Ajewen Cheris

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**Ajewen Cheris**, known as **Kel Cheris** during her years of faction service and **Dzannis Paral** much later, is a Kel soldier who is a major character in the Machineries of Empire universe. She has also gone by the name of **Shuos Jedao**.

Cheris appears in Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, Revenant Gun, the short story The Robot's Math Lessons, and the flashfics Birthdays and Sword-Shopping, and is discussed in the flashfic Persimmons. Cheris will return in the novella Glass Cannon (Hexarchate Stories, 2019).

## Appearance and Personality

Cheris is short by Kel standards, ivory-skinned, and round-faced, with black hair kept in a regulation bob. A conservative, serious woman, she had no acting ability and was terribly bad at lying. However, she is a mathematical genius on par with Hexarch Nirai Kujen. She can also communicate in Simplified Machine Universal.

She was an enthusiastic but mediocre duelist, though she loves dramatic, flashy calendrical swords. Her musical tastes frequently align with the soundtracks of her favorite dramas, which usually involve romantic comedy, dueling, and rogue engineers. Her gaming tastes run to dating games and visual novels. She likes ravens and told stories about the ones in her home city. She didn't mind Kel jokes, and enjoyed tangerines and persimmons.

## Personal Life

Cheris's mother, Ajewen Dzera, was a Mwennin; Dzera's husband Ajewen Derow married into the minority sect and learned their customs. Accordingly, their daughter was natural-born. Since it would have been heretical to follow Mwennin custom as far as naming her after a saint's-day in their old calendar, they chose the name Cheris, "twenty-three," for the high calendar day of her birth.

Dzera attempted to pass down Mwennin culture and stories to Cheris, who spoke Mwen-dal exclusively until she entered school. When Cheris was five years old, her family moved from the Mwennin ghetto to a different area of the City of Ravens Feasting, closer to the sea. The family also stopped celebrating Mwennin birthdays due to the danger of using their old calendar.

Cheris excelled in mathematics from childhood onward, and clandestinely befriended local servitors, with whom she discussed mathematics, dramas, her home city, and, later, Kel culture. She quickly learned that her furtive culture and its low language were looked down on in the hexarchate. By the time she was eleven, she had to try not to be sullen when adults at a festival her parents took her to insisted on addressing her in Mwen-dal instead of the high language. Her developing need to fit in with broader hexarchate culture culminated in applying to become a Kel, a break from the Mwennin norm of avoiding faction service.

Despite leaving Mwennin culture, Cheris continued to correspond with a few Mwennin, including writing to her parents in Mwen-dal. While she was in academy, her mother would write back to her in halting high language.

On Cheris's twenty-third birthday, her mother gave her a raven luckstone pendant which she subsequently wore whenever she was out of uniform.

Cheris was mainly attracted to women; known lovers included Linnis Orua and Shuos Alaia. She has dated at least two Shuos.

## Career

### Kel Academy

Cheris applied to Kel Academy Prime despite objections from her parents. The Nirai tried to recruit her, but she insisted on the Kel and was an attractive enough officer candidate to successfully argue for acceptance. She underwent a five-year stint at Academy Prime. As elsewhere, she befriended the servitors there.

Along with the rest of her class, Cheris was injected with an all-purpose phobia of vermin and ordered to hold First Formation while assailed by miniature servitors. Cheris held fast and the phobia was removed after the test. She also attended an obligatory historical survey during her first year, later wishing she had paid more attention to the scant details on the Liozh heresy.

Her Academy specialty was the mathematics underlying formation mechanics. She wrote a small number of mathematical papers, mostly involving number theory and all brilliant. Kujen considered her paper critiquing Nirai Medera's formation generator a novel approach. In her second year, she succeeded in shedding her low-language accent.

She graduated in the top six percent of her year. Before approving her for service, her primary examiner noted her conservativism and questioned why she had chosen to apply to a faction of risk-takers. The notes approved of her psychological need to assimilate into mainstream hexarchate culture.

### Kel Service

Approximately five years after Academy, Cheris served as captain of Heron Company, 109-229th Infantry Battalion, in the Chain of Thorns swarm under Brigadier General Kel Farosh. The battalion was landed on the planet Dredge to capture a directional storm generator. Due to field grid failure, Heron Company was missed by the first storm attack, and Cheris developed nonstandard formations to protect her company after realizing that the local terrain was affected by calendrical rot. Although Heron Company captured the generator, they were almost immediately extracted by Farosh and the generator bombed from orbit, rendering the entire battle unnecessary.

With her company slated to be broken apart by Doctrine after their exposure to the quasi-heretical formations that had kept them alive, Cheris was granted a stay by Kel Command's Composite Subcommand Two in exchange for volunteering to retake the Fortress of Scattered Needles, which had been subverted by heretics. Competing with six other candidates to lead the expedition, Cheris proposed using General Shuos Jedao to take back the Fortress, unaware that she had been preselected for the task by Hexarch Shuos Mikodez and manipulated into choosing Jedao as her weapon.

### Collaboration with Shuos Jedao

Cheris's proposal was accepted and she was transferred to the black cradle facility and anchored to Jedao; the process was overseen by Hexarch Nirai Kujen, though Cheris was not introduced to him. Jedao and Cheris assembled a large swarm of warmoths to lead to the Fortress. Cheris chose the cindermoth *Unspoken Law* as the swarm's command moth to keep an eye on Commander Kel Nerevor, and ordered the null emblem to be used as her banner rather than Jedao's infamous Deuce of Gears.

[etc]

## Relationships

### Parents

Ajewen Dzera and Derow taught Cheris the Mwennin low language, Mwen-dal, which she only spoke when visiting them. When Cheris came home from school crying because other children had made fun of her Mwennin accent, Dzera comforted her by telling her that everyone had an accent, but Cheris soon learned that broader hexarchate culture regarded low languages with suspicion. The struggle between Mwennin culture, so old-fashioned that it was barely within calendrical norms, and the broader and more judgmental hexarchate culture left Cheris determined to leave her home city. During her years in Kel Academy, she was uncomfortable when her mother would write to her in not-quite-grammatical handwritten high language, but would respond in Mwen-dal.

## Trivia

* The name "Cheris" is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and a short i in the second.
* Cheris, holding a calendrical sword and with Jedao's shadow in the background, will appear as "The Mathematician" in Hexarchate Tarot. The card represents the fundamental order of the universe and power over the natural world; reversed, it stands for disorder and natural disaster.

## References

1. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 4
2. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
3. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 4
4. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
5. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 5
6. ↑ Sword-Shopping
7. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 15
8. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 8
9. ↑ Author's remarks
10. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 3,20
11. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
12. ↑ Persimmon Quest
13. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
14. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
15. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
16. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
17. ↑ Birthdays
18. ↑ Birthdays
19. ↑ The Robot's Math Lessons
20. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
21. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 15
22. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13
23. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
24. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
25. ↑ Author's remarks
26. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 4
27. ↑ Sword-Shopping
28. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 3
29. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 26
30. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
31. ↑ Persimmon Quest
32. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 4
33. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 6
34. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 1
35. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 15
36. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 7
37. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2
38. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter
39. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 1
40. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapters 2,3
41. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 4
42. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 6
43. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 15
44. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 6
45. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20
46. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 16
47. ↑ Cooking the Books Podcast #032 interview: The Importance of Tangerines
48. ↑ Author's design
49. ↑ Hexarchate Tarot: Major Arcana