PLAYER INFO. ✖ Handle: Quix ✖ Contact:quixocalypse ✖ Are You Over 16: Y ✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: Optimus Prime
CHARACTER INFO. ✖ Character Name: Captor, Sollux ✖ Canon: Homestuck, a year or so after Cascade. ✖ Character Appearance:A nerd. ✖ Character Age: 14 ✖ Pick A Number: 222, 200
✖ Canon Setting: Sollux originally comes from a planet called Alternia, which is the homeland of the great troll Empire: an iron-fisted, galaxy-wide fleet of conquerors intent on eventually ruling everything within their reach. Alternia is entirely populated with the trolls' young - no adults are allowed to live on it, and children are essentially left to raise themselves with the help of subterranean creatures call lusii that function as their custodians. They are free to live there, doing whatever they please, until the day they come of age. Then, like all adult trolls before them, they are required to join the Alternian military.
Living as a troll is harsh. Those seen as weak or useless are culled with a casualness would would horrify most humans, and most trolls grow up with the knowledge that death is a constant possibility. In adult troll society, things are governed by the harsh hemoarchy - a caste system based on the blood colour trolls are born with. Trolls can have blood of any colour of the rainbow, though red is considered to be the lowest of the low while magenta is the natural colour of the troll Empress. Killing isn't considered a crime in most situations, especially if your victim is someone lower on the hemospectrum than you. Above all, trolls are ruled by concepts of survival of the fittest. If you aren't strong enough to stay alive, then you don't deserve the opportunity.
Sollux specifically would have been expected to become a “helmsman”upon coming of age, which basically means that he would have been cybertronically wired into a spaceship and had his powerful telekinesis used as a battery. This is what happened to his genetic predecessor and if Sollux had had more time to be messed up over it he probably would have been.
This all stopped mattering for Sollux, though, when he and his eleven “friends” became entangled in a truly bizarre “game” called Sgrub, in which groups of players are summoned to a dimension called the Medium. At the cost of the destruction of their home planet, they are given the opportunity to win the game and create an entire universe. The actual mechanics of the game play out much like your standard RPG, where you can gain abilities based on a class you are assigned, and go around solving the mysteries of a game planet where you are written as its destined hero. Sollux was the Mage of Doom in the Land of Brains and Fire. In the end, however, they ended up failing to win the game properly and the universe they did create was intrinsically flawed. It and their home universe later exploded for various reasons.
Of course, despite the total mess that was their game session, the game they played in was part of a wider and weirder universe that they have been drifting around in since. Primarily, they have been spending their time in things called Dream Bubbles, which is basically like the afterlife combined with a dreamscape, where dozens of dead versions of yourself and your friends from all possible outcomes of your game session hang out and do nothing in particular. Since their game session imploded, Sollux has mostly been spending his time drifting around his afterlife with his friend Aradia. There is some business involving a guy trying to destroy every universe (or something – the plot has gotten extremely weird) but Sollux has long since stopped caring about all that.
✖ Character Personality: As schticks go, Sollux has a pretty obvious one. As a character created to represent the horoscope of the Gemini, he unsurprisingly has an obsession with duality and the number '2'. His interest in these concepts is near compulsive - his favourite colors are red and blue, and he will try to insert them into things almost subconsciously, given the option. He likes things that are symmetrical and that come in pairs, and will make shitty jokes about these concepts when possible. When he loses his eyesight in canon he claims that he is over his duality schtick, but then the next thing you know he's wearing red and blue eyepatches with white and black eyes, so it doesn't seem that he is capable of truly leaving it behind.
He's had mood problems since he was a grub (called 'bipolar' by the narration, but since it doesn't really behave like the real life variety we can chalk it up to him being an alien) resulting in tempestuous highs and lows in his emotional spectrum that he can't always control. He feels things strongly. In his manic moods he can be arrogant and impulsive to a fault, and obsessively focused on creating - he's a hotshot and he knows it, and haters can bite it. On the other side of the spectrum are his depressive phases - while his other state is active, this is the very opposite. Its in these phases that his only coping mechanism is to guard himself with apathy and inaction, losing interest in even the things he would have obsessed over otherwise. These mood swings are violent and often painful to deal with, especially alone. He is genuinely mentally ill, but he's grown up in a society were such things were more worthy of a swift culling than treatment, so he's never really had the necessary support to deal effectively.
This has been made worse by the fact that, since a young age, he has been able to hear the screams of people destined to die soon. He learned to block it out fairly effectively, until it eventually went away along with his eyesight, but it has resulted in lifetime of sleep problems, massive headaches, and a grouchy attitude.
There is a middle ground, though, which is thankfully where he spends most of his time. His natural personality is a mixture of cool guy persona and an inner core of nerd. He's chill (in between outbursts) and sarcastic with a tendency towards casually mocking others, but not without restraint. Teasing and mockery is one of his ways of being friendly, though in his still present flashes of anger and sadness it can take on a more vicious tone. But he usually doesn't mean it, and if he accidentally hurts someone close to him, he will feel deep remorse for his own asshole behaviour, even if he doesn't openly apologize. He finds it difficult to be openly affectionate, and it takes a while for him to build up that kind of trust with a person, but once that bond has been built you will have found yourself one of the most enduring and dedicated friends you will ever meet. He would die for his friends, without question, and behind all the posturing there is the ghost of a self sacrificing soul.
But caring is hard, and so he often lies to others and even himself about how much of a damn he gives, often hiding behind a facade of not giving a fuck about the world just to get by. Further into his story, an by his canon point, his sense of justice and capability to give a damn about anything has been significantly worn down by canon circumstances. The universe is ultimately vast, senseless thing in Sollux's experience, and even his own death has failed to change much about it. He's witnessed the death of universes like it was nothing, and a major point of trauma in his childhood (the death of his moirail Aradia) was casually undone with her coming back to life without much fanfare at all. He is in the middle of a huge depressive fit for most of canon, due to his awareness of him and his friends imminent deaths, during which he basically gives up trying to do anything. His sense of agency has been sorely taxed by Sgrub's predestination-focused reality, and he does very little in canon besides just coasting along, due to the fact that he doesn't really believe that the future can be changed.
He perks up a bit towards the end of Act 5, when he loses his vision and he determines that maybe they don't all have to die after all, but ultimately he no longer has much in the way of personal ambition when it comes to their quest. When asked to come along on the next leg of Homestuck's adventure, he says no, claiming that he is done with adventuring and really just wants to lay back and live his life. He stays behind with Aradia in the hopes of accomplishing this, and it really just results in him continuing to drift along aimlessly. He isn't depressed all the time anymore, but he isn't much of anything else either.
That's the attitude he is facing CDC with - more than anything he just wants to have some kind of purpose outside of all this senseless drifting, and the possibility of making his own way is something he hasn't been given for a long time. He's not really very ambitious, though.
✖ Character Powers & Skills: HIGH LEVEL PSIONICS: It's been stated that Sollux shares the same genetics as the most powerful psionic in troll history. What this results in is telekinesis that is just completely off the charts ridiculous. It is in his capability to lift just about anything in his immediate vicinity, and the most powerful display of his abilities we ever see is him accelerating a large asteroid at greater than lightspeed as a means of transportation. This level of exertion did end up killing him, though, after arriving at their destination. It seems likely that he could also move larger objects at a lesser speed, with the risk of overtaxing his body. His psionics are more power than finesse based, so trying to perform careful, complex tasks with them would be a challenge. He's much better at just wildly throwing things around. (For example, he has been seen casually tossing meteors as a weapon.)
Beyond moving objects, he can use his psionics to create energy blasts, in vaguely shaped red and blue emissions from his hands, or more notably, his eyes. He has laser vision blasts that can easily explode an entire house. With a combination of this and his telekinesis he can create a protective bubble effect to shield himself from damage.
He can fly very quickly by lifting himself with telekinesis. It's ambiguous how fast his upper limits are, but at least enough to break the sound barrier.
ESP: Sollux has the precognitive ability to hear and sense imminent deaths, usually in the form of hearing the screams of those who are fated to die soon. Also, it has sometimes given him visions of larger scale tragedies, but without many details. In Homestuck, predestination is a central plot element, meaning that deaths he prophecized could generally not be averted, but given that CDC takes place in a much less fatalistic universe, it would likely be more hit and miss in this context.
This “power” (due to the fact that it was quite painful and disruptive to Sollux's life) was lost when Sollux went blind. Given that I'm having the CDC repair his vision on the way in, I would like to play it as having returned but in a bit less of a debilitating manner. This can also be one of the 'disadvantageous' qualities that are repaired.
DOOM POWERS: Sollux, in Sgrub, was given the class “Mage of Doom”. Most characters are generally assumed to develop some kind of powers associated with their class, but given that he is a relatively minor character, Sollux's powers have never been explained. Since all reasonable extrapolations of it (him being able to control the aspect of “Doom”) basically tie into his existing powerset, I basically just assume that it fits in there somewhere but doesn't really give him anything additional. He is just generally sort of inherently imbued with the essence of Doom. Looking at him it is not hard to see why.
COMPUTER WIZARDRY: You know how in some media you'll have like total nonsense hacking, where a character with “computer skills” can just hack pretty much anything that resembles a computer without much thought given to how computer science actually works? Sollux is basically that guy, taken to the extreme. Within the context of his universe he can do basically anything with a computer, including hacking into communication feeds from a seperate universe, and etc. Also, somehow, he can write computer viruses that affect people in real life. (He wrote a virus meant to curse the target, which one of his friends compiled due to being an asshole, which accidentally resulted in all of their lusii dying. Whoops.)
Generally speaking its all kind of ridiculous, so I will assume that in CDC verse it just doesn't work that way, hence him struggling with firewalls like a normal person. However, due to his Doom powers, he will probably retain some ability to computer virus curse people in real life, given the means. Besides that, he can just be considered a top of the line computer/electronics dude, to whatever degree is acceptable in game.
The first thing Sollux notices about this chick is that he's never heard her voice before. That sort of thing is highly notable when it comes to the eternity to eternity grind of the dream bubble flavoured afterlife.
He's just kind of floating around with his hands in his pockets when she turns up, enjoying some miscellaneous scents associated with the Land of Dew and Grass. At least he thinks that's where he is, right now. Aradia left a bit earlier to do some kind of wacky fairy business, and so he's just been chilling on his own until she gets back. He's better at getting around the dream bubbles blind than one might think, but he also doesn't have anything better to be doing.
This could the first time that he's encountered a truly unfamiliar person for over a year. Normally this would warrant quite a bit of surprise, but his capacity for that has gotten a bit worn down as of late. Hey, maybe he just misheard and this is one of those revamped human girls that he hasn't paid much attention to.
So, instead he stares into space in her general direction. You know, because he's blind.
“Sup?” he asks, and then a moment later: “Who the fuck are you?”
“No one you know,” she says, which causes his eyebrows to go right up. “But I wanted to make you an offer.”
“What? No, okay, look. We have to go back a step. Which session are you from?”
“None of them,” she says. “I'm from somewhere else.”
Sollux snorts, though he's actually pretty amused. “Man, beastshit. You know how unlikely that is when I've spent the last goddamn half sweep or whatever watching infinite iterations of the same thirty two numbfucks messing themselves?” He pauses. “Or like...hearing them. I guess. I'm blind, if that wasn't obvious. I haven't been able to see since my ghost eyeball fucked off to fuse with some fish asshole, but – you know what? Nevermind. It's not worth trying to explain it.”
“As unlikely as it sounds, how much would you like to be able to do something other than 'watching those numbfucks mess themselves?'” It obviously took some concentration on her part to remember his exact phrasing, and she paused uncomfortably. “Or listen. Or whatever it is you've been doing exactly.”
“Man, you know, that would be pretty amazing right about now. I said I didn't want to go on the meteor ride because I was done with adventuring, but it turns out that this place is seriously just as bad.” He huffs out a sigh, and it's actually pretty genuine, despite it all. “I feel like I'm doomed to relive this clusterfuck for the rest of eternity.”
“You don't have to be,” she says, and he can feel his ear perk up in reaction, even if he doesn't believe it. “I'm from the CDC, and I've been asked to give you an exclusive job offer. You'll get to work somewhere that isn't here, and in exchange for your services, we can reinburse you with just about anything you can imagine.” There is a pause. “...I know what happened to your homeworld. One mission could earn you a much better place to live than that ever was.”
That actually takes the wind out of him, if only for a moment. He's spent so long being completely detached from his roots, that some days he doesn't even think about the home he left behind. He frowns – this line of inquiry makes him feel defensive, even as it is strangely compelling.
“...What do you guys do?” Sollux has never had a job before. The idea is sort of appealling.
“We're the Cosmic Demolition Crew,” she says. “You would be working as part of a team to demolish planets on a contract. It can be hard work, but you get the opportunity to travel the galaxy, and excellent benefits. And hey, we can fix your eyesight pro bono.”
Sollux balks. That sounds...really fucked up, somehow. But it also barely rings a bell for him, these days. So what? Planets get destroyed all the time, right? Like, millions of them. And its not like they wouldn't be getting destroyed without him.
“Wow, that's already on my resume and everything,” he says, with a decidedly morbid edge. “And so what...I do this and you give me...a new planet of my own? To make up for the one that exploded?”
“We definitely can. Something that big may take more than one mission, but if you stick with us, you'll have it.”
He can't really believe he is even considering this, but he also doesn't quite believe that it's a real thing. What's to lose?
“Cool,” he says, after another moment of thought. “But you better have a way of contacting some of these other assholes so they know they have somewhere to go after they finish save or dooming the multiverse or whatever.”
“I'm sure that can be arranged. So, what do you think? You in?”
“Yeah, okay,” Sollux says, after a moment. He thinks about Aradia and wonders if she'll miss him. But man...she's been around for so long already, she'd understand. She would probably think it was cool, due to being kind of a freak like that. Maybe she can get on board later when she's done stalking people. “Show me what you got.”
CHARACTER ITEMS. ✖ Pick a Team: RED: Sollux is basically a very compact weapon of mass destruction, but he's also very smart, and accustomed to making things happen in the background instead of in the spotlight. His level of power would mean that he could take out targets very quickly and surprisingly quietly, given the training. (Not to mention, he is very combat ready but also the farthest thing from a Green soldier type mentality there is.) Also I personally feel that Dagger would be the most hilarious instructor for him to interact with, but that's just me.
ORANGE: He's extremely computer/electronics savvy and I guess can fly around and stuff for recon purposes. If allowed to he could also be a pretty good spy via some technological things. Also, this allows him to be lazier than something like Green, which he would enjoy.
✖ Reason for Joining the CDC: Sollux is one of those rare folk that are saying yes because he straight up thinks that this sounds like a good deal. Over his relatively short life, Sollux has already seen the complete annihiliation of his homeworld followed by the destruction of its entire universe of residence, along with one other. When you've already seen that much life go kaput in an instant, something like the CDC starts feeling a lot like small potatoes. Sollux started out just wanting to save his planet, but over the course of his canon his altruistic spirit has been worn down with stark fatalism. It's possible that over time work in the CDC might wake up some of those old feelings, but he could also easily go on to be a total lifer. The bizarre events in Homestuck have just gone a long way to strip life of all meaning for him. All he wants now is to just have somewhere that he can live in peace. ✖ Mission Freebie: A new planet. ✖ Personal Item or Weapon: A pimped out husktop (troll laptop) alchemized during Sgrub. High tech scifi levels of computer power, presumably can do all the things a laptop normally does, but better.
✖ Character Inventory:
- Gemini shirt. Nice. - His pants. - Footwear. - Sylladex. (Confiscated) - Disembodied brains, various. (Confiscated) - Miscellaneous game weapons. (Confiscated) - All the useless crap that he left in his sylladex. (Confiscated) - Various other computers. (Confiscated) - Bees. (Confiscated)
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quixocalypse
