Post by Aerion on Oct 5, 2011 9:08:33 GMT 1
Alexander had a surprisingly normal childhood. Sure, he was the only kid in school who could convince the teacher that his homework kept being eaten by dogs, cats, and the occasional bird.
And his parents always knew when he had lied to the teacher - somehow - and punished him worse for it than the teacher would for for not doing his homework, so it didn't exactly help.
Not to mention the whole 'ensuring he actually DOES his homework in the first place' thing parents sometimes do.
'Course, as a child he didn't know how to control his powers. Or that he had them at all, since all he knew was that sometimes people felt the way he wanted them to feel.
Since you can do that with just skill, and he saw people do it all the time on TV, he didn't really have a reason to think he was special.
As he grew older, he gradually learned to control things, a goal with which he got a lot more interested after a nasty run-in with someone who apparently managed to tell that he was using telepathy.
Given he didn't even quite know what he was doing, that meeting was especially surprising, and the subsequent 'you can't just go around mind-controling people' rant was rather confusing to the poor youth who had just recently started thinking that maybe he wasn't just good at manipulating people.
The meeting did raise an important question in his mind, though, namely 'is it right to use his powers on people?'
Which was especially important when girls stopped being strange beings and started being cute, when he had to ask himself whether using his powers to make them like him was ok.
To his great annoyance, he eventually found that no, that was not ok, and he couldn't convince himself his powers were entirely moral.
Sure, using them to get an extra slice of pizza at the cafetaria wasn't exactly going to damn him, but if his powers really were mind-control, and not just essentially having what would be a ridicilous Charisma - to use a term from one of the computer games he played - then wasn't it rape to convince a girl to be his girlfriend?
Even if he didn't take it to that level, was it right to 'force' them to like him?
All while trying to avoid his abilities becoming public knowledge, because the ones who did find out tended to be paranoid and questioning every positive feeling they had towards him.
Some years later, Alex has moved out from the influence of his parents, enjoying the Norwegian university experience - an experience comparable to the college one in the states, though with more work and less play given that it IS the University.
As far as he's concerned, he's figured out the moral questions behind what he's learning he can do if he tries.
Essentially, using his powers directly is bad, roughly on par with drugging someone - with alcohol or a specialized drug - or forcing them at gunpoint, in that it robs them of their choice.
But, using his powers to make people react how he wants to what he says isn't, as they still make their choice, nearly all of the cases makes them feel better for it - making people feel bad when around him wouldn't be very useful, after all - and it's something you can do with sufficient psychology, making it a sleazy move at worst.
And Alex doesn't care if he's 'not nice', he just wants to avoid being 'evil' and ruining society.
Though, on the mundane side, he's not taking the University all that seriously, learning whatever he feels like rather than specializing, knowing there's no way he's ever getting a 6-to-4 job (9-to-5 jobs are for Americans and their love of sleeping in, Norwegians would LOVE to be able to wait until 9 to go to the job)
That, combined with the fact he seems smarter than the average person, is likely why he bothers staying in school to start with, rather than just taking a job as a service person.
He thought it was a bit unfair that 'empaths' and other telepaths such as himself were mistrusted to such an extent, having had to listen to a lot of negative things about them under the guise of a smart-yet-lazy student.
People who can punch holes in walls might have people refuse to let them hug them, but at least they didn't get the 'are you controlling my mind right now?' frowns.
Which, of course, wasn't made better by how he was starting to learn to sense emotions rather than just control them, so that when people had a strong dislike/fear of him, he was assaulted by overwhelming signals.
Not that he could READ the emotions like telepaths read thoughts at first, just sense them, but 'this guy is really emotional' together with a frown was usually plenty to figure out that maybe, just maybe, they didn't like him.
And quite often they took his visible reaction to mean he was actively reading their minds, angering them and, of course, nausiating him even further.
It wasn't rare for him to have to have a splitting headache for the rest of the day after dealing with a particularly paranoid sceptic.
One person he did eventually meet who made the hardship of having to keep his 'talents' a secret easier to deal with, was his first girlfriend.
It was somewhat of an accident that he found out about her, really.
He had a tendency to investigate people who had strong emotional signatures while alone, because they might have a problem that most people won't know they need help with - strong emotional signatures in groups could mean they were in love with one of the other group-members, or just that they're having a good conversation and is happy because of it.
Usually, they had just had a bad day or he didn't get them to reveal the problem, but in the one case of the aforementioned girl he got something for which he was not prepared.
She had been a bit too defensive in her answering of his inquiries, yet didn't seem hostile, which eventually frustrated Alex enough to risk using his powers to convince her she could trust him and should tell him what was the problem.
And she did tell him.
Apparently, she was a shapeshifter, though in her case it was a new ability she didn't use to have, and she had been afraid someone would have found out and would tell the rest of the school.
Where Alex had to deal with people wondering if he's messing with their minds, she had to deal with people not wanting to even show their face to her after finding out, so that she can't steal their appearance and pretend to be them.
Well, after convincing her to prove it, to be sure, he reveals his own power - feeling somewhat releaved to finally tell someone - and apologizes for using them on her.
Some time later, they're proper boyfriend and girlfriend, or at most as hormonal youths who didn't know each other that well can be, and this lasted for a fair time.
There wasn't really a breakup, but the relationship somehow... Changed. At some point, they both had seperate lovers, while still talking, and sometimes doing things a bit beyond talking.
It seemed the most logical way to do things for two youths who could, through different means, consistently charm people into their beds, or anywhere else, really.
And come on, what male youth who only recently stopped being a virgin - you might think it weird that someone can get to university-age and still be a virgin, especially with his powers, but when you can control emotions it becomes easy to develop a habit of supressing any inconvenient emotions, like lust when you don't have a girlfriend - can resist wanting to keep the shapeshifting girlfriend?
It doesn't take all that long for the budgets of a University student to be insuffient for his spoiled habbits - that's not to say he was exceptionally spoiled, close to all native Norwegians are, it's what comes from being in a rich country at an age where you don't have to deal with the 'local' costs (in other words: Candy and games is cheap - especially if you import games - housing and food isn't)
His first thought is to go around convincing people to give him free stuff - nothing that'd count as 'major thievery', to roughly translate the Norwegian term, just the occasional pizza or intended-to-be-scrapped item.
But, that's risky, and wouldn't help much once he stops getting free money for people in school - well, LOANED money, same difference to a youth who has never experienced debt - so, he eventually starts befriending a few rich-yet-not-famous people by first 'coincidentally' befriending their friends or family, and learns the 'tricks of the trade' of the first type of people (the rich ones)
With the knowledge of how to make money while staying under the radar, he finds some brilliant-yet-nerdy people with great ideas that would never succeed due to how poorly they are marketed - and which no normal investor would invest in, because the cost of marketing would be higher than any reasonable split of profit would be - and takes out a loan to invest it all in them with a relatively 'friendly' contract.
Then he uses his own powers to explain why it's such a great invention to the right people - local celebrities and such. No one who would have bodyguards who might be telepaths meant to detect precisely telepathic manipulation - getting better results than most of the expensive marketing methods.
The end result is a mostly-legal way to pay back the student loans (and the new one) and still have the money to repeat the process over several years, until he has a few minor buisinesses, enough that he has a rather sizable house before he's even done with school, and has furnished it with the latest technology.
He also, at some point, learned to take his raw emotional control to the next level, learning how to either overload someone's mind entirely with it - though it tended to backlash on him, making him suffer the same effect - or sneak his way into people's minds properly before he tried to control them, avoiding the unpredictable nature of his earlier attempts - now the only unpredictable part was how long it'd take.
Speaking of technology, one topic that caught his attention was 'cybernetics', especially the idea of not only replacing, but in fact IMPROVING, one's body with electronics.
His mind was already in top shape, but his body was not so much so, so of course it's tempting.
And he has the money, and can convince people there isn't a problem with installing insufficiently-tested electronics into a living subject.
So, in the end he's unable to resist the temptation, and some lengthy and painful tests and subsequent surgeries later, which of course takes multiple years, during which there keeps being new and improved versions, so he'd still be stuck in the labratory if he hadn't refused further tests once everything was installed and seemed to work reasonably reliably.
His favorite part is the leg ones, who he wished he'd have had at an earlier age when the couches insisted he run laps.
He's not entirely certain about his 'claws', and will likely replace them with something better eventually, but for now they do the job of cutting people.
Though, as the years went by, he was supposed to graduate, but instead went on to keep going as he had by taking the less-used option of a yearly study of the classes, which is less-used because of the student loan stopping - which is no problem for Alex.
He also got gradually more confident in himself, though, and a few important discussions with a few wise anti-telepath people convinced him he wasn't far enough on the 'right' side of the equation.
And it was in the early beginnings of trying to use his power to influence people to be better, well, people, that he was caught by.
Apparently, giving up on any sense of subtlety and relying on your new speed to get you out of trouble when people notice your powers, well, just might catch up to you in the long run.
Now, Alex had been careful about not doing anything officially against the law, and most had been done while he was still a minor, but the total crimes they had evidence on was still sufficient to have him in jail for a year or two at the least, not to mention they'd reveal him as using his telepathic powers for crimes, which would no doubt make even more people sceptical of him.
They offered him an alternative, joining the Corporation's new team that was being put together, and he took the offer only somewhat reluctantly, of course grumbling about how they 'could just have asked'
And other than a plane-trip and some time spent obtaining temporary living-space, that's pretty much where we are now.
And his parents always knew when he had lied to the teacher - somehow - and punished him worse for it than the teacher would for for not doing his homework, so it didn't exactly help.
Not to mention the whole 'ensuring he actually DOES his homework in the first place' thing parents sometimes do.
'Course, as a child he didn't know how to control his powers. Or that he had them at all, since all he knew was that sometimes people felt the way he wanted them to feel.
Since you can do that with just skill, and he saw people do it all the time on TV, he didn't really have a reason to think he was special.
As he grew older, he gradually learned to control things, a goal with which he got a lot more interested after a nasty run-in with someone who apparently managed to tell that he was using telepathy.
Given he didn't even quite know what he was doing, that meeting was especially surprising, and the subsequent 'you can't just go around mind-controling people' rant was rather confusing to the poor youth who had just recently started thinking that maybe he wasn't just good at manipulating people.
The meeting did raise an important question in his mind, though, namely 'is it right to use his powers on people?'
Which was especially important when girls stopped being strange beings and started being cute, when he had to ask himself whether using his powers to make them like him was ok.
To his great annoyance, he eventually found that no, that was not ok, and he couldn't convince himself his powers were entirely moral.
Sure, using them to get an extra slice of pizza at the cafetaria wasn't exactly going to damn him, but if his powers really were mind-control, and not just essentially having what would be a ridicilous Charisma - to use a term from one of the computer games he played - then wasn't it rape to convince a girl to be his girlfriend?
Even if he didn't take it to that level, was it right to 'force' them to like him?
All while trying to avoid his abilities becoming public knowledge, because the ones who did find out tended to be paranoid and questioning every positive feeling they had towards him.
Some years later, Alex has moved out from the influence of his parents, enjoying the Norwegian university experience - an experience comparable to the college one in the states, though with more work and less play given that it IS the University.
As far as he's concerned, he's figured out the moral questions behind what he's learning he can do if he tries.
Essentially, using his powers directly is bad, roughly on par with drugging someone - with alcohol or a specialized drug - or forcing them at gunpoint, in that it robs them of their choice.
But, using his powers to make people react how he wants to what he says isn't, as they still make their choice, nearly all of the cases makes them feel better for it - making people feel bad when around him wouldn't be very useful, after all - and it's something you can do with sufficient psychology, making it a sleazy move at worst.
And Alex doesn't care if he's 'not nice', he just wants to avoid being 'evil' and ruining society.
Though, on the mundane side, he's not taking the University all that seriously, learning whatever he feels like rather than specializing, knowing there's no way he's ever getting a 6-to-4 job (9-to-5 jobs are for Americans and their love of sleeping in, Norwegians would LOVE to be able to wait until 9 to go to the job)
That, combined with the fact he seems smarter than the average person, is likely why he bothers staying in school to start with, rather than just taking a job as a service person.
He thought it was a bit unfair that 'empaths' and other telepaths such as himself were mistrusted to such an extent, having had to listen to a lot of negative things about them under the guise of a smart-yet-lazy student.
People who can punch holes in walls might have people refuse to let them hug them, but at least they didn't get the 'are you controlling my mind right now?' frowns.
Which, of course, wasn't made better by how he was starting to learn to sense emotions rather than just control them, so that when people had a strong dislike/fear of him, he was assaulted by overwhelming signals.
Not that he could READ the emotions like telepaths read thoughts at first, just sense them, but 'this guy is really emotional' together with a frown was usually plenty to figure out that maybe, just maybe, they didn't like him.
And quite often they took his visible reaction to mean he was actively reading their minds, angering them and, of course, nausiating him even further.
It wasn't rare for him to have to have a splitting headache for the rest of the day after dealing with a particularly paranoid sceptic.
One person he did eventually meet who made the hardship of having to keep his 'talents' a secret easier to deal with, was his first girlfriend.
It was somewhat of an accident that he found out about her, really.
He had a tendency to investigate people who had strong emotional signatures while alone, because they might have a problem that most people won't know they need help with - strong emotional signatures in groups could mean they were in love with one of the other group-members, or just that they're having a good conversation and is happy because of it.
Usually, they had just had a bad day or he didn't get them to reveal the problem, but in the one case of the aforementioned girl he got something for which he was not prepared.
She had been a bit too defensive in her answering of his inquiries, yet didn't seem hostile, which eventually frustrated Alex enough to risk using his powers to convince her she could trust him and should tell him what was the problem.
And she did tell him.
Apparently, she was a shapeshifter, though in her case it was a new ability she didn't use to have, and she had been afraid someone would have found out and would tell the rest of the school.
Where Alex had to deal with people wondering if he's messing with their minds, she had to deal with people not wanting to even show their face to her after finding out, so that she can't steal their appearance and pretend to be them.
Well, after convincing her to prove it, to be sure, he reveals his own power - feeling somewhat releaved to finally tell someone - and apologizes for using them on her.
Some time later, they're proper boyfriend and girlfriend, or at most as hormonal youths who didn't know each other that well can be, and this lasted for a fair time.
There wasn't really a breakup, but the relationship somehow... Changed. At some point, they both had seperate lovers, while still talking, and sometimes doing things a bit beyond talking.
It seemed the most logical way to do things for two youths who could, through different means, consistently charm people into their beds, or anywhere else, really.
And come on, what male youth who only recently stopped being a virgin - you might think it weird that someone can get to university-age and still be a virgin, especially with his powers, but when you can control emotions it becomes easy to develop a habit of supressing any inconvenient emotions, like lust when you don't have a girlfriend - can resist wanting to keep the shapeshifting girlfriend?
It doesn't take all that long for the budgets of a University student to be insuffient for his spoiled habbits - that's not to say he was exceptionally spoiled, close to all native Norwegians are, it's what comes from being in a rich country at an age where you don't have to deal with the 'local' costs (in other words: Candy and games is cheap - especially if you import games - housing and food isn't)
His first thought is to go around convincing people to give him free stuff - nothing that'd count as 'major thievery', to roughly translate the Norwegian term, just the occasional pizza or intended-to-be-scrapped item.
But, that's risky, and wouldn't help much once he stops getting free money for people in school - well, LOANED money, same difference to a youth who has never experienced debt - so, he eventually starts befriending a few rich-yet-not-famous people by first 'coincidentally' befriending their friends or family, and learns the 'tricks of the trade' of the first type of people (the rich ones)
With the knowledge of how to make money while staying under the radar, he finds some brilliant-yet-nerdy people with great ideas that would never succeed due to how poorly they are marketed - and which no normal investor would invest in, because the cost of marketing would be higher than any reasonable split of profit would be - and takes out a loan to invest it all in them with a relatively 'friendly' contract.
Then he uses his own powers to explain why it's such a great invention to the right people - local celebrities and such. No one who would have bodyguards who might be telepaths meant to detect precisely telepathic manipulation - getting better results than most of the expensive marketing methods.
The end result is a mostly-legal way to pay back the student loans (and the new one) and still have the money to repeat the process over several years, until he has a few minor buisinesses, enough that he has a rather sizable house before he's even done with school, and has furnished it with the latest technology.
He also, at some point, learned to take his raw emotional control to the next level, learning how to either overload someone's mind entirely with it - though it tended to backlash on him, making him suffer the same effect - or sneak his way into people's minds properly before he tried to control them, avoiding the unpredictable nature of his earlier attempts - now the only unpredictable part was how long it'd take.
Speaking of technology, one topic that caught his attention was 'cybernetics', especially the idea of not only replacing, but in fact IMPROVING, one's body with electronics.
His mind was already in top shape, but his body was not so much so, so of course it's tempting.
And he has the money, and can convince people there isn't a problem with installing insufficiently-tested electronics into a living subject.
So, in the end he's unable to resist the temptation, and some lengthy and painful tests and subsequent surgeries later, which of course takes multiple years, during which there keeps being new and improved versions, so he'd still be stuck in the labratory if he hadn't refused further tests once everything was installed and seemed to work reasonably reliably.
His favorite part is the leg ones, who he wished he'd have had at an earlier age when the couches insisted he run laps.
He's not entirely certain about his 'claws', and will likely replace them with something better eventually, but for now they do the job of cutting people.
Though, as the years went by, he was supposed to graduate, but instead went on to keep going as he had by taking the less-used option of a yearly study of the classes, which is less-used because of the student loan stopping - which is no problem for Alex.
He also got gradually more confident in himself, though, and a few important discussions with a few wise anti-telepath people convinced him he wasn't far enough on the 'right' side of the equation.
And it was in the early beginnings of trying to use his power to influence people to be better, well, people, that he was caught by.
Apparently, giving up on any sense of subtlety and relying on your new speed to get you out of trouble when people notice your powers, well, just might catch up to you in the long run.
Now, Alex had been careful about not doing anything officially against the law, and most had been done while he was still a minor, but the total crimes they had evidence on was still sufficient to have him in jail for a year or two at the least, not to mention they'd reveal him as using his telepathic powers for crimes, which would no doubt make even more people sceptical of him.
They offered him an alternative, joining the Corporation's new team that was being put together, and he took the offer only somewhat reluctantly, of course grumbling about how they 'could just have asked'
And other than a plane-trip and some time spent obtaining temporary living-space, that's pretty much where we are now.