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PLAYER

Name: Ghost
Age: 30+
Contact: kralkatorrik
Other Characters: N/A
Interests: Begrudging alliances, manipulation stuff, grey morals, complex relationships especially slow-burn back-and-forth "we're pals, oh you left your knife in my back" relationships, "if anyone touches you, I'll kill them" relationships, "if we make it out of here alive, I'll kill you myself" relationships... I like mess :')

CHARACTER

Name: Victor Vale
Canon/OC: Canon, V.E Schwab's Villains series
Last Canon Point: Vengeful, Exodus I
Previous Game: maskormenace
Arrival Point: Point of drop, June 2020
Journal: strikesthrough
Age: 37 (44 mentally)

Canon World

Victor's canon world is ostensibly like the earth and America we know; same level of technology, politics, world powers, and so forth. The only difference is that it also contains ExtraOrdinaries/EOs, who are people who have undergone some kind of near-death experience (NDE) and gain some kind of superpower.

It's Schwab's version of X-Men, basically.

Canon History

Wiki Link / "What Happened In" Vicious / Vengeful summaries

cw: suicidal-adjacent actions, injury, drug use, pain infliction, torture, death, resurrection
• Victor attends university as a pre-med student and meets Eli Cardale.

• Eli suggests studying EOs and while Victor makes the first attempt, it fails. Their next hypothesis is the NDA additionally needs a huge amount of adrenaline, fear, or an extreme will to live in order to successfully create an EO.

• For Eli's turn, they succeed and Eli returned as an EO with full regeneration powers.

• Victor asks Angie (an engineering student, Victor's friend, Eli's girlfriend) to help him try again.

• Angie has access to devices that send large electrical charges through objects in a controlled environment, which Victor convinces her to use on him by steadily dialling the amount of electricity up until he blacks out.

• When Victor wakes up, he's also become an EO with the ability to control pain in himself and other people, but as he's unable to understand or control his powers yet.

• Victor accidentally overloads Angie with pain, killing her in the process.

• When Victor and Eli next meet, they argue about Angie and the status of EOs in general. Their fight turns violent, and Eli shoots Victor. When Victor blacks out from bloodloss, he's arrested.

• Victor is incarcerated for ten years where he plots his revenge against Eli.

• Victor spends five years in solitary confinement and the following five years in general subtly practising and honing the use of his abilities on other inmates.

• He befriends his cellmate, a hacker innate named Mitch, and they orchestrate their escape.

• Newly freed and on the run, Mitch and Victor encounter and rescue a 12-year-old EO while driving who has been shot named Sydney; she can bring living things back from the dead.

• After tracking down and luring Eli into a fight, Victor baits Eli into killing him in front of the police, which leads to Eli's arrest and containment in an EO facility.

• Sydney then uses her powers to revive Victor two days later.

• While Sydney's resurrection abilities bring Victor back, he hasn't come back entirely the same--he now experiences being overloaded with pain and inconsistent control of his abilities. Eventually, the build up of energy amasses so much that it kills Victor... temporarily. When he wakes up, his head is clear again and his control of his powers have returned, but these death episodes are happening more often (approximately once every two months) and the length of time before his revival is steadily increasing. Victor's goal is to find a solution to this problem and fix himself.

• When Victor and Eli meet next they fight, but Victor has gained access to an EO-nullifying serum that he uses of Eli. Sydney shoots Eli while his regeneration powers are inactive, killing him.

• Victor steals six remaining vials and leaves the city solo.

Past Game History

MoM Game Navigation

• After the events in Vengeful, Victor is snatched into an another dimension and wakes up in a government facility, injected nanites, and welcomed as an imPort hero.

• There is no way back that the locals know of, and the nanites grant Victor some additional powers alongside his pre-existing abilities: healing and emotional intensification.

• Five minutes into his arrival, Victor wakes to Eli trying to kill him.

• They immediately fight and test their new abilities on each other--Eli using his forced tranquillity ability to make Victor placid, and Victor using his emotional intensification to make Eli feel more emotion than he's ever felt in his life.

• They hit a stalemate and opt into a truce with the shared goal of finding a way to make Eli human so he can die. Victor doesn't tell Eli he already has six samples of the EO-nullification serum.

• Victor takes the opportunity the new world to close the door on his old life.

• Superhero-scale events take place in imPort cities that he sometimes, either begrudgingly or tangentially, gets involved in, but overall he's a fairly minimal presence as he works as a doctor and medical researcher, searching for a more effective solution to his death-cycle problem.

cw: medical experimentation, fascist authoritarian states, brain implants, imprisonment, discrimination themes
• After the conclusion of an event that threatened to destroy both the MoM world and the multiverse at large, weak spots appear in time and space, allowing for an insight into what could have been, ushering the in-game AU event Cape and Cowl 2020--a dark dystopian version of Earth where resistant metahumans were rounded up by a fascist government. The event opens as the metahumans stage mass rebellion.

• In this AU setting, CnC2020 Victor spent 7 years in this universe, establishing himself as a highly respected name in the field of neuroscience and medicine due to his nerve controlling and healing abilities before the metahuman crackdown. Victor vehemently, then violently, resisted registration, and after two years of resisting was imprisoned by the government.

• Victor was implanted with a chip to contain and control his powers and subjected to a range of experiments in an attempt to find ways to replicate his nerve-control abilities. For the next five years, Victor gathered information and formed a carefully curated network to set the pieces in motion for a mass meta breakout at his facility.

• After the breakout, Victor operated as an open enemy to the state, participating in grand acts of terrorism and sabotage and staging large-scale extraction missions for especially powerful metahumans in maximum security. He also had a massive air-ship fortress, it was very Fox-verse X-Men.

• When the CnC2020 concluded the MoM timeline resumed and anyone who was CnC2020 AU'd during the event returned. Some retained their CnC2020 memories and experiences, including Victor.

Personality

In canon, Mitch notes "[...] there were people you stood beside because it meant you weren't in their way [...] the only thing Mitch knew was that he did not want to be in [Victor's] way."

This is a pretty decent summary of Victor: he's dangerous if you're in his way, but if you're not he's more like a sniper rifle than a grenade.

Victor's personality overall has remained fairly consistent from canon through MoM and CnC2020, it's mostly his scope of motivation that's changed.

In canon, Victor's life motivations focused solely on revenge against Eli and then trying to resolve his death-cycle problem. In MoM, Victor's scope for new motivations widened. While still very self-focused and self-involved, Victor has a greater chance of getting involved in something that doesn't directly involve him if he feels he can gain something for himself in the process--alliances, favours, leverage.

Victor is cold, detached, not very nice or likeable as a person and he makes very little effort to be personable unless he wants something, and even then he'd rather just lie than pretend to be nice.

Extremely pragmatic, Victor believes that ends justify the means in the most strategic manner possible to him. If it would make more sense to kill or torture someone than find a different but more complex way forward, Victor will just kill or torture someone.

While sadistic and ruthless, Victor doesn't seek out opportunities to cause harm just for harm's sake; he reveals in ruthlessness within context, but doesn't seek out opportunities to hurt others just to generate pleasure for himself. Like everything else he does, there has to be a reason associated with it.

He's very intelligent and a keen schemer and manipulator, content to take his time to plan as well as react quickly and pivot as needed. He could have escaped from prison any time he wanted, but instead opted to stay for the time and quiet it afforded him in plotting his revenge on Eli, meaning he is very patient indeed.

He's dry and dark humoured, downright excitable when he's working on something that has sparked his interest, and when he does make allies they are solid and he will go to great lengths for his people (if it ultimately benefits him). This became especially true in his late-CnC2020 days where he found himself leading his resistance group.

While he doesn't care so much about positions of power for the sake of it, Victor does like being in control. He's generally indifferent at best toward hierarchies and actively hostile toward authority figures at worst. However, if he has a project that interests him, Victor is intensely driven and focused.

Prior CR

• Eli Ever - Friend, enemy, friend again, then eventually complicated lover, Eli remains the most important person in Victor's life even when he isn't present. Their time in MoM allowed them to bridge certain gaps with each other, and their new powers produced a mutual addictions where Eli's induced calming was euphoric for Victor, and Victor's emotional enhancement allowed Eli to feel a twisted version of love for the first time. They partner up to find a way to kill Eli's as Eli has grown tired of both their conflict and the threat of immortality, but along the lines, Victor began to sabotage that project without telling Eli, instead selfishly wanting Eli to stay human and alive with him.

• Apollo - Victor and Apollo forged a tight alliance in CnC2020 when Victor broke Apollo out of a maximum security facility and brought him into his resistance group as their "big gun." Victor also offered to assist with the damage done to Apollo's husband, Midnighter. When Apollo and Victor returned to MoM with their CnC2020 memories in tact, they pledged that at the earliest signs of imPort registration they would be ready to act.

• Joseph "Joey" Kavinsky - Another CnC2020 resistance member and Victor's right-hand man. As someone who can literally dream things into existence, Joey dreamt up a massive floating airship, the Samodiva, and the two were intimately involved in a weird way. Kavinsky didn't hold onto his CnC2020 self like Victor did but they maintained an odd, non-sexual relationship.

• Kaz Brekker - Their shared sense of humour and pragmatism lead to a friendship with mutual benefits. Kaz reached out to Victor for help when he was jumped by members of a rival gang and badly injured, seeking out Victor's healing abilities, which Victor provided.

Strengths & Weaknesses

• A lying liar who lies

• Has an incredible sense of knowledge and awareness of the human body, even before becoming an EO

• An very skilled physician even if he's never formally completed any medical school or residency in any of the worlds he's been in

• Not even a bit squeamish

• Pragmatic

• Patient

• Tactical and strategic

• Mistrustful, sometimes paranoid

• Ruthless and remorseless

• Low emotional capacity, both in terms of his own feelings and caring about the feelings of others

• Sometimes dramatic, sometimes just a drama queen

POWERS
In Mask or Menance at the time, all characters could have up to three powersets. These three powersets could include canon abilities, MoM-specific abilities, or a combination of both. Victor had his canon Nerve/Pain control as one powerset, then two additional MoM-specific abilities.

• [Canon] Pain/Nerve Control

As an EO, Victor gained the ability to control pain intensity, both his own and in others and he tends to use his powers with very little hesitation and even less remorse.

It's suggested these abilities work on anything living with nervous system and it is experienced as being able to sense of electrical pulses within others. In practical terms, this means Victor can feel if someone is present without directly seeing them by the electrical pulses their body sends out and he can also tell if someone is dead without even touching them.

While Victor can induce pain out of nothing, he's more effective when he is tapping into some pre-existing pain produced within his target. He can both increase or decrease the intensity of pain in himself and others.

In extreme cases, Victor can turn this ability up to such a high level that it overloads a victim and can be lethal. On the other end of the spectrum, he can remove the sensation of pain entirely.

He doesn’t necessarily need to be too close to people to maintain this ability. Canonically, Victor nullifies the chronic pain experienced by another character and is able to maintain this pain-killing 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 cease if Victor is killed and resume as soon as he's alive again.

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 suggested that pre-set pain control levels maintain their consistency while he sleeps.

Later in canon, Victor develops his ability to control nerves for things other than altering pain, enabling him to control other people's nerves enough to stop them from moving or manipulating their bodies like puppets.

This is a fair bit more technical ability involved with his nerve control and it takes a lot more concentration than pain alteration.

• [MoM] Healing

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.

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.

• [MoM] Emotional Intensification

By making physical contact with others, 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.

I'd opt to keep his canon abilities.

Suggested Nerfs
Canon already has a baked-in aspect where periodically (roughly once every two months), Victor loses control of his own abilities, gets overloaded with pain that he can no-longer control, and then he dies for short periods. He's still actively searching for a cure for this and I would like to keep this as an not only an on-going personal plot, but also make it so he effectively gets a month of his powers working as well as they're ever going to in this setting, then a month of decline where they're inconsistent before he dies and the cycle resets.

I would also suggest a time limitation on how long he can maintain control someone else's nerves especially, maybe a maximum of 5-10 seconds for each use and pushing beyond that he has to fight against swiftly mounting dizziness and nausea, and ultimately passes out if he keeps going.

As the distance limit is never defined in canon for when he is inducing or changing pain levels or controlling nerves, I might suggest a limit of a 10-15 meter radius and, again, trying to push beyond that will involves him experiencing dizziness, headaches, nosebleeds, collapsing, and so forth. I'd also suggest a line of sight condition for pain/nerve control.

In canon, he can control multiple people's nerves/cause them pain at once, but I would suggest this be limited to a single target, with diminishing effectiveness and accuracy the more targets he's trying to impact simultaneously and, again, all the dizziness and eventual passing out if he tries to push beyond.

Arrival Inventory

• His CnC2020 Outfit--a long black trench coat with deep red lining, pale grey leather gloves, dark pants, dark boots, with the dream addition of his forearms and hands being covered in black sharpie lines with some written text periodically escaping the strikethrough which will take him a while to wash off

• A kid's lunchbox with a cartoon of Joey Kavinsky's face on it full of vials of blue EO-nullifying serum, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a bottle of Cool Blue Gatorade. It's hard to tell which vials are real and which are just more blue gatorade

• A toy model of the Samodiva

• A classic-looking black bible full of things said by Eli Ever at some point in time

Humanization

Victor is human. An EO human, but still human.

Fit
I've opted to bring him in as a CRAU rather than straight from canon is that he's already gone through a lot of development that decouples him from his canon motivations and obsessions that otherwise make him very myopic and disinterested in the affairs of others. In his CRAU state he's still got a "what's in it for me?" kind of attitude, but he's had a lot more experience of doing things for others in exchange for something that he doesn't just flat-out decline.

I'm very much hoping he can be someone who brings some interesting friction, but can also ideally establish himself as useful as a doctor, someone who can Get Shit Done, and who can also be in the field in a backline supportive capacity.

With his memories as a resistance leader, he also has more hands-on experience leading and participating in mission-based affairs and in having a wider-scope goal that isn't necessarily have a quick or easy to access. It's a general set-up he's now used to and can more easily slide into even with new and different players on the board.

SAMPLES

• MoM Sample
• Fade Rift TDM