Post by Mihira on Oct 11, 2009 19:00:07 GMT -8
your name | andy
your age | 20
contact information |PM, email, YIM and msn; anyway is good, check my profile for contacts
characters | fiver rye; science guy!
full name | being part of a hive mind, she has no name of her own; when she was found by Torchwood India, they gave her a designation number and codenamed her 'Mihira'.[/center][li]
nicknames & titles | Designate NH-003; Little Vishnu, Smurfette, Blue, Ghostie etc
age | looks around 27, but seems to age as a much slower rate; estimates put her at over 200 at least.
sexuality | pansexual, but as yet unaware of her sexuality
occupation | Torchwood undercover operative and general enforcer.
family information | Mihira was part of a hive mind that spanned over a thousand living organisms; traveling shoal-like through the galaxy in small pods, they were connected through electrical impulses. Mihira is a shell without the stability of the hive, but she does feel a sense of loss for them.
residence | Mihira's pod was destroyed after she fell to earth; Torchwood India did not want to risk it's discovery, though there was a chance that damaging the pod would harm the life form they had found inside. The pod held the only possibility of contacting her race; meaning that she is stuck here.
For the last eighty-eight years, Mihira has been in cryogenic sleep, sealed away in a crate in the basement of Torchwood India, until she was shipped to Cardiff and put into storage with the rest of the artifacts.
physical description | Mihira is, like many aliens, humanoid; from the outside at least, she looks human, though her coloring and demeanor could dissuade. In fact, her race evolved from a future colony of humans experimenting with base DNA reconstruction and electrically-enhanced telepathy; this is the reason for her humanoid appearance, though it has been almost a millennia since her race could be considered human. A time anomaly in deep space allowed for a shoal to travel back to around a thousand years prior to the Earth's creation - which is how a future race evolved towards the present.
Standing at 5'8 and weighing in at around 126 pounds, she is deceptively strong; able to throw a van and break bones like twigs, though not obviously muscled. Her skin is unnaturally warm to the touch, contrasting with the cold coloring which earned her her name; her skin pales to white, darkening to mottled blue around the edges of her form.
The colour blue is part of her fundamental makeup - it has been suggested that this is due to her race's reliance on electricity. Mihira's hair is predominantly blue, struck through with what once may have been red, but is now fading to grey. Falling past her shoulders in tousled waves, her hair is thick and usually tangled - Mihira often forgets to look after the details of her appearance. It has no real style; according to the records, it was past her elbows when Torchwood India found her, and was cut, inexpertly, by the unit's doctor.
Her eyes are also blue and unnaturally expressive; her race has large irises to allow for better night vision, making her eyes seem larger and brighter. She needs to blink very little, making her gaze more intense and leaving her undefeated champion in staring contests. Her eye are oval and wide, with little tilt to them, though her penchant for tipping her head to one makes up for it; her eyebrows are thin and gently arched, giving her a vulnerable expression.
Her lips are tinged blue, as though with cold, and set in a perfect cupid's box. Her lips are usually parted, as she has a highly developed sense of taste; breathing gives her a better sense of taste and smell than any human has - it's almost snake-like, but intensified.
Mihira doesn't have a sense of style; her body suit is a living fabric, created by a symbiotic virus that inhabits the pods of her race. It is bound to her, telepathically responding to her commands and is capable of the same shapeshifting that she is, though to a wider extent. Able to shift at her command, she has only to be shown an outfit to be able to mirror it; her body suit is also capable of simulating blunt weapons, though Mihira's strength precludes the need for them. The suit is predominantly red, with blue, black and gold accenting it.
Of course, the ability that makes Mihira such a good infiltrator is her ability to change the periphery of her appearance. She can alter the pigments in her body, changing the colour of her skin or hair or eyes; she can even influence her body on a cellular level, making her hair curl into a style or growing scars where none where before. Mihira's race use this shapeshifting ability to infiltrate planet-bound races; hers is a conquering race. Her ability is not bone-deep; she has only the ability to change the details, her bone structure and underlying features remain the same.
played by | amy acker
personality |
Child of a hive mind, Mihira fell to earth with no personality of her own; like shallow water, she is just a reflection with no sustenance behind it. Separated from her shoal, she is an echo of a complete person; without their combined thoughts and memories, she is like a newborn that has to learn everything for the first time. While Mihira is capable of emotion, she hasn't the experience to know what it is she is feeling, or how to react to it. Since the telepathic connection she had with her shoal was electrical, Mihira can be affected by electromagnetic fields; they can influence her thoughts, which is how Torchwood gained control of her, but they can’t influence her emotions. In her blank state, she has the mental capacity of a child of maybe five years old, though her emotional range puts her at barely human, let alone childlike.
Though the endless store of knowledge her hive mind afforded her is lost, Mihira retains the inherent knack for adaptation and survival. After her crash and falling under Torchwood control, she was treated as little more than an organic robot – she had no personality of her own, and interactions with her were recorded as ‘short, simple and with no more depth than that of a mimicking child’. As time passed and Mihira sent more time in the company of humans, she began to develop mannerisms and ask questions – a study of her was made by the resident doctor, who determined that she was ‘humanizing’ or becoming more self actualized. His theory was that, having regressed to the level of a newborn by the separation from her shoal, she was now growing and developing as a human child would. He took it upon himself to further her ‘education’, giving her books and films – however, this was not looked upon with favor by the higher ranks, those well aware that while Mihira was ‘blank’, then they could escape questions about the morality of their using her. Eventually the choice was made to put Mihira into cryogenic storage.
Within the scope of her limited experience, though they include death, sex, espionage and some of the most closely guarded secrets on the planet, Mihira remains innocent. Torchwood was able to fool her mind, exploiting the electrical weakness in her race to control her – but despite the missions she has been sent on, and the things she has been ordered to do, Mihira remains untainted by her actions. She doesn’t understand the concept of Right and Wrong, there are only orders and carrying them out; this affords her a kind of naivety born out of ignorance. She can look at a bloodied knife with the same silent acceptance as a feather, a kind of curiousity about the object but without any ideas about what it might mean. The blank state of her means that emotionally and mentally, she is like a child – this is where her innocence comes from and, though she seems to be developing slowly, it shows no sign of diminishing.
Being without the hindrance of a fully-formed personality, Mihira often notices things that normal people may overlook; due to their own internal battles, or because they are preoccupied with something or because they are simply lost in their own head. Mihira has nothing but her environment and those who inhabit it to consider – this means that she sees every facial expression, every emotion quickly hidden, al the small ways in which people give themselves away. Though Mihira has no way to comprehend what she is seeing, her developing nature seems to give her a simple insight into others – she can often tell when people are in pain, long before they give any notice of it. In her own childlike way, she notices these miniscule changes in people and points them out, though not usually in any specific way – in her disconnected way, she will try to fix anything she sees as wrong, or try and ‘make it better’. This clear-sighted side to Mihira is often overlooked, her observations dismissed as random or irrelevant.
Due to Torchwoods control over her, Mihira could quite easily be ordered to give her life for another, or to leap in front of a bullet or even to take poison – her survival instinct is strong, but outweighed by her natural state as a subordinate. However, outside of her established orders, Mihira has developed a sense of protective selflessness; though never recorded, there have been several incidents since her adoption into the Institute of Mihira actively putting herself into danger in order to assist or rescue a human. Though she does not hesitate when ordered to attack, injure or even kill someone, when it is a question of choice, it seems that Mihira is willing to give her life to prevent the death of another. As she develops, this adamant protection of life may become strong enough to override her blind loyalty to those she perceives as outranking her – whether or not she would disobey orders to save someone remains to be seen, but Torchwood records state that it may become an issue.
A lot can change in eighty-six years, and Mihira isn’t any closer to understanding this world than she was before she was put into storage. She understands her surroundings and what is said to her in the basest terms, the more literal definitions - sarcasm, irony, metaphor and all the other nuances of meaning that humans learn to recognize, Mihira cannot comprehend. She is literal to almost a fault, which can be oddly charming or wildly irritating depending on her company. With the electrical interference used to control her, Fiver could probably iron out this quirk of her non-personality – he could give her a completely human person if he wished, using the dormant knowledge that her shoal will have accumulated as they passed the planet. For some reason, Torchwood India either wouldn’t alter her at the fundamental basics, or couldn’t – either way Fiver seems reluctant to change her. Using her he has no problem with, of course. So for now, she remains robotically literal; in an odd way, it gives her a unique perspective and more often than not her comments are strangely relevant, despite being wildly out of context.
Mihira was beginning to develop when she was placed in storage and, now freed, she continues to grow and change, though not quickly. As a personality begins to emerge, small moments of individuality begin to slip through – a random comment here, an uninitiated touch there. She is slowly but surely becoming ‘someone’, despite the electrical interference that Torchwood maintains in her mind. There are a few instances recorded in the Torchwood files imported from India, of Mihira [or Designate NH-003, as she is formally known as] deviating from an established plan on a mission. There are several slightly shocked sounding reports of her ‘improvising’ during her role as infiltrator – these reports are short and infrequent, but they defiantly imply a burgeoning mind growing within her. She continued to surprise her ‘handlers’, the study the doctor conducted indicating that she was even asking questions before she was placed into cryogenic stasis.
When Torchwood India found Mihira, she was badly injured but she still managed to kill three civilians and several subordinates; their technology was basic, but adapting some alien tech they managed to gain control of the alien. They turned her into a mindless soldier with no will or thoughts of her own – like a computer, they were able to read the stores of dormant knowledge the shoal had left in the untapped regions of her brain, they were able to order her to be anyone, to do anything. They abused this – sending Mihira on missions considered ‘too dangerous for human involvement’, programming her to infiltrate organizations and families using any means necessary. Mihira followed their commands to the letter, often too literally – they had tricked her hive mind into accepting them as her superior and it was practically part of her basic genetic make-up to obey. After years amongst the India team Mihira began to develop and, though she still obeyed orders to a fault, it was decided that having a sentient alien who could lift a SUV was a liability. She was confined, restrained and, finally, put into storage. However, since the closure of Torchwood India, there have been no electrical adjustments to Mihira’s mid – she still considers the team of eighty-six years ago to be her superiors – anyone else is considered an enemy.[/li][/ul]
greatest fear | Mihira has no emotions that she can define, being incomplete without the rest of her shoal. Since being revived, she does seem to have acquired distaste for the idea of sleep; due to her species biology, she needs only a couple of hours at most, but she is reluctant to take even that.
greatest desire | For now, Mihira seems to have no desires; though being introduced to chocolate would soon change that. For some reason, her race's biology finds it even more addictive than humans do.
personal treasure | With no possessions and few definitions in her character, Mihira treasures nothing, and the concept still escapes her; she does seem to have been attached to the humans she served in India, more than half a century ago.
biggest secret | While in her cryogenic sleep, she dreamed; a foreign concept to her, she would never articulate this event, though it engenders a feeling not unlike fear in her.
best memory | Mihira has no best memory since her fall, since being separated from her mind and heart, as one could call her race. The time when she was amongst her fellows could be called her best memory, though she is fast growing able to create new ones.
worst memory | Being separated from her shoal was mentally and physically excruciating; she will not speak of it unless ordered, and it seems to elicit some small emotion from her, which is great in itself.
history |
- Mihira is one of many; her species is made up of thousands of nomadic invading shoals, made up of over a million pods flying through space as they home in on planets with a significant electrical aura. Their species has no name for themselves, apart from a collective ‘we’, though the planets they have infiltrated or those with technology capable of detecting them have many names for them; the are known as the Fleet, Sparks, New Faces, The-Ice-That-Warms, and many more. Their mode of operation was that they would look for a planet that had high electrical signals covering it and humanoid lifeforms and they would orbit – tapping into the frequencies they would learn everything about the planet’s life. Then they would send a small infiltration party of around a hundred single operatives – they would assume the shape of the dominant species and take up small roles in society as they learn more about the planet and its defenses. They would take in information, sending it directly back up to the shoal and, if the planet was considered to have assets of technology or weapons, then an invasion would begin. The species is incredibly strong and have the advantage of space-to-planet weapons and vast numbers of rained warriors.
- The shoal of which Mihira was part was not heading for Earth; in fact, they were only passing through our solar system, when disaster struck. They were moving just past Saturn when they encountered an immense lifeform; this whale-like being seemed to swim through space itself and took little notice of the evasive action of the shoal. As it moved past them, it managed to knock several of the pods out of alignment – most were close enough to maintain contact with their fellows, but Mihira’s pod was at the centre of the collision and was knocked into the rings of Saturn. Considered lost by the shoal, they moved on and left her pod to drift among the rocks – each pod being connected to the life inside, through an electro-telepathic link, Mihira’s craft reacted to the agony of being separated from her fellows. It was sent hurtling through space in a random direction, and crashed in the northern mountains in India, Earth.
The crash occurred in 1904, and was detected by Torchwood India – Mihira was badly hurt by the unstable collision, allowing them to take her from the wreckage without incident. Her pod was destroyed, being too badly damaged to be considered an asset and too difficult to transport back to the city.
- Back at Torchwood India, Mihira came round strapped to an autopsy table as a human in a white coat tended to the wide gashes in her side. Without the influence of her hive mind, Mihira reacted in a basic physical way – she went berserk. She broke her restraints, then snapped the autopsy table, before attempting to kill the doctor [who, very cleverly, ran away]. The team attempted to subdue her, finding that tazers didn’t work and bullets barely dissuaded her from destroying everything as she came for them. Finally, their doctor and the tech-expert managed to find a frequency that would practically wipe her mind – she froze in mid-spree. With a weeks tinkering and tampering, they were able to establish the team as her new ‘shoal’ and themselves as her superiors. The colonels that inhabited the Royal Connaught Club, Torchwoods cover, decided that this was a great opportunity and from then on Designate NH-003 or ‘Mihira’ was part of the team.
- As rank went, Mihira was the lowest among the Torchwood team, but it became that she clocked more field time that any of them. Her changeable appearance, great strength and complete subservience meant that she was always with the team on recovery missions. She was also sent out for reconnaissance and infiltration, after they found that they were able to unlock certain information from the dormant part of her brain. These abilities and traits only lasted for 24 hours before the electrical signals, that connected her conscious brain to the dormant part, broke down – during undercover missions, she would have to return to the base at least once or twice a day to have a ‘realignment’.
During her time with Torchwood, Mihira began to develop – she found fascination in small things and would ask simple questions like a child, only to be treated like a robot. She mimicked the actions and gestures of the team, learning as she did – this was noticed by the team’s new medic, Doctor Washburne, who joined in 1914. He had a background in psychology and found her emergent personality to be fascinating – he taught her things, gave her brightly coloured children’s toys to examine and even took her out for ice cream. Unfortunately, this behaviour was not looked well upon by the Colonels; it was decided that Mihira should be put into stasis and hidden among the artifacts, so that their abuse of a sentient being would not come to light.
- 1922; Mihira was ordered to lie down inside a coffin-like steel box, and she was frozen alive. The stasis had to be colder than that for a human, due to her species unusually high core temperature; the build up of ice combined with the heavy lead and steel contained meant that she was effectively shielded from devices that could detect her life signs. And so, she was put into storage, along with all files concerning her discovery and term with Torchwood.
In 1924, Captain Jack Harkness closed down the Torchwood India base, shipped all artifacts to back to Britain. They were sent to Torchwood One and placed in the vaults; cataloging was infrequent and fell low on the list of priorities and, after awhile, some of the deeper vaults were forgotten. After the Fall, the vaults began to be systematically emptied and their contents sent to Cardiff – Mihira’s crate included.
- After the 456 Incident, Gwen Cooper restarted Torchwood Cardiff. The Hub was rebuilt, a new team assembled; the lower vaults had been unaffected by the bomb, and Gwen recovered their contents from the government who had cleared the bomb site.
Right now, Mihira in her crate sits in the vaults of the new Hub, waiting.
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