ayoungman

 

Name	John Egbert
Gender	Male
Age	12
Canon	Homestuck

Backtagging	Y
Threadjacking	Y
Fourthwalling	N
Mind-reading	Y
Injury	Y
Death	?

I'm generally a pretty open person who's willing to plan out and plot pretty much anything. In my years of RP I've come to learn that there's very little I'm not willing to play out. So the bit thing really is, if you're unsure, don't be afraid to ask! I love big gradoise plots and out there ways to develop characters and am always willing to try out new things!

chohakkaifan

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chohakkaifan#5971

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My Private Journal!

I'm starting John off with no powers what-so-ever. But I'm going to have it that, like in Homestuck, he's something super-human midway through playing him. I want him to learn and grow and develop with his powers just as he had in the bulk of his own canon.

Of course, John Egbert's overpowered as all hell in his original series so I'm limiting that a bit. No, he is not a god. No, he is not nearly incapable of dying. No, he cannot warp through different times and places and universes and alter them at will without repercussion. That's just silly.

What I will give him are his windy abilities. Much like his original role as "Heir of Breath" in Homestuck, John will be able to control and manipulate the forces of wind at will. He will be able to at first be able to call out small gusts and be capable of flight by manipulating the breeze around him. And as his powers develop and grow I would like him to call out zephyrs and storms much as he can later in the series. Somewhat like a Storm from the X-Men type deal. And, if allowed, I would ultimately be able to allow him to "become breath" much as his title allows him in his own canon. Being able to physically turn himself into a gaseous state and control and reform himself back into a solid mass.

In terms of hard science, I suppose the best way to consider his powers is more along the lines of physical manipulation of matter. He is able to control and shift the kinetic energy of matter around him, but he is only able to do so with particularly lightweight, widely spaced out matter, aka materials that are in a particularly gaseous state. His own body acts almost like a magnetic charge for these forces causing him to be able to move and bend it around him. Of course, since it is all his own natural kinetic force extending out from his body to move and control gaseous substances around him, it takes out a physical toll on him, primarily exhausting his body. Overusing his abilities will leave him feeling, for lack of a better term, absolutely winded. And if he over pushes past his own capabilities for a prolonged period it will cause him to feel light-headed and eventually cause him to blackout.

When he starts out his powers will be unreliable and sporadic. Not knowing how he himself technically controls it, forcing it will barely get a gentle breeze rushing past while being in a more emotional state will cause his powers to react in great bursts without meaning to, sometimes even to the point of pure overexertion.

Perhaps in the distant future, he has the capabilities of becoming one of the stronger meta-humans out there. Heck, he was genetically modified and created for just that purpose. But he is a long way away from such power and is someone who only just discovered his own powers. There is no time limit to his power save for his own physical endurance, and the limits are merely the same as that of his normal physical awareness. If he cannot see or reach or have some way in which his body is physically aware of something then chances of his manipulation succeeding are very low. Not that fact they won't work at all, but simply that it's highly likely an accident or mistake will occur on his part. He can lift things with the force of the air, but much like everything else, it's going to start off very weak, barely able to lift a few small tools off the ground. When he is emotionally set off though he may inadvertently end up launching something even as big as a safe or bathtub into the stratosphere.

If it ever does reach a point in the game that he gets a better handle on his own abilities, he should in his youth be able to use his manipulation to create mighty gusts that could launch or lift the weight of up to a couple hundred pounds off the ground and be able to hold it suspended for up to a half an hour or so at a time. Hence, his ability of 'flight', which would more or less be just him lifting his own body with the air around him. The manipulation of gas with such force though creates other capabilities, like making it appear like there could be a zephyr or tornado simply because he is moving the wind at such a fast pace within a concentrated and localized area. His eventual ability to 'become wind' is a much more developed one and probably will not even happen unless I have him in the game for quite some time as that requires him to be able to shift and manipulate the matter of his own body and to cause it to expand to a semi-gaseous form. That way he would be able to not completely vanish as he does in his original series, but instead, be able to make himself him more or less phase through or around things as long as he's within that state. I'm sure in the latter days of his life he will have more than enough fun tricking people into thinking places are haunted simply because someone may once or twice see him walking through a wall or grow transparent and fade away.

He's intuitive, but he's still a kid and one who has no experience or knowledge of who or what he is. And while he may get all gung-ho over the thought of having powers, his youth will be his own downfall unless he gets plenty of time to dedicate to the development of those abilities. After all, things aren't like the comic books or old movies, and no kid is just going to know how to control the elements within the time it takes for a catchy montage to finish playing.

But that's about it I think.

As I said above, he does have a mild interest in programming and can make some fairly rudimentary code blocks, but he's in the beginning stages of understanding that. I would like to see how that develops in the future though. As for combat, he's pretty much can do just about anything a 13-year-old boy can. But he is very intuitive and is able to pick things up quickly if his canon is anything to go by.

John grew up like a normal boy in New Gate City. Of course, things weren't completely easy. John's father had to work hard as a single-parent to keep the middle-class lifestyle they had. John grew up in a perfectly safe and comfortable 'middle-class' situation, far from the worries of those who live in the lower levels and without any need for too much care towards the political environment like most of those who live in the upper levels seem to have. He goes to school, has some clubs that he partakes in, helps his dad out in any way he can and otherwise just goes about his life as any twelve-year-old boy would. Of course, his favorite extracurricular activity is the computer programming club which he set up with what small handful of friends that he has. He's not the most popular kid by a long run and it probably doesn't help that his father is oddly overprotective of him, rarely allowing him to leave the house when he's not at school. But being a single working-class businessman while raising a son on your own is hard work, and occasionally, while his father is away, John will sneak off on his own. His main hang out of choice, just like any other kid really, is in Arcadia. He is an avid gamer who spends most of his time at the old antique games shops helping fix up and play systems that are decades before his time. He also loves watching active live gaming competitions and streamers in the biggest and newest interactive games. Whereas when he's at home he spends most of his time watching old movies, practicing his tricks, or simply dicking around on the internet.

With the meta-human situation, he doesn't really understand too much of the nuanced complications the problem seems to hold on society as personally he can't help but think that having legitimate superpowers of some kind seems pretty darn cool. And he does know a few metahumans at school and is overall super amiable to them as he would be to anyone. But due to his lack of understanding, he does tend to come off as a bit over direct and insensitive to situations. It's partially due to the fact that his father always talks positively about meta-humans due to the fact that his own grandmother was, he tends to oversimplify matters because of the opinions he grew up around.

Being a kid who's huge into supernatural subjects and conspiracy theories he can't help but have an obvious distrust towards the government. He doesn't trust anything the Douman Zaibatsu comes with. It's almost at a point where anything he sees that has been produced by them he approaches with automatic distrust. He spends much of his time when he's stuck at his house lurking through government conspiracy forums, which is mostly hilarious as his father's actual job is a mid-level businessman within the Douman Zaibatsu itself. In fact, the Crocker/Egbert family have been working closely with the Douman Zaibatsu for years, and John's father is no exception, doing his best to work with the organization's committee in compensation for the bad mark placed on his family's name since it was revealed that she had at one point worked with the rebellion.

How does one start the personality section for the central protagonist of one of media-histories longest and most hyped about pieces of modern fiction? Do we start with the fact that he's a wise-cracking goofball that loves to pull cheesy pranks where ever he goes? Or should we bring up his odd petulance when he starts fixating on small issues? Or perhaps we should start instead with his hobbies, of which he has so many for a kid his age. It's no wonder that he's not really that good with many of them! No, I think we'll start with something simpler, something that gets more down to the core of his personality.

John Egbert is a good kid.

Not good in the sense of some puritanical saint; although in some far off alternate universe it would not be surprising if people were to say that he ascended to a state far beyond any mortal reach. Nor is he good in that he's a perfect prodigy student with extracurricular activities and a ton of friends. No, John is good in the sense that he just genuinely seems to care and support all those he cares for. This is perhaps the driving force for his character throughout Homestuck as he circles through the in's and out's of The Medium of SBURB (and in later extents, between various universes throughout time-and-space itself) both causing positive and negative consequences for him throughout the series.

John is the type of kid who takes all of his relationships to heart. He's the friend who knows everyone's birthdays and somehow always knows exactly the perfect gift to get, even when his own friends don't yet know it. John's strong sense of personal camaraderie shows multiple times throughout the canon how he has time and again provided help for his friends in SBURB to the fullest extent he could muster. He humors Dave's sarcastic wit, he cracks jokes with Rose to lighten her mood, and he knows just when to act a little more serious for Jade when times get tough. The same could be said with even those he didn't meet until later in canon. He was willing to tolerate and amuse Karkat's communications with him backward in time. He provided emotional support for Vriska when she felt no one else was on her side. And when he found out that his father was living a fake-life to cover his real career as a regular businessperson, just to make John proud of him, John understood it for what it was and turned his exasperation for his father's antics into an even greater reason to love and respect him.

Of course, despite how it sounds, that doesn't mean there aren't flaws in his almost boundless compassion for those he cares about. It is, in fact, because of it that he tends to be a bit of a pushover willingly throughout the canon, often getting himself into trouble simply because he did whatever his friends tell him to do. This was especially prevalent at the beginning of the series when he first enters 'The Medium'. Whether it was his friends from earth or even the Trolls, who just the day before he entered SBURB he thought were his enemies, he would unquestioningly follow their advice on the game he was playing. This came to bite him in the ass many times throughout the series, but perhaps one of the most prominent examples was when Terezi, a troll who was actively using him as an experiment, sent him off-mission to go and fight the denizen of his world earlier than the game had meant him to. This inadvertently leads up to what would be the first of many moments where he would face his own premature death within an alternate timeline.

Another thing that tends to define John is the many things he has an interest in. When the comic first opens you get a glimpse of his bedroom and see that he is a kid with a plethora of things that he likes to do. The most prominent of these is his almost obsessive interest in comedy and pranks. From his perspective, he believes he comes from a long line of tricksters and comedians. His great-great-grandfather, Colonel Sassacre, was one of the greatest humorists who ever lived in his world and was the author of the infamous book "Colonel Sander's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery", so it was only natural that every member of the family-owned and cherished a copy of the book. And John sticks to that family tradition almost religiously. In fact, within yet another alternate universe John grows up to become one of the best comedians of his era.

Speaking of Colonel Sassacre, notice the word "Magical Frivolity"? Yep, he likes parlor-trick magic as well. Not to say he's all that good at that aspect of great-great-grandpappy's legacy. In fact, he's not very good at many of his interests. Take coding as an example. He has shown a fair bit of interest in basic programming and coding and spends a bit of his personal time coming up with a plethora of different algorithms. But, even according to his own opinion, the programs he creates are quite bad. Nonetheless, he is the curious and persevering sort who will still manage to use his knowledge on the subject to figure out new ways to solve problems.

Other interests he has are in video games (something which dragged his and his friends into what started the entire plot of Homestuck), webcomics, paranormal lore, and ultimately movies. His obsession with specifically cheesy over-the-top comedy and action movies knows no bounds. Certain favorites of his are Armageddon, Ghost Dad, Little Monsters, and, his utmost favorite, ConAir. Oh, how he will do everything in his power to stop what he is doing to talk about and fight for these movies should the subject come up.

As for dislikes, there really aren't many, although what he does tend to hate he clings to with absolute passion. Clowns and especially Harlequins always had a tendency to freak him out. And he avoids peanuts at all costs due to a deathly allergy he holds towards the small legume. But worst of all, he absolutely loathes Betty Crocker. Yep. You heard me. The large American-run baking corporation Betty Crocker? John just knows they're pulling the strings behind something bigger and doesn't trust anything branded with the large red spoon of that evil batterwitch.

And you better believe that this innate fear of corporate conspiracy theories is something that will hold over within this game.

That's the thing about John. With bigger issues, he tends to just blow them off and simply accept them and move on without really taking much time to dwell on it. When he woke up to the corpse of his father in front of him, where rose completely lost her shit and "jumped off the metaphorical handle", John simply stood there for a moment, mourned what had happened briefly and then moved on. And yet when he first found out his father was a regular businessman instead of a free-roaming curbside funnyman, he completely freaked out. He also lost it when he found out that Gushers, the sweet liquid sugar-filled treat, was owned by Betty Crocker. And yet when he was told his entire planet and everyone on it was dead forever he pushed on with the game without so much as a second thought.

I suppose the best way to put it is that John has a hard time handling his emotions. Even stupidest things will cause him to overreact while major catastrophic events just seem to emotionally shut him down. Because of that, his lack of response bottles up more and more while the series continues. It isn't until he's in his twenties, far into the epilogues of Homestuck that John finally realizes the true emotional toll it takes on him.

"You’d probably never tell anyone that. Not even her.

Another arbitrary thought hits your brain, completely unrelated to the subject of Terezi, or what you would or wouldn’t tell a bunch of incarcerated teens, or so you think.



JOHN: am i... depressed??



You ask aloud, quietly enough that your friends cannot possibly hear it. All the question does is crawl back down your throat and burrow into your gut like it lives there. And it does live there, because as it turns out, you are really fucking depressed. "



That is one of the other major cores of his personality. He drives himself forward over and over, always willing to simply agree and do what others tell him without really trying to think too much about the toll it has on him. He works stupidly hard for the appeasement of his friends, and family, and some people he doesn't even truly know, but he never does anything for himself. But then again, it was his impulse to start playing the game. The most he could do was what everyone else wanted after that.


John Egbert is a good kid. He's a kid that works hard, cares a lot, has a cheesy sense of humor and a sharp sense of wit. But even kids like John, who does his damned hardest to do good, have aspects to them that aren't all rainbows and flashy windy powers.


It's what in my opinion makes John an amazing character.


My goal in the game is to take all these core aspects of his development and personality and see how they could be used within this world. NeoSapian is a world that is actually surprisingly similar to his own in many ways, but with just enough difference to make it interesting. I want to pretty much take all of Johns character arc in Homestuck and see how it can develop differently within the realms of NeoSapian. I think it would be fun to see what changes and what remains completely the same.

John Egbert (formally Meta-Human Project Number: 413) was not so much born as he was "created". Formed from the collected DNA of earlier captured top-level meta-humans and registered into an alternate government lab facility under the top-secrecy of The Douman Zaibatsu ( a few years before the research lab founded by Dr.Ezekiel), John was a living experiment; a true study into the meta-human condition.

Of course, if things worked out as planned he would still be stuck within that small dark lab barely cognoscente of the world outside. No one knew who exactly the leak was, but the Yakashiba (still in its barely budding stages) had managed to hit just as the facility was undergoing its bi-annual security inspection. John was barely an infant, not even able to stand on his own two feet. So it was simple for the anti-government rebels to swipe him up into their arms along with a few other "living samples" within the facility.

The ride was a turbulent one though and things never go as smoothly as they would be planned. Caught mid-escape, the small group of terrorists had barely managed to leave the facility alive, and it was near impossible to safely transport most of the test subjects. It wasn't long before drastic measures were made and special task forces had managed to use their resources to take down the utility vehicle which had carried "highly classified" Douman Zaibatsu Intel.

Almost all the rebels and samples alike died with the explosive impact that mangled and practically melted their vehicle, and corpses of what few of the little experiments that remained had been collected. The area closed off and advertised as what it was: a terrorist threat upon New Gate City. The entire scene was immediately dealt with. An absolute explosion of any trace of the conflict was made, a slate perfectly wiped clean to barely be mentioned in passing news the next day.

It was that next morning a young man was leaving his favorite joke shop and heading home when he had found his mother, Mrs. Jane Crocker, an ex-worker for the Douman Zaibatsu, beaten up and close to death on his home doorstep. In her arms, a small baby coo'd, barely a scratch on him. Seeing his mother risk her life to save this child, the young man took it on himself to adopt this baby, taking him into his life as if he were biologically his own.

From that point on John grew up like a normal boy in New Gate City. The black wild hair on his head covering the serial number that was tattooed upon him at "birth". No longer Project Number 413, but instead John Egbert. His father taking him in once he felt safe enough and registering John as his biological son. Of course, things weren't completely easy. John's father had to work hard as a single-parent to keep the middle-class lifestyle they had. And for some reason John had a habit of sleepwalking, drawing and writing on his walls odd messages and scribbles of self-depreciation. Scribbles that John would take notice of and treat as if they were a normal part of his room upon awakening. And so his dad played it off as if it were something normal.

But otherwise, John was a normal kid. And surely nothing about his mysterious past would ever catch up with him... Right?