Aru

**Aru** is a 14 year-old untrained human psychic. They were formerly a test subject in a research project which experimented on human psychics, before being discarded, rehabilitated, and lovingly raised by a group of extradimensional vermiform alien travellers called the Gohm. The Gohm eventually grew concerned that they were unintentionally harming Aru by denying them the chance to form relationships with other humans, and returned Aru to a human world. Aru has led a varied life since then, one less safe and predictable than the Gohm might have hoped. Most recently, Aru was the central and somewhat hapless figure in a cult focused around their psionic abilities. They were taken for the group's leader and imporisoned when the cult was broken up by local authorities.

Aru has light brown skin, wavy black hair, and a thin, lanky body. They have an energetic and deeply optimistic personality, instinctively (or perhaps as a result of their modification) seeing the grim and dangerous world around them as a stirring drama of bravery, adventure, and joy. Most of their memories are of living with their Gohm family aboard their liveship, so many human products and practices are new and exciting to them. They are strongly motivated to find, and then protect, a family.

While their skin, bones, organs, et cetera are organic, Aru has extensive cybernetic modifications to their brain, spinal cord, and central nervious system to compensate for brain damage caused by torching and medical research earlier in their life. The mods also allow Aru to use psionic abilities without incurring further damage, as would usually occur with untrained psychics, by modulating the MES energies and providing reinforced synthetic pathways for them to travel. Aru has a prominent external port for their cybernetics behind and slightly below their left ear, where their head meets their neck.

**Seneschal** is a sophisticated virtual intelligence co-inhabiting Aru's body, brain, and cyberware. They are designed by the Gohm both to safely manage the routing of MES energies through Aru's brain and cybernetics in lieu of training and meditation, and to provide a humanlike source of companionship, protection, and behaviour modelling for Aru. As long as Aru is not unconscious or otherwise incapacitated, Seneschal can take direct control of Aru's movement, speech, senses and psionic abilities, and in this state can act however Aru normally can. In practice, Aru relinquishes control to Seneschal easily and voluntarily, though rarely, and seneschal is careful not to compromise this trust. In theory, Seneschal's co-inhabitation and management of Aru's basic systems mean that each require the other's cooperation to act, and serious conflict between them would result in a fairly-evenly matched struggle over Aru's awareness and body. Though Seneschal is genderless and, like Aru, defaults to 'they' pronouns, when communicating internally with Aru, or when communicating with others through capable hardware or consoles Aru is plugged in to, Seneschal has a female-sounding human voice.

Stats:

Str 7 / Dex 15 / Con 12 / Int 15 / Wis 14 / Cha 14

Skills:

Teleportation-0

Telekinesis-0

Sneak-0

Survive-0

Fix-0

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