Registry of the Evolved Database
File #12 Oct 2008 05:47
|
 Chris Evans |
Born Under A Bad Sign
Amadora gave birth to him on the fifteenth day of November in Palermo, Sicily, where her nebbish husband was paying off their cyan blue house. He had a lot of good gifts even before his preternatural potential was actualized. Palmero had everything he needed: lots and football fields to skulk around, boats to steal, girls who were susceptible to him, turbulent politics and a pair of large blue eyes to distract the teachers from his truancy, a mother whose beauty drew remarks from everyone who knew her — which sometimes ergo provided punches to throw if pickings ever got lean, and a baby brother who knew he was more than all that.
Teodoro wasn't a bad kid according to the Book, if you were the kind of Catholic who attempted an optimistic spin on its teachings, and his family was. He averaged in drunkenness no more than any of the other boys his age. Only, he tended to forego binging a few days a week in favor of evening out his substance use right up to the day before Mass, and people talked about hangovers in and absences from the pews though they accepted practices that were scheduled with less day-to-day consistency. The same went for fighting, fornicating, and to slightly lesser portions, doing homework. His mother was occasionally criticized about it. On those occasions, punches were thrown. Teo wasn't the most tactful boy, and he certainly wasn't the more tactful of Amadora's sons.
Rom was the other one. As far as he was concerned, Rom was the smartest person Teo knew. Since childhood, Rom liked math. Rom would say, Math isn't boring if you know enough about it. It's a universal language, the same everywhere you go — Stockholm, Barbados — pure, but with just as few absolutes as anything true. It gave him troubling things to say and sophisticated things to think about, and the vice versa was true also. For example— and Teo always remembered this story— the one crucial proof of why you couldn't divide by zero was that, otherwise, nothing else made sense. It all hinged on one simple thing.
In contrast, Teo was good at languages. His writing was pretty good and he had very little patience for poorly-constructed literature. He was a character of immense internal restlessness: he always had something to say, but never seemed to have a way to say it.
Suffice to say, he learned to take a punch in the years before Romero's Evolution kicked in. The worst of those shattered his brow and cheekbone, causing a considerable hole in the family savings when he had to have metal plates screwed in to keep his head together. It was a long story and only Rom knew the whole of it. During that time, he also acquired various other skills and knowledge that he considered pretty cool. Among them, how to: travel across the rooftops of the cramped rows of residential homes without hurting himself, open a beer (practically) on his eyelid, pacify angry dogs, ingratiate himself with infants, understand river traffic, make meat sauce, speak without accent, and bless bullets that would guide themselves true. You had to boil them. He never did it, himself; he wasn't that kind of kid. It made him more confident his choice of friends, however, to discover that he was partially invulnerable when Romero turned twelve.
Romero and Teodoro were connected. It was difficult to specify the precise mechanic how, but the overall effect was that each brother was the end of a gateway, through which any major physical impact or the object that gave it would go through the target brother and protruded out through the front of the other one's body — as long as they were within half the city of one another. Knives, fistloads, kicking feet, baseball bats, even needles left them completely unmarked. It was fortunate neither of them was prone to illness.
The initial discovery was hard to pinpoint, exactly. Teo found himself surprisingly unscathed from a handful of mild scuffles, and Rom found his watch strap sliced in two once while Teo was helping Amadora cook. They talked about it eventually, quietly, in fascination, and a mutual understanding that no one else needed to know. Experimenting with their ability was good-humored and kept quiet. Rom, who tended to be lost in thought, might occasionally forget his lunch; Te would run home to retrieve it by way of jamming it into his torso. There were other, subtler and perhaps further and deeper-reaching components of their bond there also, but that much they attributed to God, love, and intuition and saw no need to question it further.
Not at that time, anyway. That time came three years later, which were counted in joyrides and academic accolades for the siblings respectively.
In Which Teo Fucks Up
Teodoro was seventeen when his favorite football team completely crushed their rivals in a legendary tournament, the first time the two teams had drawn each other in lottery for six years. Fallout was inevitable. The leader of the other team's pack was Giuseppe Braga, a bigger, burlier, and more handome boy, whom he hated unequivocally. The verbal confrontation was brief but spirited, escalating sharply from cursing each others' football teams of favor to personal insults. I'm not a man of such clever words, Giuseppe sneered (where 'clever words' apparently categorized a series of 'if' 'then' statements detailing the ascent of the Braga family to opposable thumbs), But I'm a man of action, and you are a dead one.
Teo tore that statements to shred. They was running, shouting, punching, the distant whoop of sirens as the gang territory oscillated wildly back and forth. They wound up at the wharf. Twenty boys, shouting and throwing bottles. One exploded over Paco's head, covered his hair in blood; Angelo was holding a stone in one fist, had a climbing carabiner around the knuckles of the other. Teodore threw up his arms and sauntered up to Giuseppe, arms out. Vedere. Jesus has risen! Giuseppe took out a handgun, the one everyone had heard of. Teo didn't back down, of course. Drunk off adrenaline, he was bulletproof and ten feet tall, only the second one metaphorical, and he had no way of knowing Romero was holding his girlfriend then.
It took her five minutes to die, perforated thrice. It took much less than one minute for Romero's horror to sicken Teo's gut. He knocked Giuseppe off the dock and ran all the way home. He arrived as the ambulance pulled away, his lungs on fire and a calf muscle pulled, body-checked against a neighbour in her apron. Who? he asked her. Who was it?
Romero was, in Teo's opinion, the more precocious of the two and had always been. Not the least qualification for that was the fact that he had fallen in love first. Having never experienced that himself, Teodoro made excuses that he shouldn't have, seizing on denial to assuage guilt. It was an accident, it wasn't his fault; it was unbelievable, he'd never have done anything like that if he knew, so it couldn't be his fault. Romero hit him for the first and last time after dinner. No one understood, of course. The official story was something about an unknown shooter who had broke in, come and gone, taken nothing but a little girl's life. These things happened. Sicily was a violent country. The funeral was enormous; she had been well-loved.
According to the brothers' new psychologist, they were cycling through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief normally although she could not quite follow the concatenation of logic or associations in all their manifestations. In Teo, first came and went the urge to wreak lethal vengeance on Giuseppe. Perhaps ironically, the greatest deterrent at that point was his brother's proximity and their gift was active. Bargaining mostly involved settling for gradually smaller and smaller allotments of vengeance, before rotating entirely to focus on appeasing his brother. More understandably than Teo wanted to admit, Romero would have none of it. They tackled depression in a concert movement, a melancholy that was equal parts inconsolable rage, irreparable hate, and a loneliness that neither brother could outrun. After a few months, Romero chose to drop out of school and left Palermo to backpack across the world. No amount of pleading could stop him.
And thus it became that the courses of the brothers' fates were irrevocably and ironically switched. Kind of. The literary conceit was perhaps charming, but in common truth, people only change so much. Rom had lost his locus on things. Deprived of frame of reference and no longer certain of the basic principles on which he had constructed his life, nothing made sense to the younger brother anymore. He lost interest in — everything. Spoke less, but he still thought as much and as deeply as ever, only now he seemed incapable of excavating himself from whatever permanent darkness he sought to join his girlfriend in. On the other hand, Teo had been 'scared straight' by what he had done.
Despite the majority of his time was initially spent staring absently out classroom windows, he began to attend school regularly, cooperated with his psychologists, and eventually the pointless circularity of their sessions spun off its axis and broke new ground, none of the material in which was necessarily useful in and of itself — Teo didn't know how to take the the implication that his theatrical thrill-seeking was a method of castrating his impotent father to marry his mother, for instance — but he appreciated having someone to talk to, now that he had dispensed entirely with his erstwhile circle of friends. The thugs had let him go with surprising grace; the one girl he'd ever lasted with, Michele, slightly less so. She didn't like it when he told her he'd always remember her as the bellissima ragazza who broke a vacuum machine over his neck. He gave up his recognizable vices and made plans for his life. Most of them revolved around making money, being constructive, doing his mother proud; his brother, it seemed, was beyond reach.
And Improves Upon His Character
He studied hard, went to college in the United States, at New York University, where he made up for the fact that he was a year older than most of the other incoming freshman by almost immediately undertook a double-major in Chinese language and business. Though he succeeded well there for a year, he leapt at the opportunity to transfer to Columbia University on a partial scholarship when he impressed one of the world's leading Sanskrit experts and researchers, a tenured professor from the school at a cafe, and that ancient language and science became his third major. At the time when all the other liberal arts students were finally deciding on their majors, he realized he didn't really like his and decided to take a year off. He then embarked on a strange and wonderful adventure to find himself.
Teo had realized he wanted to make something with his hands. Unhelpfully, this implied skilled labor which without an engineering or technological bent to his proclivities, was not particularly compatible with higher education. He found himself working in construction and antique bookstores for over half a year, during which his crowning achievements included pushing the plunger for a demolition of a skyscraper and keeping his neighbour's a thirteen-year-old son in school, ostensibly by tutoring him in French. He received letters from his mother frequently and word of his brother rarely. Words couldn't describe the peculiar song — limerick, really — that his heart sang, when he found the ad in the paper, for young men between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, preferably of non-Chinese descent or citizenship, who were interested in sailing across the Pacific Ocean in a three-man boat.
Yan Xiao-Ming was the son of a ranking Communist Party member, an intelligent, discerning young man with a nugget of solid gold in his heart, a cunning head for infrastructure, achieving fame, money, and choosing friends. He didn't particularly like that Teodoro was the son of nobody in particular, but after a few meals and conversations, went away with an unusually estimation of Teo's intelligence and felt he had promise; he also appreciated the unexpected cultural identity. Thus, Teodoro was in. The other man who made the cut was Finn Hartmann, who was the son of a powerful oil tycoon, a dedicated carnivore and rifle enthusiast, Mississippi born and raised, and yes, for fun he and his friends really did drive down to the river and drink all day. Training for the cross-Pacific undertaking was rigorous, at times maddeningly thorough, but refreshing after hundreds of hours inhaling the city's dust, be it the powdered stone at building sites or the weird citrusy stuff in the libraries. He'd missed being out on the water.
The journey took almost thirty days, lengthened by two unexpected storms and navigational difficulties after a peculiar magnetic phenomenon just North of Australia that prompted Finn to verbally regurgitate a transcription of a television series. The three grew close in the way that young men could when they appreciated having a certain amount of personal space. By the end, they each knew a little bit about each other: Yan's somehow 'embarrassing' egalitarian streak, Hartmann's difficulties with alcoholism, and Laudani's baby brother. They swam a lot, diving through the fingers of God refracting through the sifting surface; saw a blue shark, once, somehow caught an abalone that they threw back because they couldn't spare the gas to cook, prayed to a whole lot of different gods during the bad weather, and a dolphin nearly broke Finn's arm.
The three were welcomed in Canton, China like heroes. The drove of newspaper headlines always listed Teodoro Laudani him last, which made all three laugh. After an initial bottle of champaigne, there were expensive and unpaid escorts in lieu of alcohol, out of deference to Finn, and they met Mr. Yan whom Teo ultimately decided was probably more unpleasant to share a handclasp with than a corpse. They toured the Terra Cotta, Great Wall, and peculiarly extensive rose gardens of Beijing, sampled the seafood of Hainan, sped through the lakes of Guilin (by then, een they had had enough of water), explored the nightclubs of Shanghai, and were each of them respectively, pleasantly distracted when two unexpectedly brutal events occurred almost simultaneously.
First of all, New York City exploded.
Secondly, Teo's shirt unaccountably fell apart in shreds while he was poking around a flea market. For the first time in years, he felt that strange, secondhandedness of experience cloy his concentration. Yan was completely perplexed when Teodoro pled with him to rifle all of the city's immigration information within the last month, but consented when Rom's name was dropped. Finn was beside himself with concern for his family, though his father forbade him from returning so soon — if he could get a flight home anyway. The week of November 2008 was fraught with enough tension to break your teeth on. It concluded with Finn's departure, amid a lot of hugs and gruff sentimentality, and the first time Teodoro had seen his brother in five years— and he missed Mass to do it, for the first time in just as long.
Perhaps predictably, Teodoro's nerves failed him before he could do much more than peer through the little dim sum restaurant's greasy window, angling the trajectory of his sight around the row of basted ducks on their hooks. He was happy to see the younger man was in good health if slightly gaunt; not a knife-prick or an obvious enemy in sight. He mumbled something embarrassing to himself, and left.
Unable to reconcile himself with the idea of returning home with neither a degree nor any of his savings — and in spite of a considerable amount of protest from family and friends, he returned to New York City in late October. It looked like snow had come early, all the ash still lying around. He discovered that the window was gone but the apartment had somehow escaped being broken into. Creepily enough, his cactus plant had grown four inches and separated into two distinct hemispheric lobes. He moved it to a larger pot, started the arduous if not impossible process of acquiring government compensation for his investment losses, and found a job helping with repairs and structural safety analysis. Wonderfully, there were plenty of hands-on jobs around, now. He threw up everywhere the first time he worked down at the river's edge. People had sought shelter from the fires in it, their skin sloughed off into the salt water whole pieces like shirts and gloves, dehydrated in less than a day. The neighbour's kid cried when he saw Teodoro was back, and invited him to Christmas dinner.
Two years passed. The cumulative difference between the end and the beginning of that period were as follows: he added a pet budgerigar to his apartment, a clever little white-and-blue girl one, four sets of dinnerware, two suits, a gun he never used except to learn how, and most of the remaining academic credits necessary to graduate with a degree by studying at one of the few remaining educational departments at Columbia University that hadn't been completely deprived of funding and overlapped with his previous coursework— teaching. He saw Petrelli's announcement on the television, and thought little of it; he incidentally avoided crossing paths any recognizable metahumans and he was himself, for all intents and purposes, perfectly normal.
He made friends. Tried dating a little, a few of them memorable, painful, valuable. One who made him laugh with stories of before the bomb, another trying to cope with the fact that radiation exposure had conspired with unfortunate genetics to keep her looking thirteen though she had just turned twenty-one. He sent home most of the money he made, ostensibly for safekeeping. Yan and Finn visited, a few old friends from Sicily who were just passing through, hoping to take advantage of the depreciated dollar. Michele agreed not to come when asked.
Another Social PARIAH
It couldn't be said that Teodoro had had much experience picking terrorists out of a crowd, but to be fair, the store was otherwise empty the day he had his first run-in with PARIAH. He was with a coworker. Only one: Jeanette, a skittish, notoriously neurotic girl who was constantly checking her palms for the scarlet speckling of burst blood vessels that were the dark harbinger for all radiation poisoning victims… despite the fact that she had been in perfect health for years. She was skittish, temperamental. Teo was studying their only patron idly between conversations, and came to realize that the odd woman, buying all that fertilizer, had a gun in her coat rather than a wallet. He'd had a headache since morning, the kind that walked all over the rest of your day, ached around the eyes which might have been attributable to the metal still bolted into his head, he didn't know; anyway, he was probably thinking only about as much as he wasn't.
He grabbed a box of the most harmless thing he could find: wobbly-headed dashboard ornament Statue of Liberty dolls, and went up to her to make suggestions. Teo proceeded to talk, rapidly, out of his ass with granulated advice tossed in for good measure. They had, he fabricated, recently implemented a door-to-door service for larger quantities which only required payment at the end of the transfer. He also knew an art supply place where she could pick up wet picric acid, which had a lot more staying power than henna. He stared at the lady's trolley full of fertilizer bags for a moment, let his face change when Jeanette called out asking if he wanted anything from the cafe, looking up at her. For whatever reason, that worked. She let Jeanie go and assessed their ridiculous stand-off over the wobbly-headed statues with obvious ammusement. Said to him, Son, if you hold saving lives as your highest good, you're pretty mixed up about it. He left with the stranger, goods in tow, and was fired from the job for his trouble.
A few days later, he was helping that same woman — Simone — mix the stuff without burning off her eyebrows and teaching physical geography to a few kids at one of the Ferrymen safehouses. By the next week, she disappeared in the line of duty and the kids had moved off with their respective families to Staten Island, but Teodoro showed up to help anyway.
It went like this: there was a boy, once, who tried to turn a horrible old mistake into a reason to salve the erratic pangs of a restlessly maladjusted childhood with some semblence of maturity and live a useful life. He became tidy and kind to offset the disorder of his mind, dabbled in heroism to conceal the blood he smelled on his hands. Later, after some more people died on him, the debt that the world owed him inversed his entire worldview and slowly, his conciliatory gentleness, generosity, and humility became temporary obstructions that kept him from succumbing to his rage. He then came back in time to change history. Now, Teodoro Laudani is both of these two men merged and, therefore, neither.
Teo's previous selves had so many disagreements on the most basic issues of their lives that that it is impossible for him to escape the instinct to self-analyze on an almost pathological basis. Where his younger self was as honorable as practicality ever allowed and remorseful whenever it didn't, the older was a brutal solipsist who cajoled fathers into raping their daughters and maimed his friends almost as often as he ignored them. They walked differently, dressed differently, ate different food, and Ghost refused to drop the token words of Italian that his younger self was enamored of; whereas the kid was incapable of self-pity, the ghost refused to feel pity. As such, Teo is painstakingly aware of the effect of nature over nurture, of how event and causation determine the shape of one's personality and the color of one's moods, rather than the enduring influence of the bitter moat of some unique human soul.
This strange sense of detachment is deeper-reaching, disquieting, and more intrinsically painful than a joint popped out of place or a wrenched vertebrate— it's the entire dislocation of himself. It's as if there were a defect in the facial processing parts of his brain structure: the sight of his own reflection gives him the continuous, nagging sensation of something 'off,' in the symmetry or detail. Only, you know. He isn't all that brain-damaged. Usually.
For now, he is compelled more by inertia than anything else, and finds himself choosing his enemies as conscientiously as the white knight did and retaining his friends as fastidiously as the old serial-killer harbored his ghosts, but he is regularly taunted by the obvious wisdom of seeking new companionship and picking different battles. After all, these are the ones who ultimately drove him mad, if through no fault of their own. He is subconsciously and consciously programmed to fear any sort of libidinal excess: keeps his infamous temper in a paranoid chokehold, regards sex (once his fondest habit!) with squeamish distrust, refuses to access prayer. He knows he could do something different with his life. He thinks he knows he could do something different with his life.
Half the time, he feels neither twenty-six years old or thirty-six, but sixty two, ancient, all out of epic romances and rescues, and crabby about all the damn kids on his lawn. The rest of the time, the boingy-boing whiplash-inducing bipolarity of his identity issues is synced to a soundtrack constituted of Linkin Park covers by some adolescent's garage band. The only actual mathematical mean he sketches between his predecessors is the fact that he is agnostic.
What remains is the possibility that it's the ones who don't need to worry about keeping their passions who must, by nature of subjective priorities, always be afraid of fading— like the irony that a man who has no cause to fear for the state of their mortal soul is exactly the kind of man who would worry they don't have one. Teo's probably still present in here somewhere more meaningful than superficial mannerisms or knowledge base, some common root or essential seed of self, just as he was probably somehow present in both the littlest hero and the blithely destructive nihilist before. If there's such a thing as truth, Teodoro Laudani may well have finally earned the chance to express this in a truer form than either of his predecessors ever had. First and last, he's had to learn — is still learning — to forgive.
This time, not as a function of self-loathing or the byproduct of making harshly pragmatic, interchangeable alliances and enemies between discrete projects, but because of genuine humility, from having lost so many battles of his own. Fuck off, abandonment complex! Somewhere between here and there, there's also some clause about his fatal weakness for girls who won't back down from a fight and hero worship.
More than most things, he is worried that somebody's going to want to bring the Teo of 2019 back— and necessarily rip him apart in the process. Importantly, he's also typically running on five hours of sleep a night. This is a rather aggravating side-effect of the non-Evolved and Evolved parts of his brain and psychic presence douching up in hopeless mismatch, and has numerous effects on him day-to-day: he is more impatient, less accurate, forgetful, and reliant on substances to either put him out or keep him up. Ghost no longer had dreams, and he isn't sure if he does, either.
Teo's Evolved ability is astral projection: he can separate his consciousness from his physical body. This ability was artificially induced in Ghost, a future version of himself, by an injection of the Formula serum during an alternate timeline of existence referred to as the Bright Future, and Teo currently retains it because Kazimir's lifeforce manipulation forcibly combined Ghost with Teo's self in 2009.
Unlike many other astral projectionists, Teo's consciousness always requires the presence of other human minds to work. Incapable of the classic stunts like wafting around in the air or walking through walls, he can only jump from one host body to another.
Stunts
| Six Extra Senses |
The easiest and most common component to this ability is that to perceive the world through the senses of another human being. Teo can not essentially read thoughts or emotions, but he can see through people's eyes, listen through their ears, feel through their skin, and even extrapolate to spatial awareness, kinesthesis ('muscle sense') and proprioception ('body in space'). This also gives him access to any special Evolved senses as well, though he can not necessarily interpret information the way his host does. The distinction between sensation and feeling is extremely ambiguous, but the net effect tends to ultimately limit how accurately Teo can make predictions about the individual's future plans and intentions based on their physical behavior. He can feel the pulsation, weight, and flip-flop of a broken limb, but he can only guess that there is pain or waves of relief after a morphine injection; he will register the prickle and a certain stiffness of cold, but would be unable to tell whether the person he's riding along with enjoys it or finds the chill unpleasant. High input traffic makes Teo flounder to sort through without practice, at the very least, and Tamara's massive precognition shuts him down entirely. He would be able to see a higher chance of success when an Evolved probability predictor looks between two people and happens to be talking out loud about hiring an assassin. However, he wouldn't be able to tell whether the predictor was about to successfully kill the favored ninja or hire him for a successful wet operations. Surprises: they happen. (Especially with probability predictors.) (Fuck you, Edward.) |
| Conversational Telepathy | Under limited circumstances, when Teo is inside somebody's head and enjoying the world from their vantage point, he can also talk to his host psychically and get their responses.
Whole conversations can happen! This only applies to surface thoughts and deliberately communicated intentions. He can by no means read anybody's mind. His host is as capable of deceiving him as they are anybody they're on Skype with, though of course, having a psychic hanger-on playing witness to one's brain often makes it necessary to be very careful about how you craft your lie. Teo's astral projection tends to depict people's head-voices with unique flavors and characteristics. For example, before the merge, non-Evolved Teo's head-voice sounded A LOT LIKE THIS. HE WAS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME AND HAD VERY LITTLE SUBTLETY OF TONE, LILT, OR NUANCES OF ACCENT, EVEN WHEN HE WAS ASKING POLITE QUESTIONS. Eventually, he turned down the volume but still sounded like a dweebily cantankerous little robot. Ghost, who sounded two-tone with a simultaneous bass rumble and an overlying metallic melody, thought that the shouting was the ugliest thing in the universe and extraordinarily annoying. Merged, Teo's current voice sounds extremely weak and whispery. Conversational telepathy is vulnerable to the host's own will and desire, even if they are non-Evolved. The host can block out the sound of Teo's head-voice, choosing not to listen, or refusing to hear. |
| Forcible Disembodiment ('Brain Punch?') |
Being punched in the head can be pretty bad. Being psychically punched out of your mind is extremely unpleasant as well. To do this, Teo must have line-of-sight on a target. He then jumps out of his body, shoves them out of theirs, before bouncing back. Though in theory this could directly kill someone by summarily relieving them of their 'mortal soul,' that's never actually happened before: by dint of either physiological mechanics or God's blessing, most humans have their minds and bodies pretty firmly connected to each other. The discomfitted mind soon settles squarely back into the body. Instead, his targets tend to suffer a negligible instant in silent darkness and then a terrific neuro-electrical backlash that feels almost exactly like being electrocuted, maxing out at a taser's effect of 50,000 volts. Depending on how hard he shoves, and a little luck, the target mind may suffer anything from a startling, staticky zap to paralyzing pain and complete unconsciousness. He can hit multiple targets almost simultaneously, but he must have line-of-sight on them or they on each other, and summed altogether, all combined blows can not exceed 50,000 volts. Knocking two people entirely into unconsciousness with one strike is not possible. |
| Dream-Walking | Other times, Teo has zero (0) access to physical perceptions but winds up fully immersed in the subjective and amorphous landscapes of sleepers' subconscious. Usually, this happens when he too is asleep, though shallow glimpses into a sleeping human's head are possible when he is awake and lucid, thanks to the weird interplay between senses and cognition involved in dreams.
Perception is again his strong suit. Anything his host dreams, he'll be able to 'see' and 'hear,' either in first or third person. However, even here, his ability to understand and interpret the emotions and thoughts of his host is limited. Roses, ingested blood, and clowns mean different things to different people, and sometimes differently when one is asleep to when one is awake. Sometimes, he'll be able to tell whether one means to drink blood for Catholic salvation or is deriding oneself as a murderous monster, but not always. Manipulating dreams is a little harder. Astral projection tends to characterize a set of stunts that emphasize passivity more than affecting the world, after all. Back in the day, Ghost's main problem was that he gave everybody nightmares, and the more of his will he tried to exert, the darker his host's dream would become, perhaps as a function of his own mental pathologies and this forced him to stick to small, subtle changes. Currently, Teo is simply weaker overall. He is not capable of instigating huge changes to his hosts' dreams. He can change of symbol, replace a prop, or insert his own shape and consciousness into the preexisting world, but nothing greater and not all at once. |
Limitations
| A Slippery Lifeline |
Any destination host must be within 200 yards of the last one, and his normal senses help steer. Without (or beyond) hearing and line of sight, Teo's aim is pretty awful, and his sense of direction and distance extremely rough. Though he'll always land on someone if there are people close enough, picking one person out of a crowd if he can't see them is likely to land him in another, and his ability to return repeatedly to a target is easily thrown by movement. When awake and mobile, Teo can only 'stretch' to look outside his own body for about 5 seconds at a time before the 'tether' snaps with violent force, and his body summarily goes slack as an abandoned puppet. He falls over in a dead faint! Crawling back into his body from this kind of accident results in disorientedness and half-capacity at higher functions and fine controls for at least an hour. Injuries have been sustained. This means he trends toward making periodic radar 'ping's. Basically, he can flash a series of quick glimpses instead of monitoring his target steadily over time. He sends pings at a faster rate of frequency when he's tracking somebody specific, a slower rate when he's merely checking his perimeter. Of course, other times: it's okay to leave your house empty with the porch light off! Maybe someone is guarding it for him. Maybe he's willing to take the risk, or there isn't much of one today. If he doesn't have to maintain consciousness and availability of response in his physical body, he can choose to leave it behind. When Teo does this willingly, his astral projected form can jump around with far greater freedom, and return relatively painlessly. While he'll still be a little woozy, it will wear off within an hour. |
| Dual Mode | Maintaining consciousness and astral projection at the same time requires considerably more preparation.
Ghost discovered that an hour of meditation (prayer, breathing exercises, concentration— pick your poison) would allow him to lengthen the so-called tether, so that as long as his physical body does nothing more strenuous than walking around and idle conversation, he can simultaneously launch his astral projection out of the airlock and proportion his focus between the two. Currently, Teo can kind of do this too, but it generally takes him longer to prepare, maintaining the trance requires more concentration, and pretty much half a day disappears if he wants to find or accomplish anything at all. If he is startled, stressed (either physically or psychically), or gives in to bodily exhaustion, he snatches back into his own body. Ghost's range between 'jump' targets also expanded when he was in dual mode, but Teo's does not, and sometimes even shortens due to the effort involved. Ghost also required proportionally less sleep after a few hours' meditation, but this version of Teo is not a psychotic gymnast monk. |
| Meddling Takes Work |
For the active components of his ability, both dream manipulation and conversational telepathy, Teo must always completely leave his body to devote his full resources to the task. Whereas the passive stunts occur more or less instantaneously, these two also take longer to kick in, from one minute to hours. They also expose him to certain types of retaliation from his host: dreamers can push him out or erode him away, and telepathic conversations can be blocked out. Relatedly, forcibly disembodying someone— that is, brain-zaps, are pretty tiring, too. At best, Teo can only do this 3 or 4 times in a day without turning into a sloppy disoriented mess a 14-year-old could beat up bare-handed. |
| Miscellaneous Annoyances | As a side-effect of his astral projection, Ghost never had dreams of his own; he always, automatically went dream-walking instead, then woke into his own body fully-rested and happy as a clam in shit. This version of Teo is only halfsies, and has some compatibility malfunctions. Sometimes he dreams, sometimes he physically can't and goes dream-walking as a consequence. His quality of sleep is almost always worse than it ought to be, and he can only stay asleep at a maximum of 6 hours at a time before REM cycles and ability jarr him awake. |
Appendices
|
"Aime-moi moins, mais aime-moi longtemps." Christophe Honoré, |
Skills
Languages
Teodoro has a talent for languages which has been visible in him since he was extremely young. He speaks and writes in a staggering array of languages and is remarkably good at picking up new ones.
Of mother tongues, there is both the regional Italian and the Sicilian dialect despite that the latter has begun to fade from the younger generations recently. He knows some Finnish due to his father's mixed ancestry. From childhood studies and reasonably common usage, he can speak in English, German, French, Spanish, and Latin idiomatically and is somewhat literate all five. From more extensive schooling and practice, he can read, write some of, and is fluently conversational in Russian, Sanskrit (if people still conversed in that, anyway), Beijing Mandarin of Chinese, and Cockney Rhyming Slang. He also speaks various amounts of Japanese, Korean, modern Arabic, Haitian, Swedish, and Hebrew.
Maritime Navigation and Vehicle Management
Having grown up on salt water, spent most of his formative years doing idiotic things like stealing boats, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean a year ago, Teodoro is pretty good on water. He can navigate with sparse equipment and the celestial bodies viewable from Earth, as well as crew, steer and do basic repairs and maintenance on small to medium-sized wind-powered and motorized boats. As a function of this past-time, he is an extremely strong swimmer, has a good weather-eye, and possesses a reasonable knowledge of many bodies of water and as well as world geography, though he is primarily familiar with the coasts of Northern Sicily, California, Manhattan Island, and the Canton region of China.
Self-Defense
Wholesome water-sports aside, Teo spent a lot of his adolescence hitting things — people, really — and getting hit. Though he was never signed onto any 'official' football firm, he was a fairly active member of the sports riot scene in addition to the other delinquency he did until age seventeen. He learned, mostly in spectacularly undisciplined fashion and perhaps a little instruction from friends who mixed pleasure with martial art, how to defend himself, land hits, and utilize common melee weapons. On a related note, he's also a pretty fast runner, has been known to climb things to get away from police, and knows how to differentiate between flesh, arterial, herniated, and bone injuries and stop a bleeding wound.
Having lived just below Harlem on Manhattan for five years, he also legally owns a Para-Ordnance P-104, a .45 recommended to him by a shooting enthusiast he had met on his break from higher education, Finn Hartmann. He knows how to use and maintain it, though bad past experiences with firearms make him understandably reluctant to. He has not discharged this weapon outside of practice since owning it.
Construction and Demolitions
Having worked in this industry on-and-off for several years, Teodoro shadowed and ingratiated himself with people who appreciated his attitude. Though not the most experienced worker by any stretch, he has enough of an understanding to be useful in government-mandated building safety and regulation, heavy machinery handling such as cranes and diggers, structural safety analysis, explosive materials and mechanisms, building power and electrics, plumbing, and safe handling of structural materials. Despite that his co-workers were almost invariably good, salt-of-the-earth laborers and respectable experts, enough talk got bandied around that he also achieved a fair grasp of popular options for improvised explosive devices. Boys will be boys.
Animal and Plant Handling
Being a dog-whisperer probably would have spared Teo and his friends a few injuries in the halcyon days of yore. For lack of that, they learned to create distractions and generally get along well with such animals. As he got older, Teodoro expanded his portfolio to include care and maintenance to include cacti, basil plants, ferns, and other rare and elusive representations of the floral kingdom, and currently also has an immense fondness for budgies, one of whom he is training, mice, and arachnidae and insects of all kinds, including a grotesquely enormous (probably irradiated, immortal) silverfish that lives between his apartment bedroom and kitchen. He is not nearly as good with large, hooved animals and cats are pretty hit-or-miss with him.
Business
His first major back at New York University saw Teodoro hew his way through a series of macro, microeconomic, and policy studies with considerable difficulty. Unfortunately, the language of math didn't resonate well with his brain; unsurprisingly, that particular academic pursuit didn't last, though he managed to keep it from obliterating his GPA or anything like that. However, these studies gave him an appreciation for the intricacies of business operation and managerial science, and his friendships with Yan Xiao-Ming and Finn Hartmann led to conversations and reading recommendations that made much more sense to him. He has some opinions on and understanding of the ins, outs, and shortcomings of outsourcing, government taxation, arbitration, and other areas of debate.
Mental Defense
Teo has the ability to resist telepathic and empathic influence. Both Laudani brothers have developed this skill after having spent almost five solid years sifting through sensory and empathic feedback from the 'tesseract' that Romero kept open between himself and his sibling. Teo has also had extreme experiences with (reactions to) chemical hallucinogens, which 'helps,' after a fashion. It operates much as Noah Bennet and Angela Petrelli's resistance to mental manipulation as shown in seasons 1 and 2 of the TV series.
Teo has the capacity to discern, more accurately than most, the difference between his personal perceptions and the intrusion or overlap of 'foreign material.' If Teo notices that a projected thought, feeling, or image is not his own, he has a good chance of refusing to take it in; however, the probability of him noticing decreases if his natural inclination is to agree. It's always easier to make him do or think something he likely would have himself. For a telepath who knows what they're doing, gradually escalating their demands over time can also allow them to trick their way past this defense.
He can also sense when somebody is listening in, though his perceptive ability increases the 'deeper' past the surface of his consciousness the mentalist is burrowing. An onslaught of sufficient force will get through, though Teo may be able to resist that at the cost of falling over unconscious and remaining physically available for maiming.
At any level more intense than maintaining his own surface thoughts, this skill requires concentration. Using it is guaranteed to throw off his physical aim, verbal agility, or distribution of mental resources to do much else. It offers no protection while he is asleep, leaving him vulnerable to dream manipulation. Chemically/biologically-based manipulation tends to be more effective than raw psychic influence.
Also see: Ghost's skills.
Relationships
- OOC: Teo's Sleep-With Scale
- Sicily
- PHOENIX
- Ferrymen
- God
- Independent Operators
- Lawmen
- Legion of Doom
- School
- The Vanguard
Though this is largely accurate, it was meant as a gag and can not be entirely relied upon for temporally up-to-date information, occasionally bearing various references to history and events that have since been wiped away by a memory manipulator.
According to Logan's Player, who's been pushing this joke, a '0' indicates 'I would never sleep with this person,' and '100' an instantaneous, unhesitating guarantee. See Logan's for hilarious comparison.
It has since been improved upon. Click for the original image.
Sicily
—is home.
 |
Lucrezia is Teo's aunt and, to this day, he remains her boy before most others. She is car-crash beautiful, famous in Europe, and taught him pretty much everything he knew about schmoozing women, until his change of heart at age 17 reduced him to using his looks and the bumbling, hapless charm of good intentions garnished with tattoos. To be fair, he probably owes her his looks, too. The astonishing truth is: terrorism apparently runs in the family too. In the winter of 2008, Teo discovered that his favorite aunt in the world was a member of a terrorist organization that sought to wipe Evolved— then his gang of hero friends— then 90% of the world population— off the world with a supervirus. Discovering her nephew's association through telepathic espionage with her insects, she turned on The Vanguard in no small part— unceremoniously— because of him. It wasn't out of gratitude but an ancient, ironclad sense of loyalty, however, that he concealed her sinister connections and sought to protect her interests later from even his closest friends and comrades. Of all things, ever since She thinks he has her ex-husband's eyes, and she more or less ruined him for women before he hit puberty. You can blame it on the Sicily. Important Scenes: Our Lady Of The Capricious, Heartless and Coccoon Music: Portishead, "Numb" and Ilya, "Bellissimo" |
|---|
 |
Romero is the estranged baby brother. Once upon a time, Teo held himself solely accountable for the death of Rommy's erstwhile girlfriend, and the older brother's love for the younger ran the risk of becoming a function of his self-loathing. Since childhood, Rommy had always been the cleverest person Teo knew, a mathematical prodigy, one who understood him despite of how his adolescent misdemeanors and because of their childhood secrets. Since Teo's mind, memories and personality were forcibly merged with his evil analogue's, though, he has to come to realize that his brother was partially accountable and that fighting for the younger man's forgiveness is ultimately destructive and unfair, more specifically because what Romero truly wants from Teo is a sense of empathy: a mirrored sense of grief. Given that's contingent on somebody he cares about having to die first, Ghost reacted with arrogant outrage and disgust. The halved version that remains is playing the game of wait and see, wait and see. Maybe tomorrow— Important Scenes: Mio Fratellino Romero Music: LINKIN PARK EMOTASTIC, The Bravery, "An Honest Mistake" and Ethyline, "Wings" |
|---|
 |
Amadora is his mother. He takes after her in a lot of ways, or so friends and family tell him; both were blessed with inherent physicality, a love of water, an even but eventually violent temper, a solid bulwark of confidence distinct from arrogance, and fairly easy social graces. She is beautiful, well known throughout their constituency for it, and keeps a pristine house. Teo is almost as protective of her as he is of Romero. She never understood how Gia's death at the hands of an unknown shooter could possibly have driven such a wedge between her sons; indeed, she did not understand much about either of them, but loved and empathized with both anyway and remains hopeful that they will reconcile. The Freudian psychoanalyst she hired to try and help them had a lot of strange things to say about Teo's relationship with his parents. In the aftermath of the psychic merging, Teo has begun to feel pangs of guilt about keeping his distance from her for so long, but after discovering her sister was a genocidal terrorist and he himself was half serial-killer, he is left trying to avoid awkward conversations. This, more than even the magnitude of Work To Do in New York, is why he has not returned to Sicily. Important Scenes: None Music: Quindon Tarver, "When Doves Cry" |
|---|
| Paolo is Teo's father. A nebbish bank employee, he never had much in common with his eldest son, who seemed to tolerate his presence with the polite interest and practical acknowledgment that a good-natured cat would show his staff. |
| Michele is a girl Teo used to know and like a lot, the only one he'd stayed with for any length of time before he emigrated for college. She's a woman now, and a successful one at that. In their youth, she beat him with a vacuum machine once when he pissed her off. He had deserved it. Since he came to New York City, several of his old friends and family have visited briefly, but he requested her not to. |
If you would like to play Michele or some other NPC in this list, please let Romero and/or I know.
Phoenix
Trust begins here, and hasn't ended yet. It's been stretched a lot over time, and worn a little thin, over decisions regarding both the Vanguard and Ghost, between the abductions and the moratorium on disseminating information. However, Teo does and always will feel a sense of responsibility for the baby terrorist faction that raised him, which one might as well call love.
 |
Alexander — excuse me — Leonard or whatever alias he is going by now is a former soldier and Phoenix operative. Teo has thought Leo was asphyxiatingly cool forever: he runs at least six miles a week, plumbs, and can calibrate explosives with a Ziplock bag of water. Leo is also the one that— pretty much everyone who knows them, even the people who have stabbed Leonard in the eye with birds, tried to saw his head in half, find his sexual escapades pretty harsh and have had their heart ground into the pavement under his heel kind of think he is destined to be with Teo, and they like Teo, too. Teo adores him and he adores Teo. As such, this would probably have worked out if Teo hadn't had freaked out on him twice in 2008, had casual sex with another man for the first time, and thus mounted a huffy war of tit-for-tat which climaxed multiply with Leonard sleeping with his aunt shortly after a confession of love, destroying all hope of recovering his other relationship, and fucking everybody between the serial killer who'd ruined his life and a complete stranger, and Teo being rudely skeptical and already seeing somebody else whenever Leo asks him out. Heartache appears to be the norm and, often, it seems their friendship is held together by threads, albeit threads of what must be solid adamantium. They say they don't write songs about the ones who come easy, but only time can tell whether this song is going to crap into staticky codas and explode the phonograph. Important Scenes: Fiat Lux, Upside Down, Peace, Reassurance, Pleasure and Temper Music: Frightened Rabbit, "The Twist" |
|---|
 |
Brian was this Mormon self-replicator mutant kid who believed in doing the right thing, so he joined Phoenix and then started an orphanage. Teo saw him as a little brother, sort of, a dynamic that involved him giving terrible advice on recovering from grieving after a dead clone, got stabbed by a prisoner when Brian made a mistake once, gave more terrible advice to regarding love, before Teo finally guilt-tripped him into staying with the burning bird when shit fell apart after Helena left. Most of the time, Brian thought Teo was being stodgy and paranoid about shit— particularly Linderman's interest in the orphanage, but both recognized each others' good intentions: theirs was the most erratic but heartwarming of fraternal friendships. Now Brian is dead, and Teo— none of Teo— has a clue. Important Scenes: Where The Bear Shits, Dearest Daddy Deckard and 2.5 Inches of Steel Music: The Magnificents, "Get It Boy" |
|---|
 |
Cameron was a figure of some authority in the original PARIAH before he started sidling out of the limelight, ceding the position to those whose temperament might be better-suited to the job. And now he's dead. Based on his history with football mobs, Teo had had enough of an understanding of team dynamics to take Cameron for what he had been: substantially charismatic, where charisma entails actual, pragmatic substance, as capable as his term required. He gave appropriate orders and, Teo suspects, prevented the woman who brought him into PARIAH from maiming or blackmailing him into silence. Teo had once excused his own tendency to glance at the man's ass as part of being Italian, and Cameron's afore-mentioned substance. In wretched seriousness, he will be missed. Important Scenes: None Music: Modest Mouse, "The Ocean Breathes Salty" |
|---|
 |
In 2019, Ghost still kept Cat's acquaintance and they had a wolfish dynamic of comraderie, lieutenant to leader, and fellow mourners; back in 2009, Teo didn't really get to know Cat until he asked her to watch Abby's back after a horrifying incident involving electronic bugging devices and Sylar but their casual working relationship was given an awkward kind of depth when his decision to kidnap Eileen led to the death of her lover. Before the merge, Teo hadn't come to terms with the absolution he was given, and Ghost had detached himself emotionally on many levels from his old friends after dragging around the mountainous burden of secrets alone. In the regard of the merged-Teo that remains, however, she remains an invaluable asset, with a capacity for razor deductive insight he delights in having and a flash-freeze ferocious idealism that she has never had compunction about reigning in when he's asked her and explained why. Important Scenes: Bugger and Blood Loss Music: Dashboard Confessional, "Hey Girl" |
|---|
 |
Elisabeth used to teach at Washington Irving high school too. Like Teo, she seemed to be experiencing the same existential lack of direction until the day she found Phoenix, despite that half the men in her life were trying to protect her from that. Since then, they've gotten close, despite the various obstructions that her being a cop double-agent and him occasionally possessed by psychopathic serial killing analogues of himself. Perhaps more by merit of the fact that nobody told Elisabeth any damn thing than any deep and existential resonance of souls meeting, post psychic merging, they continue to exchange professional criticism, boy trouble, homemade meals, and intelligence at various frequency. Alternatively, their souls have the following in common: propensity for rewarded murder, turbulent sexual relations, food, and saving the woooorld. Important Scenes: At Arm's Length And Holding, Safe House and Play Along Music: Crossfade, "No Giving Up" |
|---|
 |
Helena is PHOENIX's leader and Teo's former (?) co-leader. She's sharp as a tack and resembles Claire in a number of favorable ways, the best of which are all voluntary. Despite jail, ability-cannibalizing Evolved tyrants, and more apocalypses than Teo cares to remember, she continues to walk around on great legs and carry Mediterranean weather around with her, qualities that the Sicilian appreciates in a woman, though things have gotten somewhat strained ever since she, you know, didn't do anything about the Ghost situation. His faith in her relationship with Peter] has dwindled somewhat, but that may well be as much because of the ground truth of the couple's dynamic as projecting the existential fatigue that's left after he's barely curbed the general urge to hate love. For now, he keeps her at a polite arm's length, and dresses the misshapen ragdoll remains of their friendship up in petticoats of protective sentiment. Important Scenes: A Kiss is Just A Kiss, Smoke and Mirrors and Vendetta Music: Adele, "Hometown Glory" |
|---|
Ferrymen
Cattle-rustlers. No matter how Americans truly regard themselves, the rest of the world will always see them as cowboys. As a citizen of Sicily, Teo finds that entirely respectable.
 |
Eve is the crazy seer most Phoenix operatives and Ferrymen are referring to when they mention 'a crazy seer.' Despite that, there's nothing clinical about the paradox of fragility and sass she conducts herself with and he trusts her to literally watch his back, just as she does him. Teo doesn't especially concern himself with whether she gets along with the other members or why. She was the other Phoenix operative who's kissed him out of nowhere, and his reaction implied intimacy issues that somewhat transcend easy-cheesy shit like homophobia which, naturally, have not much improved since the dawn of their friendship. They do, however, still have a comfortable rapport and physicality, despite that her Ferrymen duties and his… whatever Teo's doing tends to keep them apart. Important Scenes: Breathe Her and Wrong Idea Music: Neve, "It's Over Now" |
|---|
 |
Wireless is the cyberpathic co-leader of the Ferrymen, who Teo once primarily thought of as Helena's point of contact and completely terrifying besides. Her personality translates well to her physical image: raw-boned, straight limbs, straight back, dark clothes, straight hair, altogether as severe and minimalistic as her word choice. When she narrows her eyes, he immediately reevaluates his situation; she also smiled at him once, and Teo thought he felt the local paradigm of reality tilt slightly on its axis. As of 2009, she was Teo's Aikido and Krav Maga instructor, tactical counsel, real estate advisor, and occasional lifesaver (in the sense of applicable metaphor insofar that she actually saved him from drowning). In 2019, however, their friendship had gained length and breadth from empathy after Ghost suffered a deranging intensity of grief much as she had as a child and they hunted terrorists together for eight years with the Mossad. Here and now, Teo can't understand how she could accept the insane remorseless murderer that he had been and love her Teo still, which is probably just symptomatic of the deeper, more relevant truth: that he understands her more than he'd like to admit. Important Scenes: The Reason For The Name and Swimming With Sharks Music: Snow Patrol, "Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking" and BT, "The Antikythera Mechanism" |
|---|
 |
Teo is living with Sonny, Sal— whatever he's going by. Once upon a time, Teo batted way outside his league: wound up dating the Mayor's son and independently wealthy surgeon, Ferrymen medic, and sometimes-humanist. Like most rebound scenarios, this started off on the wrong foot: Sonny initially offered advice on that unrequited Alexander thing, then a luxurious place to stay, then casual physical companionship, and then suddenly there were shouting matches and injured feelings and monogamous preferences. Things have since ended in fire, after having been subjected to the stressful circumstance of Ghost possessing Teo and Sonny, distraught and enraged, handling that with a little less heroism than he was willing to admit to… without finally being shouted into a corner. Onnnce upon a time, their underlying relationship problem seemed to be that Sonny liked Teo more than Teo liked Sonny, but such recent events have implied that the inverse is closer to the actual truth. Teo now carries with him his younger analogue's asphyxiating sense of abandonment by the one he'd held closest as well as the ghost's cold self-entitlement, leaving an indistinct and unfocused tarred-oatmeal mess of sentiment as far as Sonny is concerned. On the one hand, Teo is sure he deserved better. On the other, that doesn't mean a damn thing, when you're left with nothing and no one. Yet, between hands, Teo remains painfully aware that Sonny needs help on many levels from someone, and the high road did used to be his preferred form of transportation. Important Scenes: From Here We All Float, Going, Not Gone, We Were A Beautiful Fantasy and The Punchline Music: Dntel, "The Dream Of Evan And Chan" and Feist, "My Moon My Man" |
|---|
God
…
| God. Where do we even fucking begin? Important Scenes: Late Music: Day One, "Bad Before Good" |
| That Other One Important Scenes: Take your pick! Music: Puscifer, "REV 22:20" |
08/12 — From this point downward, and all subsequent tabs, the relationships are not yet updated.
Abby is a slight Southern belle with big brass ones and a codefied whens and when-not-tos when it comes to cursing. Teodoro finds himself unaccountably empathetic to a young woman who holds education at an arm's length and sleeps with a Bible on her bedstand and a shotgun by the mattress. They're different people, though; he recognizes that he has little of her clarity and none of her equilibrium. She's a healer which is kind of gorgeous by itself: living proof that good pay for it in pain and fatigue and are rewarded with as much as they put in. He's been partnered with her for PHOENIX's miracles operation as her getaway guy, which is pretty easy to live with. He feels better that he's watching her back, and that's only a little bit bravado. She's probably going to get him killed someday. He can think of at least one alternative that would be worse.
- Important Scenes: Around The World In 80 Boxcars, After Naivete, and The Healing Miracle
- Music: Bliss, "Not Quite Paradise"
Colette is the twiggy little half-blind girl who once gave Abby a heart-attack, trying to blackmail the Southern belle into healing her guardian, Officer Judah Demsky of the NYPD from non-life-threatening injury, or else she would turn her into Homeland Security. Lots of the people Teo knows think Colette is skittish, selfish, and nuts. Teo's perspective differs, probably because he enjoyed the dubious privilege of being mistaken for a lowly, inconsequential, and totally harmless janitorial-level Phoenix operative: emboldened by the fact that he was bumbling around only one shoe on (HAS GOOD EXPLANATION), she went so far as to give a small display of the frightening new Evolved ability she was seeking training for; she had no way of knowing how clearly she had reminded him of Eileen, who he had came a little short of killing in a crash of temper just recently. Admiring her courage and sympathizing with her regrets, Teo is trying to help.
- Important Scenes: Like This and Becoming
- Music: K's Choice, "Believe"
Deckard is the skinny old grave-robber and petty criminal Teo tackled onto a coffin and hit with his face once. He has X-ray vision and a penchant for punching Abby's fat outta the fryer. He is on Teo's protected species list, and seems perpetually at risk of a column shift to the extinct header, guided by the unstoppable forces of his own personality. He's useful, treats his conscience like an adopted stray, and wants everybody to hate him. Teo has come to like him! This actually has very little to do with his decisions to find the man a new life, hookers, a patron saint and a place in the Crusade against the Vanguard, but he's somewhat more than a job. Deckard really likes to rub Teo's nose in the fact that he's too trusting, too all-accepting, too nice for the scummy shark pool they swim in. Although he looks like a guy who should know, the fact that he has yet to betray, run off, or be a monster combines with those constant warnings to, ironically, contradict his own advice.
- Important Scenes: Flint Deckard Saves The World, Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, Schaedenfreud and In Or Out
- Music: IT'S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP
Delilah is a crazy little redhead dumpling of teenager whose first reaction to finding a severed hand in a derelict building is to giggle and poke it with her foot. Similarly, when she found the drunken skinhead bemoaning his numerous and amorphously-defined sins underneath the overpass, she gave him bottled water, a scarf, and a small hand to hold. Lilah brings out the wolfishly confrontational protector in Teo by inspiring the sort of indulgent frustration in Teo that Abigail appears to inspire in Deckard. Instead of suicidal Biblical altruism, Delilah's coping mechanism of choice is to remain boisterously, obliviously carefree. However, she is simultaneously also capable of apologizing and accepting help when she needs it: apparently she has this small problem with uncontrolled chemical secretions from her skin that can apparently drive one into episodes of hyper-aggression, pleasant hallucinations, or death. All things considered, Delilah seems to have her head screwed on better than he did at her age.
- Important Scenes: Paradise Sickness and Matters Of Trust
- Music: Sam The Sham and the Pharaohs, "Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood"
Hagan is an Irish graphic designer who possesses the ability to manipulate shadows and an inferiority complex large out to block whatever light is left. He used to be a Phoenix prospect, but that cooled after the number of times he's said the term 'heroes' with churlish alarm. His surliness and self-destructive streak, with the smoking, drinking, swearing, and fighting, are what Teo regards as symptomatic of being middle class from Europe, but his tendencies to put himself down and embarrass easily betray a far more telling detail: he's Catholic. In that essentially miserable way that simultaneously implies he's a good guy underneath. So Hagan and Teo have a few things in common. Currently on casually friendly terms, they'll probably stay so until they realize the other is Shedda Dinu and Phoenix respectively and therefore prime candidates for casualties in their respective wars. They met in a barfight. Hagan headlocked and punched Teo a lot, thereby improving both their moods.
- Important Scenes: Colin Farrell Can Probably Skate, Where The Bear Shits, and Finder's Fee
- Music: The Killers, "Where The White Boys Dance"
Pam is his veterinarian for Pila and thinks Teo should get Abby a three-legged kitten for Christmas. She is also a stripper. She also trusts Teo when he says that Deckard is blacked out, or otherwise not himself, and that he did not kill and blow up a bunch of people despite that the police have fingerprint evidence. He isn't sure what that entails and he doesn't know what kind of explanation to volunteer, though he knows that he's eventually going to have to owe her one. In other news, Teo's veterinarian is a stripper. He kind of wishes she hadn't seen him at a strip joint, and explaining that would probably be a thousand times more uncomfortable than explaining what he was really doing there so— life could be harder.
- Important Scenes: Featherlight and Schaedenfreud
- Music: N.E.R.D., "She Wants To Move"
Tamara is the final flourish to the trilogy of nineteen-year-old blondes Providence spontaneously dumped on the pavement in front of Teo, although she kind of more like… flitted into his peripheral, falling into step one day on the street, knew stuff about him, and hurried him off to Washington Irving high school just in time to get hit by rocket-propelled grenades. Holding a conversation with her is like navigating an MC Escher drawing. Which seems to obey a certain strange, metaphoric logic that the rest of his life (which feels more like if Salvador Dali drew for Garth Ennis) does not, and hers is somehow preferable. He suspects she is Evolved and can take care of herself. He sincerely likes talking to her and, ironically, lapses into the same tendency with her that he has with God: not to look too closely or ask too many questions, for all the benefit or aggravation that might bring.
- Important Scenes: Nines, Zeroes, and Newspapers, Apollo Spat and If The Light Fails
- Music: Underworld, "Pearl's Girl"
Sylar — or Tavisha — or whatever you want to call him is A SEEEERIAL KILLEEER. Used to be. Didn't blow up Midtown though (that's the President's political conspiracy to protect his baby brother, Teo suspects, conspiracy theory, theory). Despite that Sylar had attempted to murder several of his friends and comrades, the first time Teo ever met Sylar personally was a diplomatic meeting where the notorious killer displayed not only a practical desire to fuck an even bigger mass-murdering bastard before they fucked him, but also — quite inadvertently — revealed that a burgeoning friendship had largely inspired this change of heart. Apparently, Sylar had also started falling in love. Now that Sylar is a bumbling and endearingly naive amnesiac, Teo is trying to hook him up with his ex-girlfriend and get his memories back. He has several good excuses: Sylar's now more or less indestructible, impossible to judicially try, psychologically rehabilitated, useful for fighting Homeland Security, and blah blah blah everybody chalks it up to altruism, no need to pretend shut up.
- Important Scenes: Choosing Your Enemies and Red Sky
- Music: Yellowcard, "Lights And Sounds"
Christian is fairly commonly referred to as 'Teo's Fed.' He says he's a member of the Federal Communications Consul. He is a giant. He's also a huge radio geek and motorcycle enthusiast, and the second dysfunctional and ergo charming soldier the Sicilian's met so far. Once, Christian dragged Teo twenty feet chest-down on the pavement for riding his motorcycle without a helmet. Always one to recognize good things only when bad stuff happens with them, Teo realized then that he had a real friend. Somehow, if they aren't talking ham radio or motorcycles, Teo's helping to aid and abet unsanctioned murder or reassuring him everybody's date creates graphic vomit eventually. They are too different not to question each other professionally, which probably makes up for the fact they're surprisingly alike personally: romantically useless, angry, committed, and like to ride fast.
- Important Scenes: Safety Third, For The Children and Real Friends Help You To
- Music: Bush, "Warm Machine"
Dantes — Felix — whatever the fuck you want to call him, is the Fed that everybody in Manhattan hates. Teo thinks this is probably because he's an unreliable, reckless, overconfident and incompetently manipulative stronzo with extremely bad luck. Teo once shot the man for following him and a man he was protecting into a sensitive location, figured out he was actually an undercover FBI hiding from terrorists, was then threatened at gunpoint by him on Christian's roof, and eventually to offer him help in keeping his secret identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Teo then slept with him. In light of failing to find salvation in love, Teo is still sleeping with him. What was meant to be a destructive and discreet one night stand to get that bicuriosity thing out of Teo's system did the other thing instead, thanks to Felix's catastrophically backward idea of revenge (and two decades of carnal experience). It's fun and games until one recalls that a categorical terrorist and FBI agent are playing.
- Important Scenes: Deckard Ex Machina, Fools, Drunkards, and Children, Not Purgatory and Nothing Now
- Music: Tea Party, "Sun Going Down"
adam and Huruma left fairly decent impressions, for a pair of serial killers who have cannibalism and four hundred years of debauchery covered between them. The same can probably not be said for Teo, whose bad manners Huruma remarked on — and spat on — when he finally broke his silence and spoke brusquely to get rid of the two before PARIAH showed too much trouble on the home front between the other members who had been present. Adam was slightly smaller than he had anticipated from the stories, and Huruma very much larger. Teo has enough sense to not want to get et. He's going to try.
- Important Scenes: Mind The Gap
- Music: Legion of Doom, "Devil In The Blue Dress (Coheed and Cambria vs. Senses Fail)"
Simon attends a high school where Teo occasionally teaches at as part of his undergraduate program. Their relationship would not have gone further if Simon wasn't prone to appearing in the wrong place at the wrong time; specifically, Teo helped him when he was mugged strutting around Harlem in sweet threads, albeit without a wallet. After the boy took out one gun-toting gangster with a frisbeed garbage can lid and a Campbell can of soup, Teo figured he was Evolved. Simon also kicked the guy in the face while he was down, which was hilarious. In a fit of terror and adrenaline, the boy also kneed Teo in the nuts. They get along better now, if not by much; the kid has a chip in his shoulder Teo can't seem to stop prying at.
Teo stalked both him and his cyberpath sister, Mallory, when he realized the twins were involved with Stillwater Security, a firm run by a PHOENIX member, Diego. He stopped when the twins lost interest in the faction, only to be jarringly reacquainted with them when Washington Irving high school was nuked by the Vanguard. He is deeply comforted that Hana is looking out for her fellow cyberpath.
- Important Scenes: Big Rumble In Little Harlem, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and The Other Tiger
- Music: Boom Boom Satellites, "Dive For You"
'Eileen' was originally conceived as a dark, elusive fairy of an ordinary girl, before she was unexpectedly revealed to be an operative of the Genocide Club. She reacted to her abduction and captivity with: feeding his best friend's eyeball to pigeons, hysterical honesty, sexual overtures intended to achieve opposite the normal effect, and waiting to stab him with a butter knife until after she solicited a hug for comfort. With her, Teo lost his temper for the first time in years and broke previous personal records for guilt levels. In short: hilariously, she's like all of his damaged ex-girlfriends combined. Apart from the fact that screwing up his relationship with her could mean an apocalypse real rather than imagined. Bizarrely, he managed to convince her to become an informant, with a commitment to not have all her boys murdered in cold blood in exchange for information on their work and Volken's larger plans. He is — gingerly aware that his faction's somewhat tactless response to her intel on Rickham's upcoming assassination may well have tremendously fucked that partnership over.
Timeline
Updates coming… eventually.
Memorable Quotes
- "I'm Jesus!" Or some idiotic Sicilian-Italian derivative thereof, from Character History.
- "Okay. You know what? That's a fucking plan. You stay. I'll stay with you. We'll sit here, these two stronzo will wake up, and we'll get shot together. You'll get kidnapped, or cut on, or run over with a fucking van, or all three, and I'll just work on bleeding real fast. Why does that sound like a good idea? You should know better. Even that fucking pigeon knows better! Even those fat Negro mothers know better. Everyone knows better. How did you fucking graduate middle school?!" — Teo yells at a little kid for refusing to run away from mobsters, from Big Rumble In Little Harlem.
- "You know, asking a Sicilian boy about his pretty sisters is a good way to wake up with a ticker that ain't your alarm clock." — Helena reviews Cultural Facts in Unlikely Housemates.
- "Violence happens. It happens to us more than it happens to most people. You're allowed to feel bad, but you're not allowed to fucking forget: you can take a hit, and you can just as fucking well throw one when some asshole needs to be reminded where the bear shits. Think of someone you hate. Where's the bear shit?" — Giving Brian SAGELY DEVICE on the ancient art of combat, and existential quandary. From Where The Bear Shits.
- "I know you're not going to rape her. You're just some nice Italian kid with a pet budgie and a gun stuffed down the back of your diaper." — Deckard is a jerk in Skinned.
- Helena looks speculative. "Teo… Teo kind of has this vibe. Like, it doesn't matter who he's with, people just sort of assume there's something sexual going on with him and whoever, even if it's not. Abby's not the first person to be mistaken for his girlfriend. People have even mistaken him for having boyfriends. So truth be told, maybe it's going in that direction, but it's just as likely that it isn't. It's just Teo."
| "Dude is fuckin' sketchy then, okay so am I right?" Elvis sniffs. — on Teo's creepy European vibe thing, from It's A Wonderful Life. |
Music
|
It seems to me to be a sign. It's good to see you. |
You touch the sky, we hold our hearts, And all I could have been, and all I would have been, |
Baby, you're foul in clear conditions, So I need some fine wine, and you, |
|
I'm treading for my life, believe me, I thought of just your face |
I've got friends in all the right places, 'Cause you are not alive. I can't play where I'm not supposed to anyway. |
|
| I'm like a child sailing away to you, It's the point of frustration. My room is empty, it's a need that's known by you, You make me happy, It's a comfort when you do. |
Sono ancora in piedi in questo istante di pura follia, non so piu' se desiderare il bene o il male, anche se il peccato forse piu' mi da'. |
Shake me into the night, And I'm on fire. |
Media
Gallery
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Tattoos
| Tattoo | Of What | Where |
|---|---|---|
 |
The eagle, emblem of the U.S. Città di Palermo football club | Left shoulderblade |
 |
Yacht, storm-water, crucifix, Never Knows Best | Right bicep (lower) |
| Line text | W.H. Auden's In Time of War, XII: without remorse Struck down the sons who strayed their course, And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad. | Replaced, Right bicep (upper) |
| Line text | Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Autumn: ferita minaccia Languida di fuggir, mà oppressa muore. — translation: '… wounded, threatens / Languidly to flee, but harried, dies.' | Replacement, Right bicep (upper) |
| Encircling 'cuff' text | From the tomb of The Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey: THE LORD KNOWETH THEM THAT ARE HIS / UNKNOWN AND YET WELL KNOWN, DYING AND BEHOLD WE LIVE / GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN THIS / IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE (upside-down) | Left bicep |
| Barred Triangle | The Bermuda Triangle | Left bicep |
 |
National crest of Sicily | Right thigh |
| Line text | Lei Attende Nessuno Re — the Italian translation for: She Awaits No King. | Right thigh |
 |
Chess 'knight,' for Jesse Alexander Knight. | Left pectoral |
Icons
| teo_icon.gif | teo2_icon.gif | teo3_icon.gif | s_teo_icon.gif |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Trivia and Notes
|
|
|
The boy's appearing on the deck and making it lurch, He whistles and he runs. We saw you in distraction: a sleeping, slow despair, He whistles and he runs, so hold him fast. Interpol, |
If Teo had favorites, his favorite literary passage would be the one that follows:
| “ |
The illustrious Giambattista Marino, whom the unanimous mouths of fame— to use an image dear to him— proclaimed the new Homer and the new Dante, did not die that afternoon or the next. And yet, the immutable and tacit event that happened then was in effect the last event of his life. Laden with years and glory, the man lay dying in a vast Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It takes no effort to image a lordly balcony, facing west, a few steps away, and, further down, the sight of marble and laurels and a garden whose stone steps are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed a yellow rose in the vase. The man murmurs the inevitable verses which— to tell the truth— have begun to weary him a little: Blood of the garden, pomp of the walk, gem of the spring, April's eye… Then came the revelation. Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise. And he sensed that it existed in its eternity and not in his words, and that we may make mention or allusion of a thing but never express it at all; and that the tall proud tomes that cast a golden penumbra in an angle of the drawing room were not— as he had dreamed in his vanity— a mirror of the world, but simply one more thing added to the universe. This illumination ame to Marino on the eve of his death, and, perhaps, it had come to Homer and Dante too. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. |
” |
- Deckard is probably more like Teo's best friend, now.
- Teo used to date the Mayor's son, who was then assassinated because of his indirect influence.
- If Teo won't fight and he can't run away, he'll probably choose to self-destruct; he is always subconsciously looking for a metaphorical bomb to throw himself over. It's as much a Catholic thing as a terrorist thing. On the optimistic side, he is pragmatically forgiving. On the downside, pragmatic occasionally turns into pathological when it comes to personal trespasses.
- The left side of Teo's skull, the bony region of temple, brow, and encircling partway around his eye, is shattered and literally held together by a series of metal plates screwed into place. A football rioter nearly stomped his head flat once. It makes MRI use lethal for him — as well as the machine itself, and dealing with metal detectors can be difficult.
- Teodoro owns a pet budgie. He has a soft spot for things that have been touched but not ruined by man.
- 80% of the major plot details in Teodoro's history can be attributed to Romero's player's creativity. Thanks, Rommy. The rest were scavenged from various documentaries on football hooliganism, the player's uncle's propensity for sailing, and the Bleach main character's family relations. His Catholic background and religious outlook — any lifestyle prejudices and all — borrow heavily from Mr. Kharral's attitude toward Islam from the TV series Skins which, encapsulated in eight lines, was possibly the most beautiful characterization of faith and its struggles that have ever been seen by the otherwise ignorant player. Teo's propensity for languages is a pretty blatant sublimation of his writer's feelings of inadequacy on the subject.
Teodoro has an incarnation in 2019 for the Sound of Thunder plot. Please see Teodoro Laudani for more information.