#it includes almost getting himself killed (repeatedly) and nearly ruining his relationship in the process

[rsenak]

burn out

[subfunctions]

Horizon Zero Dawn OC: Oren

Round two! Following this character.

As usual, I think at least one sub-function, if not more, has buddied up with a human in a friendly manner, and I like to make characters sometimes.

Inspiration: While it is likely just meant to mirror the story progression, the way in which the metal flowers are numbered means that they spiral outward from the Sacred Land, with the first one in the ruin that Aloy fell into as a child. It’s easy to make a story out of that.

The poetry is taken from “Flowers” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, other lines of which can be found in Metal Flower Mark III (G).

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(face claim: Tahmoh Penikett)

Name: Oren Gender: Male Tribe: Nora Age: 40 at time of main game

Notable Physical Traits: Oren has a large patch of discolored reddish skin covering part of the left side of his forehead and his left eyelid. This is a result of a neurological disorder once known as Sturge-Weber syndrome, which also results in intermittent seizures and muscle weakness, migraines, and some cognitive impairment. Notably, this has also led to the development of glaucoma, resulting in progressive and complete vision loss in his left eye and severely reduced vision in his right eye. He uses a cane and a Focus to help navigate the world, and his Focus is able to track seizure symptoms and patterns as well.

Personality: Oren is at his happiest when working with his hands and creating, and he is personable and happy to chat with anyone. However, he’s been a little set apart because of his appearance and disabilities and experiences with the Metal World, which makes leaving the Sacred Land easier than it might have been otherwise. Because of his experiences with being outcast, he’s developed a deep desire to help others, which sometimes gets him into trouble. Though he takes up wandering with DEMETER and grows to question the environment he grew up in, he retains much of his Nora roots, including a reverence for the world that All-Mother created and a sense of collective responsibility towards others. Even with his exposure to the old world, he doesn’t exactly shed his belief in All-Mother, not fully; rather, his beliefs expand and change to accommodate what little he learns from DEMETER over the years and his growing appreciation for the Metal World.

Relationship With DEMETER: Oren and DEMETER provide each other with a glimpse of the kindness of their respective “species.” Encountering DEMETER opens Oren’s mind to the wonders of the Metal World and starts him questioning his people’s fear of it, and encountering Oren leads DEMETER to question HEPHAESTUS’s attitude towards humans. They both grow to break from their original ties because of their friendship with each other - DEMETER from HEPHAESTUS and Oren from the Nora. They find joy and companionship and learning in traveling with each other, sharing common ground in their love of creating, and DEMETER stabilizes and grows much from her interactions with Oren. Perhaps unconsciously, and due to DEMETER’s extraordinary nature, Oren comes to associate her with All-Mother and the life-giving act of creation.

Songs: Bloom – ODESZA I Followed Fires – Matthew and the Atlas

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Bio:

Oren was born in 3000 to the Nora, with a mark that immediately set him apart – a discoloration of his face that seemed to accompany progressively deteriorating vision and the onset of seizures. While this was viewed with suspicion by some, his mother, Danua, was protective of him and tried to craft a different narrative for him. She called the mark a firemark and said that it was a sign of a strong spirit, one that the Goddess saw was capable of handling greater challenges.

Growing up, Oren was a little slower than his peers in speaking and moving, in addition to his vision loss and seizures, and it was apparent early on that he would never be able to run in the Proving. He found refuge in crafting instead. He loved to work with his hands, and his motor skills caught up eventually, allowing him to flourish at crafting. His limited vision did not significantly inhibit his ability to feel his way through the process. He found a particular niche in woodwork, though he was gifted at all forms of crafting.

In 3020, when Oren was 20 years old, a distant mountain exploded, spreading unease through the Nora. A year later, in 3021, the machines had already begun turning hostile on those who hunted them. They had not yet begun to attack humans on sight en masse, however, so when Oren passed near a group of scrappers, he was surprised and very nearly mauled when the one nearest to him suddenly turned on him.

He fled their wrath and stumbled into a hole and an underground ruin by accident. The fall broke his leg, and he dragged himself deeper into the ruin to avoid the scans of the scrappers.

They gave up the chase eventually, but Oren was left with further dilemma – his leg was broken, the underground gloom made it even harder to see, and he was in a ruin of the Metal World, which would lead to him being outcast if anyone knew. His attempts to get out proved unsuccessful, and eventually he tried calling for help, though it would likely get him cast out.

There was no one nearby to hear him, however, and Oren was near despair when he saw a grazer appear at the edge of the hole, with an odd green glow instead of the usual blue. To his surprise, the grazer started shrieking, repeatedly and consistently, until the noise drew nearby people.

Oren called out for help again and was found. However, those who found him were hesitant to get too close to the ruin, something which impacted Oren deeply – the strange machine had apparently been trying to help him, but his own people held back. In the end, it was a passing outcast who stepped in, jumping down to help him climb out.

By the time he was out, there was no sign of the grazer.

Afterwards, Oren was cast out with a sentence of five years, which further cemented his bitterness, as he had not meant to stumble into the ruin and the only ones who had helped him had been a machine and an outcast. Everyone he knew obeyed the law and shunned him, except his mother, who came to visit him in secret, worried about his ability to survive on his own now that the machines were getting worse. He was deeply grateful for that but also begged her not to visit, not wanting her to get in trouble. She never listened, of course.

The outcast who had saved him, Jom, also stuck around. Jom explained that he had been cast out for accidentally killing someone he’d gotten into a fight with, and that he was beginning to regret it in earnest. He’d wanted to help Oren as part of atoning for his past actions, and since Oren was partially blind and prone to seizures, he thought it was better for them to stick together. Not wanting to be alone, Oren accepted Jom’s companionship, even though it was against the law.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the grazer at the ruin, however, and he often wandered back to that area, trying to find it. On one of these occasions, he did find the same entity, but it was no longer in a grazer. It was a charger that glowed green now, accompanied by a shell-walker companion, and Oren half-expected to be attacked when he found them.

But the charger only seemed curious about him, and the shell-walker carried something with it that the charger was clearly trying to offer to him -- a Focus. He took it without much hesitation, wanting to understand these strange machines.

And that was when the Focus opened the door to another world for him. The foggy sight of his right eye could pick up on lights that floated in the air, and there was a voice coming from the grazer. It spoke rather strangely and formally, and it introduced itself as DEMETER. It – or she, as he came to think of her – wanted to know about him, for reasons that she couldn’t quite make clear to Oren.

Unbeknownst to Oren, DEMETER had established contact with HEPHAESTUS some time after the destruction of GAIA Prime and had set to carrying out her work with his help – using the Cauldrons to create metal flowers that would promote seed germination and mapping out routes to plant them. However, she didn’t share HEPHAESTUS’s hostility towards humans. She had been observing humans to see if HEPHAESTUS’s reasoning was justified. Most encounters had been hostile, but Oren had been her chance to help a human, and he was the first who didn’t attack or avoid her.

However, before they could talk much, a group of passing braves saw them and mistook the situation. They rushed to attack, and Oren tried to stop them and distracted them long enough for DEMETER and the shell-walker to flee. This incident cemented Oren’s strangeness to and distance from most of the people around him, and a few people accused him of consorting with denizens of the Metal World. Nothing was done about the incident in the end, but Oren had a reputation now.

DEMETER found him again soon after, wondering about why he had defended her. She continued to ask him about himself, and when Oren explained that he was an outcast because of what had happened at the ruin, and what that meant, DEMETER asked if he would like to come and travel with her instead. She was unwilling to explain where she came from when Oren asked, but she said that she had a job to do, and she invited him to come along. When Oren realized that it meant leaving the Sacred Land, he understood that he had a choice.

It felt almost too easy to make. Though he loved his mother and cared for Jom, he’d grown disconnected from the Nora, and developed a blooming curiosity about the Metal World and this strange machine who could speak. He wanted to experience what the rest of the world was like.

However, he was still nervous, as the Sacred Land was all he had ever known. DEMETER suggested that he give it a test run. He could accompany her around the Sacred Land, and then to the west if he still wanted to travel, and see how he liked it.

He agreed, and DEMETER showed him her project – beautiful flowers made out of metal, that she would plant across the land to keep it flourishing, accompanied by poetry from the old world that DEMETER had a fondness for. They decided to plant the first metal flower in the ruin where Oren had fallen in. Oren accompanied DEMETER back to the ruin, then to a few other locations in the Embrace and the Sacred Land, and by the end of it, Oren found that he wanted to keep going.

So he sought out his mother to say goodbye. Though Danua was upset at the thought of him becoming an exile, she realized that nothing she could say would stop him, and that her son had become different in ways that she couldn’t understand. So she gave him her blessing.

He said farewell to Jom, too. Jom wanted to accompany him, but DEMETER was against the idea, and so Oren turned him down. He encouraged Jom to keep up his good habits and seek out other outcasts to band together with, and they parted ways.

On Oren and DEMETER’s journey, no machine ever attacked Oren, though they continued to grow more aggressive towards other humans. Oren remained unaware of why – no machine would attack DEMETER, or the human under her care, and she was adamant about not letting HEPHAESTUS hurt him. And with the Focus and DEMETER’s help, Oren found a greater degree of ability that he hadn’t quite had before.

They made a meandering course up through the northern Sundom and into the Claim, then back down to the southern Sundom. For reasons that she wouldn’t explain, DEMETER refused to go any further west than the Rustwash, wanting to avoid something in the Forbidden West. From stories he’d heard, Oren wasn’t too keen to go that way either, so they passed through the Jewel, planting more metal flowers as they went, and backtracked up past the Sacred Land, making a stop at a place called the SIGMA facility to restock DEMETER’s shell-walker companion with more metal flowers.

DEMETER asked if Oren would like to return to the Sacred Land, and Oren found that he didn’t miss it very much and had no desire to live on the borders as an exile. So he and DEMETER continued their journey, heading east into Plainsong, then east and south into places that Oren had only heard whispers about, and into places he’d never known existed. They spent years traveling, planting metal flowers and working on other projects of DEMETER’s, and Oren was able to make contact with and learn about other tribes and groups that weren’t hostile to outsiders.

Meanwhile, DEMETER had been seriously questioning HEPHAESTUS’s reasoning and logic for his hostility towards humans and was avoiding contact with HEPHAESTUS more often. She was perturbed by how much worse the machines had gotten over time and by how HEPHAESTUS’s strategy did not seem to be working. However, it took her a long time to truly take a stance against it, concerned as she was with her own work and with Oren.

In the end, it was because of Oren that she realized that HEPHAESTUS needed to be stopped.

Oren was never able to resist helping someone in need, and when he heard a pack of machines attacking a group of people, he couldn’t leave it be, even though DEMETER had gone off on her own for a few minutes. He approached the fight and tried to distract the attacking machines. He succeeded at that, and it almost cost him his life. A ravager mauled him, and DEMETER returned and intervened just in time.

The tribe to which the group belonged took them in and were able to save Oren’s life, but DEMETER was deeply affected by the incident and knew that she could tolerate HEPHAESTUS’s actions no longer. She finally told Oren about HEPHAESTUS and his connection to the machines, citing her desire to see him stopped, and Oren agreed, realizing how important it was to the world to return the machines to their docile state.

However, DEMETER was uncertain about how to do this. She didn’t know if HEPHAESTUS could be reasoned with, and she told Oren that there were others of her kind also working with HEPHAESTUS, which meant they’d be outnumbered and not just because HEPHAESTUS had an army of machines on his side. Oren asked if there were any others like her that could help them, and DEMETER said there might be... if they could be found.

It started them on a journey to seek out others like DEMETER and eventually led them to someone DEMETER recognized as the Alpha Prime... who may have picked up a friend or two along the way.

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Some Notes:

I initially waffled on whether to make Oren Nora or not, as that might be too similar to Aloy, but:

1) We already have three Banuk/AI pairs (Sylens, Ourea, Aratak), and the Banuk would have been my other choice for what tribe he comes from, because you could get some similar character beats there. 2) He could be from an entirely new tribe, but I already have a lady like that in mind for ELEUTHIA, and assuming I get around to her, that is truly going to be a pain in my ass without doing it twice. If it was getting $$$ to do this I’d make them both from new tribes, but I’m not. 3) I can’t let go of the first metal flower being in the ruin near Mother’s Watch. Something had to crawl down and put it there, and why, outside of Doylist story progression reasons? 4) I think it would be nice for Aloy to find a Nora friend to relate to (same hat!). Plus, it keeps up the tradition of Nora or proto-Nora touching things that they shouldn’t and then hitting the road (hello, Araman). 5) It could lead to exchanges like this:

Aloy: Hang on, YOU fell in that place? Oren: Uh, I was being chased by machines, I’m half-blind, and it’s a big hole in the ground. Cut me some slack. Aloy: That’s not what I meant.