Governor Caliban Smith

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IamLEAM1983
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Governor Caliban Smith

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Name: Caliban Smith
Age: 57 years old
Gender: male
Species: Green Chimera (recombined T-Rex analog)

Strengths: Rhode Island's current governor doesn't owe his claim to fame to his resilience, speed, brawn or ability at dispensing pain. Like his older twin, Caliban's core strength is his intelligence, here tempered with ethics, empathy towards others and a pliable, analytical mindset. Lauded for his forward-thinking policies, he's managed to garner the trust and support of his State and the Senate's numbers not out of fear or carefully fabricated lies; but out of his uncompromising approach towards progress, equality and social justice. Adopted as a Smith during the family patriarch's last years on Earth, he's used his considerable inheritance to both further his objectives and give himself the lifestyle and social presence required of his quickly obtained notoriety.

Opposing honesty to Rendell's lies, his main advantages rest in how he essentially is in control of the public's entertained image towards Chimeras. This involves putting together required screening tests for beneficial antigens and gene sequences as well as spearheading the construction and administration of the State penitentiary that carries his name. Chimera Row, as it's more informally known, was effectively born out of Smith's desire to show that all Transgenics had the same capabilities in regards to rehabilitation and re-education. It's also under his guidance that the Row became the newest detention facility for contentious superhumans or alien beings carrying nefarious intents.

Beyond his social pull, his corporate influence is easily perceptible within Goliath Corporation. If it weren't for the dinosaur, the mammoth would be less likely to put forward certain progressive research projects, and certain inter-office problems wouldn't have come to light. Politically independent and traditionally labeled as Libertarian, the current RI Governor can be a staunch critic of the country's two dominating paradigms equally. Thanks to his background, however, Caliban's chiefly made a mark for himself in championing for the continued growth of the Internet as a deregulated and supranational entity and for putting in place a case-by-case system of corporate regulation freely inspired by the investigative tools employed by bodies such as Wyvern Holdings. In the years that have followed the Battle of Hope, many of his proposed innovations have left the Stateside borders and become country-wide standards. He also hasn't forgotten the mundanes and mortals, pushing forward new educational projects and State-backed financial planning solutions, as well as medical and psychological assistance for all newly-created Automatons and Cyborgs.

Ask most ten to fifteen year-olds, however, and they'll like to hear of Caliban Smith the Wartime Hero more than of Caliban Smith the Politician. Having had access to the same synaptic training as Rendell, Smith packs a celebrated general's worth of maneuvers and a career soldier's scars. Having fought back against his own kind during the Battle of Hope and the Elysium Invasion, he's acquired a number of official distinctions between 1976 and 1980, making him one of the most decorated civilians in American history. Where blithe power marked Rendell's approach, however, Caliban's education came complete with an acute understanding of the painful nature of the conflict at hand. As such, precision and effectiveness tend to be the hallmarks of his martial style – just as effective as Rendell's approach, but tempered by a great deal of mercy. Where the Father of All Transgenics would have killed an opponent outright, Caliban prefers to find a way to take his enemies out non-lethally.

Unless, of course, no other options are available.

Otherwise, his nature as a Transgenic derived from Rendell's own refined genes makes it so he doesn't quite carry all of the marks of his apparent age. Built like a cross between a bodybuilder and an NFL quarterback, his excessively resilient heart stands ready to keep pumping for several additional decades. Based on telomere samples, Caliban seems likely to only start his graceful downwards curve towards decreased potency around the ninetieth year. While age and expression wrinkles are already in full force, natural death shouldn't be a problem for quite a while.

Finally, his continued relationship with former Triad neurosurgeon Eiko Kazamatsuri has made it so he's become functionally bilingual. American English and Japanese are his usual linguistic implements, and frequent policy-required trips to Sweden and Paradise have added basic functionality in two other idioms.
Weaknesses: if Gregory is saddled with hubris, then Caliban is forced to deal with stubbornness. Prone to self-sacrifice and unwavering devotion towards his own principles, he frequently needs weeks before realizing that a given situation is hopeless or needs different hands to be tackled adequately. At the very least, this problem of his actually gives rise to a fairly thorough approach towards problem-solving, as he's likely to try absolutely everything he can before throwing in the proverbial towel. A bit like Wallace Doherty, he tends to give everything he has to the task at hand. If he perceives it as being worthwhile or as being something that needs to be done, he'll carry himself to the point of exhaustion, if need be.

As physically capable and moderately wealthy as he may be, Caliban's chief enemies tend to come from the political circles – and some are older and more powerful than he could ever hope to be. Various immortals having invested both of the country's biggest political gestalts, American politics are routinely pulled this way and that in Senatorial hearings. When some of your constituents originate from Imperial China or Pre-Secession War Louisiana, various extreme or sometimes retrograde points of view are voiced and upheld by dangerously capable individuals. Anyone we might define as a progressive in 2025 – especially uncompromising progressives such as Caliban – is likely to face verbal or personal attacks. Outright assassination attempts haven't been unusual, either, and few people have realized that centuries-old Bible-Belters with guns and an insane grudge are starting to be a definitive possibility...

The older a county gets, the older its immortals get, naturally. Including the crazy ones...

Otherwise, as he hasn't gone and tried to bypass the weaknesses of his artificial creation process, Caliban remains disconnected from the World's Breath, no matter how respectful and congenial he might be towards Sophia. He could brute-force his way to power the same way Rendell did, but that is obviously out of the question. He cannot sense via other than in the recognition of certain physical responses sensitives might have and couldn't hope to repel a harmful spell hurled in his general direction with an equal and opposite dose of magic. A creature of technology, he seems to be much more of a casual tech whiz than a potential practitioner.

Appearance: being Gregory Rendell's unmarred and wizened twin brother, Caliban carries the same physical traits and distinctive features as the reviled terrorist. The same wildly developed musculature and the same lightly iridescent green scales cover his frame – but the scars he carries are markedly different. With an intact face but with arms and a chest riddled with old rifle round marks and knife slashes, you can plainly tell he took quite his fair share of punishment. A lot of his wounds are characteristic of defensive postures – assumed not to protect himself but to shield others from harm. Probing his arms and chest would reveal old fractures that might have healed ages ago while still refusing to completely leave him without pain.

Time and Civilization willing, Caliban's also developed a more thorough emotional registry than his brother, and his face is a rather open book on this matter. Creases and wrinkles baked into place by the East Coast's seasonal cycles coexist with expression marks that speak of easy smiles, frequent frowns of deep thought and the occasional grins and full-bore rounds of laughter. Considering the size of his mouth and how it happens to be filled with rather cruel-looking teeth, it's also fairly obvious that he tends to rein himself in, to not smile as widely or as broadly as he could. There's always a suggestion of polite restraint in even the most casual of circumstances, and he has good enough reasons to limit himself. If his brother indulges in serial-killer-worthy leers and smoldering stares befitting a supervillain, Caliban has to take the same facial features and put a rather simple fact out there for all to see.

He isn't like his brother. You might say that it's a given in 2025's political and social spectrum, but there's always going to be someone who's going to confuse the fact that they're genetically identical twins for some sort of conspiracy in the making.

Besides, Caliban's the good-looking one. Well, as potentially good-looking as T-Rex anthros could hope to be.

What helps is the fact that his sartorial code is both professional and a bit girded, but also far simpler than Rendell's excesses that get him routine tailoring sessions from Saville Row masters expensively flown in from England.

Comparatively, Caliban tends to favor turtlenecks on an almost year-round basis, as they allow him to hide one particularly grisly scar that was the result of a failed throat slash attempt. His sports jacket and simple dress pants are usually selected to match, more frequently purchased than tailored outright. As Eiko could tell you, he tends to allow himself precisely one bespoke suit every five years, and will spend most of these having pants that fall one or two inches too short altered by local tailors. Overall, there's a definitive sense of Urban Chic to his wardrobe, but also the carefully disguised notion that he hasn't had to break the bank, either. Not being too keen on being exclusively associated to his political status, he tends to avoid the displays of freestanding patriotism most of his peers might indulge in – instead preferring to consider his status as a naturalized American as being one geographic status like any other. To Rendell might go the egotistical and ridiculous displays of globe-trotter savvy, Caliban's equal time spent on Japanese soil makes him consider himself as a citizen of the world.

So no flag-shaped pins, no party-mandated insignias – but a smartphone with a Sakura ringtone associated to his wife, however, is something that's fairly common.
Behavior: again, people tend to hear that ringtone and assume that Caliban's a Japan buff in the sense that most people would understand – the katanas, samurai suits of armor and sengoku military fanboy ethos meeting with the country's massive advances in Transhumanism. They'd be wrong.

Take a stroll through his personal office and you'll find art books chronicling the best frescoes and visually narrated stories and legends from each era. You'll find poetry compilations focusing on the Japanese haiku heavyweights that are Basho and Buson. You'll find tourist guides aimed less at the average Joe itching to ogle Akihabara or Shinjuku and more at the sort of Cultural Exchange or Peace Corps types who get schlepped out into the Kansai boonies, where not a gain of sand's worth of Western influence can be seen. You'll find an honest backbacker's intellectual survival kit and a nature lover's souvenirs – all of that coexisting with the sort of background you'd expect out of a man who might as well have been born to walk on the Senate's floor. Snuck in between a grinning shot atop Mount Fuji and of Eiko and the President shaking hands is a heavyweight legal representative's lot of reference books, as well as other tomes related to corporate culture, Transhumanism, the ethical hurdles faced by Transgenics and a wide massing of arcane vulgarization reference material – everything so he stands ready to at least understand the specifics of his appointed State. Of course, being who he is, sticking to basic understanding isn't enough for him. He's followed bachelor's and master's-level classes on the quasi-physics of via as a free auditor. The credits didn't matter so much as the raw knowledge, as he intends to do exactly what needs to be done depending on Sophia's expressed needs.

Culture, personal dedication and an awful lot of humbling injuries and near-complete failures tend to mark both his body and his surroundings. The end-result is a thoughtful and empathetic mind who does share some of John Smith's crowd-pleasing and chess-playing ethos – but for whom honesty, the rule of law and the more intrinsic concept of order are all extremely important.

Goals: to protect the interests of all of Rhode Island's citizens, and to bring his expertise to other shores if a receptive audience is found. That protection should ideally be expressed in the form of socially and politically progressive approaches to common problems. Only in the most extreme cases of need would more martial endeavors be considered.

For instance, the Governor is well-known for having vetoed the Superhuman Registration acts. He understood the need to keep track of who could do what, exactly, but the idea that largely law-abiding individuals would have to pay the price for a minority of belligerent people struck him as being unfair – and also as a fair bit of a Gordian knot. Legislate the issue, and the innocent claim they're being treated like second-class citizens. Fail to circumscribe the threat of rogue superhumans and immortals, on the other hand, and the mundanes fall prey to a culture of fear and institutionalized bigotry. The Senate overruled him, but his refusal to even speak on the issue was commended by some and decried by others. The only way he found to resolve the issue involved waiting for Time to undermine the bill's foundations.

If anything, Caliban seems to have taken the proverbial pulse of the country on the supernatural and superhuman scales, realizing that crises of various persuasions tended to shift paradigms and change the nature of certain discussions or social issues. The Centennial Tree being what it is, it stood to reason that sometime, somehow and in some way he couldn't fathom as of the nineties, there'd be an eventual need for superhuman intervention. Supervillains would have to be understood as being par for the course in these tumultuous times, and the truth was that the older and more experienced schemers hadn't simply stopped dead in their tracks because a few American Nexuses were on the Off switch.

On the short term, letting the fearful ones have their way in full confidence that things would change felt like the least contentious of approaches. This isn't so much calculation as careful deliberation, and questions like this tend to make up the bread and butter of the Governor's work. He's never been known for particularly gun-ho or partisan approaches, sometimes to the point of refusing to speak on hot-button issues if he feels that both the Democrats and the GOPers he's forced to work with on a daily basis are missing parts of the bigger picture. He's never bothered to chase a specific electorate, preferring to put clear arguments forward and to avoid easy forms of mud-slinging or name-calling. The fact that he's still in office is a testament to the fact that his refusal to insult the average voter's intelligence is paying off.

He can't please everyone, he can't fix everything – but he can try and plan ahead.

History: Caliban's history begins with Gregory Rendell's, true enough, but both are also starkly distinct. Being the result of Eiko Kazamatsuri's serious doubts regarding Rupert Isaacs' neural imprinting schemes, he emerged from the maturation tank with his brother's intellect, yes, but also with a sensitive and perceptive outlook on the world. Unfortunately, he'd barely be afforded a few minutes' worth of confusing intimacy with Eiko that he'd be forced to plan his escape. Thankfully, he'd been given a clear sense of the urgency of the situation and of just how needed his involvement was. Where most of us are busy resting from the trauma of birth in a hospital nursery, at this point, Caliban had only moments to get dressed and run. Watatsumi's extrasolar forces had been deceived, and they all were howling for Transgenic blood. The Massacre of Sector Seven was well underway.

Caliban spent his first few weeks on Paradise as a refugee and pariah, unregistered with the Dusters and forced to beg for food and shelter in a place where helplessness is frowned upon. The maintenance ducts and the Maintainer core became his temporary base of operations, which he used to request supply drops from the Dusters. Renny's people believed they were helping out the core's guard detail, but they actually spent two weeks furnishing Caliban with clothes, weapons and outer hangar access keys. Where Rendell would deceive others to further his own ends in the decades to come, Caliban knew he had no choice but to stay hidden and profit from the cracks in Paradise's security – if only to give them all a chance against Elysium's Transgenics.

As expected, he knew he'd need to cause a serious lull in his compatriots' advance towards the other sectors. Only then would he be able to consider escaping Paradise with a chance of reaching Earth in one piece. Between 1968 and 1974, he essentially rehearsed the role he'd briefly assume in Hope's sewers, come 1975. He acted as one of the station's numerous boogeymen and bugaboos, terrifying crooked Dusters into sticking to the straight and narrow and pushing back against Rendell's assaults as relentlessly as a one-man commando of his size could manage. Thanks to this, what would become a set of pedantic martial tenets parroted by Rendell was actually turned into something tangibly usable in Caliban. Where the Ancients failed to come up with something in the back of his pre-programmed mind, he had the Drifters' generally streetwise ethos to compensate. Whatever little bits of arrogance or self-congratulatory tendencies he might have felt were buffed away by the school of hard knocks – without ever undermining the deep sense of empathy Eiko had been so diligent in instilling in his mind.

Compared to his later adoptive brother's Vietnam experience, the more social aspects of Paradise turned the T-Rex into a silver-tongued devil with scarred knuckles and a heart of gold. For every bit of hard-bitten lawlessness that permeated the station, there were hard nuggets of civilization anyone would have been hard-pressed to eliminate. Kids were still kids, parents were still parents, and earning someone's trust in a place like this meant something. That would turn out to be a lesson John would never learn. Honesty was so rare it typically became deeply treasured; true friends developing little oases of trust in a sea of habitual lies.

By 1974, however, he'd achieved his first goal and managed to half-befriend and half-bribe one of Sector Seven's spaceport dock workers. He outfitted an old Karthian shuttle with shoddily adapted cockpit items designed for another species, used his forged launch and callsign papers to reserve a launch time window, and headed for Earth hoping that a bad seat, poor fastening and forced Stasis wouldn't culminate in total paralysis once he'd reach his destination. Thankfully, it all mostly worked out. His ride was a total loss, having crashed near one of Goliath's industrial parks, but he managed to limp towards the storm drains. There, he'd start working on the second part of his counterattack.

As explained earlier, he repeated the steps he'd followed on Paradise. Survival was his initial concern, prompting a slew of small night-time larcenies from various shops. He created a little hovel for himself in one of the dried-out and abandoned sections of the city's late Victorian sewers and then set to work. He “contacted” Arthur Holden by setting himself up as bait, and managed to prevent his own transformation into one of the Freaks thanks to one well-placed right cross. Once the shock had passed, he laid out the history behind his origins and Elysium's plans to the Ringleader and promised that he'd use Rendell's own coffers to pay for his brood's services. He needed the best data-mining team the seventies could afford, as he couldn't emerge in the public eye without an irrefutable case in regards to Elysium being headed for Earth.

For about a year, Caliban essentially piloted an “anti-Elysium” of sorts, directing worldwide investigations thanks to vampires that were dutifully remunerated by Elysium's own hacked coffers. Initial survey operations were dashed and various letter agencies were routinely goaded into showing up, as Caliban wanted to ensure that America's counter-intelligence officials would at least start to suspect that something of a wider scope than the usual super-criminalized fare was underway. All the while, he made it clear that a wider reveal was forthcoming, and tried his best to remain in contact with Eiko. Encrypted or encoded exchanges were the best they could handle, fairly telegraphic messages struggling to contain just how emotionally charged their relationship was turning out to be. On an emotional level, the first high point they'd reach would follow in the wake of Eiko being blinded by Kenji Watatsumi. The T-Rex had always intended to find a way to bring her back planet-side, but this dreadful event only furthered his resolve.

After eleven months, it was time. With the country's military and political elite's appetite whetted by one of the most thorough examples of hacktivism even by 2025's standards, Caliban emerged in the public eye first in Hope, and then in Washington. In front of the Senate and wearing a badly-tailored suit Arthur had purchased for him, Eiko's love, pride and joy used every scrap of evidence he had – including his own body and DNA – to warn the country of Elysium's impending invasion. The results were mitigated.

On the one hand, he'd successfully spoiled the secret of the Transgenics' existence before Rendell's arrival, essentially depriving Elysium of the advantage of dropping completely alien troops. On the other, the notion of the Drifters having failed to stamp out dissension on their own home turf seemed fairly laughable to the Americans. Many Drifter immigrants testified in Caliban's favor, but scientific skepticism and Karthian rationality won out over imminent danger. Only one hearing attendant paid close attention to the proceedings and asked to speak privately to the dinosaur, once he was done.

That man was Henry Smith.

Choosing to test the nation's doubts, Henry publicly adopted Caliban within the same month and allowed the saurian to go on an all-expenses-paid tour of the United Nations' speaking floor and of London-Upon-Faerie's great halls. Again, the dinosaur plied his wits as best he could in order to call for an armed response. Faerie heard his call and so did several European nations, but Gerald Ford stubbornly refused to consider what he and his cabinet deemed to be an unproven and potentially ruinous expense.

In Hope's universe, that mistake would cost him the White House and would leave several cities in the U.S. and its territories completely unguarded. Even if the country's dryads found that the Transgenic's words manifested in an odd sense of unrest their Nexuses exuded, they couldn't go against the country's high rulings. Minor fortifications were built in days that preceded the Transgenics Wars, some in dryad-spun roots and soil, but most of everyone who took action was compared to the usual insane and scraggly veterans that came back from the Vietnam War with too-wide eyes and unbelievable stories.

When the invasion finally came, Caliban was living in uncomfortable luxury, forced to endure the scathing criticisms of an adoptive brother who didn't particularly like him and the cold distance of a dying man who'd mostly adopted him for pure and simple purposes of political acumen. Caliban resented the notion of not having known Henry in better times, as he would have liked to be able to nurture some sort of friendship with the man. He, quite understandably, still wished to thank him for believing in him. Caliban was a Smith if only in name, now, and the family seemed focused on running Goliath more than anything else. Being pushed aside and forced through financial run-downs of the company that he didn't need infuriated him. Hadn't he already proven that he understood what those people stood to lose? Mainly, their lives more than their precious stock market shares or their bank accounts?

When the first mortar drops occurred in isolated pockets of the world, Caliban almost gratefully welcomed them. He'd finally been vindicated. The first few waves of Transgenics weren't anything the U.S. Forces couldn't handle, and Europe had the benefit of having prepared. Caliban wasn't a fool, however, and again tried to call for a more serious war effort. These had clearly been nothing except scouting parties or probes, so why stop there? Again, he was denied.

Again, America was pelted with mortar drops. This time, however, the dropped troops were more than significant. The scouts of yesterday had turned into a fully mobilized invasion force. Most of the country's urban centers were drowned in aerial and terrestrial forces.

The country burned for a year, the Transgenics War spawning the Battle of Hope. Millions died, heroes were made and lost – and Caliban fought. John kept his fists at the ready to defend the family and company's interests, but the lizard didn't care about Goliath. He soon became known for his willingness to dive into the thickest of entrenched areas, if only this would mean injured or innocents could be pulled free. He out-shined his brother's martial prowess and faced off against his twin in multiple occasions. In the meantime, Eiko did her best to establish a solid resistance against Elysium in Paradise, showing to the world that Transgenics were not mindless or irredeemable. Most simply had no idea as to why they were fighting, beyond Rendell's tirades about the greatness of Transgenics and their destiny as Earth's rulers and conquerors.

In the end, it was a bit of everything that won the war – angelic intercession and general craftiness by superheroes the country and world over, demonic pacts and clever mundane tactics, all of this thrown into the irrepressible technological progress of wartime research. As they'd always done since the October Revolution, the Karthians played a substantial role in Earth's technological progress, the ashes of burnt cities serving as soil for newly remade or restored metropolises. Instead of enslaving the world, the Transgenics were legally bound and forced to give to it in exchange, finally delivering unto the pharmaceutical world what Goliath had wanted to offer for years. From saliva, blood and skin samples were derived several treatments and cures. From their arsenal, new forms of weaponry were devised.

Peacetime, however, finally meant vindication and reunion. Caliban and Eiko were reunited in January of 1978 and married only a scant three months afterwards, propelled by a year's worth of feverishly lovelorn messages they slipped between clandestine communications to the occupied space station. The married life didn't leave him much of reprieve from the war's aftermath, however, his status as the whistleblower and primary observer of the war granting him special status during the mass trials that followed. Having turned from pariah to political rock star, however, the adoptive Smith was free to propose legislations in regards to his people's legal recourses, as well as to claim the seat of Governor for the State of Rhode Island. To this day, Caliban remains impossible to dislodge from the State office.

The eighties saw the emergence of a ballsier brand of superhero than those he'd collaborated with, as well as the instigation of the Superhuman Registration and Cataloging Act – the SuReCA – and its penal arm. The Caliban Smith Detention Center and Correctional Facility would be built and fully staffed in the same breath as the four “megacourts” that were built cross-country in order to house these mass trials. Its initial influx of prisoners would justify its nickname – Chimera Row – as well as the seemingly inevitable corruption that was to follow. In a sad twist of irony, no amount of political acumen and accrued respect would allow him to personally become involved in the initial detention protocols that concerned his twin brother. If he tried to wrest control from the appointed warden, he was publicly tarred and feathered in the newspapers in the days that followed. If he didn't, anemic restrictions were put in place.

As he'd expected, Rendell eventually broke free of his own accord, twisting the rules around in such a manner as to go from a Permanent Isolation candidate to just another shared cell user – and a prison boss to boot. With Elysium more crushed than effectively defeated and the organization's manifestos serving as a rallying cry for virtually any disenfranchised and violent person with a grudge, the prison boss soon became a kingpin who luxuriously wallowed in a very gilded cage – all of it despite Caliban's incessant attempts to tighten the proverbial noose.

For every sour note, however, more encouraging developments tended to follow. Rehabilitated Chimeras as well as those who had turned coat at the war's onset were proving to be prosperous and peaceful. The war's created panic had justified the creation of the Vienna Accords, and the consequences of the world's supernatural beings being given equal footing to the mundanes could be felt in every facet of everyday life.

Today, Caliban likes to say he tries to safeguard the technological and moral acquisitions that followed in the wake of the Transgenic War. Cultural and sexual openness is becoming a new standard despite the occasional hate crime, the mundane body's limitations are falling one by one, all the while being honored by a renewed commitment to Ethics that seems to act as a knee-jerk response to Elysium's unregulated gene farms. Disease is on the decline, employment is on the rise in America despite the increasing automation of some sectors, and magic is growing to be just as vulgarized and accepted as Physics have grown to be. Between Stephen Hawking and Meris of the Orcades, some people see no valuable differences as to how influential their contributions have proven to be.

If only Hope's Tree weren't stirring so much – and if only that hadn't acted as a prelude to the worst tragedy to befall the city since the Battle...
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