evowhisperer

Cesar received an unexpected phonecall late one night. It initially began with his brother asking for him and saying he didn't know where he was, and that he'd been taken by someone. The phone was taken away before they could talk further, and a different voice, feminine, laid out the basics: "'we' have your brother. If you ever want to see or hear from him again, you'll spy on the Numbered and report back to us periodically. Give us names and descriptions -- of themselves, their jobs, their abilities-- everything."

All he knows about his brother's captors is that they exist, and that the woman's name is Ruby. With no other choice, Cesar immediately begins, and meanwhile calls off Lazarus' investigation for his brother's sake.

Name: Zalein

Are you over 15? Yup!

Contact: Either Zalein on plurk, or Zaleinah on AIM.

IC Information:

Name: Canon name: Caesar Salazar, In-Game name: Cesar Ricardo Sanchez-Ortiz

Canon and medium: Generator Rex (Cartoon series)

Age: Twenty six

Preincarnation Species: Human

Preincarnation Appearance:

Any differences: Less combat boots and thermal vests, and more button up shirts and slacks.

Preincarnated History:

Here is the main article, and here are the main points!

-Caesar was born in Mexico, to Argentinan and Mexican scientist parents. He stayed there for a few years, and sometime in late gradeschool the family began to travel constantly.
-He eventually came to work at the same lab as his parents. They and the other scientists there worked on a nanite project that was intended to be a cure for all the ills of the world: hunger, cancer, genetic diseases, you name it. By accident, they create nanites that have godlike power over other nanites, and even over the laws of nature.
-He builds a couple of artificial intelligences, one of which goes rogue. Caesar exiles that one to a side dimension as a form of imprisonment, and meanwhile has learned valuable lessons about the perils of getting cocky.
-There is conflict in the lab and the lab’s funders over how the nanites should be used. This conflict goes too far, and Caesar’s group of family and trusted friends decide to release all the nanites they have. This leads to The Event, which is apocalyptically disastrous. Caesar is separated from his family and friends, and his escape-vessel is hit by the explosion’s shockwave and blasted away at such speeds that he encounters relativistic time dilation.
-Five years pass, but because of the speeds he’s in it feels like fifteen minutes. When he comes back down to earth, he immediately tracks down one of the more important nanites his group had been working on, making sure that it hasn’t fallen into unsafe hands. This is when he finds Rex (his younger brother), as well as Providence.

-He starts to work for Providence, which is the big organization (funded by his former employers) that deals with the uncontrollably mutated effects of malfunctioning nanites. His goal is to undo The Event and fix the mistakes he and the other scientists made.
-Rex disappears, then comes back, then leaves again. During this time Caesar is involved in a few innovations of questionable morality, and gains importance in Providence as a lead researcher.
-Alpha (the AI he exiled to a side dimension) comes back and tries to end the world, but is fought away and pushed back where it came from by Caesar, Rex, and Ben 10. (It’s a crossover.)
-Caesar’s scientist team in Providence finishes building the facilities needed to work with the meta nanites. They nab Rex and drag him back to Providence, where Caesar dances around everyone to keep Rex alive and his evil bosses from actually getting the last important nanites. The day is saved because he and his family had originally orchestrated the meta nanites to be unusable by anyone except Rex, and Rex got ahold of them.

Reincarnated History:

Pre-Incarnated Caesar grew up travelling frequently, raised by two science-loving parents, and looking after an impish little brother. Reincarnated Caesar deviated on both those points: he grew up with an older brother, and his parents are not scientists.

This time around, science is not the fuel to the fire powering his soul. He was not raised with a periodic table baby swaddle, and he didn’t pester his baby brother to say the word ‘Selenium’ before he could talk. Instead, his room had paintings of rock formations, his first steps were in a play pen to an older brother’s arms, and he’s never worked with nanotechnology. His mother is a geologist, and his father a doctor. His older brother went into sports, which Caesar used to mimick every day at recess. Caesar later took up aerospace engineering, not artificial intelligence. He considered going into research, once, but after a brutal internship with an unpleasant boss, he decided against it.

Thunder Corp was only one out of many places that Caesar applied to for his second job, but it was the highest on his list that gave him an offer. Though young, he had a dazzling resume, and glowing letters of recommendation. He’d settled on a career inspired by his favorite professor: he was a hydraulics test engineer. As an employee he is ideal: He works hard, always goes just over and beyond the assigned task to do things properly, and gets along well with the majority of his coworkers.

When he’s not at work running simulations or tests on car engine models, Caesar enjoys playing the accordion and washing his shining sports car. Learning to drive was a significant time of his teenaged years, not only because of the closeness it gave him to his brother but because of the easy friendships it made.

Updates to History:

Cesar’s time as a numbered was interspersed with moments of excitement and wonder, but most of it was very unpleasant: he was blackmailed by the mafia, and burned by the aftermath.

It started with his brother’s kidnapping. Hoping to bring in some Numbered advantage to help find him, Cesar recruited Lawliet’s detective skills to the cause. Lawliet dove into the case with a feverish intensity that was unmatched, and soon enough clues were starting to appear.

That was the first part that went wrong. Moises Sanchez-Ortiz wasn’t just missing, he was being held hostage, and Cesar finds out about this when the Mafia demands that Cesar call off his search-dog under threat of his brother’s death. Cesar tries to comply immediately, but Lawliet is rightly suspicious, and simply continues more quietly than before. Meanwhile, Cesar is feeding information on Numbered individuals to the mafia in exchange for his brother’s safety. He will ultimately feed over 20 names, physical descriptions, and job, address, and personal details to the mafia, including the information of the detective he hired on in the first place.

Cesar avoids Lawliet for a while. L pushes, and eventually they strike up an uneasy friendship, with Cesar having no choice but to trust him and his judgment in the whole affair. This trust is misplaced: L makes a rescue attempt that goes disastrously wrong, landing him and Tony in the cruel care of the mafia’s torture goons. Moises dies, L and Tony are left scarred and traumatized, and Cesar is ultimately kidnapped, forcibly relieved of his vocal cords, and abandoned to collect himself in an old warehouse. He does, cutting all ties with his strange, half-remembered time as one of the ‘numbered’.

Cesar assumes that the trauma of his ordeal damaged the memories of his last few months. He avoids thinking about them. 

Recovery from getting your vocal chords forcibly removed is not a fast process. Cesar doesn’t remember if he quit or lost his job at Thunder Corp while he was bedridden, but the net result is that it wasn’t waiting for him when he left. What was waiting was stacks and stacks of notes that he must’ve written during the delusional few months that he thought he was ‘Numbered’, which he looked through on a whim. It was a good thing that he did; the notes were incomplete and imperfect, but they were more than enough to not only file at least four patents in fledgling medical-nanotechnology, but to also have him invited to two major medical-tech companies and one research lab for his seeming brilliance. Aware that his background in his own inventions’ fields was sorely lacking in a good foundation, Cesar decided to do a little bit of both: he’s a contracted consultant at Panacea Pharmaceutical Technologies, which is breezing alarmingly quickly through its testing phases of what he’s made, and he does private research at home, where he tries to shore up as much of an understanding of his own tech as he can. He has no vocal cords to speak out loud, so he either does most of his communication through a tablet that he carries around, or uses what basic sign language he's learned so far.

The tech itself is interesting, to say the least. His self in his past life was pioneering nanotechnology that they hoped would be the cure to hunger, disease, and just about any other blight the world has ever seen. Cesar’s notes have barely exposed the basics of this sort of capability, but one thing they are capable of is accelerating cellular healing activity in a specific area. This works when applied well: tiny cuts close. Hairline bone fractures mend. So far these only seem to have the coordination and power to work on unhelpfully small cases, but the potential is clear.

The specifics of the technology are being kept tightly secret: not only could it be catastrophic to Panacea’s sales if anyone else is able to replicate it before it’s even marketed, but there’s been some concerning test results where cells begin to replicate uncontrollably if applied incorrectly. The effects almost seem similar to certain strains of cancer…

First Echo:

His first echo was triggered by witnessing his first burst pressure test: the sound of the pipes exploding gave him a distinct impression of ‘My calculations were off. They could have killed everyone.’ It’s easy for him to move past that unease when he’s not ‘in the zone’ while working, but when is is focused, lingering worries have led him to be a rigorous tester, dependable for his thoroughness.

2nd Echo- Tier One - He regained a memory of a span of a few seconds from preincarnation when Cesar was checking up on the status of his missing brother, Rex (played here as swissarmyjesus). He remembers the face, the name (Rex Salazar), and a glimpse of his emotions from when he was still missing.

3rd Echo - Tier One - He put on a fake mustache as a joke and saw himself for the first time with significant facial hair. This echoed back an evil goatee he'd briefly had in his past life. He has since shaved this goatee off.

4th Echo - Tier One - He bought and read his first book on nanomaterials and got back some of his hunger for science.

5th Echo - Tier Two - Cesar received grisly news that his brother had died in the hands of the Mafia. It was similar to Caesar's realization of how his family must have died in The Event: also likely gruesome, and nothing he could have prevented, but definitely something he may have caused. He received basic knowledge of what his past (canon) self used to cause The Event. This includes artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, basic understandings of nanites that he might be able to simulate but probably won't be able to manufacture, and some general medical knowledge of how the human body works, with emphasis on how it functions on a cellular level.

Sixth Echo (triggering the return of his echos after being dropped): He's rummaging around his kitchen for something when he finds the notebook where he stored all the personal information he'd leaked to the mafia. He'd originally stashed it in the back of a drawer, unable to toss the only record he has of everything he's done, but unable to stand looking at it, since it was an immediate cause of what got his brother killed in the first place. He regains all his echos through this.

Preincarnation Personality:

"Are you crazy?!
"Depends on who you ask."
--Rex to Caesar, Mixed Signals, Episode 28.

Preincarnated Caesar Salazar is a potential villain whose mother raised him right. This statement is only partially joking: we see at several times throughout the series that Caesar has, if not the will, then certainly the capacity to do great harm to humanity. He worked on a revolutionary medical technology that was supposed to be capable of everything from solving world hunger to curing previously incurable diseases. This technology brought about his world's apocalypse. He personally wrote two separate artificial intelligences designed to regulate that technology in some shape or form. Both of them took whole-hearted attempts at destroying humanity before convenient heroes managed to stop them in time. Although he didn't invent them, Caesar modified and played a key role in the use of mind-numbing control collars that were to be placed on uncontrollably violent mutants from his world. It wasn't long before his employers started using them to control sentient, peaceful mutants against their will, up to and including attempts on Caesar’s own brother. If there is anyone that is familiar with how quickly situations can spiral out of control, it is Caesar Salazar.

When we first see him in the series, Caesar is spontaneous, enthusiastic, and warm towards his brother. Whatever time he takes to heal from the recent wounds of his parents' death and their work's catastrophic effects is spent in private. Having just skipped five years through a relativistic time-travelling accident, he spends his first few months after his return catching up on current publications in science, taking time every now and then for odd science-related projects tossed his way. His projects have a scattered, and occasionally playful feel to them at this time: there is one occasion when Rex walks in on him using a hyper electromagnet to mix a mango smoothie in his office, and the teenager is able to recruit Caesar's help in using science to build a haunted house for his friends.

At the end of Season Two's finale, Rex disappears for six months. The Caesar he returns to has dramatically changed in this time. Caesar still keeps a leash on his emotions, but when his brother returns there are cracks in his mask. The questionable morality of his work (the collars) has become a visible burden to him, and those months in isolation have forced him to adapt his life around a new anchor besides family: science. Science has become how he passes the seconds of the day. It's where he spends most of his waking time, where his creativity, thoughts, and effort lingers in every spare moment. Caesar had always had a problem with not wanting to detach himself from the all-enveloping fog of programming lines and chemical chain reactions, but after six months with no one to encourage him to do otherwise, he has shaped himself into a man whose work is all he had left. When Rex comes back, it throws his organized world into chaos. Caesar had managed to talk himself into a manageable corner before his brother had shown up: Providence was morally wrong on a number of accounts, but if Caesar could just find some way to change what his family and coworkers had ruined with The Event (the nanite apocalypse), then the ends would justify the means. Rex didn't see it this way, especially when Caesar turned an attempted mind-control ray on him in an attempt to subdue him. The brothers parted on bad terms, and this has defined their relationship ever since.

Caesar continues to work with Providence, getting closer and closer to seeing his remaining hopes become a reality. He has assembled the team he knows is most likely to achieve fixing what they started, he has the funding and support of one of the biggest organizations in the world, and more than any of this, he has the burning drive to see it through. At this particular time in canon Caesar is distant to everyone around him, but will occasionally warm up over an involved discussion about science.

Any differences:

Caesar’s personality deviates in three primary ways from his Season-3 incarnation. The main points are:

-He’s without the weight of responsibility and guilt that his preincarnated self has. Any version of Caesar in the series has already gone through a long string of horrible events that have been started by his projects going terribly wrong. This Caesar hasn’t been burned like that, and when he looks into the unknown he does so with the innocent curiosity of someone who does not know how bad it can get.
-He’s more spread out in his interests: preincarnated Caesar grew up surrounded by research and exciting discoveries in a field that danced right to heart. Reincarnated Caesar grew up with a sports-loving older brother, and parents that were absent more often than not. While alone he entertained himself by exploring the scenery around his house, drawing elaborate sports cars, and later with playing the accordion.
-He’s less ‘kooky’, to put it plainly. Preincarnated Caesar is the type to electrocute people without warning, inject him with strange substances, and run completely untested equipment with potentially deadly malfunctions on the fly. Reincarnated Caesar has never been encouraged into daring greatly, the way his preincarnated self has, and he also hasn’t developed the same lifestyle that revolves around pushing science in the first place.

Abilities:

Caesar has no magical super powers, but his preincarnated form had a skill with programming and applied engineering that bordered on absurd. He could (and did) program artificial intelligences that later went on to threaten the safety of the world. He played a key role in developing nanites that brought about the world’s apocalypse. He used computer terminals as his main workspace, but could often be seen assembling a wide array machines that were either delightfully functional or dangerous and mobile.

What kind of involvement would you like your character to have in Save the Earth?

I'd like for the badguys--any badguys, be they the mafia, aliens, or a new third party--to use his new nanites as a bioterrorism weapon! If it's a new strain of mafia trying to fill Albero's power vacuum, they could be using it as an all new signature-killing that no one really knows how to cure or protect from. This could include connections between this new mafia group and Cesar's company. If it's a third party, it could be pharmaceuticals trying to scare people into buying products that can oh-so-conveniently treat this new bizarre plague. It could also be a third party trying to sabotage the pharmacy Cesar is working for by drumming up fear of nanites. It could also be someone higher up in Cesar's company using these nanites to kill people to try and eliminate competitors, and/or grab power for themself.

Do you all have a preference? Are these 'cancer in a jar' nanites even a plot idea you all would like to accept? (If they're not, that's totally fine, and I can think of a different way to bring him in.)

Roleplay Sample - Third Person:

His mango smoothie was almost done, he had a date in two hours, mundane household tasks were almost finished, and life was good. It wouldn’t be much longer before the clothes-dryer finished, and he could get dressed and go buy those flowers. He’d even gotten new socks for the occasion, though such a detail was embarrassingly trivial. Natalia wasn’t likely to care, but he liked to be thorough when it came to putting his best foot forward.

‘Bzzzzzzzst!’

Dryer cycle finished, Cesar emptied the clothes and located the slacks, but no socks. Huh. That was strange. He’d put them in, hadn’t he? He checked and confirmed yes, they weren’t still sitting on the table. He must’ve missed them in the load he took out. Cesar checked it twice, then three times. It wasn’t until he’d searched the entire apartment that he thought to turn his attention to the dryer itself.

‘Y entonces, don secadora?’ he asked it. Predictably, there was no response.

They weren’t hiding in the washing machine or hiding at the combo-machine’s underside. It wasn’t until the man was elbow deep in trying to disassemble it that the phone rang, jarring him out of his hunt. Perhaps this was taking it a little too far, anyway…

“Allo? Natalia!” He smiled into the phone receiver. “Are we still on for our date, tonight?”

“… Broken down? Well, why don’t I come pick you up, then?”

“… I see. That does sound serious.”

“Do you want me to go over there and help you with that?”

“Only if you’re certain.” He smiled for the phone, but the gesture lacked heart. “Of course. There’s always next time. I’ll talk with you tomorrow, then.” One last exchange. Then the phone was silent.

The rest of the apartment was, too, and Caesar sighed deeply, putting the phone down. The half-disassembled dryer stared at him from across the room.

The cancellation couldn’t have been helped, and it meant he had more time, now. Though it was with less cheer than before, Caesar picked the screwdriver back up. Time to finish what he started.

He would have those socks.

Roleplay Sample - Network:

*The video feed activates some seconds before the audio does. Caesar is wearing work-goggles pushed up over his eyes, where the fresh results of hours of pressure have left rings around the sockets. His first words are lost in the delay, and the next ones in a mighty 'WHOMPH' from somewhere on his end.*

--who took my hyper electromagnetic-flux modulator? I need it right away. It's designed like a heavily modified flashlight with a bulb on one--

*WHUMPH! Caesar breaks off and looks behind the camera. Terrible scrabbling can be heard against a smooth metal surface, but after a few seconds longer the sound fades. He looks back at the camera.*

It also has 'Magnetics-Co.-Two-Four-Eight-Three' stamped in an upper right corner. I don't care who has it, just that you please get here soon. Oh--and please come in through the lab's north side's window. The front door is blocked.

*The video ends with an abrupt click.*

OOC Information:

Name: Zalein

Are you over 15? Yup!

Contact: Either Zalein on plurk, or Zaleinah on AIM.