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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