wildphase

Name: Carden Weatherford
Door: Pass, Dominant

Canon: Original
Canon Point: n/a

Age: 22
Appearance: Carden has a smaller build and is only about 5'7" and is one of those young men who's likely to never fully grow out of a bit of baby fat, but his lifestyle has built some decent muscle on him and kept him hungry enough for it to be leaner. He has blonde hair that's more fluffy than he'd like and is usually messy regardless of brushing. He has lighter blue eyes.

Even when he's trying to make himself look smaller (which is usually what he's doing), he's got a spot of iron in his spine that makes it hard for him to avoid a whole lot of notice. Because of this, he tends to wear drab, modern clothing, typically jeans and a hoodie with a black shirt and sneakers or boots.

History:
Carden had a relatively normal childhood in one of the smaller suburbs surrounding Columbia, SC. When he was in late middle school, however, he manifested the ability to phase through things at will, something that shocked his completely normal parents who (along with Carden) weren't really sure what to do about him. His father started looking for answers on the internet, posting anonymous questions on various forums and, eventually, someone answered.

Father Joseph wasn't exactly who they were expecting to help them out. Both of Carden's parents were religious, but they were more worried about the church finding out and thinking that Carden was possessed than they were interested in using them to figure out what was going on with him. Still, Father Joseph promised answers and Carden was as eager to find them as anyone was, following him to upstate New York to both train and be studied at a secret facility.

In a different story, perhaps this would have been a different sort of facility, a school for gifted youngsters, a place to learn to be a spy or a hero. But instead, Carden found a relatively "normal" set of classrooms and lives, where he didn't have to be afraid or hide what he could do, yes, but no one was really training them how to use their abilities either, just testing to see what they were capable of.

By the time he was in high school, Carden ended up in one of Father Joseph's pet projects out west, in a desert facility where children who were deemed to be too big of problems for normal facilities to handle were sent to attempt to be cured or rehabilitated. Carden worked with the most hopeless: the violent, the insane, able to merely phase back out of securely locked rooms and avoid blows that might have killed anyone else merely by not existing where they were swung. It was hard and dangerous work, but he liked knowing that he had a gift that could help people.

Until he found out helping people was the furthest thing from what they were doing.

After he had been working at the facility for several years, Carden accidentally found documentation about the real work being done there. The children, every last one of them, were actually fae-blooded, or outright fae, and the "church" had been focusing their efforts on subduing and controlling them, breaking them of their "demonic" spirits and making them productive members of society. This could have been either metaphor or delusion, of course, but either way there were also writings about how they would "use the more controllable ones" to help them with this, along with a description of the school in New York he had been a part of.

It wasn't clear, and still isn't, to Carden how deep the corruption ran, if this was a belief held by the people back at the school, if this was even something the other people at the facility believed, or if this was just Father Joseph's delusion. Regardless, because of his own powers, he believed the information about the fae and understood that what he had been doing over the past several years hadn't been helping misunderstood children become productive members of society, it had been systematically psychologically breaking down these fae until they no longer remembered their ancestry or place or powers.

Carden isn't sure what happened after that. He woke up in the rubble of the facility, phased partially through a beam that wound have killed anyone else and, ever since, he hasn't been able to control when he phases, the power completely out of control. Feeling unable to return to the church or to New York and not sure if his family would be safe from Father Joseph or what lengths he might go to to reclaim or kill him, he's been wandering the Southwest for several years, trying to stay out of trouble and work where he can, moving on whenever he phases through something accidentally and gains too much attention.

What Carden doesn't know is that he is more connected to the fae than even Father Joseph had realized. The rest of the school in New York, though heavily religiously associated, more thinks of these children manifesting powers as some kind of potential mutation or some kind of strain within DNA, more focused on the physical than the spiritual for an explanation. Father Joseph was the only one doing research into the thought that perhaps it was some kind of otherworldly magic instead.

Perhaps some of the other children at the school were more biologically powered than Carden was, but Carden's phasing ability was actually the tip of an iceberg, a power that, with training, could have grown to reality altering levels. Carden is a reincarnation of his world's version of Merlin and the various shifting and powers the legends painted him with manifested in being just disconnected enough from reality to allow it to pass right through him.

Given the right information and training, Carden could still be an immensely powerful mage (the explosion at the facility is his doing, though he doesn't remember it and wouldn't know how to repeat it), however he is mostly unaware of this fact at the moment and still can't control for occasionally falling through things.


Personality:

Guilt-ridden – Above everything else, Carden feels the weight of the children he destroyed through both his own actions in actively helping to break their spirits, but also in his inaction for not asking more questions or being more suspicious. He believes that not being able to return home and having his powers not work anymore is a punishment, and one he fully deserves.

Distrustful/Loner – While Carden is personable to some extent on the surface (albeit awkward) he no longer trusts people any closer than arm's length. Having been hurt by someone he fully trusted and feeling like he has to distance himself from everyone else he's known to keep them and himself safe, he isn't interested in making new close friends and relationships. He wants them, obviously, and deeply at that, but he can't make himself believe anything anyone tells him about himself and how much they care about him at this point.

Gullible – Despite this, Carden's also just a sheltered Southern boy at heart. Years on the road have hardened his exterior to the point where he has trouble letting people close, but inside, he tends to still believe in the best in people and take things at face value. He knows not to trust on the macro level and that no one has his best interests at heart, but if you tell him a crazy story, he'll still believe you and he's got no ability to tell when people are lying.

Insecure – Carden is pretty sure he's terrible and there's little redeeming about him. He doesn't think of himself as attractive or special and he's not sure he can do anything or is worth anything. This stands in tension with one of his good qualities, below: Tough/Resilient, to keep him from just being kind of depressing on the surface. But deep down, he doesn't think much of himself.

Compassionate – Carden does genuinely care for the people around him and wants the best for everyone. While he'll protect himself to some extent, he's always willing to help other people ahead of himself and genuinely wants what's best for them.

Tough/Resilient – Carden is one of those people who just will. Not. Stay. Down. He's afraid of so much and doesn't think himself capable of doing anything or helping anyone, but he will often just… do it anyway. Some part of him knows that there's something special about him, some part of him remembers who he really is, and it keeps him going long past when someone else with his other personality traits would have given up.

Self-Reliant – Carden is used to being on his own, having spent his entire (short) adult life on the road. He's used to figuring things out on the fly and making split second decisions. He's not unflappable, but he's not going to be cowering around waiting for someone else to come save him, either.

Balanced/Calm – Carden does have a sense of calm about him, though it doesn't stop him from fidgeting or being tense about potentially phasing through things, or from being 22 and male with everything that comes with that. But he tends more towards observation and stillness than he does to action. He's not usually going to be the one yelling at people or getting angry about things but the one in the back, trying to figure out what to do about something so that it's fixed in the long term.


Powers and Abilities:
Technically, Carden has the ability to tap into raw magical energy and use it for nearly anything he wants. As the heir to possibly the greatest wizard history has ever seen, his powers aren't limitless, but certainly strain the upper limits of what is conceptually possible. In particular, he has an affinity for shapeshifting and elemental magic: he's more likely to toss around fireballs or turn into a wolf than to try to, say, create things or enchant something.

Of course, this is entirely theoretical.

In actual practice, magic is more a thing that happens to Carden than something that he actually shapes. Mainly, he has the ability to phase through matter, though not currently the ability to fully control it. There are no limits to this power in terms of the things found on his own world, even other magic has been unable to contain or stop his phasing. However, presumably there's more than one thing on Duplicity that can stop it, even if he learns to control it.