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entirely_empatheticApp under the cut!
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Kat
AGE: 22
JOURNAL:destroyalldreamers
IM / EMAIL: ask please
PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
HowloftheSun
RETURNING: NOPE I’M NEW AS FUCK
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Niall Wilder
CHARACTER AGE: 77 (looks like he’s thirty-something)
CANON ORIGIN: Original
CHRONOLOGY: A few months after Aileen becomes a fish stick
CLASS: Villain
HOUSING: random housing is totally fine with me
BACKGROUND:
Niall is the product of advanced genetic science and his mother’s almost fanatical drive to advance human evolution. As such, he’s more than a little screwed up. He’s the eldest of three siblings, each with their own strange psychokinetic/telepathic abilities.
Born in 1934 in Russia, Niall spent his early childhood as the subject of various experiments designed to troubleshoot his telepathic abilities. None of them pleasant and leaving him with an extreme dislike of anything even remotely similar to genetic science or medical practices. After the death of his father, the responsibility of caring for his siblings fell to Niall. Eventually, he decided that he’d had enough of his family and its insanity and left, choosing to emigrate from Russia to America at the age of 22.
Unfortunately, Niall’s arrival in America wasn’t anything like what his father had made it out to be. Due to prevalent anti-communist sentiments, he was often treated with hostility and finding a job was impossible. In an act of desperation, he resorted to using his telepathy to cheat at poker for money. Through this, Niall realized that he could get almost anything he wanted with the right push; everything else required the skills of more than one man. Fortunately for him, Niall wasn’t the only angry, disenchanted immigrant looking for a way to make a living with few scruples as to the means. And, with a combination of subtle mental manipulation, promises, and bribery, Niall was well on his way to starting his own gang.
Fast forward about ten years to somewhere in the 1960s. Niall is thoroughly enjoying the life of organized crime and, as with most illegal endeavors; people get hurt on a fairly regular basis. Due to the questionable legality of his gang’s activities, Niall became a frequent patron of an underground clinic run by Dr. Aileen Kimbler. The two butted heads almost every time Niall showed up. Aileen would almost constantly lecture Niall on his amoral practices and jacking up the price for her services; Niall alternately insulting and teasing Aileen and just generally being a jerk.
Shortly after meeting Aileen, a new gang showed up and made it a point of removing the competition; Niall’s group of hooligans to be specific. This group was made up of strange people and creatures the likes of which Niall had never seen before and had no idea how to deal with. To make matters worse, Niall took a bullet to the head and was declared dead.
Lucky for Niall, he wakes up, weak and disorientated with the most obnoxious headache of his life. Eventually he runs into Aileen, and he soon learns that her clinic had been torched by the same gang that had attacked his and that the two shared a common goal. After quite a few awkward questions as to how it was possible for Niall to be walking around without a hole in his head, the two grudgingly decide to work together. Together the two take care of their mutual goals and find out a few interesting things about each other on the way. Niall learns that Aileen is a mermaid (and that all the fairy tales he heard when he was little are true in some form or other) and Aileen learns that Niall is some weird science experiment.
Scoot forward about forty years and Niall finds himself waking up in a clinic to a rather surprised Aileen instead of mommy dearest’s smiling face. Turns out his brother’s friend, Dominik, had gone to get Niall and his brother back, succeeded, and made it out with a kid he’d found as well. Score. After the general hullaballoo of “oh my god, mom actually had us that time” dies down everybody attempts to return to what they were doing before, with the addition of Aileen and the mystery kid Dominik picked up, named Mercy.
Niall and Aileen spend more time with each other partially because Aileen is really good at tolerating Niall’s everything and also because they actually start to enjoy each other’s company. She’s the only person he’s met that he can’t mentally manipulate which gives her a sort of equal playing field that no other person has. She challenges his opinions and ideas and doesn’t let him get away with his general shenanigans. She believes he’s capable of better things while he doesn’t and that’s something he’s never had. What started off as a rather strange friendship slowly grows into something more. Next thing everybody else knows, they’re a couple. It’s surprising, I know. They’re ridiculous.
Everything is great and life is good up until a detective shows up asking questions and digging around for information on Niall’s mother and her more than questionable genetic studies. Needless to say, Niall is not pleased. Niall finds out the man was hired by the people that came before him; his mother’s failed experiments and takes it as a sort of personal attack. He goes out of his way to avoid anything to do with his mother and here these people are, nosing into his business. What better way to get them to leave him alone than to push back.
Niall goes about solving this problem with increasingly violent solutions, much to Aileen’s displeasure. She constantly offers up the option of helping these people which Niall always ignores. He refuses to see reason when it comes to his family and things finally escalates to such a point where, when Niall finds out where his mother’s rejects are hiding, he decides that burning down the building is the best idea since cell phones. It’s not but okay, Niall you do that.
When Aileen gets wind of this plan she does the first thing any altruistic mermaid would do and tries to get there first with a warning. She certainly does make it there first too. She burns.
She loses her physical body and is now some sort of watery ghost critter. As such she has to adjust to the sudden changes and goes into hiding, refusing to talk to Niall on the grounds of her needing space to figure things out. Niall is left on his own to deal with guilt he has no idea what to do with and a detective that still wants answers. In a sort of halfhearted bid to distract himself from his horrible life choices, he decides to help the detective to a degree. It’s better to do something rather than wallow in guilt and alcohol, right?
PERSONALITY:
Niall is a sociopath, plain and simple. He likes to pass himself off as charming and charismatic when there’s really a monster lurking just beneath the surface. He’s terribly manipulative. He almost never recognizes the rights of others and sees his self-serving behaviors as permissible. He’s hostile, domineering, and thinks of people as instruments to be used. Despite his intimate knowledge of human psychology and emotions, he’s incapable of empathizing with others; having only contempt for their feelings and readily taking advantage of them.
Ironically, Niall has issues expressing his own emotions let alone knowing how to deal with them. More often than not, the face he shows others is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. When he does feel something genuine he has no idea what to do with it more than half the time and ends up attempting to shove it under the proverbial carpet or, in more extreme cases, having a mild emotional meltdown.
He cares very little about the consequences of his actions as they rarely affect him directly and often blames others for things he obviously had a hand in. As long as he gets what he wants it doesn’t matter how many lives he wrecks in order to get there. The end always justifies the means and he lets nothing stand in his way. As far as he’s concerned, he never loses. He just suffers minor setbacks from time to time.
Despite the fact that Niall will ruthlessly use someone till there is nothing left, he rarely goes so far as to physically harm people himself. He feels their pain as well as the emotional trauma that goes along with it and it’s much easier to get someone else to do it for him if he really needs someone gone. That doesn’t always stop him though. He’s jealous and can get violent when angry. He doesn’t always make the most rational, well thought out decisions when he’s running on indignant, homicidal rage.
Niall is a very private, solitary individual, mostly brought on by living in the heads of every person he meets. There are very few people he cares for (and even less that want to be around him) but those few people have the dubious honor of his affections and he attempts to protect them to the best of his abilities.
Long story short, this man is ninety nine problems and all of them are his life choices.
POWER:
Dude has three already and they are:
Regeneration:
First off, he can regenerate. It heals the damage done by aging. It’s not smart though. While it can heal cuts and bruises no problem, if bones are broken or he gets shot, his body will heal things as they are. Bones do not set themselves and bullets aren’t forced back out the way they came. The healing itself is not pleasant either. It hurts like a bitch. The greater the damage, the more it hurts, and the longer it takes to heal. Small cuts heal in a second or two whereas big holes can take a few minutes. The more wounds there are, the longer it takes to heal. There is also only so much it can do. If he sustains too much damage in a short period of time (like, say, getting pumped full of lead with a tommy gun) the regeneration can’t keep up, gradually slows (partially due to blood loss as well as the sheer scale of the damage) and stops all together….and then he dies unless he gets medical attention like a normal person.
Empathy:
The second, and probably most important ability, is what he calls Empathy. He can feel the emotions of others and, by extension, manipulate them. It’s pretty much telepathy but with a specialized bent to it that is constantly working; like a sixth sense. He can ignore people to some degree but, it’s a lot like listening to white noise when he’s not paying attention to others. He hears the sound but not specific thoughts or feelings so to speak.
As far as pushing or pulling people’s emotions go, it’s a lot like trying to herd a bunch of bitchy cats. The human mind is a disorganized, complicated mess of thoughts and feelings that he has to sift through and then persuade to do a certain thing. Subtlety is key. Too heavy a hand can severely damage a mind, making a person into a vegetable. Sometimes that’s the goal though. He uses this ability as a weapon just as much as a means for gathering information or getting what he wants.
It can work against him though. Due to the fact that he can’t completely block out the thoughts of others; situations where a large group of people are thinking about the same thing can end up influencing him. It’s subtle and he generally doesn’t realize what’s going on till he finds himself doing things he usually wouldn’t ever do. Physical contact with other people is something he avoids. It hurts. It shoves their mind into his and he can’t ignore it. In the most extreme cases he passes out. He can gain a tolerance to people though; if they repeatedly touch him (he can count on one hand the people that he has a tolerance to).
The only thing this ability is limited by is magic/supernatural shenanigans. People who are born from magic (or whatever else) like faeries and such don’t register to him and so, seem to lack brain functions. It’s like they aren’t there. Mages and people who have acquired magical traits don’t count.
Forced Hallucinations:
Niall can make people hallucinate. This is augmented by the fact that he can rummage around in people’s minds and find out what makes them tick. Hallucinations can range from small, subtle things to elaborate, world encompassing nightmares depending on how much energy he’s willing to spend. The more detailed and involved a hallucination his, the more effort it takes to maintain it. He doesn’t use this ability much though, as it’s much easier to push emotions around.
Also, as a kind of catch-all: he gets headaches rather frequently from his abilities. Be it from putting too much into a hallucination or just being around large groups of people for extended periods of time.
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Kat
AGE: 22
JOURNAL:
destroyalldreamersIM / EMAIL: ask please
PLURK:
RETURNING: NOPE I’M NEW AS FUCK
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Niall Wilder
CHARACTER AGE: 77 (looks like he’s thirty-something)
CANON ORIGIN: Original
CHRONOLOGY: A few months after Aileen becomes a fish stick
CLASS: Villain
HOUSING: random housing is totally fine with me
BACKGROUND:
Niall is the product of advanced genetic science and his mother’s almost fanatical drive to advance human evolution. As such, he’s more than a little screwed up. He’s the eldest of three siblings, each with their own strange psychokinetic/telepathic abilities.
Born in 1934 in Russia, Niall spent his early childhood as the subject of various experiments designed to troubleshoot his telepathic abilities. None of them pleasant and leaving him with an extreme dislike of anything even remotely similar to genetic science or medical practices. After the death of his father, the responsibility of caring for his siblings fell to Niall. Eventually, he decided that he’d had enough of his family and its insanity and left, choosing to emigrate from Russia to America at the age of 22.
Unfortunately, Niall’s arrival in America wasn’t anything like what his father had made it out to be. Due to prevalent anti-communist sentiments, he was often treated with hostility and finding a job was impossible. In an act of desperation, he resorted to using his telepathy to cheat at poker for money. Through this, Niall realized that he could get almost anything he wanted with the right push; everything else required the skills of more than one man. Fortunately for him, Niall wasn’t the only angry, disenchanted immigrant looking for a way to make a living with few scruples as to the means. And, with a combination of subtle mental manipulation, promises, and bribery, Niall was well on his way to starting his own gang.
Fast forward about ten years to somewhere in the 1960s. Niall is thoroughly enjoying the life of organized crime and, as with most illegal endeavors; people get hurt on a fairly regular basis. Due to the questionable legality of his gang’s activities, Niall became a frequent patron of an underground clinic run by Dr. Aileen Kimbler. The two butted heads almost every time Niall showed up. Aileen would almost constantly lecture Niall on his amoral practices and jacking up the price for her services; Niall alternately insulting and teasing Aileen and just generally being a jerk.
Shortly after meeting Aileen, a new gang showed up and made it a point of removing the competition; Niall’s group of hooligans to be specific. This group was made up of strange people and creatures the likes of which Niall had never seen before and had no idea how to deal with. To make matters worse, Niall took a bullet to the head and was declared dead.
Lucky for Niall, he wakes up, weak and disorientated with the most obnoxious headache of his life. Eventually he runs into Aileen, and he soon learns that her clinic had been torched by the same gang that had attacked his and that the two shared a common goal. After quite a few awkward questions as to how it was possible for Niall to be walking around without a hole in his head, the two grudgingly decide to work together. Together the two take care of their mutual goals and find out a few interesting things about each other on the way. Niall learns that Aileen is a mermaid (and that all the fairy tales he heard when he was little are true in some form or other) and Aileen learns that Niall is some weird science experiment.
Scoot forward about forty years and Niall finds himself waking up in a clinic to a rather surprised Aileen instead of mommy dearest’s smiling face. Turns out his brother’s friend, Dominik, had gone to get Niall and his brother back, succeeded, and made it out with a kid he’d found as well. Score. After the general hullaballoo of “oh my god, mom actually had us that time” dies down everybody attempts to return to what they were doing before, with the addition of Aileen and the mystery kid Dominik picked up, named Mercy.
Niall and Aileen spend more time with each other partially because Aileen is really good at tolerating Niall’s everything and also because they actually start to enjoy each other’s company. She’s the only person he’s met that he can’t mentally manipulate which gives her a sort of equal playing field that no other person has. She challenges his opinions and ideas and doesn’t let him get away with his general shenanigans. She believes he’s capable of better things while he doesn’t and that’s something he’s never had. What started off as a rather strange friendship slowly grows into something more. Next thing everybody else knows, they’re a couple. It’s surprising, I know. They’re ridiculous.
Everything is great and life is good up until a detective shows up asking questions and digging around for information on Niall’s mother and her more than questionable genetic studies. Needless to say, Niall is not pleased. Niall finds out the man was hired by the people that came before him; his mother’s failed experiments and takes it as a sort of personal attack. He goes out of his way to avoid anything to do with his mother and here these people are, nosing into his business. What better way to get them to leave him alone than to push back.
Niall goes about solving this problem with increasingly violent solutions, much to Aileen’s displeasure. She constantly offers up the option of helping these people which Niall always ignores. He refuses to see reason when it comes to his family and things finally escalates to such a point where, when Niall finds out where his mother’s rejects are hiding, he decides that burning down the building is the best idea since cell phones. It’s not but okay, Niall you do that.
When Aileen gets wind of this plan she does the first thing any altruistic mermaid would do and tries to get there first with a warning. She certainly does make it there first too. She burns.
She loses her physical body and is now some sort of watery ghost critter. As such she has to adjust to the sudden changes and goes into hiding, refusing to talk to Niall on the grounds of her needing space to figure things out. Niall is left on his own to deal with guilt he has no idea what to do with and a detective that still wants answers. In a sort of halfhearted bid to distract himself from his horrible life choices, he decides to help the detective to a degree. It’s better to do something rather than wallow in guilt and alcohol, right?
PERSONALITY:
Niall is a sociopath, plain and simple. He likes to pass himself off as charming and charismatic when there’s really a monster lurking just beneath the surface. He’s terribly manipulative. He almost never recognizes the rights of others and sees his self-serving behaviors as permissible. He’s hostile, domineering, and thinks of people as instruments to be used. Despite his intimate knowledge of human psychology and emotions, he’s incapable of empathizing with others; having only contempt for their feelings and readily taking advantage of them.
Ironically, Niall has issues expressing his own emotions let alone knowing how to deal with them. More often than not, the face he shows others is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. When he does feel something genuine he has no idea what to do with it more than half the time and ends up attempting to shove it under the proverbial carpet or, in more extreme cases, having a mild emotional meltdown.
He cares very little about the consequences of his actions as they rarely affect him directly and often blames others for things he obviously had a hand in. As long as he gets what he wants it doesn’t matter how many lives he wrecks in order to get there. The end always justifies the means and he lets nothing stand in his way. As far as he’s concerned, he never loses. He just suffers minor setbacks from time to time.
Despite the fact that Niall will ruthlessly use someone till there is nothing left, he rarely goes so far as to physically harm people himself. He feels their pain as well as the emotional trauma that goes along with it and it’s much easier to get someone else to do it for him if he really needs someone gone. That doesn’t always stop him though. He’s jealous and can get violent when angry. He doesn’t always make the most rational, well thought out decisions when he’s running on indignant, homicidal rage.
Niall is a very private, solitary individual, mostly brought on by living in the heads of every person he meets. There are very few people he cares for (and even less that want to be around him) but those few people have the dubious honor of his affections and he attempts to protect them to the best of his abilities.
Long story short, this man is ninety nine problems and all of them are his life choices.
POWER:
Dude has three already and they are:
Regeneration:
First off, he can regenerate. It heals the damage done by aging. It’s not smart though. While it can heal cuts and bruises no problem, if bones are broken or he gets shot, his body will heal things as they are. Bones do not set themselves and bullets aren’t forced back out the way they came. The healing itself is not pleasant either. It hurts like a bitch. The greater the damage, the more it hurts, and the longer it takes to heal. Small cuts heal in a second or two whereas big holes can take a few minutes. The more wounds there are, the longer it takes to heal. There is also only so much it can do. If he sustains too much damage in a short period of time (like, say, getting pumped full of lead with a tommy gun) the regeneration can’t keep up, gradually slows (partially due to blood loss as well as the sheer scale of the damage) and stops all together….and then he dies unless he gets medical attention like a normal person.
Empathy:
The second, and probably most important ability, is what he calls Empathy. He can feel the emotions of others and, by extension, manipulate them. It’s pretty much telepathy but with a specialized bent to it that is constantly working; like a sixth sense. He can ignore people to some degree but, it’s a lot like listening to white noise when he’s not paying attention to others. He hears the sound but not specific thoughts or feelings so to speak.
As far as pushing or pulling people’s emotions go, it’s a lot like trying to herd a bunch of bitchy cats. The human mind is a disorganized, complicated mess of thoughts and feelings that he has to sift through and then persuade to do a certain thing. Subtlety is key. Too heavy a hand can severely damage a mind, making a person into a vegetable. Sometimes that’s the goal though. He uses this ability as a weapon just as much as a means for gathering information or getting what he wants.
It can work against him though. Due to the fact that he can’t completely block out the thoughts of others; situations where a large group of people are thinking about the same thing can end up influencing him. It’s subtle and he generally doesn’t realize what’s going on till he finds himself doing things he usually wouldn’t ever do. Physical contact with other people is something he avoids. It hurts. It shoves their mind into his and he can’t ignore it. In the most extreme cases he passes out. He can gain a tolerance to people though; if they repeatedly touch him (he can count on one hand the people that he has a tolerance to).
The only thing this ability is limited by is magic/supernatural shenanigans. People who are born from magic (or whatever else) like faeries and such don’t register to him and so, seem to lack brain functions. It’s like they aren’t there. Mages and people who have acquired magical traits don’t count.
Forced Hallucinations:
Niall can make people hallucinate. This is augmented by the fact that he can rummage around in people’s minds and find out what makes them tick. Hallucinations can range from small, subtle things to elaborate, world encompassing nightmares depending on how much energy he’s willing to spend. The more detailed and involved a hallucination his, the more effort it takes to maintain it. He doesn’t use this ability much though, as it’s much easier to push emotions around.
Also, as a kind of catch-all: he gets headaches rather frequently from his abilities. Be it from putting too much into a hallucination or just being around large groups of people for extended periods of time.