Ryan "Bad Life Decisions" Farrow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
averagemedium) wrote2016-01-25 09:20 pm
averagemedium) wrote2016-01-25 09:20 pm
[savrou] it's an app
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: Teej
Are you 16 or older: Yes (25)
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
teag, or by PM!
Current Characters: N/A
Tag: ryan farrow (crau)
IN CHARACTER
Name: Ryan Alan Farrow
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Pulling him as a CRAU from CDC, after the destruction of planet Macha.
Age: 29
History:
Ryan's world setting & original canon history can be found here, in his application for CDC. Past that point:
On being offered a contract with the CDC, a planet-destroying organization, Ryan accepted the chance to see more of the universe (and get his problem spirit taken care of in return), and after acclimating a bit to the crewship Neheda he was transported onto an icy planet called Ajna. More accurately, some distance above Ajna-- his first experience in the field was falling onto the planet and scrambling not to get hit by falling boxes. Not a fun time. His extra sense also went a little haywire around so many new types of people, and all things considered... Ryan was not very useful through the first stretch of his stay. He didn't know how to fight as well as others and was unused to the outdoors (not to mention out of shape), and on realizing his shortcomings he began to work on improving himself to become a more useful crew member.
His efforts appeared to pay off: near the end of their mission, he was appointed a co-leader of the efforts to obtain and catalog planet specimens along with an alien named Noh-Varr. Ryan remained friends (with benefits, later) with him through his entire stay with the CDC, becoming closest to him and Garrus, another alien he met during the Ajna mission; they helped support his improvement efforts, and were invaluable crewmates for him despite a few initial hiccups while he got used to dealing with actual alien species.
It was after their return to the Neheda and Ajna's destruction that he found himself at odds with several of the crew. Where he saw it as an inevitability, the death of the planet hit others hard, and Ryan began keeping his thoughts and personal philosophy to himself more often than not. Most people seemed displeased with the work the CDC was doing, and he wasn't keen on becoming known for being fine with planetary cleanup. Instead he once again turned his focus toward training and even joined a program run by Lydia Shepard, another crewmate, that was meant to get those who joined in functional shape for further missions. The testing the crew underwent between missions was something of a blow, however, as the instructor overseeing his team placed him on probation rather than passing him. It at least provided more motivation, especially after his instructor explained he hadn't failed-- he just didn't have the same experience as others.
By the time the Neheda crew was sent on their second mission, this time to the jungle planet Macha, Ryan was more prepared. Where Ajna hadn't seemed to have sentient species, though, Macha had sentient plant people, the Neraki, and the disconnect he felt between himself and many of his crewmates deepened when they all began to realize that destroying the planet would wipe out a sentient species. Again, he kept his feelings largely to himself, as the few times he did discuss them (with Ratchet, among others) it only ended in arguments when he tried to explain the planet couldn't possibly be saved.
Other problems came up before the end of the mission, notably that his first incentive came through-- his request to have the malevolent entity that killed him back home sent back where it came from resulted in said entity being sealed within his body. It wasn't direct possession, but rather using his body as a container for the entity, which he cannot affect or release; it was similarly rendered unable to really affect anything, though Ryan found it could cause some physical symptoms, especially when agitated (insomnia, nightmares, headaches, and similar issues cropped up after it was sealed, though that seemed to be all it could do.)
The crew was also attacked by what appeared to be some sort of elder god, and Ryan unintentionally helped to make things worse by trying to consult a book he'd received back on the ship (an ancient copy of the Necronomicon, as it turned out, which caused black holes to appear and added extra hazards for his crewmates.) Finally, he was made part of a team assigned to gather information on one of the Neraki tribes, which seemed to go fairly well... until they returned, and half of his team was punished for failure by having their life support temporarily cut. Ryan was not affected, but he was still somewhat horrified by the punishment, as he couldn't see how they'd failed and the criteria weren't explained. He was left unable to figure out what he'd done to succeed in comparison to what they'd done to fail, and remained unsure what to think of the incident; much as he wanted to trust the organization, it was more than a little hard to just accept those actions.
Not long after that, though, the crew was given an emergency evacuation order. Instead of following the same steps they had on Ajna, they were forced to leave quickly and were seen off by some of the Neraki, who were swayed by the crew's efforts at diplomacy. Macha's destruction soon followed, once they had returned to the crewship. Ryan is being pulled from the period of downtime immediately after the planet was destroyed.
Personality:
Base personality:
Despite being surrounded by death, he's a surprisingly optimistic person. Ryan doesn't have much fear of it anymore, not when it's so intimately familiar to him, and he finds there's actually a lot of comfort in speaking with the dead and in the idea that the end's not such a final thing. They're all normal people, just no longer corporeal, and he's got a largely positive outlook on his own life and work now that he's been spending time either helping them out or just making a quiet afterlife a little less lonely.
Ryan is, for the most part, fairly reclusive given the option to be. The internet is where he spends a good deal of time, particularly on forums and online RPGs. Outside of the internet most of his free time is spent taking care of the house and working on the real-life hobbies he's taken up; he's taken enough lessons in cooking from Ms. Richards to be fairly proficient, and he's found knitting and sewing are great for keeping his hands occupied and giving himself something to do when he's stressed or nervous. Most of his clothes need a little tailoring to fit well, anyway.
At this point in life, he's largely grown accustomed to the idea that people are just going to think he's completely nuts, and his old intense shyness in public or in group settings has seen some improvement. Where he used to be scared to speak up for fear that the person he was talking to was invisible to everyone else, now he manages to be a good deal more social, a little more capable of not internalizing every odd look shot his way as a personal failure in 'playing normal'. His internet presence is still where he gets a good deal of his interaction, though-- the anxiety is by no means gone, and he's simply more comfortable with it. He still has a habit of being incredibly fidgety, apologizing a lot, and gesturing with his hands a little too much when he's excited.
He also tends to be insecure and a little desperate for contact and acceptance- someone he considers a friend being upset or annoyed with him is A Big Deal and he'll do whatever he can to try to smooth things over. Any accusations of clinginess are pretty accurate, and once he considers himself close to someone he's anxious enough about losing them to often prioritize their needs over his own.
Ryan deals with conflict, discomfort, and outright fear in very similar ways: lightening the mood is his go-to tactic, and he tends to make cheesy plays on words or crack bad jokes at completely inopportune times. He also tends to laugh more when he's nervous or anxious, and that nervous laughter is sometimes his reaction to shock (which, predictably, doesn't do much to help the general impression of awkwardness.) It's not an across-the-board reaction to negative situations, though; he's a supportive and empathetic person when it comes to consolation and sympathy, which is a large part of why he's been spending his life helping out the dead.
As one of the few locals who has any idea how to deal with the stranger sorts of threats, he considers it sort of his duty to keep his area protected to whatever extent he can; ever since the entity's escape, this has extended to trying to research what the hell it is and how it can be forced back where it came from. Ryan mostly relies on subtler means for this; he's human aside from his extra sense and lacking in magical talent, and placing wards is about the most he can do to try to keep things at bay. He's gotten somewhat experienced in using protective blood wards, especially recently, but he's incapable of putting extra power into them-- his personal wards for protection from spirits were all made by a mage he knows from his forums. Ryan also reads tarot cards, but he swears his deck hates him (despite this, he keeps consulting it because he's sure it'll be blunt with him.)
Regardless of the type of problem, he's never used lethal force against anything-- he refuses to kill, partly because he knows exactly how easy it is to haunt him, but mostly due to personal discomfort. He aids the dead, he doesn't add to their numbers, and he's not sure he could consider himself a neutral party anymore if he ever had to kill.
He's also grown pretty desensitized to gore, considering his ability. Violent deaths leave imprints that he sees the signs of, some ghosts still look like they've just died, and after twenty-eight years of living with seeing all of that... well, you just get used to it. In fact, he's so used to writing off things like bloodstains that he tends to completely fail to react to them when they really are physically present. Similarly, he tends to be harder to spook than your average person after so much time spent around ghosts-- bumps in the night and odd phenomena are a fact of life for him, and he's more skittish about people than he is of a haunt.
CRAU developments:
While he's always been used to non-human creatures, being part of the Neheda crew made him realize there's far more out there than he ever thought could be possible, and it's rekindled his fascination with learning as much as possible about others. Back home, he was working with an existing knowledge base; running into people from other worlds entirely is essentially a fresh start, and he has a particular interest in whatever parallels he can draw between any of those places (and their species, their concepts-- he's always curious about their views on death and spirits.) Ryan's also grown more used to being part of a group where 'normal' humans are much less common, and that's helped to ease some of his insecurities about being seen as weird or about people not believing in what he does.
He's a more driven person now as well, after all the training he's done and the experiences he's had. Before joining the crew, he barely knew how to fight and was working on improving his abilities as a medium; now he finds it more important to be useful in general as well as capable within his role, thanks to his initial insecurity about how much he couldn't do. Ryan has more of a tendency to compare himself to others after working with so many people he thought were superior, and feels that as a human, he's a bit more boring. Special abilities aside, he thinks he's pretty mundane considering the life he led back home, and at least some of that drive comes from a desire to measure up to his peers now that he feels he doesn't have to hide or isolate himself.
Personal philosophy is something he's more careful with, and he's less likely to bring up his own feelings on death than he was before. Being in the planet-destroying business wasn't morally difficult for him, as death is just an inevitability and if those planets were marked for destruction, there wasn't going to be a way to save them. However, he found himself in the minority there, which was something of a jarring disconnect when he'd begun feeling like he fit in better with the crew than at home (and that he could be more himself there.) It's become something of a touchy subject, as his eagerness for acceptance has made him keep his views about death quieter to avoid causing more of a rift between himself and others. His work is something he'll still happily discuss; it's just harder to get him to admit that no, he doesn't have a problem with people dying, and that he doesn't believe there's any such thing as "dying before their time".
In the end, his experience has caused other insecurities to get worse as it eased his existing ones. Social situations make him anxious not because he feels like he's an outsider, but because he doesn't want to become one again. After finding a small niche to fit in at home, he now feels like home isn't a place he really belongs anymore-- and discovering there's so much more to know means there's... well, so much he doesn't know out there. His knowledge base is less useful if things don't work the same way they did on Earth.
Despite those shifts, the most negative change (in his mind) is that joining up with the CDC means he's had to give up on his refusal to kill. On missions, he's had to be willing to defend himself and capable of doing so, but even though he didn't often have to fight... there's no way he can look at his involvement in a planet's destruction and say he wasn't directly responsible for at least some of the deaths caused in the process, or for the death of the planet itself. He can't think of himself as a neutral party who only helps the dead after that, and while it hasn't caused him to question his status as a medium, the thought that he could end up haunted by someone he killed is something that scares him.
Abilities/Skills:
His sixth sense is his only real ability, but includes multiple aspects. Ryan is a natural, living 'door' between the physical and intangible. Spirits occupy a slightly separate plane that's essentially an overlay of the physical one, and he's a spot connecting the two where crossover can occur-- it's because of this that his sixth sense is stronger than normal.
Of course there's the obvious aspect of 'seeing dead people'. Ryan sees ghosts everywhere, basically, since they tend to stick around a while; in addition he sees signs and imprints of deaths that have occurred whether a spirit haunts the location or not. Seeing bloodstains and char marks all over the place is perfectly normal to him, to the point that when they're actually physically present he tends to ignore them. His sight is also harder to fool with illusions, but by no means impossible-- he can see through some, but it depends on the strength. (They also have to actually be present. He can't see through things that are a trick of the mind and not the eye.)
Thanks to his position right in the middle of that physical/intangible divide he's able to touch ghosts as though they're both fully on the same side- and they can do the same to him. Generally, it makes dealing with spirits easier, but the angrier and more malevolent ones are capable of doing actual damage to him that they can't inflict on other living people. The open-door status resulting from the entity's escape also means he can't defend against possession from anything capable of it, at least not on his own-- his only 'defense' there is the fact that he's capable of possession from up to 2 entities, so a second could conceivably do the same thing and try to push the first out. ...Or they could just argue and leave him caught in the middle. It's a toss-up, there. He also has zero defense against mind-affecting abilities and is completely incapable of fighting back against telepathy/empathy/anything that directly targets the mind/emotions/anything in that general category.
His sense also lends him limited detection. He can sense nearby people who are anything but a normal human, and to a certain degree he knows what they are. It's not a perfect, specific identification; a werewolf will give him the vague sense of something canine, vampires give him goosebumps and feel vaguely sharp, magic-users feel like they have something flowing through them, and so on. Being around lots of people he can sense or particularly strong entities will overwhelm and overstimulate him. (This also operates on an opt-out basis, and by default he doesn't pick up on NPC characters! He doesn't sense anything in the game setting itself unless I have permission for it.)
Ryan's nature doesn't make him hard to kill so much as it's hard to keep him dead after the fact- his spirit is very firmly stuck in his body, since he's sort of a fixed point. If he dies, he's basically stuck at a point where he's medically dead, but everything essentially freezes there and his body doesn't break down. It doesn't make him immortal as much as it just removes the time limit on restarting his pulse/breathing, and he's up a creek if nobody can get his body fixed up. (Which can of course be worked around for game mechanic reasons if needed, though I'm not sure if he'll manage to get himself killed that badly.)
As for skills: Ryan is very good at cooking and baking, as well as sewing/knitting/clothing repair. He's a researcher at heart and has collected a large amount of knowledge about the supernatural in his world, including basic warding (only works against weak targets); his own affinity with spirits let him learn basic exorcism (forcing weak to average strength entities from their target) and banishment (forcing weak to average spirits to cross over and pass on, using his status as point of crossover to expedite the process.) He's learned to use a gun but refuses to unless it's absolutely necessary, and prefers a dagger.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Domestic: proficient in most household tasks like cleaning, sewing, and cooking. They're all hobbies of his, and he's pretty good at baking and knitting in particular.
Detail-oriented: if you give this nerd a job, then by god he will cross all the t's and dot the i's and clean the weird hard to reach spots.
Research experience: he absolutely loves learning new things, and seeks out knowledge where he can. He's a quick study and great with organizing information as well.
Insecure: if he's not used to something, he has a tendency to second-guess himself, and will be nervous about doing it Right until he's proficient. Can lead to doing it wrong because he's overthinking.
Awkward: he tries, he really does, but while he's friendly and social... he's not great with people. He wants to be, but he grew up pretty poorly socialized. Thankfully he's not as bad as he once was, but he gets by on being earnest more than actually knowing how to talk to people.
Physical weakness: his stamina is still not great, he's lean and ranging toward twiggy even after putting on a little bit more muscle, and he's never had much arm strength. Even with training he's just passable. If he starts slacking on that, he's going to fall out of shape pretty fast.
Items:
-Clothes: a really dorky uniform I can't find a picture of anymore... also a pair of glasses and multiple hair ties.
-A deck of tarot cards.
-A knife made from a frostbrood (ice dragon, basically) fang.
-A pocket mirror that shows the viewer their fear.
-A copy of the Necronomicon. (as given to him in CDC, it was stated to be an ancient copy and seems to be the Real Deal, but I'm fine with this being lost or altered because, well. Nothing from Lovecraft ends well ever. Also I think it'd be great to have immediate panic over losing this thing on his end.)
-A pocket sewing kit.
SAMPLES
Network Sample:
[Text is what he's most familiar with, after a life spent on the internet-- so it's what he defaults to now, in an unfamiliar place.]
I guess most people can't say they've been whisked off somewhere weird twice in their life, huh? How's that for an interesting story to tell the kids later.
Well, if there are kids and if there's actually a "later", but you get what I mean, right?
[Off to a promising start, here.]
Anyway... hi. Ryan Farrow, medium and supernatural researcher. I'm sure there are questions I should ask, and since I'm also sure you guys have heard them before, I'll spare you that part til I can research things a little more. But I wanted to see how this thing worked, so-- how about this. You give me your name and anything else you feel like telling me about yourself, I'll draw a card and see what comes up for you, whether it seems like it matches.
Could be an interesting exercise, right? It's easier to read cards in person, honestly, but that's why this is an experiment. :) Just a 'get to know you guys' kind of thing.
Prose/Action Sample: From CDC: while leaving Macha, not long before his pull point. If you need something more recent, just let me know-- I understand if the CDC threads are a little old for samples.
Are you 16 or older: Yes (25)
Contact:
Current Characters: N/A
Tag: ryan farrow (crau)
IN CHARACTER
Name: Ryan Alan Farrow
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Pulling him as a CRAU from CDC, after the destruction of planet Macha.
Age: 29
History:
Ryan's world setting & original canon history can be found here, in his application for CDC. Past that point:
On being offered a contract with the CDC, a planet-destroying organization, Ryan accepted the chance to see more of the universe (and get his problem spirit taken care of in return), and after acclimating a bit to the crewship Neheda he was transported onto an icy planet called Ajna. More accurately, some distance above Ajna-- his first experience in the field was falling onto the planet and scrambling not to get hit by falling boxes. Not a fun time. His extra sense also went a little haywire around so many new types of people, and all things considered... Ryan was not very useful through the first stretch of his stay. He didn't know how to fight as well as others and was unused to the outdoors (not to mention out of shape), and on realizing his shortcomings he began to work on improving himself to become a more useful crew member.
His efforts appeared to pay off: near the end of their mission, he was appointed a co-leader of the efforts to obtain and catalog planet specimens along with an alien named Noh-Varr. Ryan remained friends (with benefits, later) with him through his entire stay with the CDC, becoming closest to him and Garrus, another alien he met during the Ajna mission; they helped support his improvement efforts, and were invaluable crewmates for him despite a few initial hiccups while he got used to dealing with actual alien species.
It was after their return to the Neheda and Ajna's destruction that he found himself at odds with several of the crew. Where he saw it as an inevitability, the death of the planet hit others hard, and Ryan began keeping his thoughts and personal philosophy to himself more often than not. Most people seemed displeased with the work the CDC was doing, and he wasn't keen on becoming known for being fine with planetary cleanup. Instead he once again turned his focus toward training and even joined a program run by Lydia Shepard, another crewmate, that was meant to get those who joined in functional shape for further missions. The testing the crew underwent between missions was something of a blow, however, as the instructor overseeing his team placed him on probation rather than passing him. It at least provided more motivation, especially after his instructor explained he hadn't failed-- he just didn't have the same experience as others.
By the time the Neheda crew was sent on their second mission, this time to the jungle planet Macha, Ryan was more prepared. Where Ajna hadn't seemed to have sentient species, though, Macha had sentient plant people, the Neraki, and the disconnect he felt between himself and many of his crewmates deepened when they all began to realize that destroying the planet would wipe out a sentient species. Again, he kept his feelings largely to himself, as the few times he did discuss them (with Ratchet, among others) it only ended in arguments when he tried to explain the planet couldn't possibly be saved.
Other problems came up before the end of the mission, notably that his first incentive came through-- his request to have the malevolent entity that killed him back home sent back where it came from resulted in said entity being sealed within his body. It wasn't direct possession, but rather using his body as a container for the entity, which he cannot affect or release; it was similarly rendered unable to really affect anything, though Ryan found it could cause some physical symptoms, especially when agitated (insomnia, nightmares, headaches, and similar issues cropped up after it was sealed, though that seemed to be all it could do.)
The crew was also attacked by what appeared to be some sort of elder god, and Ryan unintentionally helped to make things worse by trying to consult a book he'd received back on the ship (an ancient copy of the Necronomicon, as it turned out, which caused black holes to appear and added extra hazards for his crewmates.) Finally, he was made part of a team assigned to gather information on one of the Neraki tribes, which seemed to go fairly well... until they returned, and half of his team was punished for failure by having their life support temporarily cut. Ryan was not affected, but he was still somewhat horrified by the punishment, as he couldn't see how they'd failed and the criteria weren't explained. He was left unable to figure out what he'd done to succeed in comparison to what they'd done to fail, and remained unsure what to think of the incident; much as he wanted to trust the organization, it was more than a little hard to just accept those actions.
Not long after that, though, the crew was given an emergency evacuation order. Instead of following the same steps they had on Ajna, they were forced to leave quickly and were seen off by some of the Neraki, who were swayed by the crew's efforts at diplomacy. Macha's destruction soon followed, once they had returned to the crewship. Ryan is being pulled from the period of downtime immediately after the planet was destroyed.
Personality:
Base personality:
Despite being surrounded by death, he's a surprisingly optimistic person. Ryan doesn't have much fear of it anymore, not when it's so intimately familiar to him, and he finds there's actually a lot of comfort in speaking with the dead and in the idea that the end's not such a final thing. They're all normal people, just no longer corporeal, and he's got a largely positive outlook on his own life and work now that he's been spending time either helping them out or just making a quiet afterlife a little less lonely.
Ryan is, for the most part, fairly reclusive given the option to be. The internet is where he spends a good deal of time, particularly on forums and online RPGs. Outside of the internet most of his free time is spent taking care of the house and working on the real-life hobbies he's taken up; he's taken enough lessons in cooking from Ms. Richards to be fairly proficient, and he's found knitting and sewing are great for keeping his hands occupied and giving himself something to do when he's stressed or nervous. Most of his clothes need a little tailoring to fit well, anyway.
At this point in life, he's largely grown accustomed to the idea that people are just going to think he's completely nuts, and his old intense shyness in public or in group settings has seen some improvement. Where he used to be scared to speak up for fear that the person he was talking to was invisible to everyone else, now he manages to be a good deal more social, a little more capable of not internalizing every odd look shot his way as a personal failure in 'playing normal'. His internet presence is still where he gets a good deal of his interaction, though-- the anxiety is by no means gone, and he's simply more comfortable with it. He still has a habit of being incredibly fidgety, apologizing a lot, and gesturing with his hands a little too much when he's excited.
He also tends to be insecure and a little desperate for contact and acceptance- someone he considers a friend being upset or annoyed with him is A Big Deal and he'll do whatever he can to try to smooth things over. Any accusations of clinginess are pretty accurate, and once he considers himself close to someone he's anxious enough about losing them to often prioritize their needs over his own.
Ryan deals with conflict, discomfort, and outright fear in very similar ways: lightening the mood is his go-to tactic, and he tends to make cheesy plays on words or crack bad jokes at completely inopportune times. He also tends to laugh more when he's nervous or anxious, and that nervous laughter is sometimes his reaction to shock (which, predictably, doesn't do much to help the general impression of awkwardness.) It's not an across-the-board reaction to negative situations, though; he's a supportive and empathetic person when it comes to consolation and sympathy, which is a large part of why he's been spending his life helping out the dead.
As one of the few locals who has any idea how to deal with the stranger sorts of threats, he considers it sort of his duty to keep his area protected to whatever extent he can; ever since the entity's escape, this has extended to trying to research what the hell it is and how it can be forced back where it came from. Ryan mostly relies on subtler means for this; he's human aside from his extra sense and lacking in magical talent, and placing wards is about the most he can do to try to keep things at bay. He's gotten somewhat experienced in using protective blood wards, especially recently, but he's incapable of putting extra power into them-- his personal wards for protection from spirits were all made by a mage he knows from his forums. Ryan also reads tarot cards, but he swears his deck hates him (despite this, he keeps consulting it because he's sure it'll be blunt with him.)
Regardless of the type of problem, he's never used lethal force against anything-- he refuses to kill, partly because he knows exactly how easy it is to haunt him, but mostly due to personal discomfort. He aids the dead, he doesn't add to their numbers, and he's not sure he could consider himself a neutral party anymore if he ever had to kill.
He's also grown pretty desensitized to gore, considering his ability. Violent deaths leave imprints that he sees the signs of, some ghosts still look like they've just died, and after twenty-eight years of living with seeing all of that... well, you just get used to it. In fact, he's so used to writing off things like bloodstains that he tends to completely fail to react to them when they really are physically present. Similarly, he tends to be harder to spook than your average person after so much time spent around ghosts-- bumps in the night and odd phenomena are a fact of life for him, and he's more skittish about people than he is of a haunt.
CRAU developments:
While he's always been used to non-human creatures, being part of the Neheda crew made him realize there's far more out there than he ever thought could be possible, and it's rekindled his fascination with learning as much as possible about others. Back home, he was working with an existing knowledge base; running into people from other worlds entirely is essentially a fresh start, and he has a particular interest in whatever parallels he can draw between any of those places (and their species, their concepts-- he's always curious about their views on death and spirits.) Ryan's also grown more used to being part of a group where 'normal' humans are much less common, and that's helped to ease some of his insecurities about being seen as weird or about people not believing in what he does.
He's a more driven person now as well, after all the training he's done and the experiences he's had. Before joining the crew, he barely knew how to fight and was working on improving his abilities as a medium; now he finds it more important to be useful in general as well as capable within his role, thanks to his initial insecurity about how much he couldn't do. Ryan has more of a tendency to compare himself to others after working with so many people he thought were superior, and feels that as a human, he's a bit more boring. Special abilities aside, he thinks he's pretty mundane considering the life he led back home, and at least some of that drive comes from a desire to measure up to his peers now that he feels he doesn't have to hide or isolate himself.
Personal philosophy is something he's more careful with, and he's less likely to bring up his own feelings on death than he was before. Being in the planet-destroying business wasn't morally difficult for him, as death is just an inevitability and if those planets were marked for destruction, there wasn't going to be a way to save them. However, he found himself in the minority there, which was something of a jarring disconnect when he'd begun feeling like he fit in better with the crew than at home (and that he could be more himself there.) It's become something of a touchy subject, as his eagerness for acceptance has made him keep his views about death quieter to avoid causing more of a rift between himself and others. His work is something he'll still happily discuss; it's just harder to get him to admit that no, he doesn't have a problem with people dying, and that he doesn't believe there's any such thing as "dying before their time".
In the end, his experience has caused other insecurities to get worse as it eased his existing ones. Social situations make him anxious not because he feels like he's an outsider, but because he doesn't want to become one again. After finding a small niche to fit in at home, he now feels like home isn't a place he really belongs anymore-- and discovering there's so much more to know means there's... well, so much he doesn't know out there. His knowledge base is less useful if things don't work the same way they did on Earth.
Despite those shifts, the most negative change (in his mind) is that joining up with the CDC means he's had to give up on his refusal to kill. On missions, he's had to be willing to defend himself and capable of doing so, but even though he didn't often have to fight... there's no way he can look at his involvement in a planet's destruction and say he wasn't directly responsible for at least some of the deaths caused in the process, or for the death of the planet itself. He can't think of himself as a neutral party who only helps the dead after that, and while it hasn't caused him to question his status as a medium, the thought that he could end up haunted by someone he killed is something that scares him.
Abilities/Skills:
His sixth sense is his only real ability, but includes multiple aspects. Ryan is a natural, living 'door' between the physical and intangible. Spirits occupy a slightly separate plane that's essentially an overlay of the physical one, and he's a spot connecting the two where crossover can occur-- it's because of this that his sixth sense is stronger than normal.
Of course there's the obvious aspect of 'seeing dead people'. Ryan sees ghosts everywhere, basically, since they tend to stick around a while; in addition he sees signs and imprints of deaths that have occurred whether a spirit haunts the location or not. Seeing bloodstains and char marks all over the place is perfectly normal to him, to the point that when they're actually physically present he tends to ignore them. His sight is also harder to fool with illusions, but by no means impossible-- he can see through some, but it depends on the strength. (They also have to actually be present. He can't see through things that are a trick of the mind and not the eye.)
Thanks to his position right in the middle of that physical/intangible divide he's able to touch ghosts as though they're both fully on the same side- and they can do the same to him. Generally, it makes dealing with spirits easier, but the angrier and more malevolent ones are capable of doing actual damage to him that they can't inflict on other living people. The open-door status resulting from the entity's escape also means he can't defend against possession from anything capable of it, at least not on his own-- his only 'defense' there is the fact that he's capable of possession from up to 2 entities, so a second could conceivably do the same thing and try to push the first out. ...Or they could just argue and leave him caught in the middle. It's a toss-up, there. He also has zero defense against mind-affecting abilities and is completely incapable of fighting back against telepathy/empathy/anything that directly targets the mind/emotions/anything in that general category.
His sense also lends him limited detection. He can sense nearby people who are anything but a normal human, and to a certain degree he knows what they are. It's not a perfect, specific identification; a werewolf will give him the vague sense of something canine, vampires give him goosebumps and feel vaguely sharp, magic-users feel like they have something flowing through them, and so on. Being around lots of people he can sense or particularly strong entities will overwhelm and overstimulate him. (This also operates on an opt-out basis, and by default he doesn't pick up on NPC characters! He doesn't sense anything in the game setting itself unless I have permission for it.)
Ryan's nature doesn't make him hard to kill so much as it's hard to keep him dead after the fact- his spirit is very firmly stuck in his body, since he's sort of a fixed point. If he dies, he's basically stuck at a point where he's medically dead, but everything essentially freezes there and his body doesn't break down. It doesn't make him immortal as much as it just removes the time limit on restarting his pulse/breathing, and he's up a creek if nobody can get his body fixed up. (Which can of course be worked around for game mechanic reasons if needed, though I'm not sure if he'll manage to get himself killed that badly.)
As for skills: Ryan is very good at cooking and baking, as well as sewing/knitting/clothing repair. He's a researcher at heart and has collected a large amount of knowledge about the supernatural in his world, including basic warding (only works against weak targets); his own affinity with spirits let him learn basic exorcism (forcing weak to average strength entities from their target) and banishment (forcing weak to average spirits to cross over and pass on, using his status as point of crossover to expedite the process.) He's learned to use a gun but refuses to unless it's absolutely necessary, and prefers a dagger.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Domestic: proficient in most household tasks like cleaning, sewing, and cooking. They're all hobbies of his, and he's pretty good at baking and knitting in particular.
Detail-oriented: if you give this nerd a job, then by god he will cross all the t's and dot the i's and clean the weird hard to reach spots.
Research experience: he absolutely loves learning new things, and seeks out knowledge where he can. He's a quick study and great with organizing information as well.
Insecure: if he's not used to something, he has a tendency to second-guess himself, and will be nervous about doing it Right until he's proficient. Can lead to doing it wrong because he's overthinking.
Awkward: he tries, he really does, but while he's friendly and social... he's not great with people. He wants to be, but he grew up pretty poorly socialized. Thankfully he's not as bad as he once was, but he gets by on being earnest more than actually knowing how to talk to people.
Physical weakness: his stamina is still not great, he's lean and ranging toward twiggy even after putting on a little bit more muscle, and he's never had much arm strength. Even with training he's just passable. If he starts slacking on that, he's going to fall out of shape pretty fast.
Items:
-Clothes: a really dorky uniform I can't find a picture of anymore... also a pair of glasses and multiple hair ties.
-A deck of tarot cards.
-A knife made from a frostbrood (ice dragon, basically) fang.
-A pocket mirror that shows the viewer their fear.
-A copy of the Necronomicon. (as given to him in CDC, it was stated to be an ancient copy and seems to be the Real Deal, but I'm fine with this being lost or altered because, well. Nothing from Lovecraft ends well ever. Also I think it'd be great to have immediate panic over losing this thing on his end.)
-A pocket sewing kit.
SAMPLES
Network Sample:
[Text is what he's most familiar with, after a life spent on the internet-- so it's what he defaults to now, in an unfamiliar place.]
I guess most people can't say they've been whisked off somewhere weird twice in their life, huh? How's that for an interesting story to tell the kids later.
Well, if there are kids and if there's actually a "later", but you get what I mean, right?
[Off to a promising start, here.]
Anyway... hi. Ryan Farrow, medium and supernatural researcher. I'm sure there are questions I should ask, and since I'm also sure you guys have heard them before, I'll spare you that part til I can research things a little more. But I wanted to see how this thing worked, so-- how about this. You give me your name and anything else you feel like telling me about yourself, I'll draw a card and see what comes up for you, whether it seems like it matches.
Could be an interesting exercise, right? It's easier to read cards in person, honestly, but that's why this is an experiment. :) Just a 'get to know you guys' kind of thing.
Prose/Action Sample: From CDC: while leaving Macha, not long before his pull point. If you need something more recent, just let me know-- I understand if the CDC threads are a little old for samples.