Hey everybody. Thanks for joining me.
So before I started writing this post tonight I knew that I was going to need a name for the character who would be my "Man of Many Faces." So I looked up the most common first and last names, and chose from among them the first middle and last names I thought would be the most inconspicuous.
Then I did a Google Image Search for the name Robert Michael Brown just to see what came up. The result was everything I had hoped for and more, with a ton of different faces, mostly white male ages 18 to 60, with different hair styles, different eyes, different facial hair, different everything. And all completely forgettable. In this context. If you saw if you saw a picture of one of these guys, then were asked to point him out on the street, chances are you wouldn't recognize him, unless the contrast was extreme, such as if he were the only guy.
And that's what this character is. Forgettable. Plain. Normal.
Until he's not. And there is where things get a bit awesome, because when Robert goes into character he's suddenly a different person, whether that person is a homeless person begging for money, or a wealthy socialite, or a Hollywood A-lister, or Joe Shmoe Automechanic Hometown USA.
Robert Michael Brown was born to Alice and David Brown, elves in a small town in the middle of nowhere. His life growing up was for the most part fairly uneventful, his family wasn't wealthy, but nor were they poor, and they lived in relative comfort. In school he was average in the class, neither at the top or the bottom, but consistently average. (He had taken several IQ tests however, administered by his parents, and the objective conclusion they discovered was that he actually had an IQ far above average, approaching Genius level, but when they asked him why he wasn't do better in school, he confessed he wasn't quite ready to start calling that much attention to himself.)
Then when he reached High School two amazing things happened, that touched his deeply on a personal level.
First he decided to join the drama club, because of the second reason, which is that he found himself very attracted to someone who was a member of that club. This was surprising to him, because up until this point his his life he hadn't really considered the concept of attraction, though most of the other kids in his class had boyfriends/girlfriends for the past several years, since like sixth grade, though those relationships tended to be very tame. A lot of handholding and other minor displays of affection. Robert has always thought of himself apart from that kind of odd display.
But then he started to feel something a little strange, like affection, caring, and a sense of a magnetic force drawing him in. It was like suddenly finding out that you had this whole range of emotions that you had previously never realized you were capable of having. It frightened him, excited him, saddened him, but ultimately made him realize that up to that point something had been missing from his life, though of course at the time he was only fourteen.
The fact that the person he was attracted to was another boy wasn't even a concern, it was just a blip on the radar.
James was an actor in the theater, and very popular among that group, but socialized outside of that group very seldom, so in order for Robert to be able to attempt to socialize with him he would have to join the theater.
During his very first audition the drama teacher, who was also the director of the plays, gave the group a brief introduction to acting, saying that the idea was to put yourself in the place of the character you were playing, and try to react the way that they would in that situation.
They were reading for Grease and the director had given them a scene with Danny Zuko and Burger Palace Boys, a dialoge version of the male half of the song "Summer Nights" which the director had written up himself to test the range of emotion that each of the boys could give without having to worry about the singing, which would come later.
When Robert gave his rendition the director had thought he had already cast his Danny, from among the Seniors, and only freshmen were left, and the director had seen Robert's demeanor prior to the audition, very reserved, quiet, and always giving you the impression that he was somehow studying you. He didn't have high hopes.
But when Danny Zuko arrived on the stage and started telling all his friends about the girl he'd met over the summer, and how he had conquered her, before looking dreamily off into some inner world of his own to remember the tender moments spent with Sandra Dee, then putting the bravado back in place. When his friends left him and he was alone the sense of longing and sadness for Sandy that he showed, nearly brought a tears to the director's eyes.
Then when it was over, the unassuming and reserved Robert stood on the stage, looking calmly and expectantly back at the stunned director.
The relationship with James lasted through all of high school, but James had insisted that it should remain a secret because (as this was the mid 80s) homosexuality wasn't as widely accepted, and he feared the kinds of reprisals that would come with an openly gay relationship. Robert respected that request, but as he never really considered it to be anyone else's business.
But in their final year, in the last week before graduation James caused a scandal by getting caught in the boys locker room with a football player, in a very compromising situation. James had been correct in his assumption about reprisal, as he was hospitalized by the other members of the football team for "turning Shawn (the one he was caught with) gay." Shawn, for his part, was kicked off the team and forever shunned, though he never had so much as a hand laid on him.
Though he never showed it openly, Robert was devastated by the betrayal. He went to the hospital and to James' room, but did not enter, only looked at him passively through the open door, betraying no emotion whatsoever. When James saw him standing there he broke down and started weakly crying, and looking away. Robert left him without so much as speaking a word.
This reaction from James left Robert thinking about people, and about the nature of trust. he trusted James because James had seemed sincere. It's even possible that he may have BEEN sincere, but in the end it had been a manipulation.
Robert had never understood most of this, his connection with James had been his only relationship, and his only real connections with anyone other than his parents. So he decided to conduct a series of experiments in human connection with himself. He spent time developing relationships with people in different guises and personalities using his acting skill which had developed even further in the intervening years, then just did things to gauge emotional response, and attempted to discern how different kinds of people reacted in different situations. He made extensive notes, and compiled several books worth of information.
When the time came to break off the relationships that he had developed he compiled his information and developed a strategy that would end the relationship with as little impact on those he had chosen, reasoning that there was no reason to be unduly cruel, and anyway, it was possible he might have use of them someday again.
He then created a persona which he called Professor Wildmark PhD, disguising himself dramatically, and released several bestselling self-help books, from which he made enough money to support a lavish lifestyle.
However once he had accomplished this he began to feel rather bored. Needing more of a challenge, he decided to see how effective his information on personality and emotional responses would be at manipulating people into doing things they would otherwise not normally do.
He decided that he would use the exceedingly rich to do this little experiment, reasoning that if he talked them into handing over their valuable possessions they would be able to afford to go out and get more. He had no need, nor any particular desire to do lasting harm to anyone, not out of any particular sentimentality really, but just because harming others who did not deserve it seemed somehow... wrong. It gave him a feeling that he might have described as sadness, which he didn't like.
When he started working with the incredibly rich however, he began to notice a trend. Many of the very rich he ingratiated himself to seemed to find ways to aquire their wealth by taking advantage of those that were less fortunate then they were. What's more they seemed to delight in this behavior.
This made Robert quite upset. He decided then that he would not feel bad about doing a little harm to these rich people, those that were this cruel for no good reason other than gain. He used his considerable skills find ways to do incredible harm to the very wealthy, without harming those employees who worked for the companies they owned. Any money that he acquired was liquidated and moved through dummy accounts, laundered heavily, generally withdrawn as cash to be moved into another account or set of accounts, then given to people who had been victimized by these people.
He used the information he gathered from these escapades to write several more books, (in another guise of course) created as fiction, but using many of the same situations he himself had been in as the basis for his protagonists adventures.
A military Wizard Engineer read of these books, recognizing an incidence that had been described to him by an acquaintance (who he was not very fond of) sought out the Author, finding Richard G Dean, who had "written" the books. The Engineer had made a request of Robert, which is now classified. Robert began to feel the same unfamiliar attraction to the Wizard that he had to James all those years ago, and agreed to help.
They developed a relationship, and both understood that the relationship would have to be short term. Robert appreciated the honesty, and due to that honesty let down his guard, and did not maintain the Richard G Dean persona for him.
When the work was complete and the relationship had ended, Robert felt another emotion that he was generally unfamiliar with; Satisfaction. He did feel satisfaction at a job well done whenever he had completed a con, but this kind of satisfaction was different. It felt like the kind of satisfaction one would get after a particularly cleansing shower, that even though the shower was over the feeling of cleanliness persisted.
So several years later when the Wizard was killed, Robert made it his priority to find out who had done this, and... couldn't decide what to do with the culprit, perhaps con him out of all his possessions, or drive him into destitution. Perhaps he should kill the culprit. This idea gave Robert the a similar feeling of satisfaction as he received when he completed a particularly difficult con.
He had never killed anyone before, he had never needed to defend himself. This emotion was therefore a little strange, and would bear examination before deciding how to deal with it.
*****************************
And there he is.
Part of the reason that I wanted to work on him tonight was that I just finished playing the D&D character that is most similar to him. It's interesting to try to get inside the headspace of what I would classify as a "high functioning sociopath" who feels only limited emotions. I don't know how accurate the rather dispassionate benevolence is, though I imagine that for him it's a sort of mental balancing of the scales rather than any kind of sense of righteousness or fair play.
I'd thought about having him have multiple personalities, but that sounded a little complicated and convoluted. I won't rule it out, but for now I think I'm just going to keep him this way.
Comments and suggestions are always welcomed, and valued. Even if you just want to say how you feel about something, feedback is a gift.
And as always, Thanks for Reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment