Mira Hidalgo

16. azimuth

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 03:54:49 GMT

[Public Video]

[Mira Hidalgo is broadcasting from the bathtub. Her own tub, in her own quarters, hair wet and plastered to her neck. She's not quite flashing the whole barge, but currently it's only a matter of either careful or lucky cropping, rather than any actual coy bubble bath. She is drinking champagne from a bottle and utterly pleased with herself.]

Hi, barge.

[Private to Mickey]

I was thinking, if you wanted, I could...check on things, when I go. Baby things, I mean, or...whatever.

[Private separately to Mal and Luna]

Thank you.

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15. chasable

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 04:48:52 GMT

[Spam for Zane]

[Mira has had insomnia, off and on, for her entire stay on the barge. It's improved a bit since the mirror barge, but it is not at all strange to see her roaming the ship at odd hours. She avoids the patrols, creeps silently as a matter of habit. She peers at the stars and takes the occasional apple from the dining hall. Mostly, though, she winds her way up and down the stairs. Every murder so far has been in a stairwell. It makes sense - confined space, tight angles, good for concealment and sudden strikes. There is no tension of fear in her shoulders, no glancing back. She has her staser in her boot, but that, too, is not unusual.

It's not a trap, because her goal is not to stop whoever it is; her goal is not to survive or conquer. Only to see. The rest she leaves to skill and chance. And to that end, pins holding her unruly hair in place have been modified to carry some of Barbara's tiny bugs, hacked and modded with less skill but more advanced tech, transmitting to a screen where Mickey broods and watches and waits, and to Mira's neural Direct Interface. The culprit attacks from behind; but now Mira has eyes in the back of her head.]

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14. marmoreal

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 01:15:44 GMT

[Private to Iris and Simon, text]

thank you for trying

[Private to Mal, text]

What happened to you?

[After you saw me.]

[Private to Luna, voice]

Do you like pancakes?

[Spam for Mickey, Helena, Cassel, and Stephen]

[Sometime in the night, she breaks into their cabins, quietly. She just wants to watch for a while. Just wants to see that they're okay. If they wake, they might find her perched nearby, scribbling in a notebook. Or maybe just staring, small and still, chin on her knees.]

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13. shilly-shallying

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 01:32:50 GMT

[Drift spam for Mal]

[She's nervous, of course she's nervous, climbing back into the connpod after all the time she's spent trying to forget the last time she was in here. Good practice, she tells herself firmly, blood pounding in her ears, doesn't think of the rough-edged gaps in her memory or the things she remembers too clearly, doesn't think about anything at all, definitely doesn't think about how eagerly she would run right back to the gutter if not for Mal's sharp dark gaze pinning her in place better than the pneumatic hiss of the cables connecting to her drift suit, of a piece with the weight of the pons apparatus settling on her face like a spider poised to eat out her eyes. She itches everywhere under the armored jumpsuit, which makes her hard-shelled and shiny, insectoid, the better to be a spider's prey.

No. No. She needs not to think like that, because soon it'll power up and Mal will see - (everything) - nothing, nothing at all, white flat salt nothing, calm as a wide horizon, calm as a good high, calm as dead things when Plogviezhe makes them dead.

You have to own a jaeger. You have to be one, skyscraper-tall and shatterproof. (She isn't shatterproof.) And this one is her, is them, she knows the bladed edges and ammunitions of this machine better than she knows her own hands, wrapped into the arm controls. One of the techs is asking her, the second time, for confirmation. Her mouth is too dry to speak, but she is not afraid, she does not let herself think of anything at all. She catches the tech's eye for half a second, nods, and feels the first brush of the drift, Mal's sheer determination bleeding in, ready for this, wading into it, and good fucking god Mira missed her even as she's terrified by the closeness, by everything that could be seen if she doesn't - keep ahold of herself - but it's too late to back out now, for all her attempts, it was too late a year ago.]

[Open shatterdome spam before the attacks]

[Mira skulks about, approaches no one. She can't stand to stay cooped up in her quarters but she hates venturing out, too, scuttles from place to place, looks away if anyone meets her eyes, looks away before then if she sees anyone who knew her before. She feels like she must have a sign on her forehead, disgraced, AWOL, broken. She wants to hide but she needs space, and the Shatterdome is sort on both privacy and emptiness. She finds odd places, defunct half-flooded corridors painted in aquatic moss and barnacles, the sheer bustle of the medical wing where no one has the energy to notice a spare girl with wild hair picking up a batch of laundry to disinfect, climbs scaffolding in the hangar bay and watches people hurry by like a sloth, like a bat, in nervous suspension.]

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12. ibidem

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 01:09:59 GMT

[Video, public]

For the record, these penis enlargement pills do nothing. I'd like to register a complaint.

[Infirmary spam, open to visitors, backdated to 2-4 days post-Shakespeare flood.]

[She wakes up after jumping, her skin tight and and her eyes sore and her lungs aching in her chest. She groans, rolls over, tries to sleep. Maybe she can sleep for the entire toll. She's been trying so hard to be, to live and connect. Maybe she can just not be for awhile.]

(OOC NOTE: TW for suicide if people ask her why she is tolling. Ophelia's narrative was rough on her.)

[Private to Roderick, backdated also]

...can you do me a favor?

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11. Aquarelle

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:35:58 GMT

[Filtered away from Mal, Iris, and Cassel]

If you know that you were going to lose all your episodic memory - everything you've done, everyone you know - what would you try to record? Would you want your new self to know anything about you at all?

( Gift List )

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10. reacclimate

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:49:33 GMT

[Public video, but filtered away from Harvey, David, and Iris]

[It might not be immediately obvious, between the low light and the strange angle, but Mira is lying on top of the unadorned altar in the nondenominational chapel on deck, some of her hair hanging over the side, comm held above her.]

Do you ever feel like you aren't real?

( Confidential to David, Cassel, Iris, Harvey, and Helena )

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9. cave spam wooo

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 02:18:09 GMT

[Spam for Bush]

[Mira's wearing her tactical dress. It's primarily armor and camouflage, but it can be reconfigured. Right now, for instance, it's surrounding her with a keen red glow - red being considerably less damaging to human night vision than white - the smooth lines of the wrap broken by the dark bars of her pack straps. The dress was never intended for primary illumination, so she can't see all of the cavern she's in. She moves nimbly, one hand on the wall, trying to gauge the space.]

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8. spam

Thu, 29 May 2014 14:26:03 GMT

Mira sidles up to you. She's friendly, but not excessively so, not suspiciously so. She seems like a wallflower finally trying to ease out of her shell, or some similar mixed metaphor. In the cafeteria, it's 'Hey, do you mind if I sit with you?' and a small smile. In the hallways it's falling into step, one shoulder tilted awkward and shy. 'Hi. You're so-and-so, right?' In the library she asks what you're reading; on the deck she mentions the stars are beautiful. It's mild and banal, which isn't the point. The point is getting close enough to deftly tap a sticky note on your back. Don't worry, it only says your name.

[OOC: Mira is trying to do this for everyone, so David knows where people are! She also wished to remember, meaning her own past. Instead she's going to get other people's memories - critical, trivial, or things they had forgotten. Feel free to toss her one!]

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7. Public + messages to David & Iris

Tue, 20 May 2014 16:56:03 GMT

[Private to David 8]

I wasn't any different there. That I could tell.

[Public, voice]

How many people have you been? How many people have you pretended to be?

[She's not sure where exactly the distinction is between these things.]

You may estimate.

[Private to Iris]

I'd like to be allowed in the labs. I've been researching hydroponics.

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6. Open spam + Open video + private to Arthas

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:09:29 GMT

[Open Spam - hallways, deck, dining hall]

( Cut for length and CONTENT WARNING for brief suicidal imagery; In which Mira has tantrum. )

[Public, later]

[Her eyes are still a little red; she doesn't look like death warmed over but she doesn't look happy, either. Her tone is terse, not quite defiant. Challenging, maybe.]

If you knew, I mean really knew, that killing someone innocent would save millions of lives, improve more, would you do it?

[Private to Arthas]

What would you do if you couldn't remember who you were before?

[Who would be left?]

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5 - video, public

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:31:34 GMT

[When Mira comes on screen, she looks markedly different, not like a living woman at all, but like some ancient Oreiad, a desert nymph of living sandstone, her natural golden coloration translated into distinctly geological striations, polished smooth in her exact shape. Her hair was a lattice of coiled wire filaments, gleaming dark grey like hematite, and her eyes sparkled with what might have been real diamond lenses. She doesn't not smile. She opens her mouth to being, and although the noise that comes out sounds exactly like her normal voice, she does not need to breathe in to generate it.]

It's funny. History is funny. The first Turing test was invented before there were any real computers to speak of at all. The test itself was laughable. A teddy bear could pass it. Ones from my time, anyway, anything with a few specks of cheap internal software.

Put a human on one end of a text interface, an AI on the other. Let them chat. What about? Their kids? Hobbies? Shopping? The AI has to lie to pass itself off as human, presumably. A weird test of intelligence. Perhaps a better test of humanity than its inventor intended.

( Cut for length. Oy. )

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4 - standing by, locked message + spam

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:42:41 GMT

[Filtered away from all the residents of the barge, but open to any random fourth-wall people who might bother her.]

If you have any instructions for me, I'm here.

[Later, spam]

[She's just. Walking, when it hits her, descending the stairs to her room after another substitute kitchen shift. She wants to scream and bleed and set things on fire, and she barely understands why. She just - she did what she was supposed to do, she did, she didn't hide, and they - we love you, Mira, no one else will ever - they didn't -

She sits down in the middle of the stairwell, back to the wall, and draws her knees up tight so she can hide her face against them.]

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3 - open spam, gift list

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 03:49:11 GMT

[Open spam]

[Mira spends a lot of time in the greenhouse. She's barefoot, shoes dangling from magnetic straps from two fingers, enjoying the organic feeling of soil beneath her soles. She is so bored, and so still. She doesn't know if she wants it to stop or not.]

( gift list )

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2 - Video, public

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 22:56:21 GMT

[Open, Video]

[She got caught by the women's council, near the end. They dragged her off when she claimed to have no family to be returned to, interred her in a tiny church with other troublesome, unmarried young ladies. Most of them had had a child out of wedlock. They did laundry together, work and penance, the heavy lye soap burning their hands hour by hour. Mira could have swaggered out bloody, but she didn't - something about the mumbled prayers and the delicate stained glass windows and the blunt, human directness of it, the brusque cruelty and judgement appealed to her. Their God was hypocritical and describable; the things he required of her were concrete and impersonal. It didn't matter that she was no one, in the cloister - all of them were no one, were discards, and they showed her how to do the work and took her unhesitatingly in. She enjoyed it, in her way, listened to the other women talk about their children, taught one how to break her boyfriend's wrist the next time he came home drunk. And she stayed until the barge caught her up again.

She's in the chapel now, dull and bare by comparison, not gaudy morbid stories or old ash marks on squat brick. She rolls a candle from one hand to the other. She has kept to herself, so far, has made no announcements or introductions, done nothing to draw undue attention since the nature of this place was explained to her. She was content with that state of affairs. But she is curious, now.]

How many of us are religious?

( terrible horrible flirting, confidential to Two-Face )

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1 - spam

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 19:03:16 GMT

( CW for discussion of attempted suicide )

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TLV APP

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 02:09:41 GMT

User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: PM me
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor, Marsh

Character Name: Mira Hidalgo
Series: Evolution’s Darling by Scott Westerfeld
Age: Her exact age is unknown, but she is probably in her late twenties or early thirties. Mira herself doesn’t exactly know.
From When?: After her pseudo-suicide in the hotel bath.

Inmate/Warden: Inmaaaate. Mira is an assassin. Besides murder, she has raped, tortured, mutilated, mentally manipulated, and done all manner of terrible things in the course of her work, and sometimes simply for fun. She is vicious, self-centered, and petulant, and she worries very little about the morality of her actions.

( You bastard. )

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