name
Steve Something
species
Human
gender
Cis-man
appearance
I guess I am shorter than average for a man, balding, and generally unkempt. I usually wear my favorite wide-brimmed hat which I have an uncanny ability to keep between my face an any nearby cameras -- few photos of me exist, and the world is probably better off for it. I tend to wear nondescript clothing that is loose and allows a wide range of movement while also wearing well and washing easy.
personality
What is this, a dating site? Look, I'm a private person with few needs and fewer wants. I'd rather you get to know me directly than waste a bunch of words telling you things you either will or won't find out eventually.
background
I grew up in a low income, low emotional intelligence household with few positive role models save for those found in the varieties of fictional literature that fed my starving fledgling mind. Through a combination of luck, societal privilege, and a work ethic instilled in me by the need to be my own provider early on, I made it halfway through a PhD program in experimental particle physics before dropping out due to financial stress and lack of any substantive social support networks. I've been told that spending a little more time kissing ass couldn't have hurt my situation either but such social dynamics escape me.
After dropping out of university, I found low-paying but satisfying work as a sysadmin and database applications architect for a non-profit that specialized in researching industrial chemical toxicity and organizing grass roots campaigns to oppose underhanded attempts by corporate giants to deregulate these chemicals. I also developed an amateur interest in the intersection of paranormal research/debunking and low-energy experimental particle physics; after spending a few years trolling online forums and making a fool of myself with janky low-budget radioshack shitware while exploring unremarkable abandoned buildings, I attracted a wealthy benefactor with comparable paranormal proclivities who took a shining to my shrewd initiative and resourcefulness.
Within a couple years, my benefactor and I had become an inseparable team of paranormal investigators living frugally off his inheritance and investments while occasionally making a big strategic purchase here and there to augment our custom-built research equipment. As long as I'm telling the story I might as well admit that there were times when the things we needed were not for sale, and so we became good at stealing and dealing with those who steal.
Always we operated on the shared intuition that paranormal phenomena were really artifacts of collisions between our reality and nearby alternate realities. I sought to learn all I could about spacetime and grand unified theories that might explain the connection between the phenomenological realities we experience day-to-day and the reports one occasionally hears of ghosts or houses with dark spaces that no one dares crawl into or roads that appear to follow straight lines when more than one person is around yet somehow curve back on themselves whenever specific individuals follow them inattentively on dark nights.
Everything changed the day we turned on our first high-energy experiment in well-known spooky corner of an old industrial building in Chicago. The spot had developed a low-key bad reputation among the locals for aggravating mental health problems among the homeless who slept there; the way we heard it told, you spend a night in this room out of ignorance or sheer desperation and the next day you come out with any number of scrambled ideas about how reality ought to be. There were even rumors that back in the building's industrial heyday that similar such things happened to ordinary homefull folks. But they were just rumors, and of course so were the stories about that homeless man last year who according to local street sleepers stumbled in drunkenly one night and strutted out the next morning demanding where his house and four poster bed and sports car had gone.
While performing systems checks and preparing for the first set of experiments, some yelling broke out in the floor above me; it sounded like a stereotypical drug deal gone bad, you know, like in the movies. Anyway, shots were fired, my portable high voltage power supply was damaged, and the containment field for some exotic matter I had burgled the week before was breached.
It's hard to describe the behavior of high energy exotic matter when it meets the stuff of every day life. You might expect an annihilative matter/antimatter explosion or a black hole or a flare of cinematic effects signifying something special. The reality was pain, loss of vision, rapidly depleting consciousness, and a most fundamental existential concern for what happens next. I shit you not, my last thought before losing my sense of self and place entirely for some unknown amount of time was whether this could be my super power origin story.
When I woke up, I found myself covered in blood, sweat, and possibly a small amount of my own urine laying in an uncomfortable heap of reasonably intact flesh and bones at the foot of a dusty marble staircase looking out a broken doorway on what can only be described as a post-apocalyptic landscape adorned with dead and bare trees, buildings and machines decayed by time, and everywhere a prolific dust.
The second time it happened because the air I was breathing was not fit for a living creature such as myself. My head was pounding, my body was aching, and my mind was in an impossible daze. Nothing made sense. I was alive. I was suffocating. I was not where I had previously been. My equipment was gone. I was suffocating. I was suffocating! Air! I needed air to breathe, yet all the doors and windows were already open! I tried to stand, but slipped in the gruesome mud created by the mixture of my blood and the omnipresent dust of this dead world. My vision began to blur and darken once again, my futile rasping breaths became weaker and slower.
Before I lost it completely...something happened. I experienced a mental vibration -- a feeling I can only describe as a grinding of my consciousness against the scaffolding that supports it. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me, that I was hallucinating. And who knows, maybe I still am. Maybe everything that has happened since then has just been a last ditch attempt by my failing consciousness to construct whatever semblance of a reality it can all the while slowly dying for real, still.
Yet, if it hadn't happened I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. I swear to you, the dust that covered everything in this sad, decayed world faded away before my eyes, being slowly replaced by pitiful yet living plant life. Every doorway and window leading to the outside showed that this dead world was no longer dead, but dying and capable of supporting, albeit poorly, living trash like me.
[... to be continued]
abilities
I have the ability to subtly "phase" my consciousness through adjacent variations in reality. The more time and effort I put into this, the further I can diverge away from my previous baseline set of circumstances, although there is a limit to just how far I can diverge without replenishing myself through sleep and sustenance.
To everyone outside myself so far nothing special seems to happen; when I use the ability in the presence of other people to change my circumstance for the better it tends to look a lot like luck. I can't tell you how weird it is to leave behind dead and dying versions of myself to coopt the circumstances of some other parallel me.
Steve Something
species
Human
gender
Cis-man
appearance
I guess I am shorter than average for a man, balding, and generally unkempt. I usually wear my favorite wide-brimmed hat which I have an uncanny ability to keep between my face an any nearby cameras -- few photos of me exist, and the world is probably better off for it. I tend to wear nondescript clothing that is loose and allows a wide range of movement while also wearing well and washing easy.
personality
What is this, a dating site? Look, I'm a private person with few needs and fewer wants. I'd rather you get to know me directly than waste a bunch of words telling you things you either will or won't find out eventually.
background
I grew up in a low income, low emotional intelligence household with few positive role models save for those found in the varieties of fictional literature that fed my starving fledgling mind. Through a combination of luck, societal privilege, and a work ethic instilled in me by the need to be my own provider early on, I made it halfway through a PhD program in experimental particle physics before dropping out due to financial stress and lack of any substantive social support networks. I've been told that spending a little more time kissing ass couldn't have hurt my situation either but such social dynamics escape me.
After dropping out of university, I found low-paying but satisfying work as a sysadmin and database applications architect for a non-profit that specialized in researching industrial chemical toxicity and organizing grass roots campaigns to oppose underhanded attempts by corporate giants to deregulate these chemicals. I also developed an amateur interest in the intersection of paranormal research/debunking and low-energy experimental particle physics; after spending a few years trolling online forums and making a fool of myself with janky low-budget radioshack shitware while exploring unremarkable abandoned buildings, I attracted a wealthy benefactor with comparable paranormal proclivities who took a shining to my shrewd initiative and resourcefulness.
Within a couple years, my benefactor and I had become an inseparable team of paranormal investigators living frugally off his inheritance and investments while occasionally making a big strategic purchase here and there to augment our custom-built research equipment. As long as I'm telling the story I might as well admit that there were times when the things we needed were not for sale, and so we became good at stealing and dealing with those who steal.
Always we operated on the shared intuition that paranormal phenomena were really artifacts of collisions between our reality and nearby alternate realities. I sought to learn all I could about spacetime and grand unified theories that might explain the connection between the phenomenological realities we experience day-to-day and the reports one occasionally hears of ghosts or houses with dark spaces that no one dares crawl into or roads that appear to follow straight lines when more than one person is around yet somehow curve back on themselves whenever specific individuals follow them inattentively on dark nights.
Everything changed the day we turned on our first high-energy experiment in well-known spooky corner of an old industrial building in Chicago. The spot had developed a low-key bad reputation among the locals for aggravating mental health problems among the homeless who slept there; the way we heard it told, you spend a night in this room out of ignorance or sheer desperation and the next day you come out with any number of scrambled ideas about how reality ought to be. There were even rumors that back in the building's industrial heyday that similar such things happened to ordinary homefull folks. But they were just rumors, and of course so were the stories about that homeless man last year who according to local street sleepers stumbled in drunkenly one night and strutted out the next morning demanding where his house and four poster bed and sports car had gone.
While performing systems checks and preparing for the first set of experiments, some yelling broke out in the floor above me; it sounded like a stereotypical drug deal gone bad, you know, like in the movies. Anyway, shots were fired, my portable high voltage power supply was damaged, and the containment field for some exotic matter I had burgled the week before was breached.
It's hard to describe the behavior of high energy exotic matter when it meets the stuff of every day life. You might expect an annihilative matter/antimatter explosion or a black hole or a flare of cinematic effects signifying something special. The reality was pain, loss of vision, rapidly depleting consciousness, and a most fundamental existential concern for what happens next. I shit you not, my last thought before losing my sense of self and place entirely for some unknown amount of time was whether this could be my super power origin story.
When I woke up, I found myself covered in blood, sweat, and possibly a small amount of my own urine laying in an uncomfortable heap of reasonably intact flesh and bones at the foot of a dusty marble staircase looking out a broken doorway on what can only be described as a post-apocalyptic landscape adorned with dead and bare trees, buildings and machines decayed by time, and everywhere a prolific dust.
The second time it happened because the air I was breathing was not fit for a living creature such as myself. My head was pounding, my body was aching, and my mind was in an impossible daze. Nothing made sense. I was alive. I was suffocating. I was not where I had previously been. My equipment was gone. I was suffocating. I was suffocating! Air! I needed air to breathe, yet all the doors and windows were already open! I tried to stand, but slipped in the gruesome mud created by the mixture of my blood and the omnipresent dust of this dead world. My vision began to blur and darken once again, my futile rasping breaths became weaker and slower.
Before I lost it completely...something happened. I experienced a mental vibration -- a feeling I can only describe as a grinding of my consciousness against the scaffolding that supports it. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me, that I was hallucinating. And who knows, maybe I still am. Maybe everything that has happened since then has just been a last ditch attempt by my failing consciousness to construct whatever semblance of a reality it can all the while slowly dying for real, still.
Yet, if it hadn't happened I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. I swear to you, the dust that covered everything in this sad, decayed world faded away before my eyes, being slowly replaced by pitiful yet living plant life. Every doorway and window leading to the outside showed that this dead world was no longer dead, but dying and capable of supporting, albeit poorly, living trash like me.
[... to be continued]
abilities
I have the ability to subtly "phase" my consciousness through adjacent variations in reality. The more time and effort I put into this, the further I can diverge away from my previous baseline set of circumstances, although there is a limit to just how far I can diverge without replenishing myself through sleep and sustenance.
To everyone outside myself so far nothing special seems to happen; when I use the ability in the presence of other people to change my circumstance for the better it tends to look a lot like luck. I can't tell you how weird it is to leave behind dead and dying versions of myself to coopt the circumstances of some other parallel me.