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Entry tags:
Prismatica App;
▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Lettie
CONTACT: DM
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: None so far
▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Klaus Hargreeves
CANON: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix Series)
CANON POINT: Post Season 1
AGE: 29
BACKGROUND:
▶ Four was born on October 1, 1989 at noon. His mother had not been pregnant when the day began, which might explain why she was so eager to hand her newborn child over to a complete stranger by the name of Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Surely a billionaire recluse had a great grasp on how to raise children, right?
Right. Only well-adjusted people name their children in the order which they take possession of them. Along with five of his other six siblings, Four spent the bulk of his childhood being groomed by Reginald to become a member of the Umbrella Academy team. He didn’t learn until much later on in life that Reginald had planned even before taking these children into his care to use them to try and put an end to the apocalypse that destroyed the world.
Reginald’s children possessed abilities – Four communicated with the dead, for example. Reginald spent much of their childhood trying to ‘prepare’ the children by exposing them to increasingly dangerous and traumatic situations to strengthen their powers: he locked Four in a mausoleum in an attempt to have him overcome his fear of the dead (it didn’t work).
He was only named ‘Klaus’ after one of his brothers, Five, disappeared into time and space and his mother, Grace (a hyper-realistic and extremely intelligent AI) insisted the children be named. That’s fucked up, man.
Understandably, Klaus’s relationship with his father (and by extension, his father’s favorite, Luther) was strained throughout his childhood and well into adulthood. He coped with his powers by dampening their effect on him using drugs and alcohol, blocking out or at least dulling the voices of the dead that he heard day in and day out. The only spirit he could not block out was that of his brother, Ben, who had died when they were teenagers (this might be by choice, since Ben acts like Klaus’s conscience on more than one occasion).
When we meet Klaus again in the beginning of the series, he’s just overdosed on drugs after being released from a rehab facility (he high fives a paramedic – yes, seriously).
Here’s a summary of his actions in the first four episodes.
As it turns out, Klaus ends up being transported to Vietnam in 1968. He spends nearly a year in the country fighting for the United States; he falls in love with a man named Dave and returns to the present only when Dave is killed on the front lines. Dave dies in Klaus’s arms.
Klaus spends a short time with Diego and Five before he returns home to find his brother Luther, drunk and wishing he were more carefree like Klaus – which is a real problem, since Klaus is hoping to get someone to tie him up so he can get sober. What ends up happening is that he has to track Luther to a rave, and experiences PTSD flashbacks of sufficient intensity that they threaten to overwhelm him, but that instead bring him into contact with his father.
Reginald informs him that he committed suicide in order to bring the whole family back together so that they can save the world, and Klaus returns to the living without hearing the other important things that Reginald has to say.
Klaus relays this information to the rest of the family, and it goes as well as one might expect: Luther (their supposed 'leader') goes out and gets drunk again, and Klaus, Diego, and Five have to go and rescue him.
Almost completely unknown to all the brothers (because they’re stupid boys, mostly), their sister Vanya has discovered that she’s had powers all along. In fact, her powers are more powerful than everyone else’s, and that’s why their father convinced their other sister, Allison, to brainwash her into thinking she was normal. That’s fucked up, man.
Vanya comes to the house, angry at all the siblings for excluding her for her entire life (fair), and tears down the building with their mom in it (less fair). Diego is almost crushed by debris, but Ben manifests in time to push him out of the way of the rubble (and Klaus takes credit, because he’s Klaus).
The family agrees that they need to go and find Vanya, and even though Klaus is the one who ends up doing it (he finds a newspaper advertisement for her concert), he gets no credit for it. Diego at least listens to his plan, though, since the guy saved his life earlier. Klaus tries to backtrack and explain that Ben is actually around, but since he can’t get it up to manifest him catching a bowling ball he just ends up as the boy-on-drugs who cried wolf.
They all go to the concert anyway, but they leave Klaus outside as a lookout. Leaving the easily distracted brother as lookout goes predictably well, so he ends up getting food when shit starts going really south. He ends up running into the theatre, manifesting Ben-and-the-tentacles (his deceased brother's powers, but also a great band name) and kills a bunch of dudes – but as usual, the women actually know what they’re doing, so Allison is the one who actually stops Vanya from murdering all the siblings.
Unfortunately, this leads to Vanya’s super-powered laser beam blowing up the moon, which is what actually causes the apocalypse. Klaus comes to Prismatica right as Five is teleporting all the siblings back in time before the present version of it gets destroyed by moon chunks.
PERSONALITY:
▶ Klaus was raised by a man with the emotional intelligence of a cucumber, so he has what people like to call 'unhealthy coping mechanisms'. He's quick to give in to vices when he's feeling stressed (when he comes to Prismatica he's going to have a few cigarettes on him, but that's it): drugs, alcohol, sex, trouble ... whatever he can get his hands on to stimulate him. He started using substances as a teenager to cope with the militantly strict and downright abusive home of Reginald Hargreeves. These avoidance techniques mean that Klaus has buckets of unresolved trauma that's really just been building on top of itself for the better part of two decades, and he's only very recently become interested in even starting to confront them -- it's going to be a wild ride.
▶ Being raised by Reginald (who went so far as to tell Klaus he was the 'greatest disappointment' after his death), Klaus doesn't have a well-developed sense of self-esteem: this means that he's impulsive, prone to making decisions that he doesn't think through or know the consequences of, and that he absolutely has a 'will try anything once' mentality (and a 'try anything more than once' if it's enjoyable). He doesn't give himself much respect, and has a hard time thinking that he'll be able to do much. He's very much of the mentality that if you plan for the worst, when it happens, at least you'll have something witty to say about it.
▶ As we mentioned before, Reginald couldn't parent a pet rock: he didn't praise or encourage his children. With Klaus, this means that he's now constantly seeking attention - whether positive or negative -- he's more than willing to use his sometimes cartoonish personality to cheer the people around him up when they're blue, or simply to draw attention in an uncomfortable situation.
▶ From the wardrobe he wears to how he tilts his head when he talks to someone, Klaus tries to control his body language when he's consciously able to as much as possible. This take the form of obvious posing and posturing, and is yet another layer of 'pretend' protection that he can use to bubble-wrap himself from his issues.
▶ He's incredibly suspicious of people who claim to 'care' about him. His 'mom' growing up was a highly-developed android, so he had the joy as a ten-year-old of trying to decide whether his mom was programmed to say she loved him to increase his compliance with his father's wishes or because she'd developed sufficient sentient personality to mean it. It messes a guy up, all right? While he ultimately wants to do what's right and to help his family and the other people that he cares about, he also has a hard time working up the nerve to do so.
▶ It takes him a while to genuinely warm up to someone. By nature, Klaus presents himself with an off-the-wall and over-the-top personality and flippant attitude, which provides an easy buffer for people even wanting to get too close -- but once people do end up getting under his skin, they'll find that he's actually a fairly decent listener (but don't take any of his advice) with a good heart. Combine this with his lack of self-preservation, and he's actually a pretty good friend to have, once you gain his trust. His personality tones down minutely around close friends and family he trusts, settling in to snarky comments and sarcasm instead of fireworks-worthy flare.
▶ You know what's super hard to do when there's ghosts literally floating in and out of your line of sight and sometimes screaming stupid shit into your face? Focusing. Klaus might seem like he has the attention span of a goldfish, but -- well, at least he has a reason -- he's either sober and seeing ghosts, or high out of his mind and seeing colors. Regardless, he's incredibly distractible.
▶ Oh, and on top of that distractability? Just toss in some PTSD: Klaus' already jumpy personality can kick into overdrive, especially around stimuli/triggers surrounding war (or the death of soldiers): this can lead to him becoming angry or irritated especially easily.
▶ Incredibly claustrophobic. His father locked him in a mausoleum with then intent of having Klaus get over his fear of the dead, but it turns out all it did was traumatize him and make him gain a new phobia.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
▶ Mediumship: To put it simply, Klaus is able to both see and communicate with spirits of the dead. The spirits never speak through Klaus, he just gets to act as the not-so-happy middleman in conversations between you and grandma about how she really loved her cat Sprinkles more than you, and that's why he got her house in the will. Although he can allegedly 'summon' spirits, it doesn't really seem to work reliably. This might just be because Klaus spends most of his life in various states of intoxication.
▶ Astral travel: On at least one occasion, Klaus travels to what amounts to the afterlife to converse with his dead father. The man belittles him about squandering his potential, but he gets a hot shave out of the deal, so it's still an upgrade to how Reginald treated him for most of his life. This seems to only work when Klaus has a near-death experience.
▶ Spirit manifestation: With enough concentration (and expenditure of energy), Klaus is able to 'pull' spirits from their usual realm into reality. This is shown with varying levels of both success and magnitude: Klaus is able to manifest a spirit who is at first able to physically hit him in the face, then push another person out of the way of a falling object, and finally completely bring that person forth to interact with reality as if they were a completely real being. It seems like extremes of emotion, especially distress or fear, fuel this power positively. It's pretty darn exhausting, though.
INVENTORY:
▶ An old-school cassette player with headphones
▶ A 3/4 full carton of cigarettes
▶ A purple glitter lighter
▶ An old, creased photograph of Dave
▶ A pair of cheap sunglasses
▶ A mickey of tequila
MOONBLESSING: Cordis
WARE WOLF REWARDS:
▶ Barrierette (3/3 uses remaining)
▶ Totally Globular!
▶ Moonstone Necklace (enhanced freezing in Cordis)
▶ Dusklight Bracelet (magic regardless of moon cycle!)
▶ SAMPLES
link #1
link #2
HANDLE: Lettie
CONTACT: DM
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: None so far
▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Klaus Hargreeves
CANON: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix Series)
CANON POINT: Post Season 1
AGE: 29
BACKGROUND:
▶ Four was born on October 1, 1989 at noon. His mother had not been pregnant when the day began, which might explain why she was so eager to hand her newborn child over to a complete stranger by the name of Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Surely a billionaire recluse had a great grasp on how to raise children, right?
Right. Only well-adjusted people name their children in the order which they take possession of them. Along with five of his other six siblings, Four spent the bulk of his childhood being groomed by Reginald to become a member of the Umbrella Academy team. He didn’t learn until much later on in life that Reginald had planned even before taking these children into his care to use them to try and put an end to the apocalypse that destroyed the world.
Reginald’s children possessed abilities – Four communicated with the dead, for example. Reginald spent much of their childhood trying to ‘prepare’ the children by exposing them to increasingly dangerous and traumatic situations to strengthen their powers: he locked Four in a mausoleum in an attempt to have him overcome his fear of the dead (it didn’t work).
He was only named ‘Klaus’ after one of his brothers, Five, disappeared into time and space and his mother, Grace (a hyper-realistic and extremely intelligent AI) insisted the children be named. That’s fucked up, man.
Understandably, Klaus’s relationship with his father (and by extension, his father’s favorite, Luther) was strained throughout his childhood and well into adulthood. He coped with his powers by dampening their effect on him using drugs and alcohol, blocking out or at least dulling the voices of the dead that he heard day in and day out. The only spirit he could not block out was that of his brother, Ben, who had died when they were teenagers (this might be by choice, since Ben acts like Klaus’s conscience on more than one occasion).
When we meet Klaus again in the beginning of the series, he’s just overdosed on drugs after being released from a rehab facility (he high fives a paramedic – yes, seriously).
Here’s a summary of his actions in the first four episodes.
As it turns out, Klaus ends up being transported to Vietnam in 1968. He spends nearly a year in the country fighting for the United States; he falls in love with a man named Dave and returns to the present only when Dave is killed on the front lines. Dave dies in Klaus’s arms.
Klaus spends a short time with Diego and Five before he returns home to find his brother Luther, drunk and wishing he were more carefree like Klaus – which is a real problem, since Klaus is hoping to get someone to tie him up so he can get sober. What ends up happening is that he has to track Luther to a rave, and experiences PTSD flashbacks of sufficient intensity that they threaten to overwhelm him, but that instead bring him into contact with his father.
Reginald informs him that he committed suicide in order to bring the whole family back together so that they can save the world, and Klaus returns to the living without hearing the other important things that Reginald has to say.
Klaus relays this information to the rest of the family, and it goes as well as one might expect: Luther (their supposed 'leader') goes out and gets drunk again, and Klaus, Diego, and Five have to go and rescue him.
Almost completely unknown to all the brothers (because they’re stupid boys, mostly), their sister Vanya has discovered that she’s had powers all along. In fact, her powers are more powerful than everyone else’s, and that’s why their father convinced their other sister, Allison, to brainwash her into thinking she was normal. That’s fucked up, man.
Vanya comes to the house, angry at all the siblings for excluding her for her entire life (fair), and tears down the building with their mom in it (less fair). Diego is almost crushed by debris, but Ben manifests in time to push him out of the way of the rubble (and Klaus takes credit, because he’s Klaus).
The family agrees that they need to go and find Vanya, and even though Klaus is the one who ends up doing it (he finds a newspaper advertisement for her concert), he gets no credit for it. Diego at least listens to his plan, though, since the guy saved his life earlier. Klaus tries to backtrack and explain that Ben is actually around, but since he can’t get it up to manifest him catching a bowling ball he just ends up as the boy-on-drugs who cried wolf.
They all go to the concert anyway, but they leave Klaus outside as a lookout. Leaving the easily distracted brother as lookout goes predictably well, so he ends up getting food when shit starts going really south. He ends up running into the theatre, manifesting Ben-and-the-tentacles (his deceased brother's powers, but also a great band name) and kills a bunch of dudes – but as usual, the women actually know what they’re doing, so Allison is the one who actually stops Vanya from murdering all the siblings.
Unfortunately, this leads to Vanya’s super-powered laser beam blowing up the moon, which is what actually causes the apocalypse. Klaus comes to Prismatica right as Five is teleporting all the siblings back in time before the present version of it gets destroyed by moon chunks.
PERSONALITY:
▶ Klaus was raised by a man with the emotional intelligence of a cucumber, so he has what people like to call 'unhealthy coping mechanisms'. He's quick to give in to vices when he's feeling stressed (when he comes to Prismatica he's going to have a few cigarettes on him, but that's it): drugs, alcohol, sex, trouble ... whatever he can get his hands on to stimulate him. He started using substances as a teenager to cope with the militantly strict and downright abusive home of Reginald Hargreeves. These avoidance techniques mean that Klaus has buckets of unresolved trauma that's really just been building on top of itself for the better part of two decades, and he's only very recently become interested in even starting to confront them -- it's going to be a wild ride.
▶ Being raised by Reginald (who went so far as to tell Klaus he was the 'greatest disappointment' after his death), Klaus doesn't have a well-developed sense of self-esteem: this means that he's impulsive, prone to making decisions that he doesn't think through or know the consequences of, and that he absolutely has a 'will try anything once' mentality (and a 'try anything more than once' if it's enjoyable). He doesn't give himself much respect, and has a hard time thinking that he'll be able to do much. He's very much of the mentality that if you plan for the worst, when it happens, at least you'll have something witty to say about it.
▶ As we mentioned before, Reginald couldn't parent a pet rock: he didn't praise or encourage his children. With Klaus, this means that he's now constantly seeking attention - whether positive or negative -- he's more than willing to use his sometimes cartoonish personality to cheer the people around him up when they're blue, or simply to draw attention in an uncomfortable situation.
▶ From the wardrobe he wears to how he tilts his head when he talks to someone, Klaus tries to control his body language when he's consciously able to as much as possible. This take the form of obvious posing and posturing, and is yet another layer of 'pretend' protection that he can use to bubble-wrap himself from his issues.
▶ He's incredibly suspicious of people who claim to 'care' about him. His 'mom' growing up was a highly-developed android, so he had the joy as a ten-year-old of trying to decide whether his mom was programmed to say she loved him to increase his compliance with his father's wishes or because she'd developed sufficient sentient personality to mean it. It messes a guy up, all right? While he ultimately wants to do what's right and to help his family and the other people that he cares about, he also has a hard time working up the nerve to do so.
▶ It takes him a while to genuinely warm up to someone. By nature, Klaus presents himself with an off-the-wall and over-the-top personality and flippant attitude, which provides an easy buffer for people even wanting to get too close -- but once people do end up getting under his skin, they'll find that he's actually a fairly decent listener (but don't take any of his advice) with a good heart. Combine this with his lack of self-preservation, and he's actually a pretty good friend to have, once you gain his trust. His personality tones down minutely around close friends and family he trusts, settling in to snarky comments and sarcasm instead of fireworks-worthy flare.
▶ You know what's super hard to do when there's ghosts literally floating in and out of your line of sight and sometimes screaming stupid shit into your face? Focusing. Klaus might seem like he has the attention span of a goldfish, but -- well, at least he has a reason -- he's either sober and seeing ghosts, or high out of his mind and seeing colors. Regardless, he's incredibly distractible.
▶ Oh, and on top of that distractability? Just toss in some PTSD: Klaus' already jumpy personality can kick into overdrive, especially around stimuli/triggers surrounding war (or the death of soldiers): this can lead to him becoming angry or irritated especially easily.
▶ Incredibly claustrophobic. His father locked him in a mausoleum with then intent of having Klaus get over his fear of the dead, but it turns out all it did was traumatize him and make him gain a new phobia.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
▶ Mediumship: To put it simply, Klaus is able to both see and communicate with spirits of the dead. The spirits never speak through Klaus, he just gets to act as the not-so-happy middleman in conversations between you and grandma about how she really loved her cat Sprinkles more than you, and that's why he got her house in the will. Although he can allegedly 'summon' spirits, it doesn't really seem to work reliably. This might just be because Klaus spends most of his life in various states of intoxication.
▶ Astral travel: On at least one occasion, Klaus travels to what amounts to the afterlife to converse with his dead father. The man belittles him about squandering his potential, but he gets a hot shave out of the deal, so it's still an upgrade to how Reginald treated him for most of his life. This seems to only work when Klaus has a near-death experience.
▶ Spirit manifestation: With enough concentration (and expenditure of energy), Klaus is able to 'pull' spirits from their usual realm into reality. This is shown with varying levels of both success and magnitude: Klaus is able to manifest a spirit who is at first able to physically hit him in the face, then push another person out of the way of a falling object, and finally completely bring that person forth to interact with reality as if they were a completely real being. It seems like extremes of emotion, especially distress or fear, fuel this power positively. It's pretty darn exhausting, though.
INVENTORY:
▶ An old-school cassette player with headphones
▶ A 3/4 full carton of cigarettes
▶ A purple glitter lighter
▶ An old, creased photograph of Dave
▶ A pair of cheap sunglasses
▶ A mickey of tequila
MOONBLESSING: Cordis
WARE WOLF REWARDS:
▶ Barrierette (3/3 uses remaining)
▶ Totally Globular!
▶ Moonstone Necklace (enhanced freezing in Cordis)
▶ Dusklight Bracelet (magic regardless of moon cycle!)
▶ SAMPLES
link #1
link #2