holy reliic

[viiru2alert]

player.
NAME: Gira
JOURNAL: murkrows
E-MAIL: breloomasaurus@gmail.com
CONTACT INFO: startropics
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None

character.
CHARACTER NAME: Sollux Captor
SERIES: MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck
CANON POINT: The very end of Return to the Core -- he's in the middle of a fight with Eridan, but he hasn't been 'blinded by science' yet.
APPEARANCE: Disclaimer: he does actually have arms.
DESIRED CLASS & REASONING: Shadow Warlock. In canon, Sollux completely rejects using physical weapons because his psychic powers are so great; I figured this would translate best to offensive magic.
PREVIOUSLY IN HOLYRELIC: N/A

PERSONALITY: In a nutshell, Sollux is the impossibly smart guy that everyone wants to ask for help, but doesn’t because he’s an intolerable stupid jerk who probably won’t even give you the right answer anyway… and has so many psychological problems that it’s probably wiser to stay away, just in case. He can almost always be found clattering away at a keyboard, and is skilled at almost anything that involves computers — from hacking (this guy is a hella boss hacker, okay, he can make computers explode from his viruses) to computer games (it’s not uncommon to hear “BOOM HEADSHOT” spit randomly from the speakers if you happen to be on a voice call with him at the time). He hijacks the human Internet from time to time and watches one of their vastly inferior 3D movies, using his multicolored glasses as the shades. And he likes to make it abundantly clear that whatever his current project is, it is most definitely more important than you are. Sollux Captor always tells it like it is. Even if you’re a valued friend to him, if he’s caught up in the middle of his work, then he’ll gleefully blow you off and go back to whatever he was doing.

…However, he’ll then have a guilt attack about it. See, there’s another thing about Sollux. Fate apparently really digs his whole ‘duality’ concept (it comes with the territory of being a troll modeled after Gemini, the Twins), but Fate is also a nasty bitch of an ethereal force, and so she bestowed upon Sollux the majestic gift of rapid-fire mood swings. It’s almost bipolar in the fact that he has two distinct personalities that can switch at the drop of a hat — crabby and irritable, or sulky and self-deprecating. Either way, he’s rarely in a happy mood anymore; reasons for this are unclear, but Kanaya (one of the most long-winded of the trolls) once stated that in the past, it was she who had to stop him from rambling, but that changed after he became suddenly aware that everyone on the planet was going to die. According to him, everyone regarded this announcement as bullshit… at least until everyone on the planet did die. After that, he tried to shut himself right the fuck off from all of the other trolls, and only stuck around because he was forced to by the rules of Sgrub, the ethereal computer game that destroyed the world in the first place.

Yeah, a computer game destroyed the world.

Anyway, nowadays, Sollux is an inevitably moody troll. He seems to have taken some cues from his best pal Karkat, an ornery troll who spends much more brainpower than he should on thinking up long-winded metaphors to express his rage, and his old tendency of rambling has come back in a different way now that he’s in such a sour mood all the time. Sollux often seems overly dramatic in his eternal state of aggravation/depression, from Karkat-level tirades over a chat client to switching madly between manic and depressive during a ‘feelings jam’ with Feferi. He first tells her that he doesn’t know why she likes him so much, then proceeds to have a screaming fit about what a shitty idea it is to have a feelings jam in a pile of horns (“…this pile isn’t comfortable at all, I’ve got hard metal edges jabbing me everywhere, it’s lumpy as hell, and you can’t move a fucking inch without honking the shit out of it and making everyone else in the room look at you!”), proceeds further into his screaming fit by somehow changing the subject to his massively apparent problems while completely ignoring the fact that Kanaya (and everyone else in the room) was standing right there… and finally went back into moaning about how terrible he is and how Feferi is so great and he’s so not.

So yeah, Sollux has a lot of problems. But, to be fair, he’s also got quite a bit of stress put on him, as well. Sollux has another unique gift, that of Vision Twofold; it grants him immense psychic powers and some pretty badass-looking blue and red eyes. Unfortunately, another part of Vision Twofold is that he must live his life with voices in his head that are not his own — they are the words of the imminently deceased, and as you can probably tell, they are always making a hell of a racket, pleading for mercy and screaming about how they’re about to die. Now, before, when Alternia was a place that wasn’t imminently deceased as a whole, this wasn’t such a big problem; there were a few voices and they were annoying, but Sollux got on relatively well. However, one of the prerequisites of Sgrub was that the world the players lived on had to be destroyed, so the players could move on to different planets. Predictably, this meant everyone on Alternia was imminently deceased, and Sollux suddenly started hearing all of their pleas for mercy, and warnings about the imminent death of Alternia. That’s millions of voices feeding through his head, at the same time, incessantly, and all of them are harping about doom and destruction. It was probably around that time, therefore, that his mental ground started slipping. But really, if you had to listen to people dying 24-7, wouldn’t you be a little touched in the thinkpan too?

Even without the sudden sensory overload, Sollux is usually really self-deprecating, and doesn’t have a very fair view of himself. For example, despite being pretty much the ultimate authority on Apiculture Networking (and also being ‘apeshit bananas’ at coding in general, to quote the comic), he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that he has any talent in the area at all. To him, it’s just something for him to do so he can get his mind off of things, and also produce the only food that his guardian will eat. (It’s called mind honey, and it makes his powers go massively haywire; more on that later.) He also tends to obscure his thoughts with false reasoning, lies that he hopes will let him save face. He refuses to speak to the human children (John, Dave, Rose and Jade), and the reason he cites to the others is that they’re not good enough for him; since he’s basically a peasant in his society, it would be easy to say that he only wants to exercise his power over someone. However, the fact of the matter is that he was actually very anxious about speaking to the kids, and just didn’t want to walk far enough out of his comfort zone to interact with them. Furthermore, Karkat pointed out in one of their early conversations that Sollux seems to have an act where he thinks he’s much better than everyone else that he pulls out every so often. It’s nothing more than an act, though, of course — Karkat is fully aware that Sollux hates himself.

Important thing to note: Sollux’s particular brand of Vision Twofold is powerful. He can move entire meteors with the power of his mind alone. And when he consumes the mind honey… well, recall when I said it makes his powers go haywire? It does. All of the things Sollux has learned to control his crushingly powerful psionics goes right out the window, along with the rest of the room; Sollux can level entire buildings with the massive, seizure-inducing optic laser blasts he emits in this state. However, as we mentioned, it’s completely uncontrollable; the last time this happened, he completely obliterated his guardian, his apartment complex, and his girlfriend Aradia, so the whole idea kind of sits badly with him. (Aradia’s death is actually one of the biggest guilts that he carries, and he often starts babbling about her when he gets depressive.)

Fun fact: Sollux has a lisp because of his strangely overgrown front teeth. Every 'S' sound he makes comes out as 'th' instead.

samples.
FIRST-PERSON SAMPLE: [Sollux narrows his eyes at the offending bit of produce.]

[It hadn't been very long before he realized that he was hungry, and after snatching some money off a preoccupied little schmuck more concerned with catching his pet -- um -- oinkbeast, Sollux had gotten himself an unfamiliar fruit to eat. However, soon after he tried to pick it up with his psionics, and it merely attained a faint red-and-blue glow, the boy became aware that there was something terribly wrong.]

[So here he is now, sitting in the serenity of the local park, throwing some very imaginative curses at an apple.]

Are you shitting me? Are you shitting me, you pristine little piece of alien glucose-infused crap?! [And he tries again, another whack with his powers at making the apple explode. He succeeds only in the level 1 variant, which is -- again -- nothing more than a multicolored glow.]

The fuck kind of a game is this? I'm not seriously supposed to use a little lace-covered spellbook!

THIRD-PERSON SAMPLE: Sollux Captor had thought, once, not so long ago, that he was sitting before the most worthless piece of machinery to ever burden Alternia with its presence. Now, he saw that he was sorely mistaken.

It had been something like two days since he dropped into this place, the World, and after he realized that this sun wasn’t actually going to kill him, he settled in relatively well. He didn’t have a place to sleep and his mood had taken a turn for the disastrous, but at least he was still alive. And now, two days after he arrived, Sollux decided to take time out of his busy schedule to sit down with this machine he’d found in his inventory and mess around with it.

It was a piece of shit.

Whoever made the thing clearly had an understanding of modern technology -- how else would it have a touch screen? -- but unfortunately, they did not share the experience in design. Even Sollux, who couldn’t be more on the ‘function’ side of the argument if he tried, found the excessive little details exasperating; this machine actually ran on real live coal (a power source that had been dropped on Alternia thousands of sweeps before he was even born), and it shot smoke up in the air every time Sollux pressed a button. He had two strangers on his contact list, and no way to contact wither of them, if the increasingly annoying pop-up windows were to be believed.

When he first got here, Sollux had been at home almost immediately; what time he didn’t spend on coding was usually occupied with computer games, most of them just like this. This would be easy, thought Past Sollux; even, dare he say it, maybe kind of fun.

Once again, Sollux was completely and utterly wrong.

Because God forbid he ever be right.