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Sep. 1st, 2012 12:00 amPlayer Information:
Name: Jae
Age: 25
Contact: via character journals
Game Cast: Karrin Murphy, Steve Rogers
Character Information:
Name: Triela Hilshire
Canon: Gunslinger Girl
Canon Point: At the end of Volume 10 of the manga, after she discovers her personal history such as it is, and what Hilshire's given up to protect her.
Age: She appears to be around 14 or 15; she's been 'alive' as Triela for about five years.
Reference: Gunslinger Girl's Wikipedia entry
Triela's personal page on the GG wiki
Setting: OUR WORLD, BUT WITH CYBORGS!
In reality though, Gunslinger Girl does draw from many of the social tensions in Italy that actually exist, to the point of using the names of terrorist groups who were active at the time the manga began publication. It centers around a government organization outside of Rome, calling itself the "Social Welfare Agency," purportedly a charitable organization that uses advanced and experimental techniques to try and help rehabilitate lost causes. In reality, they take the children brought to them - for some reason all girls - and screen them for chemical compatibility with the cyborg modifications before rebuilding them from the ground up and brainwashing them into combat-ready killing machines.
The SWA consists of Section 1 - infiltration, information-gathering, and most of the legwork involved with spying and gaining intel on their targets, and Section 2 - the assault and combat teams, aka the cyborgs. At the beginning of the manga, there are about ten cyborgs in residence on the grounds of the SWA's facilities. By Triela's canon point, almost a year after the beginning of the manga, that number has almost doubled.
Each cyborg is paired with a handler, and each pair is called "fratello", or "siblings". While the daily needs of each cyborg are met by the staff that mans the SWA compound, their emotional health is tended to and training regimens are set by their handlers. The cyborgs live in a collective dorm; their time when they're in residence at the dorms is carefully scheduled, much like a boarding school for homicidal Lolitas.
The Social Welfare Agency was formed specifically to combat violent terrorists within Italy's borders. To simplify the politics, the northern half of Italy is incredibly wealthy, the south incredibly poor; the north incredibly tired of 'bailing out' the south via taxation and redirection of government funds. Padania and the Five Republics, of which Padania is part, fight for the agenda of the conservative wealthy and middle class - and have vast popular support in the north. The SWA works to uproot and stamp out the Padania extremists, who assassinate, bomb, bribe, and blackmail their way toward a goal of freedom from the financial burden of the southern portion of the country.
Padania is a traditional or alternative name for a valley in Northern Italy; when a political party in the early nineties proposed it as a possible capital for an autonomous Northern Italy, it became a kind of rallying cry, a kind of utopian ideal for the north to pursue. Padania's goal is more or less to force the Italian government to loosen its hold on the north and let them live independently from the poor in the south, who they have to donate a portion of their livelihood to and who essentially hold them down. The Five Republics is the violent extremist faction within Padania who perpetrate the majority of the bloodiest and most extreme attacks. The manga focuses on the Five Republics - they're the ones the SWA specifically pursue.
The SWA also occasionally does favors for its political and financial backers - an assassination here, guard duty there - in order to keep the funds flowing for the research and development of the cyborgs. The technology used to build the cyborgs is then adapted on a broader scale, furthering the research of those trying to make artificial limbs and organs available to the public at need. While the specific technology behind the creation and maintenance of the cyborgs is not detailed, it's clearly far more advanced than anything we have available. Everything but the brain is reconstructed and reinforced, designed and programmed to function in many of the same ways as an organic body without many of an organic body's weaknesses. They do make a point of saying that, like with so many treatments, young bodies adapt to it better. It's one of the reasons the initial cyborgs had to be so young - any older, and the subjects failed to adapt to the implants.
Personality:
Before talking about the personality of a cyborg, you've got to talk about their conditioning. The mind of a cyborg takes all the strain, as it were, since their bodies are so durable. Though conditioning provides them with a great deal of information implanted directly, it also more or less erases the lives they had before the agency, save half-remembered faces and dreams they never recall. The system used to brainwash them over time leads to memory loss, emotional instability, outbursts of violence, and selective recall of things they should have forgotten. All of these are signs that a cyborg is reaching the end of its lifespan.
In addition to information, cyborgs are implanted with the impetus to obey SWA personnel in general and their handler specifically, to the point where if they try to go against their handler they become violently ill and might experience physical symptoms like heart palpitations and difficulty breathing. The first-generation cyborgs were instilled with an inherent desire to protect and die for their handlers, which leads Triela to say at one point that sometimes she doesn't know what her real feelings are for Hilshire and what's been implanted into her. Most cyborgs aren't that self-aware - they adore their handlers without question, and dream of dying in their service. The ultimate purpose of a cyborg is to fight, to kill, and to protect your fratello - they can learn to be more than that, can learn to go agains their conditioning, but it's all the Agency wants.
Triela, thanks to her handler's constant insistence that she undergo the bare minimum of conditioning required to adapt to her body and function as an agent of the SWA, is far more aware of herself and her place in the agency than almost any of her fellow first-gen cyborgs. She's a big sister to the first-gen cyborgs and feels the need to take care of them specifically because she's so much more in tune with how the adults see them. Her roommate, Claes, tells Triela at one point that she's just borrowing trouble by insisting on caring for others, and Triela responds that it's her life and that's how she chooses to live it.
She's a frank, honest, practical person who dislikes excessive praise and finds any action taken to pay back or apologize suspect or disingenuous. She prefers people just be themselves, say they're sorry if something happened, say something is good if it's good, and move on. She's headstrong, intelligent, and has a certain amount of cynicism when it comes to adults and the way they live and work in the world. They don't, as far as she can tell, care about anything but their own goals - so she makes a point to care for the 'tools' they use to achieve them. At one point her handler points out the fact that Triela doesn't want to be an adult. It's true, in her eyes most adults are ineffective or hypocritical. But there's also the bitterness that exists in her with the knowledge that she never will be an adult. The other cyborgs, except Claes, have no real concept of their own mortality; Triela knows she was built, and knows soon enough she'll give out.
At first this knowledge drove her to fulfill what was conditioned as being a cyborg's purpose - fight, kill, protect your handler. She pushed herself to physical extremes and got angry whenever Hilshire tried to stop her from putting herself in a situation where she might get injured. She picked fights with him and insulted him constantly, hurt and angry at the thought that he found her inadequate to serve her purpose. His protectiveness drove her harder, to the point where when she was beaten by an ordinary man with extraordinary fighting skills and left unconscious she had a small mental breakdown. What was t he point of a cyborg that could lose to a human? She trained hard enough that the next time she came up against the same fighter, she ended up winning, barely, by ripping open his throat with her bare hands. Hilshire's reaction to her victory wasn't pride - he was horrified at how badly injured she was. Drugged and desperate for a word of approval, she says, "Didn't I do a good job? I killed the bad guys for you. Just like you ordered me to." Hilshire embraces her rather than answering, and Triela doesn't know what to think. She fulfilled her purpose.
In the wake of the death of the first cyborg ever created, Triela is left hating the fact that she can't feel sad, and wondering about her own life, still torn between her handlers insistence on nonviolence whenever possible and the fact that she's a machine designed to kill. It's not until Hilshire confesses that he saved her from the set of a snuff film set, at the cost of a friend's life - not until he tells her that he had no idea what the Agency would do to her, and that he wanted her to have a full and happy life - that she decides there's something more important for her than fighting. She wants to live. She already naturally cared for the people around her, as much as she hides her affection for adults - but after Hilshire reveals her history, she decides that her life, even life as a cyborg, is a gift, and she intends to live whatever's left of it to the fullest. She comes back from the edge of giving up on life and killing herself on the battlefield and steps into an optimism tempered by acceptance that is entirely new to her.
It's also at this point that she realizes she really does love Hilshire, and not just because of her conditioning, but because of all he's done for her, and all the small and awkward ways he tries to show her affection. As mature as Triela can be, she's still a child, still technically only about four, and she craves the love she gives so freely.
Her arrival on Tu Vishan is going to overbalance her world. She might be a comparatively free thinker, but she's still conditioned, still used to having requirements to meet and a schedule to stick to. She's used to constant supervision, orders, structure. Having none of that is going to first make her uneasy and then terrify her. Combined with the fact that she'll only have - as per canon - an emergency stock of the pills that maintain her emotional and mental stability and her conditioning, her mental state will probably deteriorate fast either within or after the first two weeks. It could mean one of several things: a sort of amnesia, where she temporarily forgets she was anywhere before Tu Vishan and it becomes a sort of substitute SWA; she may latch on to someone as a surrogate 'handler' and insist on protecting and (to some degree) obeying them; or, she'll go berserk, and start picking and killing targets based on their similarities to her former victims.
Appearance: Triela with her two favorite things, guns and teddy bears
Abilities:
Triela's entire body is synthetic, meaning from top to toe, everything is replaceable. While she appears entirely human, her body is apparently some kind of carbon-polymer construct, both much heavier and much more durable than ordinary tissue. When she's injured, the way she's been engineered causes bloodflow to slow and pain to be almost immediately dulled, though it doesn't vanish entirely. Cyborgs in canon are not (to the point where I've read) given a specific strength limit, though lifting the back-end of a car does seem to require effort, and I doubt they'd be able to, say, lift one overhead. They can punch with enough force to crack stone, have preternaturally fast response times, and can move faster and jump farther than any normal human could hope to, all without sustaining damage. Their senses are all augmented, but require focus to use - unless they're purposefully treating their vision like a sort of telescope or using their hearing to spy, it's better-than-average and that's about it. That is, in fact, one of the great weaknesses that gets pointed out several times - if a cyborg is taken by surprise, it's fairly easy to get an immediate advantage over them or even kill them, if you know their weak point. Of course, keeping the advantage once they've collected themselves becomes the issue.
When they're created, knowledge is conditioned into them - battle strategies, tactics, weapons use and maintenance, even hand-to-hand combat. As one instructor points out, however, this causes its own problems. They start out "too skilled" for their own good - their understanding of how to fight is instinctive rather than taught, so there can be massive inconsistencies between what they know how to use and how well they use it. Triela's handler worked to close this gap by having her train with black ops and special forces fighters. On a scale of harmless to Batman, she's probably at Damian's level.
The primary weak point of the cyborgs' design is the eye socket - due to the complicated mechanics involved in the construction of their synthetic eyes that is hand-waved into "IT'S MAGICAL SCIENCE, DEAL WITH IT", a bullet through the eye socket will punch through their reinforced skeletal structure where it won't if it hits almost any other part of their bodies. They go down as quick as anyone else would - mostly because the one part of them that's still organic and entirely human is the thing that the eye is 'guarding' - their brains.
The drug used to create and maintain the brainwashing, or 'conditioning', that the cyborgs undergo, effects them in a variety of different ways. It doesn't so much erase their past as it suppresses it, and every use of the drug brings them a little closer to complete brain atrophy. In the end it's never a cyborg's body that fails - it's the mind. Triela has already outlived the expectations of her creators, probably due mostly to the fact that she was the second cyborg created and they used the first to fine-tune a number of factors, and also because her handler, Hilshire, insisted from day one that she be exposed to the drug as little as possible.
They cannot use any traditional medicines because of the possibly toxic interactions they would have with the conditioning drug - as a result, any repairs, body part replacements, and other necessary surgeries or sedations require large doses of the drug. Cyborgs do not heal from more than the simplest hurts. When they are injured, they require repairs or replacement limbs and organs. Every injury leads them a little closer to total addiction, and from there it's a short road to forgetfulness, accidental violence, occasional sudden withdrawals, and finally coma and death. Symptoms of withdrawal from the drug are similar to withdrawal symptoms from painkillers, with the additional risk of violent outbursts. The average life expectancy of a first-generation cyborg is two years.
Probably thanks to Hilshire, Triela has already lived five.
Inventory:
The clothes on her back - slacks, vest, button-up shirt, tie, underwear - and a small arsenal that includes probably upwards of five concealed knives, a Winchester M1897 Trench Gun - technically an antique, but still her favorite weapon, a SIG-Sauer P232, and a Heckler and Koch P7 handgun. She also has a small emergency medkit containing several doses of her medication.
Suite: Earth. They have personalities she'd get along with and the novelty of a treehouse might distract her for a little while from being without her handler or organization. One floor - she shared a small dormitory room with another girl prior to this, and doesn't need more space than that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person:
Her breath leaves a blush of white against the glass, dissipating into the air. The bear on the other side stares back at her with unblinking pearly eyes, a kinship of artificiality.
"Is that the one you want?"
Triela startles, snatching her hand away from the shop window and giving Hilshire a haughty look. "You're the one buying the present. It's your job to pick."
He's not smiling, but she can feel the smile in him, the way she's always been able to. Something in the tilt of his head, the way his eyes look at her sidelong.
Triela turns her back to the toy shop and crosses her ams, leaning against the display window, making a point of looking like she doesn't care.
"What will you call it?"
She looks at her boots.
"I'm up to Nero."
"Ah. So Claudius was the last one."
Triela smiles, tilting her face forward so he can't see it. Hilshire's their teacher - of course he'd know right away what she was naming the bears after. "Yup."
The little bell jingles and Hilshire is gone, as quietly as he always moves. He could -
He could almost be a cyborg that way? No. He's nothing like a cyborg, whatever the other handlers might say.
She wrigglers her boots back and forth, making small shoe-print snow angels and ignoring the looks of passerby.
The bell jingles again, and her vision fills with the brown paper package Hilshire holds out. "You did well today."
Triela wraps both arms around the package and holds it tightly enough to feel the shape of the bear inside.
"What can you tell me about Nero?"
She rolls her eyes. Even here, lessons. "He was popular with the poor and lower classes and tried to keep them on his side, but the wealthy and the Senators hated him. He expelled the Jews from Rome, and was supposed to be the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians."
"Very good."
"Can we go now? It's cold out."
Another of his smiles-without-smiling. They start to walk back toward their hotel, and she reaches out with one hand to take his. He follows suit, without looking down.
This is why she loves him. Not conditioning - maybe it started like that, but not any more. Because she knows him, and he knows her, and they don't have to say it to know.
Network:
Good morning everyone! [The girl on the video is in her early teens at most, and at face seems completely unbothered by her surroundings. She supports her chin in both hands, eying the console like she's waiting for an answer.]
Not so bad, for a kidnapping. Never been on this side of one before though - usually they issue terms way before this, and the Emperor seems like the one to ask. Do you think they're aiming for some kind of quota before they tell us what we're here for?
[She sits back from the console and crosses her arms, tapping the fingers of one hand against her crisp shirtsleeve. She's wearing the clothes she arrived in - a suit vest, a white button-up shirt, slacks and a tie, all carefully pressed and clearly tailored to fit.] Either way, probably some or all of us will die, or it wouldn't be a such a secret.
[She leans in again.] Oh! I almost forgot. The army people here - is there anyone willing to spar with me? Anyone with martial training, really. Preferably field experience, black ops, that kind of thing. I need to stay sharp for- well, I just do.
[A cheerful wink.] If anyone knows a good place for noodles, I'd appreciate it!
[And she signs off.]
Name: Jae
Age: 25
Contact: via character journals
Game Cast: Karrin Murphy, Steve Rogers
Character Information:
Name: Triela Hilshire
Canon: Gunslinger Girl
Canon Point: At the end of Volume 10 of the manga, after she discovers her personal history such as it is, and what Hilshire's given up to protect her.
Age: She appears to be around 14 or 15; she's been 'alive' as Triela for about five years.
Reference: Gunslinger Girl's Wikipedia entry
Triela's personal page on the GG wiki
Setting: OUR WORLD, BUT WITH CYBORGS!
In reality though, Gunslinger Girl does draw from many of the social tensions in Italy that actually exist, to the point of using the names of terrorist groups who were active at the time the manga began publication. It centers around a government organization outside of Rome, calling itself the "Social Welfare Agency," purportedly a charitable organization that uses advanced and experimental techniques to try and help rehabilitate lost causes. In reality, they take the children brought to them - for some reason all girls - and screen them for chemical compatibility with the cyborg modifications before rebuilding them from the ground up and brainwashing them into combat-ready killing machines.
The SWA consists of Section 1 - infiltration, information-gathering, and most of the legwork involved with spying and gaining intel on their targets, and Section 2 - the assault and combat teams, aka the cyborgs. At the beginning of the manga, there are about ten cyborgs in residence on the grounds of the SWA's facilities. By Triela's canon point, almost a year after the beginning of the manga, that number has almost doubled.
Each cyborg is paired with a handler, and each pair is called "fratello", or "siblings". While the daily needs of each cyborg are met by the staff that mans the SWA compound, their emotional health is tended to and training regimens are set by their handlers. The cyborgs live in a collective dorm; their time when they're in residence at the dorms is carefully scheduled, much like a boarding school for homicidal Lolitas.
The Social Welfare Agency was formed specifically to combat violent terrorists within Italy's borders. To simplify the politics, the northern half of Italy is incredibly wealthy, the south incredibly poor; the north incredibly tired of 'bailing out' the south via taxation and redirection of government funds. Padania and the Five Republics, of which Padania is part, fight for the agenda of the conservative wealthy and middle class - and have vast popular support in the north. The SWA works to uproot and stamp out the Padania extremists, who assassinate, bomb, bribe, and blackmail their way toward a goal of freedom from the financial burden of the southern portion of the country.
Padania is a traditional or alternative name for a valley in Northern Italy; when a political party in the early nineties proposed it as a possible capital for an autonomous Northern Italy, it became a kind of rallying cry, a kind of utopian ideal for the north to pursue. Padania's goal is more or less to force the Italian government to loosen its hold on the north and let them live independently from the poor in the south, who they have to donate a portion of their livelihood to and who essentially hold them down. The Five Republics is the violent extremist faction within Padania who perpetrate the majority of the bloodiest and most extreme attacks. The manga focuses on the Five Republics - they're the ones the SWA specifically pursue.
The SWA also occasionally does favors for its political and financial backers - an assassination here, guard duty there - in order to keep the funds flowing for the research and development of the cyborgs. The technology used to build the cyborgs is then adapted on a broader scale, furthering the research of those trying to make artificial limbs and organs available to the public at need. While the specific technology behind the creation and maintenance of the cyborgs is not detailed, it's clearly far more advanced than anything we have available. Everything but the brain is reconstructed and reinforced, designed and programmed to function in many of the same ways as an organic body without many of an organic body's weaknesses. They do make a point of saying that, like with so many treatments, young bodies adapt to it better. It's one of the reasons the initial cyborgs had to be so young - any older, and the subjects failed to adapt to the implants.
Personality:
Before talking about the personality of a cyborg, you've got to talk about their conditioning. The mind of a cyborg takes all the strain, as it were, since their bodies are so durable. Though conditioning provides them with a great deal of information implanted directly, it also more or less erases the lives they had before the agency, save half-remembered faces and dreams they never recall. The system used to brainwash them over time leads to memory loss, emotional instability, outbursts of violence, and selective recall of things they should have forgotten. All of these are signs that a cyborg is reaching the end of its lifespan.
In addition to information, cyborgs are implanted with the impetus to obey SWA personnel in general and their handler specifically, to the point where if they try to go against their handler they become violently ill and might experience physical symptoms like heart palpitations and difficulty breathing. The first-generation cyborgs were instilled with an inherent desire to protect and die for their handlers, which leads Triela to say at one point that sometimes she doesn't know what her real feelings are for Hilshire and what's been implanted into her. Most cyborgs aren't that self-aware - they adore their handlers without question, and dream of dying in their service. The ultimate purpose of a cyborg is to fight, to kill, and to protect your fratello - they can learn to be more than that, can learn to go agains their conditioning, but it's all the Agency wants.
Triela, thanks to her handler's constant insistence that she undergo the bare minimum of conditioning required to adapt to her body and function as an agent of the SWA, is far more aware of herself and her place in the agency than almost any of her fellow first-gen cyborgs. She's a big sister to the first-gen cyborgs and feels the need to take care of them specifically because she's so much more in tune with how the adults see them. Her roommate, Claes, tells Triela at one point that she's just borrowing trouble by insisting on caring for others, and Triela responds that it's her life and that's how she chooses to live it.
She's a frank, honest, practical person who dislikes excessive praise and finds any action taken to pay back or apologize suspect or disingenuous. She prefers people just be themselves, say they're sorry if something happened, say something is good if it's good, and move on. She's headstrong, intelligent, and has a certain amount of cynicism when it comes to adults and the way they live and work in the world. They don't, as far as she can tell, care about anything but their own goals - so she makes a point to care for the 'tools' they use to achieve them. At one point her handler points out the fact that Triela doesn't want to be an adult. It's true, in her eyes most adults are ineffective or hypocritical. But there's also the bitterness that exists in her with the knowledge that she never will be an adult. The other cyborgs, except Claes, have no real concept of their own mortality; Triela knows she was built, and knows soon enough she'll give out.
At first this knowledge drove her to fulfill what was conditioned as being a cyborg's purpose - fight, kill, protect your handler. She pushed herself to physical extremes and got angry whenever Hilshire tried to stop her from putting herself in a situation where she might get injured. She picked fights with him and insulted him constantly, hurt and angry at the thought that he found her inadequate to serve her purpose. His protectiveness drove her harder, to the point where when she was beaten by an ordinary man with extraordinary fighting skills and left unconscious she had a small mental breakdown. What was t he point of a cyborg that could lose to a human? She trained hard enough that the next time she came up against the same fighter, she ended up winning, barely, by ripping open his throat with her bare hands. Hilshire's reaction to her victory wasn't pride - he was horrified at how badly injured she was. Drugged and desperate for a word of approval, she says, "Didn't I do a good job? I killed the bad guys for you. Just like you ordered me to." Hilshire embraces her rather than answering, and Triela doesn't know what to think. She fulfilled her purpose.
In the wake of the death of the first cyborg ever created, Triela is left hating the fact that she can't feel sad, and wondering about her own life, still torn between her handlers insistence on nonviolence whenever possible and the fact that she's a machine designed to kill. It's not until Hilshire confesses that he saved her from the set of a snuff film set, at the cost of a friend's life - not until he tells her that he had no idea what the Agency would do to her, and that he wanted her to have a full and happy life - that she decides there's something more important for her than fighting. She wants to live. She already naturally cared for the people around her, as much as she hides her affection for adults - but after Hilshire reveals her history, she decides that her life, even life as a cyborg, is a gift, and she intends to live whatever's left of it to the fullest. She comes back from the edge of giving up on life and killing herself on the battlefield and steps into an optimism tempered by acceptance that is entirely new to her.
It's also at this point that she realizes she really does love Hilshire, and not just because of her conditioning, but because of all he's done for her, and all the small and awkward ways he tries to show her affection. As mature as Triela can be, she's still a child, still technically only about four, and she craves the love she gives so freely.
Her arrival on Tu Vishan is going to overbalance her world. She might be a comparatively free thinker, but she's still conditioned, still used to having requirements to meet and a schedule to stick to. She's used to constant supervision, orders, structure. Having none of that is going to first make her uneasy and then terrify her. Combined with the fact that she'll only have - as per canon - an emergency stock of the pills that maintain her emotional and mental stability and her conditioning, her mental state will probably deteriorate fast either within or after the first two weeks. It could mean one of several things: a sort of amnesia, where she temporarily forgets she was anywhere before Tu Vishan and it becomes a sort of substitute SWA; she may latch on to someone as a surrogate 'handler' and insist on protecting and (to some degree) obeying them; or, she'll go berserk, and start picking and killing targets based on their similarities to her former victims.
Appearance: Triela with her two favorite things, guns and teddy bears
Abilities:
Triela's entire body is synthetic, meaning from top to toe, everything is replaceable. While she appears entirely human, her body is apparently some kind of carbon-polymer construct, both much heavier and much more durable than ordinary tissue. When she's injured, the way she's been engineered causes bloodflow to slow and pain to be almost immediately dulled, though it doesn't vanish entirely. Cyborgs in canon are not (to the point where I've read) given a specific strength limit, though lifting the back-end of a car does seem to require effort, and I doubt they'd be able to, say, lift one overhead. They can punch with enough force to crack stone, have preternaturally fast response times, and can move faster and jump farther than any normal human could hope to, all without sustaining damage. Their senses are all augmented, but require focus to use - unless they're purposefully treating their vision like a sort of telescope or using their hearing to spy, it's better-than-average and that's about it. That is, in fact, one of the great weaknesses that gets pointed out several times - if a cyborg is taken by surprise, it's fairly easy to get an immediate advantage over them or even kill them, if you know their weak point. Of course, keeping the advantage once they've collected themselves becomes the issue.
When they're created, knowledge is conditioned into them - battle strategies, tactics, weapons use and maintenance, even hand-to-hand combat. As one instructor points out, however, this causes its own problems. They start out "too skilled" for their own good - their understanding of how to fight is instinctive rather than taught, so there can be massive inconsistencies between what they know how to use and how well they use it. Triela's handler worked to close this gap by having her train with black ops and special forces fighters. On a scale of harmless to Batman, she's probably at Damian's level.
The primary weak point of the cyborgs' design is the eye socket - due to the complicated mechanics involved in the construction of their synthetic eyes that is hand-waved into "IT'S MAGICAL SCIENCE, DEAL WITH IT", a bullet through the eye socket will punch through their reinforced skeletal structure where it won't if it hits almost any other part of their bodies. They go down as quick as anyone else would - mostly because the one part of them that's still organic and entirely human is the thing that the eye is 'guarding' - their brains.
The drug used to create and maintain the brainwashing, or 'conditioning', that the cyborgs undergo, effects them in a variety of different ways. It doesn't so much erase their past as it suppresses it, and every use of the drug brings them a little closer to complete brain atrophy. In the end it's never a cyborg's body that fails - it's the mind. Triela has already outlived the expectations of her creators, probably due mostly to the fact that she was the second cyborg created and they used the first to fine-tune a number of factors, and also because her handler, Hilshire, insisted from day one that she be exposed to the drug as little as possible.
They cannot use any traditional medicines because of the possibly toxic interactions they would have with the conditioning drug - as a result, any repairs, body part replacements, and other necessary surgeries or sedations require large doses of the drug. Cyborgs do not heal from more than the simplest hurts. When they are injured, they require repairs or replacement limbs and organs. Every injury leads them a little closer to total addiction, and from there it's a short road to forgetfulness, accidental violence, occasional sudden withdrawals, and finally coma and death. Symptoms of withdrawal from the drug are similar to withdrawal symptoms from painkillers, with the additional risk of violent outbursts. The average life expectancy of a first-generation cyborg is two years.
Probably thanks to Hilshire, Triela has already lived five.
Inventory:
The clothes on her back - slacks, vest, button-up shirt, tie, underwear - and a small arsenal that includes probably upwards of five concealed knives, a Winchester M1897 Trench Gun - technically an antique, but still her favorite weapon, a SIG-Sauer P232, and a Heckler and Koch P7 handgun. She also has a small emergency medkit containing several doses of her medication.
Suite: Earth. They have personalities she'd get along with and the novelty of a treehouse might distract her for a little while from being without her handler or organization. One floor - she shared a small dormitory room with another girl prior to this, and doesn't need more space than that.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person:
Her breath leaves a blush of white against the glass, dissipating into the air. The bear on the other side stares back at her with unblinking pearly eyes, a kinship of artificiality.
"Is that the one you want?"
Triela startles, snatching her hand away from the shop window and giving Hilshire a haughty look. "You're the one buying the present. It's your job to pick."
He's not smiling, but she can feel the smile in him, the way she's always been able to. Something in the tilt of his head, the way his eyes look at her sidelong.
Triela turns her back to the toy shop and crosses her ams, leaning against the display window, making a point of looking like she doesn't care.
"What will you call it?"
She looks at her boots.
"I'm up to Nero."
"Ah. So Claudius was the last one."
Triela smiles, tilting her face forward so he can't see it. Hilshire's their teacher - of course he'd know right away what she was naming the bears after. "Yup."
The little bell jingles and Hilshire is gone, as quietly as he always moves. He could -
He could almost be a cyborg that way? No. He's nothing like a cyborg, whatever the other handlers might say.
She wrigglers her boots back and forth, making small shoe-print snow angels and ignoring the looks of passerby.
The bell jingles again, and her vision fills with the brown paper package Hilshire holds out. "You did well today."
Triela wraps both arms around the package and holds it tightly enough to feel the shape of the bear inside.
"What can you tell me about Nero?"
She rolls her eyes. Even here, lessons. "He was popular with the poor and lower classes and tried to keep them on his side, but the wealthy and the Senators hated him. He expelled the Jews from Rome, and was supposed to be the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians."
"Very good."
"Can we go now? It's cold out."
Another of his smiles-without-smiling. They start to walk back toward their hotel, and she reaches out with one hand to take his. He follows suit, without looking down.
This is why she loves him. Not conditioning - maybe it started like that, but not any more. Because she knows him, and he knows her, and they don't have to say it to know.
Network:
Good morning everyone! [The girl on the video is in her early teens at most, and at face seems completely unbothered by her surroundings. She supports her chin in both hands, eying the console like she's waiting for an answer.]
Not so bad, for a kidnapping. Never been on this side of one before though - usually they issue terms way before this, and the Emperor seems like the one to ask. Do you think they're aiming for some kind of quota before they tell us what we're here for?
[She sits back from the console and crosses her arms, tapping the fingers of one hand against her crisp shirtsleeve. She's wearing the clothes she arrived in - a suit vest, a white button-up shirt, slacks and a tie, all carefully pressed and clearly tailored to fit.] Either way, probably some or all of us will die, or it wouldn't be a such a secret.
[She leans in again.] Oh! I almost forgot. The army people here - is there anyone willing to spar with me? Anyone with martial training, really. Preferably field experience, black ops, that kind of thing. I need to stay sharp for- well, I just do.
[A cheerful wink.] If anyone knows a good place for noodles, I'd appreciate it!
[And she signs off.]
