Ren Shaw McLean

[Ren Shaw McLean]

NAME: Ren Shaw McLean
NICKNAME: McLean
AGE: Fifteen
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Heterosexual
POSITION: Student
FACE CLAIM: Devon Bostick

POWER:
Nightmare Vision/Generation
Ren sees dead people. And spiders. And clowns, devils, bacterium... it changes. It depends on the fears of the people around him, and his awareness of his power. For Ren, the world is always just a little darker than it actually is. Death, disruption, all kinds of base and primal fears are visible with an accuracy dependant on how focused he is on anyone at the time, and how aware he actually is of his power...

Not only can he see these horrifying things, but they also become terrifyingly realistic visions to others as well, an effect that Ren tries to control, again, when he is actually aware of it... But control is a luxury in panicked moments, and panic is the defining experience for Ren when using his power. When Ren has need of them, the worst phobias of friend and foe alike will spring to the fore, appearing as real as the victim's own two hands for a brief, terrifying time before receding into the back of their mind again, though they are no more real than any phobia they may entertain. The psychic shock of this power can have various effects, from induced short-term mental illness to temporary blackouts, all the way up to comas and death in the weak-hearted, in the most extreme cases. Nobody has ever actually died because of Ren, but he can see their fears, and death is never far away in Ren's world...

In logistical terms, Ren's power is not real. It's a psychoelectric burst of fear that a person's brain automatically turns into visions of whatever it is that they would need to see to generate that kind of raw, primal, death-is-imminent terror. It can travel aroundabout ten metres out from Ren's frontal lobe, producing a faint buzzing in the ears of those affected, and sensory hallucinations, along with a nightmarish terror. Whatever the person is afraid of, they will experience. Perhaps a person doesn't care about a dead body, so long as they don't smell it rotting - they would smell it, but not see it. If they were afraid of pasty-faced, stringy-haired ghost girls, they'd get the full Grudge experience going on in their head. It depends on what a person is afraid of. Ren, however, can only see things - he cannot hear, smell, taste or feel them. His only internally mutated sense is his vision, so he won't know the fears of anyone without a visual trigger until he unleashes them. Exiting the ten-meter radius, a person would cease to be induced into fear, but the fearful feelings would persist for as long as they're wont to. A person who is obsessed with their phobia would dwell on Ren's attack for months, hallucinating in flashbacks over and over. A stoic, balanced individual would recover within the hour.

Note: Any power mimic who copies Ren's power will not retain the amnesia. Be prepared to live with what you saw, and what you caused, for the rest of your life. That's a hardwire, not a mimicable feature, and Ren's power is literally the stuff of nightmares.

Limitations
Ren has very limited control over his power, just like anyone else would have limited control over their most primal functions. It won't always kick in when he wants it to, and it seldom kicks in when he needs it to. If Ren is afraid, everyone else follows, and he has no greater degree of control over himself than that. Furthermore, Ren is not actually aware of what his power does. After every 'episode', Ren becomes unaware of his power due to extreme post-traumatic amnesia, which makes it even harder to control. He will quickly relearn that he is special in some way, mostly due to the aftermath of his actions and other peoples' long-term reactions, but he can never be sure of what he's done, and neither can he ever be told...

One could protect from the psychoelectrical burst with a magnetic or psychic shield, or just a thick lead or brick wall. Generally, Ren's bursts are limited to within the room he stands in by their inability to conduct through most walls. Also, anyone with an extremely specific set of powers (psychic or electrical vision and teleportation, for example) could theoretically escape being affected by the attack at all, if they got away from Ren fast enough. The wave travels at the speed of lightning, though.

Side-Effects
The psychic shock of Ren's power is double-edged. It goes both ways, as it were, and even if the one-time shock of primal fear that Ren can induce can kill a lesser man, Ren himself is no stronger for having shared fears with everyone he's ever terrified. He has developed a number of mental and emotional conditions, not least of which is severe somatization disorder - clinically significant pain that cannot be treated, without any obvious cause. Every day is a struggle to wake up to, survive through and escape into sleep from, due to extreme and constant pain. Ren must walk with crutches, he cannot otherwise cross any distance.

Large patches of Ren's life are missing from his memory, as his mutated mind is wired to escape the trauma of his own actions and forget each time his power activates. Ren also suffers from regular nightmares, as the nightmares of other people affect his mindstate due to his power. Ren also suffers from a generally negative temperament.


APPEARANCE SECTION: Ren is first and foremost scrawny. His condition has him constantly on painkillers and his inability to really walk means that he has never put on weight. He has greasy brown hair and tired eyes that tell a story all by themselves of a boy who doesn't get enough sleep. His limbs are stick-thin and his skin is pale, and his actually reasonably attractive face has been sunken and stunted by years of not being able to find the strength of will to run, or smile, or go outside. He sometimes has the beginnings of stubble on his face, and he shaves when he can find the time and the strength.

Ren looks... hopeless. He looks like someone who's long ago given up on pretty much everything. He'd be right to, as well, as far as he knows and feels. He limps when he finds the strength to walk, which he never does, and he's a sad, pathetic figure in his crutches, slouching a few inches shorter than everyone his age. Ren is not a happy person to look at.

MUST HAVE APPAREL: Ren wears boring clothes. And by boring, I don't mean merely bland. I mean trashy, unappealing, functional clothes. Track-bottoms, old, yellowed shirts, crappy fly-eaten coats, all of which only sorta-kinda fit him. His family had been afraid of him ever since he hit puberty, though they couldn't put their finger on why until his power properly manifested, and that in itself manifested as a general neglect of the most helpless child in the family. His clothes did about as well as he did from the ages of thirteen to fifteen.

PERSONALITY SECTION: Ren likes books, because books are the only thing that can survive him. Most machinery is inevitably broken by him for one reason or another, as he is almost literally a technophobe. An electrically-based power synergizes too well with TVs, computers, cinema screens in front of rows of people... He also likes board games, again, because he can't fuck them up. For a period of his life in which his father's dramatic shallowness rubbed off especially strongly, he taught himself to play chess against himself. This makes him the most predictable chess player he knows, and also the best, which is sad because he sucks. He's also pretty good at scrabble, although anyone with a common trigger word should never play him, because you never know what will start an attack.

He also kind of hates these things, because they represent how trapped he is in his own shitty little amish world. He cannot escape, so he reads, but reading is filled with reminders that for a reason he cannot and will not ever remember, he cannot do anything more interesting. If he could, he'd play video games. He was fond of strategy games when he was a kid. Ren hates and craves the company of people, again, because he cannot shake the intangible feeling of doom, but he is so often lonely that he cannot get enough of them. He can come off as kind of desperate if left alone for too long. He hates that, too.

EXTRA QUIRK: Ren always walks on crutches. He has no choice. He has a thing for old poetry because his dad has a thing for superficially romantic stereotypes and flowery prose.


FATHER: A joe-average named Marcus who always had a thing for stupid names, hence Ren's stupid name.
MOTHER: A jane-not-average who had a thing for base jumping before she became pregnant, named Molly. Perversely, her greatest fear is of extreme height.
SIBLINGS: A sister named Robin. Both a joke and a planned maneuvre by their father. Robin herself doesn't really mind being the punchline to her big brother, but that's because she's not really smart enough to fully consider the implications.
PET: He had a family dog named Robert Maximillian the Second, named by his sister. Her dad rubbed off on her.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Lol, no.
WORTHY MENTIONS: Not really. A couple of faceless friends that he'd forget if he didn't see them every day. They're back home, anyway.


CHILDHOOD: Ren was normal. Was. He grew up as a kid with a fascination with greek military history - or, more precisely, those fancy horsehair plumes on Spartan helmets. An old, golden-age upbringing of movies was his first nine years of life, and his parents shared their love of all things Ben Hur et al with him and his sister, born two years after him. He filled his room with statues of ancient monsters from newer movies, and toy weapons from historical sites all over the world that his father got him for Christmas and birthdays. The easiest thing to do for Ren was to buy gifts.

Growing up ever further, Ren never really lost that childhood interest, though he did stop taking his toy axes to school around the time he started taking classical latin as a language. His parents weren't wealthy, but they were determined to afford him that much. They could see the historian growing even as the kid could only see minotaurs. Aroundabout twelve, though, Ren's life began to change. His power didn't manifest all at once, but in shades of white and pitch, evil, primal black...

ADOLESCENCE: As Ren got to the big one-three his parents noted that he was becoming more surly. Their first teenager didn't particularly worry them at first, but then the night terrors started. Ren began to have nightmares, and his parents listened with concern as he described vividly, and almost nightly, vivid visions of creeping, stalking fears... And he described their own. He described falling. Being hunted by swarms of bugs. Being eaten alive by friends and family. Some of the descriptions were so fantastically vivid, they would make his sister cry in the next room, evesdropping like the simple girl she always was.

The surliness and the fear began to bleed into his family. By fourteen, he would awake with a headache that would last all day, all week, all month, for the rest of his life, and he didn't know it. He would walk into a kitchen/dining room that contained the family that would no longer speak to him, as his presence in their lives became an imperceptible drain on their sanity. When he got into fights with his sister, he would say such horrible things that on two seperate occasions he had to sleep at a friend's house. Their parents didn't like him, either.

By fifteen, Ren was a gothic, surly child that avoided everyone, and that headache that he woke up with on the day after his fourteenth birthday had turned into a crippling pain that had earned him crutches six months prior. The happy, bright-eyed boy was becoming a monster dressed in the rags of his own unknown power, and one by one the bright stars in his future began to wink out. The gradients of white to black sank further into the pitch, and Ren Shaw McLean became the infamous old teenage man of his hometown.

The Ferguson riots, around the time they happened, had a big impact on his small town. The police force was already unpopular locally, and when the demonstrations started everyone learned why they were afraid of that strange, sad little boy. Swinging on his crutches home from school, Ren was caught in a particularly intense march, and almost trampled...

And he doesn't remember. What actually happened was that the intense feelings of the riot, influenced by the first and strongest burst of psychoelectrical fear that Ren ever produced, turned into a stampede. They left him lying there, and over an hour later he awoke to a city abandoned. Well, he thought it was the city - it was more like the street. Even though his power only reached so far, people soon got the message that the general area was to be feared, and they left. Ren himself was let off with a broken leg that he managed to convince his parents to take him to a hospital for. It was there that he was approached by Bellefonte. They had caught sight of him when he single-handedly dispersed the riot - before that, he was just a mentally and emotionally unstable boy. Afterward, he was a weapon, and one that Bellefonte wanted to protect, for reasons Ren didn't know or understand. He went with them, and arrived at the school very recently, if only because he had no choice.


SAMPLE: 

God dammit.

It was obvious, fucking obvious, that he would have run into this kind of thing today. A roadwork, an uncordoned fucking pit, between him and his house, the only place with a bed he could legally lie in to escape the constant fucking muscle-twitching agony of... whatever the fuck. He hated his body, and not because it was weedy. He hated it because he could not fucking haul it home, and he'd give anything to just astral project to his house and abandon this shitty mortal form forever. He winced as the constant throbbing in his head, the bone-break ache in his legs, back, arms, all throbbed in unison, as if to rebutt his churlish view of his own situation. "Fuck you," he cursed to nobody in particular. His joints and his temples throbbed again. Finally, he straightened up painfully and looked for some way out of this shittiness.

Back-alleys. Of course. Though he didn't like the sounds that were coming down that one. Darren Wilson had turned his whole town into even more of a shithole than it was already just by existing, filling the place with major demonstrations and minor riots that he'd managed to escape up till now. Still, if the only way out was through a march, he'd fucking do it, and he'd fucking stab anyone who got in his way, whether or not he could lay hands on a sharp edge.

He hoisted himself left, towards the twilight of the alleyway, and a kid who looked about his age - though the age Ren looked was a little younger than the age he was - and looked at the distant figures at the other end of that cesspit street he surveyed. "What's going on?" he asked, simply.

"More marches. Looks like they're gonna get intense, man, I wouldn't if I were you."

"There's an open fucking pit all the way across this street. Do I look like I have any other options?"

"Well shit, man, soh-ree..." But Ren was already moving, slowly, painfully. Fatefully.

As he stuck to the edge of the street he came out into, so did everyone else. He avoided what he could, took on the shoulder what he couldn't, and for a moment it looked like he'd make it.

Then there was the roaring rush of a firehose, and everything went to runny fucking apeshit. They went insane. They started running, faces twisted with anger, and Ren didn't give a fuck who they were or what they wanted so long as they left him alone. That was a forelorn hope, though. He was knocked down by the next shoulder, and the foot after that met his leg with a resounding crack. The man didn't notice. He was too angry.

Within Ren's mind, something went click. Something started transmitting, and receiving, and suddenly he could see things. Things. He would never describe it any other way. Nameless, chittering, slithering things. Awful things. For a moment it occured to him that he was insane, and then he saw a woman passing over him look to the snake he could see on her shoulder, a wide-jawed, twenty-headed monstrosity, twitching like every bone in its spine was broken around her neck, and she screamed in a way that didn't remotely suggest anger. As primal fear took over his surroundings, Ren passed into darkness. In a way, he would never pass back again.

But at least the pain stopped.

USERNAME: Strix Quadruped

AGE GROUP: Nineteen

EXPERIENCE: Since the dawn of time.

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