Albert Wesker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
manufactured) wrote2017-04-29 11:29 pm
manufactured) wrote2017-04-29 11:29 pm
APP | RECOLLE
PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Dal
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT: InstantEternity on plurk
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
RESERVATION LINK: Here!
YOUR NAME: Dal
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT: InstantEternity on plurk
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
RESERVATION LINK: Here!
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Albert Wesker
AGE: 48
CANON: Resident Evil
NAME: Albert Wesker
AGE: 48
CANON: Resident Evil
CANON HISTORY:
Wikipedia entry is here. Also, if more information is needed about Spencer's Wesker Project/Project W, there's a basic rundown of it here. Spencer is the third individual we meet in the trio of weirdos that founded Umbrella – a group of guys whose previous greatest hits included "let's clone this guy's ancestor over and over again until we get a pair of schizophrenic twins that are literally their own grandparents" and "one of us ended up thrown in a sewage ditch and now he gains superpowers by singing opera to leeches" – so it really isn't a tremendous surprise that Spencer's bullshit produced...well, Wesker, in hindsight.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Out of all the types of people that others don't really want around, some score higher than others – obviously, murderers and megalomaniacally insane people are two of them; lower down on the list are "people whose sense of aesthetic died sometime in the late 1990s" and "people who wear sunglasses indoors, and sometimes at night for good measure." And forming a neat one-man cross-section of all four of those things and throwing in another fun additional qualifier in the form of "that guy who's hiding the fact that he's infected with the zombie virus from the party until they all find out the hard way," we've got Albert Wesker.
Which isn't to say that he doesn't have his good qualities as well, for a given quality of "good." He's highly intelligent, for one, having become a high-ranking researcher for the Umbrella Corporation by the age of seventeen and having been selected for the company's version of a program designed to train future executives at eighteen; both bright and diligent, he was capable of ensuring that his entire future would be both promising and more or less secured for himself (should he want it to be) at an age where most people are still finishing high school. Of course, this feeds into something else that he personally values above almost all else, and that would be his natural sense of ambition; while it's true that he's very rarely satisfied with the way things are currently going, he's also willing to try to change the status quo when he can, and as such he doesn't let that sense of dissatisfaction mire him down very often – rather, he uses his frustration with the current state of things to fuel him onward in both his personal research and the work he puts in for others.
Not that "the work he puts in for others" doesn't also have a personal slant to it; bluntly put, Wesker isn't the sort of person to do things out of the goodness of his heart. Almost everything he does is to suit his own agenda, whether it's making friends, taking on business partners, joining just about every bioweaponry organization in the series that's been named and several others that haven't – even his dating life comes down to what's going to benefit him in the end and what isn't. In some ways, perhaps, this is understandable; for the better part of his life he's been dealing with odd suspicions and anxieties regarding people and how they should be handled that he really couldn't place the origins of, and he didn't find out until he was well into his forties that those origins were having been kidnapped along with dozens of other children (the series is never really clear on exactly how many, but it's generally accepted that the final number is at least 52) for the sake of being brainwashed and melded into having a personality that the man overseeing the project, Oswell E. Spencer, found acceptable. You know, a perfectly healthy sort of personality that leads a bunch of children to willingly inject themselves with viruses that will probably kill them, for a reason that comes down to "because we need to do science with these viruses, and it's not science in the Resident Evil world unless a bunch of dead children are involved, I guess."
So it would be easy to assume that Wesker always has an agenda because he was trained to always have an agenda; this seems to be something that Spencer himself believes and definitely takes credit for with regards to Wesker specifically - he twisted Wesker's entire personality from someone with free will into something that Spencer believes is far preferable – something based in obedience and adherence and reverence, someone that would honor Spencer himself as a god.
...Or at least Spencer tried to take credit for that, right up until Wesker decided that he'd had enough of the guy's shit and punched him so hard that he impaled the guy front-to-back on his hand.
Oops.
Needless to say, all of that brainwashing and what have you definitely did take in some ways – he has an inherent distrust of people, for one thing, and a nigh-on suicidal disregard for his own personal safety and well-being once something looks like a good idea, and some...problematic worldviews that we'll get into later – he's most definitely his own person. While the situation he was in as a child was unethical and highly abusive, he chooses his reactions and responses to stimuli as much as the next person. Which sounds like a good sign – however, Wesker's actions are in no way normal, nor are they anywhere near the realm of justifiable. Things like "injecting himself with the zombie plague and then letting something kill him just to see if he'll come back", because he doesn't do anything halfassed.
There's also the whole "world's most infamous bioterrorist" thing he's got going on – that's not exactly a good reaction to have to people telling you "no", either.
He's put a lot of knives in a lot of backs to get to where he is today, and he's done it to so many people in so many organizations that it's probably easier to keep a running tally of people that Wesker hasn't manipulated, betrayed, or led to their deaths somehow. And he's very good at manipulating both people and events in his favor; he spends a lot of the series acting behind the scenes, keeping everything in motion the way he likes it and trying to maneuver his chess pieces into position so he can take what he wants in the end. When he doesn't have the means or the skill to do something, he finds someone that does – whether it's a talent for espionage like Ada Wong, or the willingness to do anything for a goal like Jack Krauser, or sheer fiscal power and access to advanced medical technology like Excella Gionne. He's incredibly calculating, and he's good at knowing how to get people to cooperate, willingly or otherwise; whether it's an offer or blackmail, he'll usually find some way to get something resembling his way in the end.
That isn't to say he's completely infallible, however, nor is he necessarily as cold as he seems to come off. He never says himself that he doesn't care about anyone; Chris does say that Wesker doesn't care about anyone but himself, but when Wesker is confronted with the notion directly the conversation always seems to find a way to dance around it – he's entirely more likely to assert that "it's not like it matters" or insist that everything he's doing is necessary in some form, rather than to insist that he doesn't care about anyone involved. That isn't to say that he cares in any positive way about the people he's dealing with, but his behavior is incredibly odd toward those he has closer interpersonal relationships with – he keeps Jill Valentine around instead of killing her once he's done with the research he needs her for and tasks her with keeping an eye on both his assets and his girlfriend, Excella; he leads Excella on far longer than he really needs to, and while he gives her physical cues to step off when he finds her to be pushing boundaries he never directly tells her no, choosing to keep her around well beyond the point where things have been set in motion and he doesn't need her anymore; he goes out of his way to heal Krauser's arm and then proceeds to keep him around and apparently treat him well, despite Krauser basically being a complete rando as far as Wesker knows and not being any more useful to him than anyone else (outside of being kind of insane); he acknowledges that he once considered Chris Redfield a friend despite all the bad blood and hatred that's between them now, and he continues to assert that Chris had always been one of his best men back when they were both members of S.T.A.R.S. A lot of his behavior in interpersonal relationships is geared toward keeping people around on his terms (Jill was kept drugged and brainwashed, Excella was led on with promises of power and love, Krauser was promised stability, Chris...well, he spends the entire series dragging Chris around by the face while Chris just kind of wants to get off of Wesker's Wild Ride), but once those terms are no longer considered relevant or stable, he's quick to cut off those ties before they become any sort of liability to him. He doesn't seem bothered by doing so, and he's obviously very proud of his own ability to manipulate people's feelings, but he is highly avoidant with regards to whether he ever had feelings himself on the matter – and in a series that prides itself on being built on tropes, that's something that should probably be noted.
Of course, there's also the matter of his ultimate goal, and why he's doing all of this in the first place – according to the man himself, Albert Wesker is going to save the world. Which is another one of those things where hey, that actually sounds sort of optimistic – until the details come to light. One of those "details" is a bomber jet; another one of those "details" is a whole fucklot of missiles full of Uroboros, the most powerful virus in Resident Evil canon to date. Missiles that he plans to detonate in order to completely saturate the world with said virus, so he can create a new world to rule over as a god – a world devoid of humanity, and presumably with blackjack and some sort of inhuman hookers.
...Oops.
While part of this is due to the personality Spencer programmed into him (Spencer was big on the eugenics movement, because of course he was), Wesker once again does absolutely make his own decisions and shouldn't be absolved of responsibility for them; Spencer's original plan involved creating a race of superhumans to rule over those considered genetically inferior, while Wesker...well, he just decided to eliminate the middleman and just destroy the "inferior" outright. He believes fully that humanity has dead-ended in an evolutionary sense, and as such forced evolution is the only way up from here; this mindset is partially what led him to become a bioterrorist in the first place. The rest...
Well, the rest is grounded in Issues that he doesn't articulate very well to anyone, and really only spill out of his head when he's half out of his mind due to slowly dying from being poisoned and practically frothing at the mouth – when he's stable, he's able to be rational about what he's saying, sticking to the party line of saving the world and separating the chaff from the wheat and trying to keep humanity from slowly dying out; when he's not...there's suddenly a lot of shrieking and raving about how much he hates humans, how they bring nothing but war and pestilence and suffering upon each other, and how "the human race requires judgment" and he alone has the right to judge them, and generally just yelling a lot about how loathsome he finds them. He's confronted again at one point about how he literally has no one left, and his response is to snap back, verbatim, "I don't need anyone else, I have Uroboros."
None of this is ever portrayed sympathetically, as well it shouldn't be – he's literally trying to end the world and the series does not let us forget that. At the same time, while his decisions were his own, his situation was at least slightly stacked against him from the beginning: his upbringing literally involved huge amounts of abuse in some mad scientist's basement in order to brainwash him into subservience, he learned quickly and early on that he could rely on no one but himself, and as a result his entire life was basically a pattern of using people and throwing them away before they could do the same to him. He didn't develop the godhood/world-saving delusions until after he confronted Spencer about what he'd done to him, and apparently that was the metaphorical back-breaking straw. His entire life was built around control and power, and in a single conversation someone (a human, one that Wesker believed didn't deserve life, much less the right to become a god) took literally all of that away from him by informing him that he wasn't designed – he wasn't manufactured – to have agency, or free will, or anything that he could consider his own.
The things that did bring him power, however? Were his viruses. Uroboros.
One final thing that's worth noting regarding Wesker is that while, again, he doesn't ever seem satisfied with things, one of the few things that genuinely seems to make him excited and happy are seeing zombies in action. Fighting them, seeing what they're capable of, looking at them in stasis pods – he's a little like a kid in a candy store. Getting to experiment on them is even better. And when he injected himself with his own viruses and gained superhuman powers, at the expense of his humanity? Listening to him talk about it, it sounds like that was legitimately the best day of his life.
So he feels no remorse for any of his actions, up to and including trying to kill the entire world with a virus nuke to reboot the whole thing. However, somewhere in there, he does seem to think that he's saving the world in some fucked up way, even if that means killing all but approximately 700 people and rendering the others into inhuman monsters like him.
But then, it's not like humanity ever did anything for him, anyway.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Normal, Reasonable-Person Skills:
Virus-Based Skills:
Other
Wikipedia entry is here. Also, if more information is needed about Spencer's Wesker Project/Project W, there's a basic rundown of it here. Spencer is the third individual we meet in the trio of weirdos that founded Umbrella – a group of guys whose previous greatest hits included "let's clone this guy's ancestor over and over again until we get a pair of schizophrenic twins that are literally their own grandparents" and "one of us ended up thrown in a sewage ditch and now he gains superpowers by singing opera to leeches" – so it really isn't a tremendous surprise that Spencer's bullshit produced...well, Wesker, in hindsight.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Out of all the types of people that others don't really want around, some score higher than others – obviously, murderers and megalomaniacally insane people are two of them; lower down on the list are "people whose sense of aesthetic died sometime in the late 1990s" and "people who wear sunglasses indoors, and sometimes at night for good measure." And forming a neat one-man cross-section of all four of those things and throwing in another fun additional qualifier in the form of "that guy who's hiding the fact that he's infected with the zombie virus from the party until they all find out the hard way," we've got Albert Wesker.
Which isn't to say that he doesn't have his good qualities as well, for a given quality of "good." He's highly intelligent, for one, having become a high-ranking researcher for the Umbrella Corporation by the age of seventeen and having been selected for the company's version of a program designed to train future executives at eighteen; both bright and diligent, he was capable of ensuring that his entire future would be both promising and more or less secured for himself (should he want it to be) at an age where most people are still finishing high school. Of course, this feeds into something else that he personally values above almost all else, and that would be his natural sense of ambition; while it's true that he's very rarely satisfied with the way things are currently going, he's also willing to try to change the status quo when he can, and as such he doesn't let that sense of dissatisfaction mire him down very often – rather, he uses his frustration with the current state of things to fuel him onward in both his personal research and the work he puts in for others.
Not that "the work he puts in for others" doesn't also have a personal slant to it; bluntly put, Wesker isn't the sort of person to do things out of the goodness of his heart. Almost everything he does is to suit his own agenda, whether it's making friends, taking on business partners, joining just about every bioweaponry organization in the series that's been named and several others that haven't – even his dating life comes down to what's going to benefit him in the end and what isn't. In some ways, perhaps, this is understandable; for the better part of his life he's been dealing with odd suspicions and anxieties regarding people and how they should be handled that he really couldn't place the origins of, and he didn't find out until he was well into his forties that those origins were having been kidnapped along with dozens of other children (the series is never really clear on exactly how many, but it's generally accepted that the final number is at least 52) for the sake of being brainwashed and melded into having a personality that the man overseeing the project, Oswell E. Spencer, found acceptable. You know, a perfectly healthy sort of personality that leads a bunch of children to willingly inject themselves with viruses that will probably kill them, for a reason that comes down to "because we need to do science with these viruses, and it's not science in the Resident Evil world unless a bunch of dead children are involved, I guess."
So it would be easy to assume that Wesker always has an agenda because he was trained to always have an agenda; this seems to be something that Spencer himself believes and definitely takes credit for with regards to Wesker specifically - he twisted Wesker's entire personality from someone with free will into something that Spencer believes is far preferable – something based in obedience and adherence and reverence, someone that would honor Spencer himself as a god.
...Or at least Spencer tried to take credit for that, right up until Wesker decided that he'd had enough of the guy's shit and punched him so hard that he impaled the guy front-to-back on his hand.
Oops.
Needless to say, all of that brainwashing and what have you definitely did take in some ways – he has an inherent distrust of people, for one thing, and a nigh-on suicidal disregard for his own personal safety and well-being once something looks like a good idea, and some...problematic worldviews that we'll get into later – he's most definitely his own person. While the situation he was in as a child was unethical and highly abusive, he chooses his reactions and responses to stimuli as much as the next person. Which sounds like a good sign – however, Wesker's actions are in no way normal, nor are they anywhere near the realm of justifiable. Things like "injecting himself with the zombie plague and then letting something kill him just to see if he'll come back", because he doesn't do anything halfassed.
There's also the whole "world's most infamous bioterrorist" thing he's got going on – that's not exactly a good reaction to have to people telling you "no", either.
He's put a lot of knives in a lot of backs to get to where he is today, and he's done it to so many people in so many organizations that it's probably easier to keep a running tally of people that Wesker hasn't manipulated, betrayed, or led to their deaths somehow. And he's very good at manipulating both people and events in his favor; he spends a lot of the series acting behind the scenes, keeping everything in motion the way he likes it and trying to maneuver his chess pieces into position so he can take what he wants in the end. When he doesn't have the means or the skill to do something, he finds someone that does – whether it's a talent for espionage like Ada Wong, or the willingness to do anything for a goal like Jack Krauser, or sheer fiscal power and access to advanced medical technology like Excella Gionne. He's incredibly calculating, and he's good at knowing how to get people to cooperate, willingly or otherwise; whether it's an offer or blackmail, he'll usually find some way to get something resembling his way in the end.
That isn't to say he's completely infallible, however, nor is he necessarily as cold as he seems to come off. He never says himself that he doesn't care about anyone; Chris does say that Wesker doesn't care about anyone but himself, but when Wesker is confronted with the notion directly the conversation always seems to find a way to dance around it – he's entirely more likely to assert that "it's not like it matters" or insist that everything he's doing is necessary in some form, rather than to insist that he doesn't care about anyone involved. That isn't to say that he cares in any positive way about the people he's dealing with, but his behavior is incredibly odd toward those he has closer interpersonal relationships with – he keeps Jill Valentine around instead of killing her once he's done with the research he needs her for and tasks her with keeping an eye on both his assets and his girlfriend, Excella; he leads Excella on far longer than he really needs to, and while he gives her physical cues to step off when he finds her to be pushing boundaries he never directly tells her no, choosing to keep her around well beyond the point where things have been set in motion and he doesn't need her anymore; he goes out of his way to heal Krauser's arm and then proceeds to keep him around and apparently treat him well, despite Krauser basically being a complete rando as far as Wesker knows and not being any more useful to him than anyone else (outside of being kind of insane); he acknowledges that he once considered Chris Redfield a friend despite all the bad blood and hatred that's between them now, and he continues to assert that Chris had always been one of his best men back when they were both members of S.T.A.R.S. A lot of his behavior in interpersonal relationships is geared toward keeping people around on his terms (Jill was kept drugged and brainwashed, Excella was led on with promises of power and love, Krauser was promised stability, Chris...well, he spends the entire series dragging Chris around by the face while Chris just kind of wants to get off of Wesker's Wild Ride), but once those terms are no longer considered relevant or stable, he's quick to cut off those ties before they become any sort of liability to him. He doesn't seem bothered by doing so, and he's obviously very proud of his own ability to manipulate people's feelings, but he is highly avoidant with regards to whether he ever had feelings himself on the matter – and in a series that prides itself on being built on tropes, that's something that should probably be noted.
Of course, there's also the matter of his ultimate goal, and why he's doing all of this in the first place – according to the man himself, Albert Wesker is going to save the world. Which is another one of those things where hey, that actually sounds sort of optimistic – until the details come to light. One of those "details" is a bomber jet; another one of those "details" is a whole fucklot of missiles full of Uroboros, the most powerful virus in Resident Evil canon to date. Missiles that he plans to detonate in order to completely saturate the world with said virus, so he can create a new world to rule over as a god – a world devoid of humanity, and presumably with blackjack and some sort of inhuman hookers.
...Oops.
While part of this is due to the personality Spencer programmed into him (Spencer was big on the eugenics movement, because of course he was), Wesker once again does absolutely make his own decisions and shouldn't be absolved of responsibility for them; Spencer's original plan involved creating a race of superhumans to rule over those considered genetically inferior, while Wesker...well, he just decided to eliminate the middleman and just destroy the "inferior" outright. He believes fully that humanity has dead-ended in an evolutionary sense, and as such forced evolution is the only way up from here; this mindset is partially what led him to become a bioterrorist in the first place. The rest...
Well, the rest is grounded in Issues that he doesn't articulate very well to anyone, and really only spill out of his head when he's half out of his mind due to slowly dying from being poisoned and practically frothing at the mouth – when he's stable, he's able to be rational about what he's saying, sticking to the party line of saving the world and separating the chaff from the wheat and trying to keep humanity from slowly dying out; when he's not...there's suddenly a lot of shrieking and raving about how much he hates humans, how they bring nothing but war and pestilence and suffering upon each other, and how "the human race requires judgment" and he alone has the right to judge them, and generally just yelling a lot about how loathsome he finds them. He's confronted again at one point about how he literally has no one left, and his response is to snap back, verbatim, "I don't need anyone else, I have Uroboros."
None of this is ever portrayed sympathetically, as well it shouldn't be – he's literally trying to end the world and the series does not let us forget that. At the same time, while his decisions were his own, his situation was at least slightly stacked against him from the beginning: his upbringing literally involved huge amounts of abuse in some mad scientist's basement in order to brainwash him into subservience, he learned quickly and early on that he could rely on no one but himself, and as a result his entire life was basically a pattern of using people and throwing them away before they could do the same to him. He didn't develop the godhood/world-saving delusions until after he confronted Spencer about what he'd done to him, and apparently that was the metaphorical back-breaking straw. His entire life was built around control and power, and in a single conversation someone (a human, one that Wesker believed didn't deserve life, much less the right to become a god) took literally all of that away from him by informing him that he wasn't designed – he wasn't manufactured – to have agency, or free will, or anything that he could consider his own.
The things that did bring him power, however? Were his viruses. Uroboros.
One final thing that's worth noting regarding Wesker is that while, again, he doesn't ever seem satisfied with things, one of the few things that genuinely seems to make him excited and happy are seeing zombies in action. Fighting them, seeing what they're capable of, looking at them in stasis pods – he's a little like a kid in a candy store. Getting to experiment on them is even better. And when he injected himself with his own viruses and gained superhuman powers, at the expense of his humanity? Listening to him talk about it, it sounds like that was legitimately the best day of his life.
So he feels no remorse for any of his actions, up to and including trying to kill the entire world with a virus nuke to reboot the whole thing. However, somewhere in there, he does seem to think that he's saving the world in some fucked up way, even if that means killing all but approximately 700 people and rendering the others into inhuman monsters like him.
But then, it's not like humanity ever did anything for him, anyway.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
Normal, Reasonable-Person Skills:
- S.T.A.R.S. Training: Seeing as he was a commanding officer in the Special Tactics And Rescue Service, Wesker has received formal training in various fields of combat; he specializes in hand-to-hand, but he's shown to be exceptionally good with handguns. He's also proficient with a combat knife, and he has general knowledge regarding how to use simple incendiary devices like flashbangs and grenades.
- Martial Arts: While his specific discipline is never stated, Wesker is highly adept at something at least visibly similar to Shaolin kung fu; even before he shot himself up full of zombie viruses he was considered a master in his field, though it certainly wasn't to superhuman levels – just the result of a lot of training and discipline.
- Gymnastics/Acrobatics: Wesker is very agile, and seems to adhere to the logic of "why jump out of the way of something when I can backflip and look awesome instead" because he's kind of a loser like that. A lot of what he does seems self-taught as opposed to formally-learned, and he seems to prefer the sort of moves that involve throwing himself into the air in defiance of gravity and physics as opposed to things that require using his hands for balance or launching purposes. (Think aerials as opposed to handsprings.)
Virus-Based Skills:
- Strength: To an extent where he has no problem picking up missiles with one hand and throwing them across an airplane hangar, lifting a grown man (someone that canonically outweighs him by about twenty pounds) by the neck and holding him in the air one-handed without any visible signs of exertion or effort, killing several people by kicking them so hard their diaphragm ruptures, thrusting his hand clean through a person's body front-to-back, and punching a military-grade missile hard enough to puncture it. If he has something like an adjacent wall or part of the ceiling to brace his legs against, he can also support his weight several feet off the ground using his fingertips for grip and nothing else; the result is weird and spider-like and probably not something you want him doing above you simply because that's creepy as hell.
- Speed/Reflexes: At his full capacity, he's able to dodge bullets at almost point-blank range, regardless of weapon (meaning that he can avoid individual shots from machine guns and the like should he so choose); he can also cover short distances so quickly that human vision can't track him properly and it gives the impression of limited teleportation, though that isn't the case and could presumably be stopped if something sufficient were used to block him or force him to change course.
- Durability: In another case of "because that's how science works", Wesker is freakishly durable due to the virus hardening his internal tissues, bone structure and skin; punching him is a bad idea because it's going to hurt you far more than it hurts him and will probably just end up breaking your hand, hitting him with metal pipes just bends the pipes instead of damaging him any. Rockets are often a one- or two-hit kill in Resident Evil for lesser or mid-bosses; a rocket going off in his hands manages to...uh, well, it startles him? And that's about it. ...Yeah. (That isn't to say he's completely invulnerable, though. Fire canonically is shown to hurt him really badly, his eyes are explicitly shown to be as vulnerable as anyone else's, and he can very much be poisoned despite his blood being otherwise made of pure bullshit. Hard enough blows to the head also absolutely fuck him up; he canonically survives severe head trauma by way of blunt force impact at one point, but he's very clearly staggering around dazed after that and is in absolutely no condition to keep fighting, he just keeps trying because he's stubborn to a fault.)
- Healing Factor: On top of surviving all the stupid misadventures listed in the Durability section, Wesker has a healing factor that allows him to patch up the injuries he sustained during them. He completely loses his left eye at one point but he manages to regenerate it eventually; he'll bleed from gunshots but that'll stop eventually. Head trauma affects him for a good long time but he doesn't seem to suffer any long-term consequences from it as long as he can leave the situation and heal up. It isn't perfect by any means and he can absolutely be overwhelmed with serious injuries, but if he's given a chance to distance himself and recover then he will. Relatedly, his healing is the in-canon explanation for why he looks 27 despite being almost 50; his "sister" is the same way and she's also been infected with various things, so it seems that virus-based healing factors halt your aging beyond a certain point.
- Revival: The virus is capable of bringing Wesker back from death, to a point. It isn't a proper resurrection mechanic, given that it won't work if his body has taken too much damage – if he's sustained something like massive poisoning resulting in complete organ failure, flash burns that cause too much tissue death for the body to be salvageable, irreversible nerve damage in a way that proves fatal, or something manages to just straight-up destroy his head somehow, he's going to be gone even at the height of his powers. However, if he's taken a fatal hit but his body is still sustainable, he'll be able to get up eventually and keep going; to word it another way, the virus is capable of resuscitation, not pure resurrection.
Other
- Blood-Based Immunity: Wesker has a unique genetic mutation in his DNA that causes his blood to produce powerful antibodies that render him immune to the negative effects of all illnesses, mutagens, pathogens, or other dangerous biohazardous substances that might be injected into his body. What this means is that he reaps all of the benefits of particular viruses without taking any of the drawbacks – in other words, he gets magical zombie superpowers without mutating horribly into some sort of literal monster, because that is absolutely how science works. He's capable of passing this particular genetic trait on to any biological children he may happen to have, and it's mentioned that his DNA can theoretically be used as a cure for the zombie plague. (Theoretically. Seeing as that would be franchise-killing, it's doubtful that the series itself is actually going to go there, and as such it's difficult to say whether such a thing would actually work in practice.)
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Albert Wesker (birth name: Noah Isaacs)
AU AGE: 38
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
While it isn't a visible difference, his blood type has changed – he's just as susceptible to anything introduced to his system as anybody else. He also doesn't have his viral enhancements, so physically he's aggressively average and more or less what you'd expect from a guy that works in pharmaceuticals; as far as his apparent age goes, dermatologists still hate him, but he looks a bit closer to his actual age of almost 40. His eyes are also decidedly more normal-looking – they're a dark, steel blue as opposed to the bright orange/red, and his pupils are normal as opposed to vertically-slit. (This does not stop him from wearing sunglasses indoors, but it's not to hide anything, it's just because he's a tool.)
AU NAME: Albert Wesker (birth name: Noah Isaacs)
AU AGE: 38
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
While it isn't a visible difference, his blood type has changed – he's just as susceptible to anything introduced to his system as anybody else. He also doesn't have his viral enhancements, so physically he's aggressively average and more or less what you'd expect from a guy that works in pharmaceuticals; as far as his apparent age goes, dermatologists still hate him, but he looks a bit closer to his actual age of almost 40. His eyes are also decidedly more normal-looking – they're a dark, steel blue as opposed to the bright orange/red, and his pupils are normal as opposed to vertically-slit. (This does not stop him from wearing sunglasses indoors, but it's not to hide anything, it's just because he's a tool.)
AU HISTORY:
All mentions of other characters have been cleared with the players!
All mentions of other characters have been cleared with the players!
- He was originally born as "Noah Isaacs" to a family in England; he has no real memories of spending time with his family in any sort of normal way, however.
- He was too young to understand what was going on at the time, but apparently his parents were not terribly stable people; they were getting divorced at the time, and his father effectively kidnapped him and left for the States.
- As such, the earliest memories he has involve moving around a lot – spending a lot of time in a car with a man, and not spending a lot of time in one place. A lot of hotels, a lot of short-lease apartments.
- The man he remembers from that time wasn't good to him; he tended to turn to alcohol to solve his problems, and as such there was a fair amount of abuse going on – largely physical, though not without its share of emotional/psychological abuse as well. So Wesker learned fairly quickly that the best way to keep out of trouble was to keep his head down and remain quiet and out of the way, and generally do as he was told.
- His father was eventually arrested on an unrelated charge, and Wesker himself was put into custody of the authorities at the age of five.
- Due to his upbringing being unconventional at best, he refused to speak to most people at all for several years, despite technically having the language skills to do so; this is partially what led to him being renamed by the authorities –no one could find information on him and he was deemed either unwilling or unable to provide any personal information himself, and they had to call him something.
- However, he was very naturally bright and he consistently tested extremely high on intelligence and aptitude tests; this led to him eventually being adopted by a well-off doctor despite the warnings that he'd probably be difficult to raise.
- Socializing him was honestly kind of a horrible experience – not because he'd act out, but because he would do the exact opposite of that in that he would display reasonably little free will and still had selective mutism issues. Somewhere along the line the doctor that adopted him...more or less gave up on trying to get him to balance out emotionally and just let him do his own thing, figuring that Wesker would come around eventually on his own. It took time, but that ended up being a surprisingly valid approach – being left to his own devices assisted with the free will problems, and being neither forced nor coddled to talk to people made him decidedly more willing to do so.
- His upbringing from there on was supportive in a very superficial way – he was given whatever he wanted, assuming he wanted anything, and he would be permitted to do whatever he liked with regards to study and recreation, but at the same time there was a good amount of emotional distance between Wesker and his adoptive parent; he was always provided for, however, and the doctor never raised a hand to him or anything. Eventually he warmed up a little, albeit in a very guarded way that never really had too much emotional depth to it: he preferred his adoptive father's presence to his absence, but there was always a general sense that the guy could get hit by a bus the next day and Wesker wouldn't be particularly sad about it. Weirded out, sure, but not sad.
- This became the status quo with regards to how he interacted with people; he would find people he could tolerate, and he spent time with them because that's what people do, but he wouldn't really form any sort of deep attachment to them. If he decided he preferred their presence to their absence, he would keep them around as "friends"; if not, then he would discard the relationship entirely without a second thought.
- One of the very, very few people he kept around was Ainsley Menodora (caelestialis); they met as children in Recollé, and he's about as fond of her as he's capable of being. They have a reasonably trusting relationship, given that they've known each other for so long and she's always been kind to him in a way that's accepting of the fact that he's going to be odd and distant – she doesn't push him for anything else, so he doesn't feel inclined to shove her away or find her obnoxious in any way.
- One of the other people he kept around is Tony Carter (flyguy), whom he met while attending what's best described as "fancy rich people school"; Tony served as a sort of mentor to him for a while, and the relationship just sort of stuck – Tony sees him as a little brother, Wesker is functionally all right with that, and neither of them knows how to do family properly so the result is sort of hilariously awkward. It's the sort of thing where neither of them can really put into words why they're spending time together but they sure as hell are, and at this point it'd just be weird not to.
- As an adult, Wesker works in pharmaceutical research and development; he has a good amount of money, bolstered quite a bit by the inheritance he received from his adoptive father when he passed a few years ago. (As predicted, Wesker was weirded out by it, but not actually sad, something that admittedly bothers him a little.)
- He likes his job! He enjoys what he does – perhaps a little too much, if we're going to be blunt. He has a tendency to "borrow" research from the labs he's working at (because it's not really stealing if it's your own work, right?) and mess around on his own time. Ideally speaking he's trying to make some sort of knockoff Captain America or something – he wants to find a way to enhance the human body in ways that probably aren't right or natural but would just be really, really goddamn cool; thankfully, he has yet to actually create the zombie plague this time.
- Obviously, he can't shill his products on people because that's highly unethical and he would quite prefer to not be arrested; fortunately, he's made acquaintances with a man named Jaeger (scythegun) who's entirely here to put his creations into circulation and report back to him on who's buying for a cut of the profits. Wesker doesn't like Jaeger very much, seeing as their personalities tend to clash, but he tolerates him. Shady business practices make strange bedfellows, apparently.
- He likes to visit the no-kill animal shelter sometimes; he doesn't volunteer, he just looks at what's there. Once in a while he'll adopt dogs that are seen as a "challenge" – the ones that are poorly-socialized or aggressive and generally deemed as difficult to adopt out as a result. Usually this works out fine, as training them is something he's surprisingly patient at; sometimes it works out...less than fine, as in the time that one of them bit Silver (feistytrader) and this ended in a hospital visit and rabies shots. Fortunately Silver doesn't seem to mind the incident, and he's taken to stopping by once in a while; Wesker tolerates his presence because it breaks up monotony on slow days, and if we're all being honest with ourselves Silver is usually just visiting the dogs anyway.
- Surprisingly, he has a vaguely active dating life. He and Elda Marker (matchbreaker) take each other out on dates sometimes, despite not really being long-term compatible – they both know the relationship is probably not endgame, but they're all right with each other's company and can usually find enough to talk about.
AU PERSONALITY:
One of the more important things to note here is probably that he's not out to kill the entire world with a virus nuke for the sake of rebooting it anymore.
In Recollé, Wesker is vaguely aware of his past, though he doesn't remember it very well; minds have a way of scarring over those things, and if he's going to be entirely honest, he doesn't remember much of anything before he was adopted. However, because he wasn't heavily brainwashed and he was allowed to develop on his own, as stunted though that development was, he doesn't have quite as many hangups over humanity in general. He doesn't feel like he needs to have control over Literally Everything, and is willing to spend time with others just for the sake of doing it, rather than because he wants something. If he can get something? That's great! But he's just as likely to spend time with people for the sake of company as he is for any set purpose, because that's just what people do.
...He puts a lot of subconscious emphasis on "what people do", really, because his own grasp on empathy is very poor – he doesn't have much of a conscience, he doesn't ever feel guilt or remorse, but here he has enough general understanding and decorum to know that that's probably a bad thing. So he'll do things because they seem "normal" to everyone else, even if he doesn't like it or understand why, because fake it until you make it is as good a strategy as any.
Part of the problem stemming from the lack of empathy and failure to really understand social norms for what they are, though, is that he has difficulty forming attachments to people; he'll still discard relationships if he finds them cumbersome or just doesn't see a need for them anymore, but now it's more along the lines of "intentionally causing arguments so he's left alone" as opposed to "murdering the hell out of people he doesn't want around anymore." He still gets defensive and weird when people get too close to him, and as such he'll try to push them away before the relationship goes poorly on him for whatever reason, but it's decidedly less a case of chronic backstabbing syndrome.
He doesn't particularly like people as a whole and finds them weird and inexplicable a lot of the time, but he doesn't hate them all or want them to die; he's not a particularly ethical man, but he works in pharmaceuticals to save lives (and maybe create some sort of knockoff Captain America) and he's a fundamentally functional human being. He's an incredibly socially awkward person due to the lack of connections with people, but you know what, he goes to social events and he pays his taxes, and man, getting memory regains of being a person who tried to end the world is going to suck.