Name: John Dark

Nickname: "John Dark.  Really."

Species: Human fused with That Which Hath One Thousand Eyes

Sexual Orientation: John likes girls

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Physical information:

Gender: Male

Age: 21

Human Hair Color: Black

Human Eye Color: Deep brown

Human Distinguishing Marks: John possesses numerous small scars scattered over his body, notably his hands and forearms, and a much larger set around his chest, back and the back of his neck, all interconnected.

Human Description of General Appearance: John is 5'9", about 140 lbs with a slender build.  He has fairly pale skin, as his job doesn't let him get outside much.  He tends to dress very casually, in loose T-shirts and over-large jackets and hoodies and cargo pants or jeans and sturdy boots.  He's living very nearly his best life now, so he's usually smiling, with a faintly amused look, as if he gets a joke nobody else does, or maybe he's seeing something everyone else is overlooking.  He's very energetic, and tends to always be in motion, tapping fingers, shifting feet, looking around.

Alternate Appearance: (If applicable) Well, this kinda depends on what senses you have, to notice the rest of John.  Most people can't see the strange, anemone-like multi-eyed tentacled creature merged with him, as it doesn't occupy ordinary 4-dimensional space.  However, senses that detect life energy, souls and so on will be unable to miss the presence of an alien entity attached to John, and anything with a heightened sense of smell will likewise detect something strange about him.

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Society Information:


Occupation: Courier.  John is a specialist in taking even exotic, dangerous packages discretely across the city, no questions asked.  He will sometimes supplement his income working as a third-party delivery driver for restaurants.

What brought you to Port Washington?  TWHOTE drew John's attention to the advertisement for the community; John, in turn, assumed that a city like this would be less judgmental, and it might be a lot of fun being in a city with strange things in it.

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Personality Details:

Personality:

John is restless.  He can't hold still; he's continually looking for a place for himself, not only in a physical sense but in a social one.  He dislikes discussing his past, for tolerably obvious reasons, unless he's found someone he trusts enough to really open up to.  He's also driven to try and improve his life within the limits of his circumstances.  This is complicated by the strange urgings he gets from his symbiotic entity, who is quite curious about literally everything.  (TWHOTE is too alien to easily describe, but it has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and, oddly, a desire to try and make John happy in various ways that is often rather confused as it doesn't really understand existence in this spacetime.)

Likes: Pretty girls, having money in the bank, coffee, cars, teaching himself how to do things, music of all kinds, finding new kinds of food.

Dislikes: His body.  Spending money unnecessarily.  (Look to John to have furniture made of milk crates and salvaged college student leavings instead of ever buying something)  Rudeness.  Messiness and disorganization. Bigots.

Strengths:

John is courageous, strong-willed and adaptable; he can find ways to use or make use of a wide range of circumstances, and is willing to tolerate a wide range of conditions.  He's very frugal, if frugality is a virtue, and skilled at researching his options in that regard.  His mind is flexible enough to accept a wide range of impossible circumstances.

Weaknesses:

John can be far too cheap and unwilling to spend money, even when he should.  He still suffers from a degree of dysphoria, despite the changes to his body caused by his fusion with TWHOTE.  Loud, aggressive people attacking him verbally can overwhelm him and lead him to lash out in some way.

Fears:

His family, and people who remind him too much of his parents.  Being broke, homeless and starving again.  Being forced into being who he was in the past again.

Background/History:

John ran away from home when he was 14; he has not contacted his family in any way, and intends to never do so.  John ran away in part because of general abusiveness and dysfunction within his family, but also because they couldn't accept John for who he was-- John is transgendered, and his family cannot accept that, insisting that he should regard himself as being female.

He had managed to scrounge the money to buy a cheap used car before he left, and taught himself enough mechanics to make it actually work.  He lived in his car for three years, and things were rough.  He managed to get through it at the cost of some vicious fights, but then, one time, he was overwhelmed by what developed to be cultists who believed that they needed a virgin sacrifice to some strange alien god who would make them all powerful beyond imagining.

The ritual was painful and unpleasant, but it also revealed a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the cultists-- John was not the sacrifice to That Which Has One Thousand Eyes, but rather the channel for it.  The cultists, instead, inadvertently provided the life force that powered the spell.  Thus, John encountered TWHOTE.

TWHOTE is a being from a spacetime in which it constitutes the only life-form and a significant fraction of the entirety of that reality; it is intelligent, curious, and alien in ways beyond human comprehension, thinking complex thoughts through its vast twelve-dimensional brain.  It is aware of the existence of other spacetimes, and desperately wants to study them and learn more about them, but it cannot do more than dimly sense them unless someone opens a portal to its world, and even then, its entire biology and physics and metaphysics are so alien that it cannot truly enter a new world, instead binding a portion of itself-- an avatar of it-- to a living being in this world to anchor it, putting them into mental contact and allowing it to share the senses and brain of its host to study the wonderful, strange new space it has come into contact with.  (Some hosts go insane from the fragments of alien thought that invariably echo from TWHOTE's observations, but others benefit tremendously from the partnerships.)  John, luckily, was able to survive the bonding with his sanity intact, and gained a strange new partner in life thereby.

From there, John's life improved; he got by using friends he'd made online to help him get through his situation, and taught himself skills he never had-- computers, how to sew and alter clothes, how to cook, fixing cars, even DJing.  He found work as a delivery driver for FoodNow, a company that provides third-party delivery services for restaurants, and isn't particularly fussy about verifying information about their drivers (who are legally "Independent Contractors" and thus don't need much paperwork) and so were willing to hire John with his minimal ID and paperwork.  He made a surprisingly large amount of money doing this.

Now he's finally settling in to an improved lifestyle.  He's been on hormones through online connections, taking testosterone supplements, and has purchased a packer and similar things to help him live as his true gender.  (He still has binders left, but no longer needs them after the ritual that bound TWHOTE to him.)  With a place to live, steady work, and a roof over his head, he's now letting himself think about other things.  He'd love to find a girlfriend, but figures that it's almost impossible for him to do so, given his anatomy.

And when TWHOTE realized that Port Washington existed, it guided John to it, and John agreed that it looked like a good move.  His connections and new powers let him get a job as a courier, for in Port Washington, normal paperwork isn't what's important.  But he still delivers the occasional pizza.

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Skills and Abilities:


Education:

High school dropout; John hasn't had formal education since he was 14.

Non-Educational Skills:

John has acquired many skills through self-education and life experience.  He is a very, very good driver, and a skilled self-taught mechanic and repairman. He had to learn to fight with improvised weapons and bare-handed in self-defense, and he's also taught himself a bit about computers, a bit about DJing and editing music, a few very basic principles of magic, and a great deal about N-dimensional geometry that he literally does not have the vocabulary to explain in English.  He also knows Spanish at a very basic level.

Powers: John is attached to an avatar of an alien hyperdimensional being of great potency; this manifests in several ways.

* John is surprisingly tough, able to take inhuman amounts of punishment, and heals very quickly, as TWHOTE knits John's body back together when he's hurt in ways it can comprehend.  (It's not good with drugs or viruses-- it can't really understand the problem-- but it's good at recognizing the issues with broken bones and blood loss, and helping with those issues.)

* John has more mass and inertia than he should, due to the physical presence of the avatar attached to him, but this added mass does not interact with gravity.  (Don't try to figure that one out.  TWHOTE uses different physics.)  While John isn't super-strong, this makes him extremely hard to move against his will, and "anchors" him to this reality fairly firmly.  He also can use the extra mass in limited ways in pushing things or in punching or kicking; this makes his unarmed blows comparable in power to, say, a policeman's baton, but not as powerful as a baseball bat.

* This inertia is also metaphysical, and tends to protect John from certain kinds of magic, notably more subtle, transformational magic. John's name is also different from the one that he was born with, and his overall identity issue can also make some spells have a harder time locating him or "locking on" to him.

* John's mind being tied to TWHOTE creates inadvertently powerful mental defenses. His mind, being anchored to a being that thinks twelve-dimensional thoughts, has become much more resilient, able to shrug off mystical effects that would alter the minds of ordinary mortals with more ease.  (This does not apply to chemical effects, however.  TWHOTE doesn't change John's brain chemistry.)  In addition, beings attempting to probe into his mind will encounter this alien thought-pattern making it very difficult to perceive John's thoughts or memories at all, and may find making the attempt painful and disorienting.  Sadly, this will also make friendly telepathic contact with John quite difficult.  Similarly, no entity can possess John or force his mind or soul out of his body, as TWHOTE will simply keep John's self and his body tied closely together, regardless of what the other entity might attempt.

* TWHOTE is using John's senses to interact with our reality, but it's not limited to those senses.  As its name implies, even its avatar has numerous eyes extending a few yards from John's body, and it can use these to perceive aspects of reality all around John, notably including mass.  Since this information filters through their shared senses, the net effect is that John is always aware of the mass, shape and location of every object within about 15 feet of him at all times, regardless of darkness, smoke, or even intervening barriers.  He's also sensitive to the presence of magical and other metaphysical effects, but he has not yet learned how to really understand the nature of magic that he perceives.  (He might know that there's something unusual about a shapeshifter, for example, but not that they are a shapeshifter or what their real form is.)

* All of this combines to give John a unique defensive ability: He can safely handle cursed items, items of tremendous divine or infernal power, and so on, without suffering any effects from doing so; he won't set off mystical traps, accidentally open mystical seals, or otherwise have cause to regret picking up that strange puzzle-box as long as he can resist the urge to fiddle with it.  (If he does more than pick something up and move it, he becomes less safe.  Playing with mystical puzzle boxes is still a bad idea; they just won't shift on their own when he picks them up.)

* ...and all of this has consequences for John.  Beneficial magic has great difficulty with him as well.  Beneficent godlings will find it hard to provide John with the body he really wants, as the inertia of his form is too strong.  Friendly mental contact is likely to be painful or disorienting for the psychic cat that only wants to make friends.  Any mystical senses trained in his direction will have a hard time missing the powerful entity he's tied to.  When he's running fast, his physical mass makes it very hard for him to turn or stop quickly.  And he's often troubled by strange requests and alien thoughts from TWHOTE.  (Sometimes it even attempts to give him advice.  This is always well-meant, at least...)