Gary Greer-Wheatly

[DerArknight]

Name: Gary Greer-Wheatly
Gender: Male
Age: 16
Grade: Senior
Hobbies and Interests: Piano, Debate Club, Studying, Reading, Opera (spectating)

Gift: Bio-Cloning
Power Details: By activating his gift while touching a corpse, Gary can turn said corpse into a living clone of himself. The clone is fully sentient and able to think and act on its own, but is very similar to Gary in terms of memories, opinions and personality and therefore tends to ally with the original. Gary can also make slight adjustments to personality and memories if he concentrates very hard during the creation process.
Limitations and Drawbacks: The biomass of the corpse has to be at least 10 grams and needs to be fully in one piece for Bio-Cloning to work, but any clones created with less than 100 grams of mass die within an hour of creation. Biomass that has been separated, burnt or otherwise destroyed can't be used for a clone. Creating a clone requires Gary to physically touch the corpse for about two minutes (more or less depending on how much biomass is used) and concentrate. If he gets distracted or has to stop even for a moment, the process might fail or result in the clone being different from Gary in several ways like memories or personality. Furthermore, the amount of biomass heavily influences the clone since Gary's gift can only transform, but not create. A clone made out of a more muscular corpse will also be more muscular than the original; and a clone made out of a smaller corpse will also be smaller than the original. The only way for Gary to create a clone completely indistinguishable from himself would be to find a corpse with exactly the same BMI as him. There is always the danger of a clone turning against him for whatever reason, since the clones have free will. Any clone Gary creates will bear the same afflictions that Gary has at the time of the clone's creation, including all injuries and any illness. When a clone dies they return to their previous forms, and if the original Gary dies, all clones die as well.

Appearance: Gary is Caucasian, 5'3'' high and weighs 120 lbs. He has brown, smooth hair that is about 5 inches long and a squared face. His build is rather slim instead of muscular. He has small green eyes, a thin and high nose and a normal-sized mouth. Gary keeps very good care of his appearance and often wears expensive clothes. He also is short-sighted and always wears white-rimmed glasses.

On the day of the abduction, Gary wore a golden-buttoned grey suit with a white shirt and a black tie. His legs were coated by a pair of dark blue jeans and he wore grey shoes with white socks.

Background:

• Gary was born in Bend, Oregon on August 1st, 2005. His parents, Morgan and Hanna Greer-Wheatly, had another son two years before him. The family is old money and owns a small but successful factory. They spend most of their attention on Ferdinand, the first-born son who will inherit the factory one day.
• Having a lot of time on his hands, Gary quickly found himself interested in reading at a young age. He always showed a lot of curiosity towards everything new to him.
• Since his gift requires him to touch corpses, it didn't manifest for a long time. Eventually his parents took him to a professional, who also failed to determine Gary's gift. Figuring that his gift would be something useless anyway, Morgan and Hanna simply dropped the topic. To avoid trouble or rumors about their child being giftless coming up, they propagated the claim that Gary's gift was Dream Control, the ability to fully alter the contents of his dreams. They forbade Gary from revealing to anyone that his real gift was unknown or trying to find out what his gift was.
• It wouldn't be until Gary was 15 that he experimented with his gift on a few animals he found in a nearby forest, getting a grasp on what he could do. Since he used the corpses of small animals, the clones were too small to survive and died within an hour. Their deaths disturbed Gary, so he never used his gift again.
• While they mostly focused on raising his big brother, his parents forced Gary to take piano lessons and visit the opera regularly with them. Gary doesn't enjoy these activities much, but hides his thoughts, aware that his family wouldn't care about his opinion.
• As a result of his desire to learn and his sharp mind, he is among the best of his year and even skipped a year in middle school.
• Gary is very invested in debating viewpoints, especially if they collide with his own. For that reason, he is a member of the Debate Club at school. Apart from that, he doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities.
• Over the years, Gary developed an increased interest in science especially the science behind gifts. He uses a lot of his free time with learning more about this topic and the theories on how they work. After graduating, he plans to attend an university and become a scientist.

Personality: Gary is eager for knowledge and always interested in learning more. However, his social life has suffered from this. He doesn't have many friends at school apart from the Debate Club and doesn't make many attempts at getting closer to others. While not directly rude, he can sometimes fail to read the room, especially when something interesting has caught his full attention. Being one year younger than his classmates also makes it harder for him to connect with them. However, he also doesn't have any real enemies and is instead seen as a harmless fellow who just prefers to be alone most of the time.

Other Skills: N/A

[VoltTurtle]

Heya mostlyharmfulll. I've got Gary, and there's some content that needs addressing before he can be approved:

Gift: Bio-Cloning
Power Details: By activating his gift while touching a corpse, Gary can turn said corpse into a living clone of himself. The clone is fully sentient and able to think and act on its own, but is very similar to Gary in terms of memories, opinions and personality and therefore tends to ally with the original. Gary can also make slight adjustments to personality and memories if he concentrates very hard during the creation process.
Limitations and Drawbacks: Creating a clone requires him to physically touch the corpse for about two minutes (more or less depending on how much biomass is used) and concentrate. If he gets distracted or has to stop even for a moment, the process might fail or result in the clone being different from Gary in several ways like memories or personality. Furthermore, the amount of biomass heavily influences the clone since Gary's gift can only transform, but not create. A clone made out of a more muscular corpse will also be more muscular than the original, and a clone made out of a smaller corpse will also be smaller than the original. The only way for Gary to create a clone completely indisguishable from himself would be to find a corpse with exactly the same BMI as him. There is always the danger of a clone turning against him for whatever reason, since the clones have free will. If Gary gets injured, any clone he creates from this point on will have the same injury. Same goes for afflictions like starving or sleep deprivation. And if the original Gary dies, all of the clones die as well.

First and most minor, there are two grammar issues: one is a typo; "indistinguishable" and the other is the need for a semi-colon (specifically replacing the period between "not create" and "a clone made out").

Next, I have a lot of questions and points of contention about his Gift:

1. Gary being able to activate his Gift while touching any corpse brings up some potential problems. The air itself is full of the corpses of dust mites, so what's to stop Gary from creating an army of microscopic Garys by wiping his hand through a cloud of dust (besides the fact that any warm blooded creature that small would die of hypothermia nearly instantly)? I can't in good conscience approve him without this being addressed in some form. My suggestion is that there either has to be a minimum mass that the corpse has to be for his Gift to work (the lowest weight human being ever recorded was Lucía Zárate at 2.1 kg, so that might be a good low bar) or for it to only work on human corpses (which I'd recommend if you decide you don't want him to know what his Gift is, see below), and no others.

2. Do the corpses that Gary interacts with need to be mostly intact? Would a completely mangled corpse still work with his Gift (I would go with "no" on this one)?

3. I bring this up later with regards to his background, but how could Gary even know about what his Gift was without having created at least one duplicate of himself at some point? There is no magic way to determine someone's Gift, they have to use it at least once. If he does know what his Gift is, then there must have been at least one copy of him running around in the past, which will have to be addressed in the background one way (by having him never learn what his Gift was) or another (by directly addressing any prior clones). If you decide to go with the latter option, then giving the clones a very limited lifespan (as in, a few days) after creation might be the easiest way to do it, but it will still need direct mentioning in his background.

4. A much better way of phrasing this:

If Gary gets injured, any clone he creates from this point on will have the same injury. Same goes for afflictions like starving or sleep deprivation.

Would be: "Any clone Gary creates will bear the same afflictions that Gary has at the time of the clone's creation, including all injuries and any illness."

5. Finally, and this is very important: I want to go ahead and preface his approval with the warning that you MUST ask each and every handler of any kid you decide to turn into another Gary for permission before you do so. If you don't get someone's approval first, then any Bio-Cloning done to their dead kid will be retconned immediately with no potential for an appeal. Some people care about their kids and the possibility of their corpses being desecrated, and Gary turning them into another Gary could be liable to upset them. Should you explicitly accept these terms (and fix everything else I've asked about above and below), he will be approved.

--

Onto the rest:

They spend most of their attention to Ferdinand, the first-born son who will inherit the factory one day.

Typo; "on Ferdinand".

Having a lot of time on his hand, Gary quickly found himself interested in reading at a young age.

Typo; "on his hands".

Since his gift requieres him to touch corpses, it took the visit of a professional to determine it. Disgusted by the way their child's gift worked, Morgan and Hanna decided to keep it a secret by forbidding Gary to use it, going so far as to not tell him what exactly his gift was. They instead propagated the claim that Gary's gift was Dream Controll, the ability to fully alter the contents of his dreams.

First, two typos; "requires him" and "Dream Control".

Second, this doesn't entirely make sense to me: in order to determine what Gary's Gift actually was, he would have been required to actually use it, because there's no magic way to determine someone's Gift without them demonstrating it in some fashion. This creates a few issues:
1. What would have happened to the clone created when he first used his Gift?
2. If he had actually used it himself, his parents wouldn't have been able to lie to him about it, even if they might be able to lie to others.

Since you seem to want to make sure that Gary doesn't actually know what his Gift is (given his parents trying to lie to him), an easy way to address both issues would be to just have Gary never actually learn what his it really was because he never had the chance to use it. That might create problems come game time (or make for some interesting plot hooks, up to you). If you go that route, change this bullet point to him seeing a specialist but never learning what his Gift was in spite of the help. If you want to keep it mostly as it is, then you'll either have to have the counselor fail entirely and then go into Gary's own personal experimentation (like you mention later) or otherwise address points 1 and 2 somehow.

It wouldn't be until Gary was 15 that he experimented with his gift on a few animals he found in a nearby forest, getting a grasp on what he could do. Apart a few experiments, he never used it since he saw no practical use for it in his day-to-day-life.

Though, regarding his "experimentation" here, I have to ask, if he used his Gift, then wouldn't there be extra Garys running around? What happened to them? How did others react to these extra Garys? Again; the easiest way to address this would be Gary never actually learning what his Gift was, but if you want to keep this angle, you'll have to explain where the other Garys went (possibly using my suggestion way above).

While they mostly focussed on raising his big brother, his parents forced Gary to take piano lessons and visit the opera regulary with them.

Two typos; "mostly focused" and "opera regularly".

Over the years, Gary developed an increased interest in science especially the science behind gifts. He uses a lot of his free time with learning more about this topic and the theories on how they work. After graduating, he plans to attend an university and become a scientist.

Minor, but I'd shift this bullet point to be the last in the list, since it discusses his future plans.

Being one year younger than his classmates also makes it harder for him to connect.

Phrasing; "to connect with them".

Other Skills: Scientific Knowledge (Self-taught)

"Scientific Knowledge" is extremely vague and could encompass far too many things for a high schooler to know. Given that his main focus of study seems to be the science of Gifts, I would suggest changing it to that, but realistically that wouldn't provide him any significant survival advantages, so I'd suggest just dropping this entirely or narrowing it in on some specific field that would be advantageous to his survival.

--

That's all. Post back here when you've got those edits made (and explicitly accept the condition I laid out) and I'll give him another look.

[DerArknight]

Here I go:

1. Gary being able to activate his Gift while touching any corpse brings up some potential problems. The air itself is full of the corpses of dust mites, so what's to stop Gary from creating an army of microscopic Garys by wiping his hand through a cloud of dust (besides the fact that any warm blooded creature that small would die of hypothermia nearly instantly)? I can't in good conscience approve him without this being addressed in some form. My suggestion is that there either has to be a minimum mass that the corpse has to be for his Gift to work (the lowest weight human being ever recorded was Lucía Zárate at 2.1 kg, so that might be a good low bar) or for it to only work on human corpses (which I'd recommend if you decide you don't want him to know what his Gift is, see below), and no others.

I ended up setting the minimum requirements for biomass to "the size of a mouse", which would exclude dust mites but still allow him to experiment with animals.

2. Do the corpses that Gary interacts with need to be mostly intact? Would a completely mangled corpse still work with his Gift (I would go with "no" on this one)?

Added specifications about this point.

3. I bring this up later with regards to his background, but how could Gary even know about what his Gift was without having created at least one duplicate of himself at some point? There is no magic way to determine someone's Gift, they have to use it at least once. If he does know what his Gift is, then there must have been at least one copy of him running around in the past, which will have to be addressed in the background one way (by having him never learn what his Gift was) or another (by directly addressing any prior clones). If you decide to go with the latter option, then giving the clones a very limited lifespan (as in, a few days) after creation might be the easiest way to do it, but it will still need direct mentioning in his background.

I went with the way of having the parents never find out and have Gary dispose of the clones he makes at 15.

4. A much better way of phrasing this:

If Gary gets injured, any clone he creates from this point on will have the same injury. Same goes for afflictions like starving or sleep deprivation.

Would be: "Any clone Gary creates will bear the same afflictions that Gary has at the time of the clone's creation, including all injuries and any illness."

I just copied your suggestion. Please don't sue.

5. Finally, and this is very important: I want to go ahead and preface his approval with the warning that you MUST ask each and every handler of any kid you decide to turn into another Gary for permission before you do so. If you don't get someone's approval first, then any Bio-Cloning done to their dead kid will be retconned immediately with no potential for an appeal. Some people care about their kids and the possibility of their corpses being desecrated, and Gary turning them into another Gary could be liable to upset them. Should you explicitly accept these terms (and fix everything else I've asked about above and below), he will be approved.

I figured that was the case and hereby declare that I fully agree to this conditions. I will PM every handler whose kid I intend to use for Gary's power in any way and wait for their permission before writing anything about Gary interacting with the kid's corpse.

Second, this doesn't entirely make sense to me: in order to determine what Gary's Gift actually was, he would have been required to actually use it, because there's no magic way to determine someone's Gift without them demonstrating it in some fashion. This creates a few issues:
1. What would have happened to the clone created when he first used his Gift?
2. If he had actually used it himself, his parents wouldn't have been able to lie to him about it, even if they might be able to lie to others.

Since you seem to want to make sure that Gary doesn't actually know what his Gift is (given his parents trying to lie to him), an easy way to address both issues would be to just have Gary never actually learn what his it really was because he never had the chance to use it. That might create problems come game time (or make for some interesting plot hooks, up to you). If you go that route, change this bullet point to him seeing a specialist but never learning what his Gift was in spite of the help. If you want to keep it mostly as it is, then you'll either have to have the counselor fail entirely and then go into Gary's own personal experimentation (like you mention later) or otherwise address points 1 and 2 somehow.

As said above, I went the options of having his parents never find out.

Though, regarding his "experimentation" here, I have to ask, if he used his Gift, then wouldn't there be extra Garys running around? What happened to them?
How did others react to these extra Garys? Again; the easiest way to address this would be Gary never actually learning what his Gift was, but if you want to keep this angle, you'll have to explain where the other Garys went (possibly using my suggestion way above).

Knowing that he would get in big trouble if his parents found out about him experimenting with his gift, he conducted the experiments in a forest where no one looked and killed the clones once he was done. Since dead clones turn back into their previous form, all that was left were some dead animals.

Over the years, Gary developed an increased interest in science especially the science behind gifts. He uses a lot of his free time with learning more about this topic and the theories on how they work. After graduating, he plans to attend an university and become a scientist.

Minor, but I'd shift this bullet point to be the last in the list, since it discusses his future plans.

I did so.

Other Skills: Scientific Knowledge (Self-taught)

"Scientific Knowledge" is extremely vague and could encompass far too many things for a high schooler to know. Given that his main focus of study seems to be the science of Gifts, I would suggest changing it to that, but realistically that wouldn't provide him any significant survival advantages, so I'd suggest just dropping this entirely or narrowing it in on some specific field that would be advantageous to his survival.

I decided to drop it.

--

That's all. Post back here when you've got those edits made (and explicitly accept the condition I laid out) and I'll give him another look.

And with that, I am done. I excluded the typos from my changelog since I had not much to say apart from "Corrected!" about them.

[VoltTurtle]

I figured that was the case and hereby declare that I fully agree to this conditions. I will PM every handler whose kid I intend to use for Gary's power in any way and wait for their permission before writing anything about Gary interacting with the kid's corpse.

Acknowledged! Now, to continue:

Gift: Bio-Cloning
Power Details: By activating his gift while touching a corpse, Gary can turn said corpse into a living clone of himself. The clone is fully sentient and able to think and act on its own, but is very similar to Gary in terms of memories, opinions and personality and therefore tends to ally with the original. Gary can also make slight adjustments to personality and memories if he concentrates very hard during the creation process.
Limitations and Drawbacks: The biomass has to be at least the size of a mouse and needs to be fully in one piece. Biomass that has been separated, burnt or otherwise destroyed can't be used for one clone. Creating a clone requires Gary to physically touch the corpse for about two minutes (more or less depending on how much biomass is used) and concentrate. If he gets distracted or has to stop even for a moment, the process might fail or result in the clone being different from Gary in several ways like memories or personality. Furthermore, the amount of biomass heavily influences the clone since Gary's gift can only transform, but not create. A clone made out of a more muscular corpse will also be more muscular than the original; and a clone made out of a smaller corpse will also be smaller than the original. The only way for Gary to create a clone completely indistinguishable from himself would be to find a corpse with exactly the same BMI as him. There is always the danger of a clone turning against him for whatever reason, since the clones have free will. Any clone Gary creates will bear the same afflictions that Gary has at the time of the clone's creation, including all injuries and any illness. And if the original Gary dies, all of the clones die as well. Dead clones will transform back into their previous forms.

A few more things:

1. "The biomass has to" > "The biomass of the corpse has to"
2. "A mouse" is still fairly nonspecific (would a mouse fetus count?). You'll want a specific measurement of mass as the lower limit, in this case 10 grams is the lower limit for adult mice.
3. "or otherwise destroyed can't be used for one clone" > "or otherwise destroyed can't be used for a clone"
4. "And if the original Gary dies, all of the clones die as well. Dead clones will transform back into their previous forms." is much better phrased as: "When a clone dies they return to their previous forms, and if the original Gary dies, all clones die as well."

It wouldn't be until Gary was 15 that he experimented with his gift on a few animals he found in a nearby forest, getting a grasp on what he could do. Since he used the corpses of small animals, the clones were also small, which made it easy for him to kill them. After these experiments, he never used his gift again since he saw no practical use for it in his day-to-day-life.

So, this is the biggest remaining issue. You don't exactly paint Gary as an unfeeling, unempathetic psychopath in his Personality section, so I find it very hard to believe that Gary was able to murder fully sapient and nearly mentally identical clones of himself without there being some lasting trauma from that.

There are a few avenues for addressing this: either the clones need to be given a limited lifespan so Gary could allow them to passively die (and likely still be traumatized a little from the experience), OR if you decide to keep this I expect an entire new bullet point addressing the fallout of his actions, OR edit his personality section to detail how he lacks any kind of empathy (it takes a particularly unempathetic person to not even have empathy for yourself) and add a mention of him being unbothered by disposing of his clones in this bullet point (note that I would strongly recommend against this, as it might bring about unforeseen consequences, I am only mentioning it because it is technically an option).

Other Skills:

Other skills shouldn't be left blank. Just putting "None" or "N/A" here is sufficient.

--

That's all! When you've got that handled, post here and I'll give him another look!

[DerArknight]

Done.

[VoltTurtle]

The biomass of the corpse has to be at least 10 grams of mass and needs to be fully in one piece.

The "of mass" here is redundant since "grams" already communicates that. Cut.

It wouldn't be until Gary was 15 that he experimented with his gift on a few animals he found in a nearby forest, getting a grasp on what he could do. Since he used the corpses of small animals, the clones were too small to survive and died within an hour. Their deaths disturbed Gary, so he never used his gift again.

So this addresses the previous problem but creates a newer, smaller one: this implies either that Gary can create clones below the already established 10 gram limit (which would be a no-go) or that the clones explicitly cannot survive (perhaps because they would die of hypothermia, as mentioned? I can explain the mechanics of that if need be but the long story short is look up the "squared cubed law") if they are too small.

Either way, that would need to be noted in the power details. If I may make a suggestion: you could append Gary's limitations by stating that the clones have to be above a certain mass to survive for extended periods -- maybe a higher threshold of 100 grams (which would still be very small, just not excessively so).

To make this easier on the both of us, using the very first sentence of his limitations as a base, I would write this like so:

"The biomass of the corpse has to be at least 10 grams and needs to be fully in one piece for Bio-Cloning to work, but any clones created with less than 100 grams of mass die within an hour of creation."

That's all! He should be good after this.

[DerArknight]

Edited!

[VoltTurtle]

APPROVED