Schuldig

Canon: Weiss Kreuz
Wiki: adding later

Age: 24-27 maybe
Gender: Male
Profession: Assassin/agent/~~horseman of apocalypse~~

Height: 175cm
Hair: Orange
Eyes: Blue
Body: Slender

APPEARANCE

Schuldig is a natural redhead, his skin is pale, easily freckled and dry. His natural color is pale carrot orange, nothing like the flamboyant, bright orange he tends to go with when he feels like wasting time with hair products. He is neither tall, nor short, standing at 175 cm, but being slim and wiry rather than muscled and firm, he seems taller than he is. His eyes are blue, and hair flippy and wild, reaching to the small of his back.

He smirks, grins and laughs a lot, holds himself in a manner that speaks of confidence, sometimes flamboyant ego, sometimes self-assured strength. And true to his nature, he isn't afraid to flaunt with colours, dressing in green, white, yellow even bright red, rosy shades on top of his head, yellow bandanna keeping back his wild hair, green doublebreasted jacket hugging his slim waist. Yes, he likes to boast. But rarely mindlessly. Schuldig is a man with eyes on his back and he acts it.

Schuldig has no visible cybernetics attached to his body. However, if you get a closer look at his temples, there are patches of artificial skin covering quite an extensive arsenal of outlinks.

PERSONALITY

Schuldig is and always will be, an asshole. He's cruel, smart-mouthed and honestly enjoys pissing in the punch bowl just because. He doesn't put his bad guy suit on just to get things done, but he wears it regularly just for fun. If you like riding on the high horse of morality, he will fuck your shit up. If you're just generally a nice guy, he will want to mess with you. If you're just simply annoying or stupid, innocent, naive, broken or unbroken - it doesn't matter, as long as you have thoughts, you're in his head without an invitation, and he'd like to give you a swift kick for it.

Needless to say that all of his marbles are no longer at home. He hates and he loves, with six billion people screaming through his mind, he hates and he loves madly, with stranger hearts beating within. Often he doesn't know what are his own thoughts, and which are of those who surround him. On an every day basis, he sees the filth of human minds, listens to their self-entitled bullshit and cruelty, seeing reasons behind reasons. In his situation, who wouldn't hate people?

Schwarz's goal is nothing short of primal chaos, and that fits Schuldig just fine. He wouldn't feel sorry for anyone to lose their homes, lives, their secure little heavens just outside someone else's hell. As far as he's concerned, human kind has earned their retribution. No, he doesn't care about fairness, or justice, in his world those are words with very little meaning. In the end, the strongest rule of all is the law of survival. There is no cosmic god to set things right, people must define the world for themselves.

Schuldig is flamboyant when it suits him, he plays games when he's in the mood, he murders the room service with one shot in the head just because he feels like it, but he could also pick up a kitten on his way home just because there's silence in the creature's mind. He's still human despite the deeply disturbed, misantropic chaos that resides within his head. He's a ticking time bomb of a mind broken countless times, rebuilt again and again, sometimes distorted.

Schuldig doesn't do trust, the only people he counts on are in his team. He doesn't do friendship, even his teammates are more subjects to his constant trial of priorities. And he most certainly doesn't do love. But he's known to be sticking by his teammates, even taking a beating with a golf club for their goals. He can be loyal, he can be playful and sometimes a little bit of both S and M, enjoying causing harm and hurt and being thrilled by the fact that his plans will most probably backfire. But he doesn't get pleasure from pain, his own or pain of others around him, what a telepath would? It will all reflect back on himself.

ALIASES

Schuldig is an alias. Or it was. But he has long since forgotten who he was supposed to be. Schuldig is what he feels the most comfortable with.

Christian is a name he offers a lot offline, online, even officially. But it's not his real name.

Guilty is an online handle he uses quite often. However, it's virtually impossible to find any sort of actual information attached to the name.

Mastermind was a joke, which unfortunately stuck with him. It is his codename for Rosenkreuz, for Schwarz occasionally as well.

CONTACTS

Rosenkreuz brought him up, possibly, equipped him with cyberware to enhance his mutant powers and still holds him in their leash, employing him and his team for their own causes whenever they happen to feel like it.

Shinra pays to Schwarz to look after Rufus Shinra.

Underground organizations are not necessarily his scene, but he knows them, and who to look for when he needs something.

RESOURCES

Cybernetic implants that Schuldig employs are almost all designed to work hand in hand with his mutant power. However, the technology is hardly reliable or safe, and he was amongst the few first that it was tested on, which also means that his system is faulty. (Extreme headaches, unbalanced mood swings, uncontrollable powers...) He also possesses hacked neural bridges, which splits his reaction time, making him faster.

Weaponry is not really his thing, but he packs a heavy duty semi-automatic handgun at all times (but isn't the best of gunmen) and can get his hands on almost anything given a bit of time.

His "salary" isn't small. But he still hasn't gotten out of the habit of compulsively spending it all, however, which means he's always broke.

NEW BABYLON AU

Schuldig doesn't remember much about his childhood. His mutant powers awakened at young age and how it affected his life was rather tremendous. Untrained and stressed, the mind collapsed before long under the strain of everyone's thoughts streaming in. What kind of a kid Schuldig was, or whether he had a family - it's hard to say. He remembers at least twenty families that could have been his own, even more friends and enemies. He remembers dying at age twelve, he remembers being taken in by the corporations and trained to jump on command. He isn't sure how old he is, because there is no clear memory of a year when he was born or any birthdays.

Rosenkreuz took him in at some point of time and trained him to control his power, taught him to create psychic shields to keep his identity at least somewhat intact. In a way that is the true birth of Schuldig even if he didn't think of himself as Schuldig at the time.

(I'm leaving this quite open ended in case there will ever be a Crawford player so we can talk background connections more.)

However, while Rosenkreuz helped him to stabilize his life and personality, the organization couldn't claim to be only helping Schuldig, or any other mutant talent. Greedy as they were, they implanted several experimental cybernetic additions to Schuldig's neural system, managing to power up his abilities but also to render them permanently out of his control. In fact, they would have liked to hook him up into a machine that would give them an access to the minds of anyone in the city, living and breathing mouth piece of a mental radio receiver.

Schwarz was an escape, which Schuldig took gladly, it was his only way out of the Rosenkreuz laboratories. It was also the first time he's ever had any companions, other people he can relate to and converse with without expecting them to

POWERS/ABILITIES

Schuldig is able to hear thoughts, in fact, he doesn't have to concentrate to do anything in order for people to invade his headspace. However, to keep them out is another matter all together. It is never said much about the ability in canon; the most information about the PSI talents seems to concentrate on the drama CDs. They talk liberally about shields and PSI power blasts for example and it is suggested that many of them actually masters more talents than the one they seem to be defined by. However, I'd rather not go there. In my interpretation, Schuldig is a telepath first and foremost. His empathetic ability is fully dependent on his capability of reading thoughts, and it's a matter of debate whether it's just the vast experience he's had with this talent, or actually a mild empathic talent of its own, or even a mental link between teammates that makes him occasionally sensitive to emotions as well.

Schuldig's telepathy comes with an additional power of mind control. This is mostly an ability to make suggestions that the mind recognizes as its own, not an all powerful control over another human. Sure, he can press the control, and make someone act against their own will, however, it's difficult, it's unstable and even a normal person can break his control with enough effort put into it. It also requires quite a bit of time with the target; he can't just snap his fingers when he meets someone and make them his mind slave. He'll have to slide in carefully, work his way through the mind, prepare a scene for himself, and even then, it works the best when the target doesn't know they're being controlled. It's an ability he rarely uses at all.

Schuldig's telepathy is not a blessing. Surely, he makes a use of it, but he also suffers because of it. He gets confused of himself, of people around him, undergoes severe periods of headaches, loses the sense of himself. If you constantly have a press of every mind broadcasting to your one receiver, eventually, you will go mad with the flood of strangers screaming through yourself. The way I see him dealing with it is a some sort of psychic shield - they all received training in Rosenkreuz - to keep out the constant onslaught of telepathic streaming. Sometimes he fails to keep up his shields and ends up hearing things he would rather not. Sometimes he delves a bit too deep in a mind and finds it hard to judge the limits of his own person and where the borders of another person begins. Schuldig's telepathy might be rather strong, but he is not the best at controlling the ability.

Character bio; New Babylon AU

Schuldig