Wake Application

[cynosure_seeker]

Personal Information
Name: Troy
Age: 23
Personal Journal: None.
Email / AIM / MSN / Plurk: I’m ACloudOfSnakes over at Plurk and can be reached via email at troy.reinhart@hotmail.com
Current Character(s): None.

Character Information
Name: Ghost (superhero name), multiple past civilian names, none of which are still in use.
Age: 129
Appearance: 6”2 in height, his superhero outfit is what he’s almost always seen in. The most notable feature of that outfit is easily the mask, a white durable plastic affair with no colored markings, a slit of a line for a mouth and simple, small nose holes. As is it white and catches light, it serves to highlight his eyes, which, unnatural though they look, are not in any way part of the outfit. Since they represent something ominous in context, he chooses to highlight them with a white mask that makes their white pupils and irises coupled with black sclera impossible to miss. The mask is fitted over a cowl-like dark gray, well-tailored fabric attachment to his undershirt that allows for all traces of visible skin or hair to be hidden.

The outfit has layers for practicality’s sake not visible; it starts off with a sleeveless shirt, then a long sleeved dark gray one to which the cowl aforementioned is attached, with a light colored turtleneck sweater being the first visible layer. He has a few he rotates through, all of which are cream, gray, or light blue. His jacket is dark blue and has been modified from a suit jacket to have thermal lining and two blue buttons that are significantly more durable than they appear. His suit pants have the same thermal lining sewn into them – he’s a fair hand at sewing when he needs to be – and are the same color as his jacket. His hat, a sort of wider-brimmed bowler, was something he long ago sewed matching fabric over, with a nice black band of fabric overlaying that to match his gloves and the knee-high boots he wears. His gloves are always on, playing off of certain fears in his universe as to what he might look like.

Of course, no one looks nearly as threatening out of superhero garb, and Ghost is no exception. Pale complexioned from a lack of sunlight on his skin and creepy eyes withstanding, he’s pretty normal looking, with black wavy hair that cannot be straightened or tamed, merely flattened, though the second the cowl and hat come off it springs back to full volume. His eyes used to be a fairly unremarkable, warm gray. His nose is long and thin, his face heart-shaped, and his eyebrows a bit on the thick side. He is muscular, but in a wiry way, not a bulky one, with long fingers well suited to his sewing and playing the piano. Time has faded most scars he’s obtained to either faint ghostly white lines or utter nonexistence, something he’s rather thankful for.

Character history: Born in 1885 to a tailor and a seamstress in what eventually would become Slovenia, as a young man Tadej Mlovar was interested in travel and in the idea of the increasingly glamorized notion of Western Europe, where he got it into his head to go to make his fortune. Eventually, he made his way to England when his older brother Alojz took up the family business, and set up shop. When World War I broke out, Tadej was a married man with two daughters of his own to tend to, happily settled within the country. Normally his age and lack of physical health would have kept anyone from seeing him as anything but a liability as a soldier. Unfortunately, his ethnic and national origin put him under social and possibly legal pressure to bring to the public eye his patriotism via volunteering for the army.

Human experimentation should have been in its' infancy if not non-existent; however, somewhere along the line he and many other soldiers who had taken ill and been left for dead awoke in what appeared to be an astoundingly high-tech experimentation Cynosure Complex. How much time passed there is lost to history's shoddy record-keeping, not helped by men far braver and more daring than he improvising explosives to bring the place down. His only notable part in this was surviving, albeit without memory of nearly all events that preceded his time in the complex. Having awoken to a world that had just allowed the dust to settle on The Great War, he managed to scrape together enough composure to quell the maddening snippets of voices in his head - the opening shots of the battle he would forever fight against PTSD - and made his way instinctively back to England. Unable to recall the existence of his family or their location, he took up odd jobs where possible until wanderlust and a lack of direction drove him to seek out travel to the United States.

As he recalled the initials and some of the sounds of his name but not his actual name, he began to go by Thaddeus Miller. Appearing to be and speaking as an immigrant from England, he began life anew as the Roaring Twenties flared up. Settling in one of New York City's boroughs, he found steady work and far less flashbacks came to him as a tailor and clothesmaker, some memories of Slovenia slowly returning to him as the decade went by. Though unaware of his actual age, it did not escape his attention that he had not aged properly with the passage of time. This drew attention to him from superstitious old ladies who had immigrated from countries that held more often to beliefs in the supernatural. This would not have mattered terribly if some of their traditional ways to ward off evil hadn't hurt him visibly and immediately, often in situations where he wasn't even sure what they had done. This drew other people’s attention to him, and not in a positive way; at best, people looked at him as a freak, at worst, rumors started up.

No longer welcome where he had been trying to make a place, friends and a community for himself, he left and drifted, month by month, out into the rest of the States, making an aimless path towards the West Coast. The Great Depression hit and he found work from his seemingly bottomless strength, something he had been unaware he possessed, but which came in handy in a time where many were simply too weak to work. Though he went hungry as often as anyone, he eventually carved out a place working as a ranch hand. There, having swapped his name over to Thomas Milton, he made great strides in self-managing his PTSD symptoms, coming to the point he could force himself through much of the worse of it.

By the time he had to give up that life and leave for the same reason as his exodus from New York, conflict had again reared up in the world, but this time he was determined not to become part of it, dodging the draft with many name changes from one town to another and an inability to stay somewhere more than a month or two. Though he was by now strong enough and wiser enough that he would have been a decent soldier, he recalled just enough of the Cynosure Complex to know it was wise to stay away. Already, questions in his mind about ‘missing’ soldiers were emerging, as he had met a few other men who had the same symptoms as he did, always the leftovers of entire platoons that had gone missing. Taking up work at a copper mine in Territory of Montana allowed him to legally duck the draft and stay under one name, Terrence Morris since he was part of the war effort workforce.

The mountains and cold air brought memories to him in fragments of both the wartime and civilian kind, and he began to jot them down in a journal. Only upon sober, calm examination did the reality these were the memories of many people begin to take form. Rather than the voices that assailed his dreams and sometimes his waking hours being his, they were simply so varied in nature as to be the memories of many men, and as the Second World War drew to a close he began to compile his documents, mapping out at least six distinct histories that had their fragments tangled in and blocking out his own. Those he had encountered who were veterans of the First World War had memory issues of the same kind, particularly in regards to identity. Due to a rising awareness of his inability to make a permanent home for himself and the sense he was only looking at the tip of the iceberg in regards to Cynosure, he saved up his money to leave when the war was over.

The post WW2-era saw the rise of superheroes in his world, a natural evolution of psychics, pyrokinetics and the like, many of whom feared legal persecution if their real names and identities were known. Those first crime-fighters operated on a wide range of motives, most of them riding high on patriotism or naiveté, or sometimes simple dissatisfaction with the police. Many people with psychic powers had been soldiers for their respective countries, allowing for wider acceptance of psychic people in the United States. Regardless of the fact he was not psychic in any way, he took up his first mask then in Chicago, where he was attempting to make a life that didn't involve breathing in cancer-causing chemicals and working in a mine sixteen hours a day. There were people there whom he began to build a rapport with, and he was all too aware of what happened when crime got out of hand. He'd seen New York City in the heights of its' 20's gang glory and the way a tiny bit of power went a long way towards making people horrible, and then underhanded things in the survival mode of the 30's that left him predisposed to wanting to help. His outfit was simple as most of his era were; largely, the modern design has not been modified that much from its' original form. His lack of psychic powers were noted, however, by his comrades in arms, who knew of others with similar abilities, putting him back on the path of Cynosure.

Other Cynosure Complex veterans began to pop up, but this wave was distinct from his own, with at least some ability to age, physical abilities that put his superstrength to shame, and some, though far fewer, of his same weaknesses. All of them recalled being POWs, many suffered from 'shellshock', yet their memories of Cynosure were foggy at best. It took the better part of three years to get the information he could out of the often violent criminals who were the second wave. The Cynosure Complex was not one building, but many, a system throughout Europe. If it was still in operation, then it was his job to try to shut it down, as seemingly the only one of their experiments who had remained sane. This idea was easy to come up with, yet impossible to implement unless he found some kind of similar warzone to go to. Even then, there would be no promise of it being where the Cynosure Complexes would be; his main motivation to keep this as a possibility was the fact these Cynosure second wavers were both far stronger and far more prone to violence, insanity and as such were a greater danger than most people realized. As the years wore on, many developed black sclera and white pupils, and in many cases, gray skin, marking them as visible to the public, who, not understanding the situation, flew into a hysteria about the ‘zombies’ that were attacking them.

Though his fellow superheroes tolerated him due to his lack of visual signs and personal insanity, the camaraderie was gone more and more with each violent case, leading to more moves to other cities, where he attempted to gather data and learn ways the psychic-resistant Cynosure men could be fought. In the end, all he came up with was electrocution or blunt force, as many of the WW2 era Cynosure were able to cancel out psychic powers with their mere presence. Some were able, however, to be talked back to sanity, helped, if psychologists and family would take up the task of being there for him. Haunted by memories of the children and wife he knew he had essentially abandoned during his time after Cynosure, he tried to advocate on behalf of those who were aware something was wrong and wanted help, seeing them as just boys compared to someone of his (mental) age, just war victims. The public did not see it that way, and soon it became all too clear on even a government level that they were people to be killed, not helped.

Years of advocacy, looking into the Roswell incident (there were similarities to Cynosure that made him uneasy) and having to be on the move as psychics identified him as a former Cynosure victim by his inability to have his mind read took a mental toll, leaving him increasingly desperate to attempt to do something to make a grand impact, change the tide of public opinion. Helpless, as he was just one man, he falsified papers to deliberately make himself able to go to Vietnam and fight there with the vain hope he would be able to get ahold of concrete Cynosure information, the location of a facility or perhaps some kind of other proof something was going on he could present to some kind of power to get them on the offensive against what was happening. As much as he hated war, he was beginning to experience increasing depersonalization that allowed him to function without emotion or the impact of atrocities he saw affecting him. Increasingly detached from himself and the world around him, his mission of attempting to find any traces of Cynosure faded to a fool’s dream, a one-in-a-million chance. War brought out so much pain from his fractured and not fully repaired mind that on some level he ceased really living, just functioning.

He was woken up on some level by the reports from confused Vietnamese people of their fighters on the ground going missing. There were no bombers or enemy troops to blame for the disappearances, no bodies turning up – in fact, the absence of enemy troops was baffling, as they had been confirmed to be in the area. Enlivened by hope, he went off on his own, diving into the wilderness to seek out the answers he finally thought he was getting close to. He had not counted on one of his platoon, Raymond Harrison, running after him, thinking he was deserting, and then, when being told the crazy truth, following him deeper into the place from which no one returned. With Raymond en tow, he made his way to a Cynosure Complex not protected from the outside, made to look like an outlandish but abandoned building. It took them three days to reach it on foot; during that time he poured out what he knew for sure about himself to Raymond, and the two developed an ambiguously romantic tension that left him feeling more human than he had ever felt in his living memory. Unfortunately, the Cynosure Complex they had found was not truly abandoned, just not made in a way that accommodated the human mind’s understanding of geometry and physics.

Doors did not open to other rooms but other places, or else other times in the same general place. The landscape was recognizable as still being Vietnam, but operating the doors that actually led deeper into the complex was something only a Cynosure employee would be able to do. Subduing one was a creepy experience at best, as the creature they came across was gray and alien and moved in unnatural, fluid/gelatinous movements that necessitated a lot more violence than one Cynosure could have provided on his own (thank God for guns). The obvious demand for answers was met with the more obvious and truthfully answer: it was the equivalent of a grunt soldier and therefore had grunt-level information. What they did get was troubling enough, that humanity was being experimented upon because they were close enough genetically to be played with, given a plague of some kind from the alien world for reasons unclear, though at a guess the alien said it might be to look for a cure of some kind. As much as he’d like to have stayed and looked deeper into the Complex, he was talked out of that by Wayland, who pointed out they just needed to get the Army’s attention on the place and that would at least confirm the source of all this. Hauling around a pained alien in order to get to the door that led them out the way they came was tedious, but killing the alien and hauling the body through the wilderness back to camp in order to make sure it didn’t alert the others and they had proof was even harder. Ultimately, they made it back. For the first time in his extended life, someone in power believed him, and though the Complex was actually empty when the armed forces swarmed it (“it’s a North Vietnamese experimentation camp, we swear, look at this gray thing they made!”) the wilderness en route had plenty of third wave Cynosure, gray-skinned and black-and-white eyed already, completely out of their minds, which were captured and slated to be sent to the States for testing, alive or dead.

Hilariously, this act of heroism was not enough not to get the mysterious background of ‘Martin Talbot’ looked at, which was good news, as no government would say no to more psychic-resistant soldiers who didn’t age. No, he was kicked out for his fully-realized love and attraction to Raymond, earning them dishonorable discharges for homosexuality. This was no horror for them, as they’d seen enough war and pain, and they were shipped to San Francisco for their return to the States. Raymond’s family weren’t the kind of people one returned home to with that kind of record, so instead, the couple settled in San Francisco, living together until 1984, when Raymond died of an undiagnosed heart condition. By then, Martin had still not aged in a way that matched how long he’d been there, so it was time to move on before questions popped up again he couldn’t answer, as they always did. In the wake of losing the person who had rescued his mind and heart from the edge of insanity and hauled him back into the metaphorical light, he felt it was appropriate to take up the superhero mantle once again and give back to a world that, for all its’ horrors, had good and loving people in it who made it all worthwhile.

The world had changed, not for the better, with Cynosure now a vocabulary word in the worldwide vernacular, giving a name to the violent walking zombies that would continue to appear in war zones with variations on the same theme, as if each facility were trying a new formula. Common people had no sympathy for a condition considered only curable by death, increasing love for psychics who were immune to whatever it was that was being done, and made apprehensive of any suggestion of war with the knowledge of what could happen to soldiers. It was a time of continual Cold War and a renewed idolization of superheroes who were now more often normal people who took up masks to defend their communities. With the rise of psychic criminals, there was a place for a nobody with a mask and a willingness to help out, even if he had to claim to be the son of a Cynosure in order to be accepted by other superheroes. Fortunately, children of Cynosures were in fact actually discriminated against, sealing his new identity, and after several months of living out of a cheap motel and struggling to find temporary work, an aging superhero took him in. There in Seattle, he lived a good twelve years as Marcus Trenton, finally aging enough to look like he was in his late thirties/early forties, getting a solid amount of work from odd jobs and feeling some accomplishment from taking down gangs as part of The Greater Seattle Coalition of Heroes. Although it was clear to him that pro-Cynosure activism was not going to gain any ground and things on that front were stagnating, he was making a difference in the world, even if it was just in one small corner of it.

His eyes turned black with white irises and pupils one day in the summer of 1996. Just like that, his façade of a descendant of a Cynosure fell apart, as that was not something that people inherited. Unwilling to let history repeat itself as it had for so many sane Cynosures whose reactions were delayed or experience again being chased out of town like he had once been in New York, he left that morning, taking with him only the money he’d saved up, a bag with some food in it, and his superhero garb. But his desertion was this time seen as a sign he had snapped entirely, leading to several psychic superheroes making attempts on his life. Ultimately, he ended up spending four tense months hiding in the very city he was attempting to leave, taking out the last vestiges of the gang families that had run the city and freaking out the locals with the concept of a Cynosure on their side. While most people regarded him as a menace, looked at non-powered heroes with a new fear they were time bombs waiting to go off, or avoided him altogether, one psychic with the ability to teleport eventually came to believe him when he said that he wanted to help people. The truth of his origin by then was too absurd to be believed, so he told a modified history of his time in Vietnam, and was able to get a one-way teleportation to Fairbanks, Alaska. Though it was a dizzying experience, it left his last identity as legally dead, left him with no trail to where he’d left, and yet gave him hope that if one person could understand, this development was not the end of the world.

Permanent residence as a Cynosure-eyed superhero dressed like he came out of the 40’s was both hard and left him with his final name, Ghost. His constant moving was over; he was now the vigilante that haunted the streets of a place without any other superheroes. Although he was able to make his savings last for a while, food became a problem the longer time stretched on. Ghost had to steal a remarkable amount in creative ways to keep going, huddling in abandoned buildings where other homeless people dwelled in order to keep warm enough to survive the winters. Nonetheless, a real sense of relief settled upon him, that the journey was over, that as a non-living person in the eyes of the world he could be afforded the luxury of a permanent home. He lived as an urban legend, but he lived with purpose, fighting crime, still writing down memories on what paper he could find, trying at last to make sense of the one great mystery he had left – himself.

In 2012, he gained an ally of sorts in the form of a young couple who were both Cynosure descendants and who had seen sane Cynosure people before. Although they offered up a place to stay, he refused that, knowing how much it would hurt to get attached only to have Seattle happen all over again. Instead, he asked for their help technologically, as access to a smartphone alone greatly helped him keep up with and understand the world while remaining apart from it. As such, he currently continues his less than glamorous existence with the benefit of having actual resources to pull from in his research into World War I, the first wave of Cynosure experiments, and Slovenia, which he remembered only in vague city names for a long time. Within that, however, there is a lot of research into the medical side of Cynosure people and their descendents, with the ultimate goal of understanding his own seemingly astounding slow-acting form of the plague that drove the initial waves of experimentation in the first place. At this point, the research is simply for his own benefit until he can make a breakthrough that warrants passing along to someone in authority, at which point he will try to influence people to work for a cure to said plague to get the aliens off their world. Any attempt to fight them will end in mutually assured destruction at best.

And if he’s doing hours of research into the life he once had, well, everyone needs a hobby.

Personality: As his personality has changed over the years, I will attempt to keep this to things that presently apply to him, although how he has changed will have to be mentioned as the world and people around him have shifted him into the person he currently is. First and foremost, it needs to be clarified that he only suffered a true identity crisis in the time leading up to and during Vietnam, when he had begun to succumb to the effects of his multiple mental illnesses and a lack of human connection endured for too long and directly after he awoke from the Cynosure Complex and was rebuilding his identity from scrap. For a man who changes names and locations so often, he rarely changed who he was as a person or felt uncertainty about who he was in present. The pre-World War I identity is another person and one he would like to incorporate into himself for the sake of possibly finding peace, not due to any internal crisis over who he is. In his mind, memories and occupation do not make a person who they are; it is their actions that define them.

For the most part he’s extremely talkative. It started out as a nervous habit, talking to fill the void of things he didn’t know, which was virtually everything, and asking all the questions possible. Throughout time he got fairly verbose by listening to the answers and picking up words, learning how to express himself clearly and thoroughly in a way that denoted an education he didn’t have. A lot of life, be it moving cities, getting into a speakeasy, or getting a job is not just outward confidence, but sounding like you know what you’re talking about. This refined art of talking works wonders in helping him bluff his way through things, so that when he took up being a superhero he commanded a sort of theatrical presence, sounding like some high class lunatic who enjoyed crime fighting, which is about half right. However, it also applies to his honesty and his moments of genuine casual downtime with people. He can’t shut up to save his life. Talking is his way of making connections, no matter how small, with people around him. Just small talk or offering up factoids can be enough little pieces of conversation for Ghost to feel more connected to the world around him.

For all that talk, though, the fact of the matter is there is no better shield from the probing questions and the kind of closeness he dreads and covets like words. If people think they’re friends with him, that he’s crazy and rambling, or that he literally is a ghost from the past, they aren’t going to pry deeper. They won’t be able to get to that part of him that loves like a forest on fire and fears the way the Hadopelagic Zone of the deep sea is a little bit dark. When he gets really attached to someone – as a friend, we’ll address his romantic, um, issues, in a moment – he has problems expressing that or dealing with it, knowing it can’t last. He’ll have to move on and he can’t tell them the truth, which is suffocating. A social creature, people person by nature, the kind of person who thrives in crowds, he has been forcibly isolated by his condition as arguable-non-human to keep distance between himself and others. This is not his natural state, which is why he runs his mouth at the various homeless people who live in the buildings he uses for housing. It isn’t real connection, but it’s the closest he can obtain now. When involved in friendships he is the most loyal, constant companion that could be asked for, very giving of his time and resources, mostly because he knows those things aren’t worth to him what they are to other people. He has, if not forever, a very long time to live, and material possessions are not anything to hold fast to when their usefulness can cease in an instant. He tries surprisingly hard to be good with those who he cares for, with the desperation of someone who knows he can never ask for what he wants in return: a shoulder to cry on and an ear to listen.

The fears that haunt him are twofold: one is the fear of being unable to dig up and compile enough evidence of his cure theory. (I think we can all agree it’s not irrational to fear the end of the world when you’ve witnessed two World Wars and the invention of nuclear weapons in your lifetime.) The other is a much more personal fear, that of being/going insane, possibly violently so. He knows he isn’t sane; there’s a gray area between that and the kind of insane he fears. An attempt to test if humans could be telepathically linked was made during his round of experimentation, as anything that involved fiddling with the brain might be a shot at a cure, and it half-worked. It connected him to other people at the cost of the majority of his memories while instilling chunks of other people’s, which he sometimes hears auditory hallucinations of. They’re distinguishable from reality, but they’re numerous, and when they hit as he tries to sleep or wakes up they’re a lot harder to distinguish from reality. He finds himself nostalgic for things he knows damn well he never did, places he never was, sees visual hallucinations sometimes of people flickering at the edges of doorways and in reflective surfaces.

His mind’s natural response to try to block out the influx of information that doesn’t make sense is to remove the emotional component from processing the information. Or in other words, he becomes so detached from what’s happening that he feels only surreality, operating as less than human, becoming a quiet, ghostly version of who he actually is, seeing the world around him as unrecognizably strange, even actions as simple as drinking water seeming just as surreal and unworthy of reaction as seeing people who aren’t there. It’s a calm-appearing state of being that in reality is anything but. In this state he is likely to take physical violence farther and harder than he ever would under other circumstances, something that frightens him when he comes to his senses. More alarming are the episodes of depersonalization, where he sees himself acting, feels himself doing things, but is struck by a sense of a total lack of control, stuck helplessly watching himself go through the motions while unable to offer his own input. Everything feels as if it’s happening to someone else, someone whose body he just happens to be trapped in.

These clearly alarming signs of mental illness are all most prominent when he’s had the least amount of human contact, when he’s under the most amount of stress, and when he’s lacking severely in sleep or food. This is why it hit him so hard in Vietnam; everything leading up to that point was stress and failure to make progress in his causes, and then the horror of war was added on top of that and his mind flat out refused to process that content again. It is not exaggeration to say that his brief moments of lucidity and confiding in Raymond saved his life. Actually, a pretty good argument could be made that Raymond alone saved his life by hearing the truth and believing it, being there, offering up a reprieve, a place between extremes, at long last. He needed a real person to person connection and Raymond was water in the desert, the breaking of dawn after an endless night.

The years they spent together were the most content and happy of Ghost’s life that he can remember. He was still lying to the outside world, sure, but not to Raymond. Someone knew all his truths, believed his words, and loved him anyway. Someone stayed by him knowing he wasn’t truly human biologically or sound mentally. They were utterly devoted to each other. If Ghost is intense in his friendships, he is borderline zealous in his relationships, going off the two he’s had in his life – he left Slovenia permanently for his wife and went to war to keep their family’s reputation honorable, which was a huge deal in those days. He stopped his Cynosure investigating and lived in San Francisco for as long as Raymond lived. For him love demands dropping everything for someone, nothing less, a view that while offputting at times is based in the fact his emotions only come in two settings: non-existent and overwhelming. There is no off-switch, nothing he couldn’t talk himself into doing for someone he loves, and if things had worked out just a little differently, he could easily have ended up doing horrible things if he were ever coupled with an emotionally manipulative person. Thankfully, his inability to express affection and form real bonds with someone who he knows he’ll have to leave has kept him single for the vast majority of his life.

But Raymond was a magnificently positive force for good in Ghost’s life. He made him realize, remember that there are people worth living for, worth fighting for, worth the mental torture and life-threatening tasks of fighting crime and aliens for. He was suicidally reckless when he ran out on his own in Vietnam because he’d lost his grip on his life having worth and on the reality of other people’s lives even being real. Raymond hauled him back from that edge and their years of normalcy, love, happy moments that seem so inconsequential, like making pancakes and watching Raymond’s red hair catch the morning sunlight in their pastel yellow kitchen as the radio crooned out Bob Dylan, things like that breathed life back into Ghost, and still do. He sees couples and families and is reminded of the value of human bonds, that they are a solid reality in a world that he often can’t otherwise feel a part of. It gives him something to fight for. That’s why he fights normal crime as much as the global force of evil. People are important to him. Everyone is someone’s child, parent, sibling, friend, beloved. His sense of justice is based in a belief all people are people and all people are important to someone – even he was, not just once but twice. This is why he does not kill people in his crimefighting unless it that person’s life or his. Even criminals have loved ones, even insane Cynosure have people who care for them, and people can reform. Not everyone can reform, and he knows that, he just won’t be judge jury and executioner; he is not the arbiter of what is right and what is wrong and who can change and who should die.

A part of his superheroics stem from guilt over the fact that, despite the circumstances behind it, he did essentially abandon his wife and daughters. That haunts him, unceasingly, and his inability to recall much about them clearly makes him see remnants of them in every woman and girl he’s ever saved. The real pain in not knowing and guilt in what he may have left them to drives him to have a special interest in protecting women and children. He’s trying to make up for it in his own mind. Sometimes it even works, briefly, before the glow of victory fades. Sometimes pulling non-stop crusades against crime can’t put a dent in the emptiness in him that comes to the surface when he sees a normal family out and about. Even though he doesn’t crave the domestic life nowadays, he wonders what it would have been like if he’d returned from the Great War to his family instead of being changed into what he is now. He hopes that if there’s a higher power out there, it’ll let them know he regrets never being there for them.

There’s a real inability in Ghost to accept that something is impossible or that he’s just one person can’t change the world. Firstly, everything impossible when he was born is possible now; time marches on and brings forth all the most amazing and complicated things the world laughed at a generation ago. Secondly, he already changed the world by bringing the Cynosure Complexes into the attention of the government and therefore all world governments via ripple effect. Yes, logically one person doesn’t do that much in their lifetime, but he’s mapped it out and presuming he doesn’t go mad, he’s got several lifetimes to get things done. The concept of long odds just doesn’t register. He has the determination of someone unable to deal with failure, a work ethic based entirely around the idea all things can be accomplished with enough effort.

In order to play up his ‘no really I’m a ghost’ reputation and status as urban legend, he indulges in some theatrics, including hand gestures, sweeps of the arm and other things that are all good indicators of how well his mental health is doing at the moment. If he’s spinning 1920’s slang into a threat while picking the most dramatic time to jump out, he’s fine. If he’s quietly muttering song lyrics to himself as he beats the crap out of a criminal, he’s not alright, and is in the midst of an ‘episode’, as described above. To make up for how much the mask restricts his ability to emote, as much as it makes him a name to know in the superhero community and local crime rings, he generally talks with his hands, puts too much movement into normal conversations and is all too fond of letting the light catch his inhuman eyes to get reactions. It’s all so blissfully human and real.

Angry Ghost is a rare occurrence and that fact is proof of a benevolent God. The true sign he has been pushed too far is his total silence, the silent treatment for years being the smallest of all possible reactions. It’s the one time all the voices and echoes of memories suddenly sync up, adding anger over other issues to his own rage, making him something worse than lethal. He’s seen wars, knows death is the least of fears. Pain is what people truly fear, pain and suffering and his super strength allows his to play with someone like a toy. Generally speaking, war criminals and those who harm children are the ones on the receiving end of this, but he once snapped hard at a Cynosure he had advocated for who turned out to be embracing his violent side for fun instead of trying to seek help even when Ghost had given him multiple chances. It’s one of his few non-Vietnam, non-WWI kills and a non-gory description would be ‘ripped apart with bare hands’. We shall leave it at that. He can be irritated, annoyed, and dislike someone. Anger, real anger, is rare. It is like all his emotions, felt in tidal waves instead of in ripples.

His one true love in life, the only actual hobby he has, is music. It’s more akin to an addiction, as it helps ground him in memories he knows are his, focuses his mind, makes him feel at ease as the sounds help drown out the noise in his own head. Other than country music (he overdosed on that while living in Montana), he dives into the waters of all music. Contrary to what some might think, he doesn’t prefer oldies simply because they’re familiar to him. He’s open to all songs, obscure or popular, shallow or deep, genre-blending or ‘normal’, anything that he can ingest with his ears and use like anti-madness mantras to keep himself sane around the buildings he calls home these days. Most homeless people will agree that he has a lovely singing voice, and he genuinely cares for and has friendships as best he can with the homeless of his city. The ones who believe he’s a ghost are the ones he can tell more of the truth to, but regardless, all elderly old people can find in him someone who remembers how things were ‘back in the day’, and he’s willing to be there to discuss those days with them, sing tunes old and new, while settling into this strange home of a city he’s found himself in.

Ghost’s sense of humor is snarky and rich in overly dramatic comparisons. Almost always, it is meant kindly. He is most jovial when well rested and offers up dry, sarcastic suggestions to problems when things are light enough for that sort of thing. For the most part he’s simply someone who rolls his eyes and deadpans at the world, since there’s not much it can throw at him that’s genuinely unheard of before anymore. He’s always liked making people laugh when he can. It’s part of being a people person, and arguably part of diverting people’s attention away from his personal life and at something else.

Powers and Abilities: The thing that marked him before his eyes changed, before he even realized his new strength, is that not only is his mind not readable, not only does he not register as a presence when near psychics, he sometimes shorts out the powers of psychics who get too close to him physically. Let’s clarify that, though, because there’s a very limited range on his ability to cancel out psychic powers and even then it’s not a conscious thing. There is no on/off switch; if he’s within thirty-six feet of a psychic, their abilities are shut off. There is no weakening, just an abrupt shut-off point that he has no control over.

His superstrength can be bolstered with adrenaline like a normal person’s would be. But setting that aside, his wiry build and clothes that don’t show his muscles are deceptive – he is capable of moving, holding and pushing things up to 642 lbs in weight. The parts of him changed to have alien level physiology suggest this is not uncommon among the aliens, and as such is natural biology, meaning he could train at it and get stronger, if the need ever came up and the means to do so were ever available, but that would arouse quite a bit of suspicion. There was a lot of breaking things for the first three years after he gained his strength, as at first it was hard to coordinate the new strength of his muscles. These days he’s gained excellent control through literal decades of constant work at it. Unless he’s angry or sometimes startled, he rarely does anything that hints at the freakish amount of strength he has contained within him.

At no point in his life did he ever learn to fight in a proper, disciplined sense of the word learn. Rather, he picked up as he went through life how to throw a punch, roll with one, and hold his own. With a highly reasonable fear of hurting someone first and foremost in his mind for many years, his preferred tactic to this day is using someone’s momentum against them and sending them hurtling in any given direction by throwing them along the direction they were going. His reflexes are fast enough that for the most part he is that obnoxious evasive, quipping douchebag who no one can get a hit on, a status he enjoys as it allows him to get the other person too angry to think rationally about fighting someone with superstrength. Since moving to Alaska, he’s gotten really fond of throwing people into snowbanks, juvenile as it is. At the end of the day he’s not particularly skilled as far as fighters go, he just has a few well-practiced tricks he employs and the advantage of being able to take some outstanding hits.

The best way to kill a Cynosure is a shot through the eye. The bones of even second and some third generation Cynosure are different from human bones – harder, more resistant to blunt force, and with miniature ‘connector’ bones between the ribs to guard internal organs like a web of bone. A shot to the head will rip skin and muscle clear away but unless it’s a high powered gun and a shot to the temple, it’s not likely to be lethal. He doesn’t heal at an accelerated rate, though, so serious injuries like broken bones are still able to put him on reserve for a bit, and take longer to heal if he goes out and fights despite being already injured. Thankfully the real ways to injure someone like him are not things the average human being is going to attempt on the grounds that most people are not both that crazy and knowledgeable.

In the 1920’s, people did in fact know those superstitions and were crazy enough to believe them, and so Ghost’s forced departure from New York City was caused by salt mixed with rosewater being thrown at him. Salt alone stung like Hell, but salt mixed with rosewater left huge, aching burn-like red patches on his skin where it peeled away from some kind of toxic reaction to the mixture. The gloves aren’t just for show, they’re there to keep him from injuring himself on something that is otherwise innocuous to the rest of the world. Salt and rose petals burn at him and cause layers of skin to separate and peel off. Iron is somewhat safe to ingest, but skin contact with it will send a jolt of pain through the limb in question, making him unable to move with ease like before, as if some kind of raw nerve has been struck. St. John’s Wart is lethal to all Cynosure if they get it in their eyes or mouth, often done by mixing it with water, and the smell of it induces nausea and panic in them. While most things that aren’t iron are fine, platinum and on the gemstone front, turquoise are just as bad, with turquoise inducing pounding migraines and, if not removed from the Cynosure, unconsciousness. The saving grace is, hilariously, the internet: while it offers up these completely valid ways of harming, killing and warding off Cynosures, they also have confused them for every mythical creature known to humanity. Holy water, garlic – Ghost has had a lot of weird stuff thrown at him that thankfully didn’t work.

Those eyes are not there just to be creepy. They allow for a sort of seeing-in-the-dark that’s hard to explain for people who can’t do it, something that comes in handy quite often. The eyes do not appear to dilate or shift in size in regards to the white portion, instead handling bright light and the shift between total darkness and overly bright light without needing time to process the change. Even if it’s a day where the snow is catching all the sunlight and reflecting it back at the world, it’s no harder on his eyes than total darkness would be. They are, however, the first sign he’s beginning to turn into what the second wave of Cynosure became physically, and then consequently mentally, so he’s less than thrilled with this development.


World Summary: The world’s history mostly synced up with our own, until Vietnam. There are a few reasons why it managed to stay in-sync for so long. Firstly, the Cynosure Complexes were not producing survivors beforehand, and secondly, what people saw them assumed the buildings belonged to an enemy nation, not aliens. Beings from another world are rarely anyone’s first answer to large numbers of soldiers going missing. That’s why they went after soldiers – people would blame the other side over missing soldiers. But secondly, most Cynosure Complexes throughout history weren’t big or well funded on their own side until the Disease really got out of control and they got desperate. That’s where they made their mistake in World War I. They simply put too many Complexes on the ground, took too many people and banked too hard on the ability of people to accept huge numbers of MIA soldiers. Largely, this was successful, even producing the first few waves of survivors who are genetically more like human hybrids, but it also led to the first close calls they had with humanity. Documentation of their existence was scarce, yet it was now happening, there were multiple cases of escapees and four separate instances of humans managing to blow up the Complexes, which were the opening shots of humanity beginning to fight back and become aware something was wrong.

But humanity’s medical understanding was in its’ infancy, so only after World War Two where there were more survivors as alien techniques improved (and they still allowed survivors who they could get nothing more from to go back to humanity, because they didn’t think of the human race as a threat) was there a beginning of public conscious awareness about these people. With particularly bad ‘shellshock’, hallucinations and violent outbursts, they had obtained the mental symptoms of the Disease, and though they said nothing, many country’s governments began gathering their own data, noting the reoccurrence of the word Cynosure and the consistency of the odd symptoms, but there was nothing to draw conclusions from just yet. The world’s history continued to go as it had in our world. There were a few baby conspiracy theories brewing, however, the world was more focused on psychics.

Psychics are the major divergence from the prior human norm that gave the aliens pause, especially after the World Wars had brought them so close to being exposed. No technological shielding could keep psychics from sensing something was wrong. Though technically mutants in the human gene pool, the vast majority of countries in the world had always had some psychics prior to the population boom of them in the 20’s and 30’s. Psychics had the same powersets, dividable into four sub-groups, and were employed by militaries around the world. However, due to generals calling the shots, this possible game changer often amounted to a lot less than it could have been. Many psychics were just used as morale boosters and propaganda, because their full usefulness had not yet been realized. In human on human combat they were only truly lethal when there wasn’t another psychic to challenge them, so psychics were placed in all military groups to prevent that. No, the only way they’d make an impact in war is if they were facing something else entirely, something only they could sense and deal with.

But before we get into Vietnam, we have to note civilian life was hard to live for psychics post-military. There was so much that they wanted to do and law enforcement in many countries was less than stellar. The idea of superheroes had been put forward in comic books during World War Two, and it wasn’t a terrible idea, albeit not one everybody jumped on right away. Hiding an identity is harder than it looks, after all. It was just the inability of people who had seen what their powers were capable of to sit back and go return to being bakers or clockmakers that made some give it a shot. Their celebrity was instantaneous, bringers of hope in a time where people were hopeless in the face of the horrors they were beginning to find out had been committed. The success they had in fighting crime kept them going, and within two decades most big cities had a slew of costumed heroes trying to find outlets for their powers and help people in the process. The co-occurring phenomena of psychics going into crime was dealt with by their law-upholding counterparts. This entire thing served as a great way to distract people from very serious issues by making it something of a news spectacle, the old bread-and-circuses philosophy of governing working just as well in a booming post-war economy with psychics in place of circuses (or working in them, sometimes).

Vietnam was a global wake up call. Both sides of the war – and both sides had a lot of countries involved – became aware of what was going on, that there were aliens with buildings on Earth responsible for huge numbers of people going missing as far back as the records could show them. It was immediately agreed by every country’s government, separate as they were, not to let out the alien part to the public. The mass hysteria that could have broken out was unfathomable, yet the reality had made its’ way to reporters’ cameras and thus newspapers. What to tell your people in the face of such evidence? Simple: blame the countries you don’t like. Accusations of war crimes flew around from everyone directed at everyone, but the most viable suspect in the eyes of most people was Russia because it was big enough to churn out the resources in personnel and metal for these buildings and staff. The fact Russia and the United States were already in a Cold War helped Russia point to the United States (“this never started happening until you go involved!”) and the United States point at Russia (“Commie LIES!”).

Wars became the only thing the public had much interest in when it came to the news, even as the treatment of veterans became so deplorable that whole new laws had to be passed in many countries regarding hate crimes committed against them. The world edged around veterans like they were all timebombs waiting to go off, treating anyone who was a Cynosure victim – and whoever leaked that word just picked the closest English-sounding equivalent to the alien word everyone kept using – like second class citizens at best. Ghost was very fortunate he’d been dishonorably discharged so he could live his life in peace as someone who could legitimately claim he’d never been a POW and squeak by under the radar of wary psychics by posing as a son of a WW2 Cynosure victim. It allowed him not to have to deal with the inhumanities humanity was committing against his people… for a while. Once the physical signs showed, he was just fortunate he’d built up a reputation as ‘one of the good ones’ so he could make an escape with his life intact.

But the social stigma against being a Cynosure victim and the fact that the aliens were now aware they’d been made common knowledge among world leaders didn’t stop people from rising up to lobby for veteran’s rights or Cynosure Complexes going up where war still broke out. When the USSR fell, there was some massive scrambling by United States officials to try to find someone to shift the blame to, eventually settling on the Middle East for lack of any more realistic place to put the blame. 9/11 happened, unfortunately, and things are almost on track with our reality, if not for the rise of technology and its’ widespread accessibility. Pictures and video footage of aliens and Complexes are leaked faster than the governments of the world can cover them up or remove them. The world is about to realize exactly what they’re dealing with, and it’s set to go over exactly as poorly as one would expect.

Samples
Network:

[The camera feed comes to life after Ghost hits the broadcast button, though he’s placed his smartphone atop something so he can back off enough his inhuman eyes aren’t staring into the depths of anyone’s soul… and totally not so he can talk with his hands. In the background, bookshelves can be seen.]

Hello, everyone. I’ve been attempting to research some areas of great personal interest here in the library, but I’m running into a bit of a snag. I’m not usually overly curious about other people’s business, you see, as a man’s privacy is sometimes all he has; it’s just that history is by far my most guilty pleasure when it comes to literature, and Nautilus has a surprising number of books on the histories of many worlds, making it harder than you’d think to focus on the task at hand. Furthermore, every time I’ve found something I thought was talking about my world, divergences in later chapters show me they are not. [He spreads his hands wide, as if at a loss.]

So I’ve decided to ensure some clarity regarding the subject of history, as firstly, it factors into my research so intensely, and secondly, it appears to vary wildly from sometimes extremely similar starting points. If you are willing, I would love to hear the histories of your worlds, from significant events in recent times to those in the past, particularly regarding wars. If your world has encountered other species and made contact, I would especially like to hear about that, as that information could be highly beneficial in the long run. Now! [He claps his gloved hands together, sounding eager to both get back to work and talk.] Thank you for your time, and I leave you to what you were doing before I interrupted.

Third Person:

Nautilus had given him a radio, which he initially had blinked at, but the locals’ reassurances that it was more than just an innocent gift turned out to be dead on. His mask was rarely off, save for moments such as this, when he prepared for sleep. The room he had been allowed to stay in was still rather bare. A lifetime of transience, he mused, had not lent itself well to carrying or caring for mementos or little things to mark a space as his own. He kept to habits, with what little he would need to take in an emergency – his mask and hat, at this juncture – upon the nearest surface to the bed, ready to leave without destination or respond to some calamity.

At the moment, however, the only problem he had was that no sooner had his head hit the pillow, dark hair a voluminous mess from being compressed so often, than the radio crackled to life of its own accord. Still unused to this strange city, his tired brain had him muttering, “Electronics – you get what you paid for, even here,” before he got up to go switch it off. It took a second for his mind to process what he was hearing, however, and then he went very still, like a statue, one hand hovering outreached towards the 40’s styled radio perched upon his desk.

”In the year 2525, if man’s still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…”

Raymond loved Zager & Evans; despite his lover’s protests he had turned up the radio every time they had come on. It had something to do with the fact their work had taken off as the two discharged soldiers returned to the States, perhaps. He’d never gotten to the root of the matter, only sighed and learned to endure the band for the sake of seeing the joy on his love’s face. This song had been the only one they ever shut off under some equally mysterious silent agreement that a song about the end of the world was not what they wanted to fill their apartment with, not when there was so much good finally coming to fruition in their lives at long last. In a second, all this ripped through Ghost, and he dropped his hand, staring at the radio as it continued on. The lyrics were a stab at what he was trying to achieve, the fact it reminded him of Raymond and breakfast and sharing a newspaper as they half-ignored the world a twist of the knife counter-clockwise.

But he could shut his eyes and picture their apartment like he was there. So that’s what he did, sitting perched on his bed, letting the song play out.

When the radio went silent, he remained there for a long time.