![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strikesthrough) wrote2021-08-16 10:22 pm
[ MASK OR MENACE NAVIGATION ]
VICTOR VALE
The absence of fear led to a disregard for consequence
Victor Vale was not a fucking sidekick
NAME victor alan vale
SERIES vicious
CANON POINT post-exodus, i
CNC 2020 INFO: here
ALIAS n/a
STATUS unregistered
CLASS villain
AGE 37
ETHNICITY caucasian
HOUSING nonah #002
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Victor is not a warm or inviting person, preferring to keep to himself and presents an intimidating, strange shape of a man, often swept in blacks that draw out his pale skin, hair and eyes. He pushes out an impression of someone who is unapproachable and dangerous, both of which turn out to be entirely true.
Victor Vale is the son of two popular self-help writers and rather than follow in his parents’ footsteps and gravitate toward psychology, Victor enrols at Lockland University which boasts one of the best pre-med programmes in the country. While studying, he was assigned Eliot “Eli” Cardale (later to be known as Eli Ever) as a roommate. In Eli, Victor identified if not an entire like-mindedness, at least a like-naturedness of two people who were not normal, a shared darkness alongside arrogant ambition.
Brilliant and terrifying in their scope, the roommates’ senior thesis projects found common ground when Victor’s proposal centered around fight or flight biochemical thresholds in relation to adrenaline, and Eli’s proposal to investigate EOs—ExtraOrdinaries, a paranormal phenomena of people with powers. The question Eli and Victor came to ask was whether EOs were born with powers, or if they were made so through external factors, and then the question became what conditions may induce the latter. And then the questions moved from the realm of theory into practice. Eli and Victor deduced that the creation of EOs was liked to near-death experiences and set out to test the theory themselves.
They discovered that a person’s final thoughts before their “death” and coming back to life shape their powers when they awaken as a EO. Eli, the first to succeed, resulting in physical regenerative abilities, and Victor followed soon after, obtaining the ability to control pain in himself and other people. Where Eli’s near-death experience involved a bath of ice water and drowning, Victor’s experience involved enlisting the help of Eli’s girlfriend, Angie, to strap him to a table and run an electric current through him until he died and brought him back, but when it did Victor didn’t understand the nature of his power or how to control it, and in a burst of raw, unmeasured pain, Angie became Victor’s first victim.
A mixture of anger, grief, and trauma from their experiments lead Eli to betray Victor and call the police. Victor spent one night in jail, then broke out to return the favour to Eli. The two fight, but even being able to turn off his sense of pain, after Eli shoots Victor he passes out from bloodloss and is arrested.
Victor spends ten years in prison, four years in interrogation, five years in isolation, and in his final year he breaks out with a fellow inmate and hacker named Mitch. Having broken out together, Mitch finds himself attached to Victor, who is on a mission of revenge against Eli, who has dedicated himself to finding and eradicating other EOs with the belief that they are an affront to God.
On Victor and Mitch’s journey to Merit, they pick up a twelve-year-old girl who has been shot in the arm called Sydney. Sydney is also an EO with the ability to bring people back from the dead. Not only that, she knows Eli, because Eli is her sister Serena’s boyfriend. Also she knows Eli, because he tried to kill her. Serena is also an EO with the ability to control people through verbal suggestion, and the only reason that Eli has not killed her is because of her control over him.
Victor has Sydney resurrect one of Eli’s victims and then send the revived EO out to send a message to Eli—that Victor is out of prison, and he’s coming for him.
Mitch cracks the method by which Eli is finding EOs via the police database and officers who are working with Eli and under Serena’s control. Using the database to their own ends after Mitch hacks in, Victor seeks out an EO that Eli is targeting named Dominic with the ability to shift into another plane of time to move instantaneously in real time. He’s also in pain all the time from his time as a soldier. In exchange for taking away his pain, Dominic agrees to help Victor with Eli.
Baiting Eli to meet him at midnight after posting himself to the database, Victor uses Dominic’s power to get the drop on Serena and kill her while his ears are plugged. Removing that obstacle allowed Victor and Eli free to have their fatal meeting, during which Victor allows Eli to kill him with the police as witnesses. Eli is arrested and his final cries to the police to burn Victor’s body go unheeded, leaving Syndey free to resurrect Victor two nights later.
All Eli had to do was smile. All Victor had to do was lie. Both proved frighteningly effective.
Victor doesn't put much effort into being personable unless he needs to perform it for specific, practical reason (ie, to get what he wants) and instead often comes across as distant, cold, detached, and generally standoffish. He lies flawlessly, acts with ruthless intent, and possesses very little in the way of remorse. He's calculated and cruel, and generally is an uncomfortable presence to be around with very few exceptions.
PSYCHIC IMPRESSION
Victor likes to pretend he feels nothing at all and has no attachment to others, but that isn't entirely true. In fact, Victor feels very intensely and tries to act like he doesn't because sociopaths feel nothing and that is what he believes himself to be. In reality, Victor longs for true connection to others which it what made his break with Eli something he could only process by seeking revenge at the cost of everything. It's also why Victor ended up with a little crew of misfits including a hacker, a soldier, a teenager, and a thrice re-alive dog. Victor is not nearly as emotionless as he wants to think he is.
SUPERNATURAL IMPRESSION
Victor is broken on the inside, like the fabric that holds him together is frayed and flickering on and off. He's like a lightbulb burning too high and too hot that will eventually burn out.
Victor is a bad person. To some people, it's all just a matter of perspective.
The child of two self-help writers, Victor grew up in a stable if lonely environment where many of his teenage years at least were spent by himself in the Vale's family home while his parents went on extensive book and speaking tours. Finding the work they do to be farcical, Victor orientated him toward medicine and science, something of a middle-finger to the discipline of the doctor's Vale as Victor rejected the field of the psyche and instead opted for the bio-medical world with sights set on becoming a suregon. He also took to purposefully defacing his parents’ works into strike-through poetry as both an act of defiance toward them and an act of self-expression where he can't find the words himself.
Incredibly intelligent and possessing both an aptitude for detailed calculation and a adeptness for science and medicine, Victor is ambitious, arrogant, and self-serving.
He is pragmatic to a extreme, very much of the doctrine that the end justifies any and all means which can make him cold, cruel and utterly ruthlessness when the need calls on it, but always with logic and reason at the core. Simply put, if Victor doesn’t need to do something, he won’t, but if there is something he wants to achieve then he will do whatever is necessary in the most direct way possible. If that means it would make more sense to kill or torture someone than find a different but more complex way forward, Victor will absolutely kill or torture someone.
In his own self-assessment, Victor views himself as a sociopath, believing he is above feelings-based decisions and emotions. In reality, this is a self-aggrandising view on Victor's part and while he does seem to struggle to convey emotions, Victor does feel quite intensely and does develop attachments to other people, perhaps much to his chagrin. Despite not being an actual sociopath though, Victor is undeniably emotionally detached which enhances his general amoralism and ability to do vicious and brutal things in the pursuit of things he wants.
At times, Victor is quite sadistic and has periods, especially when angered or agitated, when he has deep-seated desires to hurt people, either with his powers or a weapon, though generally he prefers inflicting pain from a distance where possible.
Initially handling himself as something of a lone wolf, Victor met Eli Cardale while the two of them studied pre-med together at Lockland University. In Eli, Victor found a kindred spirit, someone whose darkness reflected and complimented his own. But where Eli may have been able to fake normality, Victor dug in, purposefully pulling both their inner monsters to the surface. Eli's senior thesis project related to researching EOs, or ExtraOrdinaries, urban legends of people with amazing abilities. Together, with Victor's methods of persuasion, the theoretical project of how to create EOs turned practical and Victor's desire to pull out the darkness in Eli saw their senior year end prematurely, both of them changed forever through becoming EOs.
Their success in cracking the EO code was not without casualties. Victor's jealousy, hubris, and blind ambition in pursuit of results came to a head with the accidental death of his friend and Eli's girlfriend, Angie. This was ultimately be where Victor Vale and Eli Cardale Ever became enemies as Eli turned his once-best friend over to the authorities.
Intensely driven and focused, Victor was arrested and spent ten years in Wrighton Federal Penitentiary, where he plotted his revenge on Eli with care, patience and meticulous attention to detail, while manipulating the people around him without hesitation in order to obtain his goals. This feeds into Victor's general interests in controlling not only people and situations, but also as a master of his own self-control fate without ever ascribing what happens to him to some higher, unseen power or greater meaning.
When the sunlight hit him, it didn’t bring out any colors, but only accentuated the lack of color, making him look more like an old-fashioned photo than a flesh-and-blood student.
HAIR blond
EYES blue
HEIGHT 6'
BUILD tall, slender, sometimes gaunt
FEATURES three bullethole scars
PB eamon farren
Victor felt gingerly along the lines of his power, searching for frayed threads, interruptions in the current, but felt—unchanged. Unbroken. Whole.
Victor can manipulate the electric pulses that move through nerves which allow him to manipulate movements and control pain on either end of scale. He is also recently obtained the ability to physically heal others and enhance their emotions--both require physical contact.
EXTRAORDINARY
EOs were urban legends until Victor and Eli cracked the EO creation code: a combination of traumatic near-experiences that heavily impacts the victim physically and psychologically. It requires a tremendous amount of fear-based adrenaline and personal willpower on the part of a victim who wants to survive in order for them to become an EO. Victor had himself strapped to a table and asked his friend Angie Knight to torture him with an electrical charge. When Victor blacked out from the pain, he awoke changed and with the ability to alter the experience of pain in himself and others. His transformation from human to EO also came with a permanent fatality: Angie had died from a massive pulse of electricity from Victor when he blacked out.
MUNDANE SKILLS
Victor is pragmatic, patient, and highly intelligent. He also has an innate aptitude for understanding the human body, which is part of why he went into medicine as a per-med student. He retains the belief that the human body is ultimately a machine made out of flesh and provides fuel that drives his interest in fixing broken aspects of people, though he does it for the sense of control and personal accomplishment, not to save anyone.
As a ExtraOrdinary, Victor gained the ability to control pain intensity, both his own and in others. He tends to use his powers with very little hesitation and even less remorse. While Victor can induce pain out of nothing, it is more effective when he is tapping into some pre-existing pain or wound that has been inflicted, and he can both increase pain and entirely erase it. In extreme cases, Victor can turn this ability right up to such a level that it overloads a victim and can be lethal. He doesn’t necessarily need to be too close to people to maintain this ability either. Canonically, Victor nullifies the chronic pain experienced by another character and is able to maintain this pain-numbing effect across several cities (and implicitly several states), however he is unable to alter the intensity in either direction at long distances--he can only maintain it at a fixed level or stop using his ability entirely. Any pre-set pain/numbness level ceases if Victor is killed. Similarly, he is absolutely unable to cause long-distance fatalities with his abilities and he must be in relatively close proximity in order to initially inflict or remove pain. He also cannot control his pain output while sleeping, meaning it's potentially dangerous to wake him, though it's suggests that pre-set pain control levels maintain their consistent level while he sleeps. Later in canon, Victor teaches himself to control nerves for things other than giving and taking pain away and he develops his abilities to enable him to stop people from moving or control their bodies like puppets. This is a fair bit more technical ability which takes a lot more concentration than pain alteration.
Emotional Intensification (MoM)
By making physical contact with others (which he hates to do), Victor can forcibly enhance whatever the most prominent emotion someone is feeling at that particular moment. He has no control over what that emotion is, can't pick or choose one particular emotion to enhance over another, and he can't feel their emotion himself.
Healing (MoM)
Victor's healing can only be performed on other people and Victor cannot heal himself in any shape or form.
Healing must involve physical contact with the person he's healing and the location of the wound; he absolutely cannot perform any kind of remote healing.
He also cannot heal mental or damage done to magical abilities and is only able to heal damage related to the physical body and nervous system.
Initially, Victor didn't have much of a handle on what he could and couldn't do and some early attempts to heal failed entirely and accomplished sloppy or only partial success. Other times, Victor's early attempts to heal went unexpectedly overboard and out of control, producing too much new flesh and so on.
After the CNC2020 AU event where he got to experience his full villain / resistance leader fantasy, he returned wit seven years of advanced knowledge and hands-on experience of his healing abilities and for all intents and purposes Victor considered himself a highly skilled doctor with unique neurological insight through a combination of his nerve control ability and healing abilities.
Whenever Victor uses his healing ability on someone, there is a recharge period before he can use the ability again, depending on the time spent using the ability and the level of concentration needed and may range from a few hours to a day or two.
VISUALSSUBTITLE
CONNECTIONSSUBTITLE
CONNECTION TYPE
CONNECTION INFO
PLAYLISTSUBTITLE
ghost — 31+ — gmt — jesting#7662 — plurk
Thread Tracking
no subject