Synodiporia app
May. 18th, 2015 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yourbrainasplodeP L A Y E R;
NAME: Mal
AGE: 28
PLAYER JOURNAL:themirr
TIMEZONE: GMT -8
CONTACT: TheMirr @ Plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: none
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Ruben Victoriano (Ruvik)
CANON: The Evil Within
POINT IN CANON: Chapter 15, after being burned by Sebastian Castellanos.
AGE: 37
APPEARANCE: here
CANON HISTORY: here
CANON PERSONALITY: Ruvik had a morbid curiosity even as a child. Fascinated by anatomy and psychology, he would perform experiments on butchered pigs' heads and small animals. To most this would be a worrying sign. But certain people in his life encouraged him in his initial findings and understood his interest in the macabre...and until the fire that claimed his sister's life, he was content to focus solely on the workings of non-human brains. But the fire changed Ruvik completely. The trauma of his injuries, the loss of his sister, and four years of being kept locked in the basement by his own father because of his disfigurement robbed him of the last of his sanity and almost all the empathy he still held for other human beings. He is anti-social to a staggering degree, preferring to be alone with his research and his "test subjects". He sees other people as inherently selfish, disgusting vermin who would gladly turn on one another if given the chance. He enjoys toying with them and their emotions, pitting them against one another and putting one subject in danger so the other leaps to their defense, employing rigged explosives and bladed traps to run his victims through twisted obstacle courses solely for his own entertainment, like rats in a maze. When he does have to rely on others, he uses them, without any measure of warmth or caring. To Ruvik, the world and humanity in general took his entire life away from him, and he is entitled to righteous vengeance.
This isn't to say that Ruvik is an emotionless robot or a true sociopathic monster. Far from it. He pleads his case to Sebastian Castellanos when it becomes clear the other intends on stopping him from escaping the STEM machine, detailing the horrors inflicted on him by the townsfolk of Eagle River, his father, and Dr. Jimenez, desperate to return to the physical world, even if it is through Leslie Withers's body. He still feels the loss of his sister just as keenly as he did when he was a child, and his survivor's guilt at having lived through the blaze manifests in his mental landscape as a twisted version of Laura herself. He is certainly not immune to his own fears and insecurities, either. He abhors religious faith, his father belonging to a cult that committed atrocities of its own, with the elder Victoriano turning a blind eye to it all. To Ruvik, all religions are faithless scams that cripple their believers. Being treated like a scarred, unloveable monster by his own father has had its effect as well. He is immensely self-conscious, hiding his scars when in outside company, preferring to remain unseen and away from prying eyes.
But nothing overshadows quite like Ruvik's fits of anger. His temper is normally very reserved, but once it is triggered, it becomes a murderous rage that does nothing to disguise his insanity. He is capable of holding grudges for years, either silently plotting his revenge or lashing out in a haze of anger from which nothing and no one is safe. To him, betrayal is one of the most egregious offenses someone can commit against him--when it takes so long for him to trust someone, having that trust betrayed is worse than if they had flat-out told him their intentions from the beginning. But the absolute worst is when someone exploits his own fears and turns them against him, like when Sebastian Castellanos tried to set him on fire with a smashed lantern. The fact that Ruvik was trying to strangle the man at the time doesn't matter. To Ruvik, it was the act of inciting his phobia to fire that was a legitimate excuse to try to outright kill the man in a fit.
Ruvik has his bouts of loneliness, and with his former retainers gone he would be forced to turn to someone new in order to survive, due to the numerous health conditions he suffers from. As noted earlier, he would just as easily use someone with no emotional strings attached than become too close to another. In truth it's likely that he would be more open to people who remind him of his beloved sister--and even then getting the truth out of him would require more trust than he is willing to give. It would take a genuinely selfless, nurturing person a very long time to get past Ruvik's emotional walls, and even then he would never allow them in fully out of fear of betrayal. He truly believes that his work is completely legitimate and without fault or issue. After all...it's not as if the people he experimented on were decent people, at least in his own warped mind.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
ABILITIES: Despite his mental illnesses and trauma, Ruvik is actually a highly intelligent man, perhaps even a genius by IQ standards. He is entirely self-taught from an early age...even if his methods are macabre and downright cruel, to be able to teach himself advanced neurology and psychology and apply it without any formal medical training is extremely impressive. In fact his knowledge of the human brain and its workings may be unprecedented. The experiments that led to the creation of the STEM were extremely unethical to say the very least. But even Dr. Jimenez saw the drastic impact that Ruvik's discoveries would have had on many fields of study, including psychology and pharmaceuticals.
This depth of research allows him to read people very easily. He can easily tell when someone is lying, and can anticipate their actions to a degree. Much like how a scam psychic will read people for information regarding their dead loved ones, Ruvik can get a feel for someone's personality, their fears, what sets them off, and use it to his advantage.
He also has an extremely strong will to survive. From the fire, to using the willpower of others to add to his own to a degree that allows him to affect the physical world as a "ghost" of sorts, Ruvik is relentless in his attempts to regain a physical body and exact his revenge on those who betrayed him. Once he has decided to do something, it will take a bullet to the heart or brain to stop Ruvik. Nothing less is capable of ending his determination.
As an aside, he's not a half bad artist judging by his strange sketches on the walls of his mental landscape within the STEM, and he knows how to play quite a bit of classical piano.
Within the mental landscape of the STEM, Ruvik has conscious influence over the state of his surroundings. He is able to bend steel bars that no normal human could even loosen, alter an entire city according to his whims, make walls appear and disappear, and even twist a tall vertical drop into a horizontal hallway. But these are relegated to the fact that the world inside the STEM is a product of his own mind. He is the god of his own creation inside this world. Outside the STEM he appears capable of some of this--teleportation (or perhaps more like extreme speed that occurs in the blink of an eye), inflicting trauma sufficient enough to destroy a human brain with a concussive force, and being able to affect the physical world as he would if he were really in it (such as sedating the investigators and Jimenez both and placing them into the STEM). However, it should be noted that all of these abilities were gained after he had been stripped of a physical body, and possibly derived heavily on borrowed willpower from other people in the STEM. In short, a ghost that broke out of the machine to wreck havoc on the living. It is unlikely that he would be able to duplicate these effects if returned to a physical body.
INVENTORY; pretty much just the clothes on his back.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Ruvik's physical and mental weaknesses leave him dependent on others, even if he would prefer being left to his own devices. He is susceptible to intense migraines and epileptic seizures, and suffers from mild to moderate schizophrenia with both visual and auditory hallucinations. Physically, he's not very strong at all, and the damage to his skin from his burns is so extensive that he is deadened to much sensation--the skin itself has become useless for regulating his body temperature. So being cold or overly warm can both be dangerous for Ruvik's health.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: [the recording is only about fifteen minutes long, on old magnetic tape. Ruvik speaks over the crying and whimpering of a man, his voice disturbingly calm and detached.]
Subject Forty-four. Male. Approximately seventy years of age. No external disease or defect. Mild heart arrhythmia. Underweight. ...He is known to me.
[the man becomes more coherent, pleading, asking why over and over again. Ruvik says nothing at first. Eventually though, he addresses his victim, his tone terse. Cold.]
Why? You're asking me why you're here? ...You really don't recognize me. I can't blame you, I suppose. It has been a long time. Almost thirty years now. August, wasn't it. The sunflowers were blooming.
[There is silence for a moment, save for the quiet sobbing and the clinking of instruments.] You and three others went there with kerosene. Torches. You went there with intent to commit arson, didn't you.
[Ruvik's voice turns into a dangerously low growl.] You heard children inside. A brother and sister. But you didn't care. Did you. You pretended not to hear. You poured the kerosene, you lit that barn on fire. I know, because I was there. We heard you. She saved my life. At the expense of her own. She was seventeen. How does it feel, I wonder? Knowing you killed a seventeen year old girl? Or do you console yourself by pretending that you only burned rats?
[Ruvik falls silent, as does his "patient". For a while only the breathing of the two men is audible. Finally, Ruvik's whisper can be heard:] ...Look at me, damn you. Look at what you did. You should have made damned sure that I died with her.
[the sound of a generator humming to life raises the man's panic again. There's sounds of struggling. Desperate cries for help. Ruvik waits until he quiets down again.]
I should inform you...you will have no anaesthesia. Laura certainly didn't.
[the last sounds on the tape are a high mechanical whine and an old arsonist's screams of agony.]
PROSE SAMPLE: One misstep, and the pain had been unbearable.
Ruvik knew pain. His flesh had been cut away from him piece by piece, leaving only what was necessary for the STEM. His brain. A bit of his spine, just to support the entire mass from collapsing on itself. Now he was experiencing the flood of pain and brutality of fire all over again. Only in reverse. Nerves made connections that should have no longer existed, the mass and weight of a skeleton once again keeping him supported, muscles and connective tissues allowed him movement and the ability to scream in agony.
For a brief moment he was on fire, he was burning again, and that one moment seemed to last an eternity. Then it stopped. Everything. The pain. The torment. The entire world.
He couldn't see, not because the world he had built for himself had gone dark, but because his eyes were closed. Eyes. He had eyes. He could feel their rotation, feel the connection to muscle and nerve. Slowly he opened them. Finished tile, splatters of paint. He ignored the mirror at the first glimpse of scarred skin. He bore his torment even now, with a new body. Or was it really new at all? It was still ruined. But it was a body, and it was his. There was a spike of pure giddiness in his chest as he felt along what patches of skin on his shoulder retained sensation. He felt cold. Hungry. Famished, even. His lips were dry and cracked, as if he had merely been asleep for a very long time.
Ruvik looked to the mirror, meeting his own reflection's gaze. He pressed his mind against the glass, willing it to bend, to break, to change. It did nothing. His own brain in his own body, then. The tingling he would feel when exerting his will in the STEM from the hippocampus and prefrontal lobe regions of his brain was gone. He had no power, then. Save for what his mind was capable of. Power enough.
It was cold. He was cold. He couldn't afford to linger here, not with the poor excuse for a skin he was left with after the fire. Wherever he was, it was better than inside the STEM. Better than the confines of a brain with no body attached to it. Part of him knew this to be a dream, or perhaps some other's mental landscape. There was nothing left of him. How could he so easily be transplanted?
None of this was real. No matter how real it felt, there was no possibility of this being a real body, or a real place. Ruvik pressed his lips into a thin line, the old, familiar anger settling over him like a leather glove. Someone had tried to trick him. Make him think that he was whole again, that he had free range of the real world.
Ruvik turned away from the mirror and tried the door. It opened easily, letting him out into the unfinished hallway. His bare feet made little sound on the floorboards, an errant squeak sending the lights flickering. Construction... modern conveniences... It seemed real enough. A very strong will had manufactured this place, then. Sebastian's? Unlikely. Why would Sebastian's mind put him into a raw physical form?
The better to burn you with, my dear.
He remembered now. The lantern. The fire. The deep, raw, blistering anger. Sebastian had tried to burn him. His hands shook. He wasn't burning. There was no fire. Not here.
"Ruben..."
He broke from his panic. Hearing her voice, Laura's voice, was not new to him. He had heard it often enough since he was nineteen. Had seen her, too, always dancing in her favorite red dress. Symptomatic. He didn't allow his schizophrenia to interfere with his work. With his life, or what passed for one. But when he did hear her voice, it was always as if she were standing right next to him. No matter where he saw her mirage. This was different. Her voice was distant, as if she were down the hall, just out of sight. Ruvik knew that there was no possibility of her being there. Yet some part of him had to be absolutely sure.
He followed the direction of the voice, aware that he had drawn his arms to himself against the chill of the room. Laura's voice called to him again, urgent. When he turned the corner and looked down the hallway, however, there was no disappointment of her not being there. It was expected. Laura was dead. The voice, however...that had definitely come from outside of himself. If not Laura, then who...?
NAME: Mal
AGE: 28
PLAYER JOURNAL:
themirrTIMEZONE: GMT -8
CONTACT: TheMirr @ Plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: none
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Ruben Victoriano (Ruvik)
CANON: The Evil Within
POINT IN CANON: Chapter 15, after being burned by Sebastian Castellanos.
AGE: 37
APPEARANCE: here
CANON HISTORY: here
CANON PERSONALITY: Ruvik had a morbid curiosity even as a child. Fascinated by anatomy and psychology, he would perform experiments on butchered pigs' heads and small animals. To most this would be a worrying sign. But certain people in his life encouraged him in his initial findings and understood his interest in the macabre...and until the fire that claimed his sister's life, he was content to focus solely on the workings of non-human brains. But the fire changed Ruvik completely. The trauma of his injuries, the loss of his sister, and four years of being kept locked in the basement by his own father because of his disfigurement robbed him of the last of his sanity and almost all the empathy he still held for other human beings. He is anti-social to a staggering degree, preferring to be alone with his research and his "test subjects". He sees other people as inherently selfish, disgusting vermin who would gladly turn on one another if given the chance. He enjoys toying with them and their emotions, pitting them against one another and putting one subject in danger so the other leaps to their defense, employing rigged explosives and bladed traps to run his victims through twisted obstacle courses solely for his own entertainment, like rats in a maze. When he does have to rely on others, he uses them, without any measure of warmth or caring. To Ruvik, the world and humanity in general took his entire life away from him, and he is entitled to righteous vengeance.
This isn't to say that Ruvik is an emotionless robot or a true sociopathic monster. Far from it. He pleads his case to Sebastian Castellanos when it becomes clear the other intends on stopping him from escaping the STEM machine, detailing the horrors inflicted on him by the townsfolk of Eagle River, his father, and Dr. Jimenez, desperate to return to the physical world, even if it is through Leslie Withers's body. He still feels the loss of his sister just as keenly as he did when he was a child, and his survivor's guilt at having lived through the blaze manifests in his mental landscape as a twisted version of Laura herself. He is certainly not immune to his own fears and insecurities, either. He abhors religious faith, his father belonging to a cult that committed atrocities of its own, with the elder Victoriano turning a blind eye to it all. To Ruvik, all religions are faithless scams that cripple their believers. Being treated like a scarred, unloveable monster by his own father has had its effect as well. He is immensely self-conscious, hiding his scars when in outside company, preferring to remain unseen and away from prying eyes.
But nothing overshadows quite like Ruvik's fits of anger. His temper is normally very reserved, but once it is triggered, it becomes a murderous rage that does nothing to disguise his insanity. He is capable of holding grudges for years, either silently plotting his revenge or lashing out in a haze of anger from which nothing and no one is safe. To him, betrayal is one of the most egregious offenses someone can commit against him--when it takes so long for him to trust someone, having that trust betrayed is worse than if they had flat-out told him their intentions from the beginning. But the absolute worst is when someone exploits his own fears and turns them against him, like when Sebastian Castellanos tried to set him on fire with a smashed lantern. The fact that Ruvik was trying to strangle the man at the time doesn't matter. To Ruvik, it was the act of inciting his phobia to fire that was a legitimate excuse to try to outright kill the man in a fit.
Ruvik has his bouts of loneliness, and with his former retainers gone he would be forced to turn to someone new in order to survive, due to the numerous health conditions he suffers from. As noted earlier, he would just as easily use someone with no emotional strings attached than become too close to another. In truth it's likely that he would be more open to people who remind him of his beloved sister--and even then getting the truth out of him would require more trust than he is willing to give. It would take a genuinely selfless, nurturing person a very long time to get past Ruvik's emotional walls, and even then he would never allow them in fully out of fear of betrayal. He truly believes that his work is completely legitimate and without fault or issue. After all...it's not as if the people he experimented on were decent people, at least in his own warped mind.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
ABILITIES: Despite his mental illnesses and trauma, Ruvik is actually a highly intelligent man, perhaps even a genius by IQ standards. He is entirely self-taught from an early age...even if his methods are macabre and downright cruel, to be able to teach himself advanced neurology and psychology and apply it without any formal medical training is extremely impressive. In fact his knowledge of the human brain and its workings may be unprecedented. The experiments that led to the creation of the STEM were extremely unethical to say the very least. But even Dr. Jimenez saw the drastic impact that Ruvik's discoveries would have had on many fields of study, including psychology and pharmaceuticals.
This depth of research allows him to read people very easily. He can easily tell when someone is lying, and can anticipate their actions to a degree. Much like how a scam psychic will read people for information regarding their dead loved ones, Ruvik can get a feel for someone's personality, their fears, what sets them off, and use it to his advantage.
He also has an extremely strong will to survive. From the fire, to using the willpower of others to add to his own to a degree that allows him to affect the physical world as a "ghost" of sorts, Ruvik is relentless in his attempts to regain a physical body and exact his revenge on those who betrayed him. Once he has decided to do something, it will take a bullet to the heart or brain to stop Ruvik. Nothing less is capable of ending his determination.
As an aside, he's not a half bad artist judging by his strange sketches on the walls of his mental landscape within the STEM, and he knows how to play quite a bit of classical piano.
Within the mental landscape of the STEM, Ruvik has conscious influence over the state of his surroundings. He is able to bend steel bars that no normal human could even loosen, alter an entire city according to his whims, make walls appear and disappear, and even twist a tall vertical drop into a horizontal hallway. But these are relegated to the fact that the world inside the STEM is a product of his own mind. He is the god of his own creation inside this world. Outside the STEM he appears capable of some of this--teleportation (or perhaps more like extreme speed that occurs in the blink of an eye), inflicting trauma sufficient enough to destroy a human brain with a concussive force, and being able to affect the physical world as he would if he were really in it (such as sedating the investigators and Jimenez both and placing them into the STEM). However, it should be noted that all of these abilities were gained after he had been stripped of a physical body, and possibly derived heavily on borrowed willpower from other people in the STEM. In short, a ghost that broke out of the machine to wreck havoc on the living. It is unlikely that he would be able to duplicate these effects if returned to a physical body.
INVENTORY; pretty much just the clothes on his back.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Ruvik's physical and mental weaknesses leave him dependent on others, even if he would prefer being left to his own devices. He is susceptible to intense migraines and epileptic seizures, and suffers from mild to moderate schizophrenia with both visual and auditory hallucinations. Physically, he's not very strong at all, and the damage to his skin from his burns is so extensive that he is deadened to much sensation--the skin itself has become useless for regulating his body temperature. So being cold or overly warm can both be dangerous for Ruvik's health.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: [the recording is only about fifteen minutes long, on old magnetic tape. Ruvik speaks over the crying and whimpering of a man, his voice disturbingly calm and detached.]
Subject Forty-four. Male. Approximately seventy years of age. No external disease or defect. Mild heart arrhythmia. Underweight. ...He is known to me.
[the man becomes more coherent, pleading, asking why over and over again. Ruvik says nothing at first. Eventually though, he addresses his victim, his tone terse. Cold.]
Why? You're asking me why you're here? ...You really don't recognize me. I can't blame you, I suppose. It has been a long time. Almost thirty years now. August, wasn't it. The sunflowers were blooming.
[There is silence for a moment, save for the quiet sobbing and the clinking of instruments.] You and three others went there with kerosene. Torches. You went there with intent to commit arson, didn't you.
[Ruvik's voice turns into a dangerously low growl.] You heard children inside. A brother and sister. But you didn't care. Did you. You pretended not to hear. You poured the kerosene, you lit that barn on fire. I know, because I was there. We heard you. She saved my life. At the expense of her own. She was seventeen. How does it feel, I wonder? Knowing you killed a seventeen year old girl? Or do you console yourself by pretending that you only burned rats?
[Ruvik falls silent, as does his "patient". For a while only the breathing of the two men is audible. Finally, Ruvik's whisper can be heard:] ...Look at me, damn you. Look at what you did. You should have made damned sure that I died with her.
[the sound of a generator humming to life raises the man's panic again. There's sounds of struggling. Desperate cries for help. Ruvik waits until he quiets down again.]
I should inform you...you will have no anaesthesia. Laura certainly didn't.
[the last sounds on the tape are a high mechanical whine and an old arsonist's screams of agony.]
PROSE SAMPLE: One misstep, and the pain had been unbearable.
Ruvik knew pain. His flesh had been cut away from him piece by piece, leaving only what was necessary for the STEM. His brain. A bit of his spine, just to support the entire mass from collapsing on itself. Now he was experiencing the flood of pain and brutality of fire all over again. Only in reverse. Nerves made connections that should have no longer existed, the mass and weight of a skeleton once again keeping him supported, muscles and connective tissues allowed him movement and the ability to scream in agony.
For a brief moment he was on fire, he was burning again, and that one moment seemed to last an eternity. Then it stopped. Everything. The pain. The torment. The entire world.
He couldn't see, not because the world he had built for himself had gone dark, but because his eyes were closed. Eyes. He had eyes. He could feel their rotation, feel the connection to muscle and nerve. Slowly he opened them. Finished tile, splatters of paint. He ignored the mirror at the first glimpse of scarred skin. He bore his torment even now, with a new body. Or was it really new at all? It was still ruined. But it was a body, and it was his. There was a spike of pure giddiness in his chest as he felt along what patches of skin on his shoulder retained sensation. He felt cold. Hungry. Famished, even. His lips were dry and cracked, as if he had merely been asleep for a very long time.
Ruvik looked to the mirror, meeting his own reflection's gaze. He pressed his mind against the glass, willing it to bend, to break, to change. It did nothing. His own brain in his own body, then. The tingling he would feel when exerting his will in the STEM from the hippocampus and prefrontal lobe regions of his brain was gone. He had no power, then. Save for what his mind was capable of. Power enough.
It was cold. He was cold. He couldn't afford to linger here, not with the poor excuse for a skin he was left with after the fire. Wherever he was, it was better than inside the STEM. Better than the confines of a brain with no body attached to it. Part of him knew this to be a dream, or perhaps some other's mental landscape. There was nothing left of him. How could he so easily be transplanted?
None of this was real. No matter how real it felt, there was no possibility of this being a real body, or a real place. Ruvik pressed his lips into a thin line, the old, familiar anger settling over him like a leather glove. Someone had tried to trick him. Make him think that he was whole again, that he had free range of the real world.
Ruvik turned away from the mirror and tried the door. It opened easily, letting him out into the unfinished hallway. His bare feet made little sound on the floorboards, an errant squeak sending the lights flickering. Construction... modern conveniences... It seemed real enough. A very strong will had manufactured this place, then. Sebastian's? Unlikely. Why would Sebastian's mind put him into a raw physical form?
The better to burn you with, my dear.
He remembered now. The lantern. The fire. The deep, raw, blistering anger. Sebastian had tried to burn him. His hands shook. He wasn't burning. There was no fire. Not here.
"Ruben..."
He broke from his panic. Hearing her voice, Laura's voice, was not new to him. He had heard it often enough since he was nineteen. Had seen her, too, always dancing in her favorite red dress. Symptomatic. He didn't allow his schizophrenia to interfere with his work. With his life, or what passed for one. But when he did hear her voice, it was always as if she were standing right next to him. No matter where he saw her mirage. This was different. Her voice was distant, as if she were down the hall, just out of sight. Ruvik knew that there was no possibility of her being there. Yet some part of him had to be absolutely sure.
He followed the direction of the voice, aware that he had drawn his arms to himself against the chill of the room. Laura's voice called to him again, urgent. When he turned the corner and looked down the hallway, however, there was no disappointment of her not being there. It was expected. Laura was dead. The voice, however...that had definitely come from outside of himself. If not Laura, then who...?
