Anton Azardad (W.I.P.)

[IamLEAM1983]

Name: Anton Azardad
Age: 67 years old
Gender: male
Species: Void Weaver

Strengths: as is the case for any Squid beyond the base levels of the Prelacy, Anton is a capable psychic and Mentalist, and is also possessed of a commendable grasp of Telekinetics. As is typical of those of his species who happen to stand in positions of relative power, his emotional intelligence stands as one of his more formidable weapons. Able to extend as much empathy as he is to deploy manipulative affects, he reads surface-dwellers like a book.

While he still is able to use the Black Speech when required, his personal goals have made it so its use has fallen by the wayside. Still immune to it, Anton is simply far less prone to use it than other cephalopods. Having been on the surface for over fifty years, he's learned to embrace and profit from the surface-dwellers' natural resourcefulness.

Where others would try to enthrall more capable sorts and would surround themselves with an entourage or a cult, Anton goes at it alone. This makes him weaker than most Weavers, yes, but far more unpredictable.

His goals largely falling in with the concept of base-line self-preservation on a planetary scale, he also has the advantage that while some with criticize his means, those who will understand what he is attempting to prevent will be more likely to join his cause willingly. If humans, anthros, supernaturals or otherwise ever do join his cause, they will do so of their own free will.

Trust, he believes, goes deeper than any attempt to shackle minds or break wills artificially.

On a professional level, his name pops up in the Traumatology and Neurosurgery departments of several hospitals across Lebanon, Israel, Germany, Canada and the United States. On an official basis, Anton is a Professor emeritus of Neurosurgery and Neuropsychiatry, trained and certified in both Bayreuth and Berlin. He's written a few papers for the medical segments of Scientific American and Lancet Magazine, and is considered the leading authority in “acute neocortical neural scarification” - the name the surface world has unwittingly given to the effects caused by serious exposures to the Black Speech.

Even today, Azardad is working on ways to correct the generation of erroneous pathways and neuro-glial tissue in the prefrontal cortex of severe exposure cases. Considering multiple avenues at once, he's made himself familiar with both bio-medical and cybernetic approaches to this problem.

The catch is that in order to gain that understanding and to find ways to manipulate and potentially reverse NNS, he's had to crack skulls open. Working legally only gets you so far, and deliberately weaponizing his research was something he couldn't accomplish without the help of either a military contractor or a willing military body. In the early days, using himself as bait in shady corners of cities he knew to have been infiltrated by other Weavers was the only way he'd known to obtain test subjects.

With that in mind, he's developed a surprising expertise in hand-to-hand and blade-assisted combat, this happening all on his own. Having not studied a given style, he maintains an element of unpredictability you won't find in those occasional grapplers who have focused on a particular style.

Using the Lexicon as an access point to his subjects' subconscious, Anton has devised means to subtly encourage behaviors or decision-making processes. Not wishing to overly influence his subjects, he is currently limiting himself to the broadcasting of commands designed to release additional levels of dopamine and endorphins as needed. By lightly rewarding good actions and punishing bad ones in a low-impact manner, Anton hopes to condition his guinea pigs towards the type of behavior he desires.

Of course, having created the Lexicon, Anton has designed several fail-safes in the system. If need be, he is still potentially liable to take possession of either one of his most receptive subjects – one of them in particular. This, he assumes, would allow them to keep “operating” with their team past the point where brain death would have normally occurred. If need be, he can also place the subjects' respective minds in a dormant state and assume complete control.

Finally, figuring out how to design that device required him to understand the specifics behind the programming of device drivers or various code injection methods. He isn't so much a hacker as a technical and clerical student of the semantics behind hacking in several languages.

To put it simply, he's designed the Lexicon to act as a go-between for the human mind and Void Weaver abilities, a sort of mind-based device driver encased in a biological implant. Black Speech is processed as the implant user's most familiar language, as opposed to its usual mind-rending form; while physical intent that can't be processed physically is handled by the Lexicon through the use of telekinetics.

In essence, Anton has found out how to implant mundanes with potentially sufficient power as to safely oppose not only Mab and Darkest Winter, but also the Others and their lieutenants. If he considered himself to be living in times of peace, he'd gladly attempt to present this to a research group. This is, quite honestly, Nobel Biology Prize material.

Aidan Drake represents the first and, to date, only trial run which he considers to be unilaterally successful. The Jenkins Lexicon has come a long way in terms of defense and sanity retention, but its manifested abilities are proving to be useful, if wildly divergent from his estimates.
Weaknesses: normally, surface-dwelling Weavers constitute an entourage for themselves; a mobile cult of sorts that compensates for his species' natural frailty. As the blessing of one or more of the Others is required for a Squid to be somewhat more physically capable, freelancers tend to be a bit on the scrawny side. If he had a posse, Anton wouldn't worry much and would simply play the mastermind, as any other Void Weaver would. As he doesn't and is forced to expose himself for the sake of finding guinea pigs and research elements, he's had to learn to compensate for his limited abilities with Terran tools. Guns can help on the short term, but they're useless when you're up against something that can obliterate your bullets on the atomic level or when your target is receded behind a walls of living and indoctrinated (if not twisted) flesh.

While he can be surprisingly scrappy for an egghead, there's only so much Anton can do on his lonesome, only so many uses of the Black Speech he can afford in the context of a close-quarters engagement. His being a physician means he knows where and how to strike in order to produce a variety of effects, but his stamina only goes so far.

Physically, his biggest weakness would more than likely be his assumed beard or his actual tentacles. Most Weavers normally shy away from mêlée combat for the sake of avoiding the fact of having their tentacles pulled or severed, and he oftentimes doesn't have any other choice than to add more calluses to his knuckles or blood on his knives. Firearms aren't his tools of choice, as he prefers to leave his subjects-to-be as close to entirely intact as possible.

Finally, there's the fact that Anton is almost certain that at least one of his “augmented” humans has succeeded in going past the initial tests. The subconscious communication rates are good, he can't detect any signs of lasting psychological damage and the Lexicon isn't turning the subject's brain to mush; but this triggers a risk he has to assume, which is that the guinea pig is set to surpass its creator...

Appearance: tall and scrawny, Anton Azardad tends to appear to others as the quintessential lab rat and researcher. At six feet eight for a weight of merely a hundred and forty pounds, he's quite the bony type and tends to wear clothes that only further the impression. Facially, however, he's a far cry from the mousey, maybe unassuming looks you'd assume a die-hard intellectual like him to assume.

With a long and narrow face, an aquiline nose and eyes of an unsettling pale blue sheen, you need to notice his fragile bifocals to realize he isn't blind. His Flesh Mask is of some Near Eastern extraction, with pointy features that give the impression that a dour countenance is his one and only operational mode. He's quite pale, however, for someone who claims to have roots in Palestine. You can tell he more than likely used to have a natural tan, but that years spent inside by the harsh glow of neon tubes and computer screens have made him pasty, by Israeli standards. People tend to remember his apparent extraction more than his exact features – largely the fact that he feels Azkhenazi in his traits. What they do exactly remember, however, is that he isn't a happy camper.

With defined, if thick eyebrows and a long and frizzy beard that reaches down to his belt, his contrasting baldness tends to strike most people. Under the hair, his lips appear to be finely chiselled, made perhaps just a little thick by a smidgen of African ancestry. You don't need to be able to see his lower face clean-shaven to understand that worry lines are more common than laugh lines, or that constant flirts with exhaustion in lonely lab complexes have left him with bags under his eyes.

With narrow limbs and a definitive hard time at finding clothes that do fit him, everything he tends to put on looks a little on the baggy side or wits well, but is a little too short. Shirts, neckties, belts and suspenders are a given, as are suit jackets and pants, along with patent leather shoes. The styling or general make of what he wears isn't especially remarkable – people are generally more busy reacting to the beard or the floaty nature of his clothes than anything else. Sometimes his pants cover his socks adequately but sort of clump around the shoe's top, and at other times they're just a little too short, exposing a bit more sock than is strictly normal.

As a rule, everything he wears looks rumpled, as though he considers washing them to be as simple as emptying a can of Febreeze on things that aren't too stinky. His necktie may or may not be correctly cinched at his throat. When he wears a lab coat, it'll either be a little too short for his needs or a little too long, causing brisk movements to have his scrawny shoulders slide out from underneath the coat. He's nearly constantly shucking his jackets and lab coats back in, to the point where his holding onto his jacket or lab coat's lapels isn't so much a mark of pride or pleasure, as it is of a man who needs to seriously concentrate for a moment or two.
Behaviour: ask about Anton in a few top-notch hospitals around the globe and in some of the best research centers around the world – heck, even buzz the World Health Organization's labs if you'd care, and you'll hear a bevy of stories about Anton Azardad.

This is a man who has been called the Stradivarius of Neurobiology by some, an unpleasant git by others, an absent-minded nerd by others and a heartless, even ruthless bastard by several. He's saved lives, but also earned himself slaps in the face or life-long enmities. As far as his former supervisors in Bayreuth could tell you, he doesn't seem to care about friendships, maintaining some semblance of a social life or even general tact. He's blunt, sometimes to the point where some people have uncharitably asked him if he suffered from Asperger's more than once. The social graces aren't his forte, but he does tend to consider ailing bodies and minds with the kind of cold, professional rationality that leads to saved lives.

He's also ruthless and openly manipulative. Kicked out of Haifa's biomedical research facilities for ignoring standard protocols, he's made stints in Berlin and Innsbruck that wildly veered between borderline eviction and glowing praise. As it turns out, Azardad is a whiz at finding solutions to complex problems – so long as he's allowed to work his way. It's largely thanks to him, for instance, that research in exosuit addiction has made any sort of strides whatsoever, and that means to aid Clanks and cyborgs in various stages of depersonalization have been designed. Ask around Berlin's campus and you'll find grisly anecdotes of him coldly “dating” girls based on their phenotype, DNA structure and parentage, only to pull out of the relationships once he'd successfully obtained spit, urine and vaginal secretion samples from them. He's slammed respected professors to the metaphorical ground when an exposé of theirs revealed even the slightest of flaws or the vaguest form of preferrential selection.

Where this gets odd is when you consider that the same people with these anecdotes can relate cases of him turning near-dropouts into excelling students and research collaborators and to adhering to the strictest standards in terms of research quality, even where other students might have taken the low road and found ways to bullshit their way to a passing grade.

Once you get to his history as a practicing doctor, this basic structure is repeated. He takes concussion victims with evidence of brain swelling and the violent behaviors that result from them and cures them in record time. He wrangles cases out of the hands of the Coma Ward's supervisors and restores cases that had been thought to be lost to partial or complete consciousness. Bad implantation jobs that should have required an amputation or trepanning turned into simple removals... All of that while simultaneously being decried as the worst asshole on the planet, by some. His bedside manners are terrible, but he also isn't the one you'll find in the ER's break room, wracked with guilt or remorse. In terms of raw output, he seems to operate at a constant 110%.

He also appears to be in a constant hurry to get somewhere or do something. Pleasantries bore him, passive activities see him very quickly refocus on something he'll deem to be more profitable, and if anyone is forced to tag along, he mercilessly drags them. If they're getting in the way, he dumps them at the expected drop-off point and leaves without much ceremony. In a way, there's a kind of odd well of energy behind the ever-present exhaustion, something stronger than any drug or stimulant that keeps him on the job at all times, except for those times where the body simply drops out and leaves the mind hanging.

Anton appears to be able to sleep virtually anywhere and in any conceivable position. If any discomfort is experienced afterwards, he's never voiced it. More than one fellow researcher could recount cases where a late-night microscope-gazing session turned into his chin falling on his chest, deep snores betraying his lack of work getting done. Wake him up, and he tends to react as though you were confronting him about it, somehow doubting of his ability to function efficiently.

If anything, his former and current colleagues could all acknowledge that Anton Azardad comes complete with an unfathomable goal, something that lies at the intersection point of all his years and all his studies. Something only he can see, and something which he pursues with the kind of self-negating persistence that goes beyond mere conviction.

He'll do whatever it takes to achieve it, including the wide ream of activities that are only privy to Anton himself, or to a few discharged and sometimes institutionalized members of the US military. He's played the hapless victim while letting himself be caught on gang turf or purposefully incited burglary attempts in his residence. He's kidnapped gang-bangers and junkies alike and turned abandoned industrial lots or distant storage containers into makeshift labs – and dumped countless dead bodies in a wide number of dark spots around the world.

You'd assume that there's nothing but pure sociopathy at the heart of it all; nothing but some sort of sick, twisted goal that only a diseased mind could entertain with the kind of seriousness he maintains.

You'd be wrong. Assuming you have a Mentalist on hand and manage to break past his typical Void Weaver defenses, assuming you manage to keep diving through the heartless and despicable things he's done with a straight face, you'd find something unexpected.

You'd find love. Love that starts with a single name and that blossoms out into a deeply hidden treasure trove of emotional sensibility and genuine care. From a single name, you'd find books and meals and music pieces, movies, favorite days and happily stupid jokes – literally everything that makes human existence bearable. You'd realize that everything else is a thick, nigh-impenetrable psychological shield built on top of that love. More surprising still, you'd find every indication that this love was reciprocated and that it wasn't built on the same pattern of abuse that everything else would follow actually did follow.

Then it becomes clear. Like Edmond Dantès, Anton is trying to get back at something. To crack a mystery that's older than Time itself and to stab the cosmic bitch at the center of it all in the heart.

Goals: revenge has grown in Anton's mind and heart, turned into something much bigger, much more encompassing. Killing former gods for his own sake or for that of the life he lost wouldn't cut it. Not only that, but it would be difficult, almost impossible for him to undertake. Already a pariah, he wouldn't survive even gazing at the Darkhallow. The fact is, he needs more.

The world needs more, and it needs it soon.

The world needs an army. It needs a capable group, a group of Someones to see what he sees, understand what he understands, to realize that picking off the beneficiaries and would-be provincial rulers of Their desired rule won't do anything to stop the incoming threat.

He needs to find – or create – people that are talented enough, resourceful enough and potentially crazy enough to find ways to kill former gods. Not for his sake, much less for hers; but for the entire known Universe.

History: