SYNODIPORIA APP

[bypartisan]

P L A Y E R;
NAME: bii
AGE: 33
PLAYER JOURNAL: biichan
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT: obiisama
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Charlene “Thorne” Durante

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Byerly Vorrutyer
CANON: the Vorkosigan Saga
POINT IN CANON: post-Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
AGE: 38 at the time of his pull point, as far as I can tell
APPEARANCE: Like most Barrayaran Vor, Byerly is olive-skinned and dark-haired. He's noted to be shorter and slighter than Ivan Vorpatril (his future quasi-brother-in-law) but as Ivan is 6'1 and built like a recruitment poster, there's a lot of leeway in there. His brown eyes are noted to be startlingly beautiful, which is not uncommon to members of his family. He dresses quite fashionably for Barrayar, which tends to go for military-esque suits even for those not in the military, with braiding and piping and so on done for the sake of fashion, not denoting rank. Think Revolutionary Girl Utena and you'll get the picture. I'm using David Krumholtz as his PB. He's a little young for By, but I'm willing to handwave that he's fairly well-preserved for his age.
CANON HISTORY: There's a wiki for this, surprisingly enough, but it doesn't really go all that in-depth, so I'll try to elaborate a little (although some of the finer details of the plot of CVA will likely be left out.)

Byerly grew up on the western side of the main Barrayaran continent, which is somewhat less developed than the eastern side where the capital is, although thankfully not nearly as much of the boonies as the southern continent. Although Byerly has been a member of the Vor aristocratic/military caste from birth—the Vorrutyers were even High Vor, if somewhat disreputable as a clan—By's own father was one of the younger sons of a previous Count Vorrutyer (at minimum the third son, if not the fourth) and thus By was never in line for the countship, even before he was disinherited at the age of not-quite-twenty. He had a younger sister, who he felt very protective over, and multiple cousins (at least three.)

Byerly presumably went to a military preparatory academy like most High Vor boys, although he doesn't seem to have ever attended the actual Imperial Service Academy, which served as a training ground for the Barrayaran military's commissioned officers. Since he's actually fairly intelligent, it's likely he either failed to get a passing score the physical section of the test due to being insufficiently athletic or he purposely flubbed one or both of the sections of the test so he wouldn't be shipped off to join the military. He does seem to have had some secondary education, given that he was still in school at the time of his disinheritance and Barrayaran secondary education seems to start around the age of seventeen. (It's likely that he was attending classes at the District University.)

When By was nineteen, his father accused him of molesting his little sister, based on a particularly vile bit of hearsay. Byerly was, in fact, not doing any such thing, but his father refused to believe him, even though Byerly and his sister protested loudly and longly against this smear. More outraged at his father for believing the nasty rumor than he was at the original accuser, Byerly left his father's house for good and was summarily disinherited. The break between the two was very much mutual and irrevocable.

(To be scrupulously fair, Byerly's father stubborn refusal to accept his son's innocence, while still absolutely awful and wrong, is still somewhat understandable in light of the Vorrutyer family history. Their clan has a history of being, in short, massively fucked up. Particularly one of Byerly's late uncles, the notorious Vice-Admiral Ges Vorrutyer, who was a very nasty piece of work indeed and fully capable of being guilty of any similar accusation being made against him. Having grown up in the same household as Ges, Vorrutyer Senior would have been all too ready to accept the idea that his brother's nastiness might have been inherited, especially if Byerly had born even the slightest physical resemblance to Ges.)

After the mutual disinheritance, By left the western continent for Vorbarr Sultana, the planetary capitol of Barrayar, where he proceeded to fall into the most disreputable and awful company he could find, hell-bent on losing himself in debauchery and domestic crimes. As it turns out, however, one of the member of the particular group of bad apples he was associating with was, in fact, nothing of the sort and in fact was an undercover agent for the Domestic Security branch of ImpSec. Said undercover agent, recognizing that Byerly was not actually as awful as his associates, decided to see if he could train By up as his replacement and proceeded to run By through various surreptitious tests and send him on some secret errands. Satisfied at Byerly's fitness for undercover work, his mentor revealed himself to be an agent of ImpSec and proceeded to recruit By. After a stint at an ImpSec training camp, Byerly was ready for his new career as a spy.

A career which he did rather well in, albeit with a few ups and downs. He managed to achieve a fairly high clearance by the end of it and although his pay grade fluctuated, it did follow a certain upward trend. Sure, there was that time when he basically free-lanced in order to help his cousin Dono (formerly Donna before her Betan sex-change) keep the recently vacated Vorrutyer Countship out of the hands of his odious cousin Richars and ended up becoming an agent provocateur and almost had all of his plans blow up in his face, if it weren't for his more distant cousin and not-quite-friend Ivan Vorpatril stepping in to save everyone's bacon—which led to Ivan figuring out that Byerly was a spy in the aftermath. But everything worked out. Sort of.

Possibly this was why a few years later when Byerly was on Komarr and needed to have someone take a girl out for the night so that she wouldn't be there when he sent kidnappers after her—his current 'case' was a very complicated one involving two brothers name Vormercier smuggling Barrayaran imperial fleet property and yet more Complications had been arising—Byerly turned to Ivan. For a variety of reasons, the plan did not work out and said girl (and her blue half-sister) ended up hiding out in Ivan's rented apartment for the next few days, during which both Byerly and Ivan learned that said girl (whose name was Tej) was as far as anyone knew the only living child of a pair of deposed Jackson's Whole Baron and Baronne by the name of Arqua (formerly of House Cordonnah) and that she was on the run from the people who were trying to finish wiping out her family.

Soon after, thanks to circumstances beyond anyone's control, Ivan had to make a hasty green card marriage with Tej to keep her and her half-sister (Rish) from being deported as illegal aliens, in which Byerly and Rish served as witnesses while the Kormarran Immigration Authorities attempted to break down Ivan's door. Ivan then called in a favor from Byerly to get him out of trouble with his commanding officer for the mess, which led By (and his call-girl co-agents) to make a swift retreat from Komarr.

Once arrested for show, chewed out for getting the man sixth from the Imperial camp stool involved in his schemes and having suffered a day's debriefing first at the hands of ImpSec and then at Ivan's mother, Byerly was then given his walking papers and his new surveillance assignment: Rish. He accomplished this by taking her on a rather lot of dates over the next series of weeks and it was beginning to look as if a romance was blooming.

Then virtually all of Rish and Tej's family showed up on Barrayar with the intent of bringing them home (after they recaptured it) because it turned out most of them had actually faked their deaths in the coup! Beyond that, unbeknownst to anyone outside the family, they were also on the trail of a secret Cetagandan bunker full of untold riches that they could use to fund the countercoup. Only it turned out that ImpSec headquarters had ended up being built over the secret bunker and drastic measures would have to be taken by the Arquas to break in.

Shenanigans ensued, which we won't go into very much, because it was a) very complicated and b) would spoil the back half of the book, but we should probably mention that during all this Byerly and Rish had some fights over him bugging her and there was an explosion while the Arquas were tunneling in that left Rish and her younger brother trapped in the tunnel overnight while most of the rest of the Arquas plus Ivan were stuck in the secret bunker (which was in fact as full of riches as its reputation.) In any case, a very frantic By was there for the extraction of the Arquas and the saving of Rish and got a hero's greeting in the case of the second.

Also ImpSec headquarters was swallowed by the planet.

Thanks to some backroom deals between Emperor Gregor and Baron and Baronne Arqua, in which the Arquas could have 5% of the secret bunker's contents (which was certainly enough to fund their countercoup) in exchange for a secret alliance between House Cordonnah and Barrayar, the Arquas ended up quitting Barrayar pretty fast after that and taking Byerly with them as Barrayar's new agent on the Whole, although publicly the cover story for him fleeing the planet was that he'd been conspiring with them all along. Since Byerly and Rish had mended their relationship by then, he was fairly all right with this development.

(And then, about a year later, Byerly gets to be snatched up for Traveling. Yay?)

CANON PERSONALITY:

“... At first I thought he was in it for the money, and then for the mischief, and then I figured both of those were covers for this crazy Barrayaran patriotism all these Vor fellows go on and on about. Then I thought maybe it was for revenge, for nailing the guilty. Now I wonder if this furtive obsession for sorting truth from lies is actually in aid of clearing the innocent.”
“That sounds like two sides of one coin, to me.”
“Yeah, but it’s like the man bets tails, every time.”
–Rish and Tej, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, ch. 13

So you know how in Oscar Wilde plays there's always at least one member of the cast whose entire purpose is to be witty, clever, and devious—who always gets the really good lines and whose basic purpose is to serve as Wilde's author avatar? That's Byerly Vorrutyer. He's a Wildean stock character in 31st century Space Russia and it's probably not surprising that we first meet him—and see him return as a main character—in the Vorkosigan saga books that are most easily classified as comedies of manners.

One could quite easily go on to say that Byerly is even to some degree aware he's a stock character—or rather, he's taken care to craft his public person to embody a certain character type. Being what the Vor class refers to as a Town Clown—a male Vor that declines his class's obligation toward military service in order to be an upperclass gadfly—he was already halfway there in the minds of most of Vorbarr Sultana, but Byerly takes care to embody as much of the stereotype of useless layabout of dubious morality as he can. His public persona is the sort of person who shows up at parties he was never invited to, drinks like a fish, talks shit about everyone, and somehow manages to smarm his way into people's... not good graces, exactly, but tolerance. If nothing else, he knows all the best gossip.

It all amounts to self-parody. Byerly when he first came to Vorbarr Sultana was that sort of person, dissolute and disinclined to do anything worthwhile, deeply disappointed in the world and liable to try to drown that disappointment in whatever vice was on offer. Being recruited into ImpSec gave him a purpose to pull himself out of that mental space, a purpose that he believes in fervently—but also meant that he had to put his behavior in a sort of holding pattern, at least in public. It's noted in CVA that Byerly 'firms' up when going from his public persona to discussing things with Ivan in the context of his position as a secret agent.

Byerly Vorrutyer is not a serious person, but he is more serious than the face he shows the world. Underneath his Town Clown mask, he's oddly earnest. He believes in truth, in the power of truth, in its ability to condemn the guilty and save the innocent, in a way that is at odds with the lies he swims through, that drip from his mouth as easy as breathing. It's not surprising he's as cynical as he is secretly earnest, not when he daily deals falsity in the pursuit of the truth. The only way he doesn't lie is with his hands. They function as a secret tell to his true feelings.

One suspects that he enjoys the exciting parts of his job better than the parts where he's just informing on people, the parts that let him be clever. Sometimes too clever for his own good. He'd like to believe he's a budding mastermind, lining people up and watching them fall into his plans, but he fails sometimes and sometimes he fails hard. The attack on Dono in ACC and the raid on Tej's flat in CVA are fairly good examples of Byerly's schemes coming back to bite him in the ass.

The plans involving Dono going sour, in fact, were especially harrowing because Donna/Dono had been the cousin that Byerly had been closest to and one of the few people he'd been close to in general. When the nature of your job involves lying to everyone for the good of the Imperium, it's difficult to get close to people, to have honest relationships. Part of the reason he and Rish were able to fall in love was that she knew what he was and he didn't have to pretend for her.

Byerly Vorrutyer is, on the whole, a good man—but he's not always—or even at all frequently—a nice one. To do his job he has to be willing to befriend people—and sometimes go to bed with them, at which point his bisexuality comes in handy—only to sell them out later. He has to keep company with a lot of awful people—and do what he needs to do to keep up with them. And even outside his job, he's not always nice. He enjoys needling people far too much. We all have our own coping mechanisms and getting under people's skin is his.

POINT OF DEPARTURE: So I was hoping to let Byerly be a two-jaunt veteran upon apping, because then I can skip all the Getting Him Up To Speed parts or at least most of them and jump right into the new stuff. I talked with Sleepy (Kanji's mun) and they're fine with handwaving Kanji giving By the speech during his first liminal space By was in. Which... would have been the coloring one, looks like.

His first Jaunt would have been the Marches of Purgatory, when he'd have been Infiltrating as a spectacularly catty and useless Immortali by the name of Rutger. Rutger was centuries old, quite jaded, and thoroughly steeped in debauchery and dissipation. He spent most of his time in Yomi, attempting (and once in a while succeeding) to trade gossip he'd picked up for free drinks. (Naoki's mun has given the okay for this.) Byerly as Rutger's behavior was closer to his own public persona from his ImpSec informer days than he'd probably care to admit. He contributed nothing to accomplishing the Jaunt's objectives whatsoever.

In the two iterations of Liminal Space after Purgatory, both Cars Hell and the Dark Playground, By would mostly avoided have everyone out of annoyance at his own utter uselessness in the failed Jaunt.

During the Questing Country Jaunt, By would have been Infiltrating as the human Pillar of Hands, who'd been Champion of Truth some years prior to Naoto showing up and retaking that name. (Naoto's mun has okayed this.) As the Pillar of Hands, Questing Country's Byerly had given up on bringing the Truth to light. He spent the bulk of the Jaunt sitting on the sidelines and making sarcastic commentary, whether or not anyone was actually listening. The spirit animal he used to have, incidentally, would have been an oversized, long-haired, dark blue persian cat (actually blue, not cat-owner for 'grey') named Jewel and in the Waking World he'd have been a Ukrainian university student with a messy and depressing personal life.

Having Infiltrated twice, Byerly would be quite sure that he'd very much prefer to be Investigating in the future, thank you very much. Due to his work for ImpSec, he's had to disappear into a role quite thoroughly—even if said role was usually just a parody of himself—but he's always been able to internally separate himself from that role to some degree. You can't do that when you're Infiltrating and that bothers him, even if he'd rather not go into why with just anybody.

ABILITIES: Byerly has no supernatural abilities whatsoever unless (if you ask Ivan Vorpatril) being supernaturally annoying counts. He, however, is a very gifted secret agent/spy, with all the requisite skills one requires to be one: such as lock-picking, play-acting, hard drinking, mixing said drinks, sniffing up drugs, sleeping with anybody needed to accomplish his goals, and possessing a willingness to sell out one's associates for the good of the Imperium.

He also can speak the 31st century Barrayaran versions of English, Russian, French, and Greek and quote way too much Shakespeare.

INVENTORY;

--his wristcomm
--a credit chit
--a suit of very nicely tailored clothing + socks + shoes
--keycard to his apartment at Cordonah Station
--electronic lockpicks
--pocket-sized holo projector, currently turned off, that when turned on projects a six-inch-tall, three-minute-long looping vid of one Lapis “Rish” Lazuli dancing
--Vorrutyer seal dagger (from the secret Cetagandan vault of stolen goods)
--various sample-sized packets of 31st century drugs that would be illegal anywhere else than Jackson's Whole

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? By is going to pretend he's not a highly skilled secret agent for as long as possible because... because he's awful like that, basically. And he needs something to amuse him. Besides, he's feeling kind of embarrassed he failed to contribute twice and that's without people knowing he's a secret agent.

As far as skills from his previous jaunts, By would have picked up Wound Regeneration during Marches of Purgatory and Portal Creation during Questing Country. ETA: Also Filter Intrusion, probably also during Questing Country.

S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: By and Helena in a liminal space
PROSE SAMPLE: Byerly is an flamboyant twit at an infiltrating troll + By butters up Claudia + By's own toplevel from the TDM (to give you more of his thought processes, both Infiltrating and Investigating)