ximilia app;

OOC
Name: Ade Bennett
Contact: crimsonxiphos or PM
Other characters: None

IC
Name: Adrian “Ade” Bennett
Canon: The Wess’har Wars
Canon point: Mid-Matriarch, after visiting the ruins of Constantine with Aras
Age: In his 30s

History: Summary of the first book. Note that Ade is mostly a background character here.

In the second book, word of Shan’s new “biotech” begins to spread through the ranks of the human crew. As the information filters to governments and corporations alike back on Earth, a race begins to retrieve samples. Newly bereaved by the loss of her infant son, Lindsay blames Shan for refusing to provide the child with a dose of life-saving c’nataat. Her anger becomes further inflamed when Ade tells her that the corporations want to exhume her son’s body to check for contamination. Lindsay resolves that they will retrieve a c’nataat sample from Shan and enlists the help of Ade’s detachment of marines. Though Ade has started to develop feelings for Shan, Lindsay is his commanding officer and he does not feel able to disobey her.

Lindsay and the marines hatch a plan to drop onto the planet from orbit, extract Shan, and steal a colony ship to return to the orbiting Actaeon. However, unbeknownst to the marines, Lindsay’s plan is far more extreme; rather than take Shan alive, she plans to kill Shan and destroy the c’nataat that inhabits her. Their cohort is soon joined by Mohan Rayat, a spy of uncertain loyalties who also has an interest in securing a sample for his handlers. As the date of the mission approaches, Rayat convinces Lindsay to not only capture Shan, but to destroy the c’nataat’s remaining natural habitat, the island Christopher. He suggests the use of cobalt-salted nukes, misleading Lindsay to believe that the weapon will have no lasting environmental effects aside from the destruction of the c’nataat microorganism.

Lindsay, Rayat, and the marines execute their mission, dropping near the colony and enlisting the help of a sympathetic colonist to secure passage to Christopher, the island from which c’nataat originates. Aras and Shan capture two of the six marines and interrogate them, eventually learning of their plan to bomb Christopher.

Enraged, Shan rushes off to confront her and the marines, bringing their two prisoners and Aras with her. Unfortunately, it’s too late. The bombs go off as they’re approaching Christopher by boat, poisoning the water that the bezeri inhabit. Shan arrives in the tunnels under the colony and immediately attacks Lindsay, forcing her to the ground and holding a gun to her head. However, before she can shoot, the marines open fire, starting a firefight between them and Shan. When Shan shoots one of his detachment, Ade tackles her to the ground and pins her there, but not before she manages to headbutt him in the face, bloodying him. The marines then manage to subdue, restrain, and gag Shan. As they do this, Ade seems uncharacteristically preoccupied by the wound on his face.

With Shan now incapacitated, Lindsay drops her charade and prepares to use the grenades from her belt-pack to destroy Shan and the c’nataat within her. When Lindsay tries to order Ade to leave for his own safety, he points his rifle at her, telling her to disarm the grenades on the threat of death. Lindsay attempts to pull rank on him, but Ade insists that he won’t let her murder an unarmed prisoner. Finally, Lindsay relents, sparing Shan.

Lindsay, Rayat, and the marines then load Shan onto a spacecraft and attempt to bring her back to Actaeon so that c’nataat samples may be taken. However, en-route, Shan manages to speak privately with Lindsay and convinces her to free her so that she can throw herself out of an airlock to prevent the infection being brought back to Earth. The two of them subvert the marines, secreting Shan into the cargo hatch where she can be spaced. Ade gets wind of their plot seconds too late, bursting onto the scene just in time to watch Shan fall into space.

Now empty-handed and having committed an act of war on the territory of a technologically superior foe, Lindsay, Rayat, and the marines fearfully make their way back to Actaeon. On their way, they are intercepted by an ussissi shuttle that informs them via comm that they have deployed cobalt weapons on Christopher and demands to know what has become of their prisoner. Over the course of the conversation, Lindsay and the marines realize Rayat lied to them and has made them complicit in genocide against the bezeri. Ade then interjects into the exchange and states that he is surrendering to the wess’har authorities for his crimes, much to the horror of his comrades. The ussissi agrees to take him onboard and deliver him to the wess’har.

As Ade transfers between the two ships, he takes one last look at Lindsay through the window and peels off the bandage on his face, showing that the wound Shan had given him earlier is now completely gone. He then flips Lindsay off, having revealed that she had failed in her attempt to eradiate c’nataat—he, too, is now infected.

In the aftermath of the bezeri genocide, the humans in the system are plunged into chaos. Many evacuate the Actaeon to avoid the wess’har’s retaliation, fleeing to the isenj world of Umeh. The wess’har are indeed swift in their counterattack, destroying the Actaeon and the remaining humans onboard with a single fighter.

Meanwhile, Ade surrenders himself to the grieving Aras, the wess’har matriarch Nevyan, and Eddie, giving them an account of Shan’s last moments. He also reveals that he too has been infected by c’nataat and that he had revealed as much to Lindsay. As a result, it is decided that he will be held captive in the wess’har settlement on Bezer’ej. Knowing that he’ll be unreachable to humanity within their custody, Ade willingly agrees.

The book ends with Ade and Aras living and grieving together, now both outcasts due to c’nataat, while Nevyan vows to find Shan’s body still lost in the void of space. At the same time, the Eqbas Vorhi, wess’har from the species’ original homeworld, are told of humanity’s crimes on Bezer’ej and consequently begin planning for an invasion of Earth.

Summary of the third book

Summary of the fourth book

Personality:

1. Ade is brave. He is constantly battling his own terror, both as a result of the frightening, alien circumstances he’s been thrust into and the C-PTSD he suffers from as a result of his father’s abuse. Yet, though Ade regularly feels fear, he rarely lets it stop him from doing what’s right. He regularly throws himself into harm’s way to protect others, even when he’s terrified, such as in his introductory scene when he saves a scientist from a circling alien predator—and lets himself have a panic attack only once the danger is past. Ade is not a fearless character by any means, but his willingness to face his fears to help others is what makes him a brave one.

2. Ade is gentle. Though Ade is a soldier by trade, he is far from a violent man. He is kind and patient with others, described as having a voice that “always seemed too soft for a man who was supposed to bark orders.” He is nurturing, kind, and patient, and has been since he was a boy. It is these “soft” traits that inspired so much rage in his father, who felt that Ade was not enough of a man. On the flip side, these traits are also what made Ade into the de-facto leader of his marine detachment, as the others willingly defer to his compassionate style of leadership.

3. Ade is moral. As a child, Ade was frequently protected from his father’s violent rages by the intervention of his mother, who would often take beatings meant for him. This experience left Ade with a hatred toward all cruelty and a strong desire to protect others, no matter the cost to himself. When he feels he has done wrong, he willingly submits to punishment, such as captivity under the wess’har and even servitude to the bezeri. He believes in justice and is not the sort to make exceptions for himself.

4. Ade is obedient—to a fault. One of the things that makes Ade a model soldier, especially early in the series, is his capacity to simply shut up and follow orders. The catastrophic consequences of this trait are made abundantly clear in Crossing the Line, where Ade’s continued obedience towards his commanding officer Lindsay Neville leads to the genocide of the bezeri, Shan’s capture and subsequent self-sacrifice and mummification, and ultimately war between Earth and the Ebqas Vorhi. For Ade, unwavering obedience is both a means of escaping punishment and of winning the approval and safety he was never granted as a child—the very reasons he “fell in love with” life in the Corps.

5. Ade is self-loathing. On the surface, Ade seems to have every reason to be proud of his accomplishments. He is a decorated soldier, admired by humans and wess’har alike for his competence, bravery, and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. Yet, Ade sees none of these qualities in himself, instead agreeing with his father’s assessment of him as a “gutless little bastard.” His inability to protect his mother as a child has left him with a permanent image of himself as a failure of a man, a view only cemented in his mind by his struggles with C-PTSD. He is also haunted by his role in the mass poisoning of the bezeri and Shan’s near-death, which only adds to his belief that he isn’t competent nor brave enough to save the people around him.

6. Ade is anxious. As a result of his traumatic upbringing, Ade is rarely at ease and is easily triggered by reminders of his abuse. This can manifest as unexpectedly extreme reactions to benign stimulus, such as when he throws Aras against a wall for unexpectedly grabbing his shoulders. It also leads to crushing passivity in relationships, with Ade actively expecting to be physically abused by his partners in the same way his mother was abused by his father. This constant expectation of violence means Ade is always walking a razor’s edge emotionally and makes it difficult for him to form trusting relationships.

Powers/Abilities:
1. Accelerated Healing: C’nataat gives Ade extraordinary powers of self-regeneration. A shallow cut will heal in seconds; a broken bone in one to a few hours. Even being freeze-boiled alive in the void of space can be survived, given a lengthy recovery period afterwards. The only guaranteed method to kill Ade for good is fragmentation, most reliably through the use of explosives.

2. Spontaneous Mutation: C’nataat also allows Ade to rapidly adapt to hostile conditions, for example growing gills to survive underwater or becoming able to survive on alternate food sources if nothing conventional is available. C’nataat can also activate mutations in the interest of social or emotional needs, such as altering his vocal cords to allow him to speak an alien language or making him receptive to pheromone signals. All that said, c’nataat is limited to genetic information it has acquired from previous hosts or blood exposure, i.e., it cannot give Ade cat ears if it’s never been exposed to a cat. Thus, there is a limit to the changes it can grant him.

3. Memory Sharing: C’nataat not only integrates other characters’ physical traits into its hosts, but their memories as well. Thus, if Ade is exposed to another character’s blood (or sexual fluids), the most emotionally-charged of their memories will begin to appear in his dreams. These memories can range from full sensory experiences to vague tactile impressions. Ade has no control over which memories he receives or how defined they are when he dreams of them.

4. C’nataat Vector: C’nataat is an infectious microbe that grants its powers to any host it colonizes. It can be spread through blood-to-blood contact or through sexual transmission. In canon, anyone who becomes infected with c’nataat becomes its permanent host. However, in the interest of maintaining game balance, I can alter its potency by saying that c’nataat cannot survive long-term in any host besides Ade while he is in-game. Thus, any character who is exposed to c’nataat will only experience its symptoms—including accelerated healing, spontaneous mutations, and memory sharing—for a limited amount of time, with larger quantities of blood imbuing c’nataat’s effects for a longer duration. I am very open to mod input in this regard, though my initial suggestion is that a small amount of blood can grant c’nataat’s effects for a few minutes while a very large quantity of blood (i.e., a full volume transfusion) can imbue it’s effects for a couple of days.

5. Sense of smell/Pheromones: C’nataat has allowed Ade to adapt to life among the wess’har, an alien species whose society and communication hinge upon pheromone signals. For this reason, his sense of smell is much sharper than a human's. He can identify some human scents, such as those of fear and distress, not to mention any distinctive smells a character might have due to their environment/activities. In addition, Ade passively emits wess’har pheromone signals from his skin based on his emotional state, none of which have any notable effect on humans. The only pheromone that may have an additional effect on other character’s is the pheromone emitted when Ade is at ease/in a neutral state. This sandalwood-like scent smells very pleasantly to humans and has a warm, soothing effect on wess’har (or potentially other non-human characters, at their players’ discretion).


Regret: Ade wants to undo collaborating with Lindsay/Rayat’s plan to nuke the island of Ouzhari/Christopher. This event led to the near-extinction of the bezeri, war between Earth and the Ebqas Vorhi, and Shan needing to space herself. Thus, undoing it would prevent untold death and suffering.

Suitability: From a purely practical standpoint, Ade is an asset to have on any team. He’s a highly-trained, nigh-unkillable space marine with a super-healing factor in his blood. He’s good at both giving and taking orders and is highly driven to undo his regret. Needless to say, there are many reasons to want him as a recruit.

Inventory: Arctic camo Royal Navy fatigues, a fighting knife, and several military medals

Sample: One

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