Application II.
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: gabbie
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: supergabbie
IM: (see contact page.)
E-MAIL: (see contact page.) RETURNING: 4: Norman, Felicia, Electro, and Two-Face.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Robert "Bob" Reynolds, a.k.a the VOID, a.k.a the SENTRY.
FANDOM: Marvel 616.
CHRONOLOGY: Secret Invasion.
CLASS: Hero and villain. Don't worry, I'll get to that.
SUPERHERO NAME: The Void / the Sentry.
ALTER EGO: Robert Reynolds.
BACKGROUND:
… I apologize in advance for the length, his canon is ridiculous.
Robert Reynolds started as a down and out college-age junkie, searching for a high. He broke into a lab at his school and drank an untested serum designed to be a recreation of the Super Soldier serum -- improved and intended to be one hundred thousand times the original strength -- and the resulting powers he gained from it destroyed the laboratory. Like any addict, he did what he could to get more of it, which involved staying with the professor who created the serum and undergoing tests.
Unfortunately, this serum caused Robert to turn into the Void, a violent and dangerous entity manifested out of self-hate. To counter this persona, Robert created a conflicting persona to balance out the Void -- a heroic one called the Sentry, made up of every quality Robert wished he had. Bob's aspects took physical forms because although he didn't know it yet, the serum he drank gave him the ability to manipulate molecules, and -- strongly schizophrenic -- unconsciously tapped into it.
He went on to having a prolific superhero career, working with groups such as the Avengers and the X-men and made close friends with many of them, most notably Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic of the super team the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. But all of those times were forgotten. Many years passed with Bob having no recollection of being the Sentry, and every other hero having no memory of him, either. When Bob started slowly recalling things -- flashes of memory of himself fighting a villain called the Void with his sidekick, Scout, at first he couldn't discern them from memories of comic books he may have read. But soon his memory started to return more strongly, and he realized that for some reason, he had been forgotten completely by everyone.
As he remembered, the others began to remember him as well, his presence in the world slowly rising back into reality. The only problem with this was that, the reason they -- Robert and Dr. Strange, the world's top sorcerer -- had erased the world's memories of the Sentry was because with the Sentry gone, the Void could not exist either, being counterparts (so to speak) of one another. Robert remembered the Void, but it took the resurgence of his memories -- and the reappearance of the Void -- to remember and remind everyone else that he and the Void were the same.
So again, efforts were made to make the world forget the Sentry -- and by association, the Void. Subconsciously, and unknown at the time, Sentry implanted the memories of his life and exploits into the mind of a comic writer, who went on to make comics about the character the Sentry.
Years later, in the wake of the Scarlet Witch -- one of the members of the superhero team, the Avengers -- having a mental breakdown and altering reality, several other members of the Avengers lost their lives and the team disbanded. At the same time, behind the scenes, plans were being made to stage a prison escape and riot at Ryker's Island prison. Former members of the Avengers Luke Cage (Power-man) and Jessica Drew (Spider-woman), along with Matt Murdock (Daredevil), happened to be at Ryker's when the massive electrical explosion took place, prompting other heroes to head over there.
All the inmates were set free, but Matt led Luke and Jessica to the man there they intended to meet -- Robert, who was locked up for killing his wife. Reed Richards asked Matt to visit as he felt Robert may be one of the most powerful heroes in the world (although Reed later denies this, having no recollection about who Robert is), but they were blind-sided by Carnage, WHO YOU ALL KNOW a psychotic serial killer endowed with an alien symbiotic. Robert -- the Sentry -- intervened, grabbing Carnage and flying him out into space, where he tore him in half and returned back to the prison. The former Avengers had all teamed up to fight and return the inmates captivity -- although forty-two still escaped -- and in the wake of that, the New Avengers was formed. Although he had since disappeared, Iron Man and Captain America went to track down the Sentry, where they found him in a Nevada cave, telling them that now that he has used his powers again, the Void is coming back. Neither man understands what that means, nor remembers who he is, but they have brought with them both Lindy Reynolds -- Bob's wife who he had supposedly killed -- and a comic writer named Paul Jenkins, who created the Sentry character. Lindy tells him he'd disappeared for weeks, though Bob is still convinced he'd seen her die. Frustrated and confused, he retreats to his home in a burst of light, only to be confronted by the X-Men and the Avengers, and some others, on his front lawn.
Bob tells them that the Void is here, and Emma Frost and Reed Richards ask Bob to help him stop it, since only he really can. The Sentry, before wiping his memories, had left a tape for Reed explaining who he was and who the Void was, although beyond that even he didn't remember much. Present-time Bob allows Emma Frost into his mind so she can look at the extent of his memory repression, although a lot of the memories she finds are manufactured. She finds a repressed memory that shows that one of his old foes had hired a mutant known as the Mastermind to give Bob a 'psychic virus' so that Bob and the world wouldn't remember he was the Sentry -- and that the Void would attack whenever the Sentry used his powers, and it worked, as Bob had psychic powers himself. Bob -- the Void -- reacts poorly, attacking the rest of the people there, so to help things, Emma pulls Lindy into Bob's subconscious. She coaxes Bob out with their 'shared memories', and in the end Emma successfully unlocks Bob's mental repressions and his powers and memories return. He is asked to join the New Avengers, and agrees.
Returning to the glory days of herring, the Sentry fights crime both with the Avengers and on his own, flying all over the world to handle disasters while keeping distant from his team. He has also appeared to locked the Void in a vault in his watchtower, and takes time to see a psychologist by the name of Dr. Worth, all the while growing further away from his wife, Lindy. Talking to the Void compels the Sentry to go into the Negative Zone to see if he can find the person responsible for the gaps in his memory, and he asks the Hulk to come with him, because he's powerless there. Unfortunately, it was a trap by the Void, who enlightened the Sentry that he could exist wherever Sentry did. The Void then tells him that he can't tell him what's missing from his memories, Bob has to figure it out for himself, and proceeds to seriously injure the Hulk. Bob was wracked with guilt, following; he realized in his own selfishness to find out answers, he'd exploited and hurt someone he loved. He also becomes under the added pressure of noticing his wife and her yoga instructor are getting a bit too close.
Finally, answers start coming to a head: Bob begins to realize his origin -- innocently stumbling upon a professor's secret formula -- may not be what it seems; his memories conflict. Things don't add up to the comic book-like memories he seems to have. Dr. Worth finds that the room where Void was locked in simply contains a chair and a mirror, and additionally comes to realize there is an odd pattern of disasters -- one in particular being of a plane crash that killed Lindy's yoga instructor -- occurring that match the number of lives lost as the number of lives saved by the Sentry, elsewhere. When he confronts Bob with this information -- that Bob is able to be in two places at once -- Bob jumps out the window in a rage and heads to the fairground where he initially got his powers. Worth follows him there, and Bob aims a gun at him and splits apart into his two extremes -- the Sentry, and the Void. The Void admits that he was Robert all along and tries to shoot Worth, but the Sentry stops him. The Sentry goes on to tell Worth that Robert had hired Worth to bring out this secret so that he could justify destroying the world to hide it, and that now that the two aspects have split, he remembers everything about his origin, drug addiction and all. He also explains that he pretended to be insane for Robert's benefit, allowing him to think there were two separate entities when they were really both one in the same; to keep the Void at bay. In thanks for Worth's help, he heals his comatose daughter before leaving.
Following this conversation, the Sentry flies off to find Dr. Strange and find out if he's real, if he exists. There are "missing pieces", but together they begin to piece together what's real of his memories and what isn't. However, unbeknownst to Bob, Dr. Strange uses his magic -- and machines with the aid of Bob's professor -- to make Bob believe he is in an asylum, insane, as another man entirely, and that the entire Marvel universe only existed in his head, all to protect him from the Void. However, Bob breaks free of it, and upon demanding answers from them -- asking why -- the professor says if he says anything he'll die, because what he knows could "destroy them all." The professor tells him before he dies to find the Void, because he wants to discuss these things with him himself.
Void taunts the Sentry saying that neither of them can ever win, because each is what the other is not, and that they need each other. Eventually Void reveals that the secret is neither of them is special, and that the serum would have worked on anybody. The Sentry reacts poorly, upset, but grabs the Void and flies him into space, because he doesn't 'need him anymore.' The Void begs for his life, but as he's thrown into the sun he promises to return again. However, the Sentry returns to Earth and Avengers Tower. Although things aren't perfect -- he still attends therapy, still has marital difficulties and difficulties with his disorders -- it seems to be a relatively Void-free life.
He later was sent after Tony Stark when Tony was suspected of both murder and being a fugitive of justice. Tony manages to win and obviously is later cleared of those monickers, and Bob goes on to side with Tony Stark's Registration act (forcing all superhuman to register their identities after a particularly volatile incident occurred), helping to bring people in (such as Wolverine) to SHIELD.
In the wake of Civil War caused by the Superhuman Registration Act, the Avengers reformed as the Mighty Avengers, and Bob remained active on the team, all the while the New Avengers (Spider-man, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Spiderwoman, and Wolverine) functioned as unregistered underground vigilantes.
Some time later, the Hulk -- who had been sent to the planet Skaar -- attacked the Land of the Inhumans to get revenge on Black Bolt -- and then Reed, Dr. Strange, and Iron Man -- for sending him into space. Reed and Tony went to get Bob, since the Hulk was his friend, but Bob was hesitant as the last time he saw the Hulk was when the Void hurt him, but he ends up convinced under the condition that the others try first, because his agoraphobia is literally preventing him from leaving his house. He does finally go fight the Hulk, creating massive amounts of collateral damage along the way as he uses more of his power than he ever has had to before. He loses control, but then in a huge burst of power, the Sentry turns back into Bob, and the Hulk back into Bruce Banner.
More time passed. While fighting against an Ultron -- Hank Pym's creation -- possessed Tony Stark, Ultron takes an interest in Bob's power and tells him there's no place on this world for him and that Bob should leave Earth. Ultron distracts him by dropping the SHIELD helicarrier on him and infecting a variety of other machines. In the meantime, Ultron goes to the Tower and kills Lindy as a 'Plan B' to get Bob out of the way. Bob flies out to kill Ultron, but is neutralized for a while by Ms. Marvel. Upon returning to the Tower, he finds Lindy alive again -- she'd awoken after his touch, which apparently had curative qualities in his emotional duress. Bob later overhears Lindy asking Iron Man to either find a way to make him less powerful, or kill him before he one day kills everyone. Around this time, Jessica Drew finds a dead Skrull that had been impersonating the ninja assassin Elektra all this time. This would be the start of the event known as Secret Invasion, where it came about that the alien race, the Skrulls, had secretly abducted many heroes from Earth and had been impersonating them for years.
More things happened, including a symbiotic infestation and traveling back in time, but then the Invasion grew to a boiling point when a ship landed of Skrulls in the forms of heroes. The Sentry fought the one in the guise of the Avenger, the Vision, who then turned into the form of the Void. The Skrull, in order to manipulate him, told him that the invasion was Robert's own doing, that he wanted everyone punished for forgetting him. Bob flew to Saturn to calm himself down.
PERSONALITY:
Bob didn't necessarily want to be a hero. Despite all the strength he becomes endowed with, he is actually a rather weak person -- suffering from addictions, agoraphobia, paranoid schizophrenia, schizotypal, he is actually more vulnerable than most other, less powerful heroes out there.
Because of this dissonance, Bob's life never seems to be able to balance just right. He can't balance his normal life with his hero life, in part because he is so determined to be the hero of the world and take on nearly every crisis himself, but also because he prefers his persona -- the Sentry -- to himself, and his own life. He is busy as the Sentry, but as Bob, he feels worthless, unimportant and -- as his psychologist notes -- seems to spend more time as Sentry to avoid being himself. His wife seems to prefer the Sentry, all his friends prefer the Sentry. The Sentry is an ideal that next to, Bob fails to compare. In conjunction with his addictive personality -- first drugs, then the super serum, then alcohol, then power -- it's hardly a surprise why he jumped so readily into the role of humanity's savior.
That said, Bob, on good days, could be -- or at least, at one point could be -- described as an optimist. A man with strong and rigid ideals; he wants to use his powers for good. He wants to protect the world. He wants to live happily with Lindy. He wants to be happy, and normal. If anything, he was the expression 'ignorance is bliss' personified. When he's not so self-aware, things seem to go much better for him. But Bob's major flaw is that is very seriously, very inescapably mentally ill. He is a good person at heart, but he also emotionally a weak on. He can't win against his demons, and this becomes clear time and time again. He's a man who is quite literally divided by them, literally his own worst enemy.
Contrary to popular belief, the serum he drank turned him into the Void, not the Sentry. The Sentry is an aspect of Bob, created to balance out the persona that he hated -- but that was him. Throughout his canon, it's always unclear which one is really Bob; but the Void hints cruelly at the Sentry that perhaps it is him that's the impostor, and that Void is the real Robert Reynolds. The fact that he can't reconcile with himself is why his life continues to remain in a self-defeating spiral, and is why he pretty much stops being himself after a time, spending all his time as the Sentry, because Bob himself can't handle the pressure. Even the Sentry isn't as perfect as Bob idealizes -- he's easily manipulated if the person knows what to target. Naive. Needs to be constantly reassured what he's doing is right. And of course, unstable. Above all, he fears himself. He wants to hide from the Void, but at the same time has almost masochistically taunted him. He doesn't take his medication; he spends all his time as the Sentry. He fears and dislikes being himself. He has a martyr complex; he carries the weight of the world, and he enjoys it, because again, he is addicted to the power. Not just the glory, but the darkness that comes with it.
POWER:
Bob's powers were recently revealed to be based on Molecule Manipulation; he can control the molecules of "his world." It manifests in bursts of power and in his control over his physical form. For a while Molecule Manipulation was not known to be the root of it, but Sentry has always had a set way of using it/base skills he abides by, in contrast to say, how Molecule Man uses his abilities (to create new realms, turn people into water, etc.). Sentry doesn't use his powers that way. Also, I'm taking him from a point in canon before he is aware his powers are molecule based.
That said, I'm limiting that power as such:
No psionic/psychic abilities
Reduced super senses (sight, hearing, etc.)
Reduced invulnerability (still highly durable, but not invulnerable)
No healing
No resurrection
No inducing trauma (as the Void)
What they do encompass:
Flight
Super strength
Super speed
Super senses (reduced)
Invulnerability (reduced)
Photokinesis (generating, controlling, emitting, and projecting light, as well as energy blasts composed of light)
As Void, I'd like him to have shapeshifting and storm generation. It's worth mentioning that he never uses either of these abilities as Sentry, only as Void.
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