Application to A_Facility
OOC Information:
Name: James
Age: 24
AIM: nathander2007
E-MAIL: jhr061000@utdallas.edu
IC Information:
Name: Johnny C., a.k.a. Nny
Fandom: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Timeline: Shortly after being shot in the head at the end of issue four
Age: While Nny’s age is never directly stated, he appears to most likely be in his mid-late twenties.
Appearance:
Nny is exceedingly lanky and rail thin, due to the fact that he rarely eats. He has a nearly stick-figure like physique, which works well to hide the exceptional physical strength he has. He typically wears a black and white horizontally striped t-shirt which is showing wear and tear to a considerable degree, as well as black pants and low black boots. He also tends to wear gloves, both full ones and ones with the finger tips cut out, but these seem to be dependent on how he feels at the time.
Considering he’s insane, he’s not exactly the most hygienic person either. He’s allowed his fingernails to grow long and almost claw-like. At any other time, Nny’s hair would also be a thin, greasy mess plastered over his head. However, having just come back from Hell, he’s mostly bald aside from two, horn-like protrusions of hair that have formed that point outwards.
Abilities:
In most respects, Nny is just a relatively normal human incredibly good at killing the hell out of people. Despite his lanky frame, he’s shown to possess exception strength demonstrated throughout the series. One of the best examples of this shown when he’s capable of cutting off a child predator’s hand with a knife in one swing. However, while he’s much stronger then he looks, he isn’t supernaturally so; he can’t punch through walls or any of that jazz. He’s limited to fairly normal examples of strength.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t some weird shit that surrounds Johnny. There are two things about him that could count as “abilities”, although they’re highly debatable and one of them would, for most of the setting, be negligible.
Anonymity: One power Johnny displays is the amazing ability to never be caught during one of his homicidal rampages. Considering he tends to go on killing sprees in large public places, you would think he’d have been caught by now. The reason he hasn’t is due to the fact that people can simply never remember him or what he looks like, despite seeing what he’d just done. Eyewitnesses are only able to give the most bare of accounts of his appearance, and things like security cameras can never really focus on him.
Effectively, Nny is a “waste-lock” in his world, which is essentially a human being designated to be a "container" for all the hatred and misery people generate in one area. Due to this, and how important it is in his reality to stay alive, he is protected from being caught or hurt. So, if Nny were ever to participate in a majorly large event, like a wide-scale fight or anything else, most people wouldn’t realize he was even there, or had done anything at all, let alone focus on him during the fight.
Of course, this ability becomes entirely negated if he ever encounters someone on a personal basis, as it’s simply impossible for the issue of who he is to get confused amongst one person. Needless to say, since this’ll usually be the case while in the Facility, this ability probably won’t see much play.
Survival Luck: Another ability Johnny possesses due to being a waste-lock that’s meant to protect him from dying, Nny has insane luck in getting out of what should be a lethal situation. Attempts to hurt Nny, whether by others or himself, just tend to go wrong most of the time. The best examples of this are when Nny has shown attempts to kill himself, which often fail, apparently due to Nny forgetting something on his part in the suicide attempt, such as forgetting to charge a tazer to a capacity where it could kill him or finding that a gun only has one bullet and he wasted it on someone other then himself.
Effectively, every so often, things that should kill Nny entirely fail to. He can still be hurt, and terribly so, but he'll end up surviving the injury dealt to him most of the time. Essentially, Nny is absurdly hard to kill.
Which isn't to say he's protected entirely from death. He can only hope to cheat it so often, and eventually it snaps in that he shouldn't be cheating it like he is. He isn't immortal, though he himself believed this at one point. Just obscenely lucky, and occasionally cocky to the point that he doesn't notice he's about to fall over the edge of his luck and into a heap of shit.
Personality:
Because of the massive amount of psychological issues Nny has, we’ll look at his personality in stages, based around the psychosis he suffers from and then looking at the base personality that seems apparent in him despite which stage he’s in.
Manic-Depressive: Nny goes through bouts of incredible, manic activity and crippling, horrid depression and, like many suffering from this disease, these bouts can swing between one another in an instant. Most of Johnny’s larger scale killings occur during his bouts of mania, where he shows a clear joy in doing what he’s doing. An example of this is when he made a public display of himself by giving a small speech on the relative lack of worth he finds in humanity to a group of people in a café before he proceeds to slaughter them, listening to “Ode To Joy” on a CD player the entire time and essentially whistling the tune while killing. Other examples that he’s in his mania state is when he openly speaks with the people he’s dragged back to his house to kill, where he shows a disconcertingly polite face to them and attempts to talk to them as a friend while torturing and killing them. An odd example of this was when he was attempting to kill one of his prisoners by using a power drill to burrow into their brain, with the prisoner stating he was sorry. Nny automatically accepts the apology and then, in all sincerity, states that it would be cruel for him to let the victim live after how much damage he had done, or he otherwise would’ve let him free. While still showing his natural disgust at other people during this stage, he approaches it with an odd playfulness where he acts as if what he’s doing isn’t really wrong and has no repercussions.
In his depressive states, Nny becomes far more sullen and less playful in the way he treats his victims. He tends to be more accusative towards those he’s captured and shouts justifications for why he’s killing them and how it’s their fault that he’s been brought to the point of killing them. He becomes more angsty, typically talking about how unfair everything happening to him is. It’s also during these bouts that he goes through his fairly common bouts of considering suicide as a means to escape, though each of these attempts fails miserably, either because of a huge overlook on Nny’s part, or simple, dumb luck. He shows no joy in his killing like he does during his manic state and actually seems cognizant of the horrors of what he’s doing during his depressive bouts, which are the main reasons for his consideration of suicide.
Paranoid Schizophrenia: Nny is convinced that there’s something, or somethings, out to get him and constantly watching him. He tends to assign personalities, and usually hostile ones with agendas meant to harm him, to things that couldn’t possibly have them. An early example of this is when he claims to have seen a dog on the street that Nny was certain knew he was a killer, and that the dog intended to expose him, forcing Johnny to run back home, and caused Nny to believe that a door-to-door survey agent had been sent by the dog to spy on him.
Another example of this, and quite possibly the main reason for his killing, is the fact that he believes most people, if not everyone, is out to insult him behind his back. Thus, whenever he hears even the slightest insult or faces even the lightest jostling by others, he tends to fall into a psychotic rage, mindlessly killing the offender and anyone else around in the belief that all of them are part of some conspiracy to mock him and attempt to break and degrade him. A good example of this is when he chose to massacre an entire Taco Bell-like restaurant due to the fact that one of the patrons had called him wacky, which he took as a grievous insult, and then decided everyone in the restaurant was against him when people began telling him to calm down.
The most prominent, and plot-important example of this psychosis, however, is Nny’s own tendency to attribute personalities to his psychosis and then attribute these personalities to inanimate objects in his house. The most prominent examples of this are the Doughboys and Reverend Meat. The Doughboys are two repainted, Styrofoam cutouts of the Pillsbury Doughboy that Nny either stole or made at some point and gave specific paint jobs to. These are Psycho Doughboy, who is representative of Nny’s depressive states and encourages Nny to kill himself, and Mr. Eff, who is representative of Nny’s manic states and encourages Nny to enjoy what he’s doing and, to in fact, celebrate and drown himself in the enjoyment he gets from killing. Reverend Meat, meanwhile, is the newest of Nny’s voices, and develops after Nny decides to try and become entirely emotionally distant, with Meat attempting to encourage Nny to instead over-indulge his emotions instead of drown them.
Of course, in the case of these voices, and two others, it’s quite possible Nny wasn’t hallucinating, at least by the end. But that’s for the history section.
Sociopathy: Being a killer, it isn’t surprising that Nny is a sociopath. He shows exceedingly little remorse for what he does aside from when he’s in his depressive states, and even then he only focuses on the damage he’s doing to his own psyche by killing people while still not feeling remorse for those he’s killed. He is entirely unempathic to others, focusing solely on his own wants and desires.
While an easy example of this would be his behavior of casually talking to his victims while slaughtering them in his manic states, better examples would be his far more complex relationships with two people: his next door neighbor Todd Cassil, a 8-10 year old boy Johnny has nicknamed “Squee”, and Devi D.
In his derangement, Nny has come to see himself as Squee’s de-facto guardian, due to the fact that the kid’s parents are horribly negligent of their son, as well as outright abusive. In an odd way, Nny’s desire to protect Squee show’s an oddly sympathetic light to someone who’s otherwise a near out and out monster. However, Nny goes about attempting to help Squee in the worst possible ways, though Nny clearly finds himself to be comforting to the boy despite the terror Squee clearly feels around him. Examples of the way Nny has “helped” include:
- constantly barging into Squee’s house, usually through a window in Squee’s room, both to check up on Squee and to ask for things like bandages and peroxide during the few times he’s been hurt
- Brutally murdering a pedophile that had coerced Squee into an alley, all the while shouting for Squee not to be afraid of people like the pedophile and demonstrating that pedophiles were people just like him by cracking the molesters’ skull open and tearing out his brain
- Nearly braining Squee’s father while Squee’s father had been going on about how no one would ever love Squee
While Nny clearly believes he’s helping Squee, it’s made a point that Nny is merely adding to the trauma and terror Squee already experiences in his own abnormal, miserable little life.
Devi D., meanwhile, is even more complex. Devi was a girl Nny met who had worked at a bookstore he tended to shop at, and had begun a friendship with. This ultimately culminated with the two of them going on a date, with Nny recognizing that, for a rare moment, he was happy. This led to a desire to encapsulate this one beautiful moment for himself, which he intended to do by murdering Devi so that his last memory of her would be that one special moment. Unfortunately, this didn't particularly end well, as Devi proceeded to kick the shit out of Nny and escape.
Nny, realizing he had fucked up with a girl he actually liked, would begin pondering a way to try and win back Devi’s favor, clearly not realizing, or perhaps simply not acknowledging, the actual severity of what he had just done. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that he, personally, was not to blame, at least not entirely, but rather the fact that he felt emotions at all were a main cause for his attempt to murder Devi. He therefore chooses to try and become entirely emotionally distant and detached in the belief that if he does so, he’ll never hurt anyone again, but specifically won’t hurt Devi. While this would make it seem like he’s doing it for Devi’s sake, he’s fairly clearly doing it for his own as he proceeds to record a message of this plan and play it over the phone for Devi, hoping this plan’ll get her approval and this get her to forgive him. He is, in many ways, still looking out for solely his own wants and needs and not Devi’s, despite trying to disguise it to look like he is.
Solipsism: Due to the fact that Nny has had such absurd luck in not being caught during his killing sprees, and not being killed during his own suicide attempts, Nny has come to the conclusion that he is either part of a very small group of people who TRULY exist, or that he is reality itself. Thus, believing himself to possibly be the only real person that exists might add to his disillusionment towards others, as it could add justification to his belief that not only are they not human, they’re merely parts of his own imagination or beings he himself is meant to have authority over, and thus feeling guilt over harming them would be superfluous.
Egomania/Narcissism: Despite being severely, severely self-loathing, Nny also demonstrates an insanely over-exaggerated positive view of himself. Despite recognizing he’s a bad person, he believes himself to still be above all the rest of the people around him. He views his own advice and beliefs as being exceedingly over-important. The views of others can take a back seat to his own, as unless they correspond with his own, they’re clearly incorrect. Technically, this is merely an extension of his solipsism and sociopathy, but it’s worth noting that for all his self-hatred, Nny still thinks himself something superior to most of those he otherwise sees.
Base Personality: Despite all of his tremendous, tremendous flaws, Nny is genuinely intelligent. He has a fairly good grasp on most philosophical topics, as well as an impressive vocabulary despite the fact that he can easily degenerate into a obscenity -spewing mess. He also has an interest in art in all forms and had, at some point, been a fairly talented artist in the vein of Bosch or Giger, if some of the paintings we see in his basement are an indication and a statement made about his creativity, or draining of it, in issue four.
Unsurprisingly, he also has a taste for the abstract and the existential, as he’s shown a love for the films of Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg. It’s likely he latches on to these films due to his own, realized misconceptions of who he is and his own existential crisis. At the same time, he might simply enjoy the damn films because he is, quite honestly, pretentious in several of his own ways despite his claims to hate pretension in others.
Deep down, Nny knows he’s ill. He clearly recognizes that what he’s doing is wrong, and much of what he’s seeing and experiencing makes little logical sense even to him. At the same time, he refuses to seek help, both because of his multiple derangements and the way they hamper him, and debatably his own sense of pride. Due to his overwhelming feelings of distrust and superiority, he refuses to acknowledge that, despite being sick, he should seek help. After all, if someone like him can’t even fucking help themselves, what chance does anyone else have at helping him, when they’re all so clearly beneath him?
Nny also displays a hatred of being touched by others, as well as the idea of bodily fluids, which is odd considering his “occupation”. This doesn’t seem to be a phobia, as much as merely a distaste for physical contact.
History:
Exceedingly little is known about Nny’s early life, due majorly impart that Nny himself is incapable of remembering. As a child, he apparently went through quite a bit of teasing and childish mocking by the children at his school, who nicknamed him “Noodle Boy” due to how thin he was. It is most likely these memories that serve as a basis for his idea of “me against them” in general society and the fact that he’s generally distrustful of other people and sure they’re making fun of him. Aside from this fact, absolutely nothing is known about Nny before we’re introduced to him.
At his introduction, Nny has been living in a condemned house, supposedly for several years, where he has been taking his victims and committing murder after murder, at first apparently just for the pleasure of it though it becomes clear he has an alternative purpose: there is a wall in the house that he has to keep covered in blood in order to keep the monster imprisoned behind it trapped. In order to do this, the house Nny lives in appears to have several underground floors, imply that the house had been here long before Nny had arrived and, quite possibly, had always been the cage for the monster behind the wall, and that Nny is the next in a long line of people keeping it trapped.
Aside from Nny, three other “beings” exist in the house. These are Nailbunny, a dead rabbit that Nny had bought, fed once, and then nailed to wall, and the doughboys, two repainted Styrofoam cutouts of the Pillsbury doughboy. All three of these beings appear, at first, to be manifestations of Nny’s own psyche, with Nailbunny and Psycho Doughboy being the oldest. Psycho tends to encourage Nny in his depressive behavior, attempting to get him to commit suicide repeatedly throughout the series. Nailbunny, meanwhile, gives the impression that it’s the last fragment of practicality Nny has, constantly trying to get Nny to ignore Psycho Doughboy and to try and fight both his self-destructive and violent impulses. Ultimately, neither Psycho nor Nailbunny seem to really be able to make much progress with Nny, constantly tying in their debates, and Nny ultimately getting bored with whatever they were talking about and easily distracted.
Psycho and Nailbunny are eventually joined by a third voice, the second doughboy Mr. Eff. Whereas Psycho Doughboy represents Nny’s depression and desire for self-destruction, Mr. Eff is a representation of Nny’s mania and desire for contentment. However, he tends to point Nny towards achieving this contentment through violent actions, such as how he persuaded Nny to try to attack Devi, a woman Nny had met working at a bookstore he usually went to and had been on a date with that ended with Devi kicking the shit out of Nny in order to escape being killed. Eff would also apparently be responsible for encouraging some of Nny’s more widespread killing sprees by calling it “playing” and disguising it to him as a means of having fun.
After engaging in several mass killing sprees and open murders without being caught as well as several failed suicide attempts, Nny finally begins questioning his perception of reality to an even greater degree, postulating that something is keeping him from dying or being caught. He begins to develop the idea that he is either an integral part of reality, or that he is reality itself and thus begins engaging in a form of solipsism. He demonstrates the fact that he apparently cannot die that attempt to electrocute himself with a taser he had set to max power and proceeded to jam into his skull. When he doesn’t die from the proceeding electrical burst, he proclaims this to be evidence of his invincible natural, although Psycho points out that this is more just luck then anything and that Nny had actually forgotten to charge it to full before his attempt.
It is also around this time that Nailbunny and the Doughboys begin to exert more power. Their voices, which had initially been incredibly simple but convincing in the statements they had made, begin to become stronger and more capable of open debate. On top of this, the doughboys begin displaying that they can, in fact, move around of their own accord. As the struggle between the three voices becomes fiercer and the Doughboys beginning to become clearly stronger party amongst them, Nailbunny begins revealing what it can to Nny. While all three of them had initially been voices Nny had been projecting onto inanimate objects, they had all begun to take on a life of their own. Nailbunny was effectively Nny’s last shred of sanity desperately attempting to talk with him and stop him from going too overboard. The Doughboys, meanwhile, had become corrupted by the thing trapped within the wall and were actively working to wear down Nny’s sanity as a means of eventually releasing their master.
Despite realizing what’s happened, its shown that reversing the progress Psycho and Eff had made is more or less impossible: they’ve gained far too much ground in Nny’s psyche, and Nailbunny eventually falls silent entirely. Nny yet again decides to try and commit suicide due to depression at having lost his last anchor to reality, this time through a complicated device he’s attached to his phone, attaching a gun to the receiver in a way that’ll ensure he’ll be shot if he picks the phone up for a call. Psycho derides Nny repeatedly during this attempt, stating that Nny is yet again not honestly serious about going through with it and is toying with him. Psycho and Eff also both admit that what Nailbunny had told Nny was true, though Eff seems to have an ulterior motive in using Nny by telling him they won’t need him to ensure their existence soon, and that Eff and Psycho are apparently working against each other instead of with one another.
Enraged, Nny ends up finally gathering up what remaining resolve he has and outright denies the Doughboys and stating that he refuses to listen to them anymore, going so far as to pin Psycho to a wall during this rant. He’s interrupted, however, as the phone rings unexpectedly and goes to pick it up.
And is shot in the head in the process.
Which is where he’ll be coming in from.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
"Let's talk about manners." Johnny said, slapping part of the long handled hook he held in his hand against an open palm with a satisfying thump. He liked to think it made him seem a lot like a teacher in a classroom from those stupid old portrayals of them in 1950s cinema and television, waving their long rulers around. As much as he hated the ideas spread in those forms of media, of it's honey-coated blanketing of just how bad the world was, he always appreciated that image. It was just so brutally authoritarian and was an open display to how those with any power really were: stick-wielding tyrants willing to beat the shit out of anyone who spoke out of turn.
His pupil, by all appearances, didn't seem to appreciate the image however. Squirming like a little fuckface against the chains in the wall he was bound to. What was even worse was the calm in his voice. Scared, sure, but he wasn't that hysterical with it, and that was the best entertainment. Like that shit was "haha" funny, and Nny was somewhat disappointed it was being denied to him. "Buddy, look-" the student squeaked out, still fiddling with his hands and legs as if he could just scurry out of his chains, "I think you made a big fuckin' mistake when-"
The words were cut short as the teacher decided to apply some punishment for the outburst by digging the hook right above the waistline, easily burrowing into the flesh. "Lesson one: don't talk out of turn." Nny said, though he realized his advice was probably lost due to the man's scream. And that just pissed him off more. It looked like he'd need to emphasize the lesson as they went on, which he did so by dragging the hook further up the mans chest.
"But the more important lesson, which I so deeply, deeply want to emphasize, is that you should learn to watch what you say. I am so fucking tired of hearing you people talk about, and rip on, the most inconsequential shit. You "like my boots", huh? Oh, I'm sure you did, sure you loved them, making fun about me behind my back with your friends! Laughing at the skinny little faggot and his clothes!"
It was time to apply more discipline, and Nny did so with relish. The hook became a cane, flailing wildly as Nny struck again and again to emphasize his point. "You pathetic shit! Of all the things happening in the world, you focus on someone's goddamn wardrobe? Do you not realize how fucking pathetic that is, how-"
"Where did you buy them?" the man wailed, the words gurgling out as blood started to seep to the floor from the huge incision in his chest. Nny could barely hear them, through the choked voice and the fury ringing in his own head. But he at least paused.
"Huh?"
"Your boots. Where did you buy them?"
...Oh. The guy was...being sincere when he said he liked his boots. Though it's not like he could be BLAMED for making a mistake; people insulted him for shit like this all the time. It just turned out like he had for once. And that just made all this seem bizarrely awkward. "Oh. ...Um. Famous Footwear, maybe? I dunno. I've had them for a few years."
Johnny just stared at the bloody hook, dumbstruck, before smiling back nervously at the man. "Well. Looks like you learn something new every day, huh?"
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
If you people are done squawking and hollering at one another like a bunch of stupid animals in a shit pen, maybe you're ready to listen to reason.
That reason being I don't see why you'd even bother trying to escape this place. It isn't like it's really any fucking better or worse then outside. Well, alright. The food is a bit worse, but I'm not a particularly fussy eater anyway. I can live with it. And whether or not you want to accept it, what's going on here goes on out there. Just to a different degree. They may not openly do bullshit like unleashing spiders on entire towns or putting fuckin' bombs in us, but the people out there are just as much a group of petty little shit eaters as the doctors here. At least here there's only a few people to force me into degradation and pain. Out there, there's millions.
I'll take the small group over the horde, thanks. But you can feel free to fuck yourselves over and have to put up with petty bullshit like this outside if you want.
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.
The powers listed under Nny's "abilities" section are, more or less, world specific. They're signs that he's an integral foundation of reality and meant to keep him alive as such. That being said, they'd have limited application here and him being stripped of them entirely is acceptable. I merely added them for the sake of completion and the fact that they do, indeed, exist.
Also, Johnny boy here has been to the Facility once before. He'll be retaining his memories of his previous visit, if that's okay.
Name: James
Age: 24
AIM: nathander2007
E-MAIL: jhr061000@utdallas.edu
IC Information:
Name: Johnny C., a.k.a. Nny
Fandom: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Timeline: Shortly after being shot in the head at the end of issue four
Age: While Nny’s age is never directly stated, he appears to most likely be in his mid-late twenties.
Appearance:
Nny is exceedingly lanky and rail thin, due to the fact that he rarely eats. He has a nearly stick-figure like physique, which works well to hide the exceptional physical strength he has. He typically wears a black and white horizontally striped t-shirt which is showing wear and tear to a considerable degree, as well as black pants and low black boots. He also tends to wear gloves, both full ones and ones with the finger tips cut out, but these seem to be dependent on how he feels at the time.
Considering he’s insane, he’s not exactly the most hygienic person either. He’s allowed his fingernails to grow long and almost claw-like. At any other time, Nny’s hair would also be a thin, greasy mess plastered over his head. However, having just come back from Hell, he’s mostly bald aside from two, horn-like protrusions of hair that have formed that point outwards.
Abilities:
In most respects, Nny is just a relatively normal human incredibly good at killing the hell out of people. Despite his lanky frame, he’s shown to possess exception strength demonstrated throughout the series. One of the best examples of this shown when he’s capable of cutting off a child predator’s hand with a knife in one swing. However, while he’s much stronger then he looks, he isn’t supernaturally so; he can’t punch through walls or any of that jazz. He’s limited to fairly normal examples of strength.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t some weird shit that surrounds Johnny. There are two things about him that could count as “abilities”, although they’re highly debatable and one of them would, for most of the setting, be negligible.
Anonymity: One power Johnny displays is the amazing ability to never be caught during one of his homicidal rampages. Considering he tends to go on killing sprees in large public places, you would think he’d have been caught by now. The reason he hasn’t is due to the fact that people can simply never remember him or what he looks like, despite seeing what he’d just done. Eyewitnesses are only able to give the most bare of accounts of his appearance, and things like security cameras can never really focus on him.
Effectively, Nny is a “waste-lock” in his world, which is essentially a human being designated to be a "container" for all the hatred and misery people generate in one area. Due to this, and how important it is in his reality to stay alive, he is protected from being caught or hurt. So, if Nny were ever to participate in a majorly large event, like a wide-scale fight or anything else, most people wouldn’t realize he was even there, or had done anything at all, let alone focus on him during the fight.
Of course, this ability becomes entirely negated if he ever encounters someone on a personal basis, as it’s simply impossible for the issue of who he is to get confused amongst one person. Needless to say, since this’ll usually be the case while in the Facility, this ability probably won’t see much play.
Survival Luck: Another ability Johnny possesses due to being a waste-lock that’s meant to protect him from dying, Nny has insane luck in getting out of what should be a lethal situation. Attempts to hurt Nny, whether by others or himself, just tend to go wrong most of the time. The best examples of this are when Nny has shown attempts to kill himself, which often fail, apparently due to Nny forgetting something on his part in the suicide attempt, such as forgetting to charge a tazer to a capacity where it could kill him or finding that a gun only has one bullet and he wasted it on someone other then himself.
Effectively, every so often, things that should kill Nny entirely fail to. He can still be hurt, and terribly so, but he'll end up surviving the injury dealt to him most of the time. Essentially, Nny is absurdly hard to kill.
Which isn't to say he's protected entirely from death. He can only hope to cheat it so often, and eventually it snaps in that he shouldn't be cheating it like he is. He isn't immortal, though he himself believed this at one point. Just obscenely lucky, and occasionally cocky to the point that he doesn't notice he's about to fall over the edge of his luck and into a heap of shit.
Personality:
Because of the massive amount of psychological issues Nny has, we’ll look at his personality in stages, based around the psychosis he suffers from and then looking at the base personality that seems apparent in him despite which stage he’s in.
Manic-Depressive: Nny goes through bouts of incredible, manic activity and crippling, horrid depression and, like many suffering from this disease, these bouts can swing between one another in an instant. Most of Johnny’s larger scale killings occur during his bouts of mania, where he shows a clear joy in doing what he’s doing. An example of this is when he made a public display of himself by giving a small speech on the relative lack of worth he finds in humanity to a group of people in a café before he proceeds to slaughter them, listening to “Ode To Joy” on a CD player the entire time and essentially whistling the tune while killing. Other examples that he’s in his mania state is when he openly speaks with the people he’s dragged back to his house to kill, where he shows a disconcertingly polite face to them and attempts to talk to them as a friend while torturing and killing them. An odd example of this was when he was attempting to kill one of his prisoners by using a power drill to burrow into their brain, with the prisoner stating he was sorry. Nny automatically accepts the apology and then, in all sincerity, states that it would be cruel for him to let the victim live after how much damage he had done, or he otherwise would’ve let him free. While still showing his natural disgust at other people during this stage, he approaches it with an odd playfulness where he acts as if what he’s doing isn’t really wrong and has no repercussions.
In his depressive states, Nny becomes far more sullen and less playful in the way he treats his victims. He tends to be more accusative towards those he’s captured and shouts justifications for why he’s killing them and how it’s their fault that he’s been brought to the point of killing them. He becomes more angsty, typically talking about how unfair everything happening to him is. It’s also during these bouts that he goes through his fairly common bouts of considering suicide as a means to escape, though each of these attempts fails miserably, either because of a huge overlook on Nny’s part, or simple, dumb luck. He shows no joy in his killing like he does during his manic state and actually seems cognizant of the horrors of what he’s doing during his depressive bouts, which are the main reasons for his consideration of suicide.
Paranoid Schizophrenia: Nny is convinced that there’s something, or somethings, out to get him and constantly watching him. He tends to assign personalities, and usually hostile ones with agendas meant to harm him, to things that couldn’t possibly have them. An early example of this is when he claims to have seen a dog on the street that Nny was certain knew he was a killer, and that the dog intended to expose him, forcing Johnny to run back home, and caused Nny to believe that a door-to-door survey agent had been sent by the dog to spy on him.
Another example of this, and quite possibly the main reason for his killing, is the fact that he believes most people, if not everyone, is out to insult him behind his back. Thus, whenever he hears even the slightest insult or faces even the lightest jostling by others, he tends to fall into a psychotic rage, mindlessly killing the offender and anyone else around in the belief that all of them are part of some conspiracy to mock him and attempt to break and degrade him. A good example of this is when he chose to massacre an entire Taco Bell-like restaurant due to the fact that one of the patrons had called him wacky, which he took as a grievous insult, and then decided everyone in the restaurant was against him when people began telling him to calm down.
The most prominent, and plot-important example of this psychosis, however, is Nny’s own tendency to attribute personalities to his psychosis and then attribute these personalities to inanimate objects in his house. The most prominent examples of this are the Doughboys and Reverend Meat. The Doughboys are two repainted, Styrofoam cutouts of the Pillsbury Doughboy that Nny either stole or made at some point and gave specific paint jobs to. These are Psycho Doughboy, who is representative of Nny’s depressive states and encourages Nny to kill himself, and Mr. Eff, who is representative of Nny’s manic states and encourages Nny to enjoy what he’s doing and, to in fact, celebrate and drown himself in the enjoyment he gets from killing. Reverend Meat, meanwhile, is the newest of Nny’s voices, and develops after Nny decides to try and become entirely emotionally distant, with Meat attempting to encourage Nny to instead over-indulge his emotions instead of drown them.
Of course, in the case of these voices, and two others, it’s quite possible Nny wasn’t hallucinating, at least by the end. But that’s for the history section.
Sociopathy: Being a killer, it isn’t surprising that Nny is a sociopath. He shows exceedingly little remorse for what he does aside from when he’s in his depressive states, and even then he only focuses on the damage he’s doing to his own psyche by killing people while still not feeling remorse for those he’s killed. He is entirely unempathic to others, focusing solely on his own wants and desires.
While an easy example of this would be his behavior of casually talking to his victims while slaughtering them in his manic states, better examples would be his far more complex relationships with two people: his next door neighbor Todd Cassil, a 8-10 year old boy Johnny has nicknamed “Squee”, and Devi D.
In his derangement, Nny has come to see himself as Squee’s de-facto guardian, due to the fact that the kid’s parents are horribly negligent of their son, as well as outright abusive. In an odd way, Nny’s desire to protect Squee show’s an oddly sympathetic light to someone who’s otherwise a near out and out monster. However, Nny goes about attempting to help Squee in the worst possible ways, though Nny clearly finds himself to be comforting to the boy despite the terror Squee clearly feels around him. Examples of the way Nny has “helped” include:
- constantly barging into Squee’s house, usually through a window in Squee’s room, both to check up on Squee and to ask for things like bandages and peroxide during the few times he’s been hurt
- Brutally murdering a pedophile that had coerced Squee into an alley, all the while shouting for Squee not to be afraid of people like the pedophile and demonstrating that pedophiles were people just like him by cracking the molesters’ skull open and tearing out his brain
- Nearly braining Squee’s father while Squee’s father had been going on about how no one would ever love Squee
While Nny clearly believes he’s helping Squee, it’s made a point that Nny is merely adding to the trauma and terror Squee already experiences in his own abnormal, miserable little life.
Devi D., meanwhile, is even more complex. Devi was a girl Nny met who had worked at a bookstore he tended to shop at, and had begun a friendship with. This ultimately culminated with the two of them going on a date, with Nny recognizing that, for a rare moment, he was happy. This led to a desire to encapsulate this one beautiful moment for himself, which he intended to do by murdering Devi so that his last memory of her would be that one special moment. Unfortunately, this didn't particularly end well, as Devi proceeded to kick the shit out of Nny and escape.
Nny, realizing he had fucked up with a girl he actually liked, would begin pondering a way to try and win back Devi’s favor, clearly not realizing, or perhaps simply not acknowledging, the actual severity of what he had just done. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that he, personally, was not to blame, at least not entirely, but rather the fact that he felt emotions at all were a main cause for his attempt to murder Devi. He therefore chooses to try and become entirely emotionally distant and detached in the belief that if he does so, he’ll never hurt anyone again, but specifically won’t hurt Devi. While this would make it seem like he’s doing it for Devi’s sake, he’s fairly clearly doing it for his own as he proceeds to record a message of this plan and play it over the phone for Devi, hoping this plan’ll get her approval and this get her to forgive him. He is, in many ways, still looking out for solely his own wants and needs and not Devi’s, despite trying to disguise it to look like he is.
Solipsism: Due to the fact that Nny has had such absurd luck in not being caught during his killing sprees, and not being killed during his own suicide attempts, Nny has come to the conclusion that he is either part of a very small group of people who TRULY exist, or that he is reality itself. Thus, believing himself to possibly be the only real person that exists might add to his disillusionment towards others, as it could add justification to his belief that not only are they not human, they’re merely parts of his own imagination or beings he himself is meant to have authority over, and thus feeling guilt over harming them would be superfluous.
Egomania/Narcissism: Despite being severely, severely self-loathing, Nny also demonstrates an insanely over-exaggerated positive view of himself. Despite recognizing he’s a bad person, he believes himself to still be above all the rest of the people around him. He views his own advice and beliefs as being exceedingly over-important. The views of others can take a back seat to his own, as unless they correspond with his own, they’re clearly incorrect. Technically, this is merely an extension of his solipsism and sociopathy, but it’s worth noting that for all his self-hatred, Nny still thinks himself something superior to most of those he otherwise sees.
Base Personality: Despite all of his tremendous, tremendous flaws, Nny is genuinely intelligent. He has a fairly good grasp on most philosophical topics, as well as an impressive vocabulary despite the fact that he can easily degenerate into a obscenity -spewing mess. He also has an interest in art in all forms and had, at some point, been a fairly talented artist in the vein of Bosch or Giger, if some of the paintings we see in his basement are an indication and a statement made about his creativity, or draining of it, in issue four.
Unsurprisingly, he also has a taste for the abstract and the existential, as he’s shown a love for the films of Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg. It’s likely he latches on to these films due to his own, realized misconceptions of who he is and his own existential crisis. At the same time, he might simply enjoy the damn films because he is, quite honestly, pretentious in several of his own ways despite his claims to hate pretension in others.
Deep down, Nny knows he’s ill. He clearly recognizes that what he’s doing is wrong, and much of what he’s seeing and experiencing makes little logical sense even to him. At the same time, he refuses to seek help, both because of his multiple derangements and the way they hamper him, and debatably his own sense of pride. Due to his overwhelming feelings of distrust and superiority, he refuses to acknowledge that, despite being sick, he should seek help. After all, if someone like him can’t even fucking help themselves, what chance does anyone else have at helping him, when they’re all so clearly beneath him?
Nny also displays a hatred of being touched by others, as well as the idea of bodily fluids, which is odd considering his “occupation”. This doesn’t seem to be a phobia, as much as merely a distaste for physical contact.
History:
Exceedingly little is known about Nny’s early life, due majorly impart that Nny himself is incapable of remembering. As a child, he apparently went through quite a bit of teasing and childish mocking by the children at his school, who nicknamed him “Noodle Boy” due to how thin he was. It is most likely these memories that serve as a basis for his idea of “me against them” in general society and the fact that he’s generally distrustful of other people and sure they’re making fun of him. Aside from this fact, absolutely nothing is known about Nny before we’re introduced to him.
At his introduction, Nny has been living in a condemned house, supposedly for several years, where he has been taking his victims and committing murder after murder, at first apparently just for the pleasure of it though it becomes clear he has an alternative purpose: there is a wall in the house that he has to keep covered in blood in order to keep the monster imprisoned behind it trapped. In order to do this, the house Nny lives in appears to have several underground floors, imply that the house had been here long before Nny had arrived and, quite possibly, had always been the cage for the monster behind the wall, and that Nny is the next in a long line of people keeping it trapped.
Aside from Nny, three other “beings” exist in the house. These are Nailbunny, a dead rabbit that Nny had bought, fed once, and then nailed to wall, and the doughboys, two repainted Styrofoam cutouts of the Pillsbury doughboy. All three of these beings appear, at first, to be manifestations of Nny’s own psyche, with Nailbunny and Psycho Doughboy being the oldest. Psycho tends to encourage Nny in his depressive behavior, attempting to get him to commit suicide repeatedly throughout the series. Nailbunny, meanwhile, gives the impression that it’s the last fragment of practicality Nny has, constantly trying to get Nny to ignore Psycho Doughboy and to try and fight both his self-destructive and violent impulses. Ultimately, neither Psycho nor Nailbunny seem to really be able to make much progress with Nny, constantly tying in their debates, and Nny ultimately getting bored with whatever they were talking about and easily distracted.
Psycho and Nailbunny are eventually joined by a third voice, the second doughboy Mr. Eff. Whereas Psycho Doughboy represents Nny’s depression and desire for self-destruction, Mr. Eff is a representation of Nny’s mania and desire for contentment. However, he tends to point Nny towards achieving this contentment through violent actions, such as how he persuaded Nny to try to attack Devi, a woman Nny had met working at a bookstore he usually went to and had been on a date with that ended with Devi kicking the shit out of Nny in order to escape being killed. Eff would also apparently be responsible for encouraging some of Nny’s more widespread killing sprees by calling it “playing” and disguising it to him as a means of having fun.
After engaging in several mass killing sprees and open murders without being caught as well as several failed suicide attempts, Nny finally begins questioning his perception of reality to an even greater degree, postulating that something is keeping him from dying or being caught. He begins to develop the idea that he is either an integral part of reality, or that he is reality itself and thus begins engaging in a form of solipsism. He demonstrates the fact that he apparently cannot die that attempt to electrocute himself with a taser he had set to max power and proceeded to jam into his skull. When he doesn’t die from the proceeding electrical burst, he proclaims this to be evidence of his invincible natural, although Psycho points out that this is more just luck then anything and that Nny had actually forgotten to charge it to full before his attempt.
It is also around this time that Nailbunny and the Doughboys begin to exert more power. Their voices, which had initially been incredibly simple but convincing in the statements they had made, begin to become stronger and more capable of open debate. On top of this, the doughboys begin displaying that they can, in fact, move around of their own accord. As the struggle between the three voices becomes fiercer and the Doughboys beginning to become clearly stronger party amongst them, Nailbunny begins revealing what it can to Nny. While all three of them had initially been voices Nny had been projecting onto inanimate objects, they had all begun to take on a life of their own. Nailbunny was effectively Nny’s last shred of sanity desperately attempting to talk with him and stop him from going too overboard. The Doughboys, meanwhile, had become corrupted by the thing trapped within the wall and were actively working to wear down Nny’s sanity as a means of eventually releasing their master.
Despite realizing what’s happened, its shown that reversing the progress Psycho and Eff had made is more or less impossible: they’ve gained far too much ground in Nny’s psyche, and Nailbunny eventually falls silent entirely. Nny yet again decides to try and commit suicide due to depression at having lost his last anchor to reality, this time through a complicated device he’s attached to his phone, attaching a gun to the receiver in a way that’ll ensure he’ll be shot if he picks the phone up for a call. Psycho derides Nny repeatedly during this attempt, stating that Nny is yet again not honestly serious about going through with it and is toying with him. Psycho and Eff also both admit that what Nailbunny had told Nny was true, though Eff seems to have an ulterior motive in using Nny by telling him they won’t need him to ensure their existence soon, and that Eff and Psycho are apparently working against each other instead of with one another.
Enraged, Nny ends up finally gathering up what remaining resolve he has and outright denies the Doughboys and stating that he refuses to listen to them anymore, going so far as to pin Psycho to a wall during this rant. He’s interrupted, however, as the phone rings unexpectedly and goes to pick it up.
And is shot in the head in the process.
Which is where he’ll be coming in from.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
"Let's talk about manners." Johnny said, slapping part of the long handled hook he held in his hand against an open palm with a satisfying thump. He liked to think it made him seem a lot like a teacher in a classroom from those stupid old portrayals of them in 1950s cinema and television, waving their long rulers around. As much as he hated the ideas spread in those forms of media, of it's honey-coated blanketing of just how bad the world was, he always appreciated that image. It was just so brutally authoritarian and was an open display to how those with any power really were: stick-wielding tyrants willing to beat the shit out of anyone who spoke out of turn.
His pupil, by all appearances, didn't seem to appreciate the image however. Squirming like a little fuckface against the chains in the wall he was bound to. What was even worse was the calm in his voice. Scared, sure, but he wasn't that hysterical with it, and that was the best entertainment. Like that shit was "haha" funny, and Nny was somewhat disappointed it was being denied to him. "Buddy, look-" the student squeaked out, still fiddling with his hands and legs as if he could just scurry out of his chains, "I think you made a big fuckin' mistake when-"
The words were cut short as the teacher decided to apply some punishment for the outburst by digging the hook right above the waistline, easily burrowing into the flesh. "Lesson one: don't talk out of turn." Nny said, though he realized his advice was probably lost due to the man's scream. And that just pissed him off more. It looked like he'd need to emphasize the lesson as they went on, which he did so by dragging the hook further up the mans chest.
"But the more important lesson, which I so deeply, deeply want to emphasize, is that you should learn to watch what you say. I am so fucking tired of hearing you people talk about, and rip on, the most inconsequential shit. You "like my boots", huh? Oh, I'm sure you did, sure you loved them, making fun about me behind my back with your friends! Laughing at the skinny little faggot and his clothes!"
It was time to apply more discipline, and Nny did so with relish. The hook became a cane, flailing wildly as Nny struck again and again to emphasize his point. "You pathetic shit! Of all the things happening in the world, you focus on someone's goddamn wardrobe? Do you not realize how fucking pathetic that is, how-"
"Where did you buy them?" the man wailed, the words gurgling out as blood started to seep to the floor from the huge incision in his chest. Nny could barely hear them, through the choked voice and the fury ringing in his own head. But he at least paused.
"Huh?"
"Your boots. Where did you buy them?"
...Oh. The guy was...being sincere when he said he liked his boots. Though it's not like he could be BLAMED for making a mistake; people insulted him for shit like this all the time. It just turned out like he had for once. And that just made all this seem bizarrely awkward. "Oh. ...Um. Famous Footwear, maybe? I dunno. I've had them for a few years."
Johnny just stared at the bloody hook, dumbstruck, before smiling back nervously at the man. "Well. Looks like you learn something new every day, huh?"
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
If you people are done squawking and hollering at one another like a bunch of stupid animals in a shit pen, maybe you're ready to listen to reason.
That reason being I don't see why you'd even bother trying to escape this place. It isn't like it's really any fucking better or worse then outside. Well, alright. The food is a bit worse, but I'm not a particularly fussy eater anyway. I can live with it. And whether or not you want to accept it, what's going on here goes on out there. Just to a different degree. They may not openly do bullshit like unleashing spiders on entire towns or putting fuckin' bombs in us, but the people out there are just as much a group of petty little shit eaters as the doctors here. At least here there's only a few people to force me into degradation and pain. Out there, there's millions.
I'll take the small group over the horde, thanks. But you can feel free to fuck yourselves over and have to put up with petty bullshit like this outside if you want.
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.
The powers listed under Nny's "abilities" section are, more or less, world specific. They're signs that he's an integral foundation of reality and meant to keep him alive as such. That being said, they'd have limited application here and him being stripped of them entirely is acceptable. I merely added them for the sake of completion and the fact that they do, indeed, exist.
Also, Johnny boy here has been to the Facility once before. He'll be retaining his memories of his previous visit, if that's okay.