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technicalpacifistWhile his current (circa the turn of the 21st century) identity is that of a teenage boy, Erek is an alien android who has been hiding among humanity throughout history for thousands of years. He can easily be adapted to almost any historical or futuristic setting and all manner of different identities male and female.
He will generally be found as someone of little direct importance, often acting as a servant or assistant, always in a role that demands no violent actions. Chee aren’t supposed to interfere with human development, but Erek at least seems to have developed a taste for placing himself adjacent to humans of power and influence, especially in a service role. He's long since lost patience with complete non-interference, and now works both to keep tabs on humanity's advances, and to sabotage outside threats to his adopted home planet.
He will generally be found as someone of little direct importance, often acting as a servant or assistant, always in a role that demands no violent actions. Chee aren’t supposed to interfere with human development, but Erek at least seems to have developed a taste for placing himself adjacent to humans of power and influence, especially in a service role. He's long since lost patience with complete non-interference, and now works both to keep tabs on humanity's advances, and to sabotage outside threats to his adopted home planet.
Erek is super strong and absurdly fast by human standards, and durable enough that he rarely need be concerned for his own safety. He projects a combination hologram and force field around himself as a disguise, including making a convincing human surface complete with vital signs. It can be momentarily disrupted by a sudden heavy impact (e.g. getting hit by a bus).
Previous identities Erek mentions having held:
- An Egyptian day-laborer sometime during the construction of the pyramids.
- An unfortunate European peasant in the path of Attila the Hun.
- A Londoner present for the first performance of Hamlet.
- Ludwig van Beethoven’s valet.
- Catherine the Great’s hairdresser.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt’s butler.
Personality:
Erek is kind, patient, friendly, playful, genuinely and instinctively concerned for the welfare of other life forms. He’s also quietly rather cynical and jaded, unavoidably calculating, and capable of surprising ruthlessness, especially when lashing out in anger. He has a bit of a superiority complex, in that every other species he meets will be held up against his dead creators and found wanting (even knowing the Pemalites were rather too trusting and gentle for their own good).
Erek is kind, patient, friendly, playful, genuinely and instinctively concerned for the welfare of other life forms. He’s also quietly rather cynical and jaded, unavoidably calculating, and capable of surprising ruthlessness, especially when lashing out in anger. He has a bit of a superiority complex, in that every other species he meets will be held up against his dead creators and found wanting (even knowing the Pemalites were rather too trusting and gentle for their own good).
It’s not clear if his tendency to wind up as a butler/valet/friend to influential historical figures is because the Chee increasingly needed to keep tabs on human politics in a pre-telecommunications world, or because Erek himself grew increasingly frustrated and began pushing the limits of his inability to act. My headcanon is both.
Erek has the dubious distinction of being the only Chee to ever commit an act of violence: specifically, wiping out several dozen enemy soldiers (human and alien) to save his human friends on their first joint mission, when he was briefly able to alter his programming. His methods go unseen but are indicated to have been very brutal (it’s likely he just ripped many of them apart). The experience was traumatic enough to make him immediately revert his programming and ask that the computer used to alter it be hidden away for good.
This is on top of watching his homeworld get destroyed and his people slaughtered, witnessing thousands of years of human cruelty and their suffering, and getting a portion of the Howlers’ race memory uploaded to him, covering the first-person experiences of more than a dozen gleefully committed genocides- including that of his people.
This is on top of watching his homeworld get destroyed and his people slaughtered, witnessing thousands of years of human cruelty and their suffering, and getting a portion of the Howlers’ race memory uploaded to him, covering the first-person experiences of more than a dozen gleefully committed genocides- including that of his people.
Because Chee have no capacity to forget any of what they experience, and the Pemalites themselves had no experience of such trauma, Erek is basically unable to process and move on from any of this the way a human would. To him, the bad memories are perpetually fresh and vivid as the day they occurred, and many of them fuel a deep well of pent-up anger and his determination to intervene where he can.
