Decepto

DECEPTO[/div]



Real Name: Steven Lucas



Alias: Decepto



Title: Mind Manipulator



Identity: Secret



Age: 21



Species: Neo-Human







Physical Appearance: While his telepathic powers and ability to alter the perceptions of others allow him to make people see him however he wants them to, out of costume Steven's true appearance is a young man standing about 5'9 and bit on the thin side, a bit on the pale side, dark circles under his eyes, with messy dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He tends to favor black clothes, t-shirts and jeans, though not in the intensity that would get him labeled a goth by any means.


As Decepto, Steven wears an elaborate costume designed to look like an extraterrestrial being, with a black padded kevlar bodysuit, gray gloves and boots, a tattered purple basketweave cloak, and a silver-colored helmet and gorget made of themoplastics and coated in fiberglass. The helmet has an elongated head and a visor in the front that conceals the wearer's face that resembles a large eyeball with ever-undulating green coloration.





Personality: Outwardly, Steven is a brilliant young man for his age. He is the type who doesn't actively seek company or companionship having given up on those things a long time ago. Instead he seems mostly career and goal-driven, an eccentric young genius who can seem quite philosophical at times when he has time to really think about things. He is also an enormous sci-fi geek, having grown up on all sorts of movies, books, and games of the genre from early childhood and thus they have a special place in his heart and he may be prone to reference them once in a while. Despite this, he can be charming and very cunning when he wants to be, having a way with words when he wants something and using his telepathic mind-reading to help him decide what best to say that will sway one's opinion to his own.


However, he is also rather jaded under the surface. He knows how Neo-humans are viewed and has decided if they'll see him as the scary intruder and monster then that is the role he will play to the utmost. Better to embrace the role people associate you with then to skate uphill trying to prove otherwise to those whose minds are already made up.
As a result he dislikes normal humans and sees them as beneath him.

As Decepto, Steven embraces the roles of the alien invaders and over-the-top villains he grew up loving and thinking were cool in the sci-fi movies he enjoyed. He is theatrical, menacing, and arrogant, making himself the center of the show and seeing everyone as his audience and uses his telepathic powers to their fullest to overwhelm his foes and make a damn good performance of it. It is a release to him, a chance to fully indulge in his powers and play with them to his heart's content with no one able to stand in his way.







Powers: Decepto is a powerful and versatile telepath, with the following abilities...


-Mind-Reading: Decepto, can read another's mind and read their thoughts, making it difficult to sneak up on him as it allows him to sense another's presence by hearing their thoughts. With more focus, Decepto can scan a person's memories for any specific knowledge or information he may believe them to have that he is looking for, even those buried deep down or seemingly forgotten and force them forward into the person's mind.


-Hypnotism: Decepto can combine use his telepathic powers along with his perception-altering gasses to enforce hypnotic suggestion to override a person's thoughts to obey his commands and alter their memories create temporary "proxies" until they are either rendered unconscious or the drugs he used wear off, leaving them as they were with no memory of the experience. This requires time and a great amount of focus and maintaining a psychic link during the process as it involves overruling a person's will and projecting his own thoughts into their mind.
Decepto is still unskilled with this but intends to improve upon it...

-Psionic Resistance: Because of his ability to enter anothers person's mind, Decepto is also able to consciously sense and fight back against mentally intrusive abilities that are used on him and even damage the mind of the person attempting to do this via the psychic link created by such an action.


-Illusions: Decepto can project vivid, lifelike illusions, limited solely by his imagination that give off the appearance of a reality-warper to those affected by them. From subtle things like making his prop sword look real or the eyeball-like visor on his helmet looking very much alive, to creating walls of flame or fake "magic" spells or copies of himself or of other people to distract his target.


-Hallucinatory Visions: One of Decepto's favorite uses of his power is to implant telepathic illusions in another's head and alter their perceptions. He can do this to one person or even a crowd if they are within range of him, though due to limitation they will all share the same vision, such as being adrift in the middle of the ocean or in space, or that they are on fire or sinking into the ground. Like his illusions, they are limited only by his imagination. When focusing on a singular target, he can trap people in nightmarish visions based off his victim's memories and fears that feel completely real, convince a target they are interacting with a mental image of an individual to the point of fooling their sense of sight, hearing, and touch, or making an enemy believe they have killed him when in fact he is standing right behind them unharmed and concealed by the vision.


-Dream Manipulation: Similar to his hallucinatory visions, using his invasive mind reading and memory scanning abilities, Decepto can "see" and interact with an unconscious person if they are dreaming, either to communicate or even control their dream entirely and trap them within it while maintaining a psychic link with their subconscious. If he is harmed in the real world or the person who's dream he is invading manages to regain control he can be forced out.





Abilities:


Gifted Intelligence: Steven has a 140 IQ, able to learn and process information at a much higher rate and excel in things that interest him at a faster pace then most his age. If he were more open about it he may have been forcefully recruited by the government upon graduation from college due to being considered "too dangerous" to work anywhere else or otherwise be left in the open market.


Costuming: Decepto is a master costume-designer and craftsman, skilled at designing convincing costumes and props.


Acting: Steven is a talented actor as a side-hobby. He loves getting 'in-character' and switching between hammy and over the top to subtle and smooth and vice versa, and flawlessly imitate countless scenes from movies he enjoys, particularly those of the sci-fi genre. He uses this to his advantage to make his illusions and mind tricks more convincing as well as to give his Decepto alias its own persona.


Chemistry: Steven has some skill with college-level chemistry, at least enough he knows how to create mind-affecting substances with certain incense drugs containing dis-associative agents and convert them into smoke bombs.







Weapons/Equipment:
In costume, Decepto has a supply of equipment, all of which named in ways only a sci-fi geek would come up with.

"Alien Suit": A custom-made alien costume that Steven wears to conceal his identity as well as use for his image he is trying to project as an extraterrestrial entity. The suit comes with a gas filter in the helmet to protect him from his own drugs, a utility belt that allows him to store things, and kevlar body armor is worn underneath the chest of the costume to protect him from gunfire.



"Dimensional Blade": An elaborate, alien one-handed sword wielded by Decepto. It has a curved handle and a green blade and certainly looks like something from another world. In truth, it is actually a prop replica sword from an obscure sci-fi series Steven is a fan of and he uses his powers to make it appear more authentic.



"Neutron Gloves": Decepto's gauntlets are actually "stun gloves" he had commissioned for him, gloves equipped with electrical voltage similar to a taser. He can use them to stun someone by grabbing them, or firing bolts of electricity from the fingertips by pressing a small switch on the side of the index knuckle. This is his preferred method of defense if forced into a physical confrontation he cannot use his powers on as he is mostly unskilled as a fighter.



"Chaos Bombs": Decepto often carries smoke bombs filled with designer incense drugs and disossicative agents to distract and disorient his enemies and dull their senses to make them more susceptible to his telepathic powers. They are worn on his belt and attached to clips that make them easy to remove.





History: Steven Lucas had been a huge fan of science-fiction ever since an early childhood, the type who constantly made alien costumes and bought lots of sci-fi themed toys and books and watched movies of the genre fanatically. But this was far from the only thing about him. As he grew older, Steven's intelligence became more and more apparent, boasting a genius IQ on tests that got him into gifted schools, though his genius made him few friends and several classmates jealous enough to give him a hard time.


Things changed one day in senior year of high school when Steven discovered he could hear others' thoughts, and over time discovered he could do so much more, including seeing peoples' memories and being able to create illusions. First testing it in prestidigitative ways, he later escalated to more selfish and vindictive actions, namely having dealt with his worst school bully by making him hallucinate that alien monsters were attacking him, an experience so traumatic the bully ended up catatonic, and later subjecting a girl who had set him up on a prank date to a horrible nightmare. This brought men from the government to his school but they could find nothing concrete to confirm Neo activity as neither victim was in any state to be credible to their experiences. Steven, meanwhile, graduated and moved on to college.

Things remained mostly uneventful in the next few years, until something far more unexpected happened; a surge in Neo-humans as well as the arrival of "vagrants" from other realities caused the government to take a more aggressive stance and the public grew far more distrustful and hostile towards "Neos" in particular and how special task forces were now rumored to be hunting them down. Rather then stay in hiding, Steven decided he would face them head-on in the role people wanted to perceive them as.


Dropping out of college, Steven spent the next year honing his powers till he used them to steal from banks, keeping himself mobile to reduce suspicion until he had enough money to put together an alien-themed costume and gear he needed for his plans. Decepto was born, ready to show the world he would not live in fear but rather the ordinary people would fear him.







Weaknesses:


Only Human: Under his costume and behind his mind tricks, Decepto is an ordinary young man with average strength at best. As a result he is vulnerable to all the things that can kill a normal human including severe injury, blunt-force trauma, poison, disease, and the like.


Physically Unskilled: Due to spending all of his time on intellectual and artistic pursuits, Decepto is wholly unskilled in hand-to-hand combat and is not particularly strong physically, and is thus mostly reliant on his powers to have the advantage, and prefers to remain at a distance in a confrontation.


Other Telepaths: Just as Decepto is resilient to other telepaths' latent abilities, the same works the other way as well: Strong telepaths have a natural heightened resistance to Decepto's powers and as a result have a much better chance of seeing through his illusions, resisting his more invasive abilities, and overcoming his hallucinations, and fight back against his abilities telepathically, even damaging his mind with enough effort.


Smell: While Decepto can fool perceptions by creating hallucinations based on smell, as he only has human-level senses and thus he cannot replicate more acute smells which humans cannot pick up, such a person's specific scent. As a result those with a heightened sense of smell will likely notice an illusion or hallucination of another person lacks a scent, or carries Decepto's own if they recognize it and he is attempting to disguise or conceal himself with his powers and better discern what is real and what is not.

Distraction: If Decepto is harmed or otherwise efficiently distracted while using his powers, his concentration breaks and his illusions and hallucinations become harder to sustain.
If rendered unconscious, any illusions or hallucinations he is maintaining also disappear.






Other Information: My freebie character



OOC Information

OOC Name: Shady

Character color:
3dc942
Group title: Mind Manipulator

Face Claim: Artwork