Jasper Harlow
Jasper Harlow | |
---|---|
Full Name: | Jasper Starlow Harlow |
Age: | 18 years old |
Pronouns: | He/She |
Species: | Mevya (reformatted) |
Identity: | Pansexual & bigender |
Affiliation: | The Decadent Company
Extril Flats (formally) |
Jasper Starlow Harlow is a reformatted mevya who has been working as a encourager for the Decadent Company since 2518 AE. Primarily working in the reformatting department, Jasper works to ensure unruly citizens follow the rules and stay in line. Those who have the misfortune of meeting her describe him as "judge, jury, and executioner", having the final say in what punishment those brought to the department face.
Before this, Jasper lived a very different life at the Extril Flats, a particularly poverty filled area of Nowhere City.
Table of Contents
History
Childhood
Jasper Harlow is the child of Charlotte Harlow, a mevya farrier, and Amie deu Harlow, an ishiadian doctor. Born at the beginning of the reformatted experiments, her early childhood was filled with instability from both his uncles. His cousin, Brigan Harlow, essentially lived with them, and she was viewed as an older sibling by Jasper.
When the Decadent Company took over Nowhere City in 2510 AT most of the Harlow family went missing shortly afterwards, which included Charlotte and Brigan. Amie was left alone with Jasper and went into hiding, starting a cafe in the rapidly growing Extril Flats, which was a cover for it planning heavy rebellion activity with others in the area. While Amie, in theory, tried to dedicate as much time for it's child as possible, in practice it was so busy that most days Jasper would barely see it.
Jasper would struggle to make friends, and find comfort in reading about space travel and other planets in the universe. She dreamed of meeting up with all his family and taking them somewhere far away from Nowhere, and would often spend time playing astronaut in Amie's cafe. This would help give hope to the struggling people crammed into the flat complex, much to the anger of the megacorporation watching them. Jasper was their shooting star, lighting up the darkness of a cyberpunk dystopia.
Extril Flats riots
In 2518 the flats rioted over a paycut, driven to the point of being willing to sacrifice themselves in the hope of causing change. Reformatting was currently at an all time low, due to the JOY AI that controls them having little resources to dedicate to controlling new people, and a new shipment of memory for the AI being heavily delayed. Decadent was stumped on how to stamp out this rebellion, but then... JOY had an idea. "If I cannot currently afford the resources to help all these broken rebels, why don't I help just one? Their little shooting star."
Amie's cafe was stormed by the encouragement team, and Jasper was kidnapped and taken away to be reformatted. Horrified about what happened, the rioters struggled to remain hopeful and feared what would happen to their own family and loved ones. The riot quickly dissolved, and the flats returned to an even worse state than it had been before. The Decadent Company had won.
Jasper was reformatted, a clear reminder that if you're not scared of being reformatted, you should be scared for your family instead. Ever since, he's worked with the encouragement team, and now takes other victims of the Company's reign of terror and reformats them, just like that happened to her. It has been five years since Jasper was reformatted, and it's like the adventurous bubbling astronaut never existed.
Despite all this, people have seen the reformatted glance up at the stars on occasion, as if he's longing to leave the planet. This is widely considered strange behaviour for a reformatted to have, considering the fact that they're supposed to have no free will.
Trivia
- Jasper has fibromyalgia, and struggled with chronic pain and fatigue thoughout her childhood. His legs were replaced when she was reformatted in hopes of preventing it from causing any issues with Jasper's new career path
- Jasper is scared of water, especially the sea, due to the fact that she struggles to swim
- His old telescope at the top of the flats is still there, and there's often tributes to her left next to it
- For his 12th birthday, Jasper managed to convince Amie to take a day off work and take her to see a shipwreck on the edge of the city. Amie still has the photos they took hung up in the cafe