gargleblasted app
OOC:
Name: Mono
Are you over 16?: yes
Personal LJ: cursedpanda
Email: monopoly210@gmail.com
Timezone: US eastern
Other contact: AIM: ERT KEY
Characters already in the game: none
How did you find us?: was enticed by bookwormmeister through an open RP post
IC:
Character name: Dr. Franken Stein
Fandom: Soul Eater (anime)
Timeline: end of episode 51
Age: 32 (estimated)
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: In the ~magical abilities~ section we have Soul Perception (which allows him to see the souls of other people and analyze them/adjust his own soul wavelength to match them) and Soul Wavelength Manipulation (which allows him to use his own soul wavelength as a weapon). As for skills, Stein seems to be very proficient in martial arts, speaks (or at least reads fluently) several languages, and is also apparently a trained doctor/surgeon.
How would they use their abilities?: To scar teach impressionable children and fight the forces of evil, probably.
Appearance: Since you asked so nicely for a picture... Stein is a tall, muscular guy, just short of six feet tall. It can be hard to tell he's as in-shape as he is because of the labcoat he always wears. He wears glasses, but can see well enough without them that he often removes them to fight. His hair is gray, but not from aging (it's the same color in the earliest flashbacks concerning him, in which he appears to be around the age of ten or eleven). And, of course, there's that giant screw sticking out of his head and the various obviously-stitched scars that adorn his body, the most visible being the one on his face.
Background/Personality:
According to Stein himself, he grew up in a normal, loving family and experienced a childhood free of trauma and other woes. When he was the proper age (around eleven or twelve years old) he went off to the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA) to refine his skills as a meister.
On terminology: in the world of Soul Eater, some humans are born as what are called "weapons" and "meisters". People born as weapons have the ability to transform into, as the name suggests, a weapon; people born as meisters have the ability to wield said weapons. The compatibility of weapon and meister pairs is largely dependent on how the wavelengths of their individuals souls interact. At the DWMA, which is run by Death himself, students are paired (or, in some cases, put in sets of three: two weapons to one meister) and taught to resonate their souls so that they can effectively fight the forces of madness and evil and, ultimately, groom their weapons into becoming Death Scythes, or weapons of Lord Death.
During his time as a student at the DWMA, Stein had two weapon partners. The first was Spirit Albarn, a scythe with whom Stein partnered for five years. Spirit and Stein were good friends (best friends, even) but once Spirit realized that Stein had been doing experiments on him in his sleep, they split up. After that Stein partnered with a weapon named Marie Mjolner, a tonfa, who was also Stein's girlfriend for a time. Incidentally, both Spirit and Marie went on to become Death Scythes, and Stein graduated from the DWMA with the distinction of being the strongest meister to ever pass through it.
There isn't a lot of definite information about Stein's life between his time as a student at the DWMA and the first episodes of the show. It was during this time that Stein acquired his various scars--the results of his experimentation on his own body. This was also when he implanted the screw in his head. During these years Stein apparently completed schooling to become a doctor, and established for himself a reputation as an incredible researcher.
About fifteen years after graduating from the DWMA, Stein became involved in its work once again. After one of its professors, Sid, was murdered, Stein turned him into a zombie and teamed up with him to proctor a remedial lesson for several current students, including Spirit's daughter Maka. The students were led to believe that Stein had turned Sid into a zombie and set him on students from the DWMA, so they went after him--and were promptly soundly traumatized and defeated. But since Maka's (and the other student's, Black*Star's) weapon defended her with his life instead of giving up after being defeated, Stein revealed that the whole mission was a fake and gave them a passing grade. Stein then began working as a professor at the DWMA, taking Sid's old classes.
Some time later, Maka and her weapon partner Soul stumbled upon Crona, a powerful meister, attacking humans to eat their souls under the directions of a witch. They engaged Crona in a fight, but Crona was far above their skill level and dealt Soul a near-fatal blow before reinforcements arrived in the form of Stein and Spirit. It was revealed that the real reason Lord Death called Stein back to the DWMA was so that he could handle the more difficult missions and investigate the mysterious circumstances involving the unknown witch Crona was working for. Working together, Stein and Spirit quickly defeated Crona, but were unable to catch or even identify the witch controlling the meister.
Meanwhile, at the DWMA, Stein began to suspect the school nurse of having less than pure intentions concerning the students. Her name was Medusa, and after a number of suspicious (if only to Stein) events, he began to investigate her past with Sid's help. He eventually worked up the courage to accuse her point-blank of being a witch--only to be brushed off as insulting. Still, Sid disappeared in an explosion that took place at Medusa's house (directly after finding solid evidence that she was a witch, though Stein had no way of knowing that), and Stein was left with nothing more than a sense of deepening suspicion and dread--until the annual DWMA ball.
The ball was a commemorative event, held each year on April 1st to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the DWMA. All students and faculty were required to attend. Stein feigned drunkenness to force Medusa to dance with him, and once again accused her of being a witch. It is possible that Medusa would have used his vulnerable position to kill him or worse if Sid hadn't chosen that moment to burst into the room, evidence of Medusa's real identity in hand. She was the witch who had been controlling Crona. Medusa fled immediately, and her other lackeys (a werewolf named Free and another witch named Eruka) sealed off the ballroom, seemingly trapping the meisters and weapons (including Lord Death) inside so that Medusa could achieve her true goal: releasing the kishin trapped beneath the DWMA.
Another note on terminology: a "kishin" is a human who consumes so many human souls that they cease to be human and becomes a creature of madness. The original kishin was born eight hundred years pre-canon, and at the time Lord Death ripped its skin off, made a bag out of it, and stuffed what was left of the kishin inside. He then bound his own soul to Death City so that the kishin couldn't escape. (How did it stay alive all that time? I'm pretty sure we don't want to know.) Medusa's plan was to use a material called "black blood" to release the kishin from its skin prison and use it to gain control of the entire world.
Thinking quickly, Sid managed to use a special technique to send Stein and seven students--Maka, Black*Star, Death the Kid and their weapons--to the basement of the school. In short, he put them in the perfect position to stop Medusa. As they headed for the inner sanctum of the school where the kishin lay trapped, they discovered that Spirit had managed to escape the sealing of the ballroom as well. As they headed for the kishin, Medusa herself was the first to block their path. Stein and Spirit stayed behind to keep her occupied while the students went on ahead to prevent her lackeys from releasing the kishin. Maka found herself once again fighting Crona, but this time she managed to break through Crona's barriers and convince him to stop fighting for Medusa (who turned out to be his mother) and join the members of the DWMA, who would accept him without making the demands that Medusa had. At the same time, Stein and Spirit were engaged in a fierce battle with Medusa, who implored Stein to join her cause for the sake of science. Also at the same time, Death the Kid and Black*Star caught up to Free and Eruka (who were also racing to the kishin) and tried to stop them from releasing the kishin. After a short battle, they thought they had succeeded--but soon after they realized that they had failed. The success had been a hallucination brought about by the waves of madness emanating from the kishin itself. As the kishin put its skin back on and fled the school, Stein and Spirit defeated Medusa, seemingly killing her. Meanwhile, Lord Death (the sealing around the ballroom having since worn off) tried to defeat the kishin a second time, but was foiled because he didn't have a weapon to fight with (because Spirit was with Stein). The kishin escaped into the wilderness, as did Free and Eruka, and the members of the DWMA were left to repair the school and prepare for the kishin's next move.
Just as things were seeming to calm down, the first sign of the kishin's madness affecting the world came in: a golem in Europe had gone berserk. As Maka went to deal with that incident, Lord Death called his Death Scythes to the DWMA in preparation for what he suspected was going to turn into a sort of war. While only three responded to his summons, they included both Marie and another former schoolmate of Stein's, a gun/crossbow hybrid named Asuza. Meanwhile, since Medusa's supposed death, Stein had begun to experience odd hallucinations and an increase in his usual quirky behaviors. These matters were not helped by the waves of madness still faintly emanating from the kishin, wherever he was hiding, but Stein was still functional enough to teach his classes and Lord Death assigned Marie to be his partner again, mostly because her soul wavelength was known to soothe him. Lord Death also advised Spirit to keep a closer eye on Stein at this time.
As it turned out, the rampaging golem contained the soul of Medusa's older sister, the witch Arachne, whom the kishin's madness had awoken after eight hundred years of sleep. Arachne escaped the students and reinstated her own evil organization, Arachnophobia.
Around this same time, Lord Death decided to allow Crona to live as a student in the DWMA on a probationary status. Crona made many friends at the DWMA and seemed to be adjusting well, but just as he was settling in properly he was secretly contacted by Medusa, who had somehow survived the battle with Stein and Spirit. She made it clear he didn't have a choice but to comply with her demands, then ordered him to trick Marie into imbibing a small snake made of Medusa's magic. The snake would both increase Stein's reaction to the madness and allow Medusa to eavesdrop on his and Marie's conversations, especially their private ones as they were living together at the time. Crona did as he was told, and Marie did ingest the snake. As planned by Medusa, Stein's hallucinations and paranoias began to rapidly increase in frequency and severity, despite the effect Marie's soul wavelength should have been having on him.
Soon after this, the DWMA's intelligence network discovered that Arachnophobia was making a move to claim a powerful magic tool called Brew. The DWMA gathered a force to infiltrate Brew's position (a powerful magic storm) and claim it before Arachnophobia could. Sid led a decently-sized ground force while Stein and Marie led the infiltration force, the same group of students who fought to get to the kishin plus several of their classmates. Stein and Marie entered the magic storm to retrieve Brew while the students remained outside to prevent Arachnophobia's forces from entering the magic storm. While in the storm, Stein and Marie ran into an agent of Arachnophobia and engaged them in battle. But when they tried to perform a Soul Resonance (a technical term for when a weapon and meister combine their soul waves and bounce them back and forth between each other to power a much stronger attack than they could normally achieve), the magic snake in Marie's system caused Stein's mind to break and he collapsed. As Marie was struggling to get him safely out of the storm, the students caught up with them, having followed them in because they were taking such a long time inside the dangerous environment. Marie reluctantly left the students to try and take Brew from the Arachnophobia agent so that she could get Stein out of the storm.
The students failed to retrieve Brew and returned to Stein and Marie just as the rest of the DWMA's forces began to retreat. They all returned to the DWMA safely, but because of the Soul Resonance Stein's madness had advanced to the point that he was no longer able to handle his classes. He was put under a sort of house arrest, mostly for his own safety, enforced by Marie and Spirit. They hoped that spending most of his time in Marie's presence would slow the madness (they still didn't know about the magic snake corrupting Marie's soul wavelength), but Stein continued to degrade rapidly, to the point that he was lost in hallucination almost constantly.
Meanwhile, Arachne learned that Brew, which her agents had obtained, was no longer functional. However, around the same time her intelligence agents discovered the location of the kishin, and she managed to convince it to come stay with her in her headquarters. At the same time, Medusa revealed to her lackeys that she had obtained the real Brew, and was setting a plan in motion to defeat both the DWMA and Arachnophobia. She then traveled alone to the DWMA and turned herself in to Lord Death, stating that she wished to strike a bargain. In exchange for full immunity from the DWMA, Medusa gave them Brew and told them the location of Arachne's headquarters and, by extension, the kishin's location. The DWMA then released her, as per their agreement.
Soon after this, Arachne attached the kishin to a machine that amplified and transmitted the kishin's madness through relay stations across the world. This amplified the madness so strongly that it manifested in the form of red clouds over the earth. This was also the final straw in Stein's tenuous sanity, and he snapped completely and stumbled off to find Medusa, thinking (thanks to the snake that had been poisoning his mind through Marie) that he should join her and her "new world order".
Around this time, Crona was so horrified by the effect the snake had been having on Stein (because of the various kindnesses Marie and Stein had shown him) that he went to Lord Death and confessed to spying in the school for Medusa. Lord Death expelled him (as per the rules of the DWMA). Crona wanted to go after Stein, though, as did Marie--she resigned from her position as a Death Scythe and teacher at the academy so that she could take on Medusa without breaking Lord Death's arrangement with her, and she and Crona went off to save Stein from Medusa's clutches.
Meanwhile, the DWMA was preparing for a full-scale invasion of Arachne's headquarters. Lord Death mobilized all of his forces against Arachnophobia, splitting them between the various relay stations and the headquarters itself. From the front line, Maka learned that Crona and Marie had gone after Stein and decided to go help them, and so headed for Medusa's headquarters with Soul. The rest of the DWMA's forces began moving on Arachnophobia, inducing a huge battle.
At Medusa's headquarters, Medusa had Stein completely under her thumb. When Crona and Marie arrived, they knew that they couldn't physically harm Medusa because she was possessing the body of a six-year-old child. Therefore, hurting Medusa would hurt the child, who was still alive underneath Medusa's presence. Fortunately, Marie had an ability that allowed her to drive evil from a person's soul. She and Crona devised a plan to distract Medusa long enough for them to drive her from the child's body. Before they could effectively do that, however, Medusa told Stein that his madness--manifesting in his mind as static noise--would only stop if he destroyed the source of the noise, meaning Marie and Crona. Stein began attacking Marie on this advice, keeping her from striking at Medusa. But just as things were starting to look grim for Marie and Crona, Maka and Soul showed up to save the day. Maka began attacking Medusa rather viciously, despite the fact that she was in a child's body. Stein intercepted her and managed to temporarily put down all three of the former DWMA students. Medusa used his opportunity strike Crona with a fatal blow, and Maka was so enraged by this action (Crona was a close friend of hers) that she went blindly after Medusa, not slowing down even when Stein threw himself in front of Medusa to stop the blow. Fortunately, Marie managed to get between Maka and Stein before the blow landed, blocking Maka's strike with one hand and using her Healing Wavelength technique with the other to enter Stein's mind. Once inside his mind, she was able to overpower Medusa's voice and tell Stein that he didn't have to destroy or fix the source of the noise in his mind, he only had to accept it as a part of himself. This is the prompt that Stein needs to shake free of the madness, and he finally snaps out of it. He then wields Marie and, with Maka's help, they drive Medusa out of the child's body and kill her for good. Stein and Marie then take Crona back to the DWMA so that Stein can perform life-saving surgery on him, and Maka and Soul head toward the kishin's location.
Meanwhile, back at the huge battle at Arachnophobia, Lord Death revealed that Brew's power was to give its user whatever they desired. Because of Lord Death's soul being bound to Death City, he couldn't leave it to join the battle--so he used Brew to turn the entire city into a giant mecha that he could join the fight with. He used the mecha to reach directly into Arachnophobia and pull out the kishin. He and Spirit then fought the kishin inside the DWMA, but the kishin defeated Lord Death by aiming an attack at his son, Death the Kid, prompting Lord Death to throw himself unguarded in front of the attack. The kishin then returned to the Arachnophobia headquarters and ate Arachne's soul, giving itself a significant boost in power. Filled with grief at his father's apparent death, Death the Kid went after the kishin, arriving at the same time Black*Star and Maka did. The kishin then sealed the seven students (Maka, Black*Star, Death the Kid and their weapons) and itself into a impenetrable force-field.
After finishing his work on Crona, Stein and Marie accompanied him to where the rest of the staff of the DWMA and Spirit were watching the force-field anxiously for any sign of the kishin's defeat. After a tense wait, the force-field disappeared and the students stood victorious, and they all lived happily ever after. And that is the end of the anime.
As for Stein's personality...suffice to say that he goes through major personal growth a time or two in canon. Stein states himself that from the time he was born, he loved to tear things apart. As a child he was disgusted by blind authority and his favorite hobby was attacking upperclassmen and attempting to dissect them. Fortunately (for both Stein and his victims) Spirit was usually on hand to hold him back, and that is a role that Spirit held so effectively and for so long that, when Stein's hallucinations increase to the point that he's basically wandering aimless in his own mind, a facsimile of Spirit appears to him as a sort of human/guard dog hybrid, purpose being to prevent Stein from falling further into madness. (The Spirit in his mind fails at that task, incidentally, though not for lack of trying.)
As Stein grew older, he began to realize--partly through the influence of Spirit and Marie--that he was different from other people, and that it wasn't considered a good thing to wander from the norm. In Stein's own words: "As I matured and grew stronger, the madness inside of me, the desire to dissect grew too. Do you know what it was that eventually stopped me?...Yes, I was terrified. Terrified of the person I might become." It was this fear that prompted Stein to start experimenting on his own body in an attempt to "fix" himself.
Stein developed a number of habits to help keep his madness under control. He took up chain smoking to help keep himself calm, which is why he is rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth. He also obsesses over certain shapes and actions--staying focused on one thing at a time, even if it's as inane as the way his office chair rolls over a door frame, seems to help him think. Stein also likes to spend his time at home in the dark, with only his computer screen lighting the room.
Whenever Stein is trying to think, he turns the screw in his head; doing so seems to serve the dual purpose of calming him down and helping him think clearly.
Throughout Stein's life, in addition to his struggle against his inherent madness, he has also struggled to understand emotion. Several characters (Stein himself included) state that he is incapable of truly feeling love, though he seems to have tried in the past. Stein also experiences fear infrequently enough that, after confronting Medusa for the first time, he observes that his hands are shaking and says to himself "This is fear. That's good then, I had forgotten what it felt like". Stein also tends to be confused by overly dramatic displays of affection or emotion. Spirit and Marie are both notorious for bursting into tears at the slightest emotion, which continually throws Stein for a loop. Most famously, after observing Spirit to start crying (to the point of throwing up) after being paid attention to by his daughter, Stein comments to Marie: "Puking with happiness. That's another thing I'll never understand".
Despite Stein's issues with emotion and understanding people, he seems to have a genuine fondness for children that translates into being very gifted at working with them. Stein himself doesn't understand how or why he is that way, but he is very protective of his students and is regarded in a very positive light by his them, even the ones he traumatized at the beginning of the series. Aside from consistently assisting in the school infirmary, Stein seems to be the professor that most of the students go to for advice, and he takes on a very fatherly manner when he's around them. He also seems to be protective of children in general; one of the few times he shows what appears to be genuine anger is when Medusa reveals to him and Spirit that Crona is her child, and that she intends to simply discard him. Stein also shows extraordinary patience in the classroom. He has a very warm manner, and hands out compliments liberally when his students are on the right track. It is possible that his treatment of children stems from his experiences with his own parents--after all, the fact that he received psychological attention as a child implies that they were certainly concerned with his well-being.
Surprisingly, Stein also has a decent sense of humor. He seems to enjoy playing what he considers to be mild pranks on people he's familiar with; for example, he once responded to an accusative reminder from Spirit of past misdeeds by lightly suggesting that surely Spirit must have discovered by now that Stein swapped the middle toe on his left foot with the middle toe on his right. He then waited for Spirit to shriek and rip his shoes off to check the toes in question before cheerfully exclaiming "made you look!". He also seems to enjoy acting the part of mad professor to frighten his students before calling his own bluff. (For the record, he ends that first traumatizing remedial session with "But I gotta admit it was fun scaring you kids! You should have seen the looks on your faces!") Even though his jokes are usually, for lack of a better word, creepy, he intends them sincerely and really does seem to enjoy seeing others' reactions.
Eventually, as Stein phased into adult life, he decided that what he really needed was "someone in control" (his words). For this purpose he settled on Lord Death, who is essentially the god of the Soul Eater universe. (In fact, he is referred to several times, by Stein and others, as the "Almighty God".) Stein does what Lord Death tells him and views him with a not-quite-fanatical reverence. To a lesser extent, though, Stein also submits himself to Spirit and Marie's control. This is most apparent when he's suffering at the height of his madness. Lord Death had already ordered Marie to move into Stein's home and help him manage the madness, but when Stein began to seriously degenerate Spirit and Marie intervened by setting him a strict curfew and trying to be with him more often than not. It is extremely telling of both Stein's personality and his relationship with his two closest friends that he never even argued against the curfew--he simply accepted it. In fact, there is an incident we see on-screen during the time that Medusa has turned herself in to the DWMA and is awaiting the meeting with Lord Death. Stein, sensing her presence, goes to the DWMA (against Spirit and Marie's instructions, in fact) to speak to Medusa. She takes the opportunity to mess with his mind even more, but Stein is saved from further harassment by the appearance of Spirit, who very sternly tells him that he should be in his lab. The tone Spirit takes in that scene is very much that of a stern father, and Stein's response is to shrug sheepishly, mutter an apology and--mind-blowingly--go home. He is also seen to bow to Marie's wishes and suggestions in his own home. Perhaps most telling, though, is the fact that even when he's wandering in the deepest depths of his own mind, lost in hallucination and madness, the thing that concerns him most is that Spirit and Marie will be angry that he's broken his curfew. In these examples we can see that Stein's personality is far deeper that one would assume at first.
All of Stein's quirks and personal insecurities culminate at the end of the Medusa arc, when Marie and Crona arrive to rescue Stein. In that moment, we are able to step into Stein's mind at its most basic form. The scene presented to us is this: Stein, huddled in the corner of a red room, while a lone, old-fashioned radio broadcasts nothing but static. When Marie enters this scene, intent on breaking Stein out of his fugue, Stein sums up the situation for her: "[Medusa] says I can't fix it. I have to destroy it." He is speaking of the radio--and the radio is the physical manifestation of his madness. Up until this point, Stein has spent his entire life trying to "fix" himself--through habits like chain smoking, through self-mutilation, through surrendering control of himself to other people--but it hasn't stopped the madness, the progression toward that person he's afraid of becoming. Not even trying to destroy everything about himself, as Medusa suggested, was doing him any good. He was miserable. It was then that Marie, with stunning insight, gave him the solution to his problem: Stein didn't need to fix anything about himself. Nor did he need to destroy anything. He simply needed to stop fighting the madness and accept it as part of himself. And, cliche as it may sound, as soon as he did so the radio was silenced and Stein stepped into the world of the sane once again. (For a certain value of sane, anyway.)
Thanks to this series of events, the end of canon shows Stein as a new man (so to speak). At his core, he hasn't changed--that's the point of accepting himself, after all--but there are still differences. He still chain smokes, but because he enjoys it. He still obsesses over shapes and rolls around in that office chair of his, but because he thinks it's fun. And, arguably most importantly of all, he still does what he's told by Lord Death, Spirit and Marie...not just because he understands that he needs some control in his life, but because they're his friends and he trusts them.
In terms of interests, Stein's favorite thing to do is run scientific experiments. From vivisection to dissection to the good old scientific method, he does it all and enjoys it heartily. He also reads voraciously, and can often be found in the DWMA's library surrounded by piles of books. Stein also enjoys sitting at his computer in the dark, often into the wee hours of the night. When he needs to de-stress, Stein often works out by practicing his martial arts stances. Stein also seems to be fond of sewing, considering that everything from his body to his clothes to the walls of his house is covered with his unique style of stitches.
Have you read up on how the game works?:
1. FlamingFerret
2. a. missions
b. stealing
c. mooching
1st person sample:
[It's a video! First off of a very large eye, which slowly moves back until Stein's entire face is visible, dangling cigarette and all. He's wearing a disturbingly large grin.]
Hey, this thing is great. Am I broadcasting? The technology is impressive, I'll admit that much, but the welcoming committee could use some work. They're terribly rude and not very handsome, either. Furthermore, a place where you have to fill out forms in triplicate to buy cigarettes isn't a place worth living in! [He even sticks his face back into the camera so that only his eye is visible for that announcement because it's a very important point. But he jerks back to a more visible position quickly enough.]
But let me cut to the important part. My name is Doctor Stein and I am a scientist first and foremost, so just point me to the nearest empty lab and I'll take things from there. Surely someone has a suggestion better than filling out seventeen forms.
[He puts his hand over the camera like he's about to turn it off, but changes his mind at the last second and practically leers out at all of you.]
Oh, I almost forgot. I can't wait to get to know all of you--really, all of you--in the most intimate way possible, so volunteer test subjects can just let me know what time would be best for you. This is going to be a great experiment, I can tell already, so let's get started as soon as possible!
[Did that make any sense at all? No? Too bad, because Stein's already stopped the video.]
3rd person sample:
Stein absently used his feet to bounce from one wall of the cubicle to the other, taking comfort in the sound of the wheels on his office chair. It was ostensibly a place for hapless refugees to fill out paperwork, but Stein doubted anyone would be clamoring for his position.
No, he had more important things to worry about, such as how he was supposed to feel. What emotions should he be experiencing? It wasn't as though he had dealt with loss terribly often in his life before, and even then the people closest to him were still alive and well.
Had been alive and well. He ought to start thinking that way, shouldn't he? Everything he knew was gone and he was stuck on a spaceship full of ugly bureaucrats. How should he consider his position? Should he be sad at the loss of his friends? His students?
"Maybe," he mused aloud as he kicked off the wall again. "Life'll be boring without Spirit to mess with."
On the other hand, there were positives to be considered. There was the possibility of a gigantic ship full of unsuspecting victims--
--well, unsuspecting test subjects sounded better, didn't it? Stein raised a hand and turned his over-sized screw once...twice...and three times, the third turn ending on a decisive click.
"Yeah, better just look forward." With that decision made he allowed himself a cigarette--he only had one pack on him so he would probably have to be conservative for a while--and lit it with a grin that was almost a leer.
It was time to go make some new...friends.
Questions?: CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME FOR THE LENGTH OF THIS APP. Also I assume it's okay for him to show up with his office chair from home. That is okay, right?
Did you put your characters name and fandom in the subject: oh ya.
Name: Mono
Are you over 16?: yes
Personal LJ: cursedpanda
Email: monopoly210@gmail.com
Timezone: US eastern
Other contact: AIM: ERT KEY
Characters already in the game: none
How did you find us?: was enticed by bookwormmeister through an open RP post
IC:
Character name: Dr. Franken Stein
Fandom: Soul Eater (anime)
Timeline: end of episode 51
Age: 32 (estimated)
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: In the ~magical abilities~ section we have Soul Perception (which allows him to see the souls of other people and analyze them/adjust his own soul wavelength to match them) and Soul Wavelength Manipulation (which allows him to use his own soul wavelength as a weapon). As for skills, Stein seems to be very proficient in martial arts, speaks (or at least reads fluently) several languages, and is also apparently a trained doctor/surgeon.
How would they use their abilities?: To scar teach impressionable children and fight the forces of evil, probably.
Appearance: Since you asked so nicely for a picture... Stein is a tall, muscular guy, just short of six feet tall. It can be hard to tell he's as in-shape as he is because of the labcoat he always wears. He wears glasses, but can see well enough without them that he often removes them to fight. His hair is gray, but not from aging (it's the same color in the earliest flashbacks concerning him, in which he appears to be around the age of ten or eleven). And, of course, there's that giant screw sticking out of his head and the various obviously-stitched scars that adorn his body, the most visible being the one on his face.
Background/Personality:
According to Stein himself, he grew up in a normal, loving family and experienced a childhood free of trauma and other woes. When he was the proper age (around eleven or twelve years old) he went off to the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA) to refine his skills as a meister.
On terminology: in the world of Soul Eater, some humans are born as what are called "weapons" and "meisters". People born as weapons have the ability to transform into, as the name suggests, a weapon; people born as meisters have the ability to wield said weapons. The compatibility of weapon and meister pairs is largely dependent on how the wavelengths of their individuals souls interact. At the DWMA, which is run by Death himself, students are paired (or, in some cases, put in sets of three: two weapons to one meister) and taught to resonate their souls so that they can effectively fight the forces of madness and evil and, ultimately, groom their weapons into becoming Death Scythes, or weapons of Lord Death.
During his time as a student at the DWMA, Stein had two weapon partners. The first was Spirit Albarn, a scythe with whom Stein partnered for five years. Spirit and Stein were good friends (best friends, even) but once Spirit realized that Stein had been doing experiments on him in his sleep, they split up. After that Stein partnered with a weapon named Marie Mjolner, a tonfa, who was also Stein's girlfriend for a time. Incidentally, both Spirit and Marie went on to become Death Scythes, and Stein graduated from the DWMA with the distinction of being the strongest meister to ever pass through it.
There isn't a lot of definite information about Stein's life between his time as a student at the DWMA and the first episodes of the show. It was during this time that Stein acquired his various scars--the results of his experimentation on his own body. This was also when he implanted the screw in his head. During these years Stein apparently completed schooling to become a doctor, and established for himself a reputation as an incredible researcher.
About fifteen years after graduating from the DWMA, Stein became involved in its work once again. After one of its professors, Sid, was murdered, Stein turned him into a zombie and teamed up with him to proctor a remedial lesson for several current students, including Spirit's daughter Maka. The students were led to believe that Stein had turned Sid into a zombie and set him on students from the DWMA, so they went after him--and were promptly soundly traumatized and defeated. But since Maka's (and the other student's, Black*Star's) weapon defended her with his life instead of giving up after being defeated, Stein revealed that the whole mission was a fake and gave them a passing grade. Stein then began working as a professor at the DWMA, taking Sid's old classes.
Some time later, Maka and her weapon partner Soul stumbled upon Crona, a powerful meister, attacking humans to eat their souls under the directions of a witch. They engaged Crona in a fight, but Crona was far above their skill level and dealt Soul a near-fatal blow before reinforcements arrived in the form of Stein and Spirit. It was revealed that the real reason Lord Death called Stein back to the DWMA was so that he could handle the more difficult missions and investigate the mysterious circumstances involving the unknown witch Crona was working for. Working together, Stein and Spirit quickly defeated Crona, but were unable to catch or even identify the witch controlling the meister.
Meanwhile, at the DWMA, Stein began to suspect the school nurse of having less than pure intentions concerning the students. Her name was Medusa, and after a number of suspicious (if only to Stein) events, he began to investigate her past with Sid's help. He eventually worked up the courage to accuse her point-blank of being a witch--only to be brushed off as insulting. Still, Sid disappeared in an explosion that took place at Medusa's house (directly after finding solid evidence that she was a witch, though Stein had no way of knowing that), and Stein was left with nothing more than a sense of deepening suspicion and dread--until the annual DWMA ball.
The ball was a commemorative event, held each year on April 1st to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the DWMA. All students and faculty were required to attend. Stein feigned drunkenness to force Medusa to dance with him, and once again accused her of being a witch. It is possible that Medusa would have used his vulnerable position to kill him or worse if Sid hadn't chosen that moment to burst into the room, evidence of Medusa's real identity in hand. She was the witch who had been controlling Crona. Medusa fled immediately, and her other lackeys (a werewolf named Free and another witch named Eruka) sealed off the ballroom, seemingly trapping the meisters and weapons (including Lord Death) inside so that Medusa could achieve her true goal: releasing the kishin trapped beneath the DWMA.
Another note on terminology: a "kishin" is a human who consumes so many human souls that they cease to be human and becomes a creature of madness. The original kishin was born eight hundred years pre-canon, and at the time Lord Death ripped its skin off, made a bag out of it, and stuffed what was left of the kishin inside. He then bound his own soul to Death City so that the kishin couldn't escape. (How did it stay alive all that time? I'm pretty sure we don't want to know.) Medusa's plan was to use a material called "black blood" to release the kishin from its skin prison and use it to gain control of the entire world.
Thinking quickly, Sid managed to use a special technique to send Stein and seven students--Maka, Black*Star, Death the Kid and their weapons--to the basement of the school. In short, he put them in the perfect position to stop Medusa. As they headed for the inner sanctum of the school where the kishin lay trapped, they discovered that Spirit had managed to escape the sealing of the ballroom as well. As they headed for the kishin, Medusa herself was the first to block their path. Stein and Spirit stayed behind to keep her occupied while the students went on ahead to prevent her lackeys from releasing the kishin. Maka found herself once again fighting Crona, but this time she managed to break through Crona's barriers and convince him to stop fighting for Medusa (who turned out to be his mother) and join the members of the DWMA, who would accept him without making the demands that Medusa had. At the same time, Stein and Spirit were engaged in a fierce battle with Medusa, who implored Stein to join her cause for the sake of science. Also at the same time, Death the Kid and Black*Star caught up to Free and Eruka (who were also racing to the kishin) and tried to stop them from releasing the kishin. After a short battle, they thought they had succeeded--but soon after they realized that they had failed. The success had been a hallucination brought about by the waves of madness emanating from the kishin itself. As the kishin put its skin back on and fled the school, Stein and Spirit defeated Medusa, seemingly killing her. Meanwhile, Lord Death (the sealing around the ballroom having since worn off) tried to defeat the kishin a second time, but was foiled because he didn't have a weapon to fight with (because Spirit was with Stein). The kishin escaped into the wilderness, as did Free and Eruka, and the members of the DWMA were left to repair the school and prepare for the kishin's next move.
Just as things were seeming to calm down, the first sign of the kishin's madness affecting the world came in: a golem in Europe had gone berserk. As Maka went to deal with that incident, Lord Death called his Death Scythes to the DWMA in preparation for what he suspected was going to turn into a sort of war. While only three responded to his summons, they included both Marie and another former schoolmate of Stein's, a gun/crossbow hybrid named Asuza. Meanwhile, since Medusa's supposed death, Stein had begun to experience odd hallucinations and an increase in his usual quirky behaviors. These matters were not helped by the waves of madness still faintly emanating from the kishin, wherever he was hiding, but Stein was still functional enough to teach his classes and Lord Death assigned Marie to be his partner again, mostly because her soul wavelength was known to soothe him. Lord Death also advised Spirit to keep a closer eye on Stein at this time.
As it turned out, the rampaging golem contained the soul of Medusa's older sister, the witch Arachne, whom the kishin's madness had awoken after eight hundred years of sleep. Arachne escaped the students and reinstated her own evil organization, Arachnophobia.
Around this same time, Lord Death decided to allow Crona to live as a student in the DWMA on a probationary status. Crona made many friends at the DWMA and seemed to be adjusting well, but just as he was settling in properly he was secretly contacted by Medusa, who had somehow survived the battle with Stein and Spirit. She made it clear he didn't have a choice but to comply with her demands, then ordered him to trick Marie into imbibing a small snake made of Medusa's magic. The snake would both increase Stein's reaction to the madness and allow Medusa to eavesdrop on his and Marie's conversations, especially their private ones as they were living together at the time. Crona did as he was told, and Marie did ingest the snake. As planned by Medusa, Stein's hallucinations and paranoias began to rapidly increase in frequency and severity, despite the effect Marie's soul wavelength should have been having on him.
Soon after this, the DWMA's intelligence network discovered that Arachnophobia was making a move to claim a powerful magic tool called Brew. The DWMA gathered a force to infiltrate Brew's position (a powerful magic storm) and claim it before Arachnophobia could. Sid led a decently-sized ground force while Stein and Marie led the infiltration force, the same group of students who fought to get to the kishin plus several of their classmates. Stein and Marie entered the magic storm to retrieve Brew while the students remained outside to prevent Arachnophobia's forces from entering the magic storm. While in the storm, Stein and Marie ran into an agent of Arachnophobia and engaged them in battle. But when they tried to perform a Soul Resonance (a technical term for when a weapon and meister combine their soul waves and bounce them back and forth between each other to power a much stronger attack than they could normally achieve), the magic snake in Marie's system caused Stein's mind to break and he collapsed. As Marie was struggling to get him safely out of the storm, the students caught up with them, having followed them in because they were taking such a long time inside the dangerous environment. Marie reluctantly left the students to try and take Brew from the Arachnophobia agent so that she could get Stein out of the storm.
The students failed to retrieve Brew and returned to Stein and Marie just as the rest of the DWMA's forces began to retreat. They all returned to the DWMA safely, but because of the Soul Resonance Stein's madness had advanced to the point that he was no longer able to handle his classes. He was put under a sort of house arrest, mostly for his own safety, enforced by Marie and Spirit. They hoped that spending most of his time in Marie's presence would slow the madness (they still didn't know about the magic snake corrupting Marie's soul wavelength), but Stein continued to degrade rapidly, to the point that he was lost in hallucination almost constantly.
Meanwhile, Arachne learned that Brew, which her agents had obtained, was no longer functional. However, around the same time her intelligence agents discovered the location of the kishin, and she managed to convince it to come stay with her in her headquarters. At the same time, Medusa revealed to her lackeys that she had obtained the real Brew, and was setting a plan in motion to defeat both the DWMA and Arachnophobia. She then traveled alone to the DWMA and turned herself in to Lord Death, stating that she wished to strike a bargain. In exchange for full immunity from the DWMA, Medusa gave them Brew and told them the location of Arachne's headquarters and, by extension, the kishin's location. The DWMA then released her, as per their agreement.
Soon after this, Arachne attached the kishin to a machine that amplified and transmitted the kishin's madness through relay stations across the world. This amplified the madness so strongly that it manifested in the form of red clouds over the earth. This was also the final straw in Stein's tenuous sanity, and he snapped completely and stumbled off to find Medusa, thinking (thanks to the snake that had been poisoning his mind through Marie) that he should join her and her "new world order".
Around this time, Crona was so horrified by the effect the snake had been having on Stein (because of the various kindnesses Marie and Stein had shown him) that he went to Lord Death and confessed to spying in the school for Medusa. Lord Death expelled him (as per the rules of the DWMA). Crona wanted to go after Stein, though, as did Marie--she resigned from her position as a Death Scythe and teacher at the academy so that she could take on Medusa without breaking Lord Death's arrangement with her, and she and Crona went off to save Stein from Medusa's clutches.
Meanwhile, the DWMA was preparing for a full-scale invasion of Arachne's headquarters. Lord Death mobilized all of his forces against Arachnophobia, splitting them between the various relay stations and the headquarters itself. From the front line, Maka learned that Crona and Marie had gone after Stein and decided to go help them, and so headed for Medusa's headquarters with Soul. The rest of the DWMA's forces began moving on Arachnophobia, inducing a huge battle.
At Medusa's headquarters, Medusa had Stein completely under her thumb. When Crona and Marie arrived, they knew that they couldn't physically harm Medusa because she was possessing the body of a six-year-old child. Therefore, hurting Medusa would hurt the child, who was still alive underneath Medusa's presence. Fortunately, Marie had an ability that allowed her to drive evil from a person's soul. She and Crona devised a plan to distract Medusa long enough for them to drive her from the child's body. Before they could effectively do that, however, Medusa told Stein that his madness--manifesting in his mind as static noise--would only stop if he destroyed the source of the noise, meaning Marie and Crona. Stein began attacking Marie on this advice, keeping her from striking at Medusa. But just as things were starting to look grim for Marie and Crona, Maka and Soul showed up to save the day. Maka began attacking Medusa rather viciously, despite the fact that she was in a child's body. Stein intercepted her and managed to temporarily put down all three of the former DWMA students. Medusa used his opportunity strike Crona with a fatal blow, and Maka was so enraged by this action (Crona was a close friend of hers) that she went blindly after Medusa, not slowing down even when Stein threw himself in front of Medusa to stop the blow. Fortunately, Marie managed to get between Maka and Stein before the blow landed, blocking Maka's strike with one hand and using her Healing Wavelength technique with the other to enter Stein's mind. Once inside his mind, she was able to overpower Medusa's voice and tell Stein that he didn't have to destroy or fix the source of the noise in his mind, he only had to accept it as a part of himself. This is the prompt that Stein needs to shake free of the madness, and he finally snaps out of it. He then wields Marie and, with Maka's help, they drive Medusa out of the child's body and kill her for good. Stein and Marie then take Crona back to the DWMA so that Stein can perform life-saving surgery on him, and Maka and Soul head toward the kishin's location.
Meanwhile, back at the huge battle at Arachnophobia, Lord Death revealed that Brew's power was to give its user whatever they desired. Because of Lord Death's soul being bound to Death City, he couldn't leave it to join the battle--so he used Brew to turn the entire city into a giant mecha that he could join the fight with. He used the mecha to reach directly into Arachnophobia and pull out the kishin. He and Spirit then fought the kishin inside the DWMA, but the kishin defeated Lord Death by aiming an attack at his son, Death the Kid, prompting Lord Death to throw himself unguarded in front of the attack. The kishin then returned to the Arachnophobia headquarters and ate Arachne's soul, giving itself a significant boost in power. Filled with grief at his father's apparent death, Death the Kid went after the kishin, arriving at the same time Black*Star and Maka did. The kishin then sealed the seven students (Maka, Black*Star, Death the Kid and their weapons) and itself into a impenetrable force-field.
After finishing his work on Crona, Stein and Marie accompanied him to where the rest of the staff of the DWMA and Spirit were watching the force-field anxiously for any sign of the kishin's defeat. After a tense wait, the force-field disappeared and the students stood victorious, and they all lived happily ever after. And that is the end of the anime.
As for Stein's personality...suffice to say that he goes through major personal growth a time or two in canon. Stein states himself that from the time he was born, he loved to tear things apart. As a child he was disgusted by blind authority and his favorite hobby was attacking upperclassmen and attempting to dissect them. Fortunately (for both Stein and his victims) Spirit was usually on hand to hold him back, and that is a role that Spirit held so effectively and for so long that, when Stein's hallucinations increase to the point that he's basically wandering aimless in his own mind, a facsimile of Spirit appears to him as a sort of human/guard dog hybrid, purpose being to prevent Stein from falling further into madness. (The Spirit in his mind fails at that task, incidentally, though not for lack of trying.)
As Stein grew older, he began to realize--partly through the influence of Spirit and Marie--that he was different from other people, and that it wasn't considered a good thing to wander from the norm. In Stein's own words: "As I matured and grew stronger, the madness inside of me, the desire to dissect grew too. Do you know what it was that eventually stopped me?...Yes, I was terrified. Terrified of the person I might become." It was this fear that prompted Stein to start experimenting on his own body in an attempt to "fix" himself.
Stein developed a number of habits to help keep his madness under control. He took up chain smoking to help keep himself calm, which is why he is rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth. He also obsesses over certain shapes and actions--staying focused on one thing at a time, even if it's as inane as the way his office chair rolls over a door frame, seems to help him think. Stein also likes to spend his time at home in the dark, with only his computer screen lighting the room.
Whenever Stein is trying to think, he turns the screw in his head; doing so seems to serve the dual purpose of calming him down and helping him think clearly.
Throughout Stein's life, in addition to his struggle against his inherent madness, he has also struggled to understand emotion. Several characters (Stein himself included) state that he is incapable of truly feeling love, though he seems to have tried in the past. Stein also experiences fear infrequently enough that, after confronting Medusa for the first time, he observes that his hands are shaking and says to himself "This is fear. That's good then, I had forgotten what it felt like". Stein also tends to be confused by overly dramatic displays of affection or emotion. Spirit and Marie are both notorious for bursting into tears at the slightest emotion, which continually throws Stein for a loop. Most famously, after observing Spirit to start crying (to the point of throwing up) after being paid attention to by his daughter, Stein comments to Marie: "Puking with happiness. That's another thing I'll never understand".
Despite Stein's issues with emotion and understanding people, he seems to have a genuine fondness for children that translates into being very gifted at working with them. Stein himself doesn't understand how or why he is that way, but he is very protective of his students and is regarded in a very positive light by his them, even the ones he traumatized at the beginning of the series. Aside from consistently assisting in the school infirmary, Stein seems to be the professor that most of the students go to for advice, and he takes on a very fatherly manner when he's around them. He also seems to be protective of children in general; one of the few times he shows what appears to be genuine anger is when Medusa reveals to him and Spirit that Crona is her child, and that she intends to simply discard him. Stein also shows extraordinary patience in the classroom. He has a very warm manner, and hands out compliments liberally when his students are on the right track. It is possible that his treatment of children stems from his experiences with his own parents--after all, the fact that he received psychological attention as a child implies that they were certainly concerned with his well-being.
Surprisingly, Stein also has a decent sense of humor. He seems to enjoy playing what he considers to be mild pranks on people he's familiar with; for example, he once responded to an accusative reminder from Spirit of past misdeeds by lightly suggesting that surely Spirit must have discovered by now that Stein swapped the middle toe on his left foot with the middle toe on his right. He then waited for Spirit to shriek and rip his shoes off to check the toes in question before cheerfully exclaiming "made you look!". He also seems to enjoy acting the part of mad professor to frighten his students before calling his own bluff. (For the record, he ends that first traumatizing remedial session with "But I gotta admit it was fun scaring you kids! You should have seen the looks on your faces!") Even though his jokes are usually, for lack of a better word, creepy, he intends them sincerely and really does seem to enjoy seeing others' reactions.
Eventually, as Stein phased into adult life, he decided that what he really needed was "someone in control" (his words). For this purpose he settled on Lord Death, who is essentially the god of the Soul Eater universe. (In fact, he is referred to several times, by Stein and others, as the "Almighty God".) Stein does what Lord Death tells him and views him with a not-quite-fanatical reverence. To a lesser extent, though, Stein also submits himself to Spirit and Marie's control. This is most apparent when he's suffering at the height of his madness. Lord Death had already ordered Marie to move into Stein's home and help him manage the madness, but when Stein began to seriously degenerate Spirit and Marie intervened by setting him a strict curfew and trying to be with him more often than not. It is extremely telling of both Stein's personality and his relationship with his two closest friends that he never even argued against the curfew--he simply accepted it. In fact, there is an incident we see on-screen during the time that Medusa has turned herself in to the DWMA and is awaiting the meeting with Lord Death. Stein, sensing her presence, goes to the DWMA (against Spirit and Marie's instructions, in fact) to speak to Medusa. She takes the opportunity to mess with his mind even more, but Stein is saved from further harassment by the appearance of Spirit, who very sternly tells him that he should be in his lab. The tone Spirit takes in that scene is very much that of a stern father, and Stein's response is to shrug sheepishly, mutter an apology and--mind-blowingly--go home. He is also seen to bow to Marie's wishes and suggestions in his own home. Perhaps most telling, though, is the fact that even when he's wandering in the deepest depths of his own mind, lost in hallucination and madness, the thing that concerns him most is that Spirit and Marie will be angry that he's broken his curfew. In these examples we can see that Stein's personality is far deeper that one would assume at first.
All of Stein's quirks and personal insecurities culminate at the end of the Medusa arc, when Marie and Crona arrive to rescue Stein. In that moment, we are able to step into Stein's mind at its most basic form. The scene presented to us is this: Stein, huddled in the corner of a red room, while a lone, old-fashioned radio broadcasts nothing but static. When Marie enters this scene, intent on breaking Stein out of his fugue, Stein sums up the situation for her: "[Medusa] says I can't fix it. I have to destroy it." He is speaking of the radio--and the radio is the physical manifestation of his madness. Up until this point, Stein has spent his entire life trying to "fix" himself--through habits like chain smoking, through self-mutilation, through surrendering control of himself to other people--but it hasn't stopped the madness, the progression toward that person he's afraid of becoming. Not even trying to destroy everything about himself, as Medusa suggested, was doing him any good. He was miserable. It was then that Marie, with stunning insight, gave him the solution to his problem: Stein didn't need to fix anything about himself. Nor did he need to destroy anything. He simply needed to stop fighting the madness and accept it as part of himself. And, cliche as it may sound, as soon as he did so the radio was silenced and Stein stepped into the world of the sane once again. (For a certain value of sane, anyway.)
Thanks to this series of events, the end of canon shows Stein as a new man (so to speak). At his core, he hasn't changed--that's the point of accepting himself, after all--but there are still differences. He still chain smokes, but because he enjoys it. He still obsesses over shapes and rolls around in that office chair of his, but because he thinks it's fun. And, arguably most importantly of all, he still does what he's told by Lord Death, Spirit and Marie...not just because he understands that he needs some control in his life, but because they're his friends and he trusts them.
In terms of interests, Stein's favorite thing to do is run scientific experiments. From vivisection to dissection to the good old scientific method, he does it all and enjoys it heartily. He also reads voraciously, and can often be found in the DWMA's library surrounded by piles of books. Stein also enjoys sitting at his computer in the dark, often into the wee hours of the night. When he needs to de-stress, Stein often works out by practicing his martial arts stances. Stein also seems to be fond of sewing, considering that everything from his body to his clothes to the walls of his house is covered with his unique style of stitches.
Have you read up on how the game works?:
1. FlamingFerret
2. a. missions
b. stealing
c. mooching
1st person sample:
[It's a video! First off of a very large eye, which slowly moves back until Stein's entire face is visible, dangling cigarette and all. He's wearing a disturbingly large grin.]
Hey, this thing is great. Am I broadcasting? The technology is impressive, I'll admit that much, but the welcoming committee could use some work. They're terribly rude and not very handsome, either. Furthermore, a place where you have to fill out forms in triplicate to buy cigarettes isn't a place worth living in! [He even sticks his face back into the camera so that only his eye is visible for that announcement because it's a very important point. But he jerks back to a more visible position quickly enough.]
But let me cut to the important part. My name is Doctor Stein and I am a scientist first and foremost, so just point me to the nearest empty lab and I'll take things from there. Surely someone has a suggestion better than filling out seventeen forms.
[He puts his hand over the camera like he's about to turn it off, but changes his mind at the last second and practically leers out at all of you.]
Oh, I almost forgot. I can't wait to get to know all of you--really, all of you--in the most intimate way possible, so volunteer test subjects can just let me know what time would be best for you. This is going to be a great experiment, I can tell already, so let's get started as soon as possible!
[Did that make any sense at all? No? Too bad, because Stein's already stopped the video.]
3rd person sample:
Stein absently used his feet to bounce from one wall of the cubicle to the other, taking comfort in the sound of the wheels on his office chair. It was ostensibly a place for hapless refugees to fill out paperwork, but Stein doubted anyone would be clamoring for his position.
No, he had more important things to worry about, such as how he was supposed to feel. What emotions should he be experiencing? It wasn't as though he had dealt with loss terribly often in his life before, and even then the people closest to him were still alive and well.
Had been alive and well. He ought to start thinking that way, shouldn't he? Everything he knew was gone and he was stuck on a spaceship full of ugly bureaucrats. How should he consider his position? Should he be sad at the loss of his friends? His students?
"Maybe," he mused aloud as he kicked off the wall again. "Life'll be boring without Spirit to mess with."
On the other hand, there were positives to be considered. There was the possibility of a gigantic ship full of unsuspecting victims--
--well, unsuspecting test subjects sounded better, didn't it? Stein raised a hand and turned his over-sized screw once...twice...and three times, the third turn ending on a decisive click.
"Yeah, better just look forward." With that decision made he allowed himself a cigarette--he only had one pack on him so he would probably have to be conservative for a while--and lit it with a grin that was almost a leer.
It was time to go make some new...friends.
Questions?: CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME FOR THE LENGTH OF THIS APP. Also I assume it's okay for him to show up with his office chair from home. That is okay, right?
Did you put your characters name and fandom in the subject: oh ya.