Application for City of Sin

[intuitive_aptitude]

PLAYER

↠ Age: 26

CHARACTER

↠ Name: Gabriel Gray, aka Sylar

↠ Canon: Heroes

↠ Journal: http://intuitive-aptitude.dreamwidth.org/

↠ Canon Point: End of S4E18, “Brave New World”

↠ Reserve: http://sinfulmods.dreamwidth.org/2145.html?thread=118625#cmt118625

↠ Age: 28

↠ Appearance: 

Sylar has changed his appearance (using powers) and how he carries himself (using his acting ability) dozens of times. But when he's not running a con, he has two looks. The first is a docile, bookish man who's just wants to be liked. He wears glasses, parts his hair and dresses in button-up shirts. He diverts his eyes when a pretty girl looks over. This is how Sylar used to look before he discovered his powers, and this is look he reverts to when he's trying to find an escape from reality. 

The second is megalomaniac. His clothes have crisp, clean edges and his hair is slicked back. His eyes send an uncomfortable shiver down your spine. 

Every word spoken and every stride taken exhibits an extreme degree of confidence — gained from years of disregard for all of humanity.

↠ Reference/History: There’s his Heroes Wiki, but I actually think his Wikipedia Wiki was written better.

↠ Personality: 

Sylar is a dangerous, self-absorbed psychopath with a blatant disregard for humanity. I’m not sure I can stress this any better than: he’s a crazy fuck and he knows it. Sylar is the boogeyman underneath your bed AND the one hiding in your closet. Some days he likes to just hover outside your window and watch you sleep, because he hasn’t quite decided if he wants to kill you, use you, or just play with you today.

Thirty murders ago, killing bothered Sylar. And I do mean it really bothered him. Still Gabriel Gray at the time, our future-reincarnation-of-evil hung himself out of remorse, but was saved by someone cutting the rope. Now, literally with a swipe of his finger, Sylar can kill, maim, drop, throw, decapitate, you get the idea. With that kind of power at his fingertips, Gabriel has transformed into someone who never needs to learn negotiation skills, or how to play well with other people. Why should he, when he can just force or threaten people into doing what he wants?

And this is when we realize how much of a sick bastard he is. Sylar will play nice other people, out of the pure joy he gets from successful deception. He loves taking on new roles — a package delivery man, a helpful neighbor, even an FBI agent — to talk himself into and out of situations. But the con is only as fun as it is believable, and the very moment someone starts to doubt his fake identity, Sylar drops any and all efforts to keep his cover and immediately resorts to flinging people around until they’re unconscious. 

Sylar is unstable, reckless, inhumane, and nearly bipolar in his mood swings, moving instantaneously between extremely calm and extremely agitated. This disjointed behavior comes from being a disjointed person. In order to absorb other people’s abilities as his own, Sylar must alter his DNA to match the more evolved segment contained in each Special. But such changes to his own composition brings with it not only abilities, but small hints of his victim’s personality traits. Neuroticism, carelessness, a god-complex, all amplified and integrated into his own personality. Makes for a really messed up person.

Then, there’s always the abilities themselves. There’s a reason why the Specials in Heroes only ever have one ability. It’s because just one is terror enough. Sylar now has twelve, and each one creates new terrors that separate him from other human beings. He’s lost the capacity to build trust (lie detection), he couldn’t care less about pain (regeneration), and he’s even losing his own physical form (shapeshifting). Sylar is losing his own identity, and his powers are redefining and overtaking him.

Unexpected power in the form of a weapon, or in this case a power, draws people to take risks they would never touch otherwise. For Sylar, his collection of abilities has multiplied his risk-taking exponentially, and he’s never faced real consequences for it. It goes something like this: Sylar does something crazy, kills people, gets caught, breaks out. The pattern has been repeated so many times that a psychopath can’t help but feel unstoppable.

But the villain isn’t without some redeeming qualities. Sadly for Sylar, he fluctuates so much between destruction and repentance that for those close to him, his remorse has lost any meaning. Deep down, Sylar really only wants to be loved, and to not die alone. Any desires to feel or be special only exist because he wants to impress others and in exchange receive their love. However, because of how many people he has killed, for a long time Sylar believed he deserved to live in his own isolated hell, away from others so that he can do no more damage, and so that he will live the rest of his immortal life without being loved by anyone.

Now, after Peter Petrelli, the hero to Sylar’s villain, gives him another chance, Sylar has latched onto Peter’s graciousness in an effort to prove himself. He’s decided that he will make an honest attempt to use his abilities for good (we’ve heard this one before), and he’s experienced first-hand how good it feels to take the hero’s path. Whether he can keep it up this time, or if he’ll relapse again however, will be shaped by those around him during this next part of his life.

(Now for those turning points that made him who he is...)

There are three large turning points in Sylar’s life that pushed him away from a boring life as a watchmaker, towards an identity filled with narcissism, self-isolation and self-loathing. These are three moments in his history that, if things had gone differently, Sylar could have avoided a lot of the murders and psycopathery in this life.

 

First was his meeting with Chandra Suresh, a geneticist who contacted Sylar and told him that he was special. But the muted nature of his intuitive aptitude ability prevented Chandra from detecting any ability at all, and Gabriel, hopes crushed, lashed out.

 

This first turning point gave Sylar the knowledge that individuals with powers existed, but more importantly, the knowledge was provided to him alongside another experience of not being good enough — of mediocrity. Even with his hunger (see Abilities), had Sylar been able to show Chandra his own ability to learn how anything works and experienced acceptance or admiration, it is conceivable that his future would have been completely different.

 

The second turning point came when he met Elle. After tracking down a Special with telekinesis, Sylar bludgeoned him to death, and without any self control began to examine his brain just as he does the inner workings of a watch. But afterwards, despite having gained the man’s power, his own act of murder haunted Sylar and drove him to hang himself.

 

When Elle saved him, Sylar wanted forgiveness, knowing that the murder he committed had damned him, and that while he had so desperately coveted the power, killing a man in order to get it is unforgivable.

 

Elle’s kindness towards him however, filled a void that Sylar didn’t even knew existed. For the first time in his life, he’d felt wanted, decent, maybe even loved. During the short days they spent together, it was enough to make him believe that just maybe, he could be happy with Elle and forget the past and his hunger. Her love and acceptance could have prevented what turned out to be Sylar’s future: hunting one Special after another, killing them and taking their powers for himself. Evidently, whatever hunger is created by intuitive aptitude, it has the potential to be suppressed with love.

 

But that beautiful picture is shattered when Elle introduces Sylar to another Special, and she purposefully begins showing an unbounded interest in the Special’s power. Jealous and vengeful, Sylar nearly snaps on the spot, slamming the Special against the wall. But when Elle strikes him with her own lightning to prevent Sylar from hurting anyone, he realizes that she’s not who she says she is. After Elle runs away, Sylar kills the man. His second kill shakes him, but the remorse he feels is no longer as strong as the first.

 

Third, and perhaps Sylar’s last attempt at staying normal, was when he sought out his mother. Putting on his old clothes and parting his hair to the right, Gabriel Gray even donned his old glasses and sweatervests for the visit. He wanted to return to his old way of living, so that he could avoid a future that involved more death. But when he asked Victoria to tell him he could live his life as a normal watchmaker, she refused, asking him, “Why would I tell you that? When I know you could be so much more?” Virginia, who had always wanted her son to be “special,” told Gabriel then that he could be President if he wanted to. All Sylar heard however, was that he would never be good enough for her if he stayed and had a normal life. When he used his (previously available) frost power to turn her living room in a snowglobe, the use of his power overtakes him, causing him to crash a snowglobe into his mother and scratch her face. She locks herself in her room and Gabriel falls at her door, banging his head against the wall in self-agony. He doesn’t want to keep killing people, and he needs something, anything from her to hold onto, to keep him sane. But when Victoria finally emerges, she disowns him as a son, calling him damned, and points a pair of scissors at him as a weapon. Gabriel, clearly hurt and desperate, attempts to get it out of her hands, and accidentally stabs his mother.

 

Her death shatters him. The person he wanted most to impress, and from whom he most wanted love, was now gone, killed by his own inability to control himself. The point of his own pursuit of acceptance is gone, leading Sylar to return to his old modus operandi: seek Specials, kill, understand. At that moment there was nothing left to hold him back.

↠ Powers / Abilities: 

Because this is Sylar, and he’s spent the last few years killing people for their abilities, he has a lot. Strengths and weaknesses of each power, as applicable, are listed in their own descriptions. Overall weaknesses tied to him are listed afterwards. Please let me know if we need to scale any of these down and I'm more than happy to work with you guys on the specifics!

Intuitive Aptitude (and the Hunger weakness)
Sylar’s original power: the innate ability to understand how things work. It’s what allows him to know why a watch is off by 2 seconds, and it causes him to cut open people’s heads so he can examine their brain to understand their DNA. Once he does, Sylar can re-arrange his own DNA to obtain their power. Sylar can also absorb others’ abilities through empathy and understanding their deepest fears and desires. However, because of his own self-absorbed nature, Sylar has only been able to do this once, with a woman he thought he loved, but then later decided to kill. It was not until he acquired the Empathy ability that he was better able to (and forced) to understand others. The crushing and pivotal weakness to this ability is that being able to understand how anything works also creates an insatiable hunger to know how everything works. The feeling is something that will take Sylar years to control.

Telekinesis
Moving objects with his mind. Sylar has flipped over a large jeep and busted through a brick wall just as easily moving a cup across the table. He’s frozen a bullet in mid-air and levitated dozens of small pieces of glass from the ground and sprayed them out in all directions. Telekinesis was Sylar’s first absorbed power, and since then has been his favorite because it gives him the most power over other human beings.

Rapid cellular regeneration
Taken from Claire, this ability heals Sylar despite how physically damaged he might be, in a manner of seconds or minutes. The one exception, is a microscopic spot in the back of his head. When impaled, the regeneration does not function, and Sylar is for all intents and purposes dead. An easy way to permanently kill Sylar is to decapitate him, and then completely destroy his head or brain in any manner. This particular power has numbed Sylar to the concept of violence. He understands that most other people will die, but having a body that is nearly indestructible has dehumanized him to the full meaning of pain. Finally, on the off chance that Sylar does live to be older than the normal lifespan of a human being, this power will keep in alive, and looking 28. At such an old age, the moment this ability is taken away, he will disintegrate and die.

Alchemy
Changing the chemical makeup of any substance to that of another. The man Sylar got it from liked to change any object into pure gold.

Psychometry
The ability to perceive the history of an object by touch. Via this ability, Sylar can often feel the memories of other people, and in a few instances, was tricked into thinking that they were his own. Sylar has implied that if someone was conscious and he used this power on a person for long enough, he could absorb all of their memories.

Sound manipulation
The ability to mimic and distort noise, replicate frequencies, and create devastating sonic blasts. Probably just because it isn’t very stylish, Sylar doesn’t use this one as frequently.

Electric Manipulation
From Elle. The ability to generate voltage, and manipulate and propel electricity up to fatal limits. It was the first power Sylar was able to absorb through empathy and not killing. If this ability it used while Sylar is wet however, he will electrocute himself.

Lie Detection
The ability to detect verbal lies. The power does not give Sylar automatic knowledge of the truth. He also can’t turn this one on and off like most of the others, so constantly knowing that people are lying to him fuels his own distrust of the entire world. He cannot detect if someone is lying by omission or is clearly not telling him something, except by normal human standards.

Shapeshifting
Allows Sylar to alter his own body to match that of another person that he has a tissue sample from. Usually this is accomplished by touch. He can change into another gender, become taller or shorter to match the transformation. Shapeshifting takes a few seconds to complete, and can be painful. If Sylar is knocked out, he will retain his shape shifted look, but DNA testing will always reveal his true identity. While this ability is extremely useful, Sylar avoids it if possible. Using it too often makes him feel as if he’s losing his grasp on his own identity.

Disintegration
Ability to make objects break down. The targeted object will quiver, then collapse and break down at the snap of a finger. We’ve never seen anyone with this power attempt to use it on a person, though the original Special who had it was worried it would work on organic matter.

Flight
Ability to fly, up to supersonic speeds.

Empathy
Upon skin contact, this ability allows Sylar to feel the emotions, thoughts, hopes and deepest desires of his target. The longer the contact, or the more intense the contact, the more Sylar can detect. Sylar had difficulty detecting his own deepest desire however, and needed to press ink into his skin to see what his power would reveal via a tattoo. The original person with this ability, Lydia, frequently used body tattoos as a way for her power to channel another person’s deepest desires.

This particular ability was gained in the final episodes of Heroes, and I believe has halted Sylar’s killing spree. He can now feed his hunger without death, and it’s caused him to not kill when he previously would have in all situations.

Sylar can also easily weave new backstories for himself and take on new identities to try and con others into thinking he’s a different person. He’s convinced local police officers that he was FBI, set himself up as a delivery man with a southern accent, and he’s even impersonated other Specials. However, how long Sylar can actually maintain each character depends on his interactions with other people. He plays along for as long as it amuses him, but as soon as a con doesn’t go his way, he drops the act and just starts telekinetically flinging people and objects around.

Overall Weaknesses

Brain Paralysis
All of his powers are immediately unusable if Sylar is unable to have normal functionality over his brain. Mohinder Suresh has been seen to stop Sylar’s abilities with an IV drip that causes paralysis in parts of the brain.

Emotional Manipulation
Sylar has the maturity of a child when it comes to emotional understanding and experience. He’s easily manipulated by anyone who shows a genuine interest in him, as long as outright lies aren’t spoken. His constant need to feel special and “good enough” can be easily tapped into to distract him, anger him, or calm him, depending on what someone is after. Heck, a woman he'd never met before was able to convince Sylar she was his real mother simply because she said he deserved to be loved. 

The Hunger
The same hunger that drives him is what haunts him. Sylar has even given Matt Parkman free reign into his mind, in the hopes that Parkman could suppress the hunger. He wants it to stop, but he doesn't know how, and it controls him so fiercely that Sylar can only ever think about stopping it if there are no new abilities around for him to hunt down. Anyone who can offer a conceivable way of stopping it can get Sylar to do almost anything.

↠ Languages: English

↠ Reason for Playing This Character: 

I love how complex and conflicted Sylar is as a character. Not only does he have his own goals, his ridiculously troubled past has also infused him with the memories and personalities of other people. He wants to be loved but he can't help hurting others. He's tried multiple times now to redeem himself, but no matter what he does, he can't escape his past. Normally, I always pick characters who believe strongly in one type of code (like Spock with his logic). What I love about Sylar is that he doesn't have a code. He does what he wants and pursues it to the best of his ability, which makes him an extremely flexible character to play. Now, in the City of Sin, Sylar's latest attempt at redemption and be placed face-to-face with temptation. I'm excited to see what happens.

 

↠ What is Your Character's Sin?: 

Envy. On a superficial level, Sylar has always been envious of other people's powers. He believes that having a special power makes him special. But on a deeper level, what he's truly envious of, is how other people can connect with each other. He wants human affirmation — love, respect, trust. All things he's never been able to get and all things he's tried to take by force.

 

SAMPLES

 

↠ First Person: 

[ The video blinks open to a shot of Sylar at selfie-distance, like he's holding the phone at arm's length. We see the frame cropped around his head and shoulders, and there's a wicked smile on his face. ]

My name is Claire Bennet [ That's very unlikely. ] and this is attempt number ... [ a shrug ] ... well, three.

[ That's when he pans the camera around. It's like he's completely consumed by mist, which quickly turns into a dull, gray void. Some blurry motion follows. Maybe it's just the camera, but the speed at which he's moving is insane, and there's no shake on the footage. And then bam. Back to this weird, misty backdrop. Anyone whose ever literally flown through a cloud will recognize that this is what's happening. ]

Guess there's no leaving this place.

[ A squint. He's examining the screen. ]

HA. Claire, did I send that to everyone?

[ Another shrug, and the video blinks back to a close. ]

↠ Third Person: 

 

It was incredibly kind of Peter to let him stay in his apartment and Sylar repeated his thanks many times — in a voice that he used only on the days he still pretended to be Gabriel Gray, a simple watchmaker with a mom who lives in Queens and a dad who abandoned them, and not Sylar, a crazed psychopath who was destined to die alone.

 

Because in cold, harsh reality, Sylar had needed to stay. After spending those five years together, having Peter around seemed like the only way he could get through his self-realization that doing the right thing wrought its own sense of fulfillment. It gave him the chance to avoid a lonely eternity. Plus, it seems like Peter is the only person who would ever believe that Sylar could change his ways.

 

But when Claire came in through the door, Peter trailing not far behind her, Sylar's was still hopeful.

 

She knew he was staying here and she was visiting anyway. The best he could hope for was that she was ready to start forgiving him. But even Peter, with his superhuman ability to forgive, didn’t have any quantity of it left to allocate to Sylar. 

 

You see, the tricky thing about forgiveness is that it requires letting go. And well, after you murder someone’s loved ones, they usually have a very hard time letting it go. 

 

What Peter gave him instead was faith, and a little time.

 

But after a few minutes, any delusions Sylar had of getting Claire's forgiveness were erased. Every phrase out of her mouth was laced with a passive aggressive insult. And though Sylar might be detoxicating his own villainous attributes, it didn’t mean he was going to lie down and take it. He wanted to be a hero, not a pansy. So Sylar shot back, every single one of his words dripping with double meaning.

 

They argued for the next thirty minutes.

 

But despite how much Sylar wanted to lash out, he instead looked to Peter for cues.

 

Was that comment too much? Am I being a bother? She started it.

 

But each time, Peter really only gave him one cue in return. Be nice.

 

So he tried. He turned the sarcasm down, allowing Claire to get away with her less-than-subtle commentary. It was harder than it looked. He could easily shut Claire’s mouth and toss her out the window to end the agony. Sylar even visualized it in his own mind. But inch by inch, he held on to the brakes.

↠ Additional Third Person Sample:

So this was life in the brave new world. A torn down hotel room with a murky yellow stain on the wall.

The window squeaked in protest when he lifted it open and crawled out onto the fire escape, aiming to get a look at the alleyway just ten feet below. What he saw wasn’t surprising. Men, snorting white powder off the ground. Women, looking to catch a John who could afford to pay. Sylar’s eyes lingered and wandered around a particularly busty red head, until she noticed and they locked eyes.

He smiled.

It didn’t matter anymore if this city was real, or only in his head. It didn’t matter if the rest of it was a dump, or filled with ivory towers. All that mattered to Sylar was that it wasn’t home. He’d wanted a fresh start — a way to wipe away the blood stains — so that he could try being good this time around. The main problem was that Sylar had lost the ability to know what goodmeant anymore.

Killing is bad.

Yes, he was pretty sure about that one.

Torture?

Also bad.

Unless the other person is tied to the bed and begging you for it.

Sylar smirked. 

I’ll figure it out.

This sin-filled city was it. It was his blank slate, and Sylar has every plan of giving it a hero. Even he made some mistakes along the way.