them for it, only regrets that they will make the same mistakes again. He doesn't seem to hate anyone, in fact. When he and Culdesac end up on opposite sides after years of fighting together, it still matters to Mort(e) that Culdesac have the dignity of satisfaction of going down fighting his lifelong enemy.
Mort(e) may be the Warrior Messiah, according to Michael's deeply garbled ant-induced visions, but he's no saint. He's stubborn and possessive and a little codependent; he's kind of an asshole to D'Arc when she decides to leave him to explore her own life, repeatedly snubbing her. To his credit, although he subjects her to a hypervigilant education tinged with his own PTSD, he is not controlling - he never demands that she stay, no matter how much he wants it.
And he's Grumpy, grouchy and scowly and terse as the day is long, but he isn't quite bitter. While the Queen is consumed by hate, Mort(e) is ultimately motivated by love, in a way that's both intimate and expansive. Mort(e) brings Taalik to a kind of quiet heaven in his own mind, populated by both the living and the dead and those who never had a chance to live. They're all facing destruction together, but in Mort(e)'s fantasy, the coming wave doesn't matter. They can all see it - Mort(e) isn't one for denial - but they are together, and at peace, and happy. Mort(e) sees the value in preserving and sharing life, and although he spent much of his life at war, he never lost sight of that. And after letting his oldest, dearest friend go explore the world the way she wants, in a way he can't follow, Mort(e) finally allows himself to break down some of his old isolation. When he accepts the beavers' offer to stay with them and help rebuild the dam in Hosana, he lets himself truly become part of a community for the first time.
Barge Reactions: Mort(e) is not used to quite the diversity of weird shit that the barge has to offer, but he's well practiced at trudging through regardless. Like so many others, he'll be most disturbed by breaches that make him human.
Deal: Mort(e) is making a deal for the health and sanity of the other surviving translator users, including a loss of access to the Queen's pseudo-omniscience.
History: Mort(e) began life as the ordinary house cat of an ordinary suburban family. Two parents, two kids, mom screwing the hot next door neighbor, the usual. Mort(e)'s emotional life revolved around 1) that one really good patch of sun in the living room 2) protecting the children!!!!! despite having no claws 3) that one comfy chair he wasn't allowed in, and 4) most significantly, the hot next door neighbor's dog Sheba, who became his first and only friend. They explored the strange world of the attic together, and spent lazy afternoons cuddled up together cozily while their humans were carrying on their affair. It's during one of these moments of peaceful, intimate affection that Mort(e) has his first real experience of sentience.
The ants of the world have released chemical signals that transform the nonhuman mammals, giving those without hooves human hands, and letting all of them walk upright, speak human language, and think abstract thoughts. At the same time, the ants have been slowly eradicating human cities with car-sized ant soldiers called alphas; society is starting to break down before their inexorable march. That same night, Daniel Martini comes home and while Neighbor Guy escapes, he does not have time to retrieve Sheba, who gives birth to puppies in the basement. Daniel, furious, drowns them.
Mort(e) escapes the house, and over the course of the next night, Mort(e) lurks on rooftops, feels the fur fall from his paws, and experiences the physiological aspects of the change. In the morning, most of the city is evacuating, Mort(e) has felt a great vista of mental understanding open up, but he cannot find Sheba. He returns to the Martini's house and discovers that Daniel Martini is preparing, out of a combination of anger and masculine despair, to murder his family rather than flee. Mort(e) wrestles his shotgun away from him, but doesn't know how to use it. After a thorny conversation, Daniel attacks him, and with the help of a sly alley cat and a trigger gesture, Mort(e) shoots him point-blank, killing him instantly. Unlike some of the more resentful uplifted animals, however, he doesn't have any desire to wipe out all humans, not even his "slave" owners. He lets Janet Martini and her children go, and even protects them from the alley cats.
This fateful decision, this simple mercy, sets the stage for everything that comes after. The Martinis find Sheba on their way out of town, not yet Changed, and take her with them. When they are captured by the ants, Michael - the Martini's young son - remembers that Mort(e) spared them, bringing Mort(e) to the attention of the ant Queen. When she allows Michael to escape as one of her strange experiments, Michael - his mind addled by the invasive translator that let the Queen trawl his memories - becomes a "prophet" for the scattered syncretic human resistance, claiming that Mort(e) the Warrior and Sheba the mother will be instrumental in the Queen's fall, and the coming of a new paradise where humans and animals will live together in peace - without the ants. The Queen keeps Sheba, and allows Michael to escape and preach as a test for the surface animals: if they fail, and fall prey to that most human depravity, that most human excuse for atrocities, religion, then she will eradicate them too. She calls religion "EMSAH" - a garbling of "Messiah" - and claims it is a rabies-like bioweapon that the humans (always wicked!) have released in an attempt to win the war. This allows her to quarantine and destroy any place beginning to succumb to such subversive ideas.
Before that, though, Mort(e) begins trekking through an abandoned landscape, searching fruitlessly for Sheba. He encounters abandoned libraries and reads voraciously; it is during these early days that he chooses his new name, taking it from Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur. He loves the story, and forgets whether the word has an e or not - but he also comes to like the ambiguity of the parentheses on a deeper level. Morte means death - and he does become a prodigious killer. But Mort is just an ordinary name. As long as he keeps the e noncommittal, he can imagine someday coming home from the war, finding his friend and having a normal live.
While searching for Sheba, he falls into a trap set by a cell of the Red Sphinx, an all-cat commando unit specializing in asymmetrical warfare for the Queen. The cats of the RS think Mort(e) is crazy because he 1) is yelling names out in the wilderness, and 2) refuses to explain himself even a tiny bit. They worry that he has the EMSAH plague, and tie him to a pole so that their unit doctor Tiberius can observe the progression of the disease. Mort(e) tries to warn them of a human stealth attack, but since he is unable to explain what a glider is, the cats take this as more evidence of advancing madness. Mort(e) manages to free himself in the chaos of the ensuing battle, and ends up recruited into the Red Sphinx. He doesn't really care about fighting, but the offer isn't entirely a free one, and it's not like he has any idea where to look - he might as well go with them.
Mort(e) slowly becomes close with Tiberius, who was friendly to him during his period of captivity, and builds respect and rapport with Colonel Culdesac, although neither of them are warm enough to term it friendship. Mort(e) eventually becomes Culdesac's SIC, and is a ruthless counter-insurgence fighter taking out human holdouts. Mort(e) and Tiberius continue to try to investigate EMSAH, but the biology of the disease is frustratingly difficult to pin down. When Mort(e) goes against orders to investigate a quarantined town in full hazmat gear, he sees a disturbing scene reminiscent of Jamestown - the first clue that EMSAH is not simply a disease.
Eventually Tiberius dies in combat; eventually the war begins to wind down. Mort(e) retires and settles in his old house, in his old neighborhood, in a new community of resettled refugees. He finds a fresh message painted in the basement: SHEBA IS ALIVE. Lead by this tantalizing clue of his only true desire, Mort(e) eventually makes contact with a human resistance cell living on a self-sustaining solar-powered airship that never needs to land. The humans believe Mort(e) himself is the Messiah, described by his former owner's child. Mort(e) doesn't care about that at all - but he is willing to cooperate with them in order to find Sheba. It's during the series of cloak and dagger moves that establishes this contact that Mort(e) steals and uses a translator, a device that allows mammals to receive and understand orders and information from the Queen. Many animals have gone mad due to overload; Mort(e) imagines the quiet peace of his square of sunlight and his time with Sheba to allow him to withstand the flood.
Meanwhile, due to human influence, a variety of other animals in the area have been suborned and "poisoned" with religion; the Queen takes steps to wipe out the entire settlement. Mort(e) and his new friend, a pitball named Wawa, are take up onto the airship Vesuvius. Wawa, longing for a pack of her own for longer than she's been sentient, joins the humans and their church. Mort(e) doesn't care, but he agrees to let the humans deliver him, inside a missile tube, into the ant's oceanic fortress, carrying a grenade of oleic acid, the ant's chemical signal for "dead thing, to be removed from the colony immediately."
After a strange conversation with the Queen, in which Mort(e) comes to understand the unending depths of both her hatred and her misery, Mort(e) tosses the grenade on her, causing her to be ripped apart by her own workers, while Mort(e) escapes with Sheba, whom the Queen kept in an un-Changed state this whole time. The humans and those animals they converted to their cause attack the fortress simultaneously, and the power of the ants is broken. As Mort(e) sails away, Sheba finally experiences the change, and eventually they set up in a remote area to become ranchers to giant alpha ant soldiers - now strangely docile with no queen to command them.
For a time, they enjoy a peaceful reunion, despite Mort(e)'s constant military training, to ensure Sheba is always prepared to defend herself. They fix up a farmhouse, take the ants on walks through the mountains to keep them placid until they can be killed and smoked, and spend their evenings exploring the books and television left in the house by its previous owners. Eventually, though, reality imposes itself once again.
While they kept to themselves, strange creatures have been mutating as a result of all the chemicals of the Change accumulating in water runoff. Strange creatures called Sarcops emerge from the oceans, with pincers and tentacles and terrifying abilities. Worse, some of them have access to the knowledge of the Queen - who, after watching and learning for thousands of years, with ant spies almost everywhere - knew many dangerous things.
The first Mort(e) hears of it, a community of beavers reaches out to beg him, legendary hero of the War With No Name (ironically on both sides) to help kill a giant spider creature that has captured several of their people and cocooned them alive, Mirkwood-style. Mort(e) insists it can't be done, that it would need an army, and refuses to get involved. Sheba, however, longs to see the wider world, and has too kind a heart to refuse. She takes the name D'arc, and tells Mort(e) that she's going to help the beavers.
Shortly afterward, Mort(e) grouchily turns up with a plan, and an army - their entire contingent of remaining Alphas, who probably wouldn't last another year anyway. The plan is ultimately successful, although they don't escape unscathed. The beavers' waterwheel is destroyed, and the former matriarch of the beavers is exposed as using spider eggs to try to drive out the bats in a spat of psuedo-ethnic conflict; she is taken by the bats for justice, and her son is left to make peace with them.
D'Arc, still wishing to see more of the world, travels to the joint human-animal theocratic city of Hosana with a husky agent named Falkirk, also sent to help the beavers. There, she meets Wawa (now the head of Hosana police), and is drawn into a mysterious series of murders of translator users - by another translator user, terrified of the damage the Queen's knowledge could do. And rightly so: the Sarcops are coming upriver, causing a terrible flood and a massacre, searching for Michael the prophet, because 1) their leader, Taalik, has bought into the Queen's seething hatred for humans and the surface animals in general, and 2) he intends to use a satellite meant to redirect sunlight and improve crop yields to melt the arctic ice, freeing some of this trapped (actually long-dead) people, and also drowning the world. In order to do this, he needs a translator user to access the right information and operate the satellite. The Sarcops' first attack, though devastating, is rebuffed by the Sons of Adam, Michael's zealous personal guard.
In the aftermath, Mort(e) is allowed the very rare privilege of visiting Michael. When he sees Michaels' utterly miserable existence, his mind and body both heavily deteriorated from the side effects of hostile translator use, and kept alive only by elaborate life support, Mort(e) immediately mercy kills him - kicking off a brief, brutal civil war between the outraged humans and animals who don't want to let him be executed for it. The Sons of Adam are driven from Hosana, and Mort(e) is rescued, but not for long. The Sarcops demand Mort(e) instead, under various threats - and the remaining powers of Hosana agree to humor their demand, and then ambush them. Due to the weird telepathic wavelengths that exist between some translator users, they cannot fool Taalik - they have to bring Mort(e) there for real.
The Sons of Adam ambush them while transporting Mort(e) to the meeting place near the control facility for the satellite, resulting in Wawa's death, among many others; both airships crash, and Mort(e) is pulled from the wreckage by Taalik. As Dar'c hunts them down, Taalik takes Mort(e) into the facility and invades his mind, trying to force Mort(e) to reveal the secret of the satellite's control. Instead, Mort(e) leads him in strange circles, showing him a fantasy of love and peace, where Mort(e)'s friends and family - many of them dead, some of them never-lived, including D'Arc's children - are together. Nevertheless, Taalik is strong, and rips the information out of Mort(e)'s head. He challenges Taalik that he doesn't have to do it, despite the Queen's posthumous will; he asks him "Who will meet you at the place?" Meaning: who do you love, who do you want to live for, who really matters to you? The answer is not the Queen, but his mate Orak - whom Taalik left standing guard, who D'arc fights and threatens to kill.
Taalik relents, absconding with Orak into the river and back to the sea, leaving Mort(e) in control of the satellite. Due to his absolute dickishness and closed-off coldness around D'Arc's leaving him to live her own life, there are a few moments she worries that he might end the world too, in one more grand fit of feline pique, refusing to be beholding to anyone. But Mort(e) disarms the satellite, and destroys the facility, and lets D'Arc take him back to Hosana, where he is kept under medical observation - ironically, this time, for a mind-altering condition he actually has. He cooperates as much as he's able, but when there are no more tests to run, he sneaks out to see D'Arc off as she embarks on her greatest journey yet, traveling the globe on a repurposed aircraft carrier, to re-establish contact with other parts of the world. After she disappears over the horizon, he starts walking west, intending to disappear - but after one kind invitation and one chance encounter with a bat who helped him fight the spider, he has a small hysterical happy-cry breakdown and runs back to accept that invitation after all: to live with the beavers and help with the rebuilding of Hosana and its dam.
He will be coming to the barge from a few months after this, when the dam is rebuilt and D'Arc is still not back, when he feels uncomfortable with his complicated status and the holes in his own mind, when he needs more work to do.
Samples: whomp bomp ba bommm
Special Notes: ANTHROCALYPSE NOW
User DW:
vibishanE-mail:
Other Characters: Shuos Jedao, Kahl
Character Name: Mort(e)
Series: The War With No Name, by Robert Repino
Age: he's uhhhhhhhhh probably like 20 something chronologically but the first decade-ish was in cat years (judging by the Martini children's ages) followed by another decade of war. Mentally he's a grumpy middle aged man.
From When?: Some time after the end of D'Arc (Book 2), after the new dam is completed and he's itchy for more work.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Mort(e) is kind of an implacable bastard, but ultimately he is driven by deep love. There was a time when that love was only for Sheba, and it drove him in a very selfish way, through a very brutal war. But by the end of D'Arc, Mort(e) has chosen to save the entire world even though he believes he has lost her (and been kind of an asshole about it). He does this partly by disabling the satellite weapon, but also partly by sharing his understanding of the worth of life and love with Taalik while the latter is psychically interrogating him, and forcing Taalik to reassess everything he believes and the path of zealotry he has been on since he gained sentience. Mort(e) still has a lot of "fuck the world" in him, but he doesn't let that corrode a strange and sincere moral core, and he would be particularly good for revolutionary or vengeance-driven inmates who needed to reconcile those principles with more compassion for an unjust world.
Item: The Saint Jude medallion.
Abilities/Powers:
1) he's an anthro cat. He's short for a human but real tall for a cat. He has hands (including opposable thumbs) but the first joint of every finger is missing as a result of being declawed before the Change. He still has a cat's sense of balance and much better night vision that a human. His sense of smell is not quite as good as it used to be, but also much stronger than a human's.
2) he was notorious soldier in the War With No Name, second in command of the commando unit the Red Sphinx, and is a highly accomplished warrior and strategist, especially concerning asymmetric and urban warfare. Survival skills, marksmanship, etc.
3) as a translator user, Mort(e) has highly unreliable mental access to all the accumulated knowledge of Hymenoptera Unus. Sometimes he is able to Just Know things, but this is a) limited to his own world, which HU was able to observe, or those coincidentally exactly like it until the Change, and b) far too much information for his mind to process or hold onto, so bits of it come to him in dreams with no conscious control or general access. I will never use this ability to infomod people unless they actively want to plot with someone who can just know secrets. I may very *rarely* use this to give him scientific, historical, or cultural knowledge.
Personality:
All joking aside, Mort(e) is both very constitutionally grumpy, and very quintessentially feline. Two or three days after gaining sentience in the Furry Uplift Apocalypse orchestrated by the ants, Mort(e) is already a dedicated jaded loner, fatalistically traversing the wastes in search of the one friend he ever had, whom he greatly suspects, but cannot accept, to be dead. He starts off as basically Max Rockatansky, if Mad Max were an orange tabby. Characters he meets later think that Mort(e)'s brusque, reserved demeanor and thousand yard stare are the result of his years of warfare, and while he absolutely disengages and compartmentalizes during and after his time with the Red Sphinx, it's actually not much of a change from his original laconic, cynical, persevering personality.
One reviewer compares him to an old-school noir hero; he's a confirmed pessimist, who doesn't believe the world can be fixed or saved, but he keeps on trudging through it, with his own small quest and his own odd sort of honor. His pessimism is both a symptom of traumatic repression/disengagement, but also allows him a certain amount of insight, because he is never taken in by propaganda or compromised by his devotion to lost causes. Mort(e) spends most of a decade fighting a war he doesn't really care about, and becomes very, very good at it - but Mort(e) is the first character to suggest that the uplifted animals aren't actually any different than humans they're exterminating, and that they will likely make all the same mistakes as their predecessor civilization. When he figures out that the bioweapon EMSAH is actually religious belief, he says "I don't have EMSAH. Actually, I think I'm immune." He doesn't believe in anything: not any of the human versions of God, not death-life (an afterlife, which will be awkward for him on the barge, not that he'll admit it), but also not in the Queen's desolate vision of a better perfected world without humans or their foibles, regardless of her demonstrated power.
Mort(e) is, in many ways, Chaotic Neutral. He has a cat's aloofness and independence. This can be a moral strength, refusing to bow to the convenience of complicity without even considering it. But it can also function as extreme self-absorption He has his own priorities, the few people he cares about, and the few things he decides to focus on, and no other concerns or authority can sway him. He tells Taalik "You can tell her no. I did." Even though Hymenoptera Unus is an ancient, powerful mind of nearly unlimited knowledge and bitterness with direct access to both their subconsciouses, is the source of their own sentience, and the sole mind behind the apocalypse. He doesn't care about her vendetta, or about her armies of ants, or about turning on the cause he fought for for years. He cares about his friend Sheba, and the promises he's made her, and he cares that the Queen is so lost in bitterness that she will eventually wipe out the surface animals, too. So he tells her no.
When his commanding officer Culdesac says he'd kill Mort(e) and his friend Tiberius for trespassing on a quarantined town, Mort(e) goes anyway, because he decides that he needs to find out the truth for himself, basically daring Culdesac to follow through. Mort(e) is the only person who ever really survives confronting Culdesac like this, and it's precisely his complete absence of fucks to give that wins him the brutal bobcat's respect. When the humans are airlifting him from being eaten by giant ant soldiers, he refuses to come and be the Messiah they think he is if they don't save his friend Wawa as well, even though it means the human who saved him has to sacrifice his own life - the weight of all three of them is too much for the tethers. When he finally sees Michael Martini again, he immediately mercy kills him, despite knowing full well that Michael's status as "the prophet" meant it would lead immediately to bloody civil war, and almost certainly Mort(e)'s own execution. He swore to protect Michael when he was still an animal, and Michael was suffering in front of him, so Mort(e) did something about it.
Conversely, when the badgers ask him to help deal with Gulaga, he adamantly tells them no. He can't win their fight for them, and he's retired. He finally has Sheba and a patch of sunlight and a peaceful life. He wants to stay on his ranch. He wants, despite everything he does and goes through, to be a normal person, building a quiet life, with someone he loves to cuddle with. He's a deeply pragmatic legendary soldier - and he's still, at heart, a house cat.
But when Sheba/D'Arc decides to go help them without him, he sighs and figures out a plan that will actually work - and also bring comeuppance to some of the beaver leaders who caused the problem in the first place. There's a cold streak to Mort(e), but also an insightfulness and deep capacity for concern, even if that most often manifests as pessimism. He realizes that the animals are really no better than humans, and doesn't hate either of them for it, only regrets that they will make the same mistakes again. He doesn't seem to hate anyone, in fact. When he and Culdesac end up on opposite sides after years of fighting together, it still matters to Mort(e) that Culdesac have the dignity of satisfaction of going down fighting his lifelong enemy.
Mort(e) may be the Warrior Messiah, according to Michael's deeply garbled ant-induced visions, but he's no saint. He's stubborn and possessive and a little codependent; he's kind of an asshole to D'Arc when she decides to leave him to explore her own life, repeatedly snubbing her. To his credit, although he subjects her to a hypervigilant education tinged with his own PTSD, he is not controlling - he never demands that she stay, no matter how much he wants it.
And he's Grumpy, grouchy and scowly and terse as the day is long, but he isn't quite bitter. While the Queen is consumed by hate, Mort(e) is ultimately motivated by love, in a way that's both intimate and expansive. Mort(e) brings Taalik to a kind of quiet heaven in his own mind, populated by both the living and the dead and those who never had a chance to live. They're all facing destruction together, but in Mort(e)'s fantasy, the coming wave doesn't matter. They can all see it - Mort(e) isn't one for denial - but they are together, and at peace, and happy. Mort(e) sees the value in preserving and sharing life, and although he spent much of his life at war, he never lost sight of that. And after letting his oldest, dearest friend go explore the world the way she wants, in a way he can't follow, Mort(e) finally allows himself to break down some of his old isolation. When he accepts the beavers' offer to stay with them and help rebuild the dam in Hosana, he lets himself truly become part of a community for the first time.
Barge Reactions: Mort(e) is not used to quite the diversity of weird shit that the barge has to offer, but he's well practiced at trudging through regardless. Like so many others, he'll be most disturbed by breaches that make him human.
Deal: Mort(e) is making a deal for the health and sanity of the other surviving translator users, including a loss of access to the Queen's pseudo-omniscience.
History: Mort(e) began life as the ordinary house cat of an ordinary suburban family. Two parents, two kids, mom screwing the hot next door neighbor, the usual. Mort(e)'s emotional life revolved around 1) that one really good patch of sun in the living room 2) protecting the children!!!!! despite having no claws 3) that one comfy chair he wasn't allowed in, and 4) most significantly, the hot next door neighbor's dog Sheba, who became his first and only friend. They explored the strange world of the attic together, and spent lazy afternoons cuddled up together cozily while their humans were carrying on their affair. It's during one of these moments of peaceful, intimate affection that Mort(e) has his first real experience of sentience.
The ants of the world have released chemical signals that transform the nonhuman mammals, giving those without hooves human hands, and letting all of them walk upright, speak human language, and think abstract thoughts. At the same time, the ants have been slowly eradicating human cities with car-sized ant soldiers called alphas; society is starting to break down before their inexorable march. That same night, Daniel Martini comes home and while Neighbor Guy escapes, he does not have time to retrieve Sheba, who gives birth to puppies in the basement. Daniel, furious, drowns them.
Mort(e) escapes the house, and over the course of the next night, Mort(e) lurks on rooftops, feels the fur fall from his paws, and experiences the physiological aspects of the change. In the morning, most of the city is evacuating, Mort(e) has felt a great vista of mental understanding open up, but he cannot find Sheba. He returns to the Martini's house and discovers that Daniel Martini is preparing, out of a combination of anger and masculine despair, to murder his family rather than flee. Mort(e) wrestles his shotgun away from him, but doesn't know how to use it. After a thorny conversation, Daniel attacks him, and with the help of a sly alley cat and a trigger gesture, Mort(e) shoots him point-blank, killing him instantly. Unlike some of the more resentful uplifted animals, however, he doesn't have any desire to wipe out all humans, not even his "slave" owners. He lets Janet Martini and her children go, and even protects them from the alley cats.
This fateful decision, this simple mercy, sets the stage for everything that comes after. The Martinis find Sheba on their way out of town, not yet Changed, and take her with them. When they are captured by the ants, Michael - the Martini's young son - remembers that Mort(e) spared them, bringing Mort(e) to the attention of the ant Queen. When she allows Michael to escape as one of her strange experiments, Michael - his mind addled by the invasive translator that let the Queen trawl his memories - becomes a "prophet" for the scattered syncretic human resistance, claiming that Mort(e) the Warrior and Sheba the mother will be instrumental in the Queen's fall, and the coming of a new paradise where humans and animals will live together in peace - without the ants. The Queen keeps Sheba, and allows Michael to escape and preach as a test for the surface animals: if they fail, and fall prey to that most human depravity, that most human excuse for atrocities, religion, then she will eradicate them too. She calls religion "EMSAH" - a garbling of "Messiah" - and claims it is a rabies-like bioweapon that the humans (always wicked!) have released in an attempt to win the war. This allows her to quarantine and destroy any place beginning to succumb to such subversive ideas.
Before that, though, Mort(e) begins trekking through an abandoned landscape, searching fruitlessly for Sheba. He encounters abandoned libraries and reads voraciously; it is during these early days that he chooses his new name, taking it from Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur. He loves the story, and forgets whether the word has an e or not - but he also comes to like the ambiguity of the parentheses on a deeper level. Morte means death - and he does become a prodigious killer. But Mort is just an ordinary name. As long as he keeps the e noncommittal, he can imagine someday coming home from the war, finding his friend and having a normal live.
While searching for Sheba, he falls into a trap set by a cell of the Red Sphinx, an all-cat commando unit specializing in asymmetrical warfare for the Queen. The cats of the RS think Mort(e) is crazy because he 1) is yelling names out in the wilderness, and 2) refuses to explain himself even a tiny bit. They worry that he has the EMSAH plague, and tie him to a pole so that their unit doctor Tiberius can observe the progression of the disease. Mort(e) tries to warn them of a human stealth attack, but since he is unable to explain what a glider is, the cats take this as more evidence of advancing madness. Mort(e) manages to free himself in the chaos of the ensuing battle, and ends up recruited into the Red Sphinx. He doesn't really care about fighting, but the offer isn't entirely a free one, and it's not like he has any idea where to look - he might as well go with them.
Mort(e) slowly becomes close with Tiberius, who was friendly to him during his period of captivity, and builds respect and rapport with Colonel Culdesac, although neither of them are warm enough to term it friendship. Mort(e) eventually becomes Culdesac's SIC, and is a ruthless counter-insurgence fighter taking out human holdouts. Mort(e) and Tiberius continue to try to investigate EMSAH, but the biology of the disease is frustratingly difficult to pin down. When Mort(e) goes against orders to investigate a quarantined town in full hazmat gear, he sees a disturbing scene reminiscent of Jamestown - the first clue that EMSAH is not simply a disease.
Eventually Tiberius dies in combat; eventually the war begins to wind down. Mort(e) retires and settles in his old house, in his old neighborhood, in a new community of resettled refugees. He finds a fresh message painted in the basement: SHEBA IS ALIVE. Lead by this tantalizing clue of his only true desire, Mort(e) eventually makes contact with a human resistance cell living on a self-sustaining solar-powered airship that never needs to land. The humans believe Mort(e) himself is the Messiah, described by his former owner's child. Mort(e) doesn't care about that at all - but he is willing to cooperate with them in order to find Sheba. It's during the series of cloak and dagger moves that establishes this contact that Mort(e) steals and uses a translator, a device that allows mammals to receive and understand orders and information from the Queen. Many animals have gone mad due to overload; Mort(e) imagines the quiet peace of his square of sunlight and his time with Sheba to allow him to withstand the flood.
Meanwhile, due to human influence, a variety of other animals in the area have been suborned and "poisoned" with religion; the Queen takes steps to wipe out the entire settlement. Mort(e) and his new friend, a pitball named Wawa, are take up onto the airship Vesuvius. Wawa, longing for a pack of her own for longer than she's been sentient, joins the humans and their church. Mort(e) doesn't care, but he agrees to let the humans deliver him, inside a missile tube, into the ant's oceanic fortress, carrying a grenade of oleic acid, the ant's chemical signal for "dead thing, to be removed from the colony immediately."
After a strange conversation with the Queen, in which Mort(e) comes to understand the unending depths of both her hatred and her misery, Mort(e) tosses the grenade on her, causing her to be ripped apart by her own workers, while Mort(e) escapes with Sheba, whom the Queen kept in an un-Changed state this whole time. The humans and those animals they converted to their cause attack the fortress simultaneously, and the power of the ants is broken. As Mort(e) sails away, Sheba finally experiences the change, and eventually they set up in a remote area to become ranchers to giant alpha ant soldiers - now strangely docile with no queen to command them.
For a time, they enjoy a peaceful reunion, despite Mort(e)'s constant military training, to ensure Sheba is always prepared to defend herself. They fix up a farmhouse, take the ants on walks through the mountains to keep them placid until they can be killed and smoked, and spend their evenings exploring the books and television left in the house by its previous owners. Eventually, though, reality imposes itself once again.
While they kept to themselves, strange creatures have been mutating as a result of all the chemicals of the Change accumulating in water runoff. Strange creatures called Sarcops emerge from the oceans, with pincers and tentacles and terrifying abilities. Worse, some of them have access to the knowledge of the Queen - who, after watching and learning for thousands of years, with ant spies almost everywhere - knew many dangerous things.
The first Mort(e) hears of it, a community of beavers reaches out to beg him, legendary hero of the War With No Name (ironically on both sides) to help kill a giant spider creature that has captured several of their people and cocooned them alive, Mirkwood-style. Mort(e) insists it can't be done, that it would need an army, and refuses to get involved. Sheba, however, longs to see the wider world, and has too kind a heart to refuse. She takes the name D'arc, and tells Mort(e) that she's going to help the beavers.
Shortly afterward, Mort(e) grouchily turns up with a plan, and an army - their entire contingent of remaining Alphas, who probably wouldn't last another year anyway. The plan is ultimately successful, although they don't escape unscathed. The beavers' waterwheel is destroyed, and the former matriarch of the beavers is exposed as using spider eggs to try to drive out the bats in a spat of psuedo-ethnic conflict; she is taken by the bats for justice, and her son is left to make peace with them.
D'Arc, still wishing to see more of the world, travels to the joint human-animal theocratic city of Hosana with a husky agent named Falkirk, also sent to help the beavers. There, she meets Wawa (now the head of Hosana police), and is drawn into a mysterious series of murders of translator users - by another translator user, terrified of the damage the Queen's knowledge could do. And rightly so: the Sarcops are coming upriver, causing a terrible flood and a massacre, searching for Michael the prophet, because 1) their leader, Taalik, has bought into the Queen's seething hatred for humans and the surface animals in general, and 2) he intends to use a satellite meant to redirect sunlight and improve crop yields to melt the arctic ice, freeing some of this trapped (actually long-dead) people, and also drowning the world. In order to do this, he needs a translator user to access the right information and operate the satellite. The Sarcops' first attack, though devastating, is rebuffed by the Sons of Adam, Michael's zealous personal guard.
In the aftermath, Mort(e) is allowed the very rare privilege of visiting Michael. When he sees Michaels' utterly miserable existence, his mind and body both heavily deteriorated from the side effects of hostile translator use, and kept alive only by elaborate life support, Mort(e) immediately mercy kills him - kicking off a brief, brutal civil war between the outraged humans and animals who don't want to let him be executed for it. The Sons of Adam are driven from Hosana, and Mort(e) is rescued, but not for long. The Sarcops demand Mort(e) instead, under various threats - and the remaining powers of Hosana agree to humor their demand, and then ambush them. Due to the weird telepathic wavelengths that exist between some translator users, they cannot fool Taalik - they have to bring Mort(e) there for real.
The Sons of Adam ambush them while transporting Mort(e) to the meeting place near the control facility for the satellite, resulting in Wawa's death, among many others; both airships crash, and Mort(e) is pulled from the wreckage by Taalik. As Dar'c hunts them down, Taalik takes Mort(e) into the facility and invades his mind, trying to force Mort(e) to reveal the secret of the satellite's control. Instead, Mort(e) leads him in strange circles, showing him a fantasy of love and peace, where Mort(e)'s friends and family - many of them dead, some of them never-lived, including D'Arc's children - are together. Nevertheless, Taalik is strong, and rips the information out of Mort(e)'s head. He challenges Taalik that he doesn't have to do it, despite the Queen's posthumous will; he asks him "Who will meet you at the place?" Meaning: who do you love, who do you want to live for, who really matters to you? The answer is not the Queen, but his mate Orak - whom Taalik left standing guard, who D'arc fights and threatens to kill.
Taalik relents, absconding with Orak into the river and back to the sea, leaving Mort(e) in control of the satellite. Due to his absolute dickishness and closed-off coldness around D'Arc's leaving him to live her own life, there are a few moments she worries that he might end the world too, in one more grand fit of feline pique, refusing to be beholding to anyone. But Mort(e) disarms the satellite, and destroys the facility, and lets D'Arc take him back to Hosana, where he is kept under medical observation - ironically, this time, for a mind-altering condition he actually has. He cooperates as much as he's able, but when there are no more tests to run, he sneaks out to see D'Arc off as she embarks on her greatest journey yet, traveling the globe on a repurposed aircraft carrier, to re-establish contact with other parts of the world. After she disappears over the horizon, he starts walking west, intending to disappear - but after one kind invitation and one chance encounter with a bat who helped him fight the spider, he has a small hysterical happy-cry breakdown and runs back to accept that invitation after all: to live with the beavers and help with the rebuilding of Hosana and its dam.
He will be coming to the barge from a few months after this, when the dam is rebuilt and D'Arc is still not back, when he feels uncomfortable with his complicated status and the holes in his own mind, when he needs more work to do.
Samples: whomp bomp ba bommm
Special Notes: ANTHROCALYPSE NOW