Dillon Cole || Scorpion Shard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orderfromchaos) wrote2012-07-01 06:32 am
orderfromchaos) wrote2012-07-01 06:32 am
Siren's Pull App
Player Information
Name: Isabelle
Age: 22
AIM SN: vibishantheshiny
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yup
Currrently Played Characters: House, Anya Lehnsherr, and Zachariah
Conditional: Activity Check Link: Here
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Here
Character Information
General
Canon Source: The Star Shards Trilogy by Neal Shusterman.
Canon Format: Three novels.
Character's Name: Dillon Cole
Character's Age: 16
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played.
What form will your character's NV take? A clunky Old School Compaq Concerto laptop. The longer Dillon has it, the more complex it will become.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
Dillon’s basic ability is to manipulate or reverse entropy, the force of decay in the universe. Entropy is the universal law that says that without more energy, systems become more disordered and chaotic. Around Dillon, this ceases to be true. Patterns appear out of random chance, old things become new, and broken things become whole. Columns of water retain their cohesion even after the glass that holds them has been shattered, rivers flow uphill, and the dead blink back into life, perfectly restored. If he shuffles a deck of cards, they will sort into perfect order. Although he can focus this phenomenon voluntarily, it still happens at a baseline level around him whether he wants it too or not. Touch seems to make it stronger.
The way his powers work is completely tied into cause and effect, the stability of structures in physical space and through time. If he looks at anything in the right way, he can learn a great deal about it, understanding the causes that shaped it in exactly that way, and he can see the multiplication of possible futures, and what it would take to bring about a particular one. The only real limits to this are his own perception of his powers: he has to be able to rationalize the information his powers are trying to give him by saying he can interpret it from some twitch or cadence or crevice. Otherwise, his human mind doesn’t accept it. The more blasé he becomes with his powers, the more directly he can know things.
This ability applies to people: he can look at someone and know things about their past, everything from why they are the way they are to what color car they drive. With a little more effort, he can see exactly what to say to bring them perfect peace, or to send them off the deep end, even if anyone else saying the same words, without the power of Dillon’s will behind it, would simply be brushed off. This is something he generally hates doing and will deliberately avoid in game, and even if somehow it did come up, I would never dream of doing it without OOC permission. He can heal minds that he’s sent into madness, but it takes more time and effort.
The flip side of his power is destruction. He can find and exploit the exact fault line that will turn an ordered system into chaos, shattering almost any physical edifice into rubble. At the end of the second book, he taps the Hoover Dam in just the right place with a pebble three times, sending resonances through the whole structure and causing it to completely disintegrate a few hours later. He escapes a high-security electronic vault by scooting his stocking feet on the floor, and then shaping the static shock into the perfect pattern to trigger the lock as he touches it. He even shatters a glass without touching it, simply destroying its patterns with the energetic force of his anger, but this seems to be limited to very small-scope things.
Dillon can fix anything that is broken as long as he has all the parts, but he can’t replace anything that is missing. He can’t create matter. He can heal wounds, but not disease. He heals incredibly quickly, including from drowning, and several bullet wounds that would kill a human, but it’s stated in canon that a bullet directly to the brain or heart would kill him before his powers could operate.
In port, I would like Dillon’s reversal of entropy to work against the seeping darkness within a small radius; it seems like exactly the sort of thing he would repel. In addition, the daylight is normally anathema to the darkness, and Dillon’s abilities are literally fueled by the power of a star.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them?
Weapons:
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
Seventeen years ago, the star Mentarsus-H*, from the constellation Scorpius, went supernova. The soul of the star splintered into six brilliant, unequal pieces, each of them attaching themselves to a new life being conceived at that very moment on a little blue planet only 15-odd lightyears away: the six Scorpion Shards. One of those tiny, shining lives – the one that anchored the very largest, strongest, and brightest core of the old star – would grow into the boy Dillon Cole.
The first 14 years of Dillon’s life were utterly ordinary. He was an only child of Catholic parents living in Arizona. His parents doted on him, he did well in school, and loved to rollerblade. However, as the light from the death of star that created him began to reach earth, things began to go wrong. The powerful, exceptional souls of the Shards attracted parasites that fed on their power as they manifested, warping their abilities into monstrous and dangerous forms. Dillon’s latent power of order was warped into a force of chaotic destruction
Anyone Dillon touched suffered a brief but profound break in their mental state, forgetting what they were doing and even who they were. Although most people would recover, his parents touched Dillon most often, and by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late: they had become vegetables. Dillon left home and traveled to California, living on stolen food and by hustling pool. His parasite fed on destruction, urging Dillon to use his powers to break things. This urging expressed itself as a terrible, aching hunger that only relented when the parasite was sated, and then only briefly. As the parasite grew, so did the hunger; from a psychological standpoint, Dillon’s experience reads almost exactly like addiction.
He did his best to mitigate the damage his wrecking-hunger demanded, escalating slowly to bigger and bigger acts of destruction. He tried to use his ability to understand how consequences would unravel in order to keep anyone from being hurt, but he was very new with his powers, and sometimes he miscalculated. Once he caused a massive pile-up car-crash. It should have had few casualties, but he didn’t anticipate that a single crucial truck driver was left-handed, and veered the opposite direction from his expectations. Dozens of people were hurt, including Deanna Chang, another Shard who was plagued with constant terror of everything, except when she was causing fear in others.
Dillon felt horribly guilty about the damage he caused, and he went to church afterwards to confess every time. The priest he confessed to, unfortunately, grew more and more disturbed by Dillon’s escalating crimes, his insistence that he was driven to perform them satisfy the wrecking-hunger, and his fear at the way the hunger continued to grow. After the car crash, he told Dillon that he needed a psychiatrist, not a priest. Dillon interpreted this as denial of absolution. He was furious, terrified, distraught, and certain he would be damned. Before leaving town, he visited Deanna in the hospital to make a futile apology. They realized that they were two of a kind, and he convinced her to run away with him.
Deanna and Dillon were literally soulmates, the two greatest parts of the same soul, and they quickly became incredibly codependent. Deanna didn’t need to be afraid with Dillon to protect her, and she could feed her parasite with the fear that resulted from Dillon’s increasing catastrophes. Meanwhile, Dillon could live with his actions as long as he has one person who forgave him, needed him, and cared for him in spite of what he’d done. However, they were teenagers, and they still had doubts and insecurities. Deanna worried about Dillon, about what he’d do, and whether he really needed her like she needed him – or if it was good for her to need him so much at all. Dillon felt threatened by her doubts, and abruptly changed their course: instead of moving toward the remaining for Shards, they head away from them, so that he could keep Deanna to himself. Around this time, Dillon learned how to break not only physical systems but also people, first one-on-one and soon throwing an entire town into raving, violent chaos with a single well-placed Rube Goldberg of a sentence.
The other Shards, weighed down by their own monstrosities but close on his tail, almost died in a massive collapse of skyscrapers Dillon caused in downtown Boise. Terrified of perishing along with their hosts, their four parasites abandon them, taking root in Dillon instead. Suddenly burdened with new horrors, and his own hunger grown far out of control, Dillon searched for the right chain of dominoes to tip over to destroy the entire world – and he found it.
Fortunately, before he could set off the irrevocable chain reaction, the other Shards caught up to him, and threatened to shoot him. Once again the parasites ran in the face of death, tearing a hole in the fabric of the world and fleeing to a strange un-world between universes, a place of bizarre detritus and endless red sands. There, the six shards each battled with their parasites, and five of them overcame them. The Spirit of Destruction played on Dillon’s hubris and anger, tricking him into one last destructive act, an attack that the parasite rerouted into Deanna. She died, and Dillon was unable to save her. The five remaining shards escaped back to Earth before the hole repaired itself.
The other shards rejected Dillon, and split up to find their families and try to reclaim their lives. Dillon, with nothing to return to, devoted himself to figuring out the proper use of his abilities, trying to atone for his crimes by fixing everything that he broke. This became a much more reasonable ambition when he learned to revive the dead, starting with all those that he killed. It was harrowing work, but he persevered. He poured his grief and guilt into reconstruction, hoping it would erase at least some of what he’d done.
There was one hitch: the people he brings back from death or vicious madness largely didn’t want to go back to their old lives. They were in awe of him, a serious boy who could work miracles and see into their souls, and they only wanted to follow and serve him. Dillon couldn’t figure out how to make them leave. At one point, Dillon was knocked into the Columbia river, unconscious, and temporarily drowned. Without even a shred of his will to reign in and direct it, his power ran wild, bringing the disparate bits of an ancient spirit predator named Okaya back together, setting the world on a horrible collision course, first with Okaya himself, and secondarily with all of his people. When Dillon woke, he could sense the ominous change in the world’s pattern, but had no idea what caused it.
Terrified and confused, he stopped fighting his would-be followers, rationalizing that it would be easier to fix the suddenly looming catastrophe without wasting energy trying to turn helpers away – even eerily obedient, obsessive, worshipful helpers, enthralled by Dillon’s aura of rejuvenation and perfect order. They brought him to Hearst Castle, and anyone who objected was drawn into the orbit of Dillon’s growing cult.
Dillon mentally summoned the other shards, and they joined him there, but so did Okaya, posing as a wise and helpful friend. Okaya manipulated the shards, preying upon their egos, setting them against one another and dependant on him for counsel. The other four remaining shards considered themselves gods and enjoyed flaunting their powers and being surrounded by their sycophants, while Dillon struggled to get a sense of how to stop the shape of the destruction he could feel coming. Okaya devoured the souls of hundreds of their followers, and worse, fed souls to the shards themselves in the guise of other things, with the single exception of Dillon, who was wary of Okaya’s offerings.
Even so, struggling and cut off from support, he listened to Okaya, who eventually convinced Dillon to use his power to take direct control of the world in order to facilitate saving it. Dillon and the shards traveled to Vegas to put on an outrageous show of their powers and proclaim an upcoming miracle of the waters. Having captured the world’s attention, they traveled through the desert to the Hoover damn. As they reach the dam, Dillon discovered what Okaya had done. He was infuriated and devastated. He finally realized that Okaya was the danger: that he would glut himself, consuming the souls of the world on a neat platter that Dillon himself would serve him. Worse, Dillon had no idea how to kill him; destroying his body would only release him to find another and continue on his horrendous spree.
Dillon used his power to destroy the Hoover dam while he and four hundred hand-chosen followers – the empty, soulless ones devoured by Okaya, but still acting out a semblance of life – waited beneath it. Everyone expected Dillon to hold back the waters with his power of cohesion, but he chose not to. After a year of struggling to atone, he accepted the guilt for all the downstream deaths in order to ruin his own reputation, to blot it out so darkly that the world would never worship him or the shards again, to undo the pattern Okaya began and deprive him of their controlling influence. But the attempt failed. Once again, Dillon’s power acted without his conscious control. After the initial rush of water drowned him, the waters bore him calmly at the forefront of a flood that slowed, came to a standstill, and then slid backwards, reversing the entire flow of the Colorado river. The miracle was precisely the world-shaking event Dillon had foreseen: rationality paled beside it.
When Dillon crawled from the shore, he finally confronted Okaya and they struck a bargain: Okaya would open a door to the unworld so that Dillon could retrieve and resurrect Deanna, and he would spare any particular souls Dillon wished to save. In exchange, Dillon would rule the world and allow Okaya to feast upon it. However, Dillon was incapable of accepting the deal, exchanging any souls for some kind of greater good. Instead, he betrayed Okaya. In the unworld, he found the two parasites of fear and destruction, who were trapped there without hosts, and allowed them back into himself, then delivered them to Okaya. Overcome with fear and influenced by the parasites, who wished to travel to a dimension of pure spirit creatures, Okaya fled to his home world, and the door sealed behind him. Dillon was left in a world unraveling at the seams, weighed down by the knowledge that his attempts to mend it only rent it apart more quickly.
*This is not a real star, the author made it up. The only things we know for sure about it, astronomically speaking, are that it was large enough to go supernova, and that it was green. This is complicated by the fact that stars cannot actually be green, as a function of their heat curves.
Point in Canon: Between books 2 and 3, after he banishes Okaya and the parasites at the end of Thief of Souls, but before he turns himself over to the US government to be locked up, in an attempt to mitigate the power of his influence in the beginning of Shattered Sky.
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history:
Character Personality:
Dillon is a lost, lonely little kid with too much blood on his hands. Between his parents and Deanna, he’s accidentally killed everyone he’s ever really loved, and a whole lot of other people besides. He’s a being whose very existence imposes order on the universe, and yet he has a terrible swathe of chaos left in his wake.
He was fourteen when the world started going crazy around him, he was alone and on the streets by fifteen, and despite his incredible powers, he’s felt completely out of control for most of that time. A great deal of Dillon’s decisions, for good or bad, are motivated by an attempt to regain control over his own life. While the parasite was riding him, it definitely called the shots, but Dillon clawed for every scrap of discretion he could get. Once he destroys an entire town – except for a single block, and he gleefully informs Deanna that the hunger wanted the whole town, but Dillon denied it, Dillon chose the exact trigger that would bring most of the city into seething civil war, but leave at least that one spit of suburbia unscathed. He is afraid of losing Deanna to forces outside his control if they meet the other shards, so he turns away from them.
Dillon was raised Catholic, and although he looses a lot of his faith after the priest refuses his confession, guilt still has a strong hold on him. He desperately wants to be a good person; he honestly doesn’t believe that he can, but he’s determined to try anyway. He chooses not to bring his parents back from the dead, knowing it would be a selfish act for his own comfort rather than for their sake, and selfish given all the work he has to do to help those still alive. He’s the only shard who is never truly comfortable being called a God, even though his powers are the most obviously divine. Being grounded in the limitations and intimacy of human life and personality are important to him, to his benefit. He’s a profoundly good person with way more power than he knew what to do with. He hasn’t always had the strength to resist the evil forces preying on him, who has committed terrible crimes. He’s grieving, but he‘s found the strength to accept what he’s done, and carry it honestly.
Dillon will listen if someone seems like moral guide, which allows Okaya and others to manipulate him in spite of how very canny he is. Several times in the books he listens to adults he probably shouldn’t because he just doesn’t know what to do. Knowing the power he wields, he is incapable of doing nothing in the face of suffering, even if historically he hurts as much as he helps. He firmly believes he has to try. Even when he resolves to withdraw, to try to limit his influence, he can’t resist using his powers, healing his profiler of late-stage leukemia, bringing peace to his guards, and eventually breaking out when imprisonment fails to halt the pattern he set at the Hoover dam.
Even though he wants to trust someone else’s judgment, Dillon is neither a coward nor a pushover: when Okaya gives him an ultimatum, he refuses to sacrifice a few from the supposed good of the many, confronting some of his worst fears (in the form of his old parasite) and giving up a chance to resurrect Deanna just to find a third way, trick Okaya, and keep Earth safe. He has a temper, but since it cost him Deanna, he works hard to keep it under control.
Ultimately, in spite of everything he’s been through and everything he’s capable of, he’s still a teenager. Sometimes his power goes to head. He likes to show off, he likes to impress people, and when he isn’t crushed under the weight of guilt and grief, he’s actually kind of a snarker. He has the playfully rough manner of a boy who grew up too fast, but there’s no real meanness in it, and a hell of a lot of empathy. He veers between certainty and doubt, between the patterns he understands perfectly and the ones that are too big or too close for him to perceive clearly.
He’s incapable of holding back when he senses the world’s need pressing on him, but on the rare occasions that his senses are cut off, it’s an incredible relief, and part of him just wants to hide there, to rest, to be a teenage boy for a little while. In the end, though, Dillon is willing to make enormous personal sacrifices. He makes ten impossible things happen before breakfast, but because of the intimacy of his understanding for the world around him, he never truly distances himself from the human condition the way the other sometimes shards do. In Shattered Sky, another character compares him to a shark – dangerous, majestically powerful, and always, always moving.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game:
Character Plans:
Appearance/PB: Dillon is an average-looking teenager with red hair and very neat clothes. PB is Joseph Mazzello
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The video opens to a disorienting view: flooring tile looms in foreshortened view, sweeping out the to corner, bracketed by the cheap Towers apartments wallpaper. It is neither moldy nor peeling, the colors of the garish design as bright and fresh as they day it was applied. The camera sits on the floor, creating the odd perspective, empty of any occupants. Then, suddenly, the stillness is violently interrupted. A glass falls directly in front of the camera, shattering into hundreds of pieces, a few droplets of water splashing on the lens, the rest puddling around the sharp splinters of glass. Then, slowly, the shards twitch and drift, not aimlessly, but with purpose, every speck carefully reassembling. The cracks vanish, until the seams are impossible to detect. Most bizarrely of all, the water, too, recollected, leaving the camera clean and dry as the water sits placidly in the perfectly repaired container. A hand picks up the glass and the viewpoint suddenly swoops wildly, lifted in his other hand before it stabilizes, set on the table, with Dillon seated in front of it. He’s a young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with immaculate clothes and neat red hair. He grins and takes a long drink of water.]
Hi, guys. I’m Dillon, and I can fix anything. Repair or restoration, as long as you bring me all the pieces. Fees on a sliding scale, and I’m willing to do house calls.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Third Person Sample
He sits on a park bench as the last daylight slips away, sirens wailing, shrill and plaintive. He isn’t afraid. Maybe he should be. He feels so numb. He left his own world hurtling toward a cliff, and he doesn’t know if it’s arrogance or honesty that has him feeling like he left it without a driver. Not that he had been any closer to figuring out the breaks when he left.
But the Port has it’s own pattern, and if he wants to understand it, and his place in it, then he needs to understand the Darkness. Low shadows bleed into each other, but he doesn’t see any of the more dramatic effects. Not entirely unexpected: nothing ever remains dilapidated or broken or rotted around him anymore. Was he disappointed? Had he hoped that a power capable of plucking him from his universe like a grape off a vine might be enough to quash his overflowing ability?
Oh. Yes, that’s exactly what he had hoped, without even daring to admit it to himself. He hid his face in his hands, shuddered, breathed – and he could breathe, deeper than he had in a long time. He felt like some of the endless pressure inside himself was being bled away, like a fever had broken, stuttered a few inches down the thermometer. He glanced up, eyes slowing making out distant shapes of squalor and ruin, held at bay in a neat circle of unbroken sidewalk slabs and blades of grass all leaning at precisely the same angle, centered on him like a fairy ring. He pushed, exerting his power, and the sphere of wholesomeness expanded about a foot all around its circumference, and it took genuine effort to hold the line there, as the force of the Darkness pushed back. Dillon laughed out loud, brightly, bizarrely delighted, and let the Darkness creep back to the line of natural equilibrium.
He still couldn’t contain the power of a star entirely inside his own skin. But at least he didn’t feel as though he was burning through his own perfectly maintained body. Perhaps this was what he needed. The world would turn without the relentless spur of his power fueling it, and maybe Dillon could use his time sequestered here, learn to master himself in this place where his ability to suspend entropy had a counterweight to measure against. At the very least, it was worth a try.
Name: Isabelle
Age: 22
AIM SN: vibishantheshiny
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yup
Currrently Played Characters: House, Anya Lehnsherr, and Zachariah
Conditional: Activity Check Link: Here
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Here
Character Information
General
Canon Source: The Star Shards Trilogy by Neal Shusterman.
Canon Format: Three novels.
Character's Name: Dillon Cole
Character's Age: 16
What form will your character's NV take? A clunky Old School Compaq Concerto laptop. The longer Dillon has it, the more complex it will become.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
Dillon’s basic ability is to manipulate or reverse entropy, the force of decay in the universe. Entropy is the universal law that says that without more energy, systems become more disordered and chaotic. Around Dillon, this ceases to be true. Patterns appear out of random chance, old things become new, and broken things become whole. Columns of water retain their cohesion even after the glass that holds them has been shattered, rivers flow uphill, and the dead blink back into life, perfectly restored. If he shuffles a deck of cards, they will sort into perfect order. Although he can focus this phenomenon voluntarily, it still happens at a baseline level around him whether he wants it too or not. Touch seems to make it stronger.
The way his powers work is completely tied into cause and effect, the stability of structures in physical space and through time. If he looks at anything in the right way, he can learn a great deal about it, understanding the causes that shaped it in exactly that way, and he can see the multiplication of possible futures, and what it would take to bring about a particular one. The only real limits to this are his own perception of his powers: he has to be able to rationalize the information his powers are trying to give him by saying he can interpret it from some twitch or cadence or crevice. Otherwise, his human mind doesn’t accept it. The more blasé he becomes with his powers, the more directly he can know things.
This ability applies to people: he can look at someone and know things about their past, everything from why they are the way they are to what color car they drive. With a little more effort, he can see exactly what to say to bring them perfect peace, or to send them off the deep end, even if anyone else saying the same words, without the power of Dillon’s will behind it, would simply be brushed off. This is something he generally hates doing and will deliberately avoid in game, and even if somehow it did come up, I would never dream of doing it without OOC permission. He can heal minds that he’s sent into madness, but it takes more time and effort.
The flip side of his power is destruction. He can find and exploit the exact fault line that will turn an ordered system into chaos, shattering almost any physical edifice into rubble. At the end of the second book, he taps the Hoover Dam in just the right place with a pebble three times, sending resonances through the whole structure and causing it to completely disintegrate a few hours later. He escapes a high-security electronic vault by scooting his stocking feet on the floor, and then shaping the static shock into the perfect pattern to trigger the lock as he touches it. He even shatters a glass without touching it, simply destroying its patterns with the energetic force of his anger, but this seems to be limited to very small-scope things.
Dillon can fix anything that is broken as long as he has all the parts, but he can’t replace anything that is missing. He can’t create matter. He can heal wounds, but not disease. He heals incredibly quickly, including from drowning, and several bullet wounds that would kill a human, but it’s stated in canon that a bullet directly to the brain or heart would kill him before his powers could operate.
In port, I would like Dillon’s reversal of entropy to work against the seeping darkness within a small radius; it seems like exactly the sort of thing he would repel. In addition, the daylight is normally anathema to the darkness, and Dillon’s abilities are literally fueled by the power of a star.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
Seventeen years ago, the star Mentarsus-H*, from the constellation Scorpius, went supernova. The soul of the star splintered into six brilliant, unequal pieces, each of them attaching themselves to a new life being conceived at that very moment on a little blue planet only 15-odd lightyears away: the six Scorpion Shards. One of those tiny, shining lives – the one that anchored the very largest, strongest, and brightest core of the old star – would grow into the boy Dillon Cole.
The first 14 years of Dillon’s life were utterly ordinary. He was an only child of Catholic parents living in Arizona. His parents doted on him, he did well in school, and loved to rollerblade. However, as the light from the death of star that created him began to reach earth, things began to go wrong. The powerful, exceptional souls of the Shards attracted parasites that fed on their power as they manifested, warping their abilities into monstrous and dangerous forms. Dillon’s latent power of order was warped into a force of chaotic destruction
Anyone Dillon touched suffered a brief but profound break in their mental state, forgetting what they were doing and even who they were. Although most people would recover, his parents touched Dillon most often, and by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late: they had become vegetables. Dillon left home and traveled to California, living on stolen food and by hustling pool. His parasite fed on destruction, urging Dillon to use his powers to break things. This urging expressed itself as a terrible, aching hunger that only relented when the parasite was sated, and then only briefly. As the parasite grew, so did the hunger; from a psychological standpoint, Dillon’s experience reads almost exactly like addiction.
He did his best to mitigate the damage his wrecking-hunger demanded, escalating slowly to bigger and bigger acts of destruction. He tried to use his ability to understand how consequences would unravel in order to keep anyone from being hurt, but he was very new with his powers, and sometimes he miscalculated. Once he caused a massive pile-up car-crash. It should have had few casualties, but he didn’t anticipate that a single crucial truck driver was left-handed, and veered the opposite direction from his expectations. Dozens of people were hurt, including Deanna Chang, another Shard who was plagued with constant terror of everything, except when she was causing fear in others.
Dillon felt horribly guilty about the damage he caused, and he went to church afterwards to confess every time. The priest he confessed to, unfortunately, grew more and more disturbed by Dillon’s escalating crimes, his insistence that he was driven to perform them satisfy the wrecking-hunger, and his fear at the way the hunger continued to grow. After the car crash, he told Dillon that he needed a psychiatrist, not a priest. Dillon interpreted this as denial of absolution. He was furious, terrified, distraught, and certain he would be damned. Before leaving town, he visited Deanna in the hospital to make a futile apology. They realized that they were two of a kind, and he convinced her to run away with him.
Deanna and Dillon were literally soulmates, the two greatest parts of the same soul, and they quickly became incredibly codependent. Deanna didn’t need to be afraid with Dillon to protect her, and she could feed her parasite with the fear that resulted from Dillon’s increasing catastrophes. Meanwhile, Dillon could live with his actions as long as he has one person who forgave him, needed him, and cared for him in spite of what he’d done. However, they were teenagers, and they still had doubts and insecurities. Deanna worried about Dillon, about what he’d do, and whether he really needed her like she needed him – or if it was good for her to need him so much at all. Dillon felt threatened by her doubts, and abruptly changed their course: instead of moving toward the remaining for Shards, they head away from them, so that he could keep Deanna to himself. Around this time, Dillon learned how to break not only physical systems but also people, first one-on-one and soon throwing an entire town into raving, violent chaos with a single well-placed Rube Goldberg of a sentence.
The other Shards, weighed down by their own monstrosities but close on his tail, almost died in a massive collapse of skyscrapers Dillon caused in downtown Boise. Terrified of perishing along with their hosts, their four parasites abandon them, taking root in Dillon instead. Suddenly burdened with new horrors, and his own hunger grown far out of control, Dillon searched for the right chain of dominoes to tip over to destroy the entire world – and he found it.
Fortunately, before he could set off the irrevocable chain reaction, the other Shards caught up to him, and threatened to shoot him. Once again the parasites ran in the face of death, tearing a hole in the fabric of the world and fleeing to a strange un-world between universes, a place of bizarre detritus and endless red sands. There, the six shards each battled with their parasites, and five of them overcame them. The Spirit of Destruction played on Dillon’s hubris and anger, tricking him into one last destructive act, an attack that the parasite rerouted into Deanna. She died, and Dillon was unable to save her. The five remaining shards escaped back to Earth before the hole repaired itself.
The other shards rejected Dillon, and split up to find their families and try to reclaim their lives. Dillon, with nothing to return to, devoted himself to figuring out the proper use of his abilities, trying to atone for his crimes by fixing everything that he broke. This became a much more reasonable ambition when he learned to revive the dead, starting with all those that he killed. It was harrowing work, but he persevered. He poured his grief and guilt into reconstruction, hoping it would erase at least some of what he’d done.
There was one hitch: the people he brings back from death or vicious madness largely didn’t want to go back to their old lives. They were in awe of him, a serious boy who could work miracles and see into their souls, and they only wanted to follow and serve him. Dillon couldn’t figure out how to make them leave. At one point, Dillon was knocked into the Columbia river, unconscious, and temporarily drowned. Without even a shred of his will to reign in and direct it, his power ran wild, bringing the disparate bits of an ancient spirit predator named Okaya back together, setting the world on a horrible collision course, first with Okaya himself, and secondarily with all of his people. When Dillon woke, he could sense the ominous change in the world’s pattern, but had no idea what caused it.
Terrified and confused, he stopped fighting his would-be followers, rationalizing that it would be easier to fix the suddenly looming catastrophe without wasting energy trying to turn helpers away – even eerily obedient, obsessive, worshipful helpers, enthralled by Dillon’s aura of rejuvenation and perfect order. They brought him to Hearst Castle, and anyone who objected was drawn into the orbit of Dillon’s growing cult.
Dillon mentally summoned the other shards, and they joined him there, but so did Okaya, posing as a wise and helpful friend. Okaya manipulated the shards, preying upon their egos, setting them against one another and dependant on him for counsel. The other four remaining shards considered themselves gods and enjoyed flaunting their powers and being surrounded by their sycophants, while Dillon struggled to get a sense of how to stop the shape of the destruction he could feel coming. Okaya devoured the souls of hundreds of their followers, and worse, fed souls to the shards themselves in the guise of other things, with the single exception of Dillon, who was wary of Okaya’s offerings.
Even so, struggling and cut off from support, he listened to Okaya, who eventually convinced Dillon to use his power to take direct control of the world in order to facilitate saving it. Dillon and the shards traveled to Vegas to put on an outrageous show of their powers and proclaim an upcoming miracle of the waters. Having captured the world’s attention, they traveled through the desert to the Hoover damn. As they reach the dam, Dillon discovered what Okaya had done. He was infuriated and devastated. He finally realized that Okaya was the danger: that he would glut himself, consuming the souls of the world on a neat platter that Dillon himself would serve him. Worse, Dillon had no idea how to kill him; destroying his body would only release him to find another and continue on his horrendous spree.
Dillon used his power to destroy the Hoover dam while he and four hundred hand-chosen followers – the empty, soulless ones devoured by Okaya, but still acting out a semblance of life – waited beneath it. Everyone expected Dillon to hold back the waters with his power of cohesion, but he chose not to. After a year of struggling to atone, he accepted the guilt for all the downstream deaths in order to ruin his own reputation, to blot it out so darkly that the world would never worship him or the shards again, to undo the pattern Okaya began and deprive him of their controlling influence. But the attempt failed. Once again, Dillon’s power acted without his conscious control. After the initial rush of water drowned him, the waters bore him calmly at the forefront of a flood that slowed, came to a standstill, and then slid backwards, reversing the entire flow of the Colorado river. The miracle was precisely the world-shaking event Dillon had foreseen: rationality paled beside it.
When Dillon crawled from the shore, he finally confronted Okaya and they struck a bargain: Okaya would open a door to the unworld so that Dillon could retrieve and resurrect Deanna, and he would spare any particular souls Dillon wished to save. In exchange, Dillon would rule the world and allow Okaya to feast upon it. However, Dillon was incapable of accepting the deal, exchanging any souls for some kind of greater good. Instead, he betrayed Okaya. In the unworld, he found the two parasites of fear and destruction, who were trapped there without hosts, and allowed them back into himself, then delivered them to Okaya. Overcome with fear and influenced by the parasites, who wished to travel to a dimension of pure spirit creatures, Okaya fled to his home world, and the door sealed behind him. Dillon was left in a world unraveling at the seams, weighed down by the knowledge that his attempts to mend it only rent it apart more quickly.
*This is not a real star, the author made it up. The only things we know for sure about it, astronomically speaking, are that it was large enough to go supernova, and that it was green. This is complicated by the fact that stars cannot actually be green, as a function of their heat curves.
Point in Canon: Between books 2 and 3, after he banishes Okaya and the parasites at the end of Thief of Souls, but before he turns himself over to the US government to be locked up, in an attempt to mitigate the power of his influence in the beginning of Shattered Sky.
Character Personality:
Dillon is a lost, lonely little kid with too much blood on his hands. Between his parents and Deanna, he’s accidentally killed everyone he’s ever really loved, and a whole lot of other people besides. He’s a being whose very existence imposes order on the universe, and yet he has a terrible swathe of chaos left in his wake.
He was fourteen when the world started going crazy around him, he was alone and on the streets by fifteen, and despite his incredible powers, he’s felt completely out of control for most of that time. A great deal of Dillon’s decisions, for good or bad, are motivated by an attempt to regain control over his own life. While the parasite was riding him, it definitely called the shots, but Dillon clawed for every scrap of discretion he could get. Once he destroys an entire town – except for a single block, and he gleefully informs Deanna that the hunger wanted the whole town, but Dillon denied it, Dillon chose the exact trigger that would bring most of the city into seething civil war, but leave at least that one spit of suburbia unscathed. He is afraid of losing Deanna to forces outside his control if they meet the other shards, so he turns away from them.
Dillon was raised Catholic, and although he looses a lot of his faith after the priest refuses his confession, guilt still has a strong hold on him. He desperately wants to be a good person; he honestly doesn’t believe that he can, but he’s determined to try anyway. He chooses not to bring his parents back from the dead, knowing it would be a selfish act for his own comfort rather than for their sake, and selfish given all the work he has to do to help those still alive. He’s the only shard who is never truly comfortable being called a God, even though his powers are the most obviously divine. Being grounded in the limitations and intimacy of human life and personality are important to him, to his benefit. He’s a profoundly good person with way more power than he knew what to do with. He hasn’t always had the strength to resist the evil forces preying on him, who has committed terrible crimes. He’s grieving, but he‘s found the strength to accept what he’s done, and carry it honestly.
Dillon will listen if someone seems like moral guide, which allows Okaya and others to manipulate him in spite of how very canny he is. Several times in the books he listens to adults he probably shouldn’t because he just doesn’t know what to do. Knowing the power he wields, he is incapable of doing nothing in the face of suffering, even if historically he hurts as much as he helps. He firmly believes he has to try. Even when he resolves to withdraw, to try to limit his influence, he can’t resist using his powers, healing his profiler of late-stage leukemia, bringing peace to his guards, and eventually breaking out when imprisonment fails to halt the pattern he set at the Hoover dam.
Even though he wants to trust someone else’s judgment, Dillon is neither a coward nor a pushover: when Okaya gives him an ultimatum, he refuses to sacrifice a few from the supposed good of the many, confronting some of his worst fears (in the form of his old parasite) and giving up a chance to resurrect Deanna just to find a third way, trick Okaya, and keep Earth safe. He has a temper, but since it cost him Deanna, he works hard to keep it under control.
Ultimately, in spite of everything he’s been through and everything he’s capable of, he’s still a teenager. Sometimes his power goes to head. He likes to show off, he likes to impress people, and when he isn’t crushed under the weight of guilt and grief, he’s actually kind of a snarker. He has the playfully rough manner of a boy who grew up too fast, but there’s no real meanness in it, and a hell of a lot of empathy. He veers between certainty and doubt, between the patterns he understands perfectly and the ones that are too big or too close for him to perceive clearly.
He’s incapable of holding back when he senses the world’s need pressing on him, but on the rare occasions that his senses are cut off, it’s an incredible relief, and part of him just wants to hide there, to rest, to be a teenage boy for a little while. In the end, though, Dillon is willing to make enormous personal sacrifices. He makes ten impossible things happen before breakfast, but because of the intimacy of his understanding for the world around him, he never truly distances himself from the human condition the way the other sometimes shards do. In Shattered Sky, another character compares him to a shark – dangerous, majestically powerful, and always, always moving.
Character Plans:
Appearance/PB: Dillon is an average-looking teenager with red hair and very neat clothes. PB is Joseph Mazzello
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
[The video opens to a disorienting view: flooring tile looms in foreshortened view, sweeping out the to corner, bracketed by the cheap Towers apartments wallpaper. It is neither moldy nor peeling, the colors of the garish design as bright and fresh as they day it was applied. The camera sits on the floor, creating the odd perspective, empty of any occupants. Then, suddenly, the stillness is violently interrupted. A glass falls directly in front of the camera, shattering into hundreds of pieces, a few droplets of water splashing on the lens, the rest puddling around the sharp splinters of glass. Then, slowly, the shards twitch and drift, not aimlessly, but with purpose, every speck carefully reassembling. The cracks vanish, until the seams are impossible to detect. Most bizarrely of all, the water, too, recollected, leaving the camera clean and dry as the water sits placidly in the perfectly repaired container. A hand picks up the glass and the viewpoint suddenly swoops wildly, lifted in his other hand before it stabilizes, set on the table, with Dillon seated in front of it. He’s a young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with immaculate clothes and neat red hair. He grins and takes a long drink of water.]
Hi, guys. I’m Dillon, and I can fix anything. Repair or restoration, as long as you bring me all the pieces. Fees on a sliding scale, and I’m willing to do house calls.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Third Person Sample
He sits on a park bench as the last daylight slips away, sirens wailing, shrill and plaintive. He isn’t afraid. Maybe he should be. He feels so numb. He left his own world hurtling toward a cliff, and he doesn’t know if it’s arrogance or honesty that has him feeling like he left it without a driver. Not that he had been any closer to figuring out the breaks when he left.
But the Port has it’s own pattern, and if he wants to understand it, and his place in it, then he needs to understand the Darkness. Low shadows bleed into each other, but he doesn’t see any of the more dramatic effects. Not entirely unexpected: nothing ever remains dilapidated or broken or rotted around him anymore. Was he disappointed? Had he hoped that a power capable of plucking him from his universe like a grape off a vine might be enough to quash his overflowing ability?
Oh. Yes, that’s exactly what he had hoped, without even daring to admit it to himself. He hid his face in his hands, shuddered, breathed – and he could breathe, deeper than he had in a long time. He felt like some of the endless pressure inside himself was being bled away, like a fever had broken, stuttered a few inches down the thermometer. He glanced up, eyes slowing making out distant shapes of squalor and ruin, held at bay in a neat circle of unbroken sidewalk slabs and blades of grass all leaning at precisely the same angle, centered on him like a fairy ring. He pushed, exerting his power, and the sphere of wholesomeness expanded about a foot all around its circumference, and it took genuine effort to hold the line there, as the force of the Darkness pushed back. Dillon laughed out loud, brightly, bizarrely delighted, and let the Darkness creep back to the line of natural equilibrium.
He still couldn’t contain the power of a star entirely inside his own skin. But at least he didn’t feel as though he was burning through his own perfectly maintained body. Perhaps this was what he needed. The world would turn without the relentless spur of his power fueling it, and maybe Dillon could use his time sequestered here, learn to master himself in this place where his ability to suspend entropy had a counterweight to measure against. At the very least, it was worth a try.