Post by Arcadio Buendia on Nov 26, 2016 18:10:12 GMT
Victor Arcadio Buendia
FACE CLAIM: Robert Rodriguez
♦ THE BASICS ♦
AGE: 44
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Bisexual
POSITION: Spanish professor♦ THE ABILITY ♦
POWER: Emotion absorption: Arcadio can absorb strong emotions from people around him, resulting in that person calming down/no longer experiencing that emotion, while Arcadio experiences it as his own.
Extreme Empathy: Arcadio has the ability to empathize with a person so deeply that he can mimic their personality. He will take on characteristics such as speech patterns, physical quirks, behaviour, and thought patterns of the person he is empathizing with. His mimicry can be so accurate that he can mirror a person’s actions exactly, or predict what someone might do in a situaiton.
LIMITATIONS:
Emotion absorption: Arcadio will only absorb one or two of the most powerful emotions being felt by the person he is directing his attention to. For example, if someone is feeling anger foremost, shock second, and sadness third, Arcadio will absorb the anger and part of the shock. He also cannot absorb from more than two people at a time. If he is absorbing from two people at once, he can only absorb two sets of emotions if the emotions are similar, like person A feeling disappointment and person B feeling sorrow.
Extreme empathy: The amount that Arcadio can mimic a personality depends wholly on how connected he feels to that person. He will not be able to mimic an acquaintance he has just met as well as a close friend or family member. There is also no guarantee that his predictions about someone’s course of action will be correct. There is an error margin of 40%, as Arcadio can only empathize— he is not literally becoming another person. There are things even he cannot empathize with, for example, life experiences that are so far outside of his personal experience. If he tried to empathize with a mutant who has a traumatic memory of the first time they ever shape shifted, Arcadio can only empathize with the surfaces of that trauma: shock, fear, physical pain, but not with anything involved with the shapeshifting that goes beyond what a non-shape shifter can understand.
SIDE-EFFECTS:
Arcadia cannot spend too much time in large crowds of people. It exhausts him and makes him feel sick. If he relaxes the control on his powers, he starts absorbing and empathizing more than he can handle, jumping from person to person. If he let that happen, he could become exhausted enough to pass out.
Empathizing heavily with someone will also cause Arcadio to experience disassociation. He mentally separates from his own identity, which causes him emotional anguish. Depending on how deeply he has assumed someone else’s point of view, it can take him anywhere from an hour to a few days to feel “himself” again.♦ THE FREEFORM ♦
You’re seven years old. Your father, Aureliano, is arguing with your mother, Remedios. You’re confused. You only asked if they could call you by your second name, ‘Arcadio’, instead of by Victor, which is your first. You’ve always wanted to be called Arcadio, just like the rest of your family. Like your grandfather Jose Arcadio, and your cousins Jose Aureliano, Arcadio Jose, Aureliano Jose, to name a few. All of the men on your father’s side are similarly named. Everyone in your hometown of Macondo, and even some other cities in Colombia, can tell a Buendia from the moment introductions are made.
“Let the boy be called what he wants!” Papa insists. “He wants to be called Arcadio, fine! It’s his legal name!”
“You’re only taking his side because you wanted to call him Jose Arcadio!” Mama fires back. “Victor is my grandfather’s name! Why should we keep your family tradition and not mine?”
You sit quietly in your chair at the dinner table as they continue to argue. You never met Mama’s parents. You never knew Victor Ortega, or his wife. But you know your Papa’s parents, your abuelo Jose Arcadio and abuela Ursula Iguaran. Abuela Ursula loves you dearly and tells you that you have a touch of magic about you, even if Papa scoffs when she says that. Abuelo tells you that one day you’re going to be a real man, and that he is very proud of you even though you are only a little niño. Maybe if you had know Abuelo Victor, you would feel differently about your first name. But your whole world revolves around Papa, Mama, Abuela Ursula and Abuelo. You can sense that if you say any of this out loud, Mama might slap your face for being naughty.
You’re twelve years old when the academy comes for you. Mack and Daphne? is that their names? Abuela cannot stop laughing when the serious people from the academy (serious to you, all adults are serious when you're that young) explain to Papa and Mama what this all means, and that you have powers. “I always said the boy had magic!” she cackles in an old dialect of Spanish, one that the polished academy people cannot understand. Your family is an old one, the oldest in Macondo, and there are some things best kept between relatives only.
You’re eighteen years old, and going to be graduating from the La Delgadillo Academia's high school soon. You do well in school. Unlike your cousin Oscar Ortega (from your mother’s side), who has a violent power, yours is subdued and you find it easier to control. School gives you structure, it gives you support. Oscar will be staying in the academy, but you have been given approval from the school board to apply to a non-mutant academy college once you graduate. You get into an education program, and your thesis work focuses on how to manage destructive behaviour, which no one knows how ironic it is, because you can’t manage your own.
You’re twenty six years old and you are in America for the first time. Your English is passable, but it helps that you left South America alone. You’re forced to use English to survive, and that’s the best way to learn. You have a rosary in your pocket from Mama, and a book of prayers written in the Buendia’s special dialect of Spanish from Abuela. In your bank account, you have a couple thousand dollars from Papa and Abuelo to get you by until you can find work. You have successfully transferred your teaching certification from South America to Los Angeles. America may very well be the land of opportunities, despite the warnings from your grandparents to be cautious of white Americans.
You’re thirty years old and you haven’t been back to Macondo since you left. You’re ashamed to go back. You can’t face your family like this. Practically homeless, selling yourself for money, addicted to drugs and liquor. You drink beer every morning when you wake up to stop shaking and feeling nauseous, you smoke weed right after to get hungry enough to eat breakfast, and before lunch even arrives, you’re itching to shoot up. Your head is always fuzzy. You don’t feel anymore. You’ve stopped empathizing, you’ve stopped absorbing. That is the one relief that your situation brings. You don’t have to be in control anymore. You don’t have to worry about losing yourself in someone else’s personality.
Instead of being lost in someone else’s personality, you’ve lost what it means to be a Buendia all on your own.
You’re forty years old and barely sober, let alone completely clean. You haven’t done drugs in six years, but you can’t seem to stop drinking. You would never admit it out loud, but you like it too much. There’s nothing quite like a cold beer. Your arms have healed, although you don’t think the needle mark scars will ever fade more than they have. You’re almost finished your degree in education and counselling psychology. You never would have made it this far on your own if it weren’t for your cousins Oscar Ortega and Jose Aureliano sending you money. They sent it secretly, of course, without telling your parents or grandparents. But that’s what family does, they support each other. Neither of them know exactly how far you fell, but they never asked. You know that you will pay them both back one day. You have a neat tally of exactly how much you owe both of them in the last page of the book of prayers Abuela gave you all those years ago.
You’re forty four years old and you’re staring at yourself in the mirror. You’re examining your light brown eyes, your tousled black hair that’s hidden too often under a hat. You’re looking at the dusting of stubble on your cheeks. You should probably shave. You’re also aware that you reek of booze, but a shower and teeth brushing will fix that. You have a better handle on your drinking. Privately, you style yourself as a ‘functioning alcoholic’. You repeat that to yourself so often that you’ve begun to believe your own lie. But in the end, you have to get through each day. You have a job now, a Spanish professor at Bellefonte Academy in Kalispell. Papa is proud of you for being a part of such a prestigious institution. Mama is proud too, but she still refers to you as ‘Victor’ when you call. No one has called you that for thirty six years. You even forget that ‘Victor’ is your real first name sometimes. They both still bug you about not having found a wife or had kids yet, but you have nothing to tell them about that. You wants kids more than anything but you know you're too messed up to raise a child.
Abuelo Jose Arcadio died six months ago. You’re heart broken. You flew back to Macondo for his funeral. You’re grateful that you got to see him once more before he died, the year before. Abuelo hugged you as tightly as he could with his thin arms when you visited, and whispered to you that he was as proud of you as he could ever be, and that you were a true Buendia. When your grandfather hugged you, you were no longer a six foot two, forty three year old man. For a brief flicker in time, you were a small, bright eyed eight year old boy again. That moment stands out clearly in your head and you don’t think the memory will leave you. Seeing Abuelo during that visit was one of the only sober days you had in months. Abuela Ursula is still alive, and you send her emails and, on special occasions, hand written letters. You suspect that she knows everything about you, even your lowest moments, but she never lets on. You also suspect that she has the ability to read minds, but Spanish mutant academies were not around when she was a young girl. She loves you unconditionally, anyway. She’s always known you best, after all.
After a shower, you pull on a pair of pants, toss on your leather jacket, and grab your cowboy hat before you walk out the front door. Work starts in an hour, and you want to grab breakfast from that food truck near your place beforehand. Another day, another dollar is the phrase you’ve always heard, but to you another day means another twenty four hours that you’ve been alive.♦ THE PLAYER ♦
USERNAME: Harvey
AGE GROUP: 23
EXPERIENCE: yeeeaars
WHERE DID YOU FIND US? Same as with Axel ha
