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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.