reparacija app

[smokes]

→ OOC INFO

Name: Ruthi
Contact: pm or jackalopes
Timezone: EST
Over 18?: yes

Other Characters: N/A


→ IC INFO

Character Name/Alias: Alex Karamazov (also formerly known as Alexander Kaznakov)
Character age: 28
Canon: original
Canon point: N/A

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 contradictions 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.

Appearance:
the luq

Personality:
Alex is 60% unresolved and repressed anger issues, 20% caretaker instincts left over from compensating neglect, 10% self-destructive behavior to drown out the emotional pain, and 10% longterm chronic pain in a candy shell. He's the kind of person who acts like an asshole but will show up at 3 am to hide a body or clean your house.

Because his mother gave up on being a person, he and his sister became stubbornly self-sufficient feral street cats, which is a vibe he carries with him to this very day. He insists on doing everything himself, but he's ride or die for the few people he lets in close.

To this point: Alex wants closeness, but doesn't know… how to get it? He's averse (read: scared of but would never admit it in those words) to romantic relationships, and barely opens up enough to anyone to have deep friendships. Besides that nihilism keeping everyone at arm's length, his entire existence is his work, so it feels impossible to let anyone not in that world in. He has a small group of friends — who are indebted to zygcyne — but, again, keeps them at arm's length. Even though they know What He Does, he doesn't think they can understand the awful things ricocheting in his brain cell.

He actually has a not-small amount of insecurity that he doesn't think he could be anything other than a weapon. This is obviously his only skill? And it's a skill he's extremely good at — all that emotional repression gave him a real talent for creative torture without blinking. The fact that this is the only thing he feels he's good at keeps him from trying too hard to escape.

Because he represses so much, he carries around a lot of bottled anger. He's the sort of person to just wake up angry because life is so awful and shitty. All the tantrums from childhood? A thing of the past, but he still feeds one of the two wolves inside him all of that anger. (Would he feel better if he did not? Probably.)

Overall: he acts like a chill sarcastic asshole a good most of the time. Even when he acts mad or annoyed, it's very surface-level; takes a lot to actually get him to the edge. Only a select few get to see the softer side of Sears, but it does in fact exist.


What did they do to end up here?: The most obvious and straight-forward is that he's hurt several people, and killed a few. (less than ten) He's also stolen several things, forged documents (mostly prescriptions), tampered with crime scenes (mostly ones he created...), committed arson (see: tampered with crime scenes), and trespasses into places he has no business being almost daily.


Powers / Abilities:

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.

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 (but can be nerfed to just be a friendship bracelet)

Samples:
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