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Dawn is just one of many clones, the 14th iteration of Emperor Cleon I who answered the question of his succession over the Imperial Galactic Empire by having himself cloned in perpetuity. The Cleonic dynasty resulted: three clones active at any one time—Dawn (the adolescent emperor in training), Day (the adult version and primary emperor), and Dusk (the former emperor and mentor for his younger selves)—ruling on the triple thrones for over four hundred years.
THE ABERRATION, CLEON XIV
✧ APPEARANCE: On the tall, pretty boy side. Without emperor-appropriate hair care, witness a slide into anarchy, aka hair that will air dry into natural poodle curls. He's still growing into some muscle and inches before he reaches his final form as a Lee Pace-shaped unit.
✧ DEMEANOR: The emperors have been described as "hollow men who hollow out their worlds" and it's not hard to see how spoiled, selfish, navel-gazers are made when taking into account the people raising the Cleons are other thems, their children are other thems, their advisors are other thems, they live in what amounts to a haunted house/shrine belonging to their long dead progenitor (who was actually kind of a pos), and the closest thing to a parent they know is their attendant, unbeknownst to the public a millennia-old robot who doesn't want them thinking too hard about individuality. They're a bunch of pampered purse dogs following the company line, wildly ignorant of the everyday suffering of people. Tl;dr out of touch dysfunction comes with the territory. (And don't let Hober be the only one capitalizing on the pun potential for their dumb naming scheme, either, okay.)
Privileged upbringing aside, Dawn is the pre-despot soft boy edition. He's not an identical clone to his "brothers" or Cleon I, exhibiting a different temperament and traits, not yet morally bankrupt in the way of learning to rule from a place of ruthlessness over compassion. He's gentler, more kind-natured and introverted, without displays of the same self-assuredness and bouts of explosive anger.
When under scrutiny, he puts a great deal of effort into emulating the other Cleons out of fear his differences will be discovered (like, for instance, being born left-handed instead of the usual right-handed, as well as colorblind) and has found ways to compensate. He leans on haughtiness and activating the more traditional Cleonic snippy bitch gene to cloak his behavior, though this quickly falls away given the chance, underneath it earnestly eager to make connections with people. Being intimacy-starved is peak Cleon and he vents this by being that guy who just wants to sit and talk with his hired concubine. Has big blue eyes built for crying at the slightest emotional provocation, don't test him on it.
✧ DRESS: The most vibrantly pigmented colors are reserved for the emperors' use on Trantor, but they often color coordinate their royal raiment in blues, with Dawn's the lightest shades.
✧ VOICE: I | II | ver season 2.0.
history
Gifted mathematician Hari Seldon develops an advanced form of predictive math called psychohistory, which can chart the galaxy's future across time. He sees the presiding Galactic Empire will collapse within the next few centuries, and the galaxy itself is hurtling toward a dark age that will last millennia more unless course corrected, leading him to start the Foundation project—an effort to direct humanity onto a path necessary for its survival.
The Imperium naturally takes these claims as a threat to its power. Ruled for the last 400 years of its 12,000 year reign by the Cleonic dynasty, the original Cleon chose to ensure his legacy by installing a genetic dynasty of his clones instead of relying on a bloodline, creating a system where a Dawn (a young Cleon), Day (an adult version), and Dusk (an older version) lead as a triumvirate of emperors, with back-up clones ready to replace them as needed. They're defended and cared for by their loyal servant Demerzel, who follows them through the ages—in actuality a nearly 20,000 year old intelligent robot, the last of her kind since the long ago robot wars. Discovered by the first Cleon, he programmed her to uphold the genetic dynasty at all costs—even when, centuries later, this begins to hurt the Empire and the clones themselves as they question their purpose as cogs in a dead man's machine. Stagnation is a symptom and result of Imperial cloning, an industrial line spitting out carbon copies all groomed to be the same.
Cleon 14 is born nearly two decades after an anti-Imperialist attack destroys Cleon I's most beloved architectural feat, killing 100 million citizens on the Imperial homeworld, Trantor. This echoes Hari's predictions to the letter as cracks begin forming in the Imperium. The Empire retaliates by bombing each of the perpetrators' homeworlds, devastating the Outer Reach region. Cleon 12, the Day of the age, ostensibly allows the Foundation to operate but in exile in a far corner of the Outer Reach. By the time Cleon 14 and the current Dawn is a teenager, the crackdowns on rebellions are increasingly severe and dissent continues to grow.
Dawn is a threat to the status quo in a different way—although still physically identical, he is the first Cleon born with genetic deviations to the others, including different attributes, different skills, and different interests. Most damningly, he's born colorblind, an abnormality no other Cleon has had, marking him at risk of being disposed of and replaced with a more "pure" Dawn clone.
Over time he ends up falling in love with a girl who works in the palace gardens and sees him struggling to make sense of his purpose maintaining the illusion. She plants the idea of helping him run away and escape the Imperium. He begins to contemplate abandoning the Cleon identity for a life and a name of his own.
However, Dusk's suspicions are piqued when Dawn is able to kill more camouflaged game on a hunt than any other Cleon before owing to vision better suited for tracking movement over color. Dusk tricks him into revealing his colorblindness, forcing him to flee the Imperial palace. He spends time experiencing his own home planet as it is without royal trappings for the first time, but too late realizes his escape attempt was part of a rebel plot designed to lure him out of the palace so that the rebels could switch him out with another Dawn clone raised among the resistance. Simultaneously, it's a ploy on Dusk's part to allow his capture to follow him back to the rebel faction's location, having deduced the girl was a rebel spy. Before Imperials descend on them, they admit this was a plan in the works for decades, being responsible for tweaking Imperial Dawn's DNA when he was a baby to weaken his position, while the version created among the rebels is an exact match to Cleon I's genetic profile, allowing him to infiltrate the Cleons.
With his aberrations exposed, Day and Dusk debate what to do with their Dawn. Having himself been the young Dawn at the time of the attack on Trantor's Star Bridge and growing up haunted by Hari Seldon's prophecies their lack of change is killing the Empire, Day considers making a concession and allowing their current Dawn to carry on. Demerzel executes him despite this, establishing she doesn't serve the emperors as individuals so much as the sanctity of the genetic dynasty, and will eliminate even them if they threaten it.
Only then do they discover his death was ultimately pointless, as the rebels had not just modified Cleon 14 but managed to tamper with the original Cleon's source DNA, introducing (arguably much-needed) genetic diversity. Cleon 14, even possibly Cleon 13, and any subsequent clones and back-ups created will be destined to have variance, no longer exact replicas.
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✧ BACKTAGGING: Y, love it!
✧ THREADJACKING: Y, just check in with everyone if it's other than your usual free-for-all stuff.
✧ FOURTHWALLING: Open to discussion.
✧ OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS: None for me. He's technically on the POV side for your standard War Crimes R Us space empire, which may very well brush on some touchy subjects. Drop me a line if you would like to avoid threading with him for any reason, and as well my inbox is always open for concerns and plotting out ideological headbutting.
✧ AFFECTION: Y. Protocol dictates he has a shielding device on most of the time which repels contact, so skin-to-skin contact is a thrilling security threat. His kink is taking his off for touch and soft affection.
✧ ROMANCE/FLIRTING: Y. Down for exploring intimacy in all forms because by necessity the emperors are bubble boys on lockdown. The Cleonic echo chamber doesn't really work if they're allowed to go off their script and have normal interactions with people, as proven by Dawn who would kick aside his throne for his love interest in about 0.2 seconds if left unsupervised. Encounters with the emperors are both 1) recorded so robot mom can always know if they're getting too emotionally vulnerable with outsiders
✧ VIOLENCE/FIGHTING/INJURIES: Y, let's do it. In-universe it's fair to want to punch him in the face given his face, though he's comically new to dealing with any sort of real injury to his person. As a high ranking Imperial, he's entitled to wear an aura device that emits protective forcefielding; as well he has nanobots in his bloodstream that instantly heal mild injuries, and also act as a means of tracking.
That being said, the clones are combat trained for their protection and the cast likes to refer to them as two strike hitters at the plate. When their backs are to the wall they perform well, turning around from howling about their first paper cut to slogging 100km through the burning desert in nothing but bare feet out of pure spite.
✧ KILLING: Open to it with plotting.
✧ TELEPATHY/MIND READING ABILITIES: Go nuts. If someone is in his head it may be evident his memories are regularly adjusted or removed. This is because the Cleons submit to memory audits on face for preservation and their welfare (a back-up clone won't remember how the first one died, etc.), but this also allows for the means to remove their memories if any start getting too... er, independent.