rhodos app

[smokes]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: Ruthi
Age: 18+
Contact: pm or jackalopes
Timezone: EST
Other characters: none

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Alex Karamazov
Canon: original
Canon point: n/a
Age: 28
History:
setting:
➤ A modern "urban fantasy"-esque in the sense that magic exists. Witchcraft is ubiquitous and practiced by lots of people (in secret).
➤ Supernatural abilities — telekinesis, precognition, corporikinesis (a.k.a. ability to manipulate matter), exist but are extremely rare.
➤ Deities (who for the most part act as trickster/fae types) exist in forms that can be bargained with for favors of various sorts. They can only interact with the human world through humans.
➤ The one Alex works for (/belongs to), Zygcyne, typically shows up to other humans as a wolf-fox-type creature. Bigger favors increase the likelihood of monkey's paw shit, and his quid pro quo tends to be doing something innocuous that will be the first step in a butterfly sequence.
➤ Bargains and communications are made in liminal spaces, they tend to act as portals, so any that are a particular Hot Spot can have highly unsettling Vibes. (Common spaces are train stations and hotels.)

alex:

Alex was raised in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with two mostly okay parents and an older sister whomst he hero-worshipped. Life was big normal until he was nine and broke a kid's bone on the playground just by touching them. This was the first time his power (corporikinesis) manifested. His parents (to his memory) didn't really know how to deal with this, other than to drill "conceal don't feel" into him, causing extreme emotional repression that in no way affected him in any other aspect of his life. /s (this also marked a several-year-long period of spitefully destroying objects, breaking windows, punching walls, etc out of not knowing how to deal with big feelings until high school and finding healthier outlets, like sports. AKA hockey.)

When he was 16, his family moved to Boston. He was super unhappy and immediately Over It because his entire life was in New York. (Also, his older sister had moved out and did not go to Boston with them. This was especially hard for him.) Roughly a year after they moved, his father died of a brain aneurysm. As he remembers it, his father had the same abilities Alex has. He ran his powers too hard and it killed him, the end.

The truth of the matter is that his death was actually a completely non-supernatural aneurysm and his mom decided to play "fuck around and find out" with magic. In the midst of having a huge mental breakdown, she summoned Zygcyne and tried to make a deal to bring her husband back to life. The big surprise monkey's paw of this (since you really shouldn't play fuck around and find out with... life) was that Alex got to attempt to use his powers to do this, overworked himself, seized out, then died for two minutes. (his dad got a whole 30 that he didn't even get to be conscious for.)

After all that, his mom used witchcraft to duct tape over his memory of this whole event ever happening. Again: his dad was psychic like him, he died and it was very sad, Alex was sad enough to try and bring him back himself, and got a hella tight clinical death doing it?? There are Swiss cheese hole-sized fallacies in here: e.g., if his father was "like him" why didn't he try to teach him to handle his powers at all? But Alex is, uh, "blessed" with the ability to gloss it over or not think about it at all. Or blame it on seizures.

He "remembers" his dad working for Zygcene and having to be traded in his place or something like that, when it's really more of a very toxic "I have rescued you from an abusive situation, the abusive situation I've created for you is far superior" arrangement. His "job" is to be debt collector for Zygcyne. When people make deals and don't meet their end of the bargain (typically by answering unknown phone calls and texts to perform Acts with no further information why), Alex gets to track them down and threaten them into compliance. Aggressively "threaten." Sometimes this goes bad or turns violent. He has killed a non-zero amount of people but tries not to think about it too much. Or ever. But it's fine, because he's paid in being a sugar baby and never having to worry about housing or money or anything material, really. See? Non-abusive. Great.

He never really recovered from his resurrection attempt and following NDE — by attempting to use so much power in one go, he short-circuited himself and probably should have stayed dead for real. And that's why whenever he uses his powers, he's blessed with eldritch migraines that make him feel like his skull is going to burst open. (this after-effect usually happens some time later, so he tends to think of them as and call them hangovers.) His apartment is scattered with a pharmacy's worth of medications because he's trying to cope with the pain — which only helps so much because it's throwing normal remedies at psychic problems. The reason he doesn't just Stop is that the rush from using his powers is an addictive drug in and of itself. That one moment of getting high on power is worth a day of debilitating migraine, because otherwise there would be no way to feel good at all (by his perception.)

And that's where he's been in life: living in Boston for 12 years and some change, wanting to go back to New York because it's an unrealistic ideal he's created in his mind while he's the indentured servant of a narcissist trickster god who basically goes "you can't, because I said so." He has a very small circle of friends and a robust history of Tinder/Grindr hookups, but he's commitment-averse because sometimes you come out of trauma with a deep-seated fear of abandonment. Better to live life like a psychic The Weeknd song.

Suitability:
Alex is accustomed to disturbing supernatural occurrences, being himself and knowing a widespread community of witches, psychics, working for a trickster god and knowing some of his sketchy god friends. He's also accustomed to brutality and violence, especially being on the giving side of it. It's very hard to faze him (and maybe he should be fazed, just saying. ) He also has, uh, a minefield of emotional trauma to work through.

Is this a re-app? no

Inventory:
(1) Swiss army knife
(1) Keys with a friendship-bracelet-looking attachment on the key loop — it's literally like the magic charm version of Claritin for his severe dog allergy
(1) A small first aid kit zip-up pouch with different prescription bottles and pill holders with varied amounts of medications for migraines/seizures/pain relief. (I doubt it will actually come up, but I rolled rng out of 30 for amounts: 14 Valium; 15 Topamax; 3 Imitrex; 4 Klonopin; 26 Zofran; 22 Dilaudid; 4 Phenergan)

Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits:
extrasensory perception - He can sense ghosts or otherworldly presences, but not much more than "must be a ghost in here." In short, he's able to walk into otherwise unfelt cold spots.

psychic static — As a side-effect of the wack-job on his memory, he's impervious to mind-reading. Anyone who tries is met with physically painful psychic feedback. This does not make him impervious to mind control or anything of that nature, he's simply unreadable.

corporikinesis —
Alex can manipulate the bodies of living things; essentially their physical well-being.
Skin-on-skin touch is required, and he needs physical awareness of what he's doing — e.g. being able to envision squeezing someone's heart vs. touching someone and going "hope your appendix explodes, wherever that is lol"
He can't change or alter something that isn't there, e.g. causing illnesses or anything like shapeshifting.
When he uses his powers in any capacity, he gets a "hangover" some hours later, usually in the form of a debilitating migraine.
He can heal, but it's much harder/energy-consuming (a similar principle to "it's easier to break something than to put it back together"). He also considers it worthless to heal himself unless it's a critical situation, because the trade-off usually isn't worth it.

Levels, if needed, borrowing from the Abbreviated Injury Scale and NACA scoring:

➤ 1: Can heal or inflict minor injuries. Examples: minor lacerations, first-degree burns, things that heal quickly and easily on their own.

➤ 2: Can heal or inflict moderate injuries. examples: minor fractures, moderate cuts, dehydration. things that may be painful or take longer to heal but can do so with little interference. can manipulate the nervous system to feel pain that isn't there or reduce pain.

➤ 3: Can heal or inflict serious injuries. Examples: broken bones. Person is conscious and responsive, needs help but not in imminent danger. Can manipulate the nervous system to cause temporary paralysis.

➤ 4: can heal or inflict acute injuries. Examples: suffocation, heart attack, serious things that could cause the other party to lose consciousness (BUT NOT DIE as per nerfing, any harm stops as soon as they drop)

(the pain felt by himself would match severity at those levels)

MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas:
As a child, Alex had trouble controlling his power, resulting in him potentially hurting anyone he touched. Feeling othered for something out of his control made him quick to anger and lash out via tantrums and destroying inanimate objects. He's still quick to anger, but better at keeping it inside instead of breaking lamps and punching walls. Sometimes he just wakes up angry. Pinterest says that anger is actually just grief in disguise, and considering all the things that have happened to him worth grieving over, that's accurate. If there's something that upsets him, it's easier to get mad than turn it into a cry.

Trying to keep his temper inside also led to him trying to keep everything inside, leaving him very emotionally repressed. Letting any big feelings be known, not just anger, is horrifying, because to him it means being perceived as weak. 99% of the time he is putting on a front to protect himself from being perceived. Part of it is that to be effective at his job he has to act Tough and strong, but then he never actually takes the mask off. If he acts heartless enough, maybe someday he will be and then the world won't hurt so much. (Too bad he's not heartless, no matter how hard he tries at that, too.)

Because deep inside he is a person with soft feelings who cares deeply about other people, he considers it not only a weakness, but a weakness that will bite him in the ass when he's inevitably abandoned. Being given up (as he remembers) by his mom has given him a deep fear of abandonment, which has fucked him up in the sense that he hates getting too close to anyone, romantically or platonically, because he thinks they'll find something wrong with him and leave forever. So his friendships and attempts at relationships stay very superficial. He's out there like The Goo Goo Dolls going ~I don't want the world to see me 'cause I don't think that they'd understand~


He also doesn't want anyone to get close to him because despite acting like he has an ego the size of the moon, he has a lot of self-doubt about his worth as a person. Alex doesn't think he's actually Good at anything besides using his powers to hurt people, (and he doesn't think he's a good person because he enjoys the feeling he gets from doing it too much to stop.) It's been drilled into him by Zygcyne that it's his one skill, and if he tried to leave indentured servitude and strike it out on his own, he'd fail.

(Also, dogs. He's severely allergic to dogs. When he was a kid he almost asphyxiated so they are very scary!!)

Manifestation name: The Canid
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects:
The Canid is a manifestation of Alex's self-doubt and fear of abandonment. It represents his boss-turned-surrogate-parent figure Zygcene, who constantly tells him things along the line of using his powers is the only thing he's good at and harps on the idea that his mother didn't want him. The Canid is like the nagging voice in the back of his head come to life, essentially.

Description:
The Canid is a large, shadowy figure, humanoid but with the head of what is either a wolf or a fox. It shifts between the two, depending on the angle it's seen from. Its "shadowy" nature means that it's pitch black, the lines and shape wavering to suggest intangibility. If actually close enough to touch, the darkness would feel like fur, but first... you would have to get close enough to touch. It also has a tail, puffy like a fox's.

The only color in The Canid are the eyes, which glow a sickly golden color. When it bears its teeth, which are sharp fangs like a wolf or fox, they're bright white but stained with red against the dark. His hands end in claws that retract, but are the same white-stained red as the teeth when visible.

Attacks and behavior:
The Canid is most interested in turning its target — mainly Alex, but any other player character on the off-chance they get too physically close — against either other characters. Because Alex thinks he's a Danger to Everyone, anyone in Alex's vicinity is a potential target.

If caught making eye contact with The Canid for longer than a second, the target can be persuaded to turn on anyone in its vicinity and fight them. No weapons or powers, just the urge to full-on street brawl.

And if you can attack The Canid without looking in its eyes, it fights like a feral animal with teeth and claws. getting close enough to it to deal melee damage can also make the target's skin itch and breathing become strained.

Path towards resolution:
The way Alex can resolve this is to realize he is more than his powers or a tool to be used. You know, being self-actualized enough to realize that other people care about him and aren't going to abandon him at the drop of a hat. If he can get the doubt out of his head, he can get the manifestation monster out of... his life.

Considering this is a lifetime of trauma that needs undoing, dealing with this manifestation is probably going to be long-term...

SAMPLES
one and two