Name: Sonny Game Origin: Sonny (2017) Appearance: As below. Note that I’m giving him the white shirt he wore in the Flash games as well.
Personality: This version of Sonny is significantly more well-adjusted than the one from the two Flash games that preceded him, despite his, shall we say…
abrupt upbringing. Surprisingly for an amnesiac, he clearly remembers enough about the world to function within it. This is likely the consequence of whatever information was leftover in his brain before he was injected with the modified zombie virus strain (which is probably where his Received Pronunciation accent comes from). In addition, he’s kind of a dork at times.
He has a very casual way and down-to-earth of speaking, even in the heat of battle. Hell, he’s known to crack jokes in the middle of danger. He considers his infection more of a blessing than a curse. As he puts it, “When I came back to life, I had a SIX PACK. Do you know what that means to me?” At the same time, he knows when to take things seriously and when not to.
He’s also far more intelligent than he lets on: He was able to understand most of the scientific terminology flung around by Dr. Herregods, which shows that he might have been one of the researchers on the White November in life, rather than one of the ship’s laborers as his brawny frame would suggest. The fact that Carbon, the Praetor of the ZPCI, said his face looked familiar indicates that he was possibly either a former ZPCI soldier, a zombie cure researcher, or perhaps even both at different points in his life. This would explain his ability to wield every weapon he picks up competently, at the very least.
Background: Sonny began life as a corpse. Whatever man that corpse originally belonged to, he was one of the workers onboard a research ship, the White November. Even in a world ravaged by a zombie pandemic, the human race did not go down as easily as in some other stories. The humans of this world had dedicated themselves to fighting the virus across the globe, both physically, through the corporate paramilitary organization ZPCI (Zombie Pest Control, Incorporated), and scientifically, by developing a cure. The researchers aboard the White November were the latter, working diligently on the cure...but tragedy struck.
It’s not clear what caused it, but the zombie test subjects broke free from containment somehow and ran amok throughout the ship’s decks, murdering and turning most of the crew. A lone survivor, a researcher by the name of Louis, had one last tool to turn the situation around: A syringe filled with a modified strain of the zombie virus. Desperate to survive, he found the corpse of someone he knew, someone who was clearly on the way to turning at that, and injected him with the syringe, despite not even knowing if it would work. But, in a fortunate turn of events, not only did the modified viral strain overwhelm the original strain percolating in the young man’s body, but it kept his intelligence intact at that.
Just one problem: The newly-reanimated intelligent zombie had severe memory loss. The zombie took the name “Sonny” as it was the first thing Louis called him. It wasn’t like he had a name anyway.
Louis didn’t have the time to get the kid up to speed, as he and Sonny (mostly Sonny) had to fight for their lives in an attempt to get off the ship. Things were going great at first: Whatever Louis had injected Sonny with, he was far more powerful than the basic zombies that roamed the White November, with full mobility and enhanced strength and durability over his peers, along with regenerative abilities. Louis merely had to hang back and tell Sonny the basics of combat while Sonny completely annihilated everything in his path.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law kicked in. It turned out that a trio of ZPCI agents had already been dropped onto the ship and were, as ZPCI agents were wont to do, murdering every zombie in their path. This would normally be a good thing, but when they found the pair, the squad leader, one Sergeant Meier, radioed HQ to find out what to do about the strange situation. To make matters worse, he phrased his question to HQ as “I’ve got a human survivor and a Zed [the ZPCI word for zombie] here. Survivor’s likely infected. Please advise.” Unsurprisingly, HQ ordered them to shoot, and shoot they did.
Louis was fatally shot in the chest, and then the ZPCI trio moved to get to work on the strange talking zombie. Sonny, now enraged, killed all three of them in self-defense despite being armed with only a broken pipe, but not before Meier informed HQ of the green, talking, super-powered zombie. With his last breath, Louis told Sonny about the lifeboats, and gave him, of all things, a vintage cassette tape, saying, “It saved my life once. Maybe it will save yours.”
Sonny escaped on a lifeboat, and when he made landfall, he saw a man in white and red power armor, the last survivor of his squad, trying to fight off a horde of zombies in a last stand. Sonny, naturally, moved to help, and the man in the suit wasn’t in a position to refuse him. After they fended off Sonny’s “cousins,” as the man put it, he caught Sonny up to speed as they headed back to his “Basecamp.”. It turned out that the armored man, Veradux, was a paralyzed Army veteran and former combat medic working for a corporation called InfectAid, an anti-zombie weapons manufacturer of sorts. He, and several other veterans, signed up to trial their new combat suit in order to protect the local refugee population in the area after the region became overrun by zombies. Unfortunately, their numbers quickly dropped. First to five, then three...then just Veradux.
Unfortunately, when Sonny and Veradux got back to Basecamp, it was a flaming ruin filled with burning bodies. It turned out that the ZPCI had attacked on direct orders from the Praetor, their commander-in-chief. Apparently they were “about to turn.” A lone man, Captain Vendara, had been waiting for Sonny at Basecamp the whole time, having heard about the “talking green Zed.” Taking this as proof that the Zeds were “evolving,” he attacked the two in an ambush, and nearly killed both Sonny and Veradux. However, at the last possible second, he got orders over the radio to disengage and take on another enormous threat that had appeared in the area. Due to inconvenient timing, Vendara spared their lives, stating that they would meet again.
After that, the pair spent a long time digging graves, giving the dead their due. They had only barely finished the deed when they were attacked by a grotesquely obese, eyeless zombie with obvious mutations, complete with stitches and scars on its body just like Sonny. Even stranger...it talked. It had nowhere near Sonny’s intelligence: All it could really say were simple things, like “Must eat!” But it still talked, and that was enough to indicate that the plot was thickening indeed. When the beast was dead, they both decided to follow the only lead they had: Veradux had heard the locals talk of a crazy scientist who lived in nearby Tera Jungle. It was a long shot, but maybe, just maybe, this scientist would know more about just what the hell Sonny
was.Sonny and Veradux continued on their adventure, traveling across multiple diverse regions and acquiring new allies as they continued to unravel the mystery behind the mysterious new “super zombies.” These super zombies slowly got stronger and smarter the more the group advanced, and the plot went deeper and deeper. It turned out that the Praetor of the ZPCI, a man named Carbon, was pretty much the polar opposite of who you’d want in charge of a major anti-zombie organization.
Carbon saw the zombie virus as a tool to bring humanity into a glorious new age, due to the tremendous benefits that the infected, when properly enhanced, could have on society. To this end, he secretly diverted research and funding from curing the zombie virus to creating new and enhanced strains of it from within the ZPCI itself. No-one in the rank-and-file would suspect that the leader of a zombie-hunting organization would be actively working against humanity, which, coupled with Carbon’s diehard supporters keeping everything hush-hush, allowed him to slowly advance his master plan of replacing humanity with intelligent zombies.
He worked to have all who supported curing the virus eliminated by any means necessary. For example, one of the most well-respected cure researchers in the ZPCI, Dr. Herregods (who had continued working on it even after his colleagues, Dr. Klima and Dr. Brandt (the latter of which created the viral strain inside Sonny), started drinking Carbon’s Kool-Aid), had his medical license revoked due to Carbon pulling some strings. He was then pushed out of the ZPCI, actively hunted down by Carbon’s goons, and forced to run his lab out of a shack in the obscenely-dangerous Tera Jungle for his own safety.
Louis and the other researchers on the White November had to go as well, and Carbon had the ZPCI attack the ship, unwittingly setting in motion the events that would lead to Sonny’s creation, and thus his own downfall.
Sonny and his allies--Veradux, Dr. Herregods himself, a rogue ZPCI agent named Karantha (Kara for short) who had violated orders to fire on civilians, and Zakk, a guide they had picked up along the way in exchange for destroying the cult that threatened his family--slowly made their way across the land as they closed in on Carbon’s headquarters, killing his zombified underlings and slowly dismantling his super-zombie production and research facilities.
However, Carbon had one more trick up his sleeve. In secret, he had devised the linchpin of his plan: the “SEED protocol.” It was, in truth, a satellite armed with a powerful energy weapon that would destroy all life in a given area from orbit...and all who died would be reanimated as sapient Super Zombies. Carbon actually managed to use the SEED once before he was killed at the hands of both Sonny’s crew and his ZPCI minions, who had grown wise to his sinister plans, even after Carbon unleashed the virus within his body and morphed into a gigantic, twisted abomination of flesh.
However, while Sonny’s actions had earned him a reprieve from being hunted down, Kara was made the new Praetor, and she had only worked with Sonny due to sharing a common enemy. With Carbon dead, she announced it would be business as usual as soon as she got an opportunity, which meant that the ZPCI would go back to hunting down all zombies, sapient or not. Meanwhile, Carbon’s use of the SEED had created a crater full of people just like Sonny, and they would probably need someone to guide them if they ended up losing their memory like Sonny did. So Sonny resolved to travel back to the crater where the SEED had struck and try to help out. Maybe form a community. But he hadn’t gotten very far outside the conflict zone when everything went white.
Specialty: Rapid Adaptability
Level: 1
Experience: 0/10
Powers: → Regenerate: Sonny has significant regenerative abilities. Not to insane degrees: He has to actively trigger his regeneration with a mental command. But he can even induce regeneration in uninfected allies this way. Super Zombie bullshit, who knows how it works? It also dispels a random debuff, which can be anything from being stunned, to being set on fire, to being crippled. In-game, this has a 4-turn cooldown, though a “turn” in Sonny only lasts a few seconds at most.
Strengths:→ Physical Strain: Sonny’s default, starting strain of the modified zombie virus that Louis injected Sonny with. This is a strain that dramatically enhances the subject’s physical abilities, from strength to speed to defense, and has elements of all more advanced strains. The Physical Strain is Sonny’s old standby, and the attacks from the Physical Strain are in theory capable of taking down nearly any opponent Sonny faces. Even at his absolute weakest, this strain’s abilities allowed him to take out three trained ZPCI commandos armed with rifles, futuristic blades, and even power armor by himself, and punch out basic zombies in only one or two blows. Sonny has shown that he’s capable of taking a wide variety of injuries from all manner of weapons and attacks. While he can still be killed a second time after taking enough damage, it’s clear that the viral strain inside of him has enhanced his durability significantly. The Physical Strain’s combat ability chiefly revolves around exploiting the subject’s undead physiology: It encompasses everything from claw attacks, to punching so hard that the blunt force trauma makes armor nigh-useless, to ripping apart enemy defenses, to making the target bleed outright, to necrotic regeneration and even gaining health back by damaging the opponent. The Physical Strain can be summed up as “Stereotypical Elite Zombie, Magnified.”
→ Proficient With Everything He Picks Up: For a complete amnesiac, Sonny is surprisingly adept at utilizing weapons and armor. He’s capable of wielding pretty much any weapon he picks up at a proficient level, including guns, blades, hammers, axes, and energy weapons, as well as even handling various technological armor and equipment. This implies that he might have had some combat training in life that he remembers instinctually. Hell, he even gets his hands on bizarre, possibly-magical objects at many points along his journey, and seems to know how to use them instinctually, or at least reap the benefits of having them on his person in the “Accessory” slot.
→ Rapid Evolution: Sonny has the unique ability to “evolve” (read: adapt) new abilities for the situation on the fly. As Sonny attacks, defends, heals others, etc, he slowly fills up an “Evolution Gauge,” and when the gauge fills, his virus “presents” three new temporary abilities that augment his existing active abilities, but he can only choose one per evolution. These new evolutions fade after the battle is over. The Evolutions from the game, and more information on how they work, can be found here:
sonny.fandom.com/wiki/Evolution_(Sonn…Weaknesses:→ A Goddamn Walking Corpse: Sonny is a zombie. Not only that, but he was reanimated by a virus. He doesn’t smell or anything, nor is he capable of spreading the virus to others, and he won’t rot beyond the initial stages prior to his reanimation, but there are
lots of characters, especially in the video game world, who see the undead as an existential threat. Be they Azerothians who grew up in fear of the Lich King and his hordes of undead Scourge, or Raccoon City residents whose lives were ruined and whose families were killed by the Umbrella Corporation and their bioweapons, the countless people in his own world who are driven to fear “Zeds” like Sonny, holy crusaders who see undead as a violation of the natural order of life and death and thus attack them on sight, or even just people who have watched far too many cheesy horror movies and take them as fact, people will have countless reactions to Sonny, and many of them may not be good. Sure, he talks, and he doesn’t eat human flesh, but many people will just see a green-skinned man with glowing eyes and chest scars and run for the hills.
→ Amnesiac: At his core, Sonny’s defining conflict is the struggle to determine who he is. He has no memory of his past life. He walks, and talks, and fights, and knows various things intrinsically, but in many situations, he’s a fish out of water. He’s never really been able to settle down and live out a peaceful life. Since he came back to life, he got roped into the war against Carbon. Adventuring is far more familiar to him than anything else.
Spirits: None.
Kindred Spirits: Not sure yet. I was kinda in a rush to get this sheet out.
Inventory: He doesn’t really have much to call his own. Just the clothes he was wearing on the White November, a wallet with the money he got along his travels, and a broken pipe. He has, however, finally gotten a wardrobe in his time at Smash City Alcamoth, and donned the iconic white shirt he had in the Flash games.