Caleb "Slate" Swartz

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Thread Archive (pre Fall 2008; aka, Calley's Archive)
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Playby: Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass. Avatar, signature, and attribute profile pic made by Katrina. Thanks!

Individual

Character's full name: Caleb Swartz
Nickname: Slate
Gender: Male
Age: 6 (looks 22).
Birthday: September 4, 2007 (Slate was "born" IC as Calley's split personality, but now has his own body; see IC History below. His birth is listed as the Sample RP.)
Nationality/ Ethnicity: American, with Italian, Hungarian, Irish, and German ancestry.
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Calley's mind and/or apartment building, in New York, New York.

Appearance

Hair color and style: Dark brown and short.
Eyes: Baby blue.
Height: 5'8"
Build: Scrawny. Slate is a fairly nondescript teenager.
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: None, none, none.
Other features: Slate has a small goatee, cut to a perfectly geometrical triangle, which he grew (and grew fond of) during his internment in the Romanian concentration camps.

Everyday clothing style: Slate prefers to be well dressed, in khaki pants and a blue or gray dress shirt.
Uniform: Slate finds the concept of uniforms curious but unappealing.
Sleepwear: Plain boxers and a gray T-shirt.
Miscellaneous clothing: A slate gray scarf that he wears occasionally; given to him as a Christmas present by Calley in 2007.

Character

Personality: Calm. Focused. Linear. Occasionally naïve. Slate has learned from Calley's experiences, and by observing those around him. He can come off as a misogynist, sometimes. Rest assured, though, that his statements about gender superiority are merely reflective of the statistical data he has on hand.
Hobbies/ Interests: Studying, particularly Mathematics, Zen meditation, and Geography.
Job or part time job and description: CEO of Mondragon Labs Medical.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: It is not a phobia, but Slate was taught by a hobo a very simple lesson: "Not everything needs to live." He wonders, sometimes, if he is one of those things.
Special talents: Focusing. Maintaining a level head.

Morality

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Slate has rigid morals concerning violence and hypocrisy, from having experienced them first hand and not having particularly cared for them. Outside observers might place him as "good", though this is inaccurate. Nor is he "bad". On the subject of morality, he is anything but neutral. Therefore: he is an "other".

Mutations

Mutation Description: Psychic Healer. With physical contact, Slate can affect the mind and body; he can also use telepathy over a distance with people he knows. For everything except his telepathy and mental lock downs, he needs his target to either give permission or be unconscious.

Strengths:

• Psychic Healing: Slate can heal physical wounds by entering a person’s mind and ‘resetting’ things, as it were.
  
  
• Telepathy: Slate can send and receive messages in both “audio and visual” (or any other sense). He sometimes hears “loud” thoughts nearby without meaning too, as well.
  
  
• Entering minds: Slate can enter minds to put up or take down mental barriers. Some application examples: walling in unwanted memories, unlocking repressed memories, walling off access to a sense, or tearing down another psychic’s barriers. He can also leave behind the infamous ‘loyalty command’ he learned from studying another psychic’s handiwork (only done with OOC permission; intended for NPCs). These effects are permanent.
  
  
• Mental Lock Down: Slate can temporarily seal someone inside of their own mind, cutting them off from all of their senses, as well as control of their body and mutation.

Weaknesses:

• Psychic Healing: Physical injuries only! Nothing viral, bacterial, fungal, poisonous, or created by the body itself (such as cancer). Cannot heal inorganic parts of a person’s body, like metal arms or pacemakers.
  
  
• Telepathy: Slate can haz snuggles? Because without them—or other sorts of prolonged, repeated physical contact—Slate’s telepathy cannot reach its full range. A handshake will only let him talk with a person over a few blocks. Slate cannot send messages to more than one person at a time, but he can receive them from more than one person: this makes it very possible for people to spam his mind. Shutting down his telepathy means he won’t receive any messages, not even ones sent by thirteen year olds trapped in sewers. He cannot actively read minds; he is only a passive receiver for thoughts. His powers don’t work with animals (they do work with mutants in animal form, though). OOC permission will be asked for overhearing “loud” thoughts.
  
  
• Entering Minds: Slate needs to have physical contact with a person while he creates these effects (OOC permission for them will also be asked for ahead of time). He also needs a person to either give permission, or be unconscious. Loyalty commands are also permanent, but hardly infallible—subjects do not have to obey someone who is merely sent by Slate, and can be fooled into obeying someone other than Slate—ie, in the case of a very convincing human shape-shifter. Coming into contact with an Adapted’s field will nullify all “permanent” effects Slate has made in a person’s mind.
  
  
• Mental Lock Down: Slate does not need permission/unconsciousness for this, since he’s effectively putting this barrier around a person’s entire mind—including their mental defenses. Breaking physical contact with his target will end the effect. Bodily functions controlled by the base of the brain stem, such as heart beat, respiration, digestion, etc, will not be affected. This puts a large strain on Slate’s mind which results in a ‘lag effect’ on his perception: while he will still see things happening around him, it will take him several seconds longer than usual to respond to these inputs, and several more seconds to actually react. As such, this would be a very bad move to pull if his target has an angry friend nearby.

Fighting Style

Explanation: None of which to speak.
Pros for fighting style: Heh.
Cons for fighting style: Many.

Faction Allegiance
Kabal Leader

History Of Your Character (all of this has occurred IC)
In September of 2007, Calley's mind finally broke under Hunter's mental and physical abuse: he developed Dissociative Identity Disorder. Thus Slate was born, as Calley's split personality, and an opinionated manifestation of Calley's healing abilities.

For well over a year, Calley and Slate constantly battled each other for mental control, leaving them both with an unusually high resistance to psychics by default that they had been struggling against another hostile mind for every waking moment of that time (and occasionally the sleeping moments, as well). Slate won this battle in November of 2008 when he tapped into the latent psychic abilities Calley's mind held in reserve for his next power growth. Without understanding it—or even realizing what he was doing—Slate gained the ability both to create mental barriers and communicate by telepathy. A few weeks spent living with a hobo taught Slate a harsh lesson, though: "Not everything needs to live". He relinquished his victory, letting Calley regain control. The new psychic abilities, however, remained tied to him; neither of them even knew that those abilities existed, so neither of them tried to switch them back under Calley's control.

After Calley discovered their splintering abilities, a new idea became obvious: letting Slate finally go off on his own merry way, in his own body, to do what he wanted where he wanted outside Calley's own fine skull thank-you-very-much. This became reality when a run-in with the Adapted Jacen in February 2009 reset two distinct bird forms into two distinct human forms. Slate is currently his own young man, as is Calley.

Slate took over the Kabal in January 2009 after a bloody coup. Colombia followed in April 2009. Romania is next.

Roleplay
Where did you learn about this site?: Google!
Do you have any other existing characters, if so who: Calley (1st), Rupert (2nd). Slate is my third character.
Sample RP:
(From “Learning to Heal”, Slate's IC "birth"

In one of the many training rooms of Mondragon Labs, there existed a rather extensive gymnastics room. Balance beams, spring floors, parallel bars, foam pits, the works. On one of those balance beams, there existed a teenage boy. He was of an average height for the East Coast, and his features had a strong flair of Italian mixed with something else—obviously a healthy dose of Irish, probably a little German, and perhaps a little gypsy blood tossed into the mix for... creativity. Which family line his blue eyes were descended from was anyone’s guess. This teenager was a little underweight, leanly muscled, and obviously wearing a larger man’s clothes. He looked a lot like Calley, actually.

He walked the beam barefoot, to its end. Then he performed two back flips, a hand-spring, and landed on one leg on the blue-matted floor. The one-legged landing was not to be confused with imperfection. It had been quite planned. After all, this particular teenager was wondering how much impact force it took to break a human leg.

This particular teenager was not acting much like Calley.

“Hmm,” he commented, shaking out his leg. It shook. It shook in places it didn’t have joints. Well, then. That answered that. He took a few steps, limping only slightly. “Hmm,” he said, with a rising intonation. Pain was a curious sensation. He couldn’t fathom why that clutter of voices in the back of his mind was so upset with him. With a last shake and a crick noise, he simply healed the bone. No harm done. He walked back to the balance beam. Did his other leg have the same breaking point? It was simple enough to find out.

-------------

It was Calley’s fault, really. Not that he’d take responsibility for it. But it was pretty hard to place the responsibility with anyone else, when he’d done it himself. Or himselves. Or... Or Slate. Freaking Slate. Calley was very willing to blame this all on Slate.

Though naming him probably wasn’t a good idea, actually. It was probably part of the problem. Maybe. But that didn’t mean it was Calley’s fault. He’d just been trying to heal. He’d shifted to that broken owl form, and when he’d shifted back to human... well, he’d taken the breaks with him. Two badly-healed arms and a leg that didn’t love him. This had been a problem. This had been a problem Calley had really, really wanted to let someone else deal with, but he hadn’t really wanted to explain it to the Scary Violent Abusive Boss Man, with the asking of the questions and the throwing into the wall when the questions weren’t answered neatly or sincerely or non-flippantly. So Calley had resorted to the tried-and-true method of smothering himself into his own pillow and hoping the bad things would go away if he ignored them.

Stupid. You broke yourself, you can fix yourself, he’d mentally yelled at himself. This was a habit of his. The trains of thought in his head raced around in their disjoint circles, trying to think of a way he could fix himself. Obviously, if he could break himself, he could fix himself. This was something he held to be true. But how how how how how stupid brain why’d it do that in the first place crap he hated himself—

On of the trains of thought finished its loop, and answered quite simply: Just focus. Shift to heal, like you shifted to break. It’s all the same.

Uh-huh, Calley’s main train of thought answered. You suck. And he’d gone back to sulking, with his face shoved into his feather pillow. His various thoughts kept racing. Except for one, which already had its answer. Stupid answer. Stupid thought. It’s not that easy. Even if I focus on healing, I’m going to focus on busting myself up again, and there’s going to be a vicious painful cycle of vicious painful pain. To repeat: it had its answer. Yah-huh. Great for you. If it’s so easy, why don’t you just do it?

This was probably the first mistake he made. Besides consistently addressing the various thoughts in his head as being separate from himself. The train of thought that had its answer, with the full knowledge and consent of Calley, effectively shut the rest of his thoughts up. It was a strange feeling. For the first time in a very long time, Calley’s brain could hear itself thinking. Compared to the usual clutter of thoughts competing for space, it was like someone had wiped a scribbled-upon blackboard clean. His brain... blank slated.

The train of thought that had its answer simply recalled Calley’s normal un-busted-up state, tapped into his shifting abilities, and instead of shifting into any sort of animal... it simply shifted things back to normal. Fixed. All done. Easy. Then it let the rest of Calley’s thoughts flood back in to mess things up, as all of Calley’s thoughts were quite confident they could and would do, in some way, shape, or form. The blank slate filled with scribbles again. Calley propped himself up off of his pillow, admiring his newly healed arms with much pride. Cool, he thought. I can heal.

I can break, too. It would probably be pretty easy to bust these again, just like—

Shut up, the blank slate train of thought said simply, effectively squishing the errant thought under its thumb.

Cool, Calley kept thinking. I can maybe not hurt myself for at least five seconds. Good job, Slate.

It’s never a good idea to give nicknames to the voices in your head.

------------

Things might have been fine from there. Calley could have practiced the whole healing thing, by shifting to the broken bird forms he’d acquired and fixing them up for future use. In retrospect, maybe that would have been a good idea. The whole “assuming responsibilities for this new growth in his powers” thing. Yeah, that—good idea. What wasn’t such a good idea? Pretending to himself that Slate was someone he could call on to do it for him. And he did. With around twenty-some bird forms.

This was enough to even annoy Slate, who wasn’t anything except a train of thought that had made the mistake of speaking up. It took several weeks, actually, because Calley didn’t like the whole passing out thing that happened when he shifted too often in any one day. And he certainly wasn’t dedicated enough to do the same thing on any consecutive day. But eventually, around bird nineteen or so, and around day seventeen or so, Calley called in his happy little blank slate frame of mind to do his healing for him again. Again being the key word. And Slate had done it. Again. But he was getting pretty sick of himself by this point. How much was it to ask, to get a little peace and quiet in his own idiotic mind? The blank slate rather loathed the clutter of other thoughts. Simply put... they never shut up.

So just for a few minutes after he was done healing this latest form... he didn’t let the other thoughts come back. He just kept them tucked up out of the way.

....

.....

.......

It was very nice. He spent the time gazing out of the window, being content to focus his entire attention on a tree across the street.

Then he let the rest of the clutter scribble out his nice meditative state again. Calley kind of liked the blank slate state—it was certainly useful—but he felt at home with the clutter of thoughts that was his normal mind.

This was another element of the problem. Calley—the part of Calley that thought of itself as Calley—didn’t associate itself with the blank slate. That was what Slate was for, wasn’t it?

This brings us to a few weeks later. This brings us to a teenager on a balance beam, very content to practice his acrobatic skills, and adding efficiency to the routine by testing out the extent of his healing abilities, as well.

This brings us to Slate, taking a minor vacation from the rest of Calley, and borrowing Calley’s body for the excursion. He was only going to do it for a bit. Well, a bit longer than a bit, because he’d already been at this for two hours. But when you’re focused on an activity, time does fly, doesn’t it? He’d never known that before. Curious, curious. It was very curious. But he didn’t particularly wish to think about it. One thought at a time—that was bliss. And really, it was quite negligent of Calley to know he had some acrobatic ability, but to leave it untrained. Slate was fixing that.

All he heard in his mind as he started a routine on the spring floor was the creak under his hands, the ticking of a clock on the far wall, and the slightest of clamors from the rest of the clutter. This was nice. Relaxing. Wonderful. And a few hours certainly wouldn’t hurt the rest of Calley’s mind.

Really, it was Calley’s own fault.