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MoM Application (Take Two)
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Cadel Greeniaus, although right now he is going by Cadel Darkkon. For the purposes of consistency I'll keep him on lists and such as Greeniaus, since that will be hisfinal form eventual permanent name.
CHARACTER AGE: 13
SERIES: Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
CHRONOLOGY: Mid-Evil Genius, the first book.
CLASS: Supervillain in training right now; eventually he'll heel-turn and become a hero.
HOUSING: Any is fine, but fair warning, he's not likely to stay there.
BACKGROUND: Since this is a relatively obscure book series, I've written out a comprehensive summary of each book just in case. I was concerned with it being so obscure that you wouldn't have any adequate references. The Wikipedia is not very illuminating, so here's a quick bullet point:
> Cadel at age 7 is brought to a psychologist, Dr. Thaddeus Roth, on police suggestion after he hacked into a high security network. Instead of redirecting Cadel's skills to something more, well, legal, Thaddeus told him that he needed to remember the golden rule: don't get caught. Thaddeus revealed that he knew who Cadel's real father was: an international criminal serving a life sentence, Dr. Phineas Darkkon. Meanwhile, Cadel was denied computer access despite his genius with them.
> Cadel's teachers give up on teaching him anything a couple years later, so his adoptive parents, the Piggotts, enroll him in a private high school ahead of time. This does not go well for Cadel, as he's a complete social failure, having been isolated his whole childhood; Thaddeus tells him people are the most complicated system of all, and he sets out to learn them.
> Partner Post, a fake dating web site, is established. Cadel runs the whole thing on a DNA-wired cell phone he altered himself, with the functional capacity of a full computer. He takes peoples' money and instead of matching them, pretends to be their matches himself, ensuring satisfaction and continued payment and learning people at the same time. One of the Partner Post clients, Kay-Lee McDougall, is a theoretical mathematician, and Cadel, pretending to be a Canadian math professor, starts being more and more honest in his responses. They get very close. Later on it's revealed that Kay-Lee is actually Sonja, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't communicate well verbally; they become and remain very close friends.
> Graduating high school at age 12 (sabotaging the rest of his graduating class in their exams as a final farewell present), Thaddeus shuffles him into the Axis Institute, established by Dr. Darkkon for the sole purpose of educating Cadel when he came of age. Though no one else there knows that, they all know he's the son of their infamous benefactor Phineas Darkkon, and Cadel enrolls with some notoriety. It functions as an elite, upper class post-secondary learning facility, geared toward the sciences and with especially talented students. Secretly the classes are about topics such as extortion, lying, embezzlement, and other illegal acts required for proper villainy.
> And then he finds out that his father and Thaddeus are monitoring his every move, which wouldn't be so surprising if the Piggotts weren't in on it. His own adoptive parents are on Darkkon's payroll and have been his entire life. Starting to question everything he's been told and his own world view, Cadel begins to retaliate. Using the skills he formed in high school, he sabotages the Axis Institute via a convoluted, multi-step interpersonal plot; this inadvertently causes the deaths of several professors and the complete closure of the school. This shocks Cadel's moral compass into realigning itself, and just as he's trying to decide how to escape the life he's being forced into, one of his professors catches on to what's happening and kidnaps him as leverage.
This is when I'll be taking him from. For the rest of this app I'll be referring to Thaddeus as Prosper, as that's his real name; Cadel believes (and so does Prosper, erroneously) for most of the rest of the series that Prosper is his real father, not Darkkon.
PERSONALITY: The tacit aim of the books is to take comic book tropes about villainy and dismantle them. In the real world, there's nothing glamorous about it: lives are destroyed, torn apart, and the villains themselves end up mentally broken if not outright dead. To say nothing of their victims along the way. Reality-- the sheer lack of superpowers in Cadel's world, with very few fantastical exceptions such as Gazo's stench, a product of genetic engineering-- means that most villains must resort to real world tactics. Embezzling, extortion, and assassination are hard and dangerous, and often backfire. But most importantly to this series, villains uniformly end up alone. Their own paranoia enforces it.
That is the role Cadel was almost literally born to take up, and he was literally raised for it. His social ostracization started early, intentionally set in place by Prosper with inattentive, uncaring parents, and directions to refuse to let Cadel advance academically. Later on, once he's more properly under Prosper's thumb, he's allowed to skip grades-- but not at the pace he was capable of. Always, it is ensured that Cadel is the loner in his environment, and his only comforts are the world of computers and his therapist. One of these intentionally cultivated maladjusted, condescending opinions of everyone else, and encouraged sabotage for the sake of practice.
But Cadel is not that person. He became that person for a few years purely because he got the only expression of love he'd ever had directed toward him in exchange for it. With that as the prize-- and as a young child-- it was a losing battle. It was a battle he'd never wanted to win, until he saw the effects of that mentality in the crumbling psyches and lives of those at Axis. In this series, genius children do not stop being children. Cadel very much has every emotion and immaturity of any other kid his age, and the yearning for acceptance and social validation is equally present. His doomed effort to come up with equations that can predict human behavior reveal his desperate urge to just know how people work. He's completely at sea when it comes to emotions, failing manifestly to recognize his own when he's in the grip of them several times, not to mention failing to accurately read others. This is definitely due to his stunted, isolated upbringing-- he improves somewhat over time and positive socialization, but some of it will never be recovered.
Similarly, he has the intellectual limitations of realistic geniuses. His areas of expertise (computers et al, then limited areas of chemistry, nanobiometrics, electrical engineering, cryptography, physics, applied computational theory) are all related and things outside of that he's quite incapable in. That does mean that he feels strongly about computers. He once said to Saul that he's not like normal kids-- without having a computer he might as well be missing a limb. This isn't histrionics for Cadel. With so little way of relating to the normal world or feeling a part of it, however much he tries and wishes to be, he sinks with relief into the amoral cyber sphere of codes and numbers. Sonja wrote in an early Partner Post letter as Kay-Lee that numbers have no goodness or badness to them, they just are, and Cadel relies on that heavily to find solace and respite from his endless inner moral turmoil.
Yet no app for Cadel would be complete without discussing his relationship with Prosper. It’s the central tenant of his life, the one that, no matter how dysfunctional or potentially lethal it may prove to be, has been the one unshakable foundation Cadel has ever known. It’s important to note that a discerning reader will realize that some things Cadel believes about Prosper have not been demonstrated as true in the actual text. Chief among these is his belief that Prosper is alive at the end of the series, that he saved him, and that he loves him. Certainly, there’s evidence for each, and the reader may be tempted to believe them. But that is at least partly because we have been following Cadel’s perspective and Cadel’s only for the entirety of the series. The other characters are all skeptical and even horrified by Cadel’s attachment to Prosper.
Several times Saul and others make mention of how Cadel loses all rationality the second Prosper is mentioned. There’s a moment in the third book in which a random police officer tells him there’s a phone call from a friend for him, and although he has no reason to suspect it’s Prosper, he’s paralyzed, heart in throat, for several seconds at the thought. It turns out not to be him, but this is revealing. Cadel at a very young age internalized Prosper as his guiding influence, the one source of support, and it wars with his fear and anger toward him constantly. Yet he must believe that Prosper loves him, in the same way that abused children often cling to the belief that their abusive parent still loves them. And he equally wants to believe that Prosper is still alive, as a child would of their parent, abusive or not—though his final railing protests have the definite note of grief to them.
If Prosper is dead, Cadel is left without resolution. In this way, the books mimic real life once again. We aren’t given answers about Prosper’s true opinion of him (he’s cagey to his last breath in that respect) and we aren’t given answers about his survival. This is the way life works, and Cadel’s stuck with it. But Cadel isn’t left, as I’ve said all the villains in this series are, alone. He is embraced by his family and friends, and this, truly, is what has saved him. Cadel has a legitimate horror for violence and cruelty that arises even when he’s acting evil in the first book, and no pressure from Prosper or others ever erased it. Cadel honestly wants to be a good person; he just gets confused on what that is.
His concept of morality is decidedly shaky. He has very little trouble finding justification for a whole myriad of illegal acts when they support what he deems an altruistic cause, and Cadel hardly loses sleep over it. He absolutely does lose sleep over any perceived lowering of his loved ones’ opinions of him it may cause. Although Cadel is firm on violence being bad, those violations that are far removed from any evidenced pain he’s much more hazy on, and he frequently falls back on the what would Sonja think of me if I did this? school of morality checks. Sometimes he doesn’t know. He leans heavily on Sonja (and Saul) to help him set boundaries, and without them, when he’s panicked, he tends to run a bit amuck.
Cadel has grown from relying on Prosper for guidance to relying on others in his life for guidance, likely because he’s been molded to require it. Nonetheless, he has a strong, stubborn streak of independence. He pushes relentlessly to be allowed to spearhead the hunt for Prosper and other tasks that he perceives others as less capable of doing. Frequently, he’s right in this judgement; sometimes he’s not, and when Gazo calls him out on “talking like Prosper” Cadel is immediately and irrevocably guilt stricken. More than that, he’s disgusted with himself, and can’t stop apologizing. All his love for Prosper hasn’t erased his hatred of the man, and his intense desire to escape from his shadow. Truly, he’s an impossible kid to protect and the strain shows on Saul. Cadel has very little familiarity with anyone, but especially adults, trying to protect him, and he ducks what protection he can be extended with unnerving regularity.
That isn’t to say Cadel is unappreciative of those protecting him. He’s more than once driven nearly to tears by simple declarations like “You’re my son now”, the offer of adoption, and Sonja’s blind faith in him. He’s had so little of that in his life that he is immensely, overwhelmingly grateful for it. Sometimes he feels undeserving of it, and he shows absolutely no hesitation to sacrifice his own safety for theirs. It’s his fault they’re in danger, so it’s his job to fix it, never mind his age. The problem is that Cadel is smart enough to overcome any limitations typically placed upon teenagers, and he often can enable his own investigation or escape—but there’s times he also can’t. He makes mistakes, especially where anticipating behavior is concerned.
Ultimately, he feels deeply responsible, because he needs others in his life. He has needed Sonja since he was very young, simply as a sympathetic, understanding ear; he needs Saul to prove to him that fathers do more than abandon and threaten and manipulate; he needs Fiona to straight forwardly care; and he needs Gazo to look out for him as a brother would, in ways Cadel has no method of anticipating. It’s clearly laid out in the books that Cadel’s social ties are what has saved him from becoming Prosper 2.0, and it’s how he’s escaped villainy. It’s how he’s escaped being alone.
POWER: None of these are canon and I've fabricated them all for the game.
(1) Tech command. Ability to psychically input commands in tech, such as typing or manipulating power switches. Cadel still has to know what commands to input-- this doesn't enhance his knowledge, just his interaction with the machine-- but once he's acclimated to the local technology, that will only rarely be an issue. The device in question must be either within sight range, or he must be extremely familiar with it (i.e. extended continual use).
(2) Tech psychometry. Touching technology gives Cadel a very vague, limited sense of the person or persons who most frequently use it. Typically this speaks to their interaction with the computer / machine, not unrelated subjects. If it's untouched, he won't feel anything.
(3) Ariel disguise. Several times throughout the books, Cadel disguises himself as a teenage girl named Ariel, complete with fake birth certificate and passport. This power just makes him convincing in his disguise even to magical and technological senses. It works for this disguise only and is an illusion; Cadel doesn't physically change.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [By the time Cadel posts, he has been here several days. He's scoured the network, disassembled and successfully reassembled his phone, contemplated stealing a computer and made a few plans in that direction. Nothing to fruition yet, though; he's stuck using his phone for now.
In the meantime he's going to try going about this from a different angle than normal. He has a chance here, a real chance, to persuade everyone else-- without his police record, without his history as a weird, over-intelligent, creepy little kid skulking about in grades too far past his age and schools too below his intellect-- that he is exactly what he appears to be. A sweet, lost little boy.
Cadel, when the vid clicks on, does not look his age. A casual glance would place him at perhaps ten. He has delicate dark curls that drape to frame his face; piercing blue eyes; a cultured Australian accent in a clear voice; and a face innocent enough to be suitable as a child model. Indeed, he's been approached randomly on the street before and asked to be one by real agents. A contract he'd turned down, to stay under the radar.
But he has no one else here. No Thaddeus, no Sonja, not even Vee. If Cadel has to lie to find support, he will.
He has a serious expression, perhaps nervous. ] Hi. Um. I'm Cadel Darkkon. I'm just wondering... is there any place to get training for these abilities we were given? It seems crazy to me. Totally crazy. These things aren't real, right?
I've heard that someone thought pyrogenes exist-- people who can spontaneously combust... But that's just nonsense. A scam. But they're saying this isn't a scam, that there's a war.
Is that true? Kids like me aren't supposed to get involved in that, right? I just want to dodge school. [ Which is, he hopes, a very believable response. Cadel's studied high schoolers extensively; middle schoolers can't be much different. ]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: It takes Cadel at least a week to stop looking over his shoulder for surveillance.
The very first day he's there he sneaks into his own assigned housing through the back door, creeping in, making sure no one sees him. He quickly finds a blatantly unoccupied bedroom to claim as his own, shuts and locks the door, and adds locks to his mental list of things to purchase. He needs to be able to shut out the rest of his housemates on demand. He doesn't trust any of them not to try to baby him, or do things 'for his own good', since children shouldn't take care of themselves.
Cadel's always taken care of himself. And now he knows why-- because the Piggotts were only paid to look after him to begin with.
It's absurd, that that should hurt. He never cared about them. He blatantly avoided them, was impatient to leave them behind in his meteoric rise in self-teaching. Yet Cadel finds that knowing that Lanna and Stuart Piggott had never even wanted him in the first place makes it hard to swallow, like jagged edges are stuck in his throat, pricking him mercilessly. He won't cry, he has no time for crying, he's not going to cry over something like this. Over being stuck in another dimension with strange powers he doesn't know how to harness yet and housemates he hasn't met but is already sure he can't trust...
He falls, with deep gratitude, onto the government-supplied communicator. There's almost certainly some sort of surveillance mechanism in this, he's sure. Cadel's first order of business is identifying it and removing it; his second order of business is brushing up on local laws about 'net usage; and his third is to start some scam, whatever he has to, to afford to buy his own parts to build his own computer. He has no intention of going to school for even a single day. It's a waste of time-- he has nothing to learn there-- he'll get bullied again--
Cadel breathes deeply and submerses himself in his phone. The parts are strewn about his duvet cover on his bed and it's familiar this way. Safe. He's spent so, so many months and late nights tucked up on his bed in his Lanna-designed hotel room of a bedroom painstakingly developing his DNA wiring, or developing Partner Post... or talking to Kay-Lee, who is really Sonja.
God. Sonja. If only Sonja were here. If only he weren't completely alone. But she isn't, and he is, and so Cadel spends a solid three days after arrival with his head deep in electronics, pushing himself back against the wall, hiding, whenever one of his housemates approaches the door and wonders why it's locked. Don't come in, don't come in, don't come in... and they don't.
He goes to the bathroom at night. He slips out the window to get supplies, some of them legally purchased. And ultimately, Cadel feels safe enough to take a chance, carefully calculated, heart pounding. Surely not everyone here is like they are at Axis. Surely... there's someone like Sonja. Just one person. That's all he needs. Just one.
FINAL NOTES: None.
CHARACTER NAME: Cadel Greeniaus, although right now he is going by Cadel Darkkon. For the purposes of consistency I'll keep him on lists and such as Greeniaus, since that will be his
CHARACTER AGE: 13
SERIES: Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
CHRONOLOGY: Mid-Evil Genius, the first book.
CLASS: Supervillain in training right now; eventually he'll heel-turn and become a hero.
HOUSING: Any is fine, but fair warning, he's not likely to stay there.
BACKGROUND: Since this is a relatively obscure book series, I've written out a comprehensive summary of each book just in case. I was concerned with it being so obscure that you wouldn't have any adequate references. The Wikipedia is not very illuminating, so here's a quick bullet point:
> Cadel at age 7 is brought to a psychologist, Dr. Thaddeus Roth, on police suggestion after he hacked into a high security network. Instead of redirecting Cadel's skills to something more, well, legal, Thaddeus told him that he needed to remember the golden rule: don't get caught. Thaddeus revealed that he knew who Cadel's real father was: an international criminal serving a life sentence, Dr. Phineas Darkkon. Meanwhile, Cadel was denied computer access despite his genius with them.
> Cadel's teachers give up on teaching him anything a couple years later, so his adoptive parents, the Piggotts, enroll him in a private high school ahead of time. This does not go well for Cadel, as he's a complete social failure, having been isolated his whole childhood; Thaddeus tells him people are the most complicated system of all, and he sets out to learn them.
> Partner Post, a fake dating web site, is established. Cadel runs the whole thing on a DNA-wired cell phone he altered himself, with the functional capacity of a full computer. He takes peoples' money and instead of matching them, pretends to be their matches himself, ensuring satisfaction and continued payment and learning people at the same time. One of the Partner Post clients, Kay-Lee McDougall, is a theoretical mathematician, and Cadel, pretending to be a Canadian math professor, starts being more and more honest in his responses. They get very close. Later on it's revealed that Kay-Lee is actually Sonja, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't communicate well verbally; they become and remain very close friends.
> Graduating high school at age 12 (sabotaging the rest of his graduating class in their exams as a final farewell present), Thaddeus shuffles him into the Axis Institute, established by Dr. Darkkon for the sole purpose of educating Cadel when he came of age. Though no one else there knows that, they all know he's the son of their infamous benefactor Phineas Darkkon, and Cadel enrolls with some notoriety. It functions as an elite, upper class post-secondary learning facility, geared toward the sciences and with especially talented students. Secretly the classes are about topics such as extortion, lying, embezzlement, and other illegal acts required for proper villainy.
> And then he finds out that his father and Thaddeus are monitoring his every move, which wouldn't be so surprising if the Piggotts weren't in on it. His own adoptive parents are on Darkkon's payroll and have been his entire life. Starting to question everything he's been told and his own world view, Cadel begins to retaliate. Using the skills he formed in high school, he sabotages the Axis Institute via a convoluted, multi-step interpersonal plot; this inadvertently causes the deaths of several professors and the complete closure of the school. This shocks Cadel's moral compass into realigning itself, and just as he's trying to decide how to escape the life he's being forced into, one of his professors catches on to what's happening and kidnaps him as leverage.
This is when I'll be taking him from. For the rest of this app I'll be referring to Thaddeus as Prosper, as that's his real name; Cadel believes (and so does Prosper, erroneously) for most of the rest of the series that Prosper is his real father, not Darkkon.
PERSONALITY: The tacit aim of the books is to take comic book tropes about villainy and dismantle them. In the real world, there's nothing glamorous about it: lives are destroyed, torn apart, and the villains themselves end up mentally broken if not outright dead. To say nothing of their victims along the way. Reality-- the sheer lack of superpowers in Cadel's world, with very few fantastical exceptions such as Gazo's stench, a product of genetic engineering-- means that most villains must resort to real world tactics. Embezzling, extortion, and assassination are hard and dangerous, and often backfire. But most importantly to this series, villains uniformly end up alone. Their own paranoia enforces it.
That is the role Cadel was almost literally born to take up, and he was literally raised for it. His social ostracization started early, intentionally set in place by Prosper with inattentive, uncaring parents, and directions to refuse to let Cadel advance academically. Later on, once he's more properly under Prosper's thumb, he's allowed to skip grades-- but not at the pace he was capable of. Always, it is ensured that Cadel is the loner in his environment, and his only comforts are the world of computers and his therapist. One of these intentionally cultivated maladjusted, condescending opinions of everyone else, and encouraged sabotage for the sake of practice.
But Cadel is not that person. He became that person for a few years purely because he got the only expression of love he'd ever had directed toward him in exchange for it. With that as the prize-- and as a young child-- it was a losing battle. It was a battle he'd never wanted to win, until he saw the effects of that mentality in the crumbling psyches and lives of those at Axis. In this series, genius children do not stop being children. Cadel very much has every emotion and immaturity of any other kid his age, and the yearning for acceptance and social validation is equally present. His doomed effort to come up with equations that can predict human behavior reveal his desperate urge to just know how people work. He's completely at sea when it comes to emotions, failing manifestly to recognize his own when he's in the grip of them several times, not to mention failing to accurately read others. This is definitely due to his stunted, isolated upbringing-- he improves somewhat over time and positive socialization, but some of it will never be recovered.
Similarly, he has the intellectual limitations of realistic geniuses. His areas of expertise (computers et al, then limited areas of chemistry, nanobiometrics, electrical engineering, cryptography, physics, applied computational theory) are all related and things outside of that he's quite incapable in. That does mean that he feels strongly about computers. He once said to Saul that he's not like normal kids-- without having a computer he might as well be missing a limb. This isn't histrionics for Cadel. With so little way of relating to the normal world or feeling a part of it, however much he tries and wishes to be, he sinks with relief into the amoral cyber sphere of codes and numbers. Sonja wrote in an early Partner Post letter as Kay-Lee that numbers have no goodness or badness to them, they just are, and Cadel relies on that heavily to find solace and respite from his endless inner moral turmoil.
Yet no app for Cadel would be complete without discussing his relationship with Prosper. It’s the central tenant of his life, the one that, no matter how dysfunctional or potentially lethal it may prove to be, has been the one unshakable foundation Cadel has ever known. It’s important to note that a discerning reader will realize that some things Cadel believes about Prosper have not been demonstrated as true in the actual text. Chief among these is his belief that Prosper is alive at the end of the series, that he saved him, and that he loves him. Certainly, there’s evidence for each, and the reader may be tempted to believe them. But that is at least partly because we have been following Cadel’s perspective and Cadel’s only for the entirety of the series. The other characters are all skeptical and even horrified by Cadel’s attachment to Prosper.
Several times Saul and others make mention of how Cadel loses all rationality the second Prosper is mentioned. There’s a moment in the third book in which a random police officer tells him there’s a phone call from a friend for him, and although he has no reason to suspect it’s Prosper, he’s paralyzed, heart in throat, for several seconds at the thought. It turns out not to be him, but this is revealing. Cadel at a very young age internalized Prosper as his guiding influence, the one source of support, and it wars with his fear and anger toward him constantly. Yet he must believe that Prosper loves him, in the same way that abused children often cling to the belief that their abusive parent still loves them. And he equally wants to believe that Prosper is still alive, as a child would of their parent, abusive or not—though his final railing protests have the definite note of grief to them.
If Prosper is dead, Cadel is left without resolution. In this way, the books mimic real life once again. We aren’t given answers about Prosper’s true opinion of him (he’s cagey to his last breath in that respect) and we aren’t given answers about his survival. This is the way life works, and Cadel’s stuck with it. But Cadel isn’t left, as I’ve said all the villains in this series are, alone. He is embraced by his family and friends, and this, truly, is what has saved him. Cadel has a legitimate horror for violence and cruelty that arises even when he’s acting evil in the first book, and no pressure from Prosper or others ever erased it. Cadel honestly wants to be a good person; he just gets confused on what that is.
His concept of morality is decidedly shaky. He has very little trouble finding justification for a whole myriad of illegal acts when they support what he deems an altruistic cause, and Cadel hardly loses sleep over it. He absolutely does lose sleep over any perceived lowering of his loved ones’ opinions of him it may cause. Although Cadel is firm on violence being bad, those violations that are far removed from any evidenced pain he’s much more hazy on, and he frequently falls back on the what would Sonja think of me if I did this? school of morality checks. Sometimes he doesn’t know. He leans heavily on Sonja (and Saul) to help him set boundaries, and without them, when he’s panicked, he tends to run a bit amuck.
Cadel has grown from relying on Prosper for guidance to relying on others in his life for guidance, likely because he’s been molded to require it. Nonetheless, he has a strong, stubborn streak of independence. He pushes relentlessly to be allowed to spearhead the hunt for Prosper and other tasks that he perceives others as less capable of doing. Frequently, he’s right in this judgement; sometimes he’s not, and when Gazo calls him out on “talking like Prosper” Cadel is immediately and irrevocably guilt stricken. More than that, he’s disgusted with himself, and can’t stop apologizing. All his love for Prosper hasn’t erased his hatred of the man, and his intense desire to escape from his shadow. Truly, he’s an impossible kid to protect and the strain shows on Saul. Cadel has very little familiarity with anyone, but especially adults, trying to protect him, and he ducks what protection he can be extended with unnerving regularity.
That isn’t to say Cadel is unappreciative of those protecting him. He’s more than once driven nearly to tears by simple declarations like “You’re my son now”, the offer of adoption, and Sonja’s blind faith in him. He’s had so little of that in his life that he is immensely, overwhelmingly grateful for it. Sometimes he feels undeserving of it, and he shows absolutely no hesitation to sacrifice his own safety for theirs. It’s his fault they’re in danger, so it’s his job to fix it, never mind his age. The problem is that Cadel is smart enough to overcome any limitations typically placed upon teenagers, and he often can enable his own investigation or escape—but there’s times he also can’t. He makes mistakes, especially where anticipating behavior is concerned.
Ultimately, he feels deeply responsible, because he needs others in his life. He has needed Sonja since he was very young, simply as a sympathetic, understanding ear; he needs Saul to prove to him that fathers do more than abandon and threaten and manipulate; he needs Fiona to straight forwardly care; and he needs Gazo to look out for him as a brother would, in ways Cadel has no method of anticipating. It’s clearly laid out in the books that Cadel’s social ties are what has saved him from becoming Prosper 2.0, and it’s how he’s escaped villainy. It’s how he’s escaped being alone.
POWER: None of these are canon and I've fabricated them all for the game.
(1) Tech command. Ability to psychically input commands in tech, such as typing or manipulating power switches. Cadel still has to know what commands to input-- this doesn't enhance his knowledge, just his interaction with the machine-- but once he's acclimated to the local technology, that will only rarely be an issue. The device in question must be either within sight range, or he must be extremely familiar with it (i.e. extended continual use).
(2) Tech psychometry. Touching technology gives Cadel a very vague, limited sense of the person or persons who most frequently use it. Typically this speaks to their interaction with the computer / machine, not unrelated subjects. If it's untouched, he won't feel anything.
(3) Ariel disguise. Several times throughout the books, Cadel disguises himself as a teenage girl named Ariel, complete with fake birth certificate and passport. This power just makes him convincing in his disguise even to magical and technological senses. It works for this disguise only and is an illusion; Cadel doesn't physically change.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [By the time Cadel posts, he has been here several days. He's scoured the network, disassembled and successfully reassembled his phone, contemplated stealing a computer and made a few plans in that direction. Nothing to fruition yet, though; he's stuck using his phone for now.
In the meantime he's going to try going about this from a different angle than normal. He has a chance here, a real chance, to persuade everyone else-- without his police record, without his history as a weird, over-intelligent, creepy little kid skulking about in grades too far past his age and schools too below his intellect-- that he is exactly what he appears to be. A sweet, lost little boy.
Cadel, when the vid clicks on, does not look his age. A casual glance would place him at perhaps ten. He has delicate dark curls that drape to frame his face; piercing blue eyes; a cultured Australian accent in a clear voice; and a face innocent enough to be suitable as a child model. Indeed, he's been approached randomly on the street before and asked to be one by real agents. A contract he'd turned down, to stay under the radar.
But he has no one else here. No Thaddeus, no Sonja, not even Vee. If Cadel has to lie to find support, he will.
He has a serious expression, perhaps nervous. ] Hi. Um. I'm Cadel Darkkon. I'm just wondering... is there any place to get training for these abilities we were given? It seems crazy to me. Totally crazy. These things aren't real, right?
I've heard that someone thought pyrogenes exist-- people who can spontaneously combust... But that's just nonsense. A scam. But they're saying this isn't a scam, that there's a war.
Is that true? Kids like me aren't supposed to get involved in that, right? I just want to dodge school. [ Which is, he hopes, a very believable response. Cadel's studied high schoolers extensively; middle schoolers can't be much different. ]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: It takes Cadel at least a week to stop looking over his shoulder for surveillance.
The very first day he's there he sneaks into his own assigned housing through the back door, creeping in, making sure no one sees him. He quickly finds a blatantly unoccupied bedroom to claim as his own, shuts and locks the door, and adds locks to his mental list of things to purchase. He needs to be able to shut out the rest of his housemates on demand. He doesn't trust any of them not to try to baby him, or do things 'for his own good', since children shouldn't take care of themselves.
Cadel's always taken care of himself. And now he knows why-- because the Piggotts were only paid to look after him to begin with.
It's absurd, that that should hurt. He never cared about them. He blatantly avoided them, was impatient to leave them behind in his meteoric rise in self-teaching. Yet Cadel finds that knowing that Lanna and Stuart Piggott had never even wanted him in the first place makes it hard to swallow, like jagged edges are stuck in his throat, pricking him mercilessly. He won't cry, he has no time for crying, he's not going to cry over something like this. Over being stuck in another dimension with strange powers he doesn't know how to harness yet and housemates he hasn't met but is already sure he can't trust...
He falls, with deep gratitude, onto the government-supplied communicator. There's almost certainly some sort of surveillance mechanism in this, he's sure. Cadel's first order of business is identifying it and removing it; his second order of business is brushing up on local laws about 'net usage; and his third is to start some scam, whatever he has to, to afford to buy his own parts to build his own computer. He has no intention of going to school for even a single day. It's a waste of time-- he has nothing to learn there-- he'll get bullied again--
Cadel breathes deeply and submerses himself in his phone. The parts are strewn about his duvet cover on his bed and it's familiar this way. Safe. He's spent so, so many months and late nights tucked up on his bed in his Lanna-designed hotel room of a bedroom painstakingly developing his DNA wiring, or developing Partner Post... or talking to Kay-Lee, who is really Sonja.
God. Sonja. If only Sonja were here. If only he weren't completely alone. But she isn't, and he is, and so Cadel spends a solid three days after arrival with his head deep in electronics, pushing himself back against the wall, hiding, whenever one of his housemates approaches the door and wonders why it's locked. Don't come in, don't come in, don't come in... and they don't.
He goes to the bathroom at night. He slips out the window to get supplies, some of them legally purchased. And ultimately, Cadel feels safe enough to take a chance, carefully calculated, heart pounding. Surely not everyone here is like they are at Axis. Surely... there's someone like Sonja. Just one person. That's all he needs. Just one.
FINAL NOTES: None.