Character Stories

Well. I didn't see any thread for character stories, so I figured I'd make one for Perseus and anybody else who wants to post any segments they write for their character here. - Alan aka Perseus Jade

Imprisoned.

"I have here that your name is Perseus Jade. Is that correct?" The man's tone was genial and belied suspicion in the same breath. He was bald with tufts of grey hair peeking from his head like a cactus. He had beady black pupils for eyes and was dressed in a chalk-grey lab coat.

Perseus watched him bound from the laboratory chair. He saw the green text flowing across the screen. It brought to mind jade green lillies flowing across an oxblood sky. His nostrils flared in dismay. What the hell happened?

"Mr. Jade. If you're not willing to cooperate, we're going to have to detain you further. Maybe for a very long time."

"You'd do that?"

The man smiled. It was a jovial smile but it looked sinister on the man with his labcoat and beetle appearance. It brought Perseus to recall all those cuckoo films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. He flexed his muscles to see if the binding tape would break.

He saw then that his own body was pale and brittle as a cadaver. His wrist resembled a twisted sparrow body. He licked his teeth and felt a dry salt at the roof of his mouth. He hadn't paid attention but he felt ..like a vegetable.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

"We understand you're a telepath," the man ignored him. "We've been probing your thoughts, but our understanding is limited. Were you affiliated with Charles Xavier?"

"I went to his school," Pers said.

"Do you have sympathies to the Empire?"

"What if I did?"

Perseus studied the man. Perseus's face must have looked like cold wildfire, a suppressed rage lingering inside and spreading like a virus. The man reacted with a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth. A nervous tic that might've been endearing if the man had been his uncle rather than his interrogator.

He brought up the man's mind in his own like a screen and it might have resembled the jade lillies. He let himself drift into the man's psyche. He found himself living vicariously through the humans and mutants alike. Sometimes lurid pictures would register on his frame. Sometimes he would witness things that should've been sacrosanct.

Teachers desiring young girls that were too young. Rapists who pictured their nefarious deeds before they acted. He experienced them. Their desires and wants and sometimes actions or what they'd done. He felt darker for it. He would persuade those men to give themselves over in their own minds, but he still felt as though the soil of his mind had been clogged with the blood of sin.

"I won't tell you anything," Perseus said, stubbornly.

He could not read the man's mind. The man saw him shutting his eyes and he could feel the man smile even in dark.

"Mr. Jade, we have a cylindrical device planted in your wrist to prevent this kind of thing."

"What about the telekinesis?"

The man's eyes narrowed. It was an inconspicuous gesture and something that usually would've went unnoticed, but Perseus still felt the emotional reaction attached to it. Uncertainty. What about the telekinesis?

Perseus watched the man. There was no sound but fury. The room rumbled in inanimate dismay. Perseus felt his own fury infuse him like a volcanic puritan rage. It wasn't until later that Perseus realized he hadn't been breathing. The room shook in a violent flurry.

"You should have taken precautions, sir," Perseus emphasized the sir. "You should have fed me and not kept me here. You should have done a lot of things."

The monitor heaved and fell like a giant tower of glass. Jade lillies flowing across the oxblood sky and then fading into the dark. Shards of glass broke from it and then levitated like clear diamonds sparkling in the room. He smiled. It was a wan and sickly smile and Perseus tilted his head.

When he awoke from his umbra the man was lying drenched in a creek of blood. The clear glass shards entrenched in his neck like some final rite of passage.

---

Jade they called him. Jaden Marr was his birth name but he knew that his last name was an alias. His mother had told secrets on a man that liked his secrets kept. The government had put the two of them in the Witness Protection program and assigned them a false surname. Marr.

Thus Jaden Pennington had become Jaden Marr, and his life as a drifter began. He took the name Jade. This was not such a realistic world that the prospect was an anomaly. This was a world where men called themselves Captain America and people didn't balk at it.

It sounded like some made-up story even to him, the Witness Protection thing, but when people asked him about it he just shrugged his shoulders. "Can't make this stuff up," he said with a smile.

He worked construction. He also worked as a Wal-Mart forklift operator and as a security guard for the John F. Kennedy building in New York. That was in the 1970s. And as time progressed he found one thing that was fatally different than everyone else. He did not age. He never had trouble finding work. He was big and as long as evolution was at a standstill and men couldn't move buildings with their minds, there would be work for men like him.

In the 1980s that would change. He found he could do new things too. The mutant genome. He knew he was either one of them or a superhuman. Maybe he'd been one of the first. He didn't really know - science was never his niche. But he felt more comfortable knowing that there were others like him in the world and he kept working.

A few government men would come and offer him positions and he'd turn them down.

"You could be doing your country a service," the men would say.

"I don't want any trouble," he'd say back.

Someday he might find a purpose. He felt something was missing, but he couldn't say what, so he'd move across country to country. Sometimes continent to continent. Just another rock skidding the surface of the world shining a little too brightly.