Captain Hesperus
Harbinger of the End Times and Apostle of Ghan
Torsten Cooper
Vitals
Name: Torsten Cooper
Age: 30
Posting Color: Don't feel this out until we are ready to start the game.
Gender: Male
Appearance: Torsten is tall at 6'0" in his bare feet with short mousey-brown hair. He is possessed of piercing grey eyes in a strongly male face. His body is athletically-toned, a result of his infrequent circuit training and cycling. The possibly most notable thing about Torsten is that he rarely expresses emotions on his face, greeting everything in his daily life with a deadpan expression, whether it be a corpse, a car wreck or any of his colleagues at work.
Character Skills:
Major Skill:
Forensic Examiner - Torsten is highly skilled in the processes and procedures of the Megalopolis Police Department Crime Scene Investigation teams. Useful, considering that he is a lead investigator for those teams.
Minor Skill:
Firearms Training - Torsten has undertaken firearms training both as part of his role and privately and is in possession of several firearms, both legal and not so legal.
Character Flaws:
Emotional Decay - Torsten has been mentally affected by his Metapower. He has a deeply underdeveloped emotional landscape, which has previously been diagnosed as Asperger's Syndrome. It's not, but Torsten is smart enough to pretend that it is.
Psychotic - Torsten has a textbook example of psychosis. His desire to kill stems from his need to exert his Metapower on the remains. As such, he is always on the prowl for his next victim.
The System - Torsten's father knew about his Metapower. Knew about his need to make things dead so he could decay them, he knew that one day Torsten would kill a person to make them decay. So, rather than turn in his own flesh and blood to the authorities, his father gave Torsten a strict system to follow when selecting his victims:
1: They must have escaped the legal system's checks and balances, either by re-offending after early release or by escaping prosecution in court.
2: Their crimes must be an affront to human dignity.
3: Their removal from society must benefit a portion of society. Killing with no purpose is simple murder.
4: Ensure your own survival. Don't get caught.
Torsten lives by these rules for his kills, and thus has never had to kill a random person.
Serial Killer - Torsten has decided that the legal system is flawed, it's rotten to its roots. Evil men and women with money and connections are able to buy their way out of criminal cases, out of jail. He has started taking the law into his own hands, murdering these 'untouchable' people and destroying their bodies, making it appear they have disappeared.
Trophy Keeper - Torsten, try as he might, keeps having a problem with Rule 4 of The System. He often keeps trophies, in his case he keeps teeth, one for each crime his victim got away with. While he uses some of them as discrete decorative parts in his clocks, the majority are sat in a trophy box hidden away in his workshop.
Age: 30
Posting Color: Don't feel this out until we are ready to start the game.
Gender: Male
Appearance: Torsten is tall at 6'0" in his bare feet with short mousey-brown hair. He is possessed of piercing grey eyes in a strongly male face. His body is athletically-toned, a result of his infrequent circuit training and cycling. The possibly most notable thing about Torsten is that he rarely expresses emotions on his face, greeting everything in his daily life with a deadpan expression, whether it be a corpse, a car wreck or any of his colleagues at work.
Character Skills:
Major Skill:
Forensic Examiner - Torsten is highly skilled in the processes and procedures of the Megalopolis Police Department Crime Scene Investigation teams. Useful, considering that he is a lead investigator for those teams.
Minor Skill:
Firearms Training - Torsten has undertaken firearms training both as part of his role and privately and is in possession of several firearms, both legal and not so legal.
Character Flaws:
Emotional Decay - Torsten has been mentally affected by his Metapower. He has a deeply underdeveloped emotional landscape, which has previously been diagnosed as Asperger's Syndrome. It's not, but Torsten is smart enough to pretend that it is.
Psychotic - Torsten has a textbook example of psychosis. His desire to kill stems from his need to exert his Metapower on the remains. As such, he is always on the prowl for his next victim.
The System - Torsten's father knew about his Metapower. Knew about his need to make things dead so he could decay them, he knew that one day Torsten would kill a person to make them decay. So, rather than turn in his own flesh and blood to the authorities, his father gave Torsten a strict system to follow when selecting his victims:
1: They must have escaped the legal system's checks and balances, either by re-offending after early release or by escaping prosecution in court.
2: Their crimes must be an affront to human dignity.
3: Their removal from society must benefit a portion of society. Killing with no purpose is simple murder.
4: Ensure your own survival. Don't get caught.
Torsten lives by these rules for his kills, and thus has never had to kill a random person.
Serial Killer - Torsten has decided that the legal system is flawed, it's rotten to its roots. Evil men and women with money and connections are able to buy their way out of criminal cases, out of jail. He has started taking the law into his own hands, murdering these 'untouchable' people and destroying their bodies, making it appear they have disappeared.
Trophy Keeper - Torsten, try as he might, keeps having a problem with Rule 4 of The System. He often keeps trophies, in his case he keeps teeth, one for each crime his victim got away with. While he uses some of them as discrete decorative parts in his clocks, the majority are sat in a trophy box hidden away in his workshop.
Metavitals
Type: External
Metahuman Theme: Blight. Torsten can cause things to rapidly decay, days and weeks of decomposition occurring in minutes and hours. This also affects inorganic objects which suffer degradation and dilapidation over similar timescales. The larger the object, the longer the time required to totally destroy the object: an average-sized man might take up to three hours to decompose down to the skeleton, five to six to cause the bones to wear away and possibly another two hours to degrade the teeth to nothing. A building might take months of dedicated blighting (whole days of using the power) to cause decades worth of decay. However, Torsten's Metapower has no grip on living material, he cannot blight a living person any more than he could affect a tree or patch of lichen. the object must be dead or otherwise never having life to begin with to be affected.
Ability 1: Flesh Destruction. Torsten's Metapower allows him to accelerate the decay process in a once-living body, causing days and weeks of decrepitude to occur within hours.
Ability 2: Inorganic Destruction. In much the same way as Ability 1, Torsten's power can work on materials that have never been alive.
Ability 3: Blight Detection. That which destroys calls to others of it's kind. Torsten, with a period of concentration, can detect natural sources of decay in his surroundings.
History
Torsten's early life was unremarkable, but with the emergence of his Metapower, his life started to change drastically. He became obsessed with the concepts of entropy, of decay and deterioration. He started experimenting with inanimate objects, toys which he would make rust away in the palm of his hand, disliked foods decaying to nothing on his dinner plate. that was until the day he found a dead bird. A cat had killed it, and then fled at the sound of Torsten's approach. The young boy prodded the bird curiously and watched as it rotted away beneath his fingers.
After that he was captivated. The raw beauty of his Metapower was intense. He could turn stones to dust in half an hour, cause fruits to shrivel to nothing in moments and he could strip the flesh of animals' bones within an hour. But his interest in decay was expanding. He was disappointed that his power was useless against living animals and plants. But snap the animal's neck? Uproot the plant? Then his powers worked. So he would kill animals he found. Never sadistically, always as quickly and cleanly as he could.
Then his father, James Cooper, found out. His father had come home from work early and caught him in the garage, decomposing a stray dog. Torsten greeted James with pride as he made the dog's flesh and muscles decompose, but it only caused his father grief. Torsten was confused by this, he could not understand why his father would feel sad.
Torsten's father was a police officer, a detective. His job was becoming harder and harder as criminal lawyers were becoming more and more underhanded at undermining cases, buying off witnesses, using legal loopholes to get key evidence barred and acting almost as criminally as the people they were trying to get cleared. James could see that one day his son would graduate from killing animals, the pleasure from watching them decay would not suffice, not even if it were something the size of a whale. One day, Torsten would kill another human being, just to watch them decompose.
So he decided to teach Torsten The System. It was a tried and tested system, since he himself used it. Over the years, as the frustration of having cases thrown out of court even though the evidence screamed 'guilty', James had become a vigilante. He had used his insider knowledge of the police system to track down those crooks who had made a mockery of his beloved law and continued to commit their crimes, thinking themselves safe from justice. He had hunted them, and he had killed them. Then he would leave their bodies in places that, when they were discovered, would be significant to their crimes. If a rapist stalked a certain park, his body might be found sat on a bench in the epicenter of his activities, a gangster might be found laid outside a business he was extorting. His calling card was removing his victim's eyes while they still lived, then wrapping a white linen bandage around the head after death. Justice was blind and now, so were the criminals.
James continued for many years at this endeavor, even as Torsten grew up and his need to kill matured with him. James would feed Torsten details of criminals and encouraged his son to execute them while James made sure they both had solid alibis. There was no reason to go alerting the IAB to suspicious, untraceable absences. It all worked well, until James caught a bullet in the spine bringing down a known serial killer. He was paralyzed from the neck down, only surviving thanks to machines. He asked Torsten to make his ending peaceful, but not to link it to his killings. Torsten agreed and applied his power to the interior of the machines keeping James alive. A short while later, the artificial respirator suffered a breakdown, which the respirometer failed to detect. James drifted off to sleep and never woke again.
And Torsten was alone.
Now he works for the MPD as a forensic Crime Scene Investigator, providing the much-needed forensic evidence needed to bring criminals to court. On occasions, one of them slips through the net and makes it back into society. But while it frustrates and angers his squadmates, it elicits very little emotion from Torsten.
After all, Justice will have his pound of flesh.
Personal
Motivation: Detect crime, prosecute the suspects to the extent of the law. Kill the bastards that get away.
Profession: Crime Scene Investigator.
Interests and Hobbies: Classical music (opera and orchestral music), horology.
Common Behaviors and Mannerisms: Torsten has adopted Aspergers'-like mannerisms: an inability to easily engage in small talk, strictly followed routines, intensive subject preoccupation, lack of empathy (this is not an affectation, but an actual problem), a pronounced head bob when he is speaking on a subject he is familiar with and an inability to maintain eye contact.
Personality: Torsten is most often very calm and collected, but has moments of frenetic activity. These occur when he is in a stressful, rapidly-changing situation.
Opinions:
Megalopolis Police Department: (+10) Hard-working, under-appreciated cops trying to bring order to chaos. They need all the help they can get.
Criminals: Bastards. (-5) They deserve what's coming for them. If the law cannot catch them, even when the evidence supports conviction, stronger measures are required.
Metahumans: (0) Some are good, some are bad. If they stick within the law, then they are not going to show on Torsten's radar.
