Between Dream and Reality

Player Information

Player: Toni
Contact: plurk: punchpolygons | discord: zedsabre
Invitation: Court!
Are you over 18?: Yes


Character Information

Character: Kaine Parker
Canon: Marvel Comics (Canon point: Scarlet Spider 2012, specifically issue #13. He can wake up after he dies!)
Age: physically 28, chronologically 9
So this is kind of a grey zone because he’s a clone who was rapidly aged up to be physically 19 when ‘born’. He was implanted with the memories of Peter Parker’s life, but the process was imperfect and most of them are hazy at best. Kaine views himself as his physical age and acts accordingly - he drinks alcohol, has sex with adults and has adopted a teenage girl. He no longer has the developing brain or hormones of a child. The way his meager 9 years alive mostly manifests is in his emotional regulation. Everything feels bigger because of his lack of life experience - his heartbreak is the biggest worst thing that’s ever happened to him; his happiness is the happiest he’s ever been. His current state of growth is more about learning how to accept his own personhood and seeking redemption than it is about adulthood. (Mostly I call him a 9 year old to clown on him.)

History: Link
Possessions:
-His clothes (leather jacket, jeans, boots)
-His Scarlet Spider costume (nerfed so that it is no longer made of unstable molecules, is solely fabric and cannot bend light to make him invisible)
-A duffle bag with a million dollars stolen from drug dealers (useless legal tender in Diadem)

Weapon: N/A

Powers/Abilities:

- Wall crawling
Being able to stick to surfaces! The strength of the adhesion is quite strong, so he can’t be easily pulled off and can climb sheer surfaces. An extension of this ability is a move he calls the ‘Mark of Kaine’, where he concentrates this power in his palms hard enough to brand what he touches. It’s not required for him to retain this ability, even if his journal name is based on it.

- Super strength
In canon he can lift 60 tons but that’s kind of absurd, it can easily be nerfed to something that’s quite strong without being able to pick up a yacht.

- Super reflexes/agility/stamina
This is all sorta bundled together. Note that Kaine does not have Spider-sense, so he gets no precognition of danger - he has to rely solely on his own awareness and reaction speed. It’s not fast enough to be classified as superspeed, but he’s much more agile than the average person, and extremely flexible for his size.

- Enhanced durability and healing
He can take more damage than the average person and still get up, though cutting and piercing attacks will still make him bleed. This doesn’t make him bulletproof, but you can punch him through a wall and he’ll still be able to get up. The healing allows him to recover from injuries that might take a normal person months to heal, in a few days or weeks. It can’t regrow limbs, and fatal injuries will still be fatal.

- Organic webbing
Able to create spider silk from glands in his forearms. The silk is tensile, sticky, could be nerfed to be about as strong as your average rope. It takes one hour to dissolve on its own.

- Being able to commune with spiders
He can talk to spiders. In canon this also involves being able to sense the location of spiders (the range seems to be citywide), seeing through their eyes, and controlling them. I just think it’s cute if he can be a little spider telepathic in a small radius, as a treat.

- Stingers
He has a long, sharp bone that comes out from the underside of his wrist. Like a Wolverine claw, but for stabbing instead of slicing. Since it’s organic, it can’t cut through anything like stone or metal.

- Nightvision
What it says on the tin. I would consider this an enhanced ability to see in low light situations, not complete darkness.


Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?

He simply would not exist if Peter Parker did not, courtesy of being his clone. But the sourcing of his DNA is simply the start of the gnarly, knotted complex he’s grown around the idea of the man.

He was meant to be Peter - to replace him, perfectly - built for this purpose by a madman whose only motivation was to destroy them both. But very quickly it became clear he was defective. At only a few weeks old, Kaine had already failed at his life’s purpose. His existence was torture, and for as much as he blamed his villainous creator, he also hated the original - for no crime other than having the life he wished he did. For living, being loved, healthy and free and ignorant of the pain of being a clone. That dearth of meaning ate away at him - so he constructed one for himself. He imagined himself as Peter’s shadow - the darker parts that the heroic Spider-man could never embody.

Of course, doing so was an easy way out: justification for suffering, both his own and the harm he did other people. For years, he took that pain out on Ben Reilly - someone he also considered his ‘Better’ - and let it forge him into a killer. He didn’t have to reconcile with the better nature that also existed inside him - and conversely, he didn’t have to acknowledge the fact that Peter also carried those same dark urges… the same capacity for violence and rage.

Whether he will admit it or not, he’s inherited good and bad in equal measure. The need to put every burden on his shoulders, the capacity for guilt. The easy arrogance of a man who walks the world knowing he could break the bones of practically anyone who annoys him. And a loathing, an intolerance for injustice.

But at every metric, Kaine compares himself unfairly. Both Peter and Spider-man are raised so highly on a pedestal in his mind; the more brilliantly they shine, the more harshly he judges his own failures. Peter’s a genius, therefore Kaine must be stupid (he’s not); it was Spider-man who saved the day, not him (they worked together).

This disparity isn’t even something he resents anymore. It’s simply natural, because this bad boy can fit so much self-loathing in him. More than that, Peter’s his older brother. Kaine would die for him - he has died for him. The fact that Peter believed that he could turn over a new leaf and forgave him was everything to Kaine. It was the flame that kept him going as he was piecing his life back together - the jumpstart to becoming a hero himself.

He’s not Spider-man, and he’s accepted that he never will be. But there are jobs that Kaine, a rough, untethered cynic who can get his hands dirty with no secret identity to speak of, can handle that Spider-man can’t. His path doesn’t cross too often with his brother as Scarlet Spider specifically because he works better under the radar, where Peter’s naivety can get in the way.

But oh, there’s part of him that still longs to capture a little bit of Spider-man’s light for himself one day. To know how it feels to shine that brightly.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?

For the first five years of his life, he chased Ben Reilly - another clone - across America. Both of them had surrendered the idea of ever being Peter Parker, but Ben was the perfect clone. No degenerative clone disease, implanted memories so perfect that he almost thought he was the original. And Kaine wanted to destroy him. To make his life hell. In a deluded way, he thought he was protecting Peter’s life by hounding Ben. He resented that Ben hadn’t suffered enough - but also, he saw himself in Ben. Two outcast Peter Parkers, two sides of the same coin. He romanticized the idea that they were each other’s destiny: the only people who could understand each other; destined to find each other; destined to die together.

Looking back at it now, it was all senseless. He brought pain to the one person he should’ve protected the most, his little brother. But Kaine had been so caught up in his own pain that the only way he knew how to reach out his hand was to make a fist and punch with it. Ben was the first to offer him redemption. Kaine turned himself in and went to prison. Later, Ben died being a hero.

Every day, Kaine laments that he was the one who survived; he’s always been the one who should’ve died, not Ben. If he hadn’t been behind bars, maybe he could’ve saved him. If he hadn’t cursed Ben’s existence for all those lost years, maybe they could’ve actually learned to live.

In terms of doing things differently, not immediately jumping to trying to kill him without an explanation would be a start. They’re both lost people hopped up on peak melodrama at this point in their lives, so a fistfight would probably still break out (it’s superhero comics), but seeing Ben for who he is - his brother, and not a vessel for his hate - is already a huge step. Kaine could stand to live up to his namesake a bit less.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?

While the events of the cosmic storms haven’t been fully laid out yet, I anticipate that their effects are what Kaine will struggle with most. By default, he already has a shaky relationship with his sense of self. He’s Peter, but he’s not - just stolen DNA, a violation of autonomy and nature. Everything about the life he longs for doesn’t belong to him. So for most of his existence, he considered himself less than human. Then even less so because he drowned himself in rage and hate to the point of becoming a serial murderer - a monster. It was only very recently he began to consider that his life… might be something worth living. That he deserves to try. Even if he doesn’t entirely know what living life looks like.

Most of what he has constructed in his head about what being a ‘Person’ looks like is built on a foundation of biased interpretations of Peter’s life that he only half-remembers, attempts to conform to social norms, and things he’s been abused into believing. It’s extremely easy to mess with his self perception - what he is, what he wants, why he’s alive and what he deserves.

This is a man who already hallucinates about his victims. He twists his own memory of events to serve a more damning self narrative. He is so easy to gaslight because he jumps at believing everything bad about himself. And he’s been on the receiving end of being physically mutated and controlled against his will.

Any storms that can alter his perceptions, manipulate his thoughts, his memories, his feelings and his actions are going to be debilitating for Kaine. They’re not simply events that will blow over, but can potentially linger and mess with him for days or weeks to come. Maybe what those hallucinations said were right. Maybe what he did while in an altered state actually reflects his subconscious, true feelings that even he hadn’t been aware of, and he should be punished accordingly for it.

It’s only through the support of other people can he be pulled back from drowning in the worst of himself - but reaching out to others has never been his strength. In fact he’s actively bad at it! That would be the answer to the second greatest challenge he’d have in the setting. But he’s going to have to rely on building bonds and community to get by, because isolating himself is only going to destroy his mind in the end.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?

Quite simply, living like shit. When he spent those 5 years chasing Ben across America - by foot, car, bus or train, anything that wouldn’t leave a trail - he stalked from city to city, New York to San Francisco and back. Kaine was in such a loathsome state of mind at this point in his life that he didn’t believe he deserved any kind of luxury along the way. Real beds were for real people. He wasn’t real, and wallowed in the concept.

The best he allowed himself was renting a dirt-cheap room in bad neighbourhoods, but flea-bitten motels, homeless camps, or simply living out of the sewer were equally as viable. And being penniless, anything he got for himself he had to either steal or earn from unreputable, underground sources. Being on the road for long stretches of time, having no home, and scrounging to make a living… well, it’s like falling back into old habits.


Samples

Sample:
TDM top level; thread
PSL - for context, this was a continuation of cr from Limelight, a game with the premise that all characters have had their memories wiped and replaced with an AU life.