Little Bill

ROME: In Flammas Imperii

WIP

Vergilius Pontem

Age: XXIX

Sex: Masculum

Occupation: Vergilius is the son of the most prolific bridge-builder in the Roman Empire, and has thusly never toiled a day in his life. If one were to describe Vergilius with an occupational title, it would be that of a philosopher. Though most traditional Roman philosophy focuses on law, either through legal rights or punishment, Vergilius has adopted an egalitarian philosophy that he frequently preaches in public squares, concert halls, and the muck-lined streets of Rome. He is a popular figure among Rome's slaves and commoners, who know him as "Vergilius the Fair".

Appearance: Vergilius, as his monicker would imply, is a comely man who appears younger than he is. He wears his sandy blonde hair in the typically short-cropped style of his people, wearing decorated robes, leather sandals, and an array of finery around his neck and fingers. He is shorter than most men, which he counteracts with a notably deep, soft-spoken voice.

Personality: Vergilius is, in a word, clever. He spends his days in his father's manse idly lazing and philosophizing until he has something worthwhile to say, and then -- typically once a fortnight -- he journeys down the hill his home sits atop and preaches a lifestyle of love and equality to the people of Rome. There are occasionally senators seen in crowds of followers, more interested in the audience a merchant's son commands than what he has to say.

Equipment: Vergilius, aside from his robes and jewelry, carries nothing on his person. It is plain to see that a sword has no place in his hand, and Vergilius is simply not the type to conceal a dagger for self-protection.

Skills: Vergilius is an intelligent, learned man. Rather than sharing a senator's knowledge of historied laws or a scholar's knowledge of erudite trivia, Vergilius' intelligence comes from a knowledge of people; He knows when to employ the abbreviations and slang of slaves and fish-mongers, and he knows when to eloquently wax about the Gods in front of noblemen. Aside from his ability to read an audience, Vergilius' charisma extends to interpersonal relationships and casual conversation, making his name at least known in Rome's upper echelons. He is uproariously comical when he needs to be, and gravely serious when it is to his advantage. Vergilius somehow never stutters, misspeaks, or makes remarks that can be given immediate rebuttals, and seems as comfortable in any legal debate or philosophical discourse as a gladiator would be in his arena.

Flaws: Vergilius's main defense is his sharp tongue, though this is also a great weakness -- No tongue is so sharp that it can duel with an unreasonable man's sword, and no words are more convincing than the gold in an assassin's pocket. Despite having spent his 32 years becoming as clever as he could, cleverness is historically a poor substitute for martial skill in a number of scenarios, as any Roman historian could tell you.

Backstory: (A few paragraphs explaining their life to this point. Don't have to go super in depth.)

ROME: In Flammas Imperii

Sign me up for a Patrician Philosopher.

[ C R A W L ]

>Harold: Put as much space between yourself and your pop and saunter over to A14
>Load a Deadeye Bullet

>Horace: Resist urge to synthesize dynamite
>Move to A9

Blood Reigns Over Westeros: A Song of Ice & Fire Story (Accepting Player Proposals)

wip

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House Arryn

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“As High as Honor.”

House Description

[+]

House Seat

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The Eyrie

Head of House

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Luthor Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of The Vale, and Warden of The East

Recent History

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To understand the current rule of a hunchback sitting on the weirwood throne of Arryn, one must understand the untimely deaths of its past three lords, starting with Robert Arryn. Born a sickly and frail child, "Lord Sweetrobin" ultimately died at twelve before producing an heir, passing the lordship to his older cousin with little outcry. Throughout the realm, Valemen seemed content to immortalize Robert as an eternal boy-king untouched by old age or war and move past his short-lived rule immediately. Harold Hardyng, who would then become legitimized as Lord Harold Arryn, went on to marry Cara Templeton, fathering a son and a daughter before marching North for the Night's War. Whereas some lords returned home with tales of glory or relics of war, Lord Harold returned home scarred and broken, frozen into a pale imitation of his former self by the horrors he had been unprepared to witness. Harry the Heir was a shattered man after the Night's War, spending hours walking the halls of the Eyrie in the silence of the night, drinking alone, and locking himself in his chambers for days. He was not a father to his children, much less a lord to his people, and passed zero laws or decrees during his rule. Though Harold Arryn escaped the Stranger on the fields of the North, he would ultimately meet him again at the edge of the Moon Door at twenty-nine years old.

The morning Harold Arryn's death was discovered, lordship was passed to Harold's only heir, Mandon Arryn, on his tenth nameday. The young lord inherited a Vale driven to poverty by his father's shiftless reign as an absentee ruler, and was subesquently locked in his study for the better part of three years, training in economics and legislation while his mother, Lady Cara, maintained a shaky control of the realm. Lord Mandon would flourish under this pressured responsibility and become the most economically productive lord the Vale had ever seen. Mandon sold mountains of stone to the North, who required a great deal of it after many of its castles had been destroyed during the Night's War, as well as for efforts paving the King's Road in the North. Mandon purchased miles of seaside property in the Free Cities, which had been reeling from a plague and scattered civil wars. Mandon taxed gold from the lesser landowners on these lands as often as he could, creating a scattered array of slums and shantytowns in Essos, but stimulating the Vale's economy all the same.

By the time Mandon was eighteen, the stress of his work had made him half-bald. By the time he was thirty, he was twice as bald, but five times as wealthy. He had been given the monicker "Mandon the Miser" by a smallfolk rebel leader who was hanged two days after his rebellion had started, though the nickname stayed with Mandon forever. During Lord Mandon's rule, he had raised taxes two and a half times as high, implemented arbitrary taxes for things such as windows, covered wagons, or mules, and purchased prisoners of other realms to be sent to the Vale's salt mines to "work for their freedom", unpaid, until they had died of exhaustion. Aside from these nefarious ventures, Mandon invested in the creation of many Northern and Riverlands businesses, and it was said that he owned at least a plank of every ship and inn from Gulltown to Bear Island. By his fourtieth nameday, Mandon owned what would have been a small kingdom within Essos, had all of his properties been connected. By his calculations, the Arryns could have been the richest family in Westeros by his eightieth nameday, looking down from their mountains at the golden lions and crimson dragons who held power over them for centuries.

Ultimately, Mandon would not realize his goals of transcontinental dominance, or even his humbler goals of living to eighty. By the time he was fourty-one, he had fathered eight hardworking children -- all as business savvy as their economist father, with small ventures of their own -- and one soft-spoken, simpering hunchback. Taking the birth of this cripple as a sign from the gods to cease his procreation and focus on business, Mandon put his youngest son into the Eyrie's sept for training night and day, continuing to focus on ventures and fathering his non-deformed children. This exclusion of his youngest son would ultimately keep the line of Arryn from going extinct; Days after lord Mandon's fourty-first birthday, the second tallest tower in the Eyrie collapsed. Lord Mandon was killed in the disaster, along with his wife, eight of his children, and several of his cousins, who had gathered in the relatively small tower to view a solar eclipse.

At the time, his youngest son had been sailing around the shores of Essos, visiting his father's foreign holdings in celebration of the septon's vows he would take upon his return. After returning home, he found his entire family had been killed in an accident and that he, a boy of sixteen trained in nothing more than the Faith of the Seven, would become the lord paramount of the Vale. Naturally, this caused the timid and bookish young lord a great deal of stress, though not as much as his father had inherited. After selling all of his family's investments, Luthor Arryn would go on to find that the Vale was not as difficult to run given his father's devotion to the post-war kingdom. Luthor lowered taxes to what they had been before his father's rule,, spent coffers of gold building and refurnishing septs, and began throwing tourneys worthy of song. Aside from his extravagantly expensive, exclusive "parties", Luthor has a model lord in many ways, brokering small trade alliances between neighboring kingdoms and sending frequent gifts to Great Houses of Westeros. He has maintained a small presence in King's Landing through his frequent visits to his boyhood friend Lyonel, and is unquestioningly favored in the Western half of the Vale.

House Relations

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House Baratheon: The Arryns and Baratheons are arguably the two currently closest-linked Great Houses of Westeros. Lord Baratheon has been a close friend to Lord Arryn since boyhood, which has lead to Lord Arryn's frequent visits to the capital to visit the Master of Laws. Accordingly, the Vale and Stormlands has lead to a level of trade almost unnecessary, with sanctions and routes designed to mutually boost their economies as opposed to lending this trade to King's Landing, White Harbor, or Dorne. This trade union, officiated with the signing of The Western Union of the Stag and Falcon in 364 AC shortly after Lyonel's coronation, has lead to a greater number of Essosi goods available in the Stormlands.

House Stark: The North has maintained a close trade relationship with the Vale for generations, starting with Lord Stark selling Mandon Arryn the Valyrian dagger of Peter Baelish for its worth in stone. This gesture would rebuild nearly three quarters of Moat Cailin, and spark a long-standing trade relationship with the Vale, rebuilding the North after the Night's War with mountains of Vale stone. Now, although the trade relationship with the North is as healthy as ever, Lord Luthor has never actually met the Starks. With his best friend's sister having married to their lord, it is likely that the Vale would side with the North in the coming wars.

Conceptualization

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Lord Arryn has lived well for some time -- Not even the Queen has lived in the excess he has for the past three decades. Now, at a historical turning point, Lord Arryn will either double his opulence as Hand of the King or lose everything he has worked to hide. Father to a naive fop of a son and a renowned maiden of a daughter, Lord Arryn will be forced to maneuver through the already tight crevasses he has created within the Vale by alienating his political enemies and upjumping those he owes debts to.

Point-of-View Characters

Character Name

Luthor Arryn

Lord of The Eyrie, Defender of The Vale, and Warden of The East

Age

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42

Appearance

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For all his notable disfigurement, it would be nothing short of a lie to describe the Lord of The Vale as anything less than handsome. Typical of the Arryns, his nose is strong and straight, coming to a slight hook at the end above a set of full, ever-smiling lips. Luthor's eyes are an indistinguishable shade of blue or green, inviting those who speak with him to try and ascertain by staring at them, with high cheekbones and a jaw that comes to a sharp point by his neck. He has a mane of dark brown hair, carefully combed down the sides of his gaunt face.

This is all, of course, offest by Lord Luthor's hump, a malformed source of scorn and pain. There exists a muscular mass of flesh above Luthor Arryn's left shoulder that makes Luthor appear as if his left shoulder is always raised and that his right shoulder is always lowered. As a result of this disfigurement, Luthor's left arm is withered and crooked, bent across his chest as if it were held in a sling. Accordingly, he typically hides this by leaning on his left arm, or covering his hump and arm with a half-cloak. On the rare occasions Lord Arryn has had to don armor for war, his armor has a custom-tailored harness for his arm that nearly hides his lame arm.

Reputation

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Luthor Arryn is one of the most famous nobles of his generation, with tales and rumors concerning his supposed dealings from Mole's Town to Sunspear. Some of them, in fairness, are true -- For instance, Luthor does host a lavish orgy at the Gates of the Moon at the end of each lunar quarter, and he did appoint two smallfolk sellswords to his personal guard at a knight's tourney instead of any Valeman. While he did inherit the Vale after the sudden death of his family, it was not an accident he caused (As those in any tavern would have you believe), nor did he conspire to cause the disaster with Essosi blood magic. Other rumors, such as his belief in R'hllor or other foreign, pagan faiths, are equally untrue. Luthor Arryn does not eat the children of smallfolk in the Reach who misbehave, nor does his hump whisper the secrets of his enemies to him, nor does he pretend to be crippled to feign weakness.

Fortunately for Luthor, the wide variety and nonsensical nature of many rumors surrounding him act as a shield for those rumors which are true. When low lords whisper amongst themselves that Lord Luthor's hump is a shielded pair of leathery wings, or that his daughter was conceived by himself and Queen Daenerys, the whispers about the men he brings to bed and his involvement in the upper echelons of the Faith go unnoticed more easily. Aside from the scandalous nature of stories surrounding him, Luthor has done everything in his power to maintain relations with some of the most powerful people in the realm, and warm relations at that. When a storm shattered Lord Greyjoy's flagship, Luthor donated his own, with a Lysian whore in her captain's quarters. When the youngest Dornish princess fell ill, Luthor sent a small circus to Sunspear to lift her spirits. Even without his extravagant gifts, Lord Arryn's presence in King's Landing and Oldtown have given him a retinue of friends as far south as the Starry Sept, lending a strange duality to his reputation.

Relations

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Vale Bannermen: Luthor Arryn has extremely strong support in the Vale's Western half as well as in the Sisters, but is quietly hated by the low lords of the Vale's port-towns. Lord Arryn keeps his favor with most of the Western half of the Vale through invitations to his exclusive, secretive "parties" and through trade dealings with their houses, subsequently giving them occasional gifts and visits from their ruling Lord. Further from the Eyrie, in the seaside towns where the tumultuous tax changes of the past half-century have affected low lords the most, Lord Arryn's charitable visits are rarer, and his beneficial trade relations are nearly non-existent. His father's frequent dealings with Essos has lead to a small Essosi population on the Vale's coast, a demographic that chafes the bannermen who rule them. Additionally, unbeknownst to Luthor Arryn, one of his banner houses has been siring a forgotten Arryn cousin, grooming him for a rule that can only come through usurpation.

Lyonel Baratheon: Lord Lyonel has been Luthor's closest friend and longstanding confidant since Lord Arryn's boyhood. It was Lyonel's initial gift of friendship that brought Luthor out of his shell in his adolescence, magnified further after a life-changing trip to Essos the two shared. When Luthor was nearly assassinated some twenty years ago, it was Lyonel who he bequeathed the upbringing of his only son and heir to, and when hill tribes threatened his rule, it was Lyonel who led the forces that smashed them into the mountainside. In turn, Luthor allowed Lyonel the use of The Eyrie not only to personally marry him to Rylene Redfort, but for the two to stay until the birth of his first son, Axel Baratheon.

House Hightower: After the Red Keep, Luthor's second-most visited destination is Oldtown. A pious man through and through, Lord Arryn has donated coffers of gold to the Starry Sept for repairs, renovations, and the construction of new statues, wings, gardens, and Septs. He frequently prays at the Starry Sept upon his visits to Oldtown, and has by now created a friendship between himself and the Most Devout. Accordingly, he has encountered the Hightowers many times and has been hosted in their ancestral keep -- as opposed to an inn -- on several occasions.

House Tyrell: While the two kingdoms share only paltry trade relations, Lord Luthor's trips to Oldtown have meant encounters with the Tyrells on multiple occasions. Luthor enjoys the lifestyle found in the Reach, and has often considered marrying on of his children to the Tyrells in order to retire in Highgarden. His visits with the Tyrells, while frequently brief and courtly, have all been respectful encounters.

Blood Debt - Medieval/Fantasy

Interested!

🇴🇫 🇲🇮🇨🇪 🇦🇳🇩 🇲🇪🇳 🇦🇳🇩 🇿🇴🇲🇧🇮🇪🇸

@cider Accepted! Move him on over.

🇴🇫 🇲🇮🇨🇪 🇦🇳🇩 🇲🇪🇳 🇦🇳🇩 🇿🇴🇲🇧🇮🇪🇸

@cider Sheet's good, but you have too many traits. Shave off a few and Kenny will be accepted.

🇴🇫 🇲🇮🇨🇪 🇦🇳🇩 🇲🇪🇳 🇦🇳🇩 🇿🇴🇲🇧🇮🇪🇸

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There was never a good time to be a farmhand, though there were certainly worse times to be one than a Sunday afternoon. The Tackett farmstead, for all the backbreaking labor that went into it, was a gem among the many farms scratched out in the muggy flatlands. The farm was thirty acres of sprawling countryside altogether, like a great quilt of emerald green squares stitched together by hedgerows and fences. Chickens were scattered all across the farm, preening on fenceposts and pecking at the soft dirt, each clucking contently. The long dirt road leading to the farm went straight to the farmer's front lawn, making a circle in front of the farmhouse from the countless trips cars and wagons had made. An old, twisted oak grew from the center of the circle, with long, sturdy branches that grew like a scarecrow's outstretched arms.

Sunday was the one day a week the men had off, and so the farm was not as buzzing with life as it usually had been. Most of the workers were content to stay in their respective barns whittling bears out of soap and playing cards, and the few men that had gathered outdoors for a game of stickball were on paltry three man teams. It was the second-to-last Sunday of the month, and so very few of the men had funds remaining to take trips to town to purchase anything -- by and large, they had not found themselves working on a farm because they were too good at minding their finances. The plucking of a banjo and the smell of stew being cooked pervaded the air around the colored barn while the chatter of a radio and the sharp smell of whiskey hung around the white barn, some twenty feet away. Had it been dusk, the lamplight peeking through the barn's wooden cracks would have made the two barns almost seem to stare at one another.

In the farmhouse, there were no idle farmhands, nor any of their offensive sounds or smells. The farmhouse workers worked seven days a week, and quietly at that. Farmer Tackett's female uniform employed soft-soled "mary-janes" so that he and his wife would be spared from the sounds of over a dozen pairs of clicking heels in their attic at all hours, and so the maids and cooks glided throughout the house almost silently. The house, in reality, was an old colonial mansion, built in a pseudo-Grecian style that would have appealed to the sensibilities of a slave owner hundreds of years ago. A white porch wrapped the building's three stories, supported with wide pillars on each corner. The pillars were wooden, though they had been expertly carved on all sides and painted white, and appeared almost in the morning haze. Blue shutters and shingles were set against the otherwise uniformly white building, and a single stone chimney on the western wing of the home offset the otherwise completely symmetrical appearance. It was the work of a long-dead commissioned architect, built without the cost of labor or the artistic taste of its viewers in mind. It was an antiquated building, and yet the Tackett mansion was easily the gem of the farm, and perhaps of Cypress Hills.

Approximately fifteen miles away is the Bunce farmstead, owned by Carl Bunce. He had considered himself Henry Tackett's rival for many years, going as far as to attempt to sabotage his crops three years prior and shooting one of his goats dead just a year ago. His workforce was delegated to three former slave cabins, and his farmhouse was a cedar-brown fortress of a house his great-grandfather had built, and it was currently burning to the ground. Carl Bunce was dead, sprawled out on his back across his front lawn with a rifle in his hand. Blood oozed from his chest into a great pool crimson pool around him, still slowly pooling out of the missing chunks of his head, chest, and arms. The three cabins behind him were devoid of life, but not empty by any means. Gore caked the walls and floor of the cabins, littering the dry dirt between them and the burning building. Whatever clues to the terrible fate that had befallen his workers was obscured by the level of animalism. The viscera and bones covering the cabin walls appeared more like the cave of some awful predator, though no such creature lurked about. The sole perpetrator, a woman named Susie, was long gone by now.

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Susie didn't remember how she found herself in the forest. She remembered a lantern, and a man with a gun, and eating, but these thoughts came to her like a flickering lightbulb. It didn't matter. She smelled something in the forest. Food. She was always hungry, though she hadn't remembered how long always was. She didn't remember anything, in fact. She held no memories of her former life, and made no new memories. Her thoughts, if they could even be called thoughts, were sporadic and short-lived, and mostly focused on one subject alone. Hunger. Her hunger was maddening. All she could focus on was hunting and food. Warm, life-giving, flesh and blood. She drooled at the thought, continuing her aimless shuffle. She had lost the scent she had picked up earlier, but was now tracking a noise. It sounded living. If Susie could have formed words, "prey" would have come to mind.

Something was moving up ahead.

Susie's head turned ninety degrees, snapping in place almost instantly. Two targets. Loud, screaming, tiny humans. Instinctively, the smell of blood filled her nostrils, as if she had bashed the back of her head. Her vision began to turn red. Her hands sprung open, cracking her joints with tension. She lowered her posture, squatting obscenely in the muck of the forest, wearing nothing more than a torn pink nightgown. She let out a low, gurgling growl. They hadn't seen her and they hadn't heard her, though unbeknownst to Susie, they had began to smell him -- the stench of stale urea and rotting meat clung to her as readily as the clay covering her limbs. ThoughSusie didn't possess the intelligence to consider if her prey could smell him, she knew that she could not afford to lose the two. She was too hungry to lose them. She slowly crept closer, shambling quickly from one patch of bushes to the next. When they would pause and look around, she would stay still. When they loudly advanced through the woods, she would follow.

There was little she understood outside of the hunt, though she understood the importance of surprise, as primitive of an understanding as it was.

Her red eyes blinked with an emotionless intensity, scanning the two children. She was so hungry. So hungry. She grinded her teeth together, now only about sixty yards away. The closer she got, she could feel her adrenaline rising higher and higher, filling her nostrils with the scent of their ambrosial blood and warm, marbled layers of meat. She grinded his teeth more.

She stood up, supporting herself on a tree, staring at the twon with a wolfish gaze. Her stomach rumbled softly as she growled, clenching her hands into fists. Images of violence and nourishment flashed through her mind, instinctively urging her to infect the men. She was too hungry for that. She would eat them, she planned to herself in silence.

Eat them.

The Golden City (Open Superhero RP)

Virgil Starling

_{Virgil Starling ⬝ Male ⬝ 32 ⬝ Starling Science Heir}

Powers

Other than his reptilian physiology and the conditions this requires for him to live comfortably, Virgil Starling possesses no "super" powers. He is unable to regulate his body temperature, and depends on warm environments to be functional and hot environments to be productive. His scales are about as resistant to impact or stabbing as human skin, his vision is comparatively worse than a human's if measured by way of distance or light requirements, and any hope for him to climb walls like a gecko are dashed after witnessing him trying to summon up the strength to perform a chin-up. The things that make Virgil powerful were either given to him, such as his company and estate, or are the result of his own hard work -- namely, his intellect and cadre of robotic guards and companions.

Hobbies

Virgil is an obsessive genius, who got to be such through a lifetime of study. Aside from the upkeep of the island and its many robotic inhabitants, his biggest hobbies are the study and research of superhuman politics, history, and anthropology. Before his self-imposed exile, he was known for a taste for poetry and performing equations, though this only paints a portrait of a slightly less obsessive, equally intelligent Virgil. He enjoys the music of The Beach Boys, Kraftwerk, Bjork, and Pentangle.

Appearance

Of the world's superhumans, though there are many classifications and subclassifications, it is widely agreed there are two distinct groups; Those who carry abilities with them to be used and shown at their discretion, and those who announce their extraordinary genetic makeup to the world with every waking moment. Of the two, Virgil is firmly in the latter category. Most obviously, he resembles a lizard, or perhaps some sort of bipedal dinosaur. He has reptilian scales, reptilian eyes, and if he were to be cut open, pseudo-reptilian biology. Virgil is covered head to toe in tealish grey scales, growing bluer at the tips of his extremeties, such as his fingertips, dorsal ridge, and lips. His face, neck, torso, and the inner sides of his arms and legs are significantly lighter than his darker, tougher back scales, giving him an anatomical "underbelly" that humans lack. His eyes notably lack a sclera, making it difficult to discern the direction he is looking in or his emotions. As a child, he was known for wearing a Starling Blue t-shirt and black shorts on his father's show, though his wardrobe is now made of clothes indistinguishable due to the wear and tear of his twenty year period of isolation. His clothes have lost their color from being countlessly worn through the elements, washed, and then worn again. Accordingly, they are all now in roughly the same muted shades of grey, green, and tan.

Strengths/Weaknesses

Virgil's father was arguably one of history's smartest minds -- Virgil does not have half of the genius of his father, though Virgil is still very, very, very smart. Virgil's intellect extends from performing physics equations in real time to figure out an object's exact trajectory to the most intricate inner-workings of extinct cultures from around the world. Aside from being raised and tutored by Seymour Starling, Virgil has simply been doing nothing but reading and studying for the past twenty years, for little reason other than to keep his mind occupied. He is an engineer capable of building and designing robots that border on science fiction, speaks thirteen languages, and during his short tenure in college, lead a study that began creating some of the first nanomachines.

With an intellect that is universally unquestionable, this presents Virgil unexpected drawbacks. Virgil's awkward social skills and proclivity for fainting accrued a patina of hermetic dysfunction over the past twenty years, magnifying his former faults. Where he was once shy, he is now reclusive. Where he was once overthinking, he is now paranoid and obsessive. Where he was once well-adjusted, he is now nearing incoherence. He struggles to identify with people on personal levels, and has a deep focus on extrapersonal, societal relations, their historical patterns, and other similarly large-scale concepts. He's a weird fellow with very little relatable about him, but hearing him talk about anything leaves you with the impression that he definitely knows what he's talking about.

Bio

Virgil Starling was born to Seymour Starling and Susanne Spraier, a secretary at Starling Enterprises. Due to the abnormalities of his physical shape in relation to a human newborn, his mother died from the complications of childbirth, leaving Virgil's care in the hands of Seymour. Even during infancy, Virgil's childhood was mostly spent on Eden Island, his father's forested compound, working on the set of Seymour Starling's World of Science. Though his role on the show was relatively small -- Virgil played one of the several children Seymour interacted with in his lessons -- Seymour's choice to have his very superhuman-looking son on a children's show created a firestorm of controversy from the show's inception. Some argued casual depictions of superhumans could bridge the gap between the two peoples, while others believed Seymour to be forcing an agenda through his show. Others entirely simply argued Virgil's appearance frightened their children, and that Seymour' inclusion of a physically aberrant superhuman boy was in poor taste. In any case, Virgil remained on World of Science until he was sixteen, at which point he enrolled at the Carrington University of Oregon.

Eager to break out of his life as a child actor, Virgil began studying robotics, eventually taking classes seeking to earn a double major in engineering and robotics technology. Before Virgil was able to finish this degree, his father was found mysteriously dead on Eden, catapulting Virgil into the spotlight once again. Being an anxious teenager known for fainting, this did little to help Virgil's mental state -- Three years after his death, at a press conference held for a team of scientists Virgil had been working with to further the field of nanorobotics, Virgil had a televised breakdown, known colloquially as the "Shut Up Speech". Though there is only one video, which has widely circulated the internet since then, Virgil's mood visibly changes throughout the course of the video when it becomes clear that all of the questions asked are about the recent firing of a Starling Science executive. Near the end of the video, Virgil clears the table of the papers and diagrams covering it before flipping the table entirely, attacking a reporter, destroying the recording camera, and storming out of the room shouting profanities. The video has been modified and remixed on Youtube and similar mediums extensively, essentially making Virgil's final nervous breakdown a footnote in memes of the early 2000's.

Following the incident, Virgil quietly paid a settlement to the reporter and moved to his father's secluded forest estate in California, which had served as the setting of his late father's show and housed his childhood home. It is suspected that Virgil shares the estate with groundskeepers, though other than them, Virgil has only ever made contact with the outside world through phone calls at Starling Science press conferences.

Other

Coming soon!