Eles Kuromoto

Eles Cecilia Kuromoto was a player character with a finished arc, and is currently a player-owned NPC unavailable for other storylines. In all universes, she is the second daughter of Søren Kuromoto and Heti Soterede Kuromoto, younger sister of Søra Kuromoto and older sister of Teli Kuromoto.

She was born in September 2129, and graduated from the Cecilia Payne Institute of Astronomy and Xenological Sciences in 2154, with a D. Phil. in Xenobiology, specializing in Cetian Neurochemistry.

Eles Kuromoto is best known as the master implementer of the Crimson Tide Incident, a war crime perpetrated against the Z on 12 April 2156. She was investigated by Admiral Star Honbashi during a joint NCIS investigation carried out by the ERS Gryphon and ERS Centaur at the end of April, but there was no positive evidence linking her to the crime. There was evidence to show she had suffered a psychological breakdown, and she was sent to INDOC 4 for treatment. There, she was examined by psychologists and Cetian telepaths, and they were able to determine that she did (or believed she did) send the order for Crimson Tide. They declared her non compos mentis at the time of the crime, and recommended her for a long period of treatment. An effort by those Cetians and Eles's friend Delphine Amir has gotten underway to send her to Tau Ceti for proper care.

## Personality and Specializations

Eles is, in all universes, sensitive and averse to confrontation. She is brilliant and socially inept, preferring the company of Cetians and half-Cetians, and uncomfortable with having to express her feelings rather than simply have them be understood. Eles is consistently at odds with her own humanity and the identity of humanity itself. She is uncomfortable with her own desires for violence and revenge, often trying to repress and expunge them. She is disgusted by human sexuality, including her own, and finds human culture brutish, loud, bloody and lurid. She reads Cetian poetry and tries to compose it herself, while also reading a secret stash of human-written "Cetian romances," which are harlequin novels about human women being seduced or courted by Cetian males.

Eles shows obsessive and aversive tendencies, working exclusively on what interests her and shunning all else. She believes in some properties of eugenics, having come to the conclusion during her studies (unconventionally) that Cetians represent a later stage in humanoid evolution, and that humanity can only become properly elevated by either becoming psychic in their own right, or by mating with the Cetian race. Her first thesis, which was subsequently rejected, was about humanoid brains and what she called "the tree of progress" which concerned a progressive and teleological view of evolution, tending toward eusocial organizations and psychic abilities. Her thesis heavily implied that humanity is under-evolved and that it will face complete destruction if it does not course-correct its development quickly. Her second thesis, which was accepted, concerned the toxicology of hyperonic radiation in human, half-human, and Cetian brains. She correctly predicted that three-fourths Cetian brains would face a higher percentage of toxic incidents and would sometimes require surgical correction to their structure, and advised some targeted gene corrections to fix this error, which corrections have subsequently been implemented. She is considered an expert in human-Cetian hybrid neurology, and some Cetian thinkers have shown interest in her wider array of ideas.

## Relationships

Eles has few human friends and very little interest in humans in general. However, she is very loyal to her family and extremely attached to them, and is constantly frightened and internally tormented at the idea of them off fighting wars and living in consistent danger. As she always went to different schools, she has never been close to either of her sisters--she usually pressures Teli (like a proper big sister) to stop being a commissioned officer and follow up on her other interests and talents, so she will be out of danger and more "useful." She was very embarrassed and disgusted by Søra's exploits aboard the ERS Omacatl, even calling her sister a slut in a video message, which sparked a cold war between the sisters that hasn't much abated in the intervening years. Søra and Eles were never close, as Eles was often laughed at by Søra and her friends (the Barca twins) when they were girls. Eles did look after Teli, however, sometimes comforting her with letters or handmade presents after Søra had bullied her (something Eles did not approve of).

She had a strong relationship with her mother when she was young, since they both had scientific minds and Eles was always determined to follow in her footsteps, but her father's disappearance to hyperspace and Heti's continued service aboard the ERS Hydra--despite Søren's return and need for care--caused Eles to become angry with her mother. She believes Heti buried Søren when he disappeared and refused to acknowledge his return completely, and has not been acting as his wife and partner, opting instead to continue with her career in the Star Navy as though he were still dead. Eles took care of her father for two years while earning her D. Phil, as they were both on Earth, and Søren later used his position as admiral to station her on the MCS Drake so she could explore the Cetian Sector in 2154. She could only stay away for a few months, as Søren suffered a heart attack during Christmas of that year, prompting her to return home. She has been caring for him and working for the Science Directorate ever since, usually living with her father when he has been at Star Navy Command on Earth. They have grown very close during that time, though Søren coddles his daughter and often does not tell her all of his feelings on all things (particularly when he has violence on the brain, which is often). Usually he complains to her about Heti, and tells her his suspicions about her mother and Captain Christian Brown. Eles has come to believe, as her father does, that her mother has been cheating on him with the captain. She was traveling with her father as his caretaker on 10 April 2156, when their courier shuttle was hit in hyperspace by the Howl superweapon. Her father's seizures and coma thereafter deeply distressed Eles, who had been watching him worsen for several years by then, and caused her to have a psychological meltdown. She grew vengeful and violently angry with the Z, and the feeling was so upsetting to her that she dissociated from it, entered a psychotic fugue, and sent the Crimson Tide order from her father's comconsole. She repressed this memory entirely and distanced herself, as she had always done, from that aggressive and very human part of herself.

## Name

Eles takes her first name from her maternal great-grandmother, and the name is Hungarian for "sharp" or "incisive." Her middle name was inspired by her other namesake and a hero of her mother's, Cecilia Payne, a famous astronomer. Eles would later attend the Cecilia Payne Institute of Astronomy and Xenological Sciences, her mother's alma mater and the source of the inspiration.

The last name Kuromoto is an ancient one in Japan; however, this particular Kuromoto family were once known as Kuromori, which means “Black Forest.” When they left their home and its dark trees, they changed their name to Kuromoto, leaving out “mori,” but the implication is historically “originated in the Black Forest.” Its cognate, however, is “dark origins,” and that works well for the Kuromoto family, who now strive to live most of their lives in space or take part in Black Ops.

Eles has several times considered giving herself an additional, more Cetian name, and has been researching this idea for many years. Her Cetian given name would be El'es.

## Childhood

Eles was sent to the Macgregor Academy for Scientific Excellence at age seven on a special scholarship, after she was recruited from military school at age seven. At Macgregor, she was targeted for a selection test and brain scan by the Aldea Academy for Gifted Youth on Sirius Base, and hence received part-time admission there at age nine. She attended Macgregor and Aldea from nine to fifteen, when she graduated with the equivalent of a high school diploma with several university credits. Macgregor and the children it sent to Aldea had a reputation in the 2130s and 40s for excellence among its scholars and for churning out prodigies, many of whom went on to earn PhDs at surprisingly young ages. However, when several of Macgregor's earliest graduates began ending up in INDOC centers and committing suicide in adult life, the school underwent an external investigation by an ethics board in the mid-2140s, around the time of Eles's graduation. Several of the school's board members disappeared, and some teachers mysteriously vanished or turned up dead. The school was closed in 2146, and the investigation concluded that several cohorts of students had undergone damaging physical experimentation by school staff, and learned that extreme discipline and forms of physical and psychological torture were used to impose unreasonable standards of excellence. Some students were tracked down and sent to treatment; others slipped through the cracks or claimed to have no knowledge of what transpired. Eles and her cohort claimed to know nothing. Aldea and its programs remain mysterious and comparatively untouched, established as it is on Sirius Base beyond JUDCON's reach.

Several members of Eles's cohort, a group of girls who were enrolled at Macgregor and selected for Aldea's programs, had remained in touch and maintained a cabal of silence about their school days to avoid disrupting their subsequent schooling and jeopardizing their careers. In adult life, they had begun to exhibit signs of psychological disturbance, psychotic breaks, fugue states, and suicidal tendencies. By age twenty-five, a quarter of them had managed or attempted suicide. Additionally, more than half of them held strange beliefs and led unconventional scientific careers. Aside from Eles's eugenic beliefs, one of her classmates professed a belief that life itself was an aberrant parasitic manifestation of chemistry, and that a universe without life at all was in fact its proper state. Another classmate professed the belief that "real space" was simply a very low band of hyperspace, rather than a different dimension, and that ultraspace could be reached by traveling to higher bands of hyperspace; she also believed that flora and fauna in real space were manifestations of life forms in higher bands, and vice versa. She destroyed herself by attempting to release a hive of bees in hyperspace on a stolen starflare. Researchers following the lives of Macgregor students concluded that bonds between members of each given cohort were unnaturally strong, and that distance between those members and psychological breakdowns in individuals tended to further destabilize each cohort as it aged.

Studies on Eles and some of her fellow students in INDOC have revealed unnatural brain activity during sleep, as though their brains were doing more work during REM cycles than brains normally perform. Autopsies on the brains of dead Macgregor and Aldea students have revealed nanosurgical scars in key parts of the brain, as well as biotech viruses operating like nanobots in several key regions, for reasons the research teams are still working to determine. Some believe that the girls' brains may have been networked to increase productivity during sleep and hence improve both performance and multiple neuron connections, and hence boosting intelligence and capacity. The networking may have created increased connections among the girls, but its side effects could have disrupted sleep cycles permanently after the girls separated, rendering the girls incapable of geting enough sleep and the chemicals it produces. The deficits this disruption produced may have been different, depending on the girl, or gotten worse in the presence of stress or other abnormalities, or may--as the researchers believe--gotten worse as the girls aged, producing greater and greater instances of psychological distress and mental breakdowns. Some researchers believe, however, that the girls' minds are still connected somehow, at very low and subconscious levels, though this claim has yet to be substantiated. One researcher has published a paper--spurious at best and damned by the scientific community--claiming that the brains that their team continues to study, which are fed liquids and sometimes stimulated with small electrical signals to measure activity, are also still part of their cohort's network--meaning that each cohort with a dead member may be networked to a mostly dead brain, which creates latent trauma for the living girls.

Reconstruction of Eles's specific experiences are difficult going, as she is repressive by nature and has suppressed memories in order to properly function. Unlike many other Macgregor and Aldea students, who actually show aversion to psychic connections and psychic races, Eles seems to have liked being connected to her cohort and subconsciously prefers relationships mediated by imposed empathy. She speaks sometimes of a Cetian or half-Cetian teacher she had--or possibly imagined--at the school, who apparently looked after her and inspired her. One of her supervising counselors believes this individual may be a mental construct, an invented person meant to take the place of nurturing teachers and parents who were absent when she needed them. Latent hyperonic toxicity damage to her brain, which occurred when her brain was in its formative stages, reveals that she may have been psychically imposed upon somehow by a psychic entity or by an experimental device. Researchers believe this may be connected to the Cetian or half-Cetian she refers to, but how is unclear and difficult to parse. Very old scarring reveals more conventional forms of physical abuse, such as scarring to the knees (from being forced to kneel for long periods on gravel or salt as a punishment), damage to the intestines from being fed something painful and undigestible, and neural damage in the extremities from extreme hot, cold, or electrical exposure. She shows some agoraphobic tendencies, and may be afraid of large open spaces because of punishments outdoors as a child. She is also suggestible and easily cowed by authority, and tries to prevent, diffuse and soothe confrontational situations as quickly as possible, behaving like an individual who has undergone verbal and psychological abuse in an authoritative environment. Her brain has undergone changes that are more easily detected than the networking technology, but which are old enough that they are difficult to fix, including damage and death to neurons from overuse of scholastic stimulants and extreme sleep deprivation during childhood. The rest of her body shows signs of damage from stimulant use, such as damage to her heart, and from sleep deprivation while developing, such as slightly stunted growth.