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Character Info | (General)
Aug. 5th, 2024 09:22 pm
"ELAN CERES" (No. 5)
— CANON TITLE —
"I changed my face just to stay alive. There's no way I'm dying in vain."
Other Physical Traits.
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IC Permissions.
Background.
[Warning: Witch From Mercury spoilers are a given here.]
Let's start from the absolute most basic point: "Elan Ceres" is not actually this guy's name. Like... It is, in that it's basically the only name he can introduce himself by? But he's not the real Elan Ceres, golden boy student of Asticassia School of Technology and future CEO of Peil Technologies. He's a body double, an "Enhanced Person". Enhanced Person #5, to be exact. So to keep things clearer from here on out, we'll be referring to the character that this journal is for as just, "Five".
We're also going to do this partially in Q&A format because it's what I feel like writing.
Q. Okay, so he's a clone of this Elan Ceres guy?
A. No no no, absolutely not. Cloning is hella illegal in the world of G-Witch! He's actually just some poor teenage shithead the company either yoinked or coerced into signing up for this gig somehow, and then they whammied him with sci-fi futuristic medical science to make him look exactly like the real Elan Ceres.
Q. How the heck is that any less illegal or more ethical than just making clones?
A. It isn't. But also clones take time to grow and mature at the rate of a normal human, and Peil needed body doubles with piloting skills like yesterday, so. Inflicting plastic surgery from hell on a pre-existing teen was presumably their next best option.
Q. Why tho?
A. The shortest and easiest answer to this is just, "corporate espionage". The slightly longer version is that Peil is a dumbshit company that makes all of it's internal decisions based on the predictions of a futuristic super-AI, and that AI told them that the original Elan Ceres was their best bet for a future CEO. Because he's devious, cunning, and super good at literally everything! ...Except for piloting big robots. He's really shit at that. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of this anime's corporate politics are really tied up in the goings-on at this conglomerate run high school where people solve disputes by having pilots duke things out in big robots! So that's a problem.
Q. That sounds stupid as hell and also insane.
A. Honestly I'm being flippant for the sake of comedy and I think the show itself actually does a pretty good job of selling all of this, but also: you're not wrong.
Peil's enhanced persons actually serve another purpose besides playing doppelganger. They're also made to serve as test pilots for experimental giant robots (the eponymous "Mobile Suits") that run on a system called the GUND format, which is YET ANOTHER super illegal form of technology. "Gundams", as these types of mechs are called, famously have this nasty tendency to kill their pilots, by exposing them to this world's special "make technology work" particle called "permet". To combat the permet exposure, every enhanced person has had their entire nervous system replaced with an artificial augmented one that keeps the Gundam from killing them as quickly they would a normal person. It does still kill them, though... Just at a slower pace. Peil essentially treats these augmented pilots like interchangeable machine parts, things to be worn out and then disposed of and replaced once they cease being of any use.
Peil also tampers with these pilot's memories, so Five has no knowledge of anything about his life prior to becoming an enhanced person. He doesn't even remember his own name.
Personality.
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Other Details.
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