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ataraxion application (tw: sexual content, psychological abuse, gore/violence)
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Chinatown
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beachland
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
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pyg
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: William Tsang
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: While incarcerated, William finds himself possessed by a demon named Guangtou from his country of origin. They agree to get off planet Earth by joining a military spacefaring program that recruits from jails around the world.
Number: RNG works for me!
Setting: In the year 2124, planet Earth is a dystopia with dozens of overpopulated and direly polluted metropolises, and mankind has drawn its natural resources to the maximum. The major world governments make voyages into [relatively] nearby solar systems to mine for uranium ore and other minerals necessary for the perpetuation of human civilization. Approximately 2% of the population has begun to manifest superhuman abilities due to the involvement of spiritual entities (e.g., demons), forgotten by most of mankind, who have been roused by what seems to be the end of civilization.
These spiritual enemies have many names among civilians of the world; more names than exist in folklore and teachings of religious and spiritual beliefs. While most, if not all, relate in some way to established mythologies in terms of physical appearance or the abilities that they grant their mortals, they rarely map on exactly. A creature like a Catholic angel might also have characteristics of the androgynous goddess of mercy, Guanyin, or the sun god Ra might have physical characteristics that hearken back to Amaterasu's sword, mirror, and jewel-- and both might as likely have animalistic details to their appearance, observe weakness against iron, or grant abilities to manipulate light. To the religious-minded and civilians around the world, these creatures as often seem like impostors as manifestations of faith. To secular analysts, it's no fault of the spiritual beings that human religion screwed up in the process of interpretation.
Despite an initial wave of panic in 2080 when these 'possessed' individuals first began to appear, research (both private and government-funded) indicated no particular pattern of conspiracy. Most of the anomalies had considerable autonomy. Naturally, the next step was to make these anomalies useful. Some forms of integration were relatively innocuous: elite law enforcement corps of men who could turn into fire and women who could fly, an actress who could change her skin, government aides who held or could defend against influence over the mind, park rangers who have granted their animal charges eerily keen insight into how to preserve their all but vanished numbers. Prejudice perpetuated in relatively discreet ways, such as problems in upward mobility in various structures, a little more tolerance for violence against their minority when self-defense, increasingly harsh legislation against cultism in many parts of the world.
Guangtou, whose name simply means 'bald head,' is William's companion. He is a demon, mostly. He possesses traditional Taoist magic, influences over dreams, has the painfully thin neck of the creatures starving in Hell, associations with dogbane, a healing herb, and the bird-like characteristics of a garuda, perhaps even one of the Celestial Kings. His attitudes emphasize but are not confined to the Buddhist notion of dharma. In other words, he tends to press for moral imperatives. Yet his agenda is far and away from modern human interpretations the term, and he is as comfortable with some forms of vengeance-- and certainly violence-- as with heteronormativity. Like many of his fellow entities, he seems to give limited fucks about what people actually do in practice. After all, it took a few millennia for them to make a showing in force. Curiosity and exploration seem to motivate him as much as, if not more than great righteousness.
Most importantly, his influence on Earth seems limited drastically by his human vessel.
History: William was born in the year 2100 at an impoverished enclave 869 (Balokgao) on the Hong Kong SAR, China, not unlike the Walled City of Kowloon that had fallen over a century ago. Like most of the children born within it, he did not have a birth certificate. He slept in the same room as his mother, who could reach opposite walls of their sleeping quarters with her head and feet merely by lying down. His mother was a butcher's daughter who certainly aspired to something better and his father ran mail, one of a handful of people able to come to and leave 869 with any kind of regularity. They were married, but that wasn't certified either. It would have taken them a great deal more than a marriage certificate to be happy.
To those who lived within the enclave, the televised images of eighty-story blocks of hover residences, intelligent streets, nanotechnological medical care, personal spacecraft, and robotic servicemen that didn't break or smell of mingled urine and rust seemed to belong to a different world. Other than, of course, the fact that all this was visible-- in flashes, and only far away, of course-- from the uneven rooftops of 869.
The enclave was a twenty-story warren of buildings that had become interjoined over the course of decades of illegal construction and make-do repair, plus one sprawling airship. He lived beside a doctor who had fled one of the great metropolises to avoid a tidal wave of malpractice suits, and William naturally received pediatric care there. Everybody ate dogs, cats, ducks, and fish out of a river that stank of waste, but they were hardly autonomous; plenty of industrialists had taken up space on the lowest floors, cutting costs on sanitation, safety, and labor by moving their processes into the enclave. There weren't any police, and the Triad presence within the enclave had its own peculiar loyalty as much to the hideous little district as to the hierarchy beyond the walls. As he was one of the handful of 'outsiders' who could actually find his way around, William's father was integral to the politics of industry and mafia.
As a child, William was kind and patient, but not very bright. It started when he was age five, and his father spent a fortune to bring in a psychologist to test him and determined that William might even be stupid. He had a terrible memory, couldn't lie to save his life-- nor, more relevantly, recognize a lie. Further, he had the deductive powers of an especially small cheesecloth. Lucky for him, schooling within 869 took up two hours a day perhaps three days out of the week. Luckily also, this schooling took place under the tutelage of three professors, one of whom was legally blind, the other two that were very indifferent, and nobody really noticed when he cut class. He was pretty enough to make friends easily, and thoughtless enough that he didn't notice most of the times he was made fun of or left to scapegoat their pranks. He survived primarily on cautious yes-man social graces and good looks, both of which ran afoul of him now and then, when concealed jealousy boiled over into traitorous bad instruction. William was not especially aware of how miserable he was.
Were it not for his mother's sporadic but harsh discipline, he would not have been literate. He probably would have wound up dead instead when, at the age of ten, his friends conspired to steal the enormous, genetically-modified breeder fish that food production kept downstairs. He stopped home after school very briefly in order to don rubber shoes, and his mother saw through his lie in the space of time it took to draw a breath. By the time his friends were intercepted, one of the boys had lost his arm to the paraphyletic matron in the massive blue tank tank; more importantly, none of them were shot nor particularly remembered despite their trespass. That, too, was the clout of his father's name.
Despite her occasional invocation of her husband's importance, however, William's mother had begun to resent her husband. Some ten years ago, the original plan had been to climb the ranks and get out of the block, but she had not realized her husband was as afraid of his Triad peers as he was. In truth, her husband was something of a coward and prone to feeling comfortable. Worse, the toxicity of sentiment was mutual. William's father began to bring extravagant-- indeed, unaffordable gifts from the outside world-- holographic dresses, a flesh-and-fiberglass dog that gave sloppy kisses but needed to recharge in the sun, a little hoverbike for William which he gave away the next day to make an old Popo smile. Eventually these gifts became expected. At length, they became too costly and effectively bankrupt Mr. Tsang. At no point where they actually enough. They argued frequently.
To add to their awkward strain, Mr. and Mrs. Tsang also had a homosexual son who they had never really gotten to know and culturally had no real way of accepting. What love they had for him was embarrassingly default, an evolutionary prerogative and biochemical obligation rather than any heartfelt enthusiasm for the human being he was filling out into. A conversation with a priest informed William on no uncertain terms that his sexual preferences were not consistent with the carefully designed lifestyle formula for anybody who was Chinese. Work, marriage, kids (acquired through Conventional, biological means); this was a success that would be guaranteed by sufficient fortitude. These matters were of peculiarly inflated significance in a society where exploitation and poverty were problematic and one sometimes found human teeth in one's food.
Unfortunately, the monk also took the liberty of informing his parents of his inquiries. There was A Conversation. After he turned eighteen, he went to college outside 869-- paid for by his very generous grandfather-- and then he ran away. His ingratitude became a thing of local legends later on.
Importantly, it hadn't been William's idea, actually. He had met a guy. Really cool. From Europe: Germany, to be specific, just passing through to do the latest off-brand narcotics. Isidor was a handsome orphan, terrifyingly charismatic and monstrously emotional, led a troupe of pet lesbians across the States while he was not writing poetry. He was here, he said, to right the ugliness of the world. Probably, William should've noticed something off when the stanzas that were recited to him made him weep as he measured out syringes of diamorphine, but William had always been somewhat lacking in that sort of presence of mind. He was swept off his feet. To Beijing.
Beijing was only the first stop.
It was very exciting. Even having [illegal] legal documentation for the first time was exciting. Streets without ceilings, baths out of water that wasn't cooling unit condensation, the eerie symmetry of big city gardens, money, all of this was exciting. Everything was so exciting, in fact, that it was very difficult for William to figure out what exactly was off about their adventure. Alternating between hotel rooms, youth hostels, squatting in summer mansions where one of the girls hacked the security systems or hijacked mobile apartments that had roaches in he mattresses and blood in the bathtubs, the occasional overnight stay at warehouses, all of it following the boom and bust cycle of living very irresponsibly off drug money. Occasionally, they were shot at by people who did not understand, and they lost a few lesbians to jail cells. Fortunately, Isidor had a way of rationalizing, balancing, managing everything. Even retreating to Europe with only five credits after the airship fare.
However, the long flight to London was the first time Isidor had ever needed to really shut him up. William's conscience had emerged full-force in light of recent losses to their travelling party, and all this stuff on the telly about capital punishment for drug traffickers fueled an inescapable (and rather noticeable) annoyance out of his questions and concerns. Isidor had to physically rotate his lover's head by holding his chin to get him to look out the window. The panorama of towers and sprawling holographic advertisements distracted William sufficiently to end the conversation.
William's transition into prostitution was about as gradual as one could be, which was-- not really. It only took one time, though the frequency of the act only increased to any sort of regularity when Isidor's habit got that costly. William was about twenty-one then, his worldview secularized, morality deconstructed into fundamental components like 'do no harm.' He had no job, no marketable skills. William turned tricks when they needed money; that just happened to be increasingly often as the months wore on. Almost a year into the work, in their travels, Isidor had him with a couple and he accidentally burst the woman's breast implant, which was terrifying even before he was told of their considerable political affiliations. He and Isidor fled Russia with the heat of blackmail at their heels. As dim as William was, he had his revelation then. The way that Isidor kissed him, retold the story, bit his ear the night after their hysterical escape-- he realized that it was the first time Isidor had laughed with him in weeks. He understood then that his boyfriend was getting bored of his steadfast regard.
In truth, the first real evidence of this and of the growing inequality in their relationship had become available a few months earlier. William had started to realize he had a magic, like the stories reserved for small children back at the enclave, the news stories that popped up occasionally about patriotic supersoldiers, fortune-tellers who didn't fuck up, or rogue telekinetics, and this one very popular show about a bounty hunter that could talk to cats. That was supposed to be amazing. A john hit him, and he willed away the pain and the mark. He caught 'flus, colds, fevers, venereal embarrassments for which they often didn't have the money to spare because of their other costs, like marijuana, heroin, or pills. Isidor-- dismissed this. All of it. He disbelieved the ailments when William claimed he had them, pointed out that William's deficiency in all other areas might as well contribute resources to his immune system, and save him from trouble of a simple and physical nature.
That shut William up pretty quick. He kept it to himself, over the years: his gift, that he had one, that he needed it to survive Isidor, worst of all.
A year after Russia, they were in Brighton's cold beaches at the end of the 'bust' part of the cycle when Isidor decided to leave. Upped and vanished, right out of the luxury air-cruiser they had been squatting in. Silas woke up with a dead girl friend in the bed beside him and didn't stop screaming for three minutes. In other words, indeed, he passed out.
When William woke again, he was detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. The presiding officer asked him if he wanted to ever go home again and he said "No," which was entirely true, but seemed to throw off wherever the man had been hoping to go with that line of questioning. They couldn't find much to formally charge him with, so they slapped him with trespassing and burglary. Deportation proceedings were bottlenecked first by the fact that they weren't sure where he had come from, and then second by the abrupt appearance of his odd abilities during an altercation on prison grounds. Rather than something as polite and discreet as recovering from ailments at an accelerated rate, he instead grew eleven feet tall and knocked a couple of two-hundred pound and martially-competent men down. After that, Her Majesty's officers put him under observation; nothing particularly scandalous, just what the Hell right. He literally burst out of his pants and there was nothing fabulous about it, and he'd seemed as confused as they afterward.
Around this time, William began to experience intense, almost hallucinatory dreams. Every dream featured a creature that must have been a demon or might have been a god, a chimera of images he half-recognized from old stories. It had a fearsome face and a very thin neck, iron-tipped hands and feet that seemed as much like the digits of a broken bird as the gnarled roots of a tree, a ring of dogbane flowers on his head, always with his-- its-- eyes closed. Aside from this entity's presence, no two dreams were alike; he as often found himself undergoing fantastical exorcisms as caring for a terminally ill Isidor, listening to his mother sleep and trying to hit robots in the optics with twelve-year-old cohorts. Upon waking, William characteristically dismissed them as fragmented recollections of myths and stories overheard during an earlier and different part of his life. This reaction offended the creature who was actually responsible for these dreams and a few other recent events in his life, who responded by changing his brain structure. This time, he awoke screaming.
He was also haemorrhaging blood out of his ears and had burst a vein in his eye and completely crushed by the awareness he had wasted twenty-two years his life on dependency and pathetic weakness, indifference to those who had treated him well and loyalty to those who had taken advantage of him and innumerable others. Uncharacteristically, he did not cry; in no small part because crying was no longer characteristic for him. He experienced the cruel revelation that his somewhat inscrutable new companion, Guangtou, was here to stay-- as well as the harsh relief that that was probably the best thing that had happened to him in awhile. In the span of a few days, William caught up with two decades of misery, wist, and terror he had never been fully cognizant of. Further testing revealed his cognitive abilities had improved drastically and his personality parameters changed a little beside. William was hardly in the 99th percentile of construct 'intelligence;' mostly, he was smart enough to know how unhappy he was.
When he came out of it, he found that he had been enlisted in Blackstone, a joint government-sponsored academy for incarcerated individuals who possessed gifts like (or unlike) his own. It was shockingly above-board, really: they asked him for his consent, initiated a salary, sentence-negotiation, and seven-year education program, and contacted his family on his behalf. Initially, they proposed a five-year contract pending extensive training, to integrate himself and his abilities into military operations. It seemed cushy. You know, hang around a military hospital 9-5, talk to cute soldiers, grope a nice butt to fix a cracked pelvis here or there. However, Guangtou had other, considerably more dangerous ideas. In his unhappiness and regret, the idea he would be thirty before he was free and never again beyond the reach of government interests, William agreed to help a 'demon' out. Fuck it. Notably, it did not escape William that Guangtou at no time threatened to withdraw his patronage, and this perhaps was as meaningful to him as all the financial security in the goverment could offer.
To the government, he counter-offered four years-- and an assignment aboard a spaceship. The spacefaring program, Project Antapex, focused on accumulating resources from relatively nearby solar systems and provided a mixed bag of the more competitive and less challenging positions. Much of the mining and excavation procedures were automated by technology, yet the whole thing was tremendously, inherently dangerous between the side-effects of cryogenics and geomagnetic storms.
All this in mind, he signed the contract and was promptly dual-enrolled into the Blackstone and Antapex training programs. The facility was on the moon which was-- brilliant, surreal, the view of Earth more terrifying in its smallness than the multitude of stars in their limitless depth. Guangtou felt something too and it colored William's dreams, leaked pictures of complex clouds, food offerings, and carnivorous peach gardens. Some things were alien, even to the immortals of the world. Something like kinship came from that.
William liked it better than he expected. The lunar colony was cleaner, more spacious than the cities of Earth, all white chrome and containment fields. It was emptier, too, than the idealized brochures at home depicted them to be, but there was novelty in that, too, and liquor tasted the same no matter what finish the bar glistened with. Pleasantly, there were all sorts of other officer cadets, Blackstone and otherwise; he was differentiated almost solely by the fact that he had an ankle tracker. Unlike many entities in their world, the old gods and demons found demographic details a trivial basis of differentiation. At the time of his departure from his world, he had not yet completed training, but he had maneuvered through the worst of the peer politics, made a few friends, and installed a very tiny flower pot in his quarters. If there was something insidious afoot, he wasn't around long enough to discover what it was.
Personality:
William is a depressive young man who harbors serious regrets about his past. He is vastly disappointed in himself, in no small part because he is heartbroken over an ex-partner who treated him very poorly. These perceptions are furthermore wholly accurate-- he was a doormat and complicit in a lot of abuse of third parties for much of his life. Unfortunately, insight about his problem is not enough to cure the problem entirely. His personality still lends itself easily to codependency. He is a charitable, empathic, and generous person by nature, and helping others tends to bring him considerable solace. Drawing boundaries is and has always been difficult for him. He uses alcohol, cigarettes, and narcotics when available as coping strategies.
That being said, he isn't a complete noodle! Despite his underlying unhappiness, William comports himself quite well. His self-medication, while worrisome at times, lend themselves well to social contact; he is a gregarious young man who curses often and unapologetically, loves a good joke-- or a good story even better, flirts easily, and expresses his affections as often through teasing people as by offering gifts. While he has a tendency to scold, he is fairly pragmatic about it. Typically, he is curious and genuinely interested in people, which probably stems from that he is a romantic at heart. That is, he isn't a 'romantic' in the sense of platitudes in pink icing on the top of a cake, but he has a weakness for gallows humor, men with good manners, and women who won't back down from an argument. He is rarely truly angry and finds it almost impossible to hold a real grudge. In other words, he finds other people very easy to forgive exactly because he has himself failed so many times in the past. This cheerful and sometimes rather loud affect is in no small way a method of avoiding his internal state.
Finally, it should be noted that William is a bit of a coward. Specifically, he responds very badly to Things Happening Suddenly, especially violence. In such ambushes, his immediate instinct is to hide. Possibly behind somebody else! Even if they are a lady, sorry, chivalry is totes mcgotes dead. However, this ostensible kneejerk cowardice is counterbalanced by a great deal of resolve underlying.
However, when the element of surprise is off the table, William possesses mulish resolve. When he is given enough time to truly think about something, to plan and consider his principles and options to the fullest, he is capable of remarkable steadfastness and even self-sacrifice. Furthermore, given the massive bulwark of his high-functioning depression, his self-image is very difficult for external events to influence for better or worse. He knows what he did and where he has come from.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
William's abilities are derived from mythological Taoist "magic" as seen in the Monkey King and other similar myths and fables.
William's 'supernatural' weaknesses include"
William's psychological weaknesses include:
William's skills include:
Inventory:
Appearance: William is a young man of Chinese descent, standing at 5'7" in height. He has short black hair and a reasonably fair complexion, though he tans easily. He doesn't have much of a nose, but his features 'hang together' fairly well, in keeping with conventional expectations of handsomeness in his country of origin. He is narrow of build, bordering on lanky, but physically fit in the way of someone who eats well and scraped by a rigorous fitness regimen with little intrinsic motivation. He has remarkably good teeth.
His right thumb is slightly clubbed, and visibly shorter than his let thumb.
Age: 24
AU Clarification:
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
"We ought to try one of those drinks where you set them on fuckin' fire," William decides, scraping his chair back, standing at his full height. Which isn't much, granted, but he slings himself over the top of the bar with zeal that exceeds his apparent coordination, and after the prodigious thump of his landing, his voice grows loud enough to compensate when he vanishes over the other side. Some people have a presence that are larger than their bodies are. "I seriously doubt this place has got the proper kind of lighter, but I've got a little one. I mean, I'm a little attached to the skin of my hands, personally, but--"
He emerges fist-first, his fingers closed tightly around the neck of the bottle. Cigarette smoke rings around his head like a misshapen nimbus. He arranges a pyramid of shotglasses with his other hand with surprising dexterity. Six shotglasses altogether; nothing too scandalous. "Tell me one of your powers is you're flame-retardant, yeh?" he requests. His eyebrows push up high on his forehead, and he lays a little Bic out on the surface. "And if you're gonna lie, make it good."
Comms Sample:
[A beat. Typically, he'd like more than a quaver to spend thinking about something that seems as important and inherently frightening as introducing himself to an alien space ship full of unknown quantities, but 'typically' didn't actually really apply here. The shot of liquid courage would have to suffice. You can hide anything under enough liquor. The familiarity of the device in his hand was more alarming than reassuring: any form of good news in a place like this reeks like a trick, at best something to be taken away, at worst--
--he'd rather not imagine. He is so very awful with surprises.
To anyone who's listening, his accent is probably more prominent than the fear.]
Your Name: Chinatown
OOC Journal:
beachlandUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM:
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: William Tsang
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: While incarcerated, William finds himself possessed by a demon named Guangtou from his country of origin. They agree to get off planet Earth by joining a military spacefaring program that recruits from jails around the world.
Number: RNG works for me!
Setting: In the year 2124, planet Earth is a dystopia with dozens of overpopulated and direly polluted metropolises, and mankind has drawn its natural resources to the maximum. The major world governments make voyages into [relatively] nearby solar systems to mine for uranium ore and other minerals necessary for the perpetuation of human civilization. Approximately 2% of the population has begun to manifest superhuman abilities due to the involvement of spiritual entities (e.g., demons), forgotten by most of mankind, who have been roused by what seems to be the end of civilization.
These spiritual enemies have many names among civilians of the world; more names than exist in folklore and teachings of religious and spiritual beliefs. While most, if not all, relate in some way to established mythologies in terms of physical appearance or the abilities that they grant their mortals, they rarely map on exactly. A creature like a Catholic angel might also have characteristics of the androgynous goddess of mercy, Guanyin, or the sun god Ra might have physical characteristics that hearken back to Amaterasu's sword, mirror, and jewel-- and both might as likely have animalistic details to their appearance, observe weakness against iron, or grant abilities to manipulate light. To the religious-minded and civilians around the world, these creatures as often seem like impostors as manifestations of faith. To secular analysts, it's no fault of the spiritual beings that human religion screwed up in the process of interpretation.
Despite an initial wave of panic in 2080 when these 'possessed' individuals first began to appear, research (both private and government-funded) indicated no particular pattern of conspiracy. Most of the anomalies had considerable autonomy. Naturally, the next step was to make these anomalies useful. Some forms of integration were relatively innocuous: elite law enforcement corps of men who could turn into fire and women who could fly, an actress who could change her skin, government aides who held or could defend against influence over the mind, park rangers who have granted their animal charges eerily keen insight into how to preserve their all but vanished numbers. Prejudice perpetuated in relatively discreet ways, such as problems in upward mobility in various structures, a little more tolerance for violence against their minority when self-defense, increasingly harsh legislation against cultism in many parts of the world.
Guangtou, whose name simply means 'bald head,' is William's companion. He is a demon, mostly. He possesses traditional Taoist magic, influences over dreams, has the painfully thin neck of the creatures starving in Hell, associations with dogbane, a healing herb, and the bird-like characteristics of a garuda, perhaps even one of the Celestial Kings. His attitudes emphasize but are not confined to the Buddhist notion of dharma. In other words, he tends to press for moral imperatives. Yet his agenda is far and away from modern human interpretations the term, and he is as comfortable with some forms of vengeance-- and certainly violence-- as with heteronormativity. Like many of his fellow entities, he seems to give limited fucks about what people actually do in practice. After all, it took a few millennia for them to make a showing in force. Curiosity and exploration seem to motivate him as much as, if not more than great righteousness.
Most importantly, his influence on Earth seems limited drastically by his human vessel.
History: William was born in the year 2100 at an impoverished enclave 869 (Balokgao) on the Hong Kong SAR, China, not unlike the Walled City of Kowloon that had fallen over a century ago. Like most of the children born within it, he did not have a birth certificate. He slept in the same room as his mother, who could reach opposite walls of their sleeping quarters with her head and feet merely by lying down. His mother was a butcher's daughter who certainly aspired to something better and his father ran mail, one of a handful of people able to come to and leave 869 with any kind of regularity. They were married, but that wasn't certified either. It would have taken them a great deal more than a marriage certificate to be happy.
To those who lived within the enclave, the televised images of eighty-story blocks of hover residences, intelligent streets, nanotechnological medical care, personal spacecraft, and robotic servicemen that didn't break or smell of mingled urine and rust seemed to belong to a different world. Other than, of course, the fact that all this was visible-- in flashes, and only far away, of course-- from the uneven rooftops of 869.
The enclave was a twenty-story warren of buildings that had become interjoined over the course of decades of illegal construction and make-do repair, plus one sprawling airship. He lived beside a doctor who had fled one of the great metropolises to avoid a tidal wave of malpractice suits, and William naturally received pediatric care there. Everybody ate dogs, cats, ducks, and fish out of a river that stank of waste, but they were hardly autonomous; plenty of industrialists had taken up space on the lowest floors, cutting costs on sanitation, safety, and labor by moving their processes into the enclave. There weren't any police, and the Triad presence within the enclave had its own peculiar loyalty as much to the hideous little district as to the hierarchy beyond the walls. As he was one of the handful of 'outsiders' who could actually find his way around, William's father was integral to the politics of industry and mafia.
As a child, William was kind and patient, but not very bright. It started when he was age five, and his father spent a fortune to bring in a psychologist to test him and determined that William might even be stupid. He had a terrible memory, couldn't lie to save his life-- nor, more relevantly, recognize a lie. Further, he had the deductive powers of an especially small cheesecloth. Lucky for him, schooling within 869 took up two hours a day perhaps three days out of the week. Luckily also, this schooling took place under the tutelage of three professors, one of whom was legally blind, the other two that were very indifferent, and nobody really noticed when he cut class. He was pretty enough to make friends easily, and thoughtless enough that he didn't notice most of the times he was made fun of or left to scapegoat their pranks. He survived primarily on cautious yes-man social graces and good looks, both of which ran afoul of him now and then, when concealed jealousy boiled over into traitorous bad instruction. William was not especially aware of how miserable he was.
Were it not for his mother's sporadic but harsh discipline, he would not have been literate. He probably would have wound up dead instead when, at the age of ten, his friends conspired to steal the enormous, genetically-modified breeder fish that food production kept downstairs. He stopped home after school very briefly in order to don rubber shoes, and his mother saw through his lie in the space of time it took to draw a breath. By the time his friends were intercepted, one of the boys had lost his arm to the paraphyletic matron in the massive blue tank tank; more importantly, none of them were shot nor particularly remembered despite their trespass. That, too, was the clout of his father's name.
Despite her occasional invocation of her husband's importance, however, William's mother had begun to resent her husband. Some ten years ago, the original plan had been to climb the ranks and get out of the block, but she had not realized her husband was as afraid of his Triad peers as he was. In truth, her husband was something of a coward and prone to feeling comfortable. Worse, the toxicity of sentiment was mutual. William's father began to bring extravagant-- indeed, unaffordable gifts from the outside world-- holographic dresses, a flesh-and-fiberglass dog that gave sloppy kisses but needed to recharge in the sun, a little hoverbike for William which he gave away the next day to make an old Popo smile. Eventually these gifts became expected. At length, they became too costly and effectively bankrupt Mr. Tsang. At no point where they actually enough. They argued frequently.
To add to their awkward strain, Mr. and Mrs. Tsang also had a homosexual son who they had never really gotten to know and culturally had no real way of accepting. What love they had for him was embarrassingly default, an evolutionary prerogative and biochemical obligation rather than any heartfelt enthusiasm for the human being he was filling out into. A conversation with a priest informed William on no uncertain terms that his sexual preferences were not consistent with the carefully designed lifestyle formula for anybody who was Chinese. Work, marriage, kids (acquired through Conventional, biological means); this was a success that would be guaranteed by sufficient fortitude. These matters were of peculiarly inflated significance in a society where exploitation and poverty were problematic and one sometimes found human teeth in one's food.
Unfortunately, the monk also took the liberty of informing his parents of his inquiries. There was A Conversation. After he turned eighteen, he went to college outside 869-- paid for by his very generous grandfather-- and then he ran away. His ingratitude became a thing of local legends later on.
Importantly, it hadn't been William's idea, actually. He had met a guy. Really cool. From Europe: Germany, to be specific, just passing through to do the latest off-brand narcotics. Isidor was a handsome orphan, terrifyingly charismatic and monstrously emotional, led a troupe of pet lesbians across the States while he was not writing poetry. He was here, he said, to right the ugliness of the world. Probably, William should've noticed something off when the stanzas that were recited to him made him weep as he measured out syringes of diamorphine, but William had always been somewhat lacking in that sort of presence of mind. He was swept off his feet. To Beijing.
Beijing was only the first stop.
It was very exciting. Even having [illegal] legal documentation for the first time was exciting. Streets without ceilings, baths out of water that wasn't cooling unit condensation, the eerie symmetry of big city gardens, money, all of this was exciting. Everything was so exciting, in fact, that it was very difficult for William to figure out what exactly was off about their adventure. Alternating between hotel rooms, youth hostels, squatting in summer mansions where one of the girls hacked the security systems or hijacked mobile apartments that had roaches in he mattresses and blood in the bathtubs, the occasional overnight stay at warehouses, all of it following the boom and bust cycle of living very irresponsibly off drug money. Occasionally, they were shot at by people who did not understand, and they lost a few lesbians to jail cells. Fortunately, Isidor had a way of rationalizing, balancing, managing everything. Even retreating to Europe with only five credits after the airship fare.
However, the long flight to London was the first time Isidor had ever needed to really shut him up. William's conscience had emerged full-force in light of recent losses to their travelling party, and all this stuff on the telly about capital punishment for drug traffickers fueled an inescapable (and rather noticeable) annoyance out of his questions and concerns. Isidor had to physically rotate his lover's head by holding his chin to get him to look out the window. The panorama of towers and sprawling holographic advertisements distracted William sufficiently to end the conversation.
William's transition into prostitution was about as gradual as one could be, which was-- not really. It only took one time, though the frequency of the act only increased to any sort of regularity when Isidor's habit got that costly. William was about twenty-one then, his worldview secularized, morality deconstructed into fundamental components like 'do no harm.' He had no job, no marketable skills. William turned tricks when they needed money; that just happened to be increasingly often as the months wore on. Almost a year into the work, in their travels, Isidor had him with a couple and he accidentally burst the woman's breast implant, which was terrifying even before he was told of their considerable political affiliations. He and Isidor fled Russia with the heat of blackmail at their heels. As dim as William was, he had his revelation then. The way that Isidor kissed him, retold the story, bit his ear the night after their hysterical escape-- he realized that it was the first time Isidor had laughed with him in weeks. He understood then that his boyfriend was getting bored of his steadfast regard.
In truth, the first real evidence of this and of the growing inequality in their relationship had become available a few months earlier. William had started to realize he had a magic, like the stories reserved for small children back at the enclave, the news stories that popped up occasionally about patriotic supersoldiers, fortune-tellers who didn't fuck up, or rogue telekinetics, and this one very popular show about a bounty hunter that could talk to cats. That was supposed to be amazing. A john hit him, and he willed away the pain and the mark. He caught 'flus, colds, fevers, venereal embarrassments for which they often didn't have the money to spare because of their other costs, like marijuana, heroin, or pills. Isidor-- dismissed this. All of it. He disbelieved the ailments when William claimed he had them, pointed out that William's deficiency in all other areas might as well contribute resources to his immune system, and save him from trouble of a simple and physical nature.
That shut William up pretty quick. He kept it to himself, over the years: his gift, that he had one, that he needed it to survive Isidor, worst of all.
A year after Russia, they were in Brighton's cold beaches at the end of the 'bust' part of the cycle when Isidor decided to leave. Upped and vanished, right out of the luxury air-cruiser they had been squatting in. Silas woke up with a dead girl friend in the bed beside him and didn't stop screaming for three minutes. In other words, indeed, he passed out.
When William woke again, he was detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. The presiding officer asked him if he wanted to ever go home again and he said "No," which was entirely true, but seemed to throw off wherever the man had been hoping to go with that line of questioning. They couldn't find much to formally charge him with, so they slapped him with trespassing and burglary. Deportation proceedings were bottlenecked first by the fact that they weren't sure where he had come from, and then second by the abrupt appearance of his odd abilities during an altercation on prison grounds. Rather than something as polite and discreet as recovering from ailments at an accelerated rate, he instead grew eleven feet tall and knocked a couple of two-hundred pound and martially-competent men down. After that, Her Majesty's officers put him under observation; nothing particularly scandalous, just what the Hell right. He literally burst out of his pants and there was nothing fabulous about it, and he'd seemed as confused as they afterward.
Around this time, William began to experience intense, almost hallucinatory dreams. Every dream featured a creature that must have been a demon or might have been a god, a chimera of images he half-recognized from old stories. It had a fearsome face and a very thin neck, iron-tipped hands and feet that seemed as much like the digits of a broken bird as the gnarled roots of a tree, a ring of dogbane flowers on his head, always with his-- its-- eyes closed. Aside from this entity's presence, no two dreams were alike; he as often found himself undergoing fantastical exorcisms as caring for a terminally ill Isidor, listening to his mother sleep and trying to hit robots in the optics with twelve-year-old cohorts. Upon waking, William characteristically dismissed them as fragmented recollections of myths and stories overheard during an earlier and different part of his life. This reaction offended the creature who was actually responsible for these dreams and a few other recent events in his life, who responded by changing his brain structure. This time, he awoke screaming.
He was also haemorrhaging blood out of his ears and had burst a vein in his eye and completely crushed by the awareness he had wasted twenty-two years his life on dependency and pathetic weakness, indifference to those who had treated him well and loyalty to those who had taken advantage of him and innumerable others. Uncharacteristically, he did not cry; in no small part because crying was no longer characteristic for him. He experienced the cruel revelation that his somewhat inscrutable new companion, Guangtou, was here to stay-- as well as the harsh relief that that was probably the best thing that had happened to him in awhile. In the span of a few days, William caught up with two decades of misery, wist, and terror he had never been fully cognizant of. Further testing revealed his cognitive abilities had improved drastically and his personality parameters changed a little beside. William was hardly in the 99th percentile of construct 'intelligence;' mostly, he was smart enough to know how unhappy he was.
When he came out of it, he found that he had been enlisted in Blackstone, a joint government-sponsored academy for incarcerated individuals who possessed gifts like (or unlike) his own. It was shockingly above-board, really: they asked him for his consent, initiated a salary, sentence-negotiation, and seven-year education program, and contacted his family on his behalf. Initially, they proposed a five-year contract pending extensive training, to integrate himself and his abilities into military operations. It seemed cushy. You know, hang around a military hospital 9-5, talk to cute soldiers, grope a nice butt to fix a cracked pelvis here or there. However, Guangtou had other, considerably more dangerous ideas. In his unhappiness and regret, the idea he would be thirty before he was free and never again beyond the reach of government interests, William agreed to help a 'demon' out. Fuck it. Notably, it did not escape William that Guangtou at no time threatened to withdraw his patronage, and this perhaps was as meaningful to him as all the financial security in the goverment could offer.
To the government, he counter-offered four years-- and an assignment aboard a spaceship. The spacefaring program, Project Antapex, focused on accumulating resources from relatively nearby solar systems and provided a mixed bag of the more competitive and less challenging positions. Much of the mining and excavation procedures were automated by technology, yet the whole thing was tremendously, inherently dangerous between the side-effects of cryogenics and geomagnetic storms.
All this in mind, he signed the contract and was promptly dual-enrolled into the Blackstone and Antapex training programs. The facility was on the moon which was-- brilliant, surreal, the view of Earth more terrifying in its smallness than the multitude of stars in their limitless depth. Guangtou felt something too and it colored William's dreams, leaked pictures of complex clouds, food offerings, and carnivorous peach gardens. Some things were alien, even to the immortals of the world. Something like kinship came from that.
William liked it better than he expected. The lunar colony was cleaner, more spacious than the cities of Earth, all white chrome and containment fields. It was emptier, too, than the idealized brochures at home depicted them to be, but there was novelty in that, too, and liquor tasted the same no matter what finish the bar glistened with. Pleasantly, there were all sorts of other officer cadets, Blackstone and otherwise; he was differentiated almost solely by the fact that he had an ankle tracker. Unlike many entities in their world, the old gods and demons found demographic details a trivial basis of differentiation. At the time of his departure from his world, he had not yet completed training, but he had maneuvered through the worst of the peer politics, made a few friends, and installed a very tiny flower pot in his quarters. If there was something insidious afoot, he wasn't around long enough to discover what it was.
Personality:
William is a depressive young man who harbors serious regrets about his past. He is vastly disappointed in himself, in no small part because he is heartbroken over an ex-partner who treated him very poorly. These perceptions are furthermore wholly accurate-- he was a doormat and complicit in a lot of abuse of third parties for much of his life. Unfortunately, insight about his problem is not enough to cure the problem entirely. His personality still lends itself easily to codependency. He is a charitable, empathic, and generous person by nature, and helping others tends to bring him considerable solace. Drawing boundaries is and has always been difficult for him. He uses alcohol, cigarettes, and narcotics when available as coping strategies.
That being said, he isn't a complete noodle! Despite his underlying unhappiness, William comports himself quite well. His self-medication, while worrisome at times, lend themselves well to social contact; he is a gregarious young man who curses often and unapologetically, loves a good joke-- or a good story even better, flirts easily, and expresses his affections as often through teasing people as by offering gifts. While he has a tendency to scold, he is fairly pragmatic about it. Typically, he is curious and genuinely interested in people, which probably stems from that he is a romantic at heart. That is, he isn't a 'romantic' in the sense of platitudes in pink icing on the top of a cake, but he has a weakness for gallows humor, men with good manners, and women who won't back down from an argument. He is rarely truly angry and finds it almost impossible to hold a real grudge. In other words, he finds other people very easy to forgive exactly because he has himself failed so many times in the past. This cheerful and sometimes rather loud affect is in no small way a method of avoiding his internal state.
Finally, it should be noted that William is a bit of a coward. Specifically, he responds very badly to Things Happening Suddenly, especially violence. In such ambushes, his immediate instinct is to hide. Possibly behind somebody else! Even if they are a lady, sorry, chivalry is totes mcgotes dead. However, this ostensible kneejerk cowardice is counterbalanced by a great deal of resolve underlying.
However, when the element of surprise is off the table, William possesses mulish resolve. When he is given enough time to truly think about something, to plan and consider his principles and options to the fullest, he is capable of remarkable steadfastness and even self-sacrifice. Furthermore, given the massive bulwark of his high-functioning depression, his self-image is very difficult for external events to influence for better or worse. He knows what he did and where he has come from.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
William's abilities are derived from mythological Taoist "magic" as seen in the Monkey King and other similar myths and fables.
- Healing: William is in preternaturally excellent health. He is able to heal himself from most physical illnesses, poisons, and injuries without long-term ill effects or scarring, although he cannot regenerate limbs and destroyed brain tissue will result in cognitive changes. The more severe the injury, the longer it takes to heal; a gunshot may take a few hours to close once the bullet is removed, whereas third degree burns or crush syndrome may take 3 days to recover fully. He can also 'lay hands' on others, allowing them to utilize this ability as well-- and he can 'patch up' severe arterial injury this way, preventing people from bleeding out. However, for more serious injury, the process is exhausting for both parties.
- Dream manipulation: William has limited ability to visit the dreams of others. This operates primarily through empathy and will not work on those he has not met and conversed with several times, no matter whether the interaction was favorable or conflict. He has some capacity to change the atmosphere, general trajectory (i.e., subverting a nightmare to a slightly more favorable outcome), and minor details in the dreams that he is visiting.
Notably, William contacts the demon 'riding' along with him primarily through dreams. Guangtou does not have much of a physical presence. Instead, he negotiates with William when he sleeps, through images, impressions, and usually indistinct but sometimes complex ideas.
With mod permission only: However, the 'demon' aboard William's conquest is a far more powerful dream manipulator. Guangtou's abilities emerge only when, much like the Freudian model of Id-Superego-Ego, William becomes so emotionally overwhelmed that he strives too hard to control his emotions or gives into them completely, failing to mediate or find some balance between the two. Needing only cursory contact [through William] with others, Guangtou induces hallucinatory dreams, nightmares or wish fulfillment. These dreams can cause physical injury (i.e., ranging from headaches to strokes) or healing (see William's healing above) when completed.
All of Guangtou's dreams tend to be themed around dharma, which translates loosely to an individual's fate or karmic role in the world from a perspective that holds all elements of the world are interlinked. Morality is rarely black-and-white; for example, per the Ramayana, maintaining loyalty to a wicked brother is no better or worse than betraying him to rescue others from suffering.
- Guangtou: Fleeting communication with Guangtou does occur while William is awake as well, but it tends to be rather broad strokes.
- Changing size: William can change his physical size at will. He is able to shrink to a quarter of an inch (i.e., small enough to sit in the curl of an adult human's ear) to twenty feet in height in height with proportional weight. However, when forced to do so under duress, he is likely to overshoot or undershoot the desired size change, or sometimes even shrinking instead of growing. His strength increases proportionately with his size to a maximum of 1 ton in lift and his speed increases when he shrinks, such as that he is able to run at the rate of a walking adult when shrunk to an extreme. The process of changing his size takes approximately one second.
- Mimicking physical objects: William can change his shape to mimick objects, such as furniture or even weapons. However, all of the objects must be low-technology in nature. He might be able to mimick a sword, clock, or perhaps even a pistol, but he would not be able to transform himself into a television or phaser. In order to change to an object, he must first change his mass. Note, when under duress, there will almost always be something slightly 'off' about the object that reveals it is not mundane, much as Su Wukong's tail gave him away. A clock might have a cap of black hair on top, or the pistol might have an eye on the trigger guard.
William's 'supernatural' weaknesses include"
- Exorcism: of many disciplines, not only Taoism, will suppress his abilities for hours or days (mod rules).
- Power limitations: see above for individual power limitations.
William's psychological weaknesses include:
- Cowardice: when taken by surprise, William tends to err on the side of not brave. He is easily flustered and will need to a few minutes to calm down if he reaches a hysterical state of msgklhlsf during which time he will mostly be useless.
- Guilt: it is quite possible to touch a nerve with William by eliciting details of his past. He was directly and indirectly responsible for a great deal of harm coming to those who were close to him and even those who were not (i.e., he might have been a disease vector for some time).
William's skills include:
- Basic training military training, I.e., fitness and sidearms -- he is very bad the latter, notably, and has little if any natural talent; his hand-eye coordination is mediocre at best.
- Basic space training: he understands some terms and basic mechanical functions about spacecraft and engineering in his universe.
- Narcotics knowledge
- Medical training-- the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry, and two years of graduate-level training in medicine
Inventory:
- 3 pairs of pants
- 3 shirts
- 1 Great British naval cadet uniform
- 1 spacesuit
- 1 carton of cigarettes
- 5 grams of marijuana (in a bag)
- Ankle tracker
Appearance: William is a young man of Chinese descent, standing at 5'7" in height. He has short black hair and a reasonably fair complexion, though he tans easily. He doesn't have much of a nose, but his features 'hang together' fairly well, in keeping with conventional expectations of handsomeness in his country of origin. He is narrow of build, bordering on lanky, but physically fit in the way of someone who eats well and scraped by a rigorous fitness regimen with little intrinsic motivation. He has remarkably good teeth.
His right thumb is slightly clubbed, and visibly shorter than his let thumb.
Age: 24
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
"We ought to try one of those drinks where you set them on fuckin' fire," William decides, scraping his chair back, standing at his full height. Which isn't much, granted, but he slings himself over the top of the bar with zeal that exceeds his apparent coordination, and after the prodigious thump of his landing, his voice grows loud enough to compensate when he vanishes over the other side. Some people have a presence that are larger than their bodies are. "I seriously doubt this place has got the proper kind of lighter, but I've got a little one. I mean, I'm a little attached to the skin of my hands, personally, but--"
He emerges fist-first, his fingers closed tightly around the neck of the bottle. Cigarette smoke rings around his head like a misshapen nimbus. He arranges a pyramid of shotglasses with his other hand with surprising dexterity. Six shotglasses altogether; nothing too scandalous. "Tell me one of your powers is you're flame-retardant, yeh?" he requests. His eyebrows push up high on his forehead, and he lays a little Bic out on the surface. "And if you're gonna lie, make it good."
Comms Sample:
Hey.
[A beat. Typically, he'd like more than a quaver to spend thinking about something that seems as important and inherently frightening as introducing himself to an alien space ship full of unknown quantities, but 'typically' didn't actually really apply here. The shot of liquid courage would have to suffice. You can hide anything under enough liquor. The familiarity of the device in his hand was more alarming than reassuring: any form of good news in a place like this reeks like a trick, at best something to be taken away, at worst--
--he'd rather not imagine. He is so very awful with surprises.
To anyone who's listening, his accent is probably more prominent than the fear.]
Lei ho. This is Private William Tsang. I've got superpowers. Healer ones. I hear we come out of those tupperware slimb wombs without a scratch every few weeks, guaranteed, but if you get fucked up in the interval, you ought to look me up. I don't charge.
Later.
Later.