"I always dream that I am falling from a mighty tree. Falling, faster and faster. But the ground will never strike me, and so I fly."

Player: foozzzball

Character Name: Tendaji Magoli

Age: 27

Sex: Male

Species: Fossa / Pine Marten Hybrid

Height/Weight: 5'10"

Social Status: UniClass

Physical Description: Thin and sinuous, Tendaji's body is almost liquid in its grace, curves of musculature binding around his limbs like falling water. His snout is narrow and pointed, with rough, long whiskers. His ears are short and rounded, his teeth small and sharp. Yellow-eyed and long-tailed, his two parents were similar enough in shape that to some eyes he looks like a purebreed. Even with that whitish patch of fur across his throat, many would imagine him to be so. Perhaps a weasel of some sort, or a mongoose, or... well. Whatever it is, it can't be a hybrid, right? Hybrids should have a cat's paws and a dog's muzzle. Feathers on a mammal, fur on a bird, mismatched fur patterns and ears. Hybrids shouldn't be something so well within the margins of 'normal'.

It's a mistake many make, and one that had him teased as a teenager and lets him slip relatively unnoticed through the undercity as an adult. But there are some traits that are a give away. He has retractable claws. That's a little odd, because he doesn't have a cat's eyes. And that tail. It's almost too long. And his comfort with heights? You'd think he was a squirrel. But in the dark or during a short encounter, it's not that obvious.

Background: His father, a Fossa, was alone and far, far from home when he came to Einheit. The Pine Marten girl's face was almost familiar. Her silhouette, almost alluring. To a lonely man, almost someone he could love. Tendaji's mother believed in Unity, believed in it so very, very strongly, and when Tendaji was born, he believed in it too. He believed in it so strongly that he fought in the species war, a mechanized scout out in the nightlands.

He enlisted at age nineteen, after a successful first year in undergraduate education in graphic design. Tendaji felt his talents weren't up to the standards of the other students, and that as an artist he'd never contribute anything. His father encouraged him to continue with art, to follow what he loved... but what Tendaji truly loved was his society. Looking a little purebred, early training in the Ministry was harder on him than it should've been. He had some aggressive outbursts against other trainees, although always within the context of combative training and an over-competitive streak. He was routed into training as a scout with the Eighth Mechanized Ground Reconnaisance division. He learned a little bit of everything, so that he would be able to fight for long periods of time behind enemy lines without resupply or other support. The main points of his training included observation methods, electronic warfare, mechanical repairs, vehicle operation, and infiltration and exfiltration techniques.

He spent much of the species wars searching for information on the enemy. He and his team members would get often get as close as possible to enemy facilities in order to record their daily goings on, spy on individuals, develop profiles of enemy techniques and operations. Occasionally this meant being on a hillside five kilometers away, watching and recording in every detail what happened when their defense procedures rolled into motion. Occasionally this meant getting within enemy colonies themselves. Not dedicated infiltration agents, for the Eighth this meant working in urban areas, in full military gear, studying the enemy and his information technology networks. Some called it 'stealth by force', and generally it meant using electronic warfare and force to prevent a military response for the duration of the mission. Occasionally this demanded the killing of civillians, in order to secure an area for the usage of perhaps only a few hours. While some viewed this as a chance to get payback against the purebreds, Tendaji never really held the racist streak - both of his parents originally being purebred. But he did it anyway.

He played a small part in Operation Boreas itself, utilizing electronic warfare techniques to temporarily dazzle an enemy colony's air defence sensors, thus allowing the AbZero strikes to take place. This put him and his vehicle's crew barely beyond the effective kill zone. The experience has been one he's desperately tried to understand, desperately tried to somehow express through a series of confused and tangled paintings, none of which have ever come close to the strange mix of horror and elation, the fear and awe.

Operation Boreas, however, made it all so redundant. The real threats had been taken down, now... now it was all a matter of mopping up. Now, not as many soldiers were needed. And certainly not someone whose main skills were in tracking down an enemy that no longer exists. Tendaji was removed from duty with the reduction in force at the end of the war, given a pension, and returned home.

When the more recent legislation came into power demanding that purebred Uniclass citizens undergo hybridisation, Tendaji's father panicked. To change the body so massively was not part of his father's home culture, he was afraid, and he ran. So Tendaji followed him, and shot him, because he was a traitor against unity. Tendaji loved his father very much, and still does. His mother seems to think it was the right thing to have done.

For close enough a year, Tendaji revisited his past, employing himself as an independant scavenger in the nightlands. The snowy nightlands, full of wreckage and ruins left over from the end of the war. Ruins he loves exploring. Sometimes... sometimes not just for scrap. Sometimes to try and understand what happened, to try and come to terms with something he doesn't really understand about himself. Often he went, and still goes, down into the undercity, full of people eager to get their hands on whatever they can. The undercity, where his family lived when he was born, before his parents became Uniclass citizens and migrated out with the rapid decline of the area.

But then... then it turned out the war wasn't as over as everyone thought it was. And Tendaji, desperate to do something with his life that was more than just waiting to die, re-enlisted, taking a drop in rank from Sergeant to Specialist with the 73rd Frontline Information Technologies unit. The unit deploys individuals on an-as-needed basis to other squads and groups, bringing in expertise with new and sometimes obscure front-line electronics. It is expected that once training resources for newer gear have been finalized and those units that need access to these technologies are assigned full duty members, the unit will be disbanded and he'll be assigned to a longer term post with another unit.



Personality: Tendaji is a careful person, neat and orderly on the outside. Careful to try and think about what he's doing before he does it. He doesn't like doing things that can't be undone, and he's done a lot of things which will never be undone. But you do what you do to survive. And in a world without a sun, where every speck of heat and energy costs so damn much, where every mouthful of food has to be synthesized or built in expensive heated land, there just isn't room for people to say 'I don't want to get involved. I don't want to contribute. I want to be part of my community with my culture and my family. Leave me alone.' Either you're all one family, all one culture, all one people fighting against the cold and dark, or you will die. You will freeze. This is Tendaji's perspective, given to him by his mother and tempered by his time in service.

He'll do whatever he can for Unity, or whatever he has to. He's not heartless, but somehow the moral urge that keeps us from acting like monsters is one that Tendaji has very little trouble ignoring. For awhile, anyway. Or at least he can pretend he can. And yes, the things he's had to do hurt him. He feels guilt. A guilt he tries to express through photography and painting, a guilt he tries desperately to expunge in service of Einheit.

Tendaji likes the snowy wastes, the halls of the undercity. He likes the thrill of the hunt and not knowing if he's going to wake up the next morning. And maybe he's just a little bit scared, too. A little bit scared of waking up one day to find himself old, on crisp white sheets laying in the Toride, left there like his mother, dependant on other people. Just a tiny bit afraid of waking up one day and finding out, again, that nobody needs him. That the war's once more over and he can just... go home. Unneeded surplus.

Weapons/Equipment:

Lomoko-9 Ice Trawler - An ungainly beast of a vehicle, the Lomoko-9 was, nominally, a military vehicle used by engineers of another colony. Its boxy frame was retrofitted to serve roles from assault armoured vehicle to heavy weapons carriage. Built rough and tough, Tendaji's particular one was civillianized through the removal of its weapons systems. Its hull is truck-sized, and can carry a fair sized load, though typically what it's full of is fuel and supplies to survive the nightlands with. When Tendaji makes a big find, he typically calls in friends with Aerodynes rather than try and haul it all away himself. Currently it is mothballed in a disused Vorhang garage.

WhiteGear - Modular WhiteGear armour system. Typically he will be wearing whatever is standard within the unit he is working with, however the underlying electronics and warfare packages are within the CR-CX range of electronics warfare specialist systems, including a more comprehensive communications and interface package - most notably the in-mouth probe control interface, a tricky piece of gear to get acquainted with.

RSA-5N-N (Duty side-arm) - Semi-automatic pistol of a somewhat older make, in a nightlands warfare configuration. It has been modified by the expansion of the trigger guard so as to permit easy usage whilst wearing oversized gauntlets or cold weather gloves, and has had liquid lubricants replaced by the usage of nil-friction surface treatments. Uses 10mm rounds, fed from an extended magazine of 14 rounds.

Koontz Type 4 revolver (Personal side-arm) - Military grade, though not used in the ministry in favour of more advanced firearms. The Koontz, however, is robust. So much so that even if it's packed in a half-inch of ice it'll fire, so long as you can knock the hammer loose. Greyish steel and a heavy bore, its six round cylinder accepts some makes of emergency flares as well as firearms rounds.

Fallmark-Coombes fighting knife - A twin-edged, narrow-bladed knife with a razory edge. A knife derived from pre-Einheit traditional anglic military designs.

Misc: A descendant of two naturally arboreal furs, Tendaji is a natural climber. He loves heights, and he loves exploring them. From rooftops in the midcity and weird catwalks amongst voidlike halls in the undercity, through to broken ruins and glacial mountains in the nightlands. It's just coincidental that these places are useful to someone trying to observe others. It's intoxicating to him, even in his dreams, long, strange dreams, where he falls, but never lands.

He's plagued by other kinds of dreams, too. Some of them are a result of his training as a scout. Part of his mental conditioning for the role included training to work under intense sleep deprivation, as well as exploiting his predatory genetic background. There is a neurological concept that successful predators hunt by understanding the actions and mindsets of their prey, by developing an effective theory of mind to try and predict what the prey animal will do next. Tendaji was trained as part of a probitionary 'predictive theory of mind' programme with the concept of exploiting and enhancing this tendancy, which on a quantifiable level has given him an edge with interpreting the mindset of people he's been assigned to spy on based on thier actions and physical cues, over days and weeks of 'stalking'. It's by no means 'mind reading', however.

When he does go without sleep, when his mind wanders... sometimes it manifests as voices in his head. It's nothing serious, just his mind wandering, imagination running wild in an almost waking dreamlike state with the voices of people he knows or knew or watched or... Well. It's not mental instability, just that predatory 'theory of mind' showing itself. Not quite an audio hallucination, either. The voices are no more real than the imagined things you tell yourself at night, that you need to go out and buy eggs in the morning. Except once or twice... once or twice they've told him things that shouldn't be true, fabricated memories and ideas. Some of which... somehow worked out to be true.

He is currently a specialist within the Ministry as part of the 73rd Frontline Information Technologies unit. His duties vary between training other individuals to cope with the use and maintenance of new battlefield software packages and interfaces, providing operational testing and feedback for new equipment and participating in operational deployments within a variety of warfare settings to ensure proper expertise is on hand. As such he has expertise, or at least passing familiarity, with almost every piece of electronic gear within Ministry arsenals. From an infantryman's WhiteGear to the sensor packages on Skyships.

As part of his ongoing psychiatric treatment and development, he has adopted a purebred orphan named Wels, who is currently a Uniclass Potentiate.