6I Application

[asklepian]

Character name: Julian Subatoi Bashir
Fandom/Canon: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

HISTORY
Memory Alpha, everything up to the midpoint of episode 5x14 "In Purgatory's Shadow" is in effect.

PERSONALITY OVERVIEW

Julian is a very--perhaps overly--friendly sort, the type of man that is either easy to get along with or extremely infuriating. He's confident in his abilities to the point of sometimes being a bit of a braggart, but he doesn't mean to be antagonizing. In fact, he means to be anything but. His heart is certainly in the right place. He only wants to help people and prove his merit. But he also certainly has a temper, usually triggered by those who would abuse or betray other people, or what he perceives as something morally wrong.

Speaking of this, Julian does have a very strong sense of morals, right and wrong, and he's not afraid to voice his opinion to anyone that might want to hear it--and anyone who might not. He does have a respect for authority--he has to, he serves in a military force--but he's still not hesitant about speaking up, even if he's in a position where it'd be better for his health and his career if he didn't.

Despite his relatively young age, and on his first posting out of Starfleet Medical, Julian is very obviously a more than competent doctor who will do absolutely everything in his power to save his patients and make their lives better. He's incredibly intelligent, with a sharp wit and enthusiasm for learning, but he's not perfect--a lot of that is by design. He's spent most of his life hiding his true abilities for fear of being outed as an Augment, a status that would have him barred from Starfleet and his medical practice by law. Despite this, he wanted to become a member of Starfleet, seeing that as the best use for his abilities. He was a conscious party in keeping his augmentations hidden for over 15 years, and really quite a lot of his persona is a layer of shields around the core of that secret. He's pleasant, disarming, and a little vapid so no one thinks to recognize the superhuman intelligence and ambition at the center of him, and so he is fairly adept at twisting people's perceptions of him. Behind the pleasant man, there's a whole other Julian Bashir waiting to come to the fore. His main conflict stems from his augmentation, a medical process that granted him the life he currently lives, but he resents immensely at the same time as he's grateful for it. When it's revealed, his self-loathing is surprising--he calls himself an unnatural monster and a freak, and obviously has issues believing even in his own humanity. He believes he's a science experiment, and his accomplishments aren't his own--at the base of him, he believes all of what he's done can be laid at the feet of the doctors who performed his enhancements. He hasn't really begun to work through this yet.

Despite what might for anyone else be a crippling sense of self-deprecation and fear, Julian continues to do his utmost best to help people, whether they be enemy or friend, at least in the context of medical care. His motivation is to help as many people as he can, and to be a good person, out of a desire to genuinely do good.

In his spare time Julian enjoys escapist fantasies--participating in holonovels and reading are two of his favored pastimes. He also enjoys philosophical debate about everything from politics to literature. He's a sentimental sort as well, evidenced by the fact that he's a 32 year old man who still packs around his childhood teddy bear.

Finally, he is very much a believer in the better nature of humanity. He's from a world where there hasn't been a significant conflict on Earth in decades, that wasn't brought there by an outside force--in his time, things are peaceful, and no one wants for anything. Medicine has advanced to the point where people are living well into their 120th year while still being active and healthy. Despite the war, up until now his life has been peaceful, which grants him a sense of optimism and cheer. It is getting considerably dinged up, with the war and all going on, but he's still a man that believes in the goodness of the universe while being aware of the dangers it offers.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

What skills does your character bring to the situation?:
Biggest plus, he's a doctor. And an incredibly good one. His memory serves him incredibly well here, he literally can't forget anything he's learned, so he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of disease, injury, and other illnesses as well as the anatomy for dozens of different humanoid species.

He can also adapt his knowledge to fit new situations. Like most Starfleet doctors, he's incredibly good at coming up with off-the-cuff treatments for new and strange maladies.

Despite being a bit naive Julian is a good officer as well--he knows when to take command and when to follow others, it's not something that's seen too often because of his rank, usually he's with others that are over him in the hierarchy, but he is capable of taking charge of a situation.

Explain how your character would react to the following:

- Discovering that their memories may have been tampered with:
First, disbelief. Julian isn't at all open about it (at current canon point), but his genetic enhancements mean he has a eidetic memory--he literally recalls everything from the age of 6 on. Supplimentary canon describes his mind like a cathedral, and I've adopted this--everything is in its place and there is a lot there. After he got that out of his system--probably quietly--he'd want to learn about it and the methodology behind what happened. He would certainly not quietly accept that it happened and he'd involve himself in any effort to find a way to reverse it.

- Having to do physical labor to survive:
He'd manage. Julian is from a background that doesn't necessarily lend itself to hard labor, being from a utopian Earth and even better from the sort of helicopter family that had him pursuing academics and athletics 24/7. It sort of shows, honestly, and if he was from an earlier point in canon I'd say he'd be largely insufferable about it. However, taking him from the canon point I am, he's had at least a few experiences that temper that for him. First, a brief stint in the Mirror Universe, where he was forced to do extremely heavy physical labor under threat of death, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions that started to ding up his considerably shiny world view. Second, the entirety of the Dominion War has aged him to the point where, if you'd had two of him standing side by side, one from the first few months on DS9 and as he is now, you'd be almost surprised he's the same person. Most recently:

- He's been on a world where he had to try to find a cure for a genetically engineered, 100% fatality rate, heritable plague with no technology (it accelerated the progression of disease)

- He's served in a trauma center in an active war zone and participated in an evacuation of said trauma center under fire

- He's been abducted and is coming into the game from an enemy detention center where he's been drawing attention away from the people trying to implement their escape strategy by sassing lizard-men that would sooner kill you than look at you because he knows he's one of the more strategically valuable prisoners and therefore they're less likely to kill him.

So, he's not just a scholar on a pedestal anymore, in short.

- Having to share resources with others:
Not a problem. Earth in the 24th century is a socialist utopia where the concept of communal property is pretty strong. In fact, the problem might be more getting him to keep enough to make sure he's fine, as he's not exactly used to limited resources either.

All of Starfleet's officers go through a mandatory wilderness survival training and Julian is no exception, but that's all largely theoretical for him at this point. They had a practical part of that class, but they just had to survive a couple weeks in the mountains in California, and there were medical evac shuttles on standby. He's never been in a situation where the immediate threat to his survival was exposure or being unable to find enough food and there was no backup.

- Being unable to leave the area:
Won't like it very much, will be looking for a way out, but he's coming from basically that exact same situation now--being a prisoner of war sucks, Do Not Recommend, if he could give it zero stars on Space Yelp! he would.

He'll do what he needs to in the moment, including seeming like he's just following routine, but he'd definitely be up for helping to plan a prison break.

- Doing without modern conveniences and technology and/or being around tech more advanced than they're used to:
This is gonna be difficult, not gonna lie. Julian both likes technology as an abstract and doesn't even realize how much he uses it in his day-to-day routine about 75% of the time, and what of it there is in the Glorious Space Future is so advanced that to someone from Edwardian times it would probably look like magic.

He's adaptable so he'll get used to it, but he's probably going to complain about it a lot unless something dire's happening. (Or someone yells at him.)

- Being separated, possibly permanently, from loved ones and their previous life, including loss of powers, if applicable:
This...could get complicated. Julian is, at this point, estranged from his entire family, so they're not even really going to cross his mind aside from some vague sadness that his mother isn't going to ever know what happened to him, probably more because he thinks he should be sad than anything.

'Loved ones' in this case would be the people on DS9, and he would miss them. He's coming from an interesting canon point for that, because he will have largely come to terms with the possibility that he was going to die in the detention camp and never see any of them again. They were planning to get out, yes, but if they were caught--and he can calculate the exact percentages of that happening and they really weren't in their favor--they'd be executed. Even if they weren't caught the chance that their message made it all the way to its intended recipient wasn't great, the chance that they'd make it there wasn't great...

And he's had a lot of time to think about that in solitary confinement. So yes, if he knew he would never see them again, he'd be emotional but he's already worked through most of that.

Loss of powers...nothing Julian has he would consider a power. It's all a natural extension of his genetic enhancement and the other medical interventions he underwent as a child. Even so, if he lost any of that...well, it would be a shitstorm. He'd end up panicking at first, and he would certainly be a completely different person if his genetics were reverted to how they were at 6. He'd have a tremor, poor eyesight, and a moderate to severe learning disability that he'd have absolutely no idea how to cope with.

(That being said, his genetics are completely human and all of his mental and physical abilities are within the realm of human possibility, if exceptionally so.)