Cal, Unwilling Experiment

[Llyarden]

Cal, Unwilling Experiment

(Theme Song)

Non-Magic Character Sheet

 

Mythic / Netherflame Onyx Character Sheet

 

Core Stats Name: Cal Race: Beholder-Human Hybrid Gender: Male Age: 25 Classes: Incanter (Ingotshaper) / Alchemist (Eldritch Infuser)

 

Description Cal does not exactly make for an imposing presence.  Medium height and scrawny to the point of almost looking emaciated, he tends to dress in a long series of robes, scarves, and even a few bandages, leaving barely any skin visible except around his face - and even there, he wears an eyepatch to cover his right eye.   When he unleashes his powers, though, things are different. Hidden beneath his myriad of clothes are eyes - dozens, perhaps hundreds, of a wild array of colours and even shapes, some unlike anything any humanoid would ever show. And just like the beholder that created him, he can unleash devastating rays of energy from his eyes, capable of all the powers of a beholder and more.   (The eyepatch is because if he ever has both eyes open and exposed, a swathe of antimagic energy washes over anything he looks at.)

Personality Cal has a certain outlook on life that one could almost call 'fatalistic.' He likes to make grim predictions about something going wrong - always seeming rather smug when he's proved right - and assumes that almost everyone he meets is an enemy or hindrance of some manner. Nonetheless, when he's around people long enough to trust them, he can grow to be deeply loyal, and is more than willing to put himself on the front line to protect his friends despite his rather unimpressive personal combat skills.   Not exactly the most charming or erudite person, Cal nonetheless possesses a sometimes surprising amount of intuition and knowledge of even esoteric matters - a product of a life travelling the world doing whatever random jobs he can be paid for - though his brusque demeanour and his apparent surprise that whoever he's talking to doesn't understand something that to him feels obvious can be a bit grating.

 

Background

Cal's father would've charitably called himself an entrepreneur. In practice he was a grifter, travelling around the world on whatever vessels or caravans he could wheedle his way onto as his various get-rich-quick schemes blew up in his face, stooping to real work only when there was no other options. Cal's mother was a minor noblewoman in the Kingdom of Stelius, and for a couple of short years, the two were deeply in love.

 

But in time, and as always, Cal's father's money ran out, his lover's family grew unwilling to continue supporting him, and in the end Cal's mother herself rejected him, accusing him of caring for nothing but himself and having Cal's father banned from the manor house.

 

To this day, Cal has no idea how he ended up in his father's custody.

 

In a happier story, having to take care of a child might have been the impetus for Cal's father to clean up his act. But it wasn't. He scraped by on charity and pity, spinning the tale of a devoted father who'd been abandoned by a wicked wife who wanted to see nothing of her son, and used Cal's very existence as an excuse to get away with even more than he ever had before.

 

And so this was the life Cal grew up in - a life of picking up new trades as soon as possible, keeping one eye on the doors, making sure you always had an escape route.

 

And so, in time, father and son came to the small port of Relith.

 

Cal was seventeen at the time - and to the malevolent forces that lurked around the sleepy fishing village, the perfect target. Old enough to have a resilient enough physiology, young enough to still be growing and capable of adapting, and a total stranger. Someone who no-one would miss.

 

It was a long time before Cal ever truly understood what had happened. All he knew at first was that for the first time in his life, there was something that had meaning - a desire, whispering and prickling in the back of his mind, to leave the stable he and his father were sleeping in and to come out to a cave, some half-hour's walk away from the village. Dressed only in his nightclothes, barefoot, he was scratched, bruised and muddy by the time he arrived, but he didn't care. Only the Suggestion mattered.

 

Then the experiments began.

 

Cal had been captured by a Beholder that called the island its home. And possessed of a hatred for its kin beyond even a normal Beholder, it had a plan - a plan that would allow it to wipe out its rivals and become the ultimate Beholder.

 

The first stage of the plan was to reconfigure Cal's physiology, turning him into a horrific, abominable fusion of human and aberration, with all the benefits of opposable thumbs and not only the standard powers of a Beholder's eyes but more capabilities besides, tortured to the extent that he could do little more than beg for a merciful death from a being whose telepathic powers still held him in an unshakeable grip.

 

To this day, Cal still has nightmares about that time.

 

The second part of the Beholder's plan was to transfer its very soul into the newly-primed body of the hybrid human. If it could do so, it would be able to repeat the process again, and more easily at that, transferring itself into new, young bodies when its existing ones withered and expired from the side-effects of the transformation.

 

But it was cautious. It might not have cared one whit for the well-being of the teenage human, and it was relatively confident that it would be capable of handling the effects the transformation would have on its new host, but it certainly didn't want to discover only too late that it had miscalculated and find itself trapped in too much pain to reverse the soul transfer.

 

So instead, it sent its prospective host on a mission - a trial run to check that for all its begging and pleading and screaming, it was physically capable enough. Having heard of another aberration near by, it dispatched Cal to exterminate the interloper.

 

Fortunately for Cal, someone else beat him to the punch - the Guild. And when they were attacked by a horrific, Beholder-like monstrosity, one of the Guild members threw an antimagic field around it - suppressing the enchantment that had been controlling Cal for almost two years.

 

The Guild members were not entirely sure what to think when the 'monster' fell to its knees and begged them to help it.

 

It took almost two years for Cal to recover from his experience - although 'recover' might be a little bit of an exaggeration. The experiments the Beholder had done on him had caused permanent damage to him, and it was only through some somewhat experimental alchemical concoctions of their own that they were able to help Cal adapt and come to terms with his new state. But once it was done, he could've lived a relatively normal, healthy life - perhaps even more than normal, given the heightened nature of his physiology thanks to the Beholder's experiments.

 

But he didn't.

 

The Beholder might not have killed him, but it had taken his ordinary life away, a life he would never get back. And not everyone was as lucky as him to have been rescued.

 

But there were others out there who never had to suffer at all.

 

Edited May 14, 2023 by Llyarden (see edit history)

[Llyarden]

Custom Casting Tradition Request:

 

Beholder Hybrid (5 drawbacks, +1 SP per level in a casting class)

Cal's power comes from the experiments that were performed on him when he was abducted, turning him into something between the human he once was and his beholder captor.  The intent had been for the beholder's soul to overwhelm Cal's, but fortunately for him that part of the experiment was interrupted by the Guild, leaving Cal the sole owner of his power.  A human form was not designed to hold such power, however - and the beholder had simply planned to abduct and convert a new host when Cal's body started to fail.  Alchemical procedures based off the beholder's work were enough to keep Cal alive by suppressing the beholder powers, but using his abilities is very taxing on his body.

- Draining Casting, Painful Magic, Vulnerable Spellcaster, Unstable Storage [counts as 2] / Fortified Magic - The physical side effects of his powers (net 3 drawbacks)

- Expensive Locus (Alchemy Lab), Witchmarked / Drawback Feat (Hidden Heretic) - He uses alchemy to suppress his powers when he doesn't need them, staving off the most debilitating effects, but when he does use his powers, having eyes opening up on random points of his body to unleash magic rays is kinda obvious. (net 0 drawbacks)

- Somatic Casting II - Beholders have the luxury of flexible eye stalks to aim their powers.  Being stuck with a humanoid form, Cal has to maneuver into the right position for the rays to strike true - and while the rays can quite happily just burn through light clothing if they have to, anything more sturdy can stop the blasts. (net 2 drawbacks)

[Arklytte]

Cool tradition, and a really great explanation. 🙂  Heartily approved!

[Llyarden]

Need to figure out an image and I have like 2.5k left to spend, but beyond that I think Cal is now complete.

[Arklytte]

Sounds good.  I'm going to spend the next couple days answering questions, and I'll start serious character review Thursday or Friday.