Permissions/Impressions [wip]

[morganizedchaos]

▷ First Impressions ▶ VISUAL: In human form, Ghost looks absolutely identical to Morgan Yu, the guy whose brain the human parts of him are a literal copy of. So he's a mixed-race (Chinese/German, specifically) scruffy looking guy with messy, short dark hair, in moderately dire need of a shave. He's also a large guy the size of a small guy - Morgan's build and proportions make him look like he should be in the 5'10 to 6'2 range, until you get him standing next to someone and realize that no, he's actually 5'5 (165cm). Note that because he's mimicking and not actually human, Ghost's hair doesn't grow (and he could shave off the scruff, but it would revert back the next time he changed forms). He also doesn't age, looking perpetually 30. When actively engaged in conversation, Ghost is very expressive and rarely entirely still, tending to gesture and make appropriate facial expressions while he's 'talking.' When someone is talking to him, however, he tends to go into a kind of flat affect, like he forgets to do anything with his face when he's not actively using it. He rarely makes eye contact and often doesn't even look directly at people when he's talking to them. Outside of conversation, he alternates between nervous energy - pacing, "I gotta do something with my hands or I'll implode," - and actually unnatural stillness. Occasionally (usually when doing a Big Distress), Ghost reverts completely to Phantom form, which means seven-foot-tall vaguely-humanoid bundle of black tendrils with smoky effects and Too Many glowing, bright-white eyes. Take some concept art and an in-game screenshot. Also human arms are for losers and sometimes he makes his arms do that without reverting the rest of the way. This will always be super explicit in tags. ▶ AURAL: Morgan's voice is obviously the baseline, for both actual Ghost's actual speech (as uncommon as it is) and his voice synthesizer. It's mid-range for a cis dude, American accent but not a particularly distinct one, and pretty emotionally expressive. This is all also true of the synthesized version Ghost uses; under normal circumstances, it's virtually indistinguishable from a human voice. Under circumstances, however, it becomes more obviously artificial, veering into that weird pacing you get from GPS voices and even into glitchy distortions when he's upset. Unless explicitly noted in the tag, Ghost is using the voice synthesizer with 'normal' human delivery. In Phantom form, he sounds like other Phantoms in full distorted echolalia glory. But honestly, if Ghost is having to talk verbally in Phantom form, something has gone Horribly Wrong. ▶ DEMEANOUR: Chaotic smartass. No one has taught this extrovert to socialize properly. Humanity but tilted a little to the left, no, further than that, perfect. No one will ever know, at least until you tell them. You ever been half awake? Easily distracted or unsettling focus, no inbetween. Everyone in here is so loud, don't take it personally. The worst at crowds; the worst at being a wallflower. A sensory meltdown waiting to happen, waiting for it to happen, and afterwards all you can do is pick up and keep going. I used to wish we weren't alone in the universe. Holding it together with staples and screws named 'helping others' and 'I've seen worse.' The humor helps. The humor helps a lot of things, when nothing else does. If you can't be flippant about the horrible ethics violations, they'll get you down, and you can't afford to let them get you down. You're not going to like what I have to say next. Does it count as being an apocalypse survivor if someone else did the surviving? Does it count as guilt if it's about something that happened before you were born? Are you responsible for the things you don't remember? What about the things you remember that weren't you? Would you let it live? ...Yes.

▷ IC Permissions ▶ PHYSICAL AFFECTION: Go for it! While Ghost won't initiate without permission, he's actually a very tactile person and once you get him started, expect a lot of friendly shoves, shoulder-or-hip bumps, sitting next to you and leaning on you, and other casual contact. ▶ PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: Generally not opposed, but talk to me beforehand! Ghost's first impulse is Avoiding fights with other people, but he'll throw down if he has to. ▶ RELATIONSHIPS: Ghost is non-repulsed ace (that is, no sexual drive but might fuck around for finding out purposes) and on the fence about romance. The name of the game here is generally "stunningly intense friendships," though he's not adverse to anything else. ▶ PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: There is so much to unpack here. First of all: that's not a human. It thinks, mostly, like a human, if one that is very definitely not neurotypical. But Ghost doesn't consider himself to be human (he's very aware of his hybrid identity thanks) and can't always be expected to have human thoughts or reactions. In particular, a significant subsection of his neurology is "ambush predator, reflexive hide reaction by turning into object" even discounting the psychic abilities, of which there are a Significant Amount. NEXT: Ghost is an active technopath, capable of mentally controlling pretty much anything with a computer chip in it. This is an ability that he uses to such an extent that it may as well be "always on," because it's how he manipulates the text-to-speech and voice synthesizer on his phone to serve as his voice. (It's easier than talking. Don't judge him. :v) He can also do this to simple AIs and even fairly complex ones; there's not a known upper limit of complexity. To characters who take control of machines using more traditional methods (read: AIs and hackers), his control registers as a sourceless corruption and it's not a particularly gentle manipulation even when extremely precise. It's kind of like pushing the code until it bends into doing what he wants it to, rather than rewriting it. (His phone's OS is probably a horrorshow for any AI hackers who might look at it, honestly.) ADDITONALLY VERY IMPORTANT: Ghost is a passive telepath with the potential to become active with it. He has strong telepathic senses - his "natural" species is a psionic hivemind, which he's no longer able to synchronize with because of the human hybridization. He can sense other minds around him and can recognize people based on this mental sense; however, he does not actively, intentionally read thoughts or make mental contact. Note the "actively" and "intentionally" in that sentence, because he's not unable to do those things. It's just that it usually only happens by accident, when Ghost is unprepared for it or when the other person is experiencing a strong emotion or flashback. The reason for this is two-fold: It's overwhelming to experience someone else's thoughts (a kind of sensory overload, really, that makes it impossible to experience his own thoughts), and because the first ethics anyone ever modelled for him by positive example were medical consent and patient confidentiality. What's going on your head is your business, what's going on in his head is his business, and ideally everyone can get along without the two meeting unintentionally. That isn't to say that he'll reject psychic contact from others (it's the easiest method of communication, really), but, well. Consent. Privacy. Those are things. Treat him with respect or fuck right off. Finally, when mimicking an object, it will be immediately obvious to anyone with telepathic or psychic senses that Ghost is not, in fact, an object. Ghost still has a mind while mimicking, and no amount of thinking Mug Thoughts will disguise the fact that coffee mugs do not think. ▶ MAGICAL INFORMATION: Nothing inherently magical to speak of, though if your canon reads "psychic/psionic" and "magical" as basically the same thing, see above. Characters who specifically have death-related senses would probably get the equivalent of an error noise; Phantoms are living (or, at least, "living") organisms created out of the corpses of humans, but they're not undead. ▶ MEDICAL INFORMATION: A mundane examination will reveal nothing out of the ordinary for Ghost's human form: male, age 29-30, one previously broken arm (very old, probably childhood), a few spotty burn scars on his hands (soldering mishaps), but generally in good health. It's only in neuroscans that anything unusual comes up, but at that point it's extremely obvious that there's something really weird going on. (Namely, that at the time Ghost is based off of, Morgan's brain was already extremely doctored up with alien material.) Of course, when he isn't in human form, That's An Alien, Human Medical Knowledge Means Nothing. ▶ OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Ghost is from a "family history" of unethical experiments, medical abuse, and gaslighting, with parental abuse further back in the backstory. He's mostly capable of handling himself in terms of his own experiences; it's when something unexpectedly kicks into the PTSD triggers that are embedded in the Morgan parts of his brain that he has a Problem. He will, however, firmly and with decreasing politeness nope out of any kind of virtual reality or anything that involves being fully submerged in water. Potentially triggering content for your characters that may come up: Human experimentation (very unethical), familial abuse, memory loss/modification, a wide variety of permutations of "aliens that eat people and trying not to get eaten by them," virtual reality/simulations, alien-eating-people apocalypses, kidnapping/abduction, and unreality-type experiences. Also, Ghost is very casual about use of his powers, so if your character has any supernatural-is-happening related triggers that might do a thing.

▷ OOC Permissions ▶ BACKTAGGING: I generally stop tagging slow threads at about the two month point; I have no objection to continuing to tag, it's just that it's sometimes harder for me to rewind the headspace, so to speak. ▶ THREADHOPPING: Go wild. ▶ FOURTHWALLING: I don't have anything against it, but please ask first! ▶ OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Player is transmasc and triggered by anything more detailed than a general mention of pregnancy. Parasitic worms are also a nope, as is any kind of visual gore (described is usually fine unless super explicit about organs). ▶ ANYTHING ELSE? You are 100% cleared to use different colors and fonts around me, but please don't make text super small! ▶ PERMISSIONS FOR YOU Section 1 is for telepathy permissions; Section 2 is for tech and tech characters. If you don't respond, I'll assume you want to opt-out of this nonsense, though if we build close CR I might double-check with you. <b>CHARACTER NAME AND JOURNAL</b>: <b><u>TELEPATHY PERMISSIONS</u></b> <b>Total opt-out?</b>: If you want to opt out of telepathy shenanigans entirely just say so here. <b>Is there anything unusual about your character's mind that is immediately obvious?</b> Think the psychic equivalent of looking at someone from down the street, across a crowded room, or similar levels of remove. We're talking about things that are absolutely unmissable here. <b>What kind of mental impression might your character give off?</b> This is more relevant for potential close CR; Ghost recognizes people's individual minds with a sort of metaphorical concept. Examples include a gravity well pulling things in; an icy lake too deep to see the bottom of; the concept of gridlines; and the place illuminated by a sunbreak or spotlight. <b>Do you want to potentially do something with accidental thought-hearing or other closer-than-arm's-length telepathy nonsense?</b> This is stuff that would get plotted in advance and is entirely opt-in, but if there's something you're interested in doing, here's a place for that. <B><u>TECHNOPATHY PERMISSIONS</u></b> <b>Does your character have a computer or other potentially corruptible device that you might want to have messed around with?</b> Again, this is purely opt-in. <b>IS your character a computer or other technological being?</b>No possession/techno-mind-control is going to happen (I promise) but there might be other shenanigans that come up as a result!

Comments

[bodyoftheseus]

CHARACTER NAME AND JOURNAL: V, bodyoftheseus

TELEPATHY PERMISSIONS
Is there anything unusual about your character's mind that is immediately obvious?
AI. There's a lot of corrupted data.

What kind of mental impression might your character give off?
copy and pastes from q'uila's echo permissions
The soft glow of city lights at night while you sit perched atop a water tower outside of the city. There is no breeze and the city lights are so bright you cannot see the stars above. There is the faint smell of ether that is in the air after a particularly big static shock. Initially it feels of icy razor blade edges and knives, but if you push forward and through the cuts it gives way into something soft and warm.

Do you want to potentially do something with accidental thought-hearing or other closer-than-arm's-length telepathy nonsense?
With plotting beforehand.

TECHNOPATHY PERMISSIONS
Does your character have a computer or other potentially corruptible device that you might want to have messed around with?
Opting out of this.

IS your character a computer or other technological being?
Yes, but outside of a cursory ping like mentioned in chat please talk with me first.