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t0uchIn Nashir’s world, history went down similarly to how it did in ours, but it was largely influenced by Seers. A Seer is a person with the ability to see the future, and their involvement in historical events largely shaped those events. The input of a Seer in times of war, peace, negotiation and within any government has always been invaluable, offering keen insight that helped avoid catastrophic disasters. Wars were stopped before they started based on their influence – an American Seer, Marius Thompson, was able to fight for slavery and women’s rights to be written into the Constitution when it was first created due to visions of the Civil War, and that prevented the Civil War from ever happening.
Major changes to history like these have something of a stacking effect, and Nashir’s world will have a very different 2020 than ours. His 1919 has already been impacted by the existence of current Seers: World War One was two years shorter and has a much reduced death toll due to Seers working to deescalate tensions and prevent massacres. Footbinding was made illegal in China 22 years earlier in this timeline due to China’s Seer using his influence politically and as a personal friend of people in power to get that law passed.
On the flip side, not listening to their Seer was how the French royal family ended up dying in the French Revolution. Ignoring the Seer is how England lost the American colonies, an error so egregious that the government is being extra nice to Nashir likely just to prevent a repeat of that kind of thing. Nobody wanted to believe the Chinese Seer when he warned everyone the revolution of 1911 was coming, and that refusal to believe him until it was too late meant it happened anyway. Seers can see the future and they can sometimes make the present better, but they can’t unfailingly make politicians listen to them and act in the best interest of their people. Nobody’s got that superpower.
Seers abusing their powers are a less well-studied phenomena in this universe, but it has happened. China’s only female Empress who didn’t have an Emperor she was married to/co-ruling with was a Seer. A Seer signed off on and encouraged marrying Marie Antoinette off out of sheer spite and hatred. Seers have a great potential to abuse their power and influence, it’s just that they simply haven’t, and haven’t for so long that public opinion of them and popular consensus is that they wouldn’t.
The world still runs as it does in our world: some countries are monarchies, some are democracies, some are republics. Leaders make choices, good and bad, for reasons that range from good to self-centered, and run elections or inherit positions just as in our world. Seers have historically had wide-ranging effects, but they do not run the world and in many countries simply function as advisors to government officials. They often warn those in charge of the long term effects of things like colonialism, systemic racism, etc, but they haven’t been able to solve those problems because perfectly sound advice on how not to ruin the world is often ignored in favor of personal gain, greed or prejudice. Seers help the world. They do not run it and they cannot fix it if others don’t want it to be fixed.
A long, proud history of Seers working for the good of all or the good of their nation, coupled with their relative rarity leading to the romanticizing of them among the common people, has led to overall positive views on them by the general public. The people within governments can often be less fond of these future-seeing, eerie, opinionated people who keep telling them to do things they don’t necessarily want to do, but the bulk of the population is cool with them. Seers have often been praised by religious leaders and associated with specific sects of faiths. In an era where respectability is tied to faith, this has worked to their advantage, and with no scientific explanation for their powers, religion serves as a source of comfort for many Seers.
So Nashir, being born to an observant Jewish Mizrahi family, in a time after the First World War where Seers are viewed largely as Those People Who Tried Really Hard To Save Us From Ourselves, has it relatively easy in two crucial ways: he has governmental and community support. Public opinion of Seers is very good, governmental functionality of Seers is accepted without being as weighty or dire as it would be during wartime, and his family and community see him as special, but in the sense of being a blessing, not a burden. This is not the witch trials of England back in the day wherein Seers could be accused of witchcraft and killed. This is a relatively good time to be a Seer.
The unfortunate truth is that being a Seer can be relatively easier, but never easy. Nashir’s powers manifest as extremely intense visions, often at random and deeply debilitating. Although he’s technically awake during them, the deeper he delves into them the less he’s able to interact with the world. His family has found him sitting somewhere and staring at nothing during his visions. Nothing can snap him out of it. When he touches someone he sees their death. Sometimes it’s symbolic. Sometimes it’s graphic and vivid to the point of making him ill. A few times, he’s experienced it from the perspective of the person dying. How old a Seer is when their powers manifest varies, but he got his powers at seven. Consequently, his socialization has suffered. There’s a lot of psychological damage that comes from being exposed to visions of death, being unable to play or touch or interact with other kids, and being unable to touch one’s parents. That much drastic change at once changes a person. Seers, historically speaking, have always been prone to melancholy, bad coping mechanisms and poor social skills.
Although the changes in Nashir’s personality were obvious, he did everything he could to hide his Seer status from his parents and family. His first vision was his mother’s death, and it would only happen if they stayed in Yemen in the British protectorate. (His vision was of their whole family, except for him, being massacred by anti-British forces.) If his parents knew about his powers, they would stay there rather than moving, because the Yemeni government would financially incentivize them to do so. Although his understanding of the politics of Seers was pretty limited, he understood that shutting up = his family moving = his family not dying, and his parents knowing = other people knowing = we’re staying and death is unavoidable. So for a few torturous months, he forced himself not to tell anyone even as everyday activities like shaking hands or playing gave him visions that left him a sobbing wreck. He faked being sick to explain it, got quieter and quieter to cover for the fact that he was bad at lying to his parents, and then, finally, once they moved to England, he confessed everything to his parents, feeling guilty but relieved not to have to hide it anymore.
Confirming him as a Seer was a relatively straightforward process, especially compared to the convoluted mess that was hiding his Seer status. His parents took him to a doctor to rule out other explanations, the doctor wrote detailed notes on his condition and sent them on to the government, and some testing was done. Nashir’s predictions always came to pass, his visions of some local evens were sound, his death visions were tested on animals and found to be accurate, and just like that, he was officially declared a Seer. What ensued was the government of Britain trying to ensure his loyalty and safety: they gave his family a good home in a respectable part of town, handed them money on a monthly basis to keep them taken care of, and procured and paid for a spot in a good school not just for Nashir, but for all his siblings.
In the years between being confirmed and the present day, Nashir’s life has been mostly peaceful, up until the last year or so. His Seer duties include touching people of importance to gain insight into military endeavors and to prevent the death of nobility or strategically important people, recording all his visions and sending them on to an official Overseer who then sends that information to where it needs to go, and occasionally being hauled out of school/home to go meet foreign dignitaries or whoever the government wishes to impress. Being the Seer has always meant a lot of isolation from his peers in school, given his behavior and status make him a subject of speculation and rumors, and more obviously, given that he can’t move freely. As the Seer, his house is under guard and his movements closely monitored. The Seer does not go anywhere unaccompanied; too many Seers have been killed by revolutionaries, foreign powers and malcontents throughout history to allow them much freedom of movement.
Then in 1918, when he was 14, another Seer was confirmed. Two Seers in one country is an astronomically rare thing, but Britain having so many colonies and such a stranglehold on trade in many countries, it managed to happen again, for the first time since the Roman Empire. The Second Seer was from British-occupied Malaysia, a 17 year old named Channary Rinong, and Nashir fell in love with her the second he saw her. She was everything he admired – witty, calm, well-read, poised, and serious without being pessimistic. When she was brought to Britain to be confirmed after initial confirmation in Malaysia, Nashir was formally introduced to her in order for him to help test and confirm her. And for the first time in his life, he really connected with someone roughly his own age. He found someone who understood what he was going through. She was kind to him. Kindness was enough to break through any defenses he might’ve had, in an instant.
Channary and Nashir have very different relationships with their home countries. Nashir’s first vision was of his family being murdered by pro-Yemeni independent forces. How much this represents all pro-independence forces is questionable, but he was seven and the nuances escaped him. He has benefitted from British colonialism because the British have kept his family safe, well-fed, educated and happy. He spent the bulk of his life in Britain. Channary, having seen some pretty awful racism, violence and labor exploitation by the British back home, and having spent the bulk of her life there in humiliating poverty, was significantly less swayed by the offers they made her. She took the money and took up serving Britain, but only so that she could help her family, not because she liked the government. She has revolutionary ambitions, though Nashir remained blissfully unaware of them until a week after he met her, when he began to get visions.
Because he was young and in love, he tried to ignore the alarming nature of his visions, which were thicker with symbolism than many of his visions prior had been. The Channary he saw in his visions was too different from the one he knew and was getting to know for him to understand what he should do. At the same time, Channary was teaching him the facts British society hadn’t, about the flaws and brutality within the British Empire. She was a mixed influence on him over the course of that year. She showed him how awful the world was in an attempt to get him, Britain’s First Seer, on her side for her plans of overthrowing the Empire’s control over her homeland. It didn’t work. Nashir believed, and still believes, that he can fix all systemic inequality in the world by talking to people and showing them the errors of their ways. He could never want a violent revolution, only social reform. And that kind of unshakable optimism made Channary fall in love with him in spite of how much it messed with her plans.
When she kissed him, he saw not just her death, but his. Nashir saw the whole of London on fire, saw himself arguing with Channary, trying to reason with her, when the ceiling of the building they were in gave out above them, killing them both.
Channary, having had that same vision, made the executive decision to cut off contact with him while she reformulated her plans. Seers’ visions are not set in stone. Surely, she could plan a revolution that doesn’t end with the world on fire. That Nashir would now be actively trying to undermine her and keep her from being able to start a revolution at all never occurred to her, because Channary views herself as entitled to his love and can’t fathom that she might be in the wrong. Her plans may involve at least one mass murder in order to send a message to the government, but she sees nothing wrong with that. Some collateral damage is necessary. And she’s a Seer – of course what she’s doing is right, how could it not be? So Nashir turning on her caught her entirely off-guard.
In the aftermath of learning her plans, Nashir immediately went to the Overseer who he normally sends his visions to and told him everything. They have to play this very carefully, since there’s the international politics and the optics of this to consider. Two Seers at each other’s throats in public wouldn’t just be a scandal, it could permanently sour public opinion of Channary’s entire home country and people. A scandal might lead to violence, or to internal conflict within the government, though most are inclined to take Nashir’s side since he’s been working with them for longer. The past six months have been spent gathering intel, trying to puzzle out who might be collaborating against the crown, and doing what can be done to ensure better treatment of people in British Malaysia in order to possibly alter things away from disaster that way. It’s unlikely to calm Channary down, but making life better for her people would make rallying people to her cause and against Nashir harder, and anything that can screw with her plans is worth trying.
All of this is a huge increase in pressure on Nashir, who already wasn’t doing great in terms of mental health after all his World War I related visions. The emotional toll of knowing his first love was both concealing a lot from him and was totally onboard for burning an innocent city to the ground hasn’t helped. Nashir exists in a sort of continually renewing exhaustion. He’s a teenager, but he hasn’t gotten to live a normal teenage life. All his life has been spent advising others, saving others, working for others, forcing himself to touch people to deliberately trigger visions of violence and death in himself for the sake of saving lives, and the one time he thought someone might understand and be there for him, she wasn’t.
So that’s where he’s at when he comes to Mask or Menace: trying to act polite to Channary at events where he can’t avoid her, frantically trying to avoid the bloody future he saw, and outright refusing to think about how high the stakes are if he fails.
Major changes to history like these have something of a stacking effect, and Nashir’s world will have a very different 2020 than ours. His 1919 has already been impacted by the existence of current Seers: World War One was two years shorter and has a much reduced death toll due to Seers working to deescalate tensions and prevent massacres. Footbinding was made illegal in China 22 years earlier in this timeline due to China’s Seer using his influence politically and as a personal friend of people in power to get that law passed.
On the flip side, not listening to their Seer was how the French royal family ended up dying in the French Revolution. Ignoring the Seer is how England lost the American colonies, an error so egregious that the government is being extra nice to Nashir likely just to prevent a repeat of that kind of thing. Nobody wanted to believe the Chinese Seer when he warned everyone the revolution of 1911 was coming, and that refusal to believe him until it was too late meant it happened anyway. Seers can see the future and they can sometimes make the present better, but they can’t unfailingly make politicians listen to them and act in the best interest of their people. Nobody’s got that superpower.
Seers abusing their powers are a less well-studied phenomena in this universe, but it has happened. China’s only female Empress who didn’t have an Emperor she was married to/co-ruling with was a Seer. A Seer signed off on and encouraged marrying Marie Antoinette off out of sheer spite and hatred. Seers have a great potential to abuse their power and influence, it’s just that they simply haven’t, and haven’t for so long that public opinion of them and popular consensus is that they wouldn’t.
The world still runs as it does in our world: some countries are monarchies, some are democracies, some are republics. Leaders make choices, good and bad, for reasons that range from good to self-centered, and run elections or inherit positions just as in our world. Seers have historically had wide-ranging effects, but they do not run the world and in many countries simply function as advisors to government officials. They often warn those in charge of the long term effects of things like colonialism, systemic racism, etc, but they haven’t been able to solve those problems because perfectly sound advice on how not to ruin the world is often ignored in favor of personal gain, greed or prejudice. Seers help the world. They do not run it and they cannot fix it if others don’t want it to be fixed.
A long, proud history of Seers working for the good of all or the good of their nation, coupled with their relative rarity leading to the romanticizing of them among the common people, has led to overall positive views on them by the general public. The people within governments can often be less fond of these future-seeing, eerie, opinionated people who keep telling them to do things they don’t necessarily want to do, but the bulk of the population is cool with them. Seers have often been praised by religious leaders and associated with specific sects of faiths. In an era where respectability is tied to faith, this has worked to their advantage, and with no scientific explanation for their powers, religion serves as a source of comfort for many Seers.
So Nashir, being born to an observant Jewish Mizrahi family, in a time after the First World War where Seers are viewed largely as Those People Who Tried Really Hard To Save Us From Ourselves, has it relatively easy in two crucial ways: he has governmental and community support. Public opinion of Seers is very good, governmental functionality of Seers is accepted without being as weighty or dire as it would be during wartime, and his family and community see him as special, but in the sense of being a blessing, not a burden. This is not the witch trials of England back in the day wherein Seers could be accused of witchcraft and killed. This is a relatively good time to be a Seer.
The unfortunate truth is that being a Seer can be relatively easier, but never easy. Nashir’s powers manifest as extremely intense visions, often at random and deeply debilitating. Although he’s technically awake during them, the deeper he delves into them the less he’s able to interact with the world. His family has found him sitting somewhere and staring at nothing during his visions. Nothing can snap him out of it. When he touches someone he sees their death. Sometimes it’s symbolic. Sometimes it’s graphic and vivid to the point of making him ill. A few times, he’s experienced it from the perspective of the person dying. How old a Seer is when their powers manifest varies, but he got his powers at seven. Consequently, his socialization has suffered. There’s a lot of psychological damage that comes from being exposed to visions of death, being unable to play or touch or interact with other kids, and being unable to touch one’s parents. That much drastic change at once changes a person. Seers, historically speaking, have always been prone to melancholy, bad coping mechanisms and poor social skills.
Although the changes in Nashir’s personality were obvious, he did everything he could to hide his Seer status from his parents and family. His first vision was his mother’s death, and it would only happen if they stayed in Yemen in the British protectorate. (His vision was of their whole family, except for him, being massacred by anti-British forces.) If his parents knew about his powers, they would stay there rather than moving, because the Yemeni government would financially incentivize them to do so. Although his understanding of the politics of Seers was pretty limited, he understood that shutting up = his family moving = his family not dying, and his parents knowing = other people knowing = we’re staying and death is unavoidable. So for a few torturous months, he forced himself not to tell anyone even as everyday activities like shaking hands or playing gave him visions that left him a sobbing wreck. He faked being sick to explain it, got quieter and quieter to cover for the fact that he was bad at lying to his parents, and then, finally, once they moved to England, he confessed everything to his parents, feeling guilty but relieved not to have to hide it anymore.
Confirming him as a Seer was a relatively straightforward process, especially compared to the convoluted mess that was hiding his Seer status. His parents took him to a doctor to rule out other explanations, the doctor wrote detailed notes on his condition and sent them on to the government, and some testing was done. Nashir’s predictions always came to pass, his visions of some local evens were sound, his death visions were tested on animals and found to be accurate, and just like that, he was officially declared a Seer. What ensued was the government of Britain trying to ensure his loyalty and safety: they gave his family a good home in a respectable part of town, handed them money on a monthly basis to keep them taken care of, and procured and paid for a spot in a good school not just for Nashir, but for all his siblings.
In the years between being confirmed and the present day, Nashir’s life has been mostly peaceful, up until the last year or so. His Seer duties include touching people of importance to gain insight into military endeavors and to prevent the death of nobility or strategically important people, recording all his visions and sending them on to an official Overseer who then sends that information to where it needs to go, and occasionally being hauled out of school/home to go meet foreign dignitaries or whoever the government wishes to impress. Being the Seer has always meant a lot of isolation from his peers in school, given his behavior and status make him a subject of speculation and rumors, and more obviously, given that he can’t move freely. As the Seer, his house is under guard and his movements closely monitored. The Seer does not go anywhere unaccompanied; too many Seers have been killed by revolutionaries, foreign powers and malcontents throughout history to allow them much freedom of movement.
Then in 1918, when he was 14, another Seer was confirmed. Two Seers in one country is an astronomically rare thing, but Britain having so many colonies and such a stranglehold on trade in many countries, it managed to happen again, for the first time since the Roman Empire. The Second Seer was from British-occupied Malaysia, a 17 year old named Channary Rinong, and Nashir fell in love with her the second he saw her. She was everything he admired – witty, calm, well-read, poised, and serious without being pessimistic. When she was brought to Britain to be confirmed after initial confirmation in Malaysia, Nashir was formally introduced to her in order for him to help test and confirm her. And for the first time in his life, he really connected with someone roughly his own age. He found someone who understood what he was going through. She was kind to him. Kindness was enough to break through any defenses he might’ve had, in an instant.
Channary and Nashir have very different relationships with their home countries. Nashir’s first vision was of his family being murdered by pro-Yemeni independent forces. How much this represents all pro-independence forces is questionable, but he was seven and the nuances escaped him. He has benefitted from British colonialism because the British have kept his family safe, well-fed, educated and happy. He spent the bulk of his life in Britain. Channary, having seen some pretty awful racism, violence and labor exploitation by the British back home, and having spent the bulk of her life there in humiliating poverty, was significantly less swayed by the offers they made her. She took the money and took up serving Britain, but only so that she could help her family, not because she liked the government. She has revolutionary ambitions, though Nashir remained blissfully unaware of them until a week after he met her, when he began to get visions.
Because he was young and in love, he tried to ignore the alarming nature of his visions, which were thicker with symbolism than many of his visions prior had been. The Channary he saw in his visions was too different from the one he knew and was getting to know for him to understand what he should do. At the same time, Channary was teaching him the facts British society hadn’t, about the flaws and brutality within the British Empire. She was a mixed influence on him over the course of that year. She showed him how awful the world was in an attempt to get him, Britain’s First Seer, on her side for her plans of overthrowing the Empire’s control over her homeland. It didn’t work. Nashir believed, and still believes, that he can fix all systemic inequality in the world by talking to people and showing them the errors of their ways. He could never want a violent revolution, only social reform. And that kind of unshakable optimism made Channary fall in love with him in spite of how much it messed with her plans.
When she kissed him, he saw not just her death, but his. Nashir saw the whole of London on fire, saw himself arguing with Channary, trying to reason with her, when the ceiling of the building they were in gave out above them, killing them both.
Channary, having had that same vision, made the executive decision to cut off contact with him while she reformulated her plans. Seers’ visions are not set in stone. Surely, she could plan a revolution that doesn’t end with the world on fire. That Nashir would now be actively trying to undermine her and keep her from being able to start a revolution at all never occurred to her, because Channary views herself as entitled to his love and can’t fathom that she might be in the wrong. Her plans may involve at least one mass murder in order to send a message to the government, but she sees nothing wrong with that. Some collateral damage is necessary. And she’s a Seer – of course what she’s doing is right, how could it not be? So Nashir turning on her caught her entirely off-guard.
In the aftermath of learning her plans, Nashir immediately went to the Overseer who he normally sends his visions to and told him everything. They have to play this very carefully, since there’s the international politics and the optics of this to consider. Two Seers at each other’s throats in public wouldn’t just be a scandal, it could permanently sour public opinion of Channary’s entire home country and people. A scandal might lead to violence, or to internal conflict within the government, though most are inclined to take Nashir’s side since he’s been working with them for longer. The past six months have been spent gathering intel, trying to puzzle out who might be collaborating against the crown, and doing what can be done to ensure better treatment of people in British Malaysia in order to possibly alter things away from disaster that way. It’s unlikely to calm Channary down, but making life better for her people would make rallying people to her cause and against Nashir harder, and anything that can screw with her plans is worth trying.
All of this is a huge increase in pressure on Nashir, who already wasn’t doing great in terms of mental health after all his World War I related visions. The emotional toll of knowing his first love was both concealing a lot from him and was totally onboard for burning an innocent city to the ground hasn’t helped. Nashir exists in a sort of continually renewing exhaustion. He’s a teenager, but he hasn’t gotten to live a normal teenage life. All his life has been spent advising others, saving others, working for others, forcing himself to touch people to deliberately trigger visions of violence and death in himself for the sake of saving lives, and the one time he thought someone might understand and be there for him, she wasn’t.
So that’s where he’s at when he comes to Mask or Menace: trying to act polite to Channary at events where he can’t avoid her, frantically trying to avoid the bloody future he saw, and outright refusing to think about how high the stakes are if he fails.