kidthesedays | deerington app

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Number Five
Canon: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Canon Point: End of episode 7, after he passes out from blood loss

In-Game Tattoo Placement: Right forearm, mirroring his umbrella tattoo
Current Health/Status: Major abdominal puncture wound from shrapnel, but alive and stable
Age: Mentally 58, physically 13
Species: Human (theoretically), mysteriously superpowered

History: He has a wiki page here but it has almost no useful information. To supplement, here is a written history:

Five was born very suddenly on October 1, 1989 to a woman who hadn't previously been pregnant, simultaneously with 42 other children all over the world. He and six other of these children were promptly bought by an eccentric billionaire-adventurer-Olympic gold medalist(??? who knows) named Reginald Hargreeves for, uh, study. All these children turned out to have superpowers.

Ol' Reggie was a piece of shit who thought the best thing to do with these children was to run experiments on them and raise them as child soldiers for an eventual superhero team. Reginald delegated the entirety of the actual child-rearing to a robot and a sentient chimpanzee; for a while the children didn't even have names, only numbers, with the actual naming left to their robot mom. (Why Five never got a name is unknown.) This, surprisingly, did not result in a healthy and well-adjusted childhood for anybody.

Five's power is the ability to jump through time and space. He's also a precocious little shit, and when he was thirteen he really wanted to try the whole time travel thing even though Reginald forbade it. He tried it anyway, and promptly fucked up and got himself stuck in an apocalyptic future for like thirty years. Oops!

After decades of living entirely by himself (and a mannequin he projected a personality onto), scavenging to survive, and fruitlessly trying to figure out a way back home and prevent the apocalypse he was stuck in, he was recruited for an organization called the Commission, which is tasked with maintaining the time continuum. He would travel to various periods in history and assassinate anyone threatening the integrity of the timeline in order to ensure historical events played out as they should. Like Time Squad but, like, with murder.

After several years of this, he had an epiphany regarding his own personal time travel mission and broke his contract in order to arrive eight days before the apocalypse was set to happen (April 1, 2019), when his adopted siblings are now almost thirty. Unfortunately, he fucked up again and arrived in the thirteen-year-old body he'd had when he left the first time, not his actual age of 58 (give or take).

He promptly dismisses his entire family's attempts to help him with anything and tries to avert the apocalypse all by himself. This doesn't work out very well, the apocalypse happens anyway, and he has to jump back in time again (but with everyone this time) in order to give it another shot. End season one! His pull point is mid-season, after he gets a shrapnel wound from blowing up the Commission (which wants the apocalypse to happen), then neglects to tell anybody about it and later collapses. He's very competent.

Personality: So, first thing, main thing: Five's a dick. He was a dick as a child, he's a dick as an adult, he always has been and always will be a dick. He's brusque, condescending, impatient, plain old intentionally hurtful on occasion, and one hell of a show-off. His being a dick is partly what got himself stuck in the apocalypse in the first place, and part of what made it so damn difficult for his family to get their shit together and prevent that apocalypse later (earlier?) on, so you go causing all your own problems, dude. But that's the stumbling block of his personality in a nutshell: pride, and how it causes him to shoot himself in the foot.

Even as a child, this is evident. He toys with his opponents, gleefully shows up his siblings, and challenges their father to a degree even Designated Rebel Diego doesn't (that we see, anyway). And as an adult... he toys with his opponents, condescends to his siblings, and is abrasive to everyone he meets. He's extremely smart, capable of calculating fourth-dimensional probability and quantum mechanics on the fly, but he's also fully aware of this, which makes him insufferable. But above everything else, he is--in a word--driven. At the end of the day, what defines him isn't that he's a smartass, or an insensitive jerk, or capable of breathtaking hubris--it's his sheer refusal to just lay down and die, in circumstances in which most people would happily give up. As long as he has breath to take another step forward, he'll take one. And then he'll take another just to show you that he fucking can.

But it isn't for his own self-preservation that he does this. In truth: he loves his family. Keeping his family alive through the apocalypse is his most important motivation and, in many ways, his only motivation. He doesn't seem to care how much he, personally, is a part of their lives--what matters is that they have them. In fact, he seems to think he doesn't belong with them anymore; he acts it's as if he's "better" than them (something he actually says at one point), and part of it is genuine arrogance, but he also doesn't seem to think that he's worthy of them anymore. On some level, he thinks of himself as a bad person. He tells the Handler that he doesn't belong anywhere because of the killer they made him into, and she counters that he always was one, and that would maybe qualify as one of his greatest fears if he didn't already know it to be fact.

Because it really is true that protecting his family is his only motivation. It isn't just that there is very little he wouldn't do to ensure their survival--there is nothing he wouldn't do. He survived in the apocalypse for over thirty years out of sheer cussedness for it. He's killed likely hundreds of innocent people for the Commission, probably tortured nearly as many, for it. He drives himself to the point of exhaustion and ignores his own life-threatening injuries for it. It is the only thing he cares about, no line he won't cross for it, and it's that drive, that tenacity that kept him alive and made him a legend within the Commission.

The thing, though, about having only one thing that you truly care about is that losing it is the most terrifying thing in the world, and so his greatest fear is, quite simply, failure. His family dying is the one thing he will do anything to prevent, and that makes his family his greatest weakness. And, since he's convinced he's the only person in the world capable of actually accomplishing this, that's a lot of pressure he puts on himself. It also only hurts him in the end--he dismisses his siblings and keeps important information from them when telling the truth could have rallied them sooner. (It also could not have, considering how dysfunctional they are, but he didn't even really try.) His pushing them away is a fear of vulnerability, as well. Several times his siblings express concern for him, and he simply seems to think he doesn't need it. He doesn't ask them for help, or accept it when they offer, because he's convinced they can't, so there's no point in them trying. And he knows better than everyone, so that's the end of it.

There's a point where his brother Klaus compares Five's fixation with the apocalypse to Klaus's own drug addiction, and the takeaway seems to be that he's correct to do so. I'm pulling Five from before this conversation takes place, but it's still relevant: he's so driven by preventing the apocalypse that he won't know what to do with himself with it out of the equation. He even admits as much! He's been addicted for forty-five years, to the point that it's more or less become his identity. Or, more accurately, he's sacrificed so much of himself to it that it's replaced his identity. It's certainly something that haunts him. It's all but said outright he has PTSD from his experiences--he even has on-screen flashbacks--and more than once his siblings wonder if he's just lost his mind.

Socialization, too, is... tricky, for Five. By all indications, he's fairly extroverted, but decades of existing entirely by himself have impacted his ability to socialize in a healthy way, as well as impacted his tolerance for it. He might be willing to murder and even die for his siblings, but he can't actually seem to be able to stand being in the same room as them for any significant length of time. And yet, the isolation affected him badly enough for him to create an imaginary companion for himself in the form of Delores--a broken mannequin he found in the ruins of a department store, and also, to his mind, a fully fleshed out person that he is in a long-term relationship with. He holds entire conversations with her and absolutely seems to think she is real, despite also knowing she's a mannequin, and reacts to her being "in danger" with the same seriousness as a real person. He risks his own life to save her, early on, despite that potentially putting his plans at risk--and she's the only "person" he's willing to do that for, other than his family. And she's a mannequin. Dude needs therapy.

So, all this combined paints a kind of terrifying picture. Ultimately, Five is a person who is capable both of great arrogance and great self-sacrifice. To be honest, I don't think he entirely thinks of himself as a person. The apocalypse was a crucible that boiled him down to his basest priorities very early on in his life--that was what he got instead of a real childhood, a real adulthood--and that's had a tremendous impact on his sense of self. He isn't whole, anymore, and he knows it, but he can work with it because it's what he is. He didn't choose this life, he's just living it. And that kind of pragmatism is maybe the most succinct encapsulation of his character that I can think of.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:

Teleportation: Five can perform "spatial jumps" (he also calls it "blinking") which essentially means he can teleport. Distance limitations aren't clear, but it seems to be relatively short, and he seems to need either line-of-sight or thorough knowledge of where he's going (he can, say, jump to his attic room from a lower floor, but he still needs to drive places and we never see him jumping farther than, say, across the street). There's also a limit to how much he can do it within a short period, and when he reaches it his power will simply not work, or will take significantly more effort to do so. He is able to take objects with him but has never indicated that he can bring along a person.

Time travel: Five can also travel through time, but he's not particularly good at it and it seems to require precise calculation to work. He has never actually been able to time travel without fucking up in some way: the first time, he got stuck in the future and couldn't get back; the second time, he accidentally stuck himself in a younger body, which seems to be permanent. This is probably why he's only attempted unassisted time travel three times in his entire life (we don't know what the consequences of the third will be, since it was the season one cliffhanger). He will likely not be attempting time travel while in Deerington, but if he did, it would be warped in accordance with the guide--that is to say, he'd only be able to do it within Deerington.

I don't believe his powers require further warping, but because his teleportation and time travel are technically the same ability I'd like to apply the skin-tearing handicap to his spatial jumps as well, mostly because I'm a dick.

Inventory:

Delores (a broken department store mannequin who is also his girlfriend)
One (1) sniper rifle he stole from his dad's study
One (1) box of ammunition

Writing Samples:

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Sean
Player Age: 18+
Player Contact: PM this account or

cerebrah

Other Characters In Game: None
In-Game Tag If Accepted: number five: sean
Permissions for Character: here (still under construction)
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yep!
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Psychological horror, cosmic horror, and surreal horror are big faves. Horror that forces characters to address unpleasant things like trauma or personality flaws, horror that blurs the line between reality and unreality, horror about very basic, primal human fears, Lovecraft-adjacent horror about things that are beyond a human's capacity to understand, that kind of thing. I also dig the sort of Stepford wrongness that Deerington seems to be built on. Silent Hill, Amnesia/Penumbra, It Comes at Night, Triangle (2009), the Fallen London setting, and the original Blair Witch Project are all properties that really press the right buttons for me. Anatomy is probably the best horror game I've ever played, if you're familiar with that.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Nope!
Additional Information: n/a