Name: Clyde Leonard

Age: 28

Gender: Male

Appearance: Clyde is tall and thin, almost more a pale skeleton than a person. He’s let his hair grow out since the dream, resulting in a thin beard and tangled mess of brown hair that tends to sit in a heap on his head. Underneath the ragged hoodie that he wears at all hours of the day, his chest and back are a tapestry of scars, and a thin layer of dirt and a strange sort-of-sticky grey substance cover him from head to toe. In summary, he looks like a complete mess, and looks aren’t really deceiving in this case.

Biography/History: It’s getting hard to remember.  He was born in Boston, that’s something he’s fairly sure of – he remembers being an only child in a rich household, his Mom and Dad always busy with something else. They’re still alive, as far as he can remember, but he hasn’t seen them in a while. 

His parents paid his way to higher education in spite of his lack of motivation, and his easygoing and likeable personality combined with his background to basically guarantee a cushy job in finance was waiting for him right out of school. He remembers being successful, well-liked, and alone, and then everything changed.

It told him that he was going to be very special. He thrashed in his sleep and screamed as its voice skittered inside him like a thousand chattering insects. He would be important, he would be needed, and he would never be alone again.

Immediately his life began to degenerate alongside his mind. He stopped going to work, ate less, got evicted from his apartment. His few friends that came to check on him thought he’d gone completely mad, and the few that had tried to get help for him had been torn apart by his pets for their trouble – had to be done, the hive told him. They were a threat.

Finally, the Hive told him to build, and he did so. He found a warehouse in a crappy part of town and took up residence there, converting it into a full-blown nest for his pets within a few days. He lives their now, breeding his family, muttering to himself, and awaiting further instructions.

Personality: Back in the day, Clyde was a likeable, extroverted, and good-naturedly lazy person. Now, of course, that’s all taken a backseat to the fact that he’s completely out of his skull. He’s twitchy, paranoid, he can barely remember his life before the dream, his sense of humor has become morbid at the best of times and he has no sense of hygiene whatsoever. He still tries to be friendly, but his ability to interface with people who aren’t bugs has been shot to hell, resulting in a lot of non-sequiturs and generally weird behavior. Finally, he hears a voice in his head he calls ‘The Hive’, which is basically the rampant id of his powers made manifest – it’s what tells him to breed, to build, to find food and grown his nest and all sorts of bizarre requests, and while it has no technical power over him, he’s not good at ignoring it. 

Power: Clyde makes bugs. The cells of Clyde’s skin contain microscopic eggs that, when shed, quickly grow and after about a day hatch into large insectoid creatures which obey his orders. The vast majority, the ‘drones’, are about a foot in length and resemble huge ants with spiky brown carapaces and serrated pinchers, and are capable of secreting a bizarre grey substance that hardens after an hour or so, which the hive uses to build structures. One in five will be born as a ‘warrior’, which have a much greater variety in size and form – some are as big as cats, some as big as dogs, some have claws, some have stingers, and so forth, but they basically all resemble some form of insect or arachnid and they all have one purpose – to kill for the hive. Very, very rarely, an insect will be born as a ‘Queen’ – a fat sack of goo capable of producing eggs at a slightly slower pace than Clyde does. Only three of these have been born so far, and Clyde guards them closely.

The main weakness of the power is that it’s driving Clyde completely out of his mind, but that’s not all. He can’t turn it ‘off’ in any sense, so any place he stays for more than a day is going to be filled with bugs before long. Growing these eggs has also taken a severe toll on Clyde’s body, causing him constant pain and near crippling him. Finally, the hive and all the insects are intensely flammable, and the influence of ‘The Hive’ has guaranteed that Clyde shares his pets’ primal fear of fire.

Theme Song:

	[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ip1irYWXck]I'm Only Joking by KONGOS[/url]