Stutter

by **Thorgron** August 12th 2016, 2:39 am

STUTTER
"I have no idea what's r-r-real and what isn't anymore"

Basic Biography

Real Name: Stanton Stacy
Renegade Name: Stutter
Alignment: CN
Age: 26
Gender: Male
Race: Human (no metagene)
Hair: Dark Brown
Eyes: Blue
Height: 5'9
Weight: 160 lbs
Blood type: A-

The Looks

Stanton:

Stanton:

The Legacy

Personality:
Stutter was once a well mannered and calm young man. While never really outstanding he was a loyal friend, the kind of person whose company was always appreciated regardless of the people around him. His accident however has stripped him of much that once defined his personality. He is now manic, impulsive and truly paranoid. His abilities rob him of much of his grip on reality, making it increasingly difficult for him to interact meaningfully with other people. His loyalty and compassion however seem to have only grown stronger. He remains the kind of person who would stick his neck out for a person in need and is all too willing to ignore his own pain if someone around him is suffering.

History:
Stanton story starts not at his birth or in his adolescence, but on the day he joined the Army. Throughout his high school years, Stanton had been unsure of what direction he wanted his life to go. He was an average student, passing but never excelling. Pursuing sports or the arts or something if that nature was equally unappealing as he had never been physically superior to his peers nor did he feel he had anything interesting to say as a creator or performer. That left him the option of enter the work force or join the military. Flipping burgers or collecting trash did not necessarily appeal to him as a career choice, but military service had always had its appeal. Stanton was a young man not of exceptional ability but of character. Always the first to lend a hand to those in need or to offer a kind face to a struggling friend, he felt he could do some real good as an American soldier. If nothing else, he's be doing his duty as an American and that was something he felt he could be proud of.So just two weeks before high school graduation, Stanton enlisted. And not an hour after he crossed the stage and accepted his diploma, he was in a plane and off to boot camp.

This was a time of trial for him. As it was, boot camp was not an easy experience. People yelling in your face, hours in the hot sun, rigorous physical activity, all of it wa designed to tear down your spirit as an individual and to build you back up as part of something greater. Once the building up part began to happen, Stanton felt that he had truly made the correct choice in the oath he had chosen for his life. These were his brothers in arms, and he felt as compelled as ever to stand by their side to defend his country by their side. And Stanton was in fact a good soldier. Not a standout or top of the line or anything if that nature, but when the cards were down his superiors realized thatbthisbwould be the kind f man that a unit could fall back on. He's fight loyally and dutifully to the very end. It was however this loyalty and trust that would eventually be taken advantage of.

After serving for three years and doing two tours overseas, one which saw constant combat, Stanton came to the attention of a private military research organization. The project, code named CHRONOS was in need of physically capable young men and woman willing to put their lives on the line. Essentially, they were looking for expendable soldiers, unfortunately Stanton fell under this category. Thiugh that was never what he was told. When he was approached by his superiors about CHRONOS by his superiors, they painted it as a promotion and an opportunity to serve without further engaging in combat. All they had to do was tell him to jump and he would say how high, so the choice was clear. Immediately he was transferred from his unit into the hands of CHRONOS along with twelve other mean and women from across the American military branches.

At first service in the private organization was not unlike regular military service. They were each informed that they had been selected for their strong sense of moral right and wrong (the truth) and for someo special quality or another that they would need to succeed in their line of research (a lie). For the first six months, each of them were put through training similar to that of a NASA astronaut. They were forced to undergo g force training, exposure to high and low amounts of pressure, low oxygen environments and extremes of heat and cold all to test their physical capability to survive the project which they were yet to receive the specifics of. In that time alone, eight of the members dropped out, the rigorous testing rooting out physical defects in then that would make them unfit for their mission. In the next month, an additional soldier defected from the program, stating that she no longer felt safe. Her pay was severed and the remaining three subjects were rushed ahead in the program.

Though the name should have suggested it, all three remaining members including Stanton were shocked to find that they were being groomed to survive the rigors of time travel. This was obviously a field of great interest to the military, as it would allow them to eliminate threats to American safety retroactively before they ever arose. And these two remaining women and Stanton were going to be the first soldiers to ever travel back in time. This was very exciting to Stanton. He had never assumed that his life would amount to anything spectacular, let alone historic. Humbly and with gratitude he thanked the project leaders for allowing him the opportunity. They of course thanked him by moving forward with the project. Stanton would be the first of the three subjects to test their time machine.

It was a true marvel. The thing was not a vehicle but instead encompasses the area of an entire military base in the middle of the Death Valley. The colossal marvel required its own nuclear power plant for its power supply alone. Stanton could not even imagine the kind of money that was being poured into something like this. Once more he was in awe at the turn his life had taken. And he carried that feeling all the way into the smal chamber where he would be strapped Into a chair and briefed on the experiment. They were going to start out small. Attempting to send him back less than a second in time. This seemed like a small step to Stanton, but they explained to him that even that would be the single most significant scientific breakthrough in modern history. If successful, they could begin to move forward with further and further jumps back. The explanation was good enough for him and soon he was sealed within his chamber and the monstrous machine crackled to life.

Instantly Stanton's body felt strange. His skin tingled as though electricity were dancing a strange tango across his skin. The hairs on his head stood on end as his stomach turned over once, twice, three times. It was as though he was floating, spinning ever faster in zero gravity. Clenching his eyes shut, he concentrated all of his effort on keeping from losing his lunch. Ever faster he felt the invisible forces inside the chamber churn around and inside of his body. Then he heard a voice, and another and another. So many voices all thinking similar things echoed in his head he couldn't think straight. He was becoming delirious, his mind felt warped, stretched, like the reflection seen in two mirrors facing one another. It was far too much for him to handle his body went limp, passing out from the overwhelming stress.

When he woke up he had no bearings on where he was. The room seemed to be spinning. No, not spinning, it was like every motion of his occurred and then was echoed multiple times over in his vision. Already, feeling sick from the experience Stanton expelled the contents of his stomach all over his uniform. Then he did it again, and again and again. The action seemed to be on repeat as he felt his body go through the exact experience over and over again. Even the sound of the vomit hitting the floor was the same. He needs to calm himself, get his bearings. Maybe this was an unforeseen side effect, maybe the experiment was still going on. Even those thoughts in his head seemed to echo inside his mind.

HELP! he screamed into the small room he now recognized as being the inside do the chamber where he had passed out. Once more he heard and felt himself crying out over and over again, the echo of his actions overlapping themselves. Through the disorienting experience he could hear people faintly on the other side of the blast door. It swung wide open, and two men in heavy full body suits cautiously approached him. Slowly he watched them approach before they I strapped him from the chair and lifted him to his feet. They were wobbly and I easy as he felt the experience of standing happen multiple times though he knew he was already on his feet. All at once his body collapsed once more under the stress of his straining mind. "What is happening to me" was his last thought before he lost consciousness once more.

For what seemed like forever after the experiment, Stanton could not maintain consciousness for more than an hour. The doctors and scientists would do everything they could, pump him full of stimulating drugs to force him to stay awake, sedate him to try dulling the mental stress. But it all failed. No matter what they did he would succumb to the echo in his head, like a plugging a microphone into a speaker then holding the microphone to the speaker. There was such a great feedback in his mind that when he did awake, he was terrified to think. That would be all it would take was one single thought and the echoing would grow louder and louder until he broke and his body provided him with the only release it could find. That was it the only problem he was suffering from however. At some point during their effort to recover him they accidentally let Stanton get a glimpse of himself in a mirror. What he saw he at first thought was a result of his ever deteriorating mental state. Further inspection proved this not to be the case however. In the wake of every movement from his body was an what could only be described as an after image. It was like something he'd seen done before by a speedster on TV only he wasn't moving fast. Perhaps it was more like a psychedelic video, his movements being mimicked by ever more transparent and delayed versions of himself occupying the same space. As soon as the scientist escorting him at the time of his discovery noticed what Stabton had seen he immediately pulled him away, trying to save the man from what he assumed would be another fainting spell.

This was not the case however. The sight was somehow stabilizing, a more solid idea of why he was experiencing things in such bizarre fashion. From that point his periods of alertness gradually increased. After what he was told had been six months since the incident he could now maintain conscious thought for up to six hours a day. The improvement was miraculous and promising. But while his doctors were happy for him, CHRONOS had other ideas. As he would be soon informed, he had been the only person to survive the time experiments. The other man and woman had no the been completely lost as soon as the machine turned back on. This infuriated Stanton, inviting him to ask his superiors in CHRONOS why they had thought to even think of turning the machine back on before they understood what it was that had caused his incident. Their response was cold, explaining to him that the project had been such a costly investment that results had to be produced. And Stanton being the only survivor, he would once more need to be put into the terrifying device. The information was too much for him to process and once more he ended up fainting.

Like waking up from some horrid nightmare he found himself retrained in the same chair that had so severely damaged him. He fought with all of his might as he heard the machine turn back on and felt the similar sensation of weightlessness inside the hellish room. The sensations compounded on themselves from his fractured existence and sent Stanton into a full blown panic attack. He began to scream at the top of his lungs, thrashing about at his restraints. The delayed after images of himself did the same and to the CHRONOS researchers observing outside the chamber he appeared to be a writhing blob of struggling human parts. All at once the screams of himself and his after images compounded, shattering the glass barriers containing the temporal energies. Similarly his shuddering form ripped free of his restraints. Raw timestream energy ripped through the facility, wreaking existential havoc on all those in the compound. People age into dust and rejuvenated into unbirth. Metal corroded to nothing and reverted to ore in their place. And at the center of it all was Stanton, his time fractured body uniquely equipped to weather the time storm.

When finally the machines energies reached the power source, the entire thing shut down and Stanton was left the sole survivor of the compound. He shook with fear, his eyes practically bulging from his head. The idea that a fate worse than what he already suffered may have awaited him if he had not broken free continuously echoed in his mind. He would push it out, but always and after image would pull the though back. He had to leave, had to get out of the compound. While that was a simple enough task, life for Stanton would never be the same.

Alone and afraid, one of the first things he would come to realize we're the lies he had been told. The military had no record of his service and would not take him back. Everyone he had known in the service had mysteriously disappeared. It was a CHRONOS machination, he knew it. And that knowledge led him further down the rabbit hole. He had been essentially sold to them, an expendable soldier, a lab rat for testing of a highly experimental and dangerous program. He was expendable. Echo after echo the thought wracked his brain. He was never going to be the important man they had promised. They had probably even known that he would not survive the experiment. All of this along with his appearance and deteriorating mental state drive Stanton to isolation. In desperation he sought out the sewers, finding there a possibility for a new beginning...

The Powers and Weaknesses

(All characters can be as powerful as they want, as long as they are balanced with proper weaknesses.)
Powers

Fractured Continuum: Stanton does not experience time in the same way that anything else does. We and everything around us move through time in a smooth, continuous straight line, like a rail line that starts when we are created and carries us all the way to eventual annihilation. This is not the case for Stanton. If we all travel on time like trains on a railroad, then he the incident derailed him. In every passing moment, Stanton is made and remade. This results in the phenomenon of him creating increasingly transparent after-images in the wake of his movement. Each after image is a delayed moment in time and each loses all ability to interact physically in the world the moment that the next Stanton is created. So perhaps his existence is less like a train and more like watching a reel of film as it runs in front of a projector. The part being projected is the part that matters, the part that we see on the screen, but if you watch the reel, you can see the past images as they roll along and eventually disappear back into the reel. Stanton's after images however, do not always have to remain incorporeal. He can at will, force one or multiple after images into the present moment juxtaposed over top of himself. While that's all well and good, what exactly does this let him do? I'll give two examples of how this ability might play out in combat.

Let's say Stanton is holding a pistol and is in a standoff with four other gunmen. He could fan the arm holding the gun in front of his body, pulling three additional version of that arm from the after images generated in his wake. Each arm would be physically identical to the arm that produced them all attached at the shoulder and would be holding identical guns. Once finished, Stanton can select which present version remains in the present and which remains an after-image (if he drops the guns before returning them to being after-images then they will remain real). This use of the ability can also be used for things like rearing back and hitting something, then constantly recreating the same motion from after images, effectively jack hammer the same punch home over and over. It should also be noted that when an after image is pulled into the present it appears differently than the other after images, losing all of its translucence.

Now let's say that Stanton is running towards a gunman. The gunman fires, hitting Stanton right between the eyes. The bullet will hit the Stanton of that moment in the head, making it fully real but killing it, while the current Stanton continues running, physically unharmed by the bullet. Stanton has to be aware that an attack is coming or the attack must be slow enough that he can feel it and react to it for this ability to work (if its non-lethal damage it does not generate a real clone and instead the damage transfers harmlessly to an after-image). So in this case, there is a gun pointed at him, he's pretty aware that he's most likely going to be shot. Where as he if he were just standing around and got sniped in the head, he'd be really truly dead before he ever knew what hit him.

Weakness(es)

No Clones:
While Stanton can duplicate items (like the guns in the above example) he cannot duplicate himself. No after image version of himself (unless its a dead one) can fully detach from him. If they do stretch away from the main body they must remain attached by their waists or in the same footprints.

Avoidance Not Healing:
Stanton can use his ability to avoid damage (like a flavorful version of phasing) by mitigating the damage to that moment's after image so long as he is able to react to the damage. However, once he takes a hit it not only stays with him but with every after image he brings to the present. So if you cut off a hand, no afterimages generated from that arm will have a hand.

Motion:
The big kicker of Stanton's ability. He has to be moving to generate after images and they can only generate in the wake of movement. So if in the example of him running at a gunman he is instead standing still and does not move before the gun goes off, he cannot pull the dying after image into the present and instead dies himself. This works the same way with non-fatal injuries and makes him particularly vulnerable if he is asleep, well restrained, paralyzed, etc. It also means that he cannot duplicate items that he has no way of moving.

Rogue Images:
Every now and then, an after image of Stanton's will go rogue, no longer acting in his wake. Once this happens to an after image Stanton loses all control of it. Usually they act erratically when this happens, as though in response to some sort of incredibly stressful stimuli. And since after-images can still make noise, this could prove highly detrimental in a situation where he is trying to hide or be stealthy. When an image goes rogue, it has to stay touching Stanton or his wake of images and if it does not it will instantly dissipate. However so long as it remains in contact with him, Stanton becomes wholly aware of both his own and the image's mental states, thoughts, and emotions, often creating an existential crisis in him. To even further complicate things, if a rogue image were to engage in an act that would kill it, such a shooting itself, it still produces a real physical version of a dead Stanton.

Human:
Stanton is for all intents and purposes a human. His speed, strength, stamina, durability, reaction time and rate of healing are all in line with what the average recent Army veteran's would be.

Overwhelming Echoes:
The biggest downside to this power. Stanton has (to some extent) learned to drown out the echoing of his after images in his head. If he hadn't he'd still be unable to maintain consciousness for more than an hour as he had to deal with an essentially infinite amount of thoughts all echoing around in his head. However, once he pulls an after-image into the present, that after images thoughts play in his head just as his own thoughts do. The more after images, the louder and more chaotic it gets in his head until the point where he can no longer concentrate on anything. This is also true for when an after image dies. SO in the example of him running at a gunman, when the shot hits, he gets the full sensation of dying. He experiences all of the fear and regret and uncertainty that happen at though moment of death as though he had died himself (technically he did, just not the present one). Now in the example of getting shot once that would be traumatizing but doable. Now imagine someone firing a machine gun at him as he experiences the sensation of dying over and over again in rapid succession. It should quickly become clear why Stanton is as twitchy, paranoid and detached from reality as he is.

Detached From Reality:
Stanton frequently has constant struggles with what is his reality and what is simply the experience of an after image. He will outright refuse at times that he has ever been referred to as Stutter and will insist that he has always been called Glitch (or Flux, or Jitter, or one of a plethora of other names). Sometime he will become the rogue image himself, responding to stimuli and events around him that aren't actually there before coming back to his relative sense and back to reality. He has memories of dying, of injuries and dismemberment that have no physical sign because they were experienced by an after image and not actually him. This all compounds in him remaining in a constant uneasy relationship with the nature of his own reality and identity.

RP Mechanics

RP Mechanic(s):
-Stanton talks with a Stutter brought on by him unintentionally looping through the same after image during speech

-It is always evident that Stanton is producing after images, making his size shape and outline often vague and disorienting

-Time based abilities and effects seem to have absolutely no affect on him

Items/Minions

Physical Priority
(You are to put these physical attributes in order from 1 to 4. 1 is the highest priority, 4 is the lowest.)
Agility 4
Endurance 1
Reaction 2
Strength 3

by **Silus** August 12th 2016, 4:27 pm

Interesting power...approved until stated otherwise.

Stutter

Stutter

Re: Stutter