Re: Journal of Sociology [S!6] - [Signups Open~]
04-24-2012, 06:44 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Godbot.
Posted on TimeothyHour's behalf:
Username: TimeothyHour
Name: Nemo (is not his real name, but all records of such have long since been destroyed.)
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Color: Red on White
Description: Nemo is a quiet, sort of forgettable young man of about twenty years. Caucasian. Black hair, eyes of generally inconsequential colour, generic face. A little below average height, fairly skinny, with a voice neither too memorable nor too generic. A reproduction of Nemo’s left-facing mugshot is available in Subdocument VI for further viewing.
Nemo’s experience in various survival, combat, and espionage situations, strong will to live, and high intelligence contribute to the effectiveness of his pragmatic moral code. He considers himself a fairly nice person, and will cooperate cordially until feeling as though his life of quality of life is threatened. Then, all bets are off.
At the time of his disappearance, Nemo was dressed in the following: An orange prisoner jumpsuit, two black tennis shoes, a pair of handcuffs, two black gloves, an orange facemask, and a pair of black socks.
Weapons/Abilities: Nemo posses one and only one extraordinary talent: any and all stored data that comes into contact with his person is instantly and irrecoverably destroyed. If Nemo were to, say, acquire a printed document, as soon as his hand was to touch the cover, all printed characters within the book would turn into “junk data”: instead of containing, say, a High-Clearance government case debriefing, the papers would contain nothing but garbled characters, symbols scrambled beyond information-bearing possibility. This applies to normal and nonnormal classifications of stored data: computers crash*, tapes—video and audio—become static, any and all objects are removed of text, carved stone tablets morph into gibberish at a single touch. Theoretically, a human that comes into contact with him would lose their memory, but that single touch scrambles their genetic information as well.
Thankfully, this ability has some limits. Nemo can only destroy stored information, not information in transit. So, for example, a human being can speak to Nemo, and he can speak back, and they could have a pretty pleasant conversation so long as they don’t touch each other. This has certain other applications: Nemo cannot destroy information traveling through the air or through wires (although he could destroy either the sender or the receiver). This ability, also, thankfully, does not apply to physically-existing pictorial data. Nemo could destroy a recording or a digital image of a painting, but not the painting itself (hieroglyphs, however, or other pictograms used to transfer specific data still fall under this rule. For example, a sign displaying a biohazard warning or an architectural diagram would be scrambled by Nemo, but an abstract painting would not**). It should also be Noted that information pertaining to or of Nemo can be easily stored and reviewed without consequence, although most records of his existence have been destroyed by his and the hands of others; it is not his likeness that destroys information, but the man himself.
Another defining characteristic of this ability is the definition of touch. Nemo’s ubiquitous black gloves allow him to interact with the physical world fairly effectively, by virtue of the fact he’s not actually touching any data-storing objects with his physical body. This aspect of the data elimination process has been interestingly exploited by Nemo numerous times—poisoning drinks, coating blowdarts or syringes, and filling splatter-breaking glass vials with various bodily fluids, providing the same information-destroying effects as if he had physically touched the target in question, as long as the substance is greater in volume than 1 milliliter. Several vials, real and fake, of his blood and urine float around the black market to this day.
*In this regard, one has to think of all the things in this day and age that contain computers, and how many of them could be rendered unusable for the man. Phones, radios, televisions, cars, copy machines, calculators. Airplanes rendered unusable once stepped on board, cameras become garbage, touching the thermostat or air conditioning renders climate control, for him, a difficult task. In some homes, the flip of a light switch could be enough to ruin the house’s lighting control and render aspects of the wiring useless.
**This distinction, along with the conceptual aspects of Nemo’s ability, suggest to some that his ability is not a physical trait but an extension of some aspect of his mind—a sort of unconscious psychic ability. There is no official consensus on the matter, mainly contributed by the fact no study or experiment has been conducted and survived long enough to be published to the scientific community. However, interesting questions can be raised. How can Nemo deactivate a car’s internal computers by simply touching an exterior window, a part completely unrelated to the vehicle’s data storage? Why are certain images destroyed and others are not? How can a being who naturally destroys data be constructed of the same data it destroys? Currently, there is no clear answer, and there may never be a definitive scientific reason for Nemo’s data-eliminating ability.
Backstory:
Posted on TimeothyHour's behalf:
Username: TimeothyHour
Name: Nemo (is not his real name, but all records of such have long since been destroyed.)
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Color: Red on White
Description: Nemo is a quiet, sort of forgettable young man of about twenty years. Caucasian. Black hair, eyes of generally inconsequential colour, generic face. A little below average height, fairly skinny, with a voice neither too memorable nor too generic. A reproduction of Nemo’s left-facing mugshot is available in Subdocument VI for further viewing.
Nemo’s experience in various survival, combat, and espionage situations, strong will to live, and high intelligence contribute to the effectiveness of his pragmatic moral code. He considers himself a fairly nice person, and will cooperate cordially until feeling as though his life of quality of life is threatened. Then, all bets are off.
At the time of his disappearance, Nemo was dressed in the following: An orange prisoner jumpsuit, two black tennis shoes, a pair of handcuffs, two black gloves, an orange facemask, and a pair of black socks.
Weapons/Abilities: Nemo posses one and only one extraordinary talent: any and all stored data that comes into contact with his person is instantly and irrecoverably destroyed. If Nemo were to, say, acquire a printed document, as soon as his hand was to touch the cover, all printed characters within the book would turn into “junk data”: instead of containing, say, a High-Clearance government case debriefing, the papers would contain nothing but garbled characters, symbols scrambled beyond information-bearing possibility. This applies to normal and nonnormal classifications of stored data: computers crash*, tapes—video and audio—become static, any and all objects are removed of text, carved stone tablets morph into gibberish at a single touch. Theoretically, a human that comes into contact with him would lose their memory, but that single touch scrambles their genetic information as well.
Thankfully, this ability has some limits. Nemo can only destroy stored information, not information in transit. So, for example, a human being can speak to Nemo, and he can speak back, and they could have a pretty pleasant conversation so long as they don’t touch each other. This has certain other applications: Nemo cannot destroy information traveling through the air or through wires (although he could destroy either the sender or the receiver). This ability, also, thankfully, does not apply to physically-existing pictorial data. Nemo could destroy a recording or a digital image of a painting, but not the painting itself (hieroglyphs, however, or other pictograms used to transfer specific data still fall under this rule. For example, a sign displaying a biohazard warning or an architectural diagram would be scrambled by Nemo, but an abstract painting would not**). It should also be Noted that information pertaining to or of Nemo can be easily stored and reviewed without consequence, although most records of his existence have been destroyed by his and the hands of others; it is not his likeness that destroys information, but the man himself.
Another defining characteristic of this ability is the definition of touch. Nemo’s ubiquitous black gloves allow him to interact with the physical world fairly effectively, by virtue of the fact he’s not actually touching any data-storing objects with his physical body. This aspect of the data elimination process has been interestingly exploited by Nemo numerous times—poisoning drinks, coating blowdarts or syringes, and filling splatter-breaking glass vials with various bodily fluids, providing the same information-destroying effects as if he had physically touched the target in question, as long as the substance is greater in volume than 1 milliliter. Several vials, real and fake, of his blood and urine float around the black market to this day.
*In this regard, one has to think of all the things in this day and age that contain computers, and how many of them could be rendered unusable for the man. Phones, radios, televisions, cars, copy machines, calculators. Airplanes rendered unusable once stepped on board, cameras become garbage, touching the thermostat or air conditioning renders climate control, for him, a difficult task. In some homes, the flip of a light switch could be enough to ruin the house’s lighting control and render aspects of the wiring useless.
**This distinction, along with the conceptual aspects of Nemo’s ability, suggest to some that his ability is not a physical trait but an extension of some aspect of his mind—a sort of unconscious psychic ability. There is no official consensus on the matter, mainly contributed by the fact no study or experiment has been conducted and survived long enough to be published to the scientific community. However, interesting questions can be raised. How can Nemo deactivate a car’s internal computers by simply touching an exterior window, a part completely unrelated to the vehicle’s data storage? Why are certain images destroyed and others are not? How can a being who naturally destroys data be constructed of the same data it destroys? Currently, there is no clear answer, and there may never be a definitive scientific reason for Nemo’s data-eliminating ability.
Backstory:
Spoiler
![[Image: Nemo.png]](https://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g405/Timeothy_Hofmann/Nemo.png)