Enarr

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Nicholas Adair had several possible outcomes in mind when he left the dance to venture into the woods. Perhaps he would've lost his gumption to ever return to society. He figured he may have just kept walking until he flattened himself into a stain on the inside of The Promise's hull. With luck, maybe he could've been the first human to be consumed by the ship's indigenous squirrels. Or, ever so slightly more realistically, he'd get killed in the next unscrupulous incident aboard the ship.

Maybe it said something about his character that in attempting to escape his own perspective and anxieties, telling himself he wanted to be alone, he actually seemed to have zeroed in on a group of teenagers who looked like they were pregaming for shooting a slasher film. Pretty girls. Dudes who were.. well, dudes. He didn't hold any strong opinions toward their appearance but saw one who looked like even more of a fish out of water than he did.

Piercing his internal monologue as though it was cast in hot wax, a voice like a siren, blistering with clarity called out to him. "Hey you! Want a shot?" But there was no one in front of him, he was yards away from anybody. Then he saw her, a dark haired angel. For the first time since he'd boarded the ship, it really felt like he was tumbling through space.

She was looking at him. Had he been staring at her and zoning out at the same time? Nic didn't know that people could do that. Then again, he wasn't used to being around people his own age without the explicit instructions of running surveillance. Surveillance! That's it! His subconscious had made him focus on the girl and analyze her. That made sense. Well... it almost made sense. If that were the case he didn't understand why he hadn't inferred anything meaningful about her. God, I'm an idiot.

After he had hung his smile slack-jawed for a minute, trying to unravel his own web of dumbassery, he felt the first real duchenne of the day roll across his lips and curl his eyes.

"Why, thank you! I can't think of anything that sounds better right now."

And it was true. Just a little something to take the edge off would be nice. If he just shaved off the progress he'd spent the last two years making, it'd mean that he wouldn't pose a threat to the partygoers and it would mean that he would finally be normal. Kinda. Being abnormal was part of what qualified you as belonging here so in a cruel twist of fate it would actually make him the deviant.

Fuck it. It always seemed inevitable that I'd rinse myself out up here anyhow. I thought I could rise above my former crutch, that I'd overcome it, but nothing sounds sweeter than the sour sting of surrender as my darling depressants fix me, just for a bit.

_{"nah man, the alcohol was part of the old you. Just hang in there. Think about it from your perspective from tomorrow. You'll have overcome this. You'll be stronger.}

I am so unbelievably sick of thinking of things from different perspectives. How cruel it is that my penchant for empathy serve as my penance.

He continued to think about it entirely too hard as he cleared the ground that stood between him and the girl that had invited him. She looked like a dream. He approached her with his head down, mildly shy before beaming at her, scooping up one of the Jello shots and holding it inches away from his chin. The gelatinous drink felt more structurally sound than his own willpower right now, he thought as it weighed upon his forearm like a dumbbell, burning in his hand like the sort of confession you only make when it's too late to make a difference.

"My name is Nicholas but people tend to like Nic better. I hope that the evening has been kind to you."

One Big Jace's Family

Name: Dark Jace

Age: Negative Twenty-Three

Character Bio: When Jace looks in the mirror, he sees this guy. Sometimes this guy even steps out of the mirror. He looks just like Jace, except he's gaunt with scarlet eyes. Just like regular humans are made mostly out of water, Dark Jace is mostly made out of Jace's tears. For that reason, he can both literally and figuratively be described as pretty generally salty when compared with the real thing. For every personal defeat regular Jave faces in life, Dark Jace will grow stronger. While DJ doesn't really have IBS, all of the crying it causes Jace to do results in power gains of greater or equal value.

One Big Jace's Family

<Snipped quote by Nightrunner>
I just have a couple of questions regarding your thought process during the creation of this concept.

1) Have you read the Jace lorebook? How well-versed are you in the Jaceverse's lore?

2) Given that he is essentially Jace's dark reflection, does this mean that he doesn't have IBS? Have you thought about what this means for his power level, considering that Jace's IBS is the source of his power?

@GreenGrenade

1) I have not but I have skimmed the Wikipedia page

2) For every personal defeat regular Jave faces in life, Dark Jace will grow stronger. While DJ doesn't really have IBS, all of the crying it causes Jace to do results in power gains of greater or equal value.

One Big Jace's Family

Name: Dark Jace

Age: Negative Twenty-Three

Character Bio: When Jace looks in the mirror, he sees this guy. Sometimes this guy even steps out of the mirror. He looks just like Jace, except he's gaunt with scarlet eyes. Just like regular humans are made mostly out of water, Dark Jace is mostly made out of Jace's tears. For that reason, he can both literally and figuratively be described as pretty generally salty when compared with the real thing. For every personal defeat regular Jave faces in life, Dark Jace will grow stronger. While DJ doesn't really have IBS, all of the crying it causes Jace to do results in power gains of greater or equal value.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

I'm gonna touch the butt

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

"Wow, you look great tonight."

"Oh, you're too much. Besides, you don't look so bad yourself."

"Man, it's so nice that these last few years have been building up to the satisfying emotional climax that tonight presents."

"I know. There's nothing worse in this world than being alone," Nic said to himself in the mirror. With his black sport coat on over his red t-shirt, it occurred to him that he looked like he'd stepped out of a nineties rom-com. He wished he had. "It's high time for my meet-cute. I wonder what everybody's up to."

It had been an unusually lonely couple weeks. Not anyone else's fault. His solitude was basically entirely self imposed. It's just hard to imagine that he's out here with all these parahumans. His dad would have had a heyday. Out of habit, his first inclination was to study everybody but, although it felt right, it felt very wrong. So he mostly walked around, smiling almost ditsily, avoiding eye contact. Even the act of getting to know people, the act of making friends, out of earnest curiosity, felt like a personal betrayal.

He'd literally spent the last forty-five minutes looking at himself in the mirror, thinking. Thinking far too clearly for his own liking. His muscles were wound far too tight. His mind even tighter. Everything felt so crisp. So dry. He felt kinda thirsty. Nope. That's not happening. Not dumping the last 593 days of progress down the drain or, perhaps more accurately, down his throat.

"Y'know what? Fuck it. Tonight I'm gonna dance with somebody and we're gonna fall in love. And they're gonna know all about me implicitly, inferring things. Making unreasonable jumps in logic. And understand and respect me for who I am... Like that means anything. The fuck do I expect? No!" His fists clap down against his bathroom sink. "I just gotta get out of this bedroom before I go stir crazy."

And so, after standing in front of a mirror for almost an hour, he still hadn't done his hair. But he took a few brave steps out into the common area, seeing almost no one dancing, unless their eyes darting back and forth with obvious intent counts as a dance.

And so he did a dance of his own. He did the wallflower, walking in a tight little circle every time the song changed. He saw a girl he wanted to talk to. She looked at him. He thought she wanted to talk. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. Reasoning it would be better not to talk without any idea of what to talk about, he stepped out of the room for a moment. But then he kept going, thinking he'd probably have a better idea by the time he came back if he walked further away.

Soon enough, he found himself stumbling out into the nearby woods. It was dark. Too dark to see. And that was just how he liked it. He couldn't see anything. Not with his eyes nor anyone else's.

But he could hear a helluva lotta noise nearby. So he mosied on over, making his way into a forest party. So he put on a smile and prepared for combat conversation.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas Adair

NICHOLAS ADAIR

_______________________________________________ Nicholas Sylvester Adair _______________________________________________ December 31 | 17 | Caucasian _______________________________________________ Bachelor | ♂ | Heterosexual _______________________________________________ Junior | Student _______________________________________________ Physical Profile ___________________________________ [+] //Basics: • Height | 5'8" • Weight | 150 • Build | Taut • Hair Colour | Brunette • Eye Colour | Brown Miscellaneous Items ___________________________________ [+] //Every Day Carry: • Steelbook Sketchpad | 180 pieces of 3.5" x 5" 50 lb paper, very smooth and pleasant to touch. Sturdy enough to sketch on, though not quite ideal for markers or runnier sorts of pens. The pages are sealed within airtight steel lips, which can only be bypassed by dialing the correct combination or, y'know, breaking it. The exterior has a smooth matte black finish with the image of an all-seeing-eye pressed into its' face.

A p p e a r a n c e D e t a i l s When he's with other people, nine times out of ten, Nicholas is smiling. Like, the sort of smile that makes you wanna smile. He has perfect posture and is usually standing in a way that emphasizes his musculature, though he is by no means a body builder. He is very neat and presentable, always ready to be examined. Otherwise, he tends to be wearing unicolor t-shirts beneath a jacket reminiscent of the one he wore around his old militia compound, modeled after the US Army BDU but unicolor. For his legs, he usually wears denim jeans, though he occasionally makes the choice of wearing yoga pants, which people tend to make fun of him for. As far as footwear goes, he tends to wear running shoes, but has been known to switch to oxfords if there is some sort of special occasion. If he's lounging, he may even make the choice to wear a sport coat. He tends to have a black rolex on his left wrist, though.

_{P e r s o n a l i t y}

Nicholas essentially rotates between behaving extremely skittishly and affirmatively. He is a deeply conflicted young man on account of the ways his abilities have been exploited in order to facilitate the harm of his fellow parahumans. For that reason, he has recently been attempting to avoid giving in to even the most remotely hostile inclination he has. On the other hand, he also feels that he has allowed his self-restraint to prevent him from reaching his full potential, causing him to allow others to come to harm in some of the more recent events. It all makes him want to reach for his signature crutch, alcohol, but he is generally abstaining in order to fall into his old habits of binge drinking. He wants to make the world a better place but isn't confident in his own judgment.

He feels guilty for all the people that he has hurt, acknowledging that he is a prime example of why parahumans are prevented from being a part of law enforcement or the military. He wants to make the world a better place but he also feels like that, to a certain extent, simply means withdrawing from it. Mathematically it seems that many people's lives had been ruined and would, in fact, have been better off without him in it. But, having debated on following that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, he decided that there is a balance he can strike. Maybe it involves using his powers minimally. Maybe it means not at all. He's working on it.

At this phase, he is most likely to attempt to settle disputes peacefully and is quick to volunteer himself as a mediator. He hasn't thrown a punch in the last year. He tells himself he's a pacifist. That's what he tells everyone else, too. But he knows better deep down. But thanks to the rubber hand effect, in spite of the fact that he's never killed anyone, he loses a lot of sleep over feeling like he had and, maybe one day, could again.

He tends to keep to himself. Sometimes he spends the entire day journaling. Other times it feels more appropriate to clear his mind with intense exercise until he's so tired he can't help but fall asleep. The world feels safer with his eyes shut. But when he can find it within himself to go outside, or when he has to, he smiles and attempts to make everyone else's day better than the last. It can come across as clingy, maybe creepy, even. But he'd do anything to avoid repeating his own history.

_{C h a r a c t e r S y n o p s i s}

When US Army Sergeant Nathan Adair was thirty-three years old, he and his wife, Avery, had a son named Nicholas. It was around this time, due to the perspective and pride accumulated over his career, he grew resentful toward the parahumans of the United States because they did not serve in the military. Retiring at the age of thirty-eight, he took his family and moved into a quiet corner of Nebraska in which he formed his own militia, with expectations of privacy so stringent that it bordered on cultism. The objective was to keep an eye on parahumans, even more meticulously than the federal and state programs. As for whether that was actually the result was inconclusive and complicated, to say the least.

When Nathan became aware of Nicholas' parahuman status, he bribed the relevant physicians to falsify his documentation so that he was legally considered well within the spectrum of biological normalcy. At that, they ran some tests and discovered that his eight year old son was biologically predisposed to become the ultimate surveillance asset, thanks to his inherent ability to piggyback the eyeballs of other people. Nic was then trained as the first junior private in Nathan's militia, being run through the equivalent of basic training and then some, all before he ever hit his double digits.

In spite of the pedigree for action, he was mostly deployed on missions to somewhat-literally "get eyes on" various parahumans in the area without the targets even becoming aware. Nicholas complied and always succeeded. No one ever demonstrated an understanding of his true function and seemingly few ever seemed to have noticed his antennae. Periodically Nathan and his fourteen man platoon would assassinate a parahuman they suspected of being disrupted or being particularly menacing. Nicholas watched all of it, participating and broadcasting the shared eyesight to the entire militia at times. He occasionally saw parahumans beaten down as though he were doing it with his own hands. Around the time that he was twelve, Nicholas had become complicit in several parahuman abductions, the victims of which were housed and restrained in the militia's recently annexed holding facility.

Around this time, Nicholas grew to understand and became somewhat calloused before his nightmares began. In order to cope, he began binge drinking. This illuminated his special relationship with alcohol: It totally decimated the tissue that allowed him to transmit and receive visuals. This proved, obviously, problematic due to its neutering of the essential function of his father's unit as a whole. Therefore, he was severely reprimanded every time alcohol was found in his possession.

Though it had been legitimately clandestine and, most succinctly, extremely effective in its operations, the militia met its end around the time Nicholas had become fifteen years old. There was a raid on the compound and the majority of the militia was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, presumably dropped in Guantanamo Bay or a similar facility. They had mercy on Nicholas, however, due to his young age and fragile state. He was entered into constant therapy, and occasionally dosed with alcohol to prevent him from redeveloping his abilities. After threatening to sue his caretakers when he came of age, his treatment was stopped.

Nicholas Adair has recently turned seventeen years old and has been sober for 593 days. His antennae are three inches long, less than half of what they were before he initially turned to alcohol at his peak, when he was thirteen, and he has been deposited onto The Promise in an effort to further his rehabilitation and enable him to be a contributing member of society.

_{A b i l i t i e s & S k i l l s}

_//Abilities:

Superhuman Ability | Eyejacking

Nicholas is anatomically distinct from other humans on account of the retractable antenna that have grown in his brain and protrude through his skull. The base of his antennae are located in his occipital lobe and penetrate through a pair of parallel foramen, each being about two centimeters thick, along his lambdoid suture. That is to say that his antennae can pop out of the back of his skull above his neck, both telescoping and by pumping large quantities of blood into them, in the visual processing part of the brain. The antennae can nest all of the way inside his skull, or alternatively they can be extended to a maximum length of three inches at present, though they had used to be longer.

His antennae are extremely dense with nerve endings and are sensitive, much like whiskers, and can detect a sudden change in the wind, for example, but are more generally outstanding because they primarily function as receptors for a specific sort of electromagnetic wave. The other main function of his antennae is that they can release an invisible cloud of parasitic cells that can, if ingested by another human, take root within the brain and begin constructing an organ dedicated to transmitting and receiving the visual output of the host along the frequency that Nicholas' antennae are attuned to.

What this means in practice is that Nicholas' can see through the eyes of the people he's infected as long as they are in range of his antennae. He also has the option to allow them to see through his eyes or through the eyes of anyone else within range of his local infected network. Though it straddles the line between skill and superpower, he can use the input to create a very rough facsimile of a live overhead video feed, assuming he has some kind of an idea about the relative position all of his input is coming from.

Limitation(s) | First and foremost, he does not have telepathy. He can only transmit live visual input, though he is vulnerable to being affected by optical illusions seen by one of his transmitters by merit of piggybacking off of their perception.

If the person ingesting the virus has a particularly strong immune system, the virus may be deterred entirely. Though on average, it takes about twelve hours, four if asleep, for a person in average health to begin manufacturing the transmission organ, assuming that they are not actively starving to death. For those with a particularly healthy diet and plenty of nutrients to spare, particularly if they eat "brain foods", then they will likely have a functioning organ in as little as six hours, two if they happen to be asleep.

The range of effectiveness on a fledgling transmitter is largely limited by how long they have been infected. One thing to note is that his reception is crippled if there are concrete walls, or anything similarly dense, separating him from a transmitter. For a transmitting organ to fully mature, it typically takes two weeks, at which point it can transmit to Nicholas while he is actively receiving at a maximum of 1,000 feet within line of sight. Beyond that, signal decay is rapid and largely becomes unreliable. From the moment that an organ is initially operational, he has a working range of about 100 feet.

In addition to juggling his own sight, he can reliably keep track of about six other people's transmissions comfortably, simultaneously, though by his estimate he'll be capable of actively networking with as many as twenty people at once in a years time. If he's not paying attention to a transmission, he's still technically sensing it though he wouldn't really be perceiving it, most of the time. It's very easy for him to lose track and become distracted amidst all of the simultaneous input however and, for that reason, he is especially prone to jumpscares.

Weakness(es) | His kryptonite is alcohol. Alcohol disintegrates his transmission organ and causes rapid shrinkage and deterioration. That is to say, if he were to drink an entire fifth of vodka in a single night, he would have reset his entire development back to ground zero. While that is unlikely to happen, it's more of a problem because the people he infects with his virus can be "cured" by drinking or otherwise ingesting alcohol. Due to the fact that their transmission organs aren't nearly so integral to their being and usually haven't existed very long, it is extremely likely that they will be periodically diminished if the subject has a casual drink.

Otherwise, his antennae are extremely sensitive and have an extreme concentration of nerve endings. If they were struck while they were extended from his head, the pain would be debilitating and any impact on his occipital lobe would be even more likely to render him unconscious than it would any other person.

_//Skills:

Combat Training | Thanks to his time in his father's militia, he has been thoroughly prepared for hand to hand combat against both armed and unarmed opponents of biological normalcy.

Firearm Training | Nicholas is an abnormally precise shot with guns, obviously owing to the usual availability of enhanced perspective. He prefers rifles but will essentially work with anything he has.

Spatial Awareness | His access to multiple perspectives at once has generally heightened his spatial awareness and coordination, essentially training him to be extremely precise when performing tasks such as balancing or drawing.

_{O T H E R}

Though he has not been diagnosed, he exhibits many symptoms of PTSD.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas Adair

NICHOLAS ADAIR

_______________________________________________ Nicholas Sylvester Adair _______________________________________________ December 31 | 17 | Caucasian _______________________________________________ Bachelor | ♂ | Heterosexual _______________________________________________ Junior | Student _______________________________________________ Physical Profile ___________________________________ [+] //Basics: • Height | 5'8" • Weight | 150 • Build | Taut • Hair Colour | Brunette • Eye Colour | Brown Miscellaneous Items ___________________________________ [+] //Every Day Carry: • Steelbook Sketchpad | 180 pieces of 3.5" x 5" 50 lb paper, very smooth and pleasant to touch. Sturdy enough to sketch on, though not quite ideal for markers or runnier sorts of pens. The pages are sealed within airtight steel lips, which can only be bypassed by dialing the correct combination or, y'know, breaking it. The exterior has a smooth matte black finish with the image of an all-seeing-eye pressed into its' face.

A p p e a r a n c e D e t a i l s When he's with other people, nine times out of ten, Nicholas is smiling. Like, the sort of smile that makes you wanna smile. He has perfect posture and is usually standing in a way that emphasizes his musculature, though he is by no means a body builder. He is very neat and presentable, always ready to be examined. Otherwise, he tends to be wearing unicolor t-shirts beneath a jacket reminiscent of the one he wore around his old militia compound, modeled after the US Army BDU but unicolor. For his legs, he usually wears denim jeans, though he occasionally makes the choice of wearing yoga pants, which people tend to make fun of him for. As far as footwear goes, he tends to wear running shoes, but has been known to switch to oxfords if there is some sort of special occasion. If he's lounging, he may even make the choice to wear a sport coat. He tends to have a black rolex on his left wrist, though.

_{P e r s o n a l i t y}

Nicholas essentially rotates between behaving extremely skittishly and affirmatively. He is a deeply conflicted young man on account of the ways his abilities have been exploited in order to facilitate the harm of his fellow parahumans. For that reason, he has recently been attempting to avoid giving in to even the most remotely hostile inclination he has. On the other hand, he also feels that he has allowed his self-restraint to prevent him from reaching his full potential, causing him to allow others to come to harm in some of the more recent events. It all makes him want to reach for his signature crutch, alcohol, but he is generally abstaining in order to fall into his old habits of binge drinking. He wants to make the world a better place but isn't confident in his own judgment.

He feels guilty for all the people that he has hurt, acknowledging that he is a prime example of why parahumans are prevented from being a part of law enforcement or the military. He wants to make the world a better place but he also feels like that, to a certain extent, simply means withdrawing from it. Mathematically it seems that many people's lives had been ruined and would, in fact, have been better off without him in it. But, having debated on following that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, he decided that there is a balance he can strike. Maybe it involves using his powers minimally. Maybe it means not at all. He's working on it.

At this phase, he is most likely to attempt to settle disputes peacefully and is quick to volunteer himself as a mediator. He hasn't thrown a punch in the last year. He tells himself he's a pacifist. That's what he tells everyone else, too. But he knows better deep down. But thanks to the rubber hand effect, in spite of the fact that he's never killed anyone, he loses a lot of sleep over feeling like he had and, maybe one day, could again.

He tends to keep to himself. Sometimes he spends the entire day journaling. Other times it feels more appropriate to clear his mind with intense exercise until he's so tired he can't help but fall asleep. The world feels safer with his eyes shut. But when he can find it within himself to go outside, or when he has to, he smiles and attempts to make everyone else's day better than the last. It can come across as clingy, maybe creepy, even. But he'd do anything to avoid repeating his own history.

_{C h a r a c t e r S y n o p s i s}

When US Army Sergeant Nathan Adair was thirty-three years old, he and his wife, Avery, had a son named Nicholas. It was around this time, due to the perspective and pride accumulated over his career, he grew resentful toward the parahumans of the United States because they did not serve in the military. Retiring at the age of thirty-eight, he took his family and moved into a quiet corner of Nebraska in which he formed his own militia, with expectations of privacy so stringent that it bordered on cultism. The objective was to keep an eye on parahumans, even more meticulously than the federal and state programs. As for whether that was actually the result was inconclusive and complicated, to say the least.

When Nathan became aware of Nicholas' parahuman status, he bribed the relevant physicians to falsify his documentation so that he was legally considered well within the spectrum of biological normalcy. At that, they ran some tests and discovered that his eight year old son was biologically predisposed to become the ultimate surveillance asset, thanks to his inherent ability to piggyback the eyeballs of other people. Nic was then trained as the first junior private in Nathan's militia, being run through the equivalent of basic training and then some, all before he ever hit his double digits.

In spite of the pedigree for action, he was mostly deployed on missions to somewhat-literally "get eyes on" various parahumans in the area without the targets even becoming aware. Nicholas complied and always succeeded. No one ever demonstrated an understanding of his true function and seemingly few ever seemed to have noticed his antennae. Periodically Nathan and his fourteen man platoon would assassinate a parahuman they suspected of being disrupted or being particularly menacing. Nicholas watched all of it, participating and broadcasting the shared eyesight to the entire militia at times. He occasionally saw parahumans beaten down as though he were doing it with his own hands. Around the time that he was twelve, Nicholas had become complicit in several parahuman abductions, the victims of which were housed and restrained in the militia's recently annexed holding facility.

Around this time, Nicholas grew to understand and became somewhat calloused before his nightmares began. In order to cope, he began binge drinking. This illuminated his special relationship with alcohol: It totally decimated the tissue that allowed him to transmit and receive visuals. This proved, obviously, problematic due to its neutering of the essential function of his father's unit as a whole. Therefore, he was severely reprimanded every time alcohol was found in his possession.

Though it had been legitimately clandestine and, most succinctly, extremely effective in its operations, the militia met its end around the time Nicholas had become fifteen years old. There was a raid on the compound and the majority of the militia was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, presumably dropped in Guantanamo Bay or a similar facility. They had mercy on Nicholas, however, due to his young age and fragile state. He was entered into constant therapy, and occasionally dosed with alcohol to prevent him from redeveloping his abilities. After threatening to sue his caretakers when he came of age, his treatment was stopped.

Nicholas Adair has recently turned seventeen years old and has been sober for 593 days. His antennae are three inches long, less than half of what they were before he initially turned to alcohol at his peak, when he was thirteen, and he has been deposited onto The Promise in an effort to further his rehabilitation and enable him to be a contributing member of society.

_{A b i l i t i e s & S k i l l s}

_//Abilities:

Superhuman Ability | Eyejacking

Nicholas is anatomically distinct from other humans on account of the retractable antenna that have grown in his brain and protrude through his skull. The base of his antennae are located in his occipital lobe and penetrate through a pair of parallel foramen, each being about two centimeters thick, along his lambdoid suture. That is to say that his antennae can pop out of the back of his skull above his neck, both telescoping and by pumping large quantities of blood into them, in the visual processing part of the brain. The antennae can nest all of the way inside his skull, or alternatively they can be extended to a maximum length of three inches at present, though they had used to be longer.

His antennae are extremely dense with nerve endings and are sensitive, much like whiskers, and can detect a sudden change in the wind, for example, but are more generally outstanding because they primarily function as receptors for a specific sort of electromagnetic wave. The other main function of his antennae is that they can release an invisible cloud of parasitic cells that can, if ingested by another human, take root within the brain and begin constructing an organ dedicated to transmitting and receiving the visual output of the host along the frequency that Nicholas' antennae are attuned to.

What this means in practice is that Nicholas' can see through the eyes of the people he's infected as long as they are in range of his antennae. He also has the option to allow them to see through his eyes or through the eyes of anyone else within range of his local infected network. Though it straddles the line between skill and superpower, he can use the input to create a very rough facsimile of a live overhead video feed, assuming he has some kind of an idea about the relative position all of his input is coming from.

Limitation(s) | First and foremost, he does not have telepathy. He can only transmit live visual input, though he is vulnerable to being affected by optical illusions seen by one of his transmitters by merit of piggybacking off of their perception.

If the person ingesting the virus has a particularly strong immune system, the virus may be deterred entirely. Though on average, it takes about twelve hours, four if asleep, for a person in average health to begin manufacturing the transmission organ, assuming that they are not actively starving to death. For those with a particularly healthy diet and plenty of nutrients to spare, particularly if they eat "brain foods", then they will likely have a functioning organ in as little as six hours, two if they happen to be asleep.

The range of effectiveness on a fledgling transmitter is largely limited by how long they have been infected. One thing to note is that his reception is crippled if there are concrete walls, or anything similarly dense, separating him from a transmitter. For a transmitting organ to fully mature, it typically takes two weeks, at which point it can transmit to Nicholas while he is actively receiving at a maximum of 1,000 feet within line of sight. Beyond that, signal decay is rapid and largely becomes unreliable. From the moment that an organ is initially operational, he has a working range of about 100 feet.

In addition to juggling his own sight, he can reliably keep track of about six other people's transmissions comfortably, simultaneously, though by his estimate he'll be capable of actively networking with as many as twenty people at once in a years time. If he's not paying attention to a transmission, he's still technically sensing it though he wouldn't really be perceiving it, most of the time. It's very easy for him to lose track and become distracted amidst all of the simultaneous input however and, for that reason, he is especially prone to jumpscares.

Weakness(es) | His kryptonite is alcohol. Alcohol disintegrates his transmission organ and causes rapid shrinkage and deterioration. That is to say, if he were to drink an entire fifth of vodka in a single night, he would have reset his entire development back to ground zero. While that is unlikely to happen, it's more of a problem because the people he infects with his virus can be "cured" by drinking or otherwise ingesting alcohol. Due to the fact that their transmission organs aren't nearly so integral to their being and usually haven't existed very long, it is extremely likely that they will be periodically diminished if the subject has a casual drink.

Otherwise, his antennae are extremely sensitive and have an extreme concentration of nerve endings. If they were struck while they were extended from his head, the pain would be debilitating and any impact on his occipital lobe would be even more likely to render him unconscious than it would any other person.

_//Skills:

Combat Training | Thanks to his time in his father's militia, he has been thoroughly prepared for hand to hand combat against both armed and unarmed opponents of biological normalcy.

Firearm Training | Nicholas is an abnormally precise shot with guns, obviously owing to the usual availability of enhanced perspective. He prefers rifles but will essentially work with anything he has.

Spatial Awareness | His access to multiple perspectives at once has generally heightened his spatial awareness and coordination, essentially training him to be extremely precise when performing tasks such as balancing or drawing.

_{O T H E R}

Though he has not been diagnosed, he exhibits many symptoms of PTSD.

Absolute Comics - Season Two: The Monster Within

I withdraw. Love you all.

NR: IWCBADALWOCBTWWTAUA for Short or NI for Shorter

This is the cover of Kingdom Come's first issue, entitled "Strange Visitor". I love it. It doesn't look like a comic book. Sure it has grown men with weird outfits, but this looks like a representation of history meant to be put up in government building. This looks like the way that George Washington and his posse were portrayed by Emanuel Leutze when they were #CrossingTheDeleware. But instead of carrying the American flag, they're just standing there, menacing you, as The Spectre (God's Spirit of Vengeance) stands among them. But The Spectre isn't staring you down. He's just keeping his head down. Is there a metaphor there? Probably.

When Kingdom Come came out, it was the summer of 1996. Mark Waid had spent a great deal of the decade writing stories like The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Flash and Justice League. He'd only recently gotten knee deep writing X-Men, Onslaught and Deadpool before he began production on this story. Basically the premise of the story is that the old superheroes were pushed out of the limelight by younger, edgier heroes who stand in stark contrast to the previous generation with their characteristic lack of mercy and hyperviolent ways. My personal theory is that this is less of a commentary on other comic writers output and more of a meditation on his own bibliography. To back this up, you even see a cameo from The Legion of Super-Heroes amongst the old heroes, even though that would make absolutely no sense from an in-universe chronological perspective.

You could argue that this story isn't even about superheroes, though. The character that we start the narrative by focusing on is a preacher who is reading from the book of Revelation. Wanna guess who he's reading to? Too bad. He's spending time with the geriatric Wesley Dodds, once a wiry and spry superhero, now reduced to an unraveling knot of bed-ridden organ failure. He used to be The Sandman. He used to be a superhero. One page-turn later and he's just dead. So the preacher dude goes out into the world and checks out a restaurant where everyone is dressed up as a classic superhero, mostly Justice Leaguers. One of the waiters is dressed up as Hal Jordan, but he literally doesn't even know whose costume he's wearing. It really hammers in the theme of the previous generation being deemed more and more irrelevant and, even worse, forgotten.

It reminds me of Grant Morrison's New X-Men, where Professor Xavier tells Magneto "The only thing you have that they want is your face on a t-shirt". Don't get me wrong. I hate Hal Jordan, but I also refuse to wear clothing with symbols or logos on them that I haven't thought about intensively because I refuse to allow people I dislike to use me as a billboard. So it's against my personal philosophies and probably isn't a universal takeaway.

He ends up stewing on how the new heroes battle each other just for the thrill of it and how the old are fading fast. Then he starts receiving intrusive visions of the future that unsettle him. It gets to him so bad that he ends up preaching doom and gloom in a sermon to his congregation before cutting himself off, apologizing and dismissing his audience. Shortly afterward, he's met by The Spectre, who explains that he is assigned to punish the wicked and deliver vengeance, but he literally cannot because his faculties are not what they once were and that he needs to a host to accomplish his plan. He wanted Wesley because he had been having visions of the future, but Wesley's dead. So this dude winds up with the Spectre by process of elimination.

They go on a little spirit walk where they see Wonder Woman check up on a gray-tinged Superman in the fortress of solitude where he's living out a fantasy of being a simple farmer. She tells him that they need him in order to stand up to the new generation of super heroes because everyone follows his lead. Even the old timers who didn't entirely give up still were changed remarkably. The Green Lantern created an Emerald City that looked upon the Earth from below, an idea that I love, btw. The Flash runs through Central City and literally never stops, correcting everything with a faux omnipresence that only the fastest man alive could muster. Hawkman is acting as a protector of the remaining natural environment, which has become very minute after the new generation of superheroes attacked The Parasite viciously and literally relentlessly before The Parasite cracked Captain Atom open in an attempt to end his suffering, destroying the midwestern United States, and therefore causing an ecological/economic disaster.

Superman has been living in a self imposed exile for the better part of the past ten years when he was essentially outshined by Magog, one of the antiheroes we keep mentioning, and the public refused to heed his warnings that this style of heroism would destroy the world. Diana attempts to snap him out of his complacency by insisting that they need him to take the lead, not because of his might but because he is Superman, the epitome of heroism. If he doesn't stand up then neither would the rest. Superman declines, dismissing Wonder Woman.

That's where the vision ends. That preacher dude is, like, super let down by Superman's bogus response, and asserts that The Spectre was supposed to have provided hope. The Spectre quips that he, in fact, did not ever promise hope. Hold that in mind for a second. Then they take a peek at a fight between superheroes and villains. You literally can't tell who is who on account of the massive amounts of damage that is being done. Preacher-dude screams "We need Hope" and guess what. All of the guns are crushed by hands more powerful than a locomotive. In a whirlwind, a dangling cablecar is deposited safely and Superman has brought the battle to a close.

Which is one of the best executed superhero interventions ever because it's strongly implied that Superman had truly retired. Unfortunately, the world rejects him once more. The final page displays him being overtaken by a redness that I presume to be either radiation or magic. The point of origin isn't given away in this particular issue. A real cliffhanger. Having never read it, I imagine it might be this Magog that keeps coming up. But yeah. For a second it looked like everything was gonna be okay. Though the spectre of God's vengeance had been insufficient, Superman had not forsaken the world.

Anyhow, I'm off to bed. If anybody has any interpretations of this that they wanna bounce off of me, I am, like, all ears. Or at least, like, 87 percent ears. I assume I probably have some blood and serotonin left in me given that I feel an overwhelming need to slump off to sleep.

Ciao.