Character Notes: Angkor

I have a lot of characters running around in my head between all my various projects. Angkor is the first Korean character I made, with Hector being a distant second. Ang is someone I might write science fiction novels about some day.

If you have read Strange Fruit or Zero Sum, or the short story Those Who Breathe Under the End, you'll have met Angkor in the context of one or more stories before.

Race: Human

Age: Appears to in his early to mid twenties

Gender: Angkor is intersex, but identifies as trans-masculine

Height: 5ft 9

Weight: 132lb

Build: Slim but muscular. He had broad shoulders and narrow hips, long legs, and especially graceful, slim hands.

Eyes: Dark steel grey, almost black.

Hair Color: Black

Hair Length/style: Angkor is not committed to any single hairstyle, but favors short, fashionable haircuts. Due to being XX-male, his hair is finer and softer than the average man’s, so he likes fades and tends to keep the longer top section swept back with light pomade. He has to keep his hair short enough to easily fit under a helmet at all times.

Personality: Angkor is charming, witty, sometimes risque and often flirty: behaviors that quite effectively disguise the ruthless, intelligent, sometimes troubled man within. To be able to perform in his role as an ANSWER/CEIDR operative, Angkor has to be able to live an effective double life, being both warm and friendly while simultaneously observing, calculating, and acting on environmental threats. Like most veteran Special Agents or Special Ops veterans, this makes him easy to talk to and hard to get to know - in part because much of what he knows cannot be told to anyone else other than his superiors at CEIDR. He is, however, surprisingly good with children.

To perform his role effectively, Angkor uses his Biomancy abilities to consciously suppress his autonomic responses to fear. He has reduced arousal to pain and terror, which can make him callous and narcissistic if not closely monitored. When he is on leave, he upcycles his hormone/cortisol levels to near-human rates, but has spent so long in dangerous alien environments while being immune to terror that he is uncomfortable with the sensation of ‘feeling’ too much, even while off-duty. This means he can come across as being superficial to some people, especially those who are highly empathic and struggle to perceive the normal subconscious cues used to determine what someone is feeling.

Bio: Angkor began his career in South Korea. Born XX-Male with ambigious sex characteristics, he was assigned female at birth and was subjected to numerous surgeries that left him with crippling abdominal pain throughout his early life. He wasn’t told he was intersex and was raised as a girl, named Jeong-Ah, in the coastal city of Busan in South Korea. His relationship with his parents was cold, but he dearly loved and admired his elder brother, Jung-Hoon, who was a full ten years older than he was.

When Angkor was 10, he began experiencing severe pain in his legs and was diagnosed with Stage 2 osteosarcoma of the left tibia. The family moved to Seoul for treatment, and Jung-Hoon went to go and do his compulsory military service before starting college. Angkor awakened to his capacity for Biomancy while undergoing bone marrow replacement surgery in his shin, and met a strange being he simply calls ‘The Girl’ who gave him his first instruction in magic. Through the use of Biomancy, Angkor realized the source of his abdominal pain and - even at a young age - was furious about the helpless medical interventions made to his body.

Angkor spent five years battling the cancer in his legs while struggling to keep up academically from hospital. He barely saw his father during that time, while his mother was constantly by his side - until his elder brother perished in the Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995. The tragic loss of Jung-Hoon devastated the family. His father drowned his sorrows in work, while his mother was rendered desolate - not only from the loss of her son, but because she knew Angkor would never be able to have children of his own.

The loss of Jung-Hoon changed Angkor in many ways. He suffered severe survivor’s guilt and responded by throwing himself into study, as it was something his parents approved of. Having come into his magic at an early age, he started to unconsciously make subtle hormonal and chemical adjustments to his body, vastly improving his memory and capacity for retaining information. He aced through South Korea’s notoriously brutal highschool system, graduating with top grades and gaining admission and a scholarship to the Seoul National University medical program. He chose the oncology track, hoping to help children going through the same awful experiences he had survived.

After puberty, Angkor began to engage with Biomancy more actively, practicing his magic on cell samples and laboratory animals. The pain and sexual dysfunction caused by his sex-conforming surgeries was crippling by his late teens, and so he dedicated his private hours to finding ways to reverse the surgeries and restore his natural hormonal and physical profile. The process of regrowing his gonads and the tissue that had been cut away was agonizing, but after several months of hard work, Angkor looked - and felt - like himself for the first time in his life. He began to naturally masculinize, to the horror of his parents. As Angkor began to increasingly resemble his dead brother, his father and mother withdrew from him despite his achievements. Around this time, he picked a new name for himself - the word ‘Angkor’ is the Old Khmer word for ‘city’, implying a structure that is self-contained and surrounded by secure walls. The word resonated with him, and he took it as his unofficial given name while keeping his family name, Seung.

Cast adrift from his parents, Angkor became increasingly radical in his research, forming testy relationships with his supervisors at the university. Like most Asian universities, the hierarchy of seniority was strict, and questioning superiors was both unusual and considered highly undesirable. Angkor was tolerated because of his brilliant grades, but during his PhD thesis, he made a discovery well ahead of his time: that some cancers are caused by viruses, and that if you treat the virus, you can prevent or destroy the cancer. He took this thesis to his supervisor and was shot down and ordered not to pursue ‘quackery’.

Angkor was furious: and responded by forging ahead on his thesis in secret while also writing something else that conformed to his supervisor’s standards. He tested his theory by using magic to cure a young girl with leukemia. When he attempted to show how this worked by using mice in a lab, his supervisor reported him to the university board and Angkor was called up for a review due to defiant behaviour - regardless of his results. He lost his temper in front of the review board and stormed out, barely four months from graduating with his doctorate.

Not to be daunted, Angkor decided to take action on his own terms. Private unregulated medical clinics were not uncommon in Korea at the time, and he decided to set up his own cancer treatment center. 

But to do that, he needed money. 

He suppressed his fear and anxiety responses for the first time, and then calmly and efficiently robbed a bank in Seoul, stealing almost 7 billion won (about 5 million USD), which he took north to Sokcho, a small city in the mountainous north-east of South Korea. There, he significantly changed his appearance, forged some papers, and set up an oncology retreat: and soon, word began to spread of a doctor who was able to perform miracles for people with certain types of cancer. He worked at the center for many years, slowing down his own rate of aging so effectively that he appeared to be in his twenties when he was actually in his sixties. Unconventional as his methods were, he saved many lives and helped many families.

In the mid-2010s, Angkor took comfort from the fact that his original thesis - that viruses are responsible for some cancers - was proven out at universities around the world and became part of medical canon. As he grew older and more mature, Angkor found himself looking to retire. He was increasingly drawn to botany and the world of plants, and after passing on his knowledge to his students (who were actual doctors), he retired to a small retreat in the surrounding country.

One day, while hiking in the nearby Seoraksan Mountains, he found a newly opened sinkhole and - being fit and fearless - decided to go caving. After a long hike, he found something that shocked him: a tiny extraterrestrial tree, guarded by a dying humanoid creature that identified himself as an ‘AhMan’. At his urging, Angkor returned to excavate the tree and her small patch of alien soil, and began carefully, patiently tending her and defending her from monstrous creatures called Morphorde… and in doing so, accidentally caught the attention of ANSWER, an off-world organization that battle Morphorde and were looking for Trees of exactly that kind. The leader of ANSWER - himself an AhMan - paid Angkor a visit in his home, and made him an offer that immediately piqued his interest: join ANSWER, go through Cellular Scout training, and work for them in helping trees and other similar alien beings like the one he’d found. In return, he’d have access to magical and technological learning beyond his wildest dreams… not to mention an exciting career beyond Earth.

Angkor, who felt he had lived a full life, agreed: and quickly discovered that not only had the Admiral of ANSWER told the truth, but he was very well suited to the roles he was assigned. Approaching his training with the same zeal he’d had for medicine as a younger man, Angkor became a noted xenobiologist and Cellular Scout, and after several decades of effective service, was offered a new and much more dangerous role in a special division of ANSWER, known as CEIDR - the Cellular Extraction, Infiltration, Dispatch and Reconnaissance division. CEIDR work on highly classified targeted operations, often to dangerous planets in deep distress, and Angkor enjoys both the role and the status that comes with it. 

Abilities: Angkor is a Biomancer: a mage specializing in Life magic. His field of ability is confined to biological organisms and some inert organic matter. He is skilled in medicine - internal and otherwise - and has a great bedside manner. His technical medical abilities complement his magical abilities.

Several decades of active service in ANSWER have honed him into a very capable combatant, and he has modified his own body in numerous ways - some aesthetic, some functional.He is capable of using most firearms and light hand-to-hand weapons.

He travels with a being known as Asaya’Uud, an amorphous Hk'mi Tulaq he is closely bonded to. So closely bonded, in fact, that he wears her as a suit… Asaya can take the appearance and texture of almost anything, and she happily lets Angkor wear her like clothing.