history for karteria

[macgyver]

early life ( cw: drug usage, zombie virus stuff )

In 2059, Anastasios Argyros was born on the icy blue shores of Mykonos, Greece to an auspicious Greek cryonics empress and a humble, smalltime photojournalist from Iraq. They worked great together as a couple, but their individual parts sure didn't work great together in a child - Anastasios, who would later insist on "Hugh" once British boarding school hit and the nickname Stacy started to stick, struggled with the expectations put on him by both his mother, her family, the Orthodox Catholic schools he went to up until his mid to late teens (boarding school!), and most importantly, himself. He struggled with paying attention to topics and curriculum he didn't find interesting, had issues with authority when corrected, and the more he was pushed into "correct" behavior, the more he pushed back. This lead to increasingly rebellious behavior in his teens and early twenties: Hugh had a distinct weakness for the "obnoxious, jetsetting rich instagram kid" lifestyle, throwing money around, buying his friends, buying his friends drugs, buying himself drugs, and getting into really, really inadvisable friendships and romantic relationships. His talents with engineering and physics fell by the wayside.

All of this culminated in a hard break from his family and their financial support that lasted a good (miserable) five years, until the news that his father was dying brought him crawling back home and put him squarely back under his mother's thumb. He'd been corralled into working for the family cryonics business as a salesman for their side venture of selling supercooled, incredibly fancy thermoses - a blatant, humiliating punishment - and happened to be in NYC when the LEERA biobooms hit. LEERA (a viral infection with rapid transmissibility, a 100% fatality rate, and symptoms that were basically every zombie virus in every zombie movie ever) drove the lucky few nearby onto Earth's fleet of colony and private ships built years ago in preparation for travel to Phanes, a recently-ish discovered distant Earthlike "paradise" planet that seemed to be humanity's answer to looming climate and pollution-related total annihilation. Fleeing Earth, the entire fleet was essentially trapped in orbit, as none of the ships were properly prepared for the trip to Phanes yet and no one was willing to risk starving and dying in space on the way there.

The Protogonos/YS ( cw: body horror, amputation, dental trauma )

It also trapped Hugh on the US ship, the USN Protogonos, as essentially their only sufficiently trained and talented source of engineering skills. (The Protogonos was, in fact, hijacked by a dismissed former spaceship pilot, and the people he took into space were not artfully selected for their skills and usefulness.) Becoming the de facto Head of Engineering on the spot, he was forced to relearn his old skills and teach himself a whole new set or, you know, he and everybody else on the ship would fucking die, which was a great motivator. And he took to it well! The position made him feel important and valuable in a way he'd never really had before, and he was good at it. The Protogonos stayed in one piece, trading with neighboring ships for what it needed and getting by, and nothing bad ever happened, ever.

Enter YS, an extradimensional, non-Euclidean, psychic as fuck alien being that accidentally skipped dimensions and ended up in this one, then set to infecting ships. YS used spores to infect and take over the crews of entire ships, killing everyone in the process and leaving them as haunted, half-empty mausoleums of mutated dead people wandering around - the Rembault went first, then the Prios, and finally, YS came for the Protogonos itself. After losing an entire section of the ship and being forced to airlock everyone and everything inside, Hugh did the normal thing and decided that jettisoning himself and a host of explosive chemicals as a deterrent was the only option they had. Which worked, weirdly enough! Not as intended, but YS was able to make psychic contact with Hugh in such close proximity and communicated with him in their own way - they were lonely, desperately so, and Hugh was able to dissuade them from attacking ships in exchange for his company out in open space from time to time. All was well.

Until his teeth started to change, and then it wasn't.

Over time, Hugh began to experience distressing, inhuman physical changes that culminated in his teeth fusing and his right arm mutating into a shape that could barely be recognized as human. He was able to replace both of these things with prostheses, but not after violently mutilating himself in a fit of panic and a need to get it out of him that nearly ended his life. Confronting YS about this later on confirmed his fears - his close contact to them had set it in motion, and they implied that it needed to be done because of the shortness of human lives and the frailty of their bodies, that it was an improvement. He cut all contact with the creature (on threat that if they tried to do anything, he'd kill himself and they'd feel it) and slipped into a deep, deep depression, simultaneously drowning himself in work and alcohol and pretending nothing was wrong at all, ever, for any reason, why would you even ask him that.

Later features included the early structures for mind control spores similar to YS' alongside mental and physiological changes to eventually make him into his own hivemind.

Earth ( cw: traumatic medical experimentation )

This transformation would continue, steadily, while Hugh and a small task force descended to Earth again, forced to go looking for crucial parts to keep the Protogonos' engines running after a mysterious incident of sabotage. They were able to find those parts at an abandoned top secret military base, but not before Hugh himself was captured by doctors Strela and Strauss, two twin (and really weirdly emotionally attached) blacksite US scientists who had survived LEERA bunkered up underground. And who were incredibly enthusiastic about an experiment subject different than the usual straggler survivors (who the rest of Hugh's team were contending with while he was trapped in Bunker China, which was actually located in remote Illinois). Hugh only spent a few days there, but it was more than enough time for some incredibly fun, not at all harrowing and traumatizing experimentation, the chiefest of which were the burning out of his spore pits (the structures that made his mind control spores) and the removal of his prosthetic right arm. Forcibly.

When his team and Earth's survivors rallied together to attack the base, Hugh - bolstered by both the fact that they came to save him at all and your average, cinematic moment of all hope is lost we're all gonna die when they were pinned, was able to tap into his powers a bit more intently and regenerate his right arm entirely alien, which he promptly used to tear Strauss to literal pieces and leave Strela, as the worst of the two, distraught and crippled, alone, in her pitch black bunker. Collapsing afterwards, he spent the next day in the camp until he was approached by none other than his mother, who had come to the US after the LEERA biobooms searching for him and settled there. It was an awkward, somewhat terse encounter that Hugh nonetheless sort of benefited from. They made their peace with one another, Hugh finally got the recognition from her that he did good, she told him to never come back (humanity didn't want to risk any alien substances or weird, space-based bacteria wiping out what was left of them), and Hugh assured her that he never planned to.

The trip back to the Protogonos was largely uneventful. Their reception was slightly moreso, on discovery that in their absence, the ship's doctor (and a rival figure of Hugh's that had no idea they were in a rivalry at all, because he was genuinely a really nice guy with no beef), Dr. Hieronymus Singh, had been kidnapped by agents from another ship.

The Venus ( cw: cannibalism, slavery, rape, human trafficking, extreme violence, torture, human leathercraft, forced breeding )

The Venus was a fellow colony ship known for its luxury - boasting gambling, artisans, entertainment, and even the incredibly rare treat of actual beef where other ships subsisted off vegetables and fish, its populace was largely known to be wealthy/powerful individuals and those resourceful or ruthless enough to secure themselves a place there. Hugh, ignoring the rest of the crew telling him to stay put and recover, promptly fixed the engine and joined the rescue attempt disguised as a nameless exosuited engineer looking for work, because how fucking dare they think they could come onto his ship and kidnap his people. Even if Singh was annoying, being so incredibly nice all the time and helpful and having his stupid ass real actual doctorate. The nerve.

The ship's gilded exterior promptly fell away once the team separated and Hugh's personal nosy investigation into the off-limits lower decks revealed that the Venus, known for its meat and leather exports, was actually run by a fraction of well-fed elites and a sea of slaves used for creating trade goods, a source of leather, forced gladiatorial combat, and most importantly, cattle. The elite were feckless, shameless monsters who eagerly accepted off-ship tourists and picked just a few off here and there who wouldn't be missed, adding them to the stock, churning as many children out of them as they could to keep the numbers up and the influx of meat and money coming. A minor rebellion, quickly quashed, had involved the Venus' premiere surgeon and forced them to replace her - Singh had been their choice. He was kept in the med-deck performing lifesaving surgeries for the elites against his will. The team reconvened there to make their rescue.

And failed. Miserably. Some were killed, some were dragged away for combat or meat or breeding, Singh was dragged to the bowels of the ship. Hugh was shot twice in the chest and vented into open space, but not before an encounter with a man he'd known on Earth who essentially taunted him by taking responsibility for a close friend's death to save his own skin. And also showed zero remorse for the horrible things the Venus had done, because hey, it was them or us, right? Fuckin Cody.

His alien condition slowed the effects of being vented into outer space unprotected, but when YS joined him, it was to comfort him in his last moments. They spoke again in their own weird, psychic way, and Hugh made it known that he didn't hate them for what they'd done anymore. He also asked for their help. After seeing what was happening on the Venus, knowing that his people, his friends, and all those helpless suffering people would keep on suffering and nobody would ever punish those responsible for it was a catalyst - he knew he couldn't let it happen, no matter the cost. So YS advanced his condition, made him strong enough to stop all of it.

The Hugh that crawled his way back onto the Venus' lower decks was a bloody, half-blind, half-frozen mess, but quickly set to work freeing the gladiator caste via air vents, stolen weaponry, and his shiny new rib-based stabbers. This excruciatingly well-trained army quickly sank the ship into chaos, allowing Hugh to rescue Singh midway through a session of corrective torture and go about collecting the rest of his people. The elites locked themselves away on the highest levels, panicking, as their slaves and captives were funneled to safety onto the Protogonos - Hugh offered them grace if they handed over Cody, which they did eagerly, and then locked them all in that room together, instructing YS to spore the room and make them eat each other alive. He took his time taking Cody apart, piece by piece, and finished up just in time to meet the Protogonos' salvage teams, gutting and scuttling the Venus for all it was worth.

And it's some nebulous stretch of months after that he shows up in the game!