i will write a better infopost later i swear to god

the fuck is up with this OC ( tl;dr in comments ) Anastasios "Hugh" Argyros is a 38 year old Greece native from an environmentally devastated Earth in its 2080s, significantly ahead of modern Earth as far as crazy stupid scifi technology goes. Formerly the heir to a multimillion dollar cryonics empire, a worldwide outbreak of LEERA - an incredibly aggressive, rapidly transmissible virus with a 100% mortality rate - drove him and the remnants of uninfected humanity onto massive colony ships in orbit around the planet. Now they linger uncertainly, caught between the risk of returning planetside or the distant, impossible dream of staking a claim on recently discovered Phanes, which is by all appearances a genuine paradise planet. (Spoilers: it totally isn't.) Also, an alien came around turning ships into weird dead hiveminds, LEERA didn't kill everyone (just wiped most of humanity out, and they do not want the space people coming back, thanks), and Hugh had to fight his way in and out of a luxury rich people ship that turned out to be a hot combo of Gladiator and The Hills Have Eyes. Great stuff. character specifics (personal): Chief of Engineering on the USN Protogonos, flagship of the United States. Arrived five years back as a loud, moderately annoying engineering prodigy nepo baby and has since been forced to grow up rapidly in the face of maintaining an entire colony ship, keeping various things from blowing up, repelling an alien hivemind apocalypse, surviving an excursion to Earth - with a dash of human experimentation, on the receiving side - while also confronting his mommy issues head-on, and mounting a rescue mission into the belly of the Venus, the aforementioned rich people ship turned Gladiator/The Hills Have Eyes. And also all the body horror alien shit. Understandably, he is now a different kind of loud and annoying. Still bossy, still mouthy, and still with a very high opinion of himself (in none of the ways that actually matter, but you can fuck off if you don't think he's the most mechanically talented creature walking the face of the dying fleet orbiting Earth, thanks), people who only know him in passing might not notice much of a shift! In truth, it's a bit of a veil; Hugh both means and doesn't really mean it, feels it and doesn't entirely feel it anymore, but feels the need to keep it up for his own sake. He's reached a kind of acceptance of both his condition and his position in life - he can't save himself, he can't save things forever, but he can do what little is possible right now to try to preserve the people that care for him despite his... you know. Everything. He doesn't want to die, but he is. He doesn't want this life for himself, and he's still deep down absolutely grieving, but he covers it up with the same old bravado and genuinely pretty obnoxious candor he's always fallen back on. Why wouldn't he? You can't whip him. Literally nobody can whip him, he'll go off like a weird alien nuke, he swears to God. (He will not, in fact, go off like a weird alien nuke... intentionally. Maybe still a better idea not to try it, though.) In truth, what other options does he have? Talking about how awful it is all the time? Terrible and annoying and boring. Sure, he's spending every minute of every day waiting for one of his aches and pains to turn into some horrific new physical mutation, but it's fine. It kind of has to be, doesn't it? It's a weird, passive sort of nihilism where he's both painfully aware he and everything around him is dying and also aware that he can do nothing about it, and is more or less hoping something comes out of the blue and puts him down like a sick dog before he has to do it himself and get everybody really, really bummed out. So yeah it's a really good time, he's doing super great. Never better. character specifics (physical): 38 years of age, 5'10, mixed Greek and Iraqi heritage, with (formerly) black hair and (formerly) brown eyes. His left eye is still intact, albeit speckled with pearlescent flecks. He has a beauty mark beneath his left eye and short, swept back hair that looks like he cuts it himself, but isn't too terrible at it these days. Dark circles, fine lines, callused hands - he looks like he's had a time but wears it surprisingly well, or maybe just gives so little shit that it seems natural, not tired. His teeth are the same pearlescent material as his alien bits and if you count them, there are maybe just a few too many. alien specifics: After making contact with an alien being self-dubbed YS - an amorphous, ageless, psychic creature that made contact with ships and used spores to hijack the crew's nervous systems, killing and adding them to an ever-increasing hivemind to ease its loneliness - Hugh discovered that either due to his proximity to the being, his regular psychic contact with it, or YS' own deliberate interference, his body had begun to warp and shift into something similarly alien. These changes started out relatively small and superficial, but in the years since (and with his body's healing response hijacked and altered as well), his biology has been drastically altered no matter his efforts to stop it. Presently, these include: His right eye, which has turned milky and split its pupils to cover his entire visible eyeball (and some only visible when he looks in another direction and exposes them). The pupils move independent of each other, covering a much larger field of vision concurrently. Sharing flickers of YS' dimensional sight, Hugh has occasionally seen glimpses of the same points in time and space he's physically looking at as they are in other dimensions - generally this is just empty space, but occasionally, they're horrifying. Fun! It has no other odd/unnatural types of sight, and functions as a normal eye, if compounded. He frequently wears an eyepatch over it to keep it from distracting him and also because people stare, boo womp. His hair, half of which has been replaced by pearlescent, chitinous material that lays flat against his scalp. It's sharp. His right arm, which he amputated himself when it began to show signs of warping/alienness early on and replaced with a prosthesis. That prosthesis is now gone, but the arm has helpfully regrown completely alien in response to needing to absolutely fuck up a couple douchebag human experimentation running scientists Earthside. A better sense of his powers and control over them has allowed him to keep it human in shape, albeit with fingers that are a bit too long and joints that bend at angles just slightly wrong to the human eye, as if drawn by a very artistically gifted twelve year old. From memory. It's made up of the same pearlescent chitinous material as the rest of his alien features, and is slightly too flexible for comfort. Function is still... dodgy. (As in, it functions perfectly fine mechanically, but he feels things differently with it than his normal hand. How does someone know what the firing of neurons in someone's brain feels like, but not warmth or softness? He hates it.) His stabbers, a colloquial term for two jagged, bladelike protrusions formed from his last set of ribs that are super original donut steel and definitely not based on anything else, at all. They emerge from his back near the spine and lift high enough over his shoulders to make room for - you know. Stabbing. Or threatening to stab. He also uses them for stability when necessary. When not in use, they stay folded around his midsection (because the loss of them being, you know, inside his body protecting his organs means he's squishier to gutpunches) and look like a particularly odd, ugly belt or other fashion accessory. They make a hideous clicking noise when folding or unfolding. His spore pits, a series of soft, fleshy holes along his spine that release the same mind control spores as YS, which carries every kind of horrible implication you'd imagine. At this point in time, these have been very painfully burned out and rendered inert. Finally, the mental toll of these transformations and the alien shift to his brain structure itself have been severe. On a personal level, Hugh no longer sees himself as human, despises what he's become, and is plagued by constant lowkey dread over whatever's going to change or go wrong with him next, finding little relief outside of getting plastered or burying himself in work. From a functional standpoint, his brain has physically begun to shift to accommodate the whole hivemind biz, which clashes horribly with the human brain it's rewiring - he gets splitting migraines from time to time, can't use his right eye with its fuckoff weird number of pupils for very long without causing himself massive strain, and occasionally has to take breaks so the lines of things start looking Euclidean again. More worryingly, his actual thought processes and perceptions have begun to shift into something not entirely human, lending to odd, out-of-the-box thought patterns. When it comes to problem solving, this is super useful - not so much when it comes to, say, making it through a conversation, or explaining to someone why you're welding things into intricate, winding patterns instead of normal plates. (The answer being that's how nacre works and it's the strongest organic material on Earth, stupid, stay in your lane.) Miscellaneous details include red blood streaked with a whitish substance he's tried valiantly not to look too much into (but seems to hold onto oxygen more efficiently, albeit no more than a regular human trained to hold their breath, and is mildly caustic to human skin) and a form of incomplete, malformed asexual reproduction that results in vomiting up weird worm-centipede abominations every rare once in a while. Which are carnivorous. And aggressive. Good stuff. The pearlescent bits themselves are made of an organic but alien material similar to nacre - his are extremely tough and flexible, but highly susceptible to acids in a way that steel or stone might not be. Sufficient exposure to the right kind would leave his alien bits brittle, or even destroy them entirely.

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OOC INFORMATION Name: Kirsten Are you over 18?: yep!! Contact: journal PM Other characters: N/A Permissions & opt-out: on the same post! IC INFORMATION Name: Anastasios "Hugh" Argyros Canon: Original Age: 40 Gender: Male Species: Human/alien hybrid Appearance: link and link! His weird alien googly eye isn't there but it just has a bunch of pupils, so nothing really important. Canon point: A few months after returning from the Venus rescue mission. History: here! I tried to condense things as much as possible because... OC.......... but can definitely expand if needed! Personality answers: 1: The most influential person in Hugh's life is his mother, which is unfortunate, because she never really liked him and he absolutely never liked her. She both set him up with high expectations for the world and set high expectations on him that he just couldn't manage to fulfill as a kid, and that feeling of "I'll never impress people anyway, so why the fuck should I try" followed Hugh through a huge chunk of his life. He was a disappointment, so he lived up to being a disappointment in the biggest, most self-indulgent way possible until he was literally forced into a role where he couldn't be that way or people would die. Nevertheless, it triggered his drive to prove her (and everyone else on the ship who saw him as a freak and a liability) wrong and he managed to beat the odds again and again out of sheer stubbornness, so she made some positive impact on him. By the time he revisited Earth and met her again by sheer accident (in a not entirely warm reunion), hearing her actively praise and show respect for what he was doing - and what he was willing to do for his people - was a big moment of closure for him. He really, really needed it. 4: Hugh is incredibly keen on his appearance, which is unfortunate when you're infected with a visibly disfiguring alien infection type deal. His looks used to give him an elevated, probably largely undue sense of self-confidence - he was beautiful, he worked hard to maintain it, and even at his lowest, preening in the mirror was always at least kind of soothing. Ever since the changes started to happen, his opinion on himself has taken an entirely different turn and he now finds himself strange, frightening, and repulsive. It's hard to look in the mirror and see yourself turning into something that you absolutely shouldn't be, and some of the extreme measures he's taken to remove evidence of it haven't entirely been motivated by wanting to hide his condition from others. Even at this point where he's more resigned to it all, he still avoids mirrors and covers up the more alien parts of himself when he can. On the brighter side, he now judges others significantly less on looks. Growth! 5: Hugh's greatest fear is a soupy mix of becoming some incomprehensible, terrifying alien thing like YS and losing control of himself. If he ever went full hivemind, it would kill all the people on his ship he's come to care for and worked so hard, sacrificed so much for to keep safe. If one happens, the other is likely to follow soon after. He downplays these fears and covers them up with bravado and/or nonchalance, but the idea of it being just plain inevitable as his body and mind continue to change are a constant, terrifying specter he knows he can't get away from. He'd genuinely rather die. 9: Formerly, justice was a pretty simple concept to Hugh - good things happen to good people, bad stuff happens to bad people. Simple, neat, and not too terribly pressing an issue to him. In space, he's had exposure to a much wider, much greyer spread of moralities and actions and understands that things are complex. However. He's also had exposure to some of the absolute worst that humanity can offer as well, and now knows that justice isn't some nebulous thing that just happens if you're good or bad. It needs to be meted out. Sometimes, the most heinous things will just keep being done and nothing will happen to the people that do them unless someone steps in, and he's very much willing to be that person nowadays. Like with the Venus, where he went out of his way to inflict what he felt was as equal and severe a punishment as he could possibly get without wasting too much time on them that could be better spent helping their victims. To him, justice isn't just some passive force anymore - it's a personal responsibility. If he doesn't do it, there just might not be anyone else who does. Inventory: ▶ his toolset, which is your average couple of wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, hammer, etc and fits in your average side bag. the only notable aspect is a fancy lil futuristic welding kit - a portable welding machine, a mask that folds and unfolds (somehow), and a welding torch. ▶ an electric guitar, clearly well-loved (meaning it's a battered POS on the outside, but maintained immaculately in the parts that matter) ▶ a super cool and accurate coffee mug, given to him affectionately by Singh because he wouldn't shut the fuck up about having an imaginary engineering doctorate for the LONGEST time Powers/Abilities: HIVEMIND: Normally, via the spores produced from the pits in his spine, Hugh is able to infect and control other living things physically, essentially puppeting them. This involves the spores taking root in their brainstem and killing them, allowing him to hijack their nervous systems and senses in general - even when not "activated", these spores are still active and give him some meager sensory/psychological feedback from infected hosts. Which is obviously excruciating and awful when it's hundreds of people and you still have a kinda mostly human brain not wired for that kind of thing. Luckily, due to a teensy weensy bit of horrific scientific experimentation during his field trip to Earth, these spore pits were rendered totally inert and his connection to any and all hosts back home has been severed by coming to the game setting! He legitimately could not be happier about this. ALIEN PHYSIOLOGY: Due to his alien fuckery, Hugh runs a bit differently than an average human (although with YS absent, his condition won't advance any further). For brevity, there's an in depth blurb about each of his main alien physical traits over here, but the actual, functional aspect of them is that parts of him have been slowly replaced with a pearlescent, chitinous xeno-organic material that boasts both preternatural toughness and flexibility at the cost of normal sensitivity and a marked weakness to acids. (As in, exposure to most acids will weaken it considerably, leaving it brittle, or even dissolve it given enough time.) Currently this includes his right arm up to the bicep, the toes of his left foot, and half of his hair. His right eye has also split into multiple pupils that span the entire visible eye plus some only visible when he looks far enough in the other direction, which gives him a wider field of vision at the cost of being an absolute headache-inducing nightmare that he keeps covered with a patch more often than not. Recently, his last two ribs have decided to entirely vacate his abdomen and reform themselves into extra long, extra sharp segmented bone... things... that exit his body near the spine and extend over his back like spider legs when in attack mode (when he's startled or attacked, occasionally when he loses his balance and doesn't have the presence of mind to keep them in check). When not in use, they wrap around his midsection like a belt or a corset to protect the gigantic, much softer/more vulnerable target he has painted on his abdomen now. Great stuff. They're just made of bone at the moment, albeit weird looking bone, but are starting to form the same pearly coating that the other weird parts of him have. His Alien Stuff allows him a bit of leeway in surviving serious injuries (like not bleeding out from a missing arm, assuming immediate medical attention is available), as well as prolonging his survival in the vacuum of space by a tiny bit, but without the active connection to YS or the progressing alienification there's no option for miraculously regrowing limbs or healing otherwise life-threatening injuries. He's just a weird, nerfed little fella in-game who can take a bit more punishment than your average nerd. TECHNICAL SKILLS: While far from a world-class genius in the field, Hugh is remarkably keen with engineering/technical tasks and has a good twenty or so years of experience working in the field, on top of a natural aptitude towards learning new things given the time and materials. Originally focused around his family's cryonics technology, which gave him a grasp of general mechanics, he's since branched out into pretty much a bit of everything that keeping a colony ship from exploding would entail, albeit not nearly enough to call himself an expert in it (although he still might). He's had to fix and maintain electrical systems, weld various materials, repair the gravity engine like six times, do some extremely mediocre plumbing, and generally just become the jack of all trades until actual experts in those fields made themselves available to take over for him. Unless it's involving his specific fields of expertise, which are systems relating to hypercooling biological tissue or moderate to highly advanced engines, Hugh isn't the expert you call in when something is really bad, he's the guy you call in to make sure it doesn't explode until the other guy shows up. Unless it's welding. He loves to weld. He's also actually really, really good at the guitar these days. Lots of downtime to practice and not think about things. He hits Everlong like a sore tooth - frequently and only sometimes on purpose. Samples: introspection and dialogue Goals: I want Hugh to get genuinely invested in the setting and plot - and in something in general, honestly. Back home, he's essentially settled comfortably into his role on the Protogonos and is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic, taking care of things and kind of just waiting to die honestly. Not great. My main goal is to blow up and act like I don't know nobody ararararar get him excited and interested in figuring out the various mysteries of the setting, getting invested in CR, making himself useful/lending his skills, dealing with new and exciting flavors of body horror BS. I'd also like to dig into Hugh's no doubt complex feelings on the city's richest and poorest, and of his own dynamic with them - he's both been the obnoxious rich guy who doesn't have to care and the desperate underdog fighting back against monstrous people with monstrous power, and that grants him a unique, if incredibly biased perspective. A secondary goal is him struggling over whether or not he can stand to ignore whatever the hot fuck Patho-Gen is clearly up to (or duck his head because he remembers how horrible scientists can be when they have a specific reason to pay attention to you), but shhh. Soul Choice: Ave! Specifically, a leucistic peacock. Because there's nothing better than "I need to be pretty and preen" mixed with preexisting self-disgust and body horror, it'll be fine probably. I'd love to pull from the peacock's mythological associations with purification/purity in general for some sort of healing ability (other people/things, not himself) in lieu of one of the usual Ave powers - the irony that he can fix seemingly everyone and everything except himself won't be lost on him. If y'all discourage peacock choices in particular because of the NPCs/setting, I can figure something else out! Whatever works best for everybody.