✘ application ✘

[frankensoul]

YOU
Player name: Zero
Contact: arrpee, zero#8942 at discord
Referral: the effervescent rae

THEM
Character Name: Colin
Character Age: He looks about 29-30 but is physically about six months old
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Mid-story, just after he gets his appearance modifier

World History/Context:

The history of the world progressed in a relatively identical fashion to our own up until the early 2000s, when a fissure in space-time opened above the planet Earth, sending an outpouring of extraplanar beings into our world and plunging the world into a perpetual night. Since the extraplanars are invisible to the naked eye, there wasn’t a lot of understanding as to what was going on until some communication could be established. This would set off a long chain of events and developments that aren't super pertinent so I won't bore you with the details. The bottom line is that there would come to be a mutual understanding between the extraplanars and the human race - the humans (known to the extraplanars as "Hollows") could serve as vessels for the extraplanars to allow them to affect the physical world, while the extraplanars (known to the humans as "Kindreds") could allow for heightened perception of the elevated plane of existence where the human soul resides.

This was a fairly rocky road to start with. Initial resonance doesn't necessarily predicate a good and healthy long-term relationship; when you're literally sharing a soul you kind of have to put a lot of work into making sure you're both getting along. If there’s discord in the soulspace then the Hollow is going to reflect that, and neither the Hollow nor the extra tenant living there is gonna want to live in a house with the windows blown out and the rooms all drafty. The Hollow and Kindred are bonded for life, essentially, and once they're together they are Together; if the Kindred dies so does the Hollow and if the Hollow dies so does the Kindred.

In the early days there was a lot of resonances that went wrong because they happened while both Hollow and Kindred were in the middle of their lifespans and thus weren't used to sharing metaphysical personal space with each other. The products of these flawed unions would come to be known as Splinters - souls at war with themselves. The Hollow starts to decay under the strain of so much discord in the vessel, tearing itself apart and generally lashing out at everyone else around it. The modern timeline sees the development of rehab programs and therapy centers to reconcile extreme strive between Hollow and Kindred, but in the early days it was seen as most humane and safest to simply put the Splinters down.

Despite the bumps in the road, for a couple hundred years this went along pretty great. Hollows and Kindreds could be drawn together in the existential pre-life soup based on the qualities of their souls, and this would go along much better than initial resonances. Hollows got an increased lifespan, increased stamina, and ways to interact with other Kindreds on a secondary plane of existence, while Kindreds got to be able to interact with the physical world. Hollows and Kindreds can choose who's taking the wheel of the shared body at any given time, which functionally does away with the need for sleep; whoever isn't at the wheel can just chill on the secondary plane of existence for a bit and interact with other Kindreds (and other Hollows whose Kindreds are bumming around in their bodies).

Hollows and Kindreds tend to reflect each other in terms of appearance and the like. Hollows look like ordinary human people and all that entails, while Kindreds can have all sorts of varied appearances that will vary depending on personality. If a pair are together for a long time, they'll start to gain attributes from each other (an example being a bespectacled Hollow with a horned Kindred would eventually sprout a stubby pair of horns while their Kindred would gradually grow nearsighted).

Obviously there's a lot of minutiae here but for brevity's sake I'll just leave you with the basics.

tl;dr people share their souls with interdimensional monsters and that's just how it is on this bitch of an earth

Character History:

In general, the act of a Hollow or Kindred separating themself from their soulmate is considered extremely taboo. This act is usually nonconsensual and will often result in the death of the other party, as well as leaving the living party moping around with a shattered piece of hoarded soul. But at one point, one particular Kindred manages to pull this off. They retitle themselves "Anomaly" because they're so edgy like that and set about trying to create a completely vacant Hollow - a vessel devoid of soul, that they can appropriate and steer around without needing to share. They do this by knitting together pieces of old Splintered Hollows. Basically, Anomaly grabbed a bunch of shattered pieces of bodies and souls and squeezed them together, welding things into place until they had a rough approximation of a human body - their very own Hollow.

Anomaly didn't anticipate one critical error. See, they did such a good job creating their very own organic, homegrown Hollow that this Hollow came away with sentience. Intentional or not, Anomaly fabricated a being with a soul, albeit one made of cobbled-together pieces of other dead people's souls.

This is Colin. And, unlike every other living being on the planet, Colin doesn't share his soul with anybody. He's a broken Hollow. He has no Kindred at all. Just a messed-up mishmash of a stitched-together soul in a stitched-together body that never should have existed.

Anomaly tosses Colin pretty much immediately once they realize their experiment failed, and Colin wakes up shortly after - in a dumpster, no less, in the streets of a city known as Noctalion. He wanders around in a daze, looking like hell, until he runs into a bunch of folks who take him in. They're all normal Hollows/Kindreds, and they're a little bit in awe that this guy has sentience at all, but like it or not, he's a living creature now, and they try to teach him about the ways this weird little world operates. Fortunately for everyone, they genuinely have his best interests at heart and want to help him blend in. Since Colin is a very newly-created bab, he's still learning how most things work and frequently makes rookie mistakes like, "now would maybe be a good time to lie to the authorities about being a fabricated abomination," or "so maybe that literal bag of literal dog food isn't for you to Literally Eat."

Shenanigans ensue for a time, but gradually Colin starts to draw the attention of people that a found family of misfits and errant rulebreakers definitely don't want side-eying them. The de facto parent of this dubious household, a haggard Hollow on the older side of things with an equally old Kindred, uses their connections to get Colin an appearance modifier. The device affixes to Colin's wrist, and a fabricated appearance is installed in. So now Colin the three-eyed, toothy, patchwork-frankenstein monsterboy can look like an ordinary average chum. Except for his eyes. His eyes are still bright yellow. And unless he can blend in with crowds, anyone with a Kindred (so like, everyone) will be able to tell that there's something very wrong with the state of his soul. But, uh...nothing's perfect.

Personality:

Colin is a horrendous mixture of "psychologically underdeveloped due to being literally six months old" and "intuitive enough to adapt borrowed concepts into his worldview remarkably quickly." Within moments of gaining sentience and getting a good look at himself, he's immediately able to tell that he doesn't look the way a person should. Even without a frame of reference for normality, he knows that most people don't have three eyes and this many fucking teeth.

Despite his fearsome appearance, Colin himself is skittish, easily spooked, and comparatively much gentler than his toothy exterior implies. While at this point he has a good six months of life experience, he's still very much on a learning curve as far as normality goes. He understands basic social cues and knows that it's easier and kinder on others if he doesn't bring up what he is or what he really looks like, but he's also possessed with a downright dangerous sense of curiosity in regards to the world at large. He wants to know more about his own existence and the world in which he was made. He pokes and prods and sticks his nose into unfamiliar things, even when he positively shouldn't. Part of this has to do with a genuine sense of childlike interest, the way any growing mind would want to know more about things.

This is unfortunately paired with a next to nonexistent sense of impulse control. If Colin sees something he wants to try to eat, he will eat it. If he's tired, he's going to sleep Right The Fuck Now. If he wants to climb this thing, he will climb the thing. Someone's watching him try to devour his roommate's blunt on the spot? Doesn't matter; he's going to see if it's edible. Someone's cooking dinner on this stove? He's going to reach out and try and grab that burning hot pan anyway, just to see how it feels. It's not enough for someone to tell him how things are. He has to feel it for himself, and a good deal of this instinct has to do with a desire to make up for lost time, as it were. If other people had to learn these sorts of things by experience, then surely he can too! If he burns his hand on a pan, then look at that - now he knows that burning pans are painful and should not be touched! See? He learned something! Aren't you proud of him? And with that being said, he's unlikely to make the same mistake twice. He can and will adapt as he assimilates new experiences.

Colin's origins have unsurprisingly imbued him with a deep sense of shame. His actual underlying appearance isn't the sole part of that, though it certainly is an extension of it. Mostly, he's just incredibly hyper-aware of the fact that he doesn't share his soul with anyone. He's an abomination in every sense of the word. He's utterly alone in both the sense that there's nothing else like him, and he doesn't have a Kindred who knows him through and through the way everyone else in the world does. Combine this intense loneliness with a sense of distinct unbelonging, and you get someone who craves affection and validation from literally anyone. It's in Colin's best interest that the first people to run across him did genuinely want to help him, because he gets very attached, very quickly, and probably would have imprinted on even the most sadistic of lowlife if that was the sort of person to find him first. The quality of personality has nothing to do with it; he was simply so isolated from the start that the presence of literally anyone else was enough to attract his interest and therefore his loyalty. While he's learned to become slightly more discerning in the six months he's been alive, it really only takes an incremental amount of kindness for Colin to start getting fond and eager to please as a result. He's aware of deception as a concept, but he's yet to really learn how to identify it in others, or understand the motivations behind it.

He's very much a kinetic learner by default, and is subsequently pretty soft-spoken and prone to stammering. His vocabulary is a bit cluttered, since his understanding of basic world concepts is about as patchworked as the rest of him. Fragments of memories dredged up from the pieces of the souls that comprise him can occasionally lend him the odd understanding or definition (as an example, he could recognize the concept of "streets" not long after waking, but had to be informed as to the nuances of "cars"), but oftentimes it's so divorced from context that it ends up being more confusing than anything else. In essence, he's got a bunch of random-ass shreds of other people's life experiences dumped together in his skull, and next to no instruction as to how he should set about sorting through that mnemonic soup in search of a clear narrative.

Colin's young. He's incredibly new to the world and an aberration on top of it, and he knows it. His insecurities stem from the fact that he knows he was a mistake. He's a creature that the world didn't anticipate. There's no place for him here by default, and he has no idea how to set about carving one out for himself. He's plagued with doubt and uncertainty about his long-term future, and compensates by settling instead for thinking only of the short-term. It's about getting through the next day and then the next and then the next. He's been operating off survival instinct from pretty much the moment he awoke, and he's not yet learned how to switch that off.

Items:

• Appearance Modifier: fixed to his wrist; it's relatively hardy and waterproof, but if it's hit by something akin to an EMP it'll short out and his real appearance will be exposed, since it's basically a hard-light projection over his actual features
  
• Packet of Facemasks: the disposable surgical kind; he has about ten left
  
• Wallet: mostly empty, as he's in the process of cobbling together a false identity for the purposes of navigating public spaces; contains a folded-up bullet-point list of "facts" for his cover story and a list of phone numbers
  
• Burner Phone: a gift from his roommates; now functionally useless
  
• Clothing: the clothes on his back; borrowed t-shirt, hoodie, and jeans

Powers/skills:

Love the Cronch: Since Colin's organs are a mishmash of other people's organs, he's capable of eating things he really shouldn't be eating. Like a horrible deformed dog. This is obviously within reasonable limits - if he goes about eating knives, he's going to get cut up organs as a result, and he'll have to find a way to, uh, "replace" them. Unfortunately this also means he could like completely realistically chug a gallon of bleach and aside from feeling rather ill be completely fine. It's less that he has a sturdy immune system and more like he's just such a fucking wreck by default that there's not a lot of toxic shit in the world that could do him worse than he already does to himself.

Patchwork Goblin: Since Colin is made up of other people's body parts, he could potentially learn to replace parts of himself with...other parts...if he wanted to. Granted, this isn't something that's part of his skillset, as he's not the sort of person to rip off people's limbs, probably couldn't even stomach it, and furthermore doesn't actually know how to, uh, sew flesh onto other flesh. The most pertinent part of this particular "ability" is the fact that decapitation doesn't necessarily spell the end for him. It's only if his central nervous system is damaged (like, say, getting his head lopped off or his spinal cord snapped in two) that he'll be irreparably broken to the point of death. Since he's technically a bunch of corpses reanimate, he doesn't risk death by bleeding out of he loses the odd limb or two. But again, he'd have to figure out how to...reattach...the parts of himself...that get lost if that were to happen, and he'd lose functionality in those detached limbs until he could squeeze them back on.

Just Hollow Enough: While he's not a legitimate Hollow, Colin still has a lot of the perks since he's made up of uh, pieces of Hollows, though not to the same extent. He can go for about seventy-two hours before he needs to sleep (a normal Hollow can go on indefinitely, provided they switch off with their Kindred semi-regularly) and has levels of strength/stamina that would measure up to roughly twice the amount of an ordinary human person.

Something I Can't See: So spoilers, Anomaly only managed to imbue Colin with proper sentience by literally hacking up bits of their own fractured soul to stick it into their experimental Hollow. Like they just deadass spliced pieces of their own dang self into Colin's hodgepodge of a soul. These fragments don't have their own sentience; it's more like Anomaly's backdoor into Colin's body, so they can use pieces of their own gotdamn self to slide on in and use him like a meatsuit. Being in a different setting will alter this tremendously - without Anomaly present in the setting to puppet this shit, Colin's sense of self will just go fucking haywire, the dregs of Anomaly's experimentations playing righteous havoc. All this means in terms of gameplay is that occasionally Colin will start oozing black, oily liquid, lose grasp of his sentience for a bit, and will swing wildly between "vacant zombie going through the motions" and "fangs for the memories even if they weren't so great hope you don't mind if I try to rip your limbs off they look gorgeous by the way mind if I borrow them." Colin's ordinarily quite sweet-tempered personality will get all rudely hijacked, but only by Anomaly's bruteforce instinct, and none of the intellect. This doesn't happen often; the impetus is usually something like a huge shock to Colin's system. Think a blow to the head that completely floors him or knocks him out, leading to these little frazzled tidbits of Anomaly to try and pilot the ship for a bit. Another jolt to his system will be enough to jar him back into being his typical monsterboy self, once he wakes up from probably being knocked the fuck out.

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Patchwork Boy makes some friends