June

June is an old Siol, several millennia by her own reckoning (though she is known to be an unrepentant liar) who travels the multiverse in search of things to amuse herself. She is consciously capricious and often unkind, but only when she considers it funny. She doesn't have much use for friends or consistent confidants. Her blasé attitude towards others may be a result of her advanced age-- though she still looks like she's in her 20s.

She was the catalyst for both Rally and Rourke's transformation into Siol. Her intentions in inducing this transformation aren't clear.

Description

June is a medium height girl, appearing to be in her mid to late 20s, of slender build. She has little body fat. She often dresses herself in ornate costumes that she finds interesting, but she also sometimes just throws on mismatched pyjamas or t-shirts and simple slippers when she doesn't care about her appearance-- her moods influence her style of dress greatly.

She dresses in brightly colored, often impractical garb with elaborate makeup and hair that she changes often.

She has a southern accent, sometimes emphasizing it for effect.

Personality

Exhuberant but willful, moody but principled, disdainful of boring people, sociopathic towards sociopaths, capricious. Her primary goal seems to be to seek amusement and slake her own boredom. She oscilates between extremes day by day, sometimes manic and capricious, sometimes blasé and apathetic towards anything except her various vices.

She enjoys her powers and role in the multiverse as a Siol immensely, and sees herself as a kind of catalyst for change: she demonstrates the absurdity of things people take for granted, as a challenge, to see how they try to resolve it. She is pleased when others are willing to change in light of new information. She herself says she will never get tired of pushing, of striving, of trying to find the limits of philosophical and aesthetic beauty, trying on new personae and discarding them just as easily if they fail to show promise.

It's not always clear whether her intentions are good. She has moments of kindness and conviviality, but she can just as easily show unexpected spite. She feels the need to test her friends ceaselessly, and while some easygoing characters like Rally and Rourke may find it easy to go along and get along, or treat it all as a game, others may justifiably find it irksome. She has thrown away valuable friendships that she regrets because they got tired of her capriciousness and inability to say what she really believes, isolating herself from her true emotions.

She enjoys creating visualizations of complex mathematical topics, making little displays out different limits and calculations she thinks are interesting, playing with them constantly in her head like self-stimming mental puzzles. When using advanced techniques, she can often be seen pantomiming writing with both her right and left hands, the left hand making broad strokes as if drawing diagrams, the right making sharp strokes as if writing figures and variables.

In teaching, she is almost merciless, insisting that anyone who learns from her understand the topics inside and out before she will let them move on, and she is known to be very strict when they are found to be lacking in their efforts.

She has a great love for old things and cultural artifacts from various times throughout history-- cheeky victorian bronze door knockers to the frutiger aero inspired kitsch of the modern era to propaganda posters from empires big and small.

Powers and Abilities

Programming/Computer metaphor

June has been known to use the programming metaphors from The Book of Now and Forever, but only in a pedagogical context, when demonstrating techniques to students. She appears to think the programming metaphor from the book is perfectly serviceable for Siol techniques, but doesn't use them herself, presumably having learned her own methods long before the book was ever cobbled together by the CIA.

Mathemagic

June sometimes playfully calls her techniques "Mathemagic," describing what her powers do in terms of linear algebra, and pantomiming math calculations with her hands. She doesn't teach her students these methods, however she will gladly describe them if anyone asks. Others rarely make use of them because of the sheer strain her techniques place on working memory.

Prayer

June of course uses prayer for many techniques-- for negotiating with fundamental forces and inducing their sympathy, there's simply no better method. Logical techniques harangue nature into compliance, each spell basically being an entire session of "rules-lawyering" from a certain point of view... instead why not convince the fundamental forces that they WANT to help you, by imbuing them with personality and will of their own? This of course works because it's true from a certain point of view, it's not like you're coercing life into existence when you need it. The universe is far more vast than anyone can imagine, and it's a very panpsychist setting (though what I mean by that... I mean, you have to filter for attention.)

Intuition

June's greatest ability, possibly intuitive but definitely preternatural, is that she can identify people who are good candidates for the Siol ascension process, and they almost invariably grow into formidible and long-lived Siol (i.e. Rally, Rourke and countless others throughout the multiverse.) This has made her something of a target of the CIA, whose process for creating them is extremely limited and fraught with risk. Siol who use programming metaphors from the book extensively, but aren't limited to them (i.e. who can also use mathematical or faith-invoking methods) are a calling card of her protegés. Also large amounts of original programming techniques, some formulated on the fly, are a signature of her students.

Dream

June's Siol dream was of a band of hunters on flying machines hunting great floating creatures by sticking them with massive numbers of barbed harpoons attached to boulders, which the creature dragged across the plains until it finally faltered under their weight and became immobilized.

History

June originated on earth before the eclosion. While it's not clear exactly who she was or how she ascended, she appears to have an association with advanced math. She never gives her age, but claims to have lived for at least "millennia."

At some point in the past, she found Rally's body in a junk dealer's basement. Intending to take him as a souvenier, she instead found a latent consciousness inside him being held down by a brutal control program. Upon removing it, she found that the toy contained a centuries-old copy of a complete human consciousness. As this human consciousness contained inside a frog puppet had nowhere else to go and nothing to do, she allowed him to travel with her-- on the condition that he studied to become a Siol so as not to be a burden on her.

Some time later, she found Rally living in a very small post-eclosion terran Crann (i.e. a Crann that used to be a part of Earth) with a small human community that had fled there. The family's young daughter, Rourke, took an instant liking to June's eccentric personality and style, and June in turn, saw Siol potential within her, so she secretly gifted her with a copy of The Book of Now and Forever. She promised Rourke that if she studied it, she could become more like June. Rally was against this, but could do little to dissuade Rourke. This ultimately leads to their home reality getting invaded, and Rally having to escape with Rourke. June has never shown any guilt for this episode.