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Jan. 8th, 2015 02:41 amHello, this is Leoben Conoy. I'll be happy to return your call at my earliest convenience, otherwise please leave a message or text after the beep.
Permissions
Dec. 11th, 2014 12:19 amFrom the wiki:
"Projection is a Cylon ability that allows them to consciously induce an extraordinarily realistic hallucination in the form of an artificial environment around themselves, which they can choose to share with other Cylons.
Cylons use this ability as a way to detach themselves of reality, and experience the world around them as they wish to, rather than how it is, serving as a psychological comfort."
Since Cylons can deliberately share projections, this is a permission post intended to cover for that possibility. Just leave your player name in the subject header and type YES or NO in your comment, thank you!Application
Dec. 6th, 2014 03:20 amP L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Reg
OOC Journal: regasssa
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: no
Email + IM: regasssa and at hotmail dot com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: n/a
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Leoben Conoy
Canon: Battlestar Galactica
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Season 3, Exodus Part 2
Number: 002
Setting: Battlestar Galactica is set, essentially, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The setting is post-modern earth-like planet science fiction, where robotic advancements have led to the development of AI, and robotkind have gone to war with humans. After forty years of peace, the Cylons, led by new immitation human models, attempt the complete destruction of the human species, then pursue the survivors across space in their joint quest for Earth.
History: Human life originated on a planet called Kobol. These humans developed their own civilization, and eventually robotics, which took on a life of their own and left the planet to find their own future. They (the thirteenth tribe), settled on a planet they called Earth, and there eventually developed robotics of their own, which turned on them and killed them all, destroying themselves and razing the entire planet in the process. The survivors - five remaining members of the thirteenth tribe who had fortunately (visions!) recreated resurrection technology - went looking for the survivors of Kobol, whom they knew would develop robotic technology themselves, wishing to warn them to treat their creations well. They failed to get there in time: the Colonies were already at war with their own creations.
The human Cylons were then built by these five; there were originally eight models, Leoben among them, all of them slightly different to each other. The ones, the John Cavil model, were based on Ellen's father, and they were ultimately more jealous and resentful than the others: resentful of the Daniel model (seven) whom he destroyed by poisoning the tanks in which the model's bodies were maturing, resentful of his parents (the "Final Five") whom he mindwiped and placed among humans to witness their destruction, and resentful of humanity themselves, seeming to care less ultimately for their misuse of machines as he did for his own limitations, fashioned to mimic human weaknesses and fragility.
The ones wiped the memories of the six remaining models, Leoben among them, and convinced them that humanity needed to be destroyed as a gesture to the mechanical centurions that had taken them in, an act of ultimate vengeance. There was complete agreement, and the seven models prepared their battle force. Some infiltrated humankind, others worked to prepare the fleet.Then they launched a surprise attack, obliterating the twelve colonies at once, infiltrating the new computers of the human fleet to paralyze them and destroying them utterly.
A small group of humans escaped, some sprinkling of these human Cylons hiding among them. The Battlestar Galactica fled to find armaments, and at a weapons store in a nebula bleeding radiation, came upon a dying Leoben masquerading as an arms runner. This Leoben's experiences - fighting Adama - aren't backed up by resurrection, so this storyline stops here.
It's the Leoben model on one of the ships in the fleet that really gets the ball rolling. This Leoben meets up with all the other cylons hidden in the fleet (those that remember), and is instructed to listen into the fleet's communications. He succeeds in doing this for some time, listening in particular to the traffic between Galactica and its pilots in battle and maneuvers, and he becomes particularly drawn to Kara Thrace, callsign "Starbuck", connecting her with his prophecies.
When he's eventually captured (Cavil escapes after ordering him to kill Kara) Leoben claims to have hidden a nuke in the fleet, and by chance it is Kara who is ordered to interrogate him. She does so with vehemence, having him beaten and then waterboarded, despite his proving at one point that he could have killed her but chose not to (disobeying Cavil's instructions). Basically she reflects the anger of the survivors of the human race, such as they are, the utter hatred they have for the scale of death the Cylons have wrought. Kara is cold, and vicious, contempt radiating off her, but Leoben is cool, focused and never wavers. He tells her that she will find Kobol, then "rescued" by the President, admits the truth: there is no nuke in the fleet, he had told them that to buy himself some time. Laura Roslin goes back on her word, and has him thrown out of an airlock anyway, but not before he tells her that Adama is a Cylon (he isn't), and has a touching moment with Starbuck through the glass.
Leoben isn't seen again until New Caprica, although his models are present throughout, and are shown on the occupied, irradiated planet of Caprica. In the meantime there is unrest among the fleet, the Battlestar Pegasus arrives, Kara returns to Caprica twice, and eventually the Cylons call for peace. As Baltar is inaugurated as President, one of the ships in the fleet is detonated by a nuclear bomb, taking out several others. The survivors settle on New Caprica, a miserable little planet hidden in a nebula, and over the next year decamp to the planet's surface. Eventually only a skeleton crew remain in the fleet, but as the Cylons arrive to break the peace, they're forced to jump away, leaving behind the people on the planet's surface.
What follows is four months of occupation by the Cylons. The humans put up a resistance, and make terrorist attacks, some collaborate, others are taken prisoner. The Leobens are largely absent from administrative affairs; in fact just one version of the model is seen (although a Leoben is clearly captured and interrogated by the resistance during this time), having taken Kara hostage and created an apartment home for the two of them to share, a mimicry of domestic bliss. Only there's not much bliss. Kara spends her life waiting for an opportunity to kill him, succeeding five times over the four months she'd been held by him, while Leoben - ever patient - waits for her to settle in, or join him in bed. He does have one specific purpose in mind: he's prophesised a moment where she tells him she loves him, holds him, and kisses him.
He brings a child into their household, Kacey, a little girl whom he claims is Kara's (she lost an ovary during her first trip back to Caprica), and uses both as a tool to try and calm her down and a way to force her to confront her feelings about her mother, and motherhood. Kara grows close to Kacey after accidentally leaving her alone leads to a near fatal "accident"; sure enough she seems to bond somewhat to Leoben too, holding his hand in the hospital room as they wait for Kacey to wake up.
When Galactica returns to free the occupied New Capricans, Leoben leaves to help the fight, and knocks Kara unconscious when she tries to escape after him. She is rescued by Anders, her husband, but as she stirs to consciousness, Kara realises that she's left Kacey behind, and goes back for her. Leoben is waiting - he knew she'd come back - and Kara goes to him, tells him she loves him, kisses him--and stabs him dead, then gathers Kacey up and flees.
Personality:
The seven human models are in many ways very similar to children. They lack experience with life, weren't raised within a large society with its rules and passed down knowledge, and these difficulties were in fact compounded by the wiping of their minds by Cavil. They're still learning, discovering things about humanity that alter their perception of them, and their understanding of themselves. This inherent childishness and inexperience limits the way they approach the world around them, confuses their approach to things that humans find easy--particularly, universally among them, love is the hardest to quantify. It's illogical.
Leoben is gentler in soul than many of the others. He possesses an ease with himself and approaches the world around with him pragmatically and without any apparent kind of rush. He's patient; he knows his destiny and in his belief in it understands that it will come in time, and no amount of chasing it will bring it on sooner. Leoben spends most of his time on screen waiting. He waits for his interaction with Kara, waits for her to love him, waits for her to find him drifting in his broken ship. He's gentler in his expression too; he rarely resorts to violence, though he's certainly capable of it, and his tone in conversation is patient and soft, practically a whisper.
With patience comes resilience and determination. Leoben has the misfortune of being frequently beaten, but he takes the abuse; it's all just a part of his plan. In fact as Kara has him waterboarded, when his face is out of sight in the water but in view of the viewer, his expression transforms to reveal utter focus, a contentment that comes with things proceeding as expected. Consequently Leoben is also very forgiving, because of the aforementioned understanding of the way things have to go for the future to unfold as he sees it. Also, why blame a human for doing what humans do? Paranoia and violence are simply a part of their natural state of being--perhaps that's why he's drawn so much to Kara, who's thrill in the cockpit over the radio is positively radiant to a Cylon still learning about the complexities of human emotion.
Leoben is effectively somewhat more peaceable than the other models, though he does inevitably do things that are morally unfathomable in his own desperate, childish way. When the Cavils elect to lobotomize the raiders, Leoben sides with the sixes and eights in favor of keeping them whole, a decision that consequently sparks the Cylon civil war. The three models who then elect to make a survival pact with what is left of humanity are without doubt the more human models. In fact it would be accurate to say that amongst them, they seem to have developed something of a conscience, certainly sufficient that it makes them debate the morality of taking away the raiders' ability to reason, and causes them eventual turmoil over their decisions regarding their uncomfortable alliance with the human fleet.
So yes, Leoben is transfixed on Kara Thrace. There's really no more defining facet to him than that. He's obsessed with her, to the point where he's prepared to put his life on the line, disobey orders, sustain a beating for her sake. It's clear that Leoben - despite functioning just fine as part of the Cylon team - is capable of fixing himself on one thing with immense zeal, to the point of what people might call self-deception, but in fact he becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She becomes important because - for the most part - he makes her important--to believe in something as strongly as he does is to not be surprised when it turns out to be true.
The flip side of this is that when Leoben's prophecies prove incorrect, he finds it hard to adjust to reality. It devastates his world view, and ultimately Leoben cuts off ties with Kara altogether after their grim discovery on Earth.
Leoben is impassioned in his belief in the Cylon God, although at the same time he's perfectly accepting of the polytheistic religion of the Colonies. He is not abusive in that respect. His beliefs tie into his way of speaking; he often references God, plans, fate, truth and destiny. Beyond that, he uses his words as tools. Everything he says means something, often because it is drawn directly from the Hybrid. The rest is pure observation. This makes him a cunning and dangerous enemy to have. A manipulator and a strategist, Leoben can turn even the simplest things into a Cylon advantage. As Laura points out, with just a few words he'd managed to scatter the fleet--he'd in fact done more than that, exposing the worst of what humanity was now capable of, inflicting compassion on Kara and exploiting Laura's niggling doubts about who she can and can't trust by fingering Bill Adama as a Cylon, as well as - following his resurrection - returning information back to the fleet about Galactica callsigns, the number of Viper pilots available and presumably much, much more.
He is, without doubt, an excellent liar; convinces people of things they shouldn't believe and insinuates himself into situations of trust they shouldn't accept. Effectively Leoben is capable of multilayered thought, preemptive planning on a grand scale, and is dangerously good at reading people at face value. He is shrewd and intelligent, and hides this under what at first appears to be simple quietness, but in fact is the patience and attentiveness of someone who hears everything, watches everyone, misses nothing.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
As far as his Cylon abilities go, Leoben doesn't use them except when he's making the point that he could. He prefers the solidity of his manipulations; so for instance when he creates an imaginary child to use in his attempts to domesticate Kara, he does so by abducting an actual child, when he might just as easily have projected one.
Augmented strength; Leoben is shown physically breaking his handcuffs, flipping a heavy table and easily overwhelming Kara. Even weakened by radiation, his strength surprised Adama, and he possesses enough power in one hand to choke a person, lift them easily off the ground, or break their neck.
Implied enhanced speed, physical resilience and endurance; see above.
Computer integration; nobody thought to install wifi in humanoid Cylons, unlike their bioship counterparts, so interacting with computers means hardlining into them directly, a bloody business that requires self harm and extra cables. Leoben is very good with computers regardless of this fact, particularly communications equipment.
Projection; Like all Cylons Leoben has the ability to project a sort of dreamstate, either for his own purposes or to share with others. These can be very complex, with imaginary original characters, can warp time, and feel as real as life. This ability can be used to control reactions to pain and drugs and overcome bodily functions, though Leoben has demonstrated no desire to do that, welcoming pain and resurrection when they come.
Prescience; Leoben's prophecy can be played as being straight up and just that. I prefer to think that his 'power of prophecy' originates in realism: first, he is overwhelmingly prepossessed with his interest in the Hybrids, and is told to have spent hours with them, letting their words carress his "associative mind". The Hybrids seem in fact to be the origin of most of his prophecy. The rest is his ability to 'see patterns'. Leoben is observant, patient--he watches people and sees how they respond, and then he applies what he's learned. He plays with probability and human anxiety, politics and tactics, balances it against Hybrid prophecy, and as a result his predictions are immensely accurate, comprehesively so.
Some of these things are clearly massive jumps of logic: for example when the path leads toward humans and the 2s, 6s and 8s forming an alliance, Leoben helps Kara to complete her painting showing the broken Cylon basestar where that alliance will be forged. This is probably not difficult considering the fact that he'd come from the site of the battle to find her, but it reads off the page as purely prophetic, and not the actions of someone with immense scope. That isn't to say that Leoben's prothetic abilities weren't bolstered in some fashion by God as it/they exist in the BSG universe, or his understanding of his leaps of logic don't in fact occur to him as a kind of divine inspiration: God told me to do it. THAT SAID, on some occasions he literally experienced visions--it totally happened. The spiritual element of the series is soundly solid, as real as its scientific elements, and it's not outside the realms of possibility, given the interference of it/them that they were feeding insight to Leoben throughout, one way or another.
The Leoben model while enhanced in attributes is physically and psychologically comparable to a human in as many ways as possible. As such they have human vulnerabilities, such as fragile easily pierced skin, the possibility of bleeding out or sustaining irreperable trauma, the capability of being driven to the edge of suicide and beyond it, making emotional decisions; in short in many of the ways humans are weak, so are Cylons, and in some ways besides.
Leoben in particular has a very powerful connection to his belief system, and it can be knocked beyond his ability to function, for instance when Kara Thrace's body is found on Earth. He also has difficulty understanding and mastering human emotion, or in Kara's case reading it, misunderstanding her eventual compliance on New Caprica as love--just before she killed him again. At other times he reads emotion very quickly, for instance cold reading Kara in his interrogation with her, which he plays off as deiific insight.
Like other Cylons, Leoben has an extreme vulnerability to some unfamiliar viruses, having never been exposed to them, and some kinds of radiation, which will essentially compromise the non-organic components of his body. He's presumably just as weak to regular radiation as a human would be.
Inventory: One outfit, one knife, one set of Kara Thrace's dogtags
Appearance: Callum Keith Rennie as Leoben Conoy
Age: Appearing ~40
AU Clarification: n/a
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
It was like resurrection, and yet entirely unlike it, emerging gasping like a newborn from the tank. Falling to the floor helpless was different; Leoben prefered the version where he was gently nursed awake, surrounded by his brothers and sisters.
There were no brothers and sisters to welcome him here. He remembered dying, the knife driven into him, the slow bleed out, the grip of shock. He remembered the warmth of his blood, and the warmth of Kara's mouth against his own, and then death death yawing, slow death, opening its jaws wide to admit him.
He'd expected to come back, but on a resurrection ship, in orbit of New Caprica--not wherever this was. There were people aplenty milling about, emerging from the tanks like him, which only served to offer more confusion. They weren't Cylons. There were so many of them. He watched hawkishly as they passed, staying still and silent and unmoving as they went to and fro. They seemed organised, like they'd done this a hundred times before, but who were they? Leoben had never see any of them before.
Only when the movement began to still did Leoben shift away from his hiding space, moving with determination toward the showers. He didn't want to draw attention to himself. He'd dress and slip away, then find out who these people were, which ship he was on - and how - and why they'd emerged from pods the way they had.
God was with him, but this hadn't been in the plan.
Comms Sample:
[ The voice is cool, lilting, all of a tone, and unhurried. It's also for those that recognise it, the voice of a particular Cylon; a two. ]
You have to stop talking. Listen--let the words wash over you; there's wisdom in them more kaleidoscopic than human feeling, but you have to stop talking over her, and you have to be willing to listen, willing to recognize the existence of a life that is far beyond your own narrow understanding.
The ship is alive, and it's beautiful; the ultimate predator.
[ Leoben turns the video feed on. His eyes are glacier blue and very close to the screen; cold eyes but they reflect an impenetrable, calculating focus. ]
For those of you that knew a woman called Kara Thrace, I'd like to speak with you.
Your Name: Reg
OOC Journal: regasssa
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: no
Email + IM: regasssa and at hotmail dot com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: n/a
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Leoben Conoy
Canon: Battlestar Galactica
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Season 3, Exodus Part 2
Number: 002
Setting: Battlestar Galactica is set, essentially, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The setting is post-modern earth-like planet science fiction, where robotic advancements have led to the development of AI, and robotkind have gone to war with humans. After forty years of peace, the Cylons, led by new immitation human models, attempt the complete destruction of the human species, then pursue the survivors across space in their joint quest for Earth.
History: Human life originated on a planet called Kobol. These humans developed their own civilization, and eventually robotics, which took on a life of their own and left the planet to find their own future. They (the thirteenth tribe), settled on a planet they called Earth, and there eventually developed robotics of their own, which turned on them and killed them all, destroying themselves and razing the entire planet in the process. The survivors - five remaining members of the thirteenth tribe who had fortunately (visions!) recreated resurrection technology - went looking for the survivors of Kobol, whom they knew would develop robotic technology themselves, wishing to warn them to treat their creations well. They failed to get there in time: the Colonies were already at war with their own creations.
The human Cylons were then built by these five; there were originally eight models, Leoben among them, all of them slightly different to each other. The ones, the John Cavil model, were based on Ellen's father, and they were ultimately more jealous and resentful than the others: resentful of the Daniel model (seven) whom he destroyed by poisoning the tanks in which the model's bodies were maturing, resentful of his parents (the "Final Five") whom he mindwiped and placed among humans to witness their destruction, and resentful of humanity themselves, seeming to care less ultimately for their misuse of machines as he did for his own limitations, fashioned to mimic human weaknesses and fragility.
The ones wiped the memories of the six remaining models, Leoben among them, and convinced them that humanity needed to be destroyed as a gesture to the mechanical centurions that had taken them in, an act of ultimate vengeance. There was complete agreement, and the seven models prepared their battle force. Some infiltrated humankind, others worked to prepare the fleet.Then they launched a surprise attack, obliterating the twelve colonies at once, infiltrating the new computers of the human fleet to paralyze them and destroying them utterly.
A small group of humans escaped, some sprinkling of these human Cylons hiding among them. The Battlestar Galactica fled to find armaments, and at a weapons store in a nebula bleeding radiation, came upon a dying Leoben masquerading as an arms runner. This Leoben's experiences - fighting Adama - aren't backed up by resurrection, so this storyline stops here.
It's the Leoben model on one of the ships in the fleet that really gets the ball rolling. This Leoben meets up with all the other cylons hidden in the fleet (those that remember), and is instructed to listen into the fleet's communications. He succeeds in doing this for some time, listening in particular to the traffic between Galactica and its pilots in battle and maneuvers, and he becomes particularly drawn to Kara Thrace, callsign "Starbuck", connecting her with his prophecies.
When he's eventually captured (Cavil escapes after ordering him to kill Kara) Leoben claims to have hidden a nuke in the fleet, and by chance it is Kara who is ordered to interrogate him. She does so with vehemence, having him beaten and then waterboarded, despite his proving at one point that he could have killed her but chose not to (disobeying Cavil's instructions). Basically she reflects the anger of the survivors of the human race, such as they are, the utter hatred they have for the scale of death the Cylons have wrought. Kara is cold, and vicious, contempt radiating off her, but Leoben is cool, focused and never wavers. He tells her that she will find Kobol, then "rescued" by the President, admits the truth: there is no nuke in the fleet, he had told them that to buy himself some time. Laura Roslin goes back on her word, and has him thrown out of an airlock anyway, but not before he tells her that Adama is a Cylon (he isn't), and has a touching moment with Starbuck through the glass.
Leoben isn't seen again until New Caprica, although his models are present throughout, and are shown on the occupied, irradiated planet of Caprica. In the meantime there is unrest among the fleet, the Battlestar Pegasus arrives, Kara returns to Caprica twice, and eventually the Cylons call for peace. As Baltar is inaugurated as President, one of the ships in the fleet is detonated by a nuclear bomb, taking out several others. The survivors settle on New Caprica, a miserable little planet hidden in a nebula, and over the next year decamp to the planet's surface. Eventually only a skeleton crew remain in the fleet, but as the Cylons arrive to break the peace, they're forced to jump away, leaving behind the people on the planet's surface.
What follows is four months of occupation by the Cylons. The humans put up a resistance, and make terrorist attacks, some collaborate, others are taken prisoner. The Leobens are largely absent from administrative affairs; in fact just one version of the model is seen (although a Leoben is clearly captured and interrogated by the resistance during this time), having taken Kara hostage and created an apartment home for the two of them to share, a mimicry of domestic bliss. Only there's not much bliss. Kara spends her life waiting for an opportunity to kill him, succeeding five times over the four months she'd been held by him, while Leoben - ever patient - waits for her to settle in, or join him in bed. He does have one specific purpose in mind: he's prophesised a moment where she tells him she loves him, holds him, and kisses him.
He brings a child into their household, Kacey, a little girl whom he claims is Kara's (she lost an ovary during her first trip back to Caprica), and uses both as a tool to try and calm her down and a way to force her to confront her feelings about her mother, and motherhood. Kara grows close to Kacey after accidentally leaving her alone leads to a near fatal "accident"; sure enough she seems to bond somewhat to Leoben too, holding his hand in the hospital room as they wait for Kacey to wake up.
When Galactica returns to free the occupied New Capricans, Leoben leaves to help the fight, and knocks Kara unconscious when she tries to escape after him. She is rescued by Anders, her husband, but as she stirs to consciousness, Kara realises that she's left Kacey behind, and goes back for her. Leoben is waiting - he knew she'd come back - and Kara goes to him, tells him she loves him, kisses him--and stabs him dead, then gathers Kacey up and flees.
Personality:
The seven human models are in many ways very similar to children. They lack experience with life, weren't raised within a large society with its rules and passed down knowledge, and these difficulties were in fact compounded by the wiping of their minds by Cavil. They're still learning, discovering things about humanity that alter their perception of them, and their understanding of themselves. This inherent childishness and inexperience limits the way they approach the world around them, confuses their approach to things that humans find easy--particularly, universally among them, love is the hardest to quantify. It's illogical.
Leoben is gentler in soul than many of the others. He possesses an ease with himself and approaches the world around with him pragmatically and without any apparent kind of rush. He's patient; he knows his destiny and in his belief in it understands that it will come in time, and no amount of chasing it will bring it on sooner. Leoben spends most of his time on screen waiting. He waits for his interaction with Kara, waits for her to love him, waits for her to find him drifting in his broken ship. He's gentler in his expression too; he rarely resorts to violence, though he's certainly capable of it, and his tone in conversation is patient and soft, practically a whisper.
With patience comes resilience and determination. Leoben has the misfortune of being frequently beaten, but he takes the abuse; it's all just a part of his plan. In fact as Kara has him waterboarded, when his face is out of sight in the water but in view of the viewer, his expression transforms to reveal utter focus, a contentment that comes with things proceeding as expected. Consequently Leoben is also very forgiving, because of the aforementioned understanding of the way things have to go for the future to unfold as he sees it. Also, why blame a human for doing what humans do? Paranoia and violence are simply a part of their natural state of being--perhaps that's why he's drawn so much to Kara, who's thrill in the cockpit over the radio is positively radiant to a Cylon still learning about the complexities of human emotion.
Leoben is effectively somewhat more peaceable than the other models, though he does inevitably do things that are morally unfathomable in his own desperate, childish way. When the Cavils elect to lobotomize the raiders, Leoben sides with the sixes and eights in favor of keeping them whole, a decision that consequently sparks the Cylon civil war. The three models who then elect to make a survival pact with what is left of humanity are without doubt the more human models. In fact it would be accurate to say that amongst them, they seem to have developed something of a conscience, certainly sufficient that it makes them debate the morality of taking away the raiders' ability to reason, and causes them eventual turmoil over their decisions regarding their uncomfortable alliance with the human fleet.
So yes, Leoben is transfixed on Kara Thrace. There's really no more defining facet to him than that. He's obsessed with her, to the point where he's prepared to put his life on the line, disobey orders, sustain a beating for her sake. It's clear that Leoben - despite functioning just fine as part of the Cylon team - is capable of fixing himself on one thing with immense zeal, to the point of what people might call self-deception, but in fact he becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She becomes important because - for the most part - he makes her important--to believe in something as strongly as he does is to not be surprised when it turns out to be true.
The flip side of this is that when Leoben's prophecies prove incorrect, he finds it hard to adjust to reality. It devastates his world view, and ultimately Leoben cuts off ties with Kara altogether after their grim discovery on Earth.
Leoben is impassioned in his belief in the Cylon God, although at the same time he's perfectly accepting of the polytheistic religion of the Colonies. He is not abusive in that respect. His beliefs tie into his way of speaking; he often references God, plans, fate, truth and destiny. Beyond that, he uses his words as tools. Everything he says means something, often because it is drawn directly from the Hybrid. The rest is pure observation. This makes him a cunning and dangerous enemy to have. A manipulator and a strategist, Leoben can turn even the simplest things into a Cylon advantage. As Laura points out, with just a few words he'd managed to scatter the fleet--he'd in fact done more than that, exposing the worst of what humanity was now capable of, inflicting compassion on Kara and exploiting Laura's niggling doubts about who she can and can't trust by fingering Bill Adama as a Cylon, as well as - following his resurrection - returning information back to the fleet about Galactica callsigns, the number of Viper pilots available and presumably much, much more.
He is, without doubt, an excellent liar; convinces people of things they shouldn't believe and insinuates himself into situations of trust they shouldn't accept. Effectively Leoben is capable of multilayered thought, preemptive planning on a grand scale, and is dangerously good at reading people at face value. He is shrewd and intelligent, and hides this under what at first appears to be simple quietness, but in fact is the patience and attentiveness of someone who hears everything, watches everyone, misses nothing.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
As far as his Cylon abilities go, Leoben doesn't use them except when he's making the point that he could. He prefers the solidity of his manipulations; so for instance when he creates an imaginary child to use in his attempts to domesticate Kara, he does so by abducting an actual child, when he might just as easily have projected one.
Augmented strength; Leoben is shown physically breaking his handcuffs, flipping a heavy table and easily overwhelming Kara. Even weakened by radiation, his strength surprised Adama, and he possesses enough power in one hand to choke a person, lift them easily off the ground, or break their neck.
Implied enhanced speed, physical resilience and endurance; see above.
Computer integration; nobody thought to install wifi in humanoid Cylons, unlike their bioship counterparts, so interacting with computers means hardlining into them directly, a bloody business that requires self harm and extra cables. Leoben is very good with computers regardless of this fact, particularly communications equipment.
Projection; Like all Cylons Leoben has the ability to project a sort of dreamstate, either for his own purposes or to share with others. These can be very complex, with imaginary original characters, can warp time, and feel as real as life. This ability can be used to control reactions to pain and drugs and overcome bodily functions, though Leoben has demonstrated no desire to do that, welcoming pain and resurrection when they come.
Prescience; Leoben's prophecy can be played as being straight up and just that. I prefer to think that his 'power of prophecy' originates in realism: first, he is overwhelmingly prepossessed with his interest in the Hybrids, and is told to have spent hours with them, letting their words carress his "associative mind". The Hybrids seem in fact to be the origin of most of his prophecy. The rest is his ability to 'see patterns'. Leoben is observant, patient--he watches people and sees how they respond, and then he applies what he's learned. He plays with probability and human anxiety, politics and tactics, balances it against Hybrid prophecy, and as a result his predictions are immensely accurate, comprehesively so.
Some of these things are clearly massive jumps of logic: for example when the path leads toward humans and the 2s, 6s and 8s forming an alliance, Leoben helps Kara to complete her painting showing the broken Cylon basestar where that alliance will be forged. This is probably not difficult considering the fact that he'd come from the site of the battle to find her, but it reads off the page as purely prophetic, and not the actions of someone with immense scope. That isn't to say that Leoben's prothetic abilities weren't bolstered in some fashion by God as it/they exist in the BSG universe, or his understanding of his leaps of logic don't in fact occur to him as a kind of divine inspiration: God told me to do it. THAT SAID, on some occasions he literally experienced visions--it totally happened. The spiritual element of the series is soundly solid, as real as its scientific elements, and it's not outside the realms of possibility, given the interference of it/them that they were feeding insight to Leoben throughout, one way or another.
The Leoben model while enhanced in attributes is physically and psychologically comparable to a human in as many ways as possible. As such they have human vulnerabilities, such as fragile easily pierced skin, the possibility of bleeding out or sustaining irreperable trauma, the capability of being driven to the edge of suicide and beyond it, making emotional decisions; in short in many of the ways humans are weak, so are Cylons, and in some ways besides.
Leoben in particular has a very powerful connection to his belief system, and it can be knocked beyond his ability to function, for instance when Kara Thrace's body is found on Earth. He also has difficulty understanding and mastering human emotion, or in Kara's case reading it, misunderstanding her eventual compliance on New Caprica as love--just before she killed him again. At other times he reads emotion very quickly, for instance cold reading Kara in his interrogation with her, which he plays off as deiific insight.
Like other Cylons, Leoben has an extreme vulnerability to some unfamiliar viruses, having never been exposed to them, and some kinds of radiation, which will essentially compromise the non-organic components of his body. He's presumably just as weak to regular radiation as a human would be.
Inventory: One outfit, one knife, one set of Kara Thrace's dogtags
Appearance: Callum Keith Rennie as Leoben Conoy
Age: Appearing ~40
AU Clarification: n/a
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
It was like resurrection, and yet entirely unlike it, emerging gasping like a newborn from the tank. Falling to the floor helpless was different; Leoben prefered the version where he was gently nursed awake, surrounded by his brothers and sisters.
There were no brothers and sisters to welcome him here. He remembered dying, the knife driven into him, the slow bleed out, the grip of shock. He remembered the warmth of his blood, and the warmth of Kara's mouth against his own, and then death death yawing, slow death, opening its jaws wide to admit him.
He'd expected to come back, but on a resurrection ship, in orbit of New Caprica--not wherever this was. There were people aplenty milling about, emerging from the tanks like him, which only served to offer more confusion. They weren't Cylons. There were so many of them. He watched hawkishly as they passed, staying still and silent and unmoving as they went to and fro. They seemed organised, like they'd done this a hundred times before, but who were they? Leoben had never see any of them before.
Only when the movement began to still did Leoben shift away from his hiding space, moving with determination toward the showers. He didn't want to draw attention to himself. He'd dress and slip away, then find out who these people were, which ship he was on - and how - and why they'd emerged from pods the way they had.
God was with him, but this hadn't been in the plan.
Comms Sample:
[ The voice is cool, lilting, all of a tone, and unhurried. It's also for those that recognise it, the voice of a particular Cylon; a two. ]
You have to stop talking. Listen--let the words wash over you; there's wisdom in them more kaleidoscopic than human feeling, but you have to stop talking over her, and you have to be willing to listen, willing to recognize the existence of a life that is far beyond your own narrow understanding.
The ship is alive, and it's beautiful; the ultimate predator.
[ Leoben turns the video feed on. His eyes are glacier blue and very close to the screen; cold eyes but they reflect an impenetrable, calculating focus. ]
For those of you that knew a woman called Kara Thrace, I'd like to speak with you.
