ATTENTION PEOPLE OF THE OOC THREAD! THE KING OF CHILDREN'S CARD GAMES-BASED ROLEPLAYING IS NOW HOLDING HIS COURT IN SESSION! WILL EVERYONE PLEASE BOW AND GIVE HIM MONEY! *shot*
Okay... now that I've got your attention, Syn asked me to post this RP sample so that you guys can vote on whether or not I should get into the RP even though I have a late sign-up. Just as a point: I've always had a secret love of Pokemorph RPs, even though the concept of Pokemorphs pretty much breaks quite a few logic barriers even in a fandom as varied as Pokemon, but I've never done one before. Anyway, starting off~
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Montressor.
That was what the humans called him. "Montressor". He'd heard that the name came from a story about a murder, and a few months ago it would have suited him just fine. In fact, he still felt that it was kind of appropriate considering that he was a ghost. Technically, of course, the scientists termed him as a "Conscious gas-based entity", but everyone knew what he was. Or what he had been in any case. Ghost types weren't all that uncommon in areas where people had died, it was easy enough to find them. That was how they had caught him. The blonde human in the leather jacket had found him floating around a local graveyard as he attempted to feed off the dreams of a young girl sleeping near her father's grave. Oh, he had fought back when the man had ordered his Sceptile to attack, of course, but the enormous lizard was too fast, too experienced, and above all he knew a dark-type move. If there was one power that all ghost types were vulnerable to, it was the dark power wielded by Pokemon whose elemental affinity was closely related to the experience of death. Even getting too close to a dark-type caused a ghost to experience a painful flashback to his time spent in what many called the "afterlife", that strange land where Montressor suspected that those who had committed sins went to before they were condemned to wander the earth, trapped in the bodies of Pokemon, a thought-provoking punishment. It was funny. Before they had changed him, he had never been that much of a philosopher.
The change had been strange. They had locked him in a small room, airtight of course to ensure that the gasses that formed his physical body didn't leak out and allow him to escape. Then they had opened a vent and filled the chamber with some kind of powder. He didn't know what it was, but it made him sleepy. What happened next, Montressor didn't remember. What he did remember was waking up and staring at his new body. It wasn't so much the fact that his clawed hands which had previously floated freely, detached from his main body, were now linked to a large, purple, humanoid torso extending from the head that had once composed the better part of his mass that caused his newfound stomach to churn. Nor were the long, purple legs ending in clawed, almost reptilian feet particularly disturbing to the ghost. After all, such things were trivial when he considered that his body still bore relatively little resemblance to a true human and was still composed of the same spirit-supporting gas as it was before. No, what caused him to shudder in revulsion was the fact that he was registering emotions, emotions long absent from his soul. First there was shock. Then rage. Anger in itself was not foreign to him, but the reasons that his body now quivered with it were. These humans had no right to transform him in this way without his consent! How dare they! Thoughts like those were supposed to be completely outside the scope of a ghost. Ghosts fed off of human emotions and dreams! They played pranks out of spite and led people to their deaths for the fun of it! How could he, a ghost, be morally outraged?
The humans had been kind enough to explain the process. He had been transported to a chamber, they wouldn't tell him where in the facilities it was, where he had been subjected to some kind of machine that had somehow attached a human conscience to his own mind. Somehow the conscience had blended with him, and become a part of his conscious mind. Then they had wheeled him back to the chamber, and had pumped extra gas into the room. His subconscious mind had registered his new human nature and had gathered the gas into itself and used it to form these new arms and legs, as well as the squat torso that now served as a central hub. Later he had changed the shape of the gas slightly, lengthening the arms and adjusting his elbow and knee joints slightly in order to give the appearance of them being predatory limbs, in an effort to make himself look less human. It had helped, but only slightly. He was still having thoughts that no ghost should have been subjected to. If humans were capable of torture such as this, perhaps these humans had even less of a conscience then ghosts.
It was for this reason that he spent his nights crawling the hallways, entering the nightmares of fellow inmates and absorbing nutrients from them. Once upon a time, Montressor had hated the taste of nightmares. He had preferred sweet, innocent, happy dreams and nothing had given him more pleasure than to take a bite out of the landscape and watch as the unfortunate victim's psyche supplemented other pieces instead, in some cases transforming someone's peaceful slumber into a tortuous sleep plagued by horrid nightmares. Now that he had these feelings of guilt, he couldn't even consider performing such an action. Instead he walked among those whose dreams were hellholes without his brand of assistance and absorbed their suffering in order to sustain his own life force, watching as their psyche repaired the "Damage" by replacing it with nonsense or the rare fragment of a happy memory. Worst of all, he felt pleasure as he watched this process, pleasure that by far equaled and in some cases surpassed the enjoyment he had once received by performing the opposite process. It was enough to cause the deformed beast to want to rip his gaseous throat out. Not that it would do him any good, of course. Anything that was purely phsyical passed straight through his body.
Those experiences were horrible in their own right, but one thing about his new life caused Montressor more pain by far. It was when he lay awake at night and in pondering his new attitude towards life wondered if he was better off then before. Whenever this thought occurred to him, he attempted to stifle it and was crushed by wave after wave of guilt. A ghost wasn't allowed to think such traitorous thoughts, after all. But the thought stayed, and it grew larger. He knew this because as the days went by it became harder and harder to squash the impudent idea and, as if sensing Montressor's weakness, it became more and more daring to the point that it would sometimes occur when he was engaged in conversation with another one of the "Condemned", as they called themselves, or when he was taking orders from one of those Shade thugs. This little idea hurt Montressor worse then anything else he had to endure in this new life. Physical abuse wasn't an effective method of punishment because of his ability to control how solid his body remained at will. Insults were equally ineffective, since the ghost's newfound emotions had not dimmed his snarky wit in the least and he was easily able to shrug off and parry the paltry verbal abuse that the humans hurled at him. No, when the humans wished to punish Montressor they locked him in an airtight room for fifteen minutes or so. When they came in, he would always be crying. Always. And all because of these stupid emotions.
These humans were shrewd ones. Even the keen wit that had apparently followed Montressor across two lifespans was no match for the devious devices their scientists had put in place to handle him. Special vaccuums were available to trap him if he attempted to escape. If physical clout was needed, guard Absol patrolled the outside, each one armed with a particularly painful dark-type attack of some variety. He was routinely subjected to interrogation while a psychic type attempted to discern the truthfulness of his statements to make sure that he wasn't planning to break free. If ever he attempted to attack his handler, they would respond by releasing a few thousand volts worth of electricity into his system by means of a handheld taser. Montressor couldn't escape on his own, and wouldn't. Nothing could be kept secret, and no part of the facility was safe even if you followed orders all the time. His conversations, he knew, were monitored by hidden cameras and bugging devices. The ghost knew that this moral outrage thing was neither desirable nor enjoyable, but even without his new conscience he suspected that he would at least be uncomfortable with the fact that there was nothing he could call his own.
Until now, that is.
Reaching towards the ceiling, Montressor breathed into a cupped hand. The clawlike appendage glowed for a moment as the entirety of the former ghost's body tensed and relaxed. Slowly, dark energy congealed into the palm of his hand until it had formed a sphere about two inches thick covered with silver sparks. He had forgotten long ago how forming a shadow ball worked. Now that he remembered, maybe things would be different. Maybe he'd be able to stop being this half-human thing, and start being a ghost again.
The one thing more annoying if less painful then a moral sense that had resulted from receiving a conscience was the fact that Montressor now had a healthy dose of what humans called "common sense". And whatever this common sense was, exactly, it knew wishful thinking when it saw it.
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So.... how was that? Oh, and in case it wasn't quite clear to you all, Montressor is a Haunter. Yah, special favorite of mine. :3
