Viatos

NEMESIS HEARTS: You Are Worthy Of...

Zachary Ornsdale

Name: Zachary Ornsdale
Nickname: Zeke

Age: Seventeen.

Appearance: Image Uploaded by User 7/23/2013.

Caption: 'I'm a real caption. Nothing unusual about me can be discerned.'

Personality: Zeke is a laid-back, generally friendly individual given to light banter - the kind that invites you to be a part of the joke instead of just its subject - and a certain flair for the melodramatic. He tries not to take life too seriously, except...well, when it comes to competition, he can't seem to help it. He does his best to stay playful on the battlefield, but anyone who's gone up against him knows the smile never touches his eyes out there. Zeke's Class is a duelist most effective against other duelists, and descends in effectiveness against more well-rounded opponents whose eggs aren't all in the beating-the-shit-out-of-him-in-particular basket. Given the often singular nature of the Nemesis system and the social pressure of Rank, some of Zeke's classmates have accused him of overspecializing something meant to be meaningful to a harmful degree in pursuit of petty status, rumors incensed by his preferred Tournament engagement of letting his prey pick off his most dangerous opponents and then stalking them in turn.

They're right. That's exactly what he's doing. It's just a little more complicated than the foundation, that's all...

Occupation: Third year at PCEA. Secretary of the Monster Hunting Club's committee.

History: Zeke is scion to the Ornsdale family, a clan of powerful merchants and alchemists known for their work providing miracle treatments to the rich and famous. But the Ornsdales aren't really the biggest ghost haunting Zeke, that's Raensdyr Scaedish - the Lady of the Second Skin - his highly-priced tutor, the one with a Tablet Power that, like his, revolved around the mysterious appearance of the beings called Monsters. It isn't really true that she raised him; his parents weren't absent, they weren't even all that different. But he was close with Raen, and so he took it hard during the sealed-record events wherein an ordinary Monster hunt went terribly wrong...and somehow, by methods no public information can illuminate, she somehow lost her humanity entirely and became the thing she'd hunted. Official records show her as missing; location unknown. With a few updates, as well, to her general records: Class unknown. Tablet Power unknown. Occupation unknown. No logged history. No contact records. Nothing to see.

It was after that incident that Zeke decided to join the PCEA. He has questions - about what happened to his mentor, about his own power, about the Enlil Network, the world...but a Nobody can't ask those questions. And only the people at the top can expect answers...

Class: Mirror Shepherd

Class Skills:

[Active]

• Dreams Come True in Silvered Glass: The core Skill of Zeke's class is division into five duplicates, or shards, that share his Enlil signature. Each shard bears a single mutation symbolic of an Attribute; this is the Attribute it possesses at full strength, while its others are somewhat reduced. Only four are ever actually separated out - Zeke always wears the fifth shard like a masquerade costume, sharing its mutation and gaining a boost to the corresponding Attribute. It is thus functionally impossible to tell Zeke apart from a shard...until he activates a Class Skill, at least. Shards are resistant to void / non elemental damage, but are otherwise ordinary entities.

Shards are not actually under Zeke's control, but coordinate instinctively through a hive-mind AI collective slaved to Zeke. They are extraordinarily effective at working together and with Zeke against single opponents, moving in a flawless tandem that multiplies their individual prowess, but this is a result of heavy parallel-processing analytics - every additional target dramatically increases workload, meaning that despite appearances this power is actually vulnerable to multiple attackers rather than advantageous against them. Shards can avoid being overwhelmed by simply focusing on a single target at a time, but doing so means their ability to defend themselves against other enemies is only what Zeke's own awareness and reflexes allow.

Shards dealt lethal damage are banished, and reform when he next sleeps.

• Masquerade Waltz: Zeke can step between nearby shards, leaving the shard he was wearing in his place and cohabitating the shard stepped into.

• Fantastic Festival Eschaton: The flashiest of Zeke's Skills, Fantastic Festival Eschaton is a roulette of powerful coordinated assault plans - eschatons - distributed to each of his shards and flavored according to their Attribute. Eschatons deal bonus void / non-elemental damage and feature an intricate, mind-warping attack sequence, which is the real secret of their efficacy: their flamboyance causes 'lag' in the Enlil Network, allowing them to 'glitch' through non-Tablet defenses. Zeke can stock a single eschaton per shard and must be masquerading as that shard to use its eschaton. Once used, the local Enlil Network acclimates to a given eschaton, obviating the lag for any characters who bore witness until the cache refreshes - usually an hour's time.

• Broken Mirror Bite: A sharp sensation of something that isn't pain, but isn't not, heralds the activation of this Skill. It provides a brief scan of the target's Skills and then copies one of their Active Skills, replacing Broken Mirror Bite. The target can still use the copied Skill, but doing so invites a fracture - a moderate-duration 'bleed' of light void / non-elemental damage that amplifies further damage of that type.

[Passive]

• Bare Before the Gate: Zeke has resistance to void / non-elemental damage and rapidly "frays" debuffs from the last enemy to apply them. Like his shards, this Skill can be overwhelmed by multiple sources.

• Keys to the Ring: While a shard is banished, Zeke deals a small amount of additional void / non-elemental damage and receives a small increase in speed. These effects stack.

Tablet Power: Fallen Star Coronation: The first and strangest reflection Zeke ever learned to create. If present at the slaying of a Monster, Zeke can mirror its essence in his Enlil signature, creating a daemon, a level-adjusted variation of that Monster. More powerful Monsters are devolved, while less powerful Monsters are enhanced to match Zeke's level. It can store an eschaton, and Zeke can masquerade as the daemon (becoming a cosmetic hybrid) to gain access to a single retained Skill and symbolic Attribute boost. If banished, it reforms much more rapidly than shards do...either by consuming a shard in its regrowth or causing Zeke moderate void / non-elemental damage (even after accounting for his resistance) as it claws its way back out of him. This power seems to cause minor corruption in the local Enlil Network, and looking directly at a daemon sometimes produces mild audiovisual glitches or discomforting [DATA LOSS] errors for others.

It has one even more uncomfortable effect - shards typically mirror Zeke exactly and are entirely codependent, but so long as Zeke has a daemon, sometimes they...change, developing a second mutation representative of his daemon and a small degree of individuality. These personality shifts inevitably reflect the daemon, rather than Zeke. Banishment will "reset" a corrupted shard, but the advantages of corruption - as well as its inevitability - discourage this option. Rumors that Zeke developed his Class entirely because of its synergy with this effect are sometimes shadowed by a more sinister whisper: that without his shards, these mutations would affect Zeke himself. Zeke's teachers are typically required to read a small docket containing information related to his possession of this power. Zeke doesn't know what's in it.

The daemon doesn't share the shards' hivemind, instead having its own "black box" AI and an intuitive consciousness of Zeke's will to which it is generally loyal. It remains active even while Zeke sleeps. Usually, it also remains nearby.

Shadow Smiles

No one wants to know
If their straight and narrow swayed;
If they have ever been unmade;
That we are not of stone,
That what we carve is sure to fade...

Bathroom stall poetry. No author. I asked my phone about it, just out of curiosity, but she didn't know. Cute, I guess, but maybe not the best inspiration for an entertainer. Forever is kind of my patron saint, you know? Fame is definitely an orthodox religion, we pray for intercession, we try not to look God in the eye. Except in mirrors, where we're hypnotized, but you can't help that. God needs his stage makeup like everybody else. Cameras aren't big on reverence.

It was opening night at the Corpus Coliseum.

The screams rolled through the open space, slamming and slicing into each other, a frenzy of sound and passion ready to exalt or to annihilate. Martin waited in the wings, looking out over the crowd. All those faces, so hungry to be happy. His expression would have been strange to anyone looking, it wasn't excitement, it wasn't anxiety, or boredom, or contempt, or pride. Martin's face was a mask of pain, and beneath the mask was just more of the same. But no one was looking; that was the point. In moments like that one, buried in the blue breath of a fog machine and gazing out into a sea of expectant eyes, Martin was invisible, intangible, an absence stretched between the past and the future. Between backstage and center, there was nothing, as far as anyone knew; Martin himself was not self-aware.

He couldn't have said what it was that ached so fiercely during that time. Self-awareness was a tenet of his faith, one among many narcissistic oblations, and as a purveyor of mystery - magic being the popular misnomer - he had few mysteries himself, but those moments were exceptional, unknowable. Maybe the shape of that pain eluded him because it was too fast, transfixing him in a single soul-shivering motion that didn't slow as it passed through his conscious experience. The prestidigitation of a superior magician.

"You're overcomplicating things, kid."

Flash

The light shattered his trance, brought him into being, and then he was dashing through the blue fog, mounting the central altar he'd had set up upon the stage, and the roar of the crowd and his heartbeat became one great paean as he leapt up into clear view, arms spread and white teeth gleaming. The announcer was introducing him - his better half, anyway. The Magnificent Me. The Me that I could be, if only I didn't have to be me. Lowercase, unremarkable, recursively self-absorbed... An unproductive line of thinking, but his opening routine was too well-rehearsed, too familiar to distract him from thinking about it. The he he had to be.

"You're just thinking, thinking, thinking...like all the world's red and raw could fit inside your bursting brain."

Flash

Colors burst across the stage, a line of performance fireworks designed to mislead and dazzle as he moved from point to point. He drew three rabbits from three hats simultaneously - each a different color - and set them loose on the stage. Actually he drew only one of the rabbits, the white, and a pair of mirrored arrays replicated and shaded her to match her cousins' brown and grey coats. The timing was delicate, like a phone call to someone you were leaving behind.

"But pain doesn't fit. Couldn't. Pain isn't a thought, it's a feeling. You can't order it the same way."

Flash

She was in the audience, Anna's friend. Not having the best night herself, judging by the distance between her and her paramour, her crossed arms. She smiled up at him, unknowing that his eyes had found her through his fantastic mask, but there was sadness caught in the curve of her lips. Not just her date. Had something happened? Martin missed his catch, improvised a recovery. The audience murmured. Oh, fuck this.

"You're addicted to it. To order."

Flash

Back in the apartment, years ago. Anna called him a child playing dress-up. She'd been passed over at work, come home to find him working on his latest trick. She'd broken part of it and stormed out. Martin stayed up all night, but she never came home.

"So you try anyway. Adding pressure to pressure."

Flash

Half a hundred phones on camera, you better believe not everyone turned their flash off. It drove him crazy, threw off his timing - that was his favorite excuse. The truth was the timing didn't much matter, not as he moved into the second act. His tricks were too mechanical, too complicated, you couldn't follow it all, couldn't appreciate it, and in this half of the show the Magnificent Marovio evanesced into little more than light and shadow. The suggestion of a magician, like the suggestion of a family, like the suggestion of a morning mist - never materializing. Beneath consideration. Unimportant.

"You have to let the bad blood out, kid. You have to make a mess."

Flash

Jake and Ally, thick as thieves, like when they were kids - the same guilty eyes unwilling to meet. Everything seemed the same, except that time had stolen away their innocence and their childhood invulnerability, and so mischief had become trouble, and so mistakes became damage. It was Christmas, and they didn't want to talk about the personal things. So nobody talked at all, and love lay crucified by the silence, unavoidable and inexpressible, a ruined gift beneath the tree.

"Stop trying to think of everything, kid. Give your brain a rest."

Flash

It loomed over the stage, the incarnation of nightmare. It was all smile, all Smile, and when it moved Martin saw how it broke the rules around it, how it stretched in ways a body couldn't, shouldn't, must not. Blue fog rose over the stage, threaded by something darker, and driven by primal instinct Martin kicked off the end-stretch lightshow early. He disappeared into silhouette, small beside the monster, and now the crowd's murmur was interested. Anna's friend had spilled her drink across her date's lap, who was cursing, which she would neither hear nor remember. She was on her feet as Martin lost his, and Smile leaned down to offer him something. Something dripping. Something beating.

"Why don't you just...have a heart?"

Flash

"Fuck!" Martin snapped awake, gasping, eyes wild. Images crashed into him, a waterfall from nowhere, as he tried to place himself in space and time. Am I...

The room was white.

Halogen light beat down on him, beat him down. There wasn't much to see, just an empty cell, panels set into the walls and ceilings behind which all the interesting terrible glittering instruments of science coiled like sleeping serpents, a drain in the floor, a cot, a bathroom. The room was divided in half by a polycarbonate shield, beyond which were one-way windows for observation, one end of the airlock into the cell. There was no one there now, nor had there been since Martin's arrival. Nothing to break up the monotony - except the hazard strobe, which was flashing now. What...happened?

Scenes from the nightmare offered him answers, a few, those that he could bear. Smile. The heart. An exploding web of viscera and burrowing claws. The unit of...paramilitary, special forces? Armored people with guns. Martin remembered feeling electricity arc through his body, choking on gas, trying to say...something, anything. Stop. Wait. Help me.

I'm not sick.

Was he? Martin looked down at shaking hands, and something seemed to - there. Shit. What the fuck? Shit! His hand was melting, running together, the flesh sliding back from a newborn spike of alien bone...

The airlock door hissed. Martin's head snapped up and he half-crawled, half-lunged across the laboratory cell to impact the shield, pressing his face and hands - human hands - up against the transparent polymer. "Hey. Hey! I'm in here! What the fuck is happening to me?!"

Shadow Smiles

I'm pretty sure that if you could pull me out of this game, they'd have to make you the King of England.

Worlds Apart

Tristan watched the newcomers with divided eyes, his stance uncertain but active. His instinct was to follow Tabitha, but...whatever she was talking about with the kid, there was a connection there, one his cyborg form might endanger. And she was armed, and she had always taken care of herself, had done so before he met her. She didn't need a guard dog. He didn't need a collar. Plus talk had been kind of heavy recently.

A little space might not go amiss.

Still, the village disturbed him, for reasons it wasn't too hard to identify. Free food and drink, the idyll environment, the smiles...maybe without the masks, or the deaths, or the Ghost Girl, he could have been sold on this image of a witchless Narnia. But the scream in his Semblance was a context impossible to ignore. This other world was not an idyll. There were dangers here, and too much they didn't understand.

So knowledge was power. So Tristan sought empowerment. Zino Bertram. A late arrival? Are you part of her plan?

"The Ghost Girl of Lightbridge," he said quietly, "Was a mystery and an urban legend when she first started to appear. She lured...well, maybe. She's not exactly transparent-"

He paused.

"Sorry. Not a ghost joke. Anyway, she started showing up and people started dying. They stepped onto subway tracks and were killed by the train. Rumor was those people died trying to help her, but that's rumor, you know. Posthumous. She...gathered us. All of us together. When she brought us to the subway, it was-"

Another pause. Tristan was vaguely conscious of the acceleration of various processes, faster breathing, pistons shifting gears. She made that fucking ringing noise with her mouth, that night in my office. She did things, said things...nobody's sure of her, but in aggregate...no. She isn't safe. She isn't an ally. A mistress, maybe. But if there's anything about her that's true, it's that she is a dead thing in important senses. If there's anything about her I know is a lie, it's the implication of her humanity.

"-she made us offers. None of it made a lot of sense. I can't tell you why...most of us stepped onto the tracks, which is what she asked us to do. That and hold onto the masks. Some of us put them on. I guess you can tell," said Tristan, one hand gesturing to himself, his pentacle of eyes always tracking. "I don't think the mask is there anymore. At least, I don't feel like I'm wearing a mask, this is just...my face, now. I guess.

Anyway, most of us stepped onto the tracks. There was some, uh, excitement...the guy in the cocoon, he rushed Officer Keahi, back in the station. We're not really clear on why. I think he's just...that way. But the Ghost Girl wanted him, I guess. Wanted you too. And if you haven't figured it out already, that looks like it's probably a rigged game. You'll get the truth, maybe, but it's the truth about the mystery that she created, centered around your personal tragedy, which probably she arranged that too. You've been murdered and...reassembled, you said? all at her behest. When we got here, she said she wanted 'blades.' So far our free will hasn't actually been curtailed, but...you know, I think that's more about the cleverness of the strings she's drawing us along with than their absence.

For example, here are the first other living things we've found, and there's something wrong with these people, Mr. Bertram. With this place. I don't know if these folks were here before the Magician, or how long HE was here, or - what the fuck is anything, really. But I do know it's more than a little fucked up that these folks are in no shape to communicate to us anything at all about this world, its rules, its powers. Anything she hasn't approved for us to know. Anything that might be introduced in a context outside the one she has planned for it."

Tristan looked around at the others, a process that required less head movement than it might have once entailed. There were dichotomies forming, and alliances, and he wanted to see who was nodding along, who wasn't. Part of that was an old mentality and part of that was a new and alien paranoia. But we don't know anything about each other, and suddenly it occurs to me that even if we ask...who's to say who's telling the truth?

Suddenly he wished he'd gone after Tabitha after all. Standing together among the others, in the middle of a smiling crowd, on the eve of some great festival - more even than the dark of his office after-hours, Tristan felt very alone.

Shadow Smiles

Martin the Magnificent

Name: Martin Margrave, formerly Martin Warrick, sometimes the Magnificient Marovio

Age: 33

Human Appearance: Tall, dark, and handsome, Martin plays hard to the stereotypical image that screams either magician or evil vizier, depending on what sort of movies you watch.



Personality (Optional): The showman. The charmer. The daredevil. The maniac?

Occupation: Stage magician (former?)

History (Optional): Martin majored in theatre, to the despair of his math and engineering professors - whip-smart and clever with his hands, he would have made an outstanding architect. He wanted to be a magician instead, but it turns out all the fantastical props in the world don't make up for a certain lack of stage presence and an insurmountable aversion to the slow ramp of complexity necessary to hook an audience instead of just overwhelming them from the start. He knows the backstage arts, but his work has to be front and center. He's skilled, but his career is failing.

So is his marriage; Martin may have locked in the dream of marrying his high school sweetheart, but somewhere after the early years the dream began to fade. Adrianna Lisbon-Margrave hasn't been home the last couple years, and their awkward bitterness-edged friendship has been deteriorating of late - some kind of trouble she won't disclose, something to do with her work up at Blackthorne. He'd be more concerned if he wasn't also trying to be a positive influence in the lives of Jacob and Alison Warrick, younger siblings by seven years and ten respectively, who their parents say are in trouble with a drug craze quietly sweeping NSC. Some newfangled thing called Thana or Thane, short for Thanatopsic Arcana, said to produce the same full-throttle trip as a dying brain dumping its remaining chemical load all atonce.

Maybe he'd at least have a handle on THAT, along with his stumbling career and the oncoming subway train of middle-aged loneliness and mediocrity he can feel starting to circle around him, if it wasn't for the latest complication - two unexpected visitors to his last, greatest, and most fateful performance. One was a friend of his wife, an off-duty S.C.A.R.E. operative (Martin knew her as "internal security") determined to make the most of a bad date by taking in a good show.

The other was Smile, not off-duty at all, who changed what actually wasn't a very good show into something...extraordinary. He pointed out, over the course of a movie-monster fast advance, that all these suffering people weren't really looking for Martin's help. No one suffering is. They just want to be understood. For Martin to...have a heart.

The clip's gone viral, but nobody outside the kooky conspiracy boards has bitten on the idea that a magic show might have involved an actual supernatural event - yet. Sure, it was a weird finale, but timely pyrotechnics and a little primal instinct from Martin covered up the worst of what happened for the majority of his audience.

Not so much for the operative, though. Martin was black-bagged backstage and woke up buried in the laboratory-dungeons of the Evadne Complex, full of strange urges and rippling with a power he doesn't understand. As if his life wasn't complicated enough.

Infection Status: Infected

Miasma Abilities (Infected Only):

LUNAR OMENS: His Infected appearance is contrarian - a bulky body and wide, wedge-shaped predator's head, but its slender limbs move delicately, balancing on bone spurs like a dancer. He has help, though, in the form of a loose relationship with mass and gravity. He moves too fast - especially through the air, breaking physical laws regarding velocity and air resistance as if he'd received a state exemption - and across surfaces that not only lack obvious grip but shouldn't be able to support his weight, which is actually several times what his appearance would suggest. The selectivity of these omens make him exceedingly dangerous on the hunt for prey unaware of them, especially if that prey is not itself imbued with supernatural physicality.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: Martin can consume biomass to create batlike "familiars" that are mostly bundles of teeth, wings, and tail-tacles from his body: a corpse offers enough material to refine into a single familiar. They're loosely independent and not particularly dangerous (to humans) when not directed by his will; they hunt nonhuman fauna and for bodies, whose biomass they repurpose into infected disturbing "hives" that can produce more of their number (with the advantage that hives accept piecemeal offerings; the character needs at least a hundred pounds worth of corpse all at once). While familiars are intelligent enough to avoid harm when possible, they don't threaten living humans even in self-defense - they're unwilling to endanger potential Infected hosts. They hide from Infected not of their strain, but sometimes follow them in hopes of new biomass sources, and sometimes mob non-sentient Infected who cross into a hive's "territory". Their hives begin to leak Miasma as they grow, and non-sentient Infected created by exposure or forced into extended contact (at least a day) with its Miasma adopt familiar instincts - driving Infected of different strains to destroy both familiars and hives if they can get at them.

Within about a hundred yards of the character, Martin can hear and echolocate through his familiars. Within about thirty yards, they become effectively extensions of his will. Within biting range, Martin can actually eat familiars that have been directed to consume and catalyze blood or neural tissue for him - a mouthful of blood allowing him to recover about a day's worth of memory over a few minutes' time, while a familiar that's snacked down on a whole brain offers up to a week, digested over hours. Infected with the familiar strain aren't quite so attuned: he can listen through one at a time, direct its actions, or consume it to recover memory, but all of these activities require his full concentration to perform.

RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL: Once a hive reaches about a busload's worth of biomass, it stops producing batlike familiars and "calls" its existing brood home. If most of them make the journey, the hive devours them to spawn a single new being - a packmate - a lupine Infected whose form and relationship to the physical laws of our universe are similar to Martin's own. More alarmingly, a packmate displays sentient levels of autonomy...and the first time it consumes an entire human corpse, becomes imprinted, thereafter capable of taking that form and a week's worth of its memories. Like familiars, they can catalyze blood and neural tissue. Unlike familiars, they don't need to die to update each other or Martin - a single heavy bite will do. These creatures aren't capable of creating familiars or evolving, but the phenomenon is one whose threat is immediately obvious.

Familiars and packmates both seem compelled to sing or hum softly in the presence of a hive or their ultimate master, and this sole instinct resists all attempts at override.

Miasma Appearance (Infected Only): His transmogrified form is a monstrous sort of chiropterolupine mash-up, big, toothy, with no eyes in the usual place and too many elsewhere, winglike limbs clawed by bone spurs, and big fluffy ears. He is a fever-dream variation of a vampire werewolf.

Shadow Smiles

actually i don't like this guy as much as i thought i did and i didn't realize our psychic is doing electromagnetic stuff already

Name: Sunday Kavanaugh

Age: 28

Human Appearance:

Personality: Sunday is an anxious, analytical person. He suffers from a variety of nervous jitters and a compulsive need for information, and despite his extraordinarily conscientious and effective work in the noble field of cybersecurity, he has a more serious flaw as well: a tendency towards mystic obsession, a switch in his mind that sometimes trips and throws everything into sharp relief as symbols and icons and omens of some unknowable nightmare-truth slithering behind reality. It's a kind of dangerous panic he's prone to. He's happiest gathering up and working through volumes of sterile, bloodless data, and he fits most definitions of stable or functional, but every now and again, he...goes off for a while.

An infusion of Miasma-infested brain tissue'll probably sort him right out.

Occupation: Lab technician

History (Optional): Sunday had an easy childhood; his family loved him, they had wealth and opportunity, things were golden - the last of three well-bred brothers, he always seemed nervous about some unidentified concern, but other than that...not a lot to complain about. Okay, sometimes he had a little fit, he was hard to keep calm some days, but he was smart and soft-spoken and it's not like the empire hadn't already been divided up for his brothers in lions' shares. His parents picked out a quiet corner for him and expected he'd be happy there, and they were almost right, too. He started out in accounting, which went well, until one night they found him making arbitrary transactions to try and describe a numerology he'd invented and it became clear he was going to be a long-term project after all.

They moved him to data analysis, which Sunday excelled at, until his parents had to replace a second and then a third boss after he unnerved them badly enough to force the issue of continued employment. They tried discreet medications, but there was some pressure from economic rivals at the time and the risk of exposure meant curtailing any in-depth treatment. His oldest brother offered him a spot at the top of their IT department. It was an awkward first few years, Sunday had to pick up the expertise as he went along and most of his subordinates saw the signs, but he was settling. Then another incident. This was a bad one. There were arguments, fights. The word institutionalization was spoken out loud. But they weren't that kind of family, the Kavanaughs. That kind of thing didn't happen, so:

So Sunday bounced around a lot. There were relationships, which ended as badly as the work. There were - does it matter? It wasn't a great life. It was really a neurosis with "life" painted over it. Anyway, one day things changed.

He'd landed a lab tech job at a bleeding-edge medical firm under the name Blackthorne. He wasn't doing anything too terribly important himself, but he got to look at the numbers of people who were, and to him the numbers were as good as a documentary, so in a way - a quiet little way not very many people but Sunday could understand - it was all pretty exciting. Until the usual began, only...this time it wasn't the usual. This time he'd found something real - because someone, or something, was changing the numbers. Someone, or something, knew his head and where it was soft and vulnerable. They knew how to draw him out, and where everyone else in his life had seen spasms or frenzies, whatever watched Sunday gave order to his flailing limbs and made a marionette out of a madman. It's still not clear how he got through the security protocols. He had information that wasn't possible to have obtained, and he used it with surgical precision to breach containment.

Sunday ended up in a black lab himself after that.

And then Smile came, and told him if it was his brain holding him back all this time, maybe he should try another...

Infection Status: Infected

Miasma Abilities (Infected Only):

FASHIONED CREATURES HALF MADE UP: Miasma is adaptive, revolutionary as well as evolutionary, and where its movement through a world of meat has been curtailed by iron and electricity, it seeks to overcome. Sunday is the harbinger of a strain of Infected capable of biomechanical integration: by Infecting a creature or corpse with his Miasmic strain (usually through blood transfusion) he triggers a process of rapid mutation that makes the resultant meat remarkably receptive to mechanical introductions. In layman's terms, he can hybridize Infected and machines, creating semiconscious horrors - gremlins - that bring mobility and agency to devices or resilience and weaponization to organic hosts. This power is mostly limited by time and resources: the further from default functionality and the grander in scale or complexity a gremlin, the more subsidiary materials he'll need and the longer it'll take to fashion a working result. The easiest thing to work on is himself, although unlike his Infected transformation, grafted tech and biomass aren't supernaturally concealed in human form.

Gremlins that spend at least an hour a day within a hundred feet of Sunday's Infected form don't get "hungry," but barring this opportunity to recharge they need to seek out power sources or go dormant. Any sort of electricity will do - including bio-electricity, the harvest of which is incapacitating to humans and fatal to small animals and children. Gremlins that last more than a day start developing quirks and minor evolutions beyond their original form and function. How, why, and to what extent or end are all open questions.

BY SLIGHT LIGAMENTS: With understanding comes mastery. Sunday's Infected flesh is studded with pods of boiling light, within which sacred storms howl and rage. The copper-lined nerve clusters that extend into these pods manipulate electromagnetism to send electronic signals, allow him to levitate half a dozen feet off the ground or, often more significantly, unleash precisely-targeted lightning blasts. This last ability is by default no more dangerous than the modern rifle, because Sunday's body can only hold so much power at once - though it seems limitlessly able to replenish itself, "reloading" at a bolt-action's pace - but nearby gremlins that have been appropriately modified with pods of their own provide additional containment he can fill and then draw upon. It's not the fastest weapon in the world, but it's certainly impressive.

This power has two notable side-effects. The first is that energy is energy, and Sunday doesn't really run down: he doesn't get tired and he hasn't felt hungry since meeting Smile. He isn't sure where the power comes from, but he has nightmares about it - a dark place, a laughing thing that looks like a star at first, but isn't.

The other notable side-effect is that there are certain kinds of signal Sunday can't help but send: within a few hundred feet minor malfunctions and bursting light bulbs are the order of the day, non-sentient Infected that don't share his strain suffer occasional bursts of mental static, and certain people begin to experience slightly-intrusive daydreams about Sunday's Infected form in vague, symbolic, and sometimes decidedly uncomfortable sequences. Such idle thoughts are, uniquely, as apparent to Sunday as radio chatter. He doesn't understand this side-effect either, why the marked are chosen, what it means that they're marked, what it means that he's shown.

Miasma Appearance (Infected Only): Sunday thinks of his other self as a "serpent of light," which as titles go isn't terribly accurate - the twisting, sinuous thing he becomes is loosely serpentine, and does shine with an uncomfortable radiance, but it's more of a furred cephaloinsectoid nightmare spotted everywhere with translucent boils full of alien light. Tucked up close against his underbelly, he has a bevy of delicate unfolding mantis-claws a few feet in length, of little use in combat but with impressive potential dexterity. He can slither effectively with his assorted appendages, as nimble and unpleasant to watch as a centipede.

this guy feels good though

Name: Martin Margrave, formerly Martin Warrick, sometimes the Magnificient Marovio

Age: 33

Human Appearance: Tall, dark, and handsome, Martin plays hard to the stereotypical image that screams either magician or evil vizier, depending on what sort of movies you watch.



Personality (Optional): The showman. The charmer. The daredevil. The maniac?

Occupation: Stage magician (former?)

History (Optional): Martin majored in theatre, to the despair of his math and engineering professors - whip-smart and clever with his hands, he would have made an outstanding architect. He wanted to be a magician instead, but it turns out all the fantastical props in the world don't make up for a certain lack of stage presence and an insurmountable aversion to the slow ramp of complexity necessary to hook an audience instead of just overwhelming them from the start. He knows the backstage arts, but his work has to be front and center. He's skilled, but his career is failing.

So is his marriage; Martin may have locked in the dream of marrying his high school sweetheart, but somewhere after the early years the dream began to fade. Adrianna Lisbon-Margrave hasn't been home the last couple years, and their awkward bitterness-edged friendship has been deteriorating of late - some kind of trouble she won't disclose, something to do with her work up at Blackthorne. He'd be more concerned if he wasn't also trying to be a positive influence in the lives of Jacob and Alison Warrick, younger siblings by seven years and ten respectively, who their parents say are in trouble with a drug craze quietly sweeping NSC. Some newfangled thing called Thana or Thane, short for Thanatopsic Arcana, said to produce the same full-throttle trip as a dying brain dumping its remaining chemical load all atonce.

Maybe he'd at least have a handle on THAT, along with his stumbling career and the oncoming subway train of middle-aged loneliness and mediocrity he can feel starting to circle around him, if it wasn't for the latest complication - two unexpected visitors to his last, greatest, and most fateful performance. One was a friend of his wife, an off-duty S.C.A.R.E. operative (Martin knew her as "internal security") determined to make the most of a bad date by taking in a good show.

The other was Smile, not off-duty at all, who changed what actually wasn't a very good show into something...extraordinary. He pointed out, over the course of a movie-monster fast advance, that all these suffering people weren't really looking for Martin's help. No one suffering is. They just want to be understood. For Martin to...have a heart.

The clip's gone viral, but nobody outside the kooky conspiracy boards has bitten on the idea that a magic show might have involved an actual supernatural event - yet. Sure, it was a weird finale, but timely pyrotechnics and a little primal instinct from Martin covered up the worst of what happened for the majority of his audience.

Not so much for the operative, though. Martin was black-bagged backstage and woke up buried in the laboratory-dungeons of the Evadne Complex, full of strange urges and rippling with a power he doesn't understand. As if his life wasn't complicated enough.

Infection Status: Infected

Miasma Abilities (Infected Only):

LUNAR OMENS: His Infected appearance is contrarian - a bulky body and wide, wedge-shaped predator's head, but its slender limbs move delicately, balancing on bone spurs like a dancer. He has help, though, in the form of a loose relationship with mass and gravity. He moves too fast - especially through the air, breaking physical laws regarding velocity and air resistance as if he'd received a state exemption - and across surfaces that not only lack obvious grip but shouldn't be able to support his weight, which is actually several times what his appearance would suggest. The selectivity of these omens make him exceedingly dangerous on the hunt for prey unaware of them, especially if that prey is not itself imbued with supernatural physicality.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: Martin can consume biomass to create batlike "familiars" that are mostly bundles of teeth, wings, and tail-tacles from his body: a corpse offers enough material to refine into a single familiar. They're loosely independent and not particularly dangerous (to humans) when not directed by his will; they hunt nonhuman fauna and for bodies, whose biomass they repurpose into infected disturbing "hives" that can produce more of their number (with the advantage that hives accept piecemeal offerings; the character needs at least a hundred pounds worth of corpse all at once). While familiars are intelligent enough to avoid harm when possible, they don't threaten living humans even in self-defense - they're unwilling to endanger potential Infected hosts. They hide from Infected not of their strain, but sometimes follow them in hopes of new biomass sources, and sometimes mob non-sentient Infected who cross into a hive's "territory". Their hives begin to leak Miasma as they grow, and non-sentient Infected created by exposure or forced into extended contact (at least a day) with its Miasma adopt familiar instincts - driving Infected of different strains to destroy both familiars and hives if they can get at them.

Within about a hundred yards of the character, Martin can hear and echolocate through his familiars. Within about thirty yards, they become effectively extensions of his will. Within biting range, Martin can actually eat familiars that have been directed to consume and catalyze blood or neural tissue for him - a mouthful of blood allowing him to recover about a day's worth of memory over a few minutes' time, while a familiar that's snacked down on a whole brain offers up to a week, digested over hours. Infected with the familiar strain aren't quite so attuned: he can listen through one at a time, direct its actions, or consume it to recover memory, but all of these activities require his full concentration to perform.

RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL: Once a hive reaches about a busload's worth of biomass, it stops producing batlike familiars and "calls" its existing brood home. If most of them make the journey, the hive devours them to spawn a single new being - a packmate - a lupine Infected whose form and relationship to the physical laws of our universe are similar to Martin's own. More alarmingly, a packmate displays sentient levels of autonomy...and the first time it consumes an entire human corpse, becomes imprinted, thereafter capable of taking that form and a week's worth of its memories. Like familiars, they can catalyze blood and neural tissue. Unlike familiars, they don't need to die to update each other or Martin - a single heavy bite will do. These creatures aren't capable of creating familiars or evolving, but the phenomenon is one whose threat is immediately obvious.

Familiars and packmates both seem compelled to sing or hum softly in the presence of a hive or their ultimate master, and this sole instinct resists all attempts at override.

Miasma Appearance (Infected Only): His transmogrified form is a monstrous sort of chiropterolupine mash-up, big, toothy, with no eyes in the usual place and too many elsewhere, winglike limbs clawed by bone spurs, and big fluffy ears. He is a fever-dream variation of a vampire werewolf.

Worlds Apart

Tristan's gaze roamed over the town, snapping nervously to wherever townsfolk roamed outside, though it was the buildings he really wanted to look at. I guess I'm into architecture now. It was strange that it didn't feel strange. He wondered what other alterations the mask had made, and if it was done with its work, but the anxiety that line of thinking generated eventually pulled the whole string out into the encircling ocean of fear that had been the first, most immediate internal change his Semblance had levied. Its defining emotion.

Silverbrook's defining emotion seemed to be happiness. Though seeming isn't always being. He shared the reservations of the group; they were half a collection of unnatural things wandering down the road, invoking no alarm, no guardedness. Maybe this is normal here. Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way. But we're still strangers...

He touched the elegant gun at his side. If he had had a face, he would have frowned. He settled for a slow movement of his head, eyes drifting over the group, making sure everyone was still there. Counting the Ghost Girl's uncertain sheep to lull his mind to ease. No way but forward. Which wasn't true, of course. They could all wander as they liked, except perhaps for Oedipus. But if they did, the world would open into chaos. A memory flickered.

Edge of Lightbridge. Reading Lance's last text. The seawall, the sea... He'd felt so bound up in destiny back then, so chained to the world. All the things that had kept him grounded had been cut away like blindfolds or curtains, and he could see so clearly that he was just someone else's dream, an actor with nothing waiting offstage. And I thought, I could jump. Not to die, just...to leave. To swim out until I couldn't see the city. But he would have died. It didn't work that way. The edges of the map were boundaries, like pain, like fate. So he hadn't jumped, and he hadn't gone swimming since.

Now Tristan was drowning on dry land, fear encircling his little bubble of clarity and consciousness. It had occurred to him that if that bubble popped he'd probably go insane. His first reaction to the Semblance - if I hear that scream - was not unjustified, he suspected.

But Silverbrook beckoned, and if he ever wanted to get home...his heart panged at the thought of Rani and Lane. They had to find a way. So. No way but forward. They needed so many things. A center. Information. And...

...yeah, I'm hungry. I guess that didn't go anywhere.

While he was working that over in his mind, he voiced a subsidiary thought to the others. "Uh, I can grow food, I think. Given time. It...might be kind of intense, but if they're not willing to feed us..." He would have frowned again, settled for the eye thing again. He'd just thought of something.

Fuck, how do I eat?

Worlds Apart

Tristan startled as Tabitha hugged him. Appearances suggested an experience of immutable metal, but he wasn't; immutable, anyway. Plates gave way against pressure, and soft coils of wire and repurposed flesh beneath them added little more than the usual reinforcement of a fully organic body. As she drew away, he ran a hand over his head. It was perhaps the most human gesture he'd yet evinced. Listening to her, he laughed - or produced the sound - and it was almost his laugh,

"Who else would I...thank you. I guess I'm a little scared -"

That ocean knows no boundaries, submits to no human cartography. Even the sky is drowning.

"-myself. But less so, now. You're right. We can't lose focus. Our friends are waiting. And...I'm sorry too,
Tabitha. I could have been kinder. I told myself it wasn't my business, but really I didn't think anything was my business. Except business. It's no way to live. Pain IS a boundary, but not one that ought be left long unbreached. I could have been kinder to you."

Tristan paused to take in the sight of Anni flying past them, her face a setting-sun counterpoint to the pale-winged boy she'd left behind. Again? He hadn't been paying close enough attention; he could only assume. He sighed, or affected to sigh, and made a gesture towards the event that almost seemed to hold a smile. "Not that every boundary needs crossing, eh?"

He laughed again, and then stopped, his tone returning to an intensity-edged neutrality. "This moment pays for the rest, Tabitha. A prelude to the one where we go home again, and get to tell Lane and Rani we're back.

Nobody's getting left behind."

Shadow Smiles

Thanks for being patient with all this! I'm really looking forward to exploring the world and the Miasma!

Also, as a general question. Do you guys plan to play solely one Character, or do you mind juggling multiple?

@Redward

Also looking forward to this exploration!

I'd generally rather play one character, but I don't mind writing additional minor characters to drive narrative or expand the world.

I did once play a game where the website architecture was such that character accounts were sort of like puppets your master account invisibly manipulated, and the GM misinterpreted my interest in having a sorcerous familiar as "here you go, here's a second character account," and it ended up being really fun playing that role as well, so I'm at least open to giving it a shot if we end up short-handed!

Shadow Smiles

REASONS TO PLAY IN THIS GAME

• Have you ever been stumbling helplessly around the setting of Resident Evil with your battle-tank movement controls, and some huge, fluid horror of undead flesh and ill intent comes bursting out of the scenery with flawless scripted precision and you thought to yourself, heck, why aren't I playing that guy? This game is probably for you.
• Do you ever find the distant, informal patronage of priest and warlock to be frustratingly impersonal, and wish instead you'd been hand-selected for unbearable greatness by a shadow-walking devil-zombie? This game is probably for you!
• Parasite EVE was an amazing game for its time. Prototype was tons of fun. Dishonored, Bioshock, Eternal Darkness...
• A world of rising infection and crisis where for ONCE your entire existence is not a series of tense interpersonal arguments involving concealed bite-marks and "someone has to make a supply run" - it's too late! And it's GLORIOUS! Overturn the stereotypes and sink both hands into the wriggling pseudo-life discovered beneath them!