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[heroslayer]

Player Info

Name: Alishia
Age: 28
Contact: inaloadedroom (at) gmail (dot) com (email); knightinqs (Plurk); inaloadedroom (AIM)
Characters Already in Teleios: n/a
Reserve: Here.

Character Basics:

Character Name: Gabriel Gray (Sylar)
Journal: heroslayer
Age: While no canon age is ever given for Sylar, based on the age of his PB, the writer assumes him to be 32.
Fandom: Heroes
Canon Point: Post-Landslide (1x22)
Debt:

Class A: 18 years
(For multiple counts of murder including: Brian Davis, Trevor Zeitlan, Chandra Suresh, James Walker, Mrs. Walker, an unnamed FBI agent, Jackie Wilcox, a handful of unnamed Primatech employees, an unnamed trucker, Zane Taylor, Dale Smither, Isaac Mendez, Virginia Gray, and Ted Sprague.)

Class B: 15 years
(For multiple counts of theft, including the abilities of all of his powered victims, assault, breaking and entering, and fraud)

Class C: 4 years, 5 months
• Car Jacking
• Property Damage (multiple counts, including but not limited to, Union Wells High School, Primatech Paper, the Bennet Home and Mohinder Suresh's apartment)
• Fleeing the Scene of a Crime (pretty much every murder he's ever committed)
• Stalking
• Conspiracy to Commit Murder (Charlie Andrews, Claire Bennet)
• Escaping Police Custody (Or, well, Primatech custody)
• Tresspassing
• Cruel and Unusual Punishment (Isaac Mendez, Mohinder Suresh)
• Attempted Murder (Molly Walker, Audrey Hanson, Eden McCain, Peter Petrelli, Claire Bennet)
• Attempted Suicide
• Lying About Everything Under the Sun
• Being a Nutcase
• Being Prideful
• Being Wrathful
• Being Envious
• Being Vain
• Being Greedy
• Using Underhanded Means in a Fight
• Using Abilities to Mess With People
• Psychopathic Tendencies

List crimes you’ve created for your character: None.

GRAND TOTAL: 37 years, 5 months

Canon Character Section:

History: Here.

Personality:

For the most part, Sylar is exactly what one would expect of a psychopath. As far as his canon point, he has shown little in the way of self-control and his moods are mercurial, shifting from furious anger to smug self-importance at the drop of a hat. He seems to have no problems using manipulation, intimidation, or plain old-fashioned violence to satisfy his own needs and is perfectly fine with violating social taboos without remorse. While a large portion of this is, in fact, true of the killer, there is far more to him that what he initially presents and, by the clinical definition, he may not even technically be a psychopath. Whether or not he is, however, is largely irrelevant; what is important is the fact that he's the emotional equivalent of an eight-year-old in a thirty-something's body.

With his real father having sold him to his brother (a memory that was apparently so traumatic that he suppressed it) and his adoptive father leaving him and him and his mother when he was just a child, Sylar was left in the care of his adoptive mother, Virgina Gray. Unfortunately for Sylar, however, Virginia was something of a paradox, constantly pushing him to become something more than what he was while consistently denying him the opportunities to do so. Canonically, we're shown that she wanted him to be more than just a watchmaker like his father, yet she appears to have no steady job of her own, so my assumption is that she forced more and more of her responsibilities onto him, forcing him to become the man of the house and forgo a college education, in spite of presumably doing well in school, and support her. Between that, what can be assumed to have been a strict Catholic upbringing (based on the collection of prayers painted on the back wall of his apartment after his murder of Brian Davis), and Virginia's clingy and dependent nature, Sylar had very little of the care required to mature emotionally and was forced into a life he ultimately wished to escape.

He stuck with it, however, repressing many of his own angers and frustrations concerning the life he was dissatisfied with, with the desperate hope that, by being the dutiful son, he could win his mother's approval and all the while terrified that he never would and that she would leave him as his adoptive father had. Then, mercifully, Chandra came into the picture, and he was everything that Sylar had secretly hoped for. A father figure to replace the ones that had abandoned him. Someone who could give him direction and guidance and purpose, where his mother could only offer criticisms concerning the life he had let her choose for him. Someone he could share intellectual ideas, gleaned from the pages of all the books in his apartment, with. And, most importantly, someone who could give him the approval he had been longing for -- someone who told him he was already important.

When Chandra told him that maybe he wasn't so special after all, it broke something in him. Here was a man no better off than he was, yet apparently better than him. It was all his mother's Why Can't You Be More Like So-and-Sos from the closest thing to a father he had and this man didn't even want what he had. It was too much, and in a manic attempt to keep Chandra's affections and his dreams alive, he killed Brian Davis and took his ability. While he did feel remorse for the act, however, going as far as to try and commit suicide for his sin, thus began Sylar's belief that everyone with abilities were undeserving of them and the manifestation of the darker side of his original ability, the hunger.

Technically, the hunger is what drives Sylar to kill, the feeling manifesting as an uncontrollable need to understand how an ability works which can only be sated by opening a victim's head and finding the part of the brain that controls the ability. While it has never been revealed in canon what it's like to experience the hunger, it is the writer's assumption that standing in close proximity to someone with an ability is the equivalent to standing next to a cabinet in which a clock has been hidden, being able to hear but unable to place the source of the ticking, and it getting to the point where the sound is so distractingly maddening, all one can do is tear apart the room and look for the source. If he already has a particular ability, the ticking isn't so bad, apparent but ignorable, as he understands how it works already (or, to run with the metaphor, where the sound is coming from), and therefore won't drive him to kill for it again. While feeding is both a relief and allows him enough understanding of his victim's ability to rearrange his own neural pathways to copy the ability, however, according to Noah Bennet, the constant rearranging of the way his body works hasn't done much for his sanity. Which probably explains why, even without his ability and the hunger attached to it, he still kills, as we saw in the beginning of the second season when he was without his abilities but still murdered Candace Wilmer. He's simply mad enough to have come to enjoy the killing and deluded enough to think that, with enough abilities, he'll be able to command the attention and awe he felt he was denied by his mother and Chandra.

Bear in mind, though, that Sylar does have some sense of morality, however twisted, and that is why the writer doesn't consider him a true psychopath. Yes, he's been more than a little disturbed by what he's done to himself and the circumstances of his life, but a psychopath wouldn't have shown remorse for their first murder. Nor would they have been as unsettled by the potential destruction of an entire city on their heads. Sylar was when he thought he was going to be the one that would destroy New York in the first season, and for more than just the fact that their loss would have left him entirely alone. As terrified as he is of dying alone thanks to Hiro's warnings that he would, he seemed more concerned with the loss of, in his own words, so many innocent lives. And along those same lines, chances are that he will refuse to kill someone who doesn't have an ability, providing that they're not blocking him from his exit or his goals or haven't wronged him in some way, and he has even been known to be genuinely pleasant to those that aren't on his hit list.

If you've hurt him, though, even if you're without an ability, God help you. Chandra learned this the hard way by crushing whatever delusions of grandeur he had and then presumably threatening to turn him over to to the police (or, at very least, cutting ties with him once he learned he was a murderer). Bennet learned it, too, by being the continual thorn in his side, capturing him at Union Wells and taking him off to be tortured. Never mind that Sylar technically started it by going after Bennet's daughter -- he's mostly of the opinion that, since he didn't hurt Claire then, he didn't deserve what he got and everything he did to the Bennet family afterward was fair play. He's a firm believer in an eye for an eye, and conversely, if you do something nice for him with no apparent ulterior motives, he's more than willing to return the favor later.

Oddly, it should be noted that Sylar's far more willing to trust than someone in his position should be. The writer believes that it's a combination of his own ego (who would dare betray someone with as much power as him?) and his own emotional immaturity (how could someone do something so terrible to him again?) but either way, he's laid himself on the line for some of the most bizarre people, particularly in the later seasons of his canon. He trusted both Angela and Arthur Petrelli when they said he was their son, he trusted Bennet when he later revealed that he wasn't, and closer to his canon point, he trusted Mohinder to be able to help him keep from destroying New York and trusted Elle with the knowledge that he'd recently murdered someone when she was, for all intents and purposes, still a complete stranger. And it was all, for the most part, because they were nice to him.

All that's been already said considered, however, Sylar is not without the potential for redemption. All in all, he's nothing more than an angry child lashing out at a world that never seemed to give a damn about him, and if people hadn't consistently used him and then turned on him when he outlived his usefulness, chances are he wouldn't have turned out so viciously. Even considering the price of his ability, if he'd had someone who genuinely understood and cared about him, he most likely would have learned to control himself or died trying for their sake. All he wants is for someone to love him -- though he settles for hate because it's at least acknowledgment -- and to not have to be truly alone.

Powers/Abilties:

• INTUITIVE APTITUDE -- In Sylar's world, most people manifest one ability and are stuck with it their entire lives. Intuitive aptitude was this ability for Sylar and, put simply, the ability to understand the structure and operation of complex systems without special education or training. What that means is that, given enough time looking something over, Sylar will just know how it functions, what it's capable of, and how to fix it if it's broken. Since this ability requires no conscious effort to turn on or off (though analyzing something does take a willing desire), he first used it without knowledge of doing so, or that it was anything out of the ordinary, to repair watches in his shop in Queens. Later on, he learned that, through extensive study of the brain of another special, he could come to understand an ability and could force his neural pathways and body to mimic it. This always results in the death of the special, since it obviously involves significant blood loss, and grants him a sense of mastery of the ability oftentimes better than the person who originally displayed it and based solely on the fact that he simply understands how it works better than anyone else ever could. It is suggested in the first season of canon that every new ability that Sylar takes makes him that much more unstable, however, and the writer firmly believes this to be true, if only because changing yourself that drastically and so often can't be healthy and because Sylar oftentimes seems that much more evil after acquiring a new ability. Such as, for example, his shift from being terrified of the destruction of New York to playing with the ability that could make it happen with an almost childlike glee after killing Ted Sprague.

The applications of this ability extend far beyond simply being able to take on more powers, however. As mentioned before, he originally used his aptitude to fix watches, and that facet of the ability did not simply go away because he turned to murder. Given enough time and study, Sylar can understand just about anything biological or mechanical and know enough about it to make it work for him. He demonstrated this ability in the presence of both Hiro Nakamura and Charlie Andrews, recognizing that there was something physically wrong with both of them (a tumor in Hiro's case; an aneurysm in Charile's) and was able to cure Charlie without hurting her. He showed his aptitude's capacity for understanding again when, in the comics, he stole an 18-wheeler to get across the country after his escape from Primatech, and just knew how to drive it with only a cursory glance at the driver's manual. Furthermore, Sylar has claimed that his ability also allows him to analyze human behavior and canon has shown us that, with it, he can understand the complexities of cause and effect, both allowing him to roughly predict how someone will act or how a situation will go. While this is true, however, it is not infallible. He still can and is, in fact, prone to ignoring his intuitions in favor of his ego and feelings under the mindset that, regardless of how the situation looks, no one could possibly take him on and win, or that a certain person wouldn't possibly do a certain thing.

It should also be noted that this ability is not without a price. Sylar's aptitude comes with a darker side known as the hunger that compels him to understand how things work. This is, unfortunately, part of what made him into a murderer, and is covered in more detail in the personality section.

And finally, in his later seasons of canon Sylar has been known to be able to take on another ability with his aptitude without having to hurt anyone. It requires an understanding on a emotional level rather than a physical one, allowing him to form a connection with and thereby take the ability of someone else, albeit with much less control over the new ability than he would demonstrate otherwise. This seems difficult for him, however, the only ability he's shown to copy in canon without the aid of another ability being Elle's, but it's not impossible. As of his point in canon, however, he's unaware of that particular aspect of his ability, and even if he was, he still much prefers murder.

• TELEKINESIS -- This ability allows Sylar to move things with the power of his mind. As displayed in Landslide (1x22), his lifting limit seems to be around 6 tons -- as much as an armored truck -- but his telekinesis is useful for much more than just that. He has, after all, used it to do anything from picking locks to making himself appear as though he has super strength and speed to sawing open the skulls of unsuspecting specials. And, as a side note, he tends to telegraph the use of this power by pantomiming whatever he plans on doing with it (making a sweeping motion with his arm to throw someone back, for example), but such is not always the case. He has used this ability without the accompaniment of gestures, it just seems easier for him to do so when he does.

• SHATTERING -- By holding his fingers like a child would to imitate a gun, Sylar can shatter things made of glass or things that he's frozen with his cryokinesis ability (see below). The writer is assuming that, since the man he stole it from tried to defend himself with this ability in the moments before Sylar killed him, it can be used on another person, but it won't do any real damage (no broken bones, nothing like that). Chances are, if he bothered relying on this ability in a fight at all -- which he likely won't, since he never did in canon -- it'd be something akin to being shot at a distance with an airsoft rifle. Worst case scenario, if he were standing at point blank range, you might end up with some nasty welts; best cast scenario, it would only be enough to distract someone as they wondered what the hell that was.

• CRYOKINESIS -- Given physical contact and a few seconds, Sylar can freeze things solid. On a living thing, this effect causes great pain but generally only lasts a few seconds before the ice melts (unless, of course, he remains in contact until the person is frozen solid, and then, well, they're dead). On something inanimate -- such as Hiro's sword -- the freezing effect seems to be more permanent, not wearing off as quickly, if at all. Anything that has been frozen solid can be shattered with a great enough application of violence, as we see in canon when Sylar breaks Hiro's sword, and the writer assumes that his shattering ability could likewise produce a similar effect on a frozen target. Fortunately, however, Sylar doesn't seem to use this ability in combat very often, possibly because it takes too long to freeze something solid, and generally reserves it for other, less destructive applications. Like freezing the road so it would be more difficult to follow him, given its slickness, or making snow from his mother's sink sprayer.

• MATTER LIQUIFICATION -- With this ability Sylar can melt objects. This power seems to apply solely to inanimate objects, as both he and the man he took it from had melted everything from glass beer bottles to toasters, and requires him to be touching or nearly touching the thing he wants to melt. As far as offensive powers go, this is a relatively useless one as he couldn't use it to melt a person or anything like that, but he could use it, say, destroy someone's favorite keepsake if he felt they deserved it.

• ENHANCED HEARING -- This ability basically does what it says on the box, allowing Sylar to hear things such as others' heartbeats to be able to gauge whether or not they're lying, or when the weather is about to change just by how the clouds sound. In canon, in fact, he claimed to have been able to hear a pin drop from a mile away, while it's debatable as to whether or not he was lying, the writer has always assumed that he wasn't. There is a substantial weakness that comes with this ability, however -- namely noises that are extremely loud or of the right pitch hurt his ears like you wouldn't believe. So much so that sustained exposure to something as simple as a tuning fork was nothing short of torture and anything louder or unexpected has the chance of deafening him, temporarily.

• PRECOGNITION -- Through art, Sylar has the ability to predict the future. This ability works with any physical art form -- though everyone who's had the ability has shown a tendency towards painting or drawing -- and when he uses it, his eyes turn completely white. It's a little unsettling, he's sure, but even more so is the fact that, when he starts, he can't be stopped until the art is finished, his movements seemingly controlled by some outside source. It is the writer's personal opinion that he's still lucid enough to hold conversations while using this ability, albeit with lengthy pauses between his answers, however, though it is unlikely he'd be able to do much beyond that.

• INDUCED RADIOACTIVITY -- With this ability Sylar can, as one would expect, generate and emit radioactive particles. On a broad scale, this means that he could technically produce enough radiation to mimic the effect of a nuclear bomb explosion. On a finer scale, however, and with his level of mastery, Sylar can use this ability to do something as simple as boil a glass of water or melt a metal lock, or use it to generate an electromagnetic pulse to disable any nearby electronics. As per radiation in the real world, however, there is one massive downside to the use of this ability, assuming Sylar has any concern for the people around him when he uses it -- namely, depending on the destructive force of his application of the power, say, for example, using it to generate fireballs in his hands, those around him may be subject to the effects of radiation poisoning. Sylar, himself, seems to have a certain degree of immunity to this downside, much like the man he took it from, who could use his power without suffering from the effects of radiation poisoning while others around him did, but this immunity is not absolute. Without some guaranteed means of recovery -- such as Claire Bennet's ability -- a total meltdown with this ability on Sylar's part would most likely be fatal.

Appearance: Here.

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

Here. Sylar's first network post from the last game the writer played him in. She felt this was appropriate, given that he had no CR at the time (so she felt this would not be considered a CR AU link) and came from almost identical canon point. If the mod would prefer a fresh sample, however, the writer would be more than happy to write one.

Prose Sample:

It should bother him to wake up in a room he doesn't recognize when he doesn't remember falling asleep in the first place, his last memories of standing above Manhattan, fire at his fingertips, or that there's bracelet on the wrist that he can't seem to get off and where his namesake watch, the sum of his psychological scars, should be. A lot of things about this should bother him, really -- simple, mundane things that would unsettle a normal person -- but they don't.

He'd like to write it off as being anything but normal, but in this case, he is. That much he knows that from the instant he wakes up and doesn't immediately have to focus on the sound of his heartbeat to dull what would otherwise be an assault of ambient noise from the other people in the room. And that, the idea of not having even one of his abilities, that's what shakes him. It doesn't help to think that his enhanced hearing probably isn't the only thing he's missing.

Sucking in a sharp breath, he scrambles into a sit and flicks a hand out at the nearest warm body, intent on shoving them away telekinetically. It's a test, one he can apologize for later if he feels like it, he figures, and when he fails, he breathes out and actually takes the time to consider his surroundings. If he doesn't have his powers, then he needs to get to somewhere where he can get them and himself back. If the Haitian is involved, and he doesn't doubt that he is, whatever power the man holds the only thing he's come up that's been strong enough to stop his for any real length of time, that may be as simple as getting away from here.

He gives up on that idea the instant he gets a good look at the room around him. The Company wouldn't have left him in what looks to him to be the ruins of the old Clash of the Titans set, nor would they have left him with what could potentially be a buffet in the form of the other people around him, with or without his powers. They saw what he did to Eden.

Fear congealing into slow rising anger, he gets to his feet slowly, intent on finding something he can use as a weapon and a way out. He's not above teaching someone else, someone beyond Mohinder and the Company, that's it's not a good idea to try to cage him.

His plan, like all his others thus far, gets shot to hell before he even gets to his feet, as a screen rises to life at the front of the room to explain the situation. He tries to tell himself that this just means he might have to bide his time -- he's done it before, both times, actually -- and ignore the voice of doubt at the back of his head that reasons that this just might be for the best somehow. After all, at least this way, he won't be the one behind New York's fall and that he won't die alone.