[OOC] Application for Lost Carnival

[control_freak]

PLAYER↴ Name: Raile Contact: railehatesfun or railehatesfun #6621 Other Characters: Mari Makinami Illustrious CHARACTER↴ Character Name: Foster van Denend Age: 25 Species: Human Canon: OC Canon Point: He'd just killed himself and been resurrected under his own necromantic control, achieved via what was basically an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. Character Info: Foster is from an urban fantasy setting. You know, magical creatures and elements meshed with modern society. Vampires control most if not all world governments, and a few centuries ago decided that now was the time for magical members of society to come forward and stop hiding from the non-magical majority. To prevent some kind of hideous immortal overpopulation explosion (not to mention, you know, ethical and legal issues), making new undead (vampires or otherwise) is tightly regulated and in most cases highly illegal. That part will be relevant later. Foster was born to the kind of lower/middle-middle class family that lives in an apartment, but is in a pretty nice school district. No one probably cares about his childhood, except that he was a Weird Kid (TM) and lagged behind his peers socially, but because his academics were well ahead of the curve, he never got any special support in school. It's not until middle school, when he began to struggle with memory problems, that he got an MRI and CAT scan and was diagnosed with a progressive neurological disease (involving the formation of plaques in the brain and the necrosis of neural cells.) Without treatment, he'll be dead before he turns twenty. WITH treatment... he still won't see 30, but his prognosis is better. The decay is slower. His parents take him to specialists to try and find a cure (or at least stop/slow its progression), but don't handle the news or his emerging symptoms/him in general well. About 9 months after that first MRI, he runs away. The short version of the next ten years is that he continues to deteriorate, but slowly. By the time he's in his early twenties, he suffers from memory problems, motor tics, disinhibition and impulsivity. He also struggles with certain forms of motor control and he's begun to struggle with the task of swallowing, specifically when excited or worked up. He just forgets, basically, and so ends up drooling, a lot. It's a relatively minor inconvenience, but "forgetting" a basic reflex still isn't really a GREAT sign. Foster decides to learn necromancy in order to kill himself before he loses any more agency, then raise himself. He enlists the help of a shop that sells the controlled substances he needs to be able to do this (run by a werewolf named Grant) and talks Grant into giving him the things he needs. Foster was fully prepared to lie about why he was interested in necromancy, but the truth charm over the building wouldn't allow it. By saying something about it, he simultaneously called Grant out on spelling the place and outed himself as willing to lie. With the truth out, Grant (who was honestly kind of a doormat) found he wasn't really willing to turn away someone with a(n eventually lethal) condition. Even if it was illegal. And questionable. But in Grant's defence, Foster's idea was also functionally impossible. Then a few months later, due to the combination of stress and his worsening condition, however, Foster has a psychotic episode in which he becomes convinced Grant is going to turn him in, and tries to kill Grant before he can do that, in self-defence. Which... isn't really self-defence, because Grant wasn't doing any of those things. It's a new low for his mental health, and even though he doesn't succeed in killing Grant, he manages to stab the man multiple times and takes a knife through his own forearm before trying to persuade Grant's adopted child to murder him. He's taken back to the house of his Craigslist girlfriend, a quasi-vampire named Sophie, and she patches him up to the best of her ability. Three weeks later, he attempts his (un)death. And his "answer" to the achieving the impossible is not even close to magical. It's a massive, intricate Rube Goldberg machine, large enough to fill a room and spill out a bit into the hall. It's impractical at best and hilariously overachieving at worst. It starts with a bucket tied to a string, which is connected to the rest of the device and suspended over a series of grooves he's carved into the floor. In order to spill his own blood (as the necromancer) the way the ritual requires and place his own corpse (as the body to be raised) as the ritual requires, he cuts his own throat with a ritual knife, and bleeds out into the bucket. The weight of his blood will eventually pull the bucket down (starting his contraption) and tip the blood so it pours into the grooves, through which it runs until it reaches its intended placement. At one point in this process, there is an undead, headless mouse (his very first necromantic success, in fact) that has to run on a wheel. It's. Definitely something. But it works. Whether he's lucky or brilliant, it fucking works. And he is, in fact, resurrected--under his own magical command, very likely the first undead puppet to be pulling its own strings. This is, admittedly, incredibly illegal. It's illegal in several ways, none of which involve the actual possibility of this happening, because it's not supposed to be possible. But suicide is still (pointlessly) illegal, for one. Raising human beings necromantically is illegal, two. Undead with free will--not to mention human undead--are illegal, for three. Especially without a lot of bureaucratic legwork and/or grandfather clauses, none of which he attempted or qualified for. Raising humans illegally generally earns you life behind bars, at minimum. BEING an illegal undead human is handled via "returning you to death." Undead humans with free will and/or consciousness are committed to a program that works with the undead in question to move on and accept a return to death before they're... uh, re-killed, because you can't have 3985923 randomass previously dead people walking around. Instead, he's just (somewhat involuntarily) joined the circus. Fuck Foster van Denened, honestly. Personality: Simultaneously cold and kind, cunning and desperate, Foster is honestly best described as a hot fucking mess. It's impossible to know Foster without knowing about his neurodegenerative condition. It is (was, is, might always be) the basis for a great deal of his personality, the filter through which he perceives the world. Even though his (un)death has halted its progression, the damage it already caused can't be undone. And because he had/has no future, he has never pursued any interest(s) of his own. But the reason he killed himself (or more specifically raised himself) is not about escaping his fate or any desire to live. Due to a combination of his condition(s), life experiences, and distorted thinking, Foster simultaneously struggles with delusions of grandeur, yet believes himself to be absolutely worthless, someone for whom living is a privilege he doesn't really deserve. And because of his schizoid personality disorder, he has a massive emotional deficit and lacks affective empathy, as well as ambitions or a desire for social interaction. He is aware this latter is abnormal, and that something is wrong with him. Coupled with his neurodegenerative disorder, he's interpreted it as a sign, an inherent deficit that makes him perfect to be someone's puppet or tool rather than having ambitions of his own, like a 'whole' or 'real' person. A kind of special destiny, like a messiah of worthlessness. Being treated like an object is, perversely, validating and empowering to him. But his inevitable, intense awareness of the scarcity of time is a source of intense anxiety and depression for him; he's spent his entire life trying to find a hill to die on, a reason TO die, which means he has effectively spent it trying to throw himself under buses repeatedly and taking his failures harder and harder each time. This hasn't changed. It was his desire to find a "purpose" to justify his having lived that motivated him to pursue undeath, not a desire to actually be alive. In fact, he really, really can't wait to die. In this vein, Foster is desperate to find someone 'real' for whose purposes he can 'serve', and in that sense, he is obsessed with relinquishing control of himself (and his life, and his fate) to someone else. (In a sense, this is a form of running away.) Contradictorily, he's so opposed to giving up control that he went to extraordinary lengths (IMPOSSIBLE, impractical, extremely illegal lengths) to be raised under his own necromantic power, rather than have someone else resurrect him. The concept of control is very, very important to him. The dynamics of control and who's in control and what he controls... distorted thinking is a bitch, okay. He is constantly self-deprecating, constantly trying to degrade himself in others' stead--or, more uncomfortably, trying to get others to agree with him and participate in his quasi-delusional interpretation of reality. A lot of conclusions he draws are often inherently flawed, so his motives sometimes seem counterproductive to how he acts on them (or vice versa.) The (flawed) internal logic of delusional thinking is the primary emotive force for him; outside of it, he struggles to experience or express emotions in any meaningful way. Whether or not others play along, he doesn't listen to direct argument with his assertions. Trying to push different perspectives on him too hard usually elicits a negative response. And it's not that he's opposed to people being nice to him--on the contrary, Foster (like most people) prefers to get along with others, if only because (quite frankly) it's a lot easier to get along than not. And it's certainly not that he believes he's better than anyone else (even if he is smarter, even if he does know or see something they don't, even if--) It's that he resents the idea that someone else knows him better than he does. Such an emotional thought process is fairly rare, though. Due to his emotional apathy, he is a lot less emotionally opposed to things like murder or theft. He is similarly indifferent to the approval or disapproval of others--in this sense, he can appear amoral, if not outright sociopathic. He's only learnt to seem at least somewhat normal by trial and error. Internally, he's disaffected and disinterested and fairly unaware of how others feel about him. Despite (and not because of) his (delusional) beliefs about himself as a person, he simply cannot bring himself to actually care about or even want to care about others. He's outwardly very friendly, though--despite his obvious preference for personal privacy, he prefers to interact with others in a way that doesn't cause conflict or stress. But due to his desire to minimise friction--and his beliefs about his own merit (or lack thereof) as a human being, he tries to sound positive and supportive of people around him. From some perspectives this might be considered selfish, since there's no real altruism behind it. But there's no malice, either. This is very characteristic of Foster, to be honest. Ironically for someone whose own brain is so self-destructive, Foster's greatest strength is actually in his brain. He's very creative, very inventive; though his execution (heh) was absurd and irresponsible, he did achieve a necromantic feat previously considered impossible. He can't stand the idea of himself, but he doesn't actually WANT to feel miserable, and so is as desperate as his schizoid ass can be to find someone to take "control" over him and his life (because he is so worthless he could never live for something of his own/because he is so afraid of failure that having desires of his own is probably terrifying) so he can hurry up and die, but he wants to control himself just as badly as he wants to be overpowered. He's trapped by the circular logic of his own made-up rules. Honestly, he's inherently self-destructive, but as long as you let him be self-destructive on his own terms, he can stay pretty upbeat about it. He's just not a terribly healthy human being. ... Zombie. ... Necromancer. Uh. Thing. Abilities: - Foster is a pretty decent necromancer. What he lacks in experience, he's making up for in creativity. - In LC, he can animate and control bodies, but souls are out of bounds. He can also replace his own body's parts with scavenged ones, at least at the beginning. As he changes more, this may end. - Undead. Can't be stopped or slowed by physical injury. No need to breathe, eat, etc. No pulse. (Still has active breathing reflex from intact brain stem sometimes. Still feels pain, central nervous system IRONICALLY intact.) - Necromantic control over self. Can give himself orders he can not refuse or disobey (or cancel, thanks to logistical loop.) - Lies very easily, sometimes for very little reason. (Disinhibition means he often lies impulsively or 'on a whim.') This is not malicious (that would require a lot more motivation than he has) but it's sometimes easier and less effort. Or, you know. The only way to get the outcome he needs/wants. CARNIVAL↴ Soul Colour: Dark green Ideal Jobs: Talker, Patch, Magician, Conman Relevant Experience: - Life spent learning how to pretend to have affect (affective empathy, facial expressions, etc.) Every moment he's interacting with someone demands a choice between apathy or constant "performance." - IDK necromancy Reason for Joining: SOMEONE doesn't have the self-inhibition to know when to quit games of chance. SAMPLES↴ Sample one Sample two