Application: thisaccident
The Player
Name/Nickname: Herit
Personal LJ: texas_red
IM: texasr3d [aim]
E-mail: Chabliya [gmail]
Past Experiences: This is my third app, you know that now. :D
Other Characters: brb_napping, ars_varia_vulpi
The Character
Character Name: Huey Laforet
Character Journal: immortalstudies
Canon: Baccano!
Age: 244 (physically 21)
Race: Human, immortal.
Timeline: During his stay in Alcatraz, but before meeting Firo.
Abilities/Powers: Immortal. Regenerates any injury in no time, including lost limbs, which reattach automatically. He can "eat" other immortals by putting his right hand on their heads and thinking "I want to eat", which also gives him their memories and knowledge. Likewise, he can share information by just putting his hand on somebody's head. He's furthermore an alchemist and can, with knowledge stolen from fellow alchemist and immortal Szilard, create homunculi. In the anime, one scene implies that he is able to communicate with his daughter Chane through telepathy, although this is never fully explained and can be disregarded.
Power Limitations: OBVIOUSLY NOT IMMORTAL ANY MORE. |D Idk how that would affect regeneration, though? Can he still have that, albeit limited? He likes setting his hand on fire to show off to people.
Inventory: Literally nothing but the clothes on his back. He was in prison, guys, come on.
Personality:
While the other characters may have many, fundamentally different opinions Huey, the most appropriate description to summarise him is "thoroughly unsettling". This is brought up by Sylvie Lumiere, an old acquaintance of his, when discussing the alchemists from the experiment in 1711 with another of them: While the anime's villain Szilard gains the descriptor "the most evil", and Huey's best friend Elmer is described as "definitely [...] the strangest", Sylvie proceeds to calling Huey "the most terrifying", adding after being asked if she is sure ("Is Huey really all that scary? He's just an unfathomable person."): "Scary, scary. Wasn't the person closest to him someone like Elmer?", to which her companion comments that Elmer didn't know what terror was. And as it turns out, that impression is quite justified.
Huey is a person who leaves you unsure what to think of him. Calm and quiet, intelligent, urbane, and incredibly cold and bitter, he is a ruthless man who pursues his aims with no regard for morals or ethic concepts. While he does not engage in needless sadism or killing, he goes to whatever lengths he has to in order to advance in his research, not hesitating for a second to experiment on humans or sacrifice who- and whatever he has to, including even his own daughter whom he raised himself. A scientist and researcher to heart, Huey observes rather than participates. Humans are interesting to him, and he sees no reason not to flat out say so. He is curious about their reactions and how circumstances influence them, watching them detached and "from above", which he considers his duty as a researcher. Death, violence, loss - all those things have no visible effect on him. Even when imprisoned as a terrorist and traitor to the U.S., he is calm, disinterested, thoroughly unaffected. He rarely sees things as a threat to him, at least not enough to be openly worried. He is, however, also perceptive and analytical enough to see that even his own organisation has no interest in him past his secret of immortality. While never shown feeling fear, neither during imprisonment nor when facing a demon, he also trusts nobody. Even with his daughter Chane, he only relies on her so much, and only because he has carefully and thoroughly manipulated her, made her dependent on him over years.
He has only one friend, Elmer C. Albatross, who is the one person Huey admits to consider human. And yet even with him, although Huey openly and honestly calls Elmer his friend, he also considers him "pure evil" and disturbing, because Elmer aims at making everybody happy - without distinguishing between good and evil. Huey also has a curious interest in him due to Elmer's highly traumatic childhood and past, he does not believe that he knows the meaning of happiness himself. Nonetheless, according to himself, Huey admits that it was Elmer who first made him smile in front of other people. They have been friends since they were teenagers and at the same school, but even back then, perfect contradictions of each other. Huey was, contrarily to Elmer's typical optimism, the kind of teenager who hated the world and wanted its destruction, and would counterfeit money (with the knowledge of his principal) to finance his research even at the age of only 15 years. His pessimism and disgust against the world and humanity are the main source of his lack of sympathy for anybody. Huey is a man who is entirely disenchanted and cold, expecting nothing good from anything in this world and valuing nothing. His humour is cynical and cruel at best, full of loathing and a certain, spiteful sadism.
For that reason, he does not see anything wrong with his experiments; he lacks a conscience to feel guilt over what some of the results mean for the people he experimented on, and lacks the empathy and interest to care. Humans offer him nothing, and all favours look like bribes to him, because everything is, in his scientist's mind, done for a reason, and every creature has only itself in mind. That is also why he does feel the cynical sympathy he feels for Elmer, and is intrigued (but not completely convinced) by Chane's absolute loyalty to him, which he admits was a reaction by this guinea pig of his that he had not expected. Above all, however, Huey is ruthless and unscrupulous; he has no qualms that hold him back, and sees no reason not to use what nature and chance have given him - a brilliant, scientific mind and immortality. With these abilities, he believes - very Darwinian - that because he can, he has the right to do, even the obligation to do what he wants, and has a rightful power over people's lives, such as his homunculi and his test subjects, including Chane. He does not believe in morality or justice, or that they have or should have any power, even less about him. Even though he is not directly fond of taking hostages and killing, he would stop at nothing if it were necessary. Sometimes, this goes as far as that he takes unnecessary risks completely out of proportion to his gain, just to sate his curiosity; for instance, he prefers a life on America's Most Wanted list to an existence where he could calmly do his research under somebody else's supervision.
History:
The story of Baccano!'s immortals starts in the year 1711, on board the Advena Avis. A group of alchemists gathered there, with the intention to perform a ritual and summon a demon in order to find what all alchemists have ever been searching for: the elixir of immortality and eternal youth. Huey, 21 years old at that time, having been born in 1690, was among them. He had been studying at a private school teaching the hermetic arts as a teenager, where he had also met Elmer C. Albatross, who had become his only friend and was present on the ship as well. Before the ritual, however, a heated discussion started between the alchemists, about whether or not the ritual made any sense and there was any chance of achieving their goal at all. Huey spoke up, interrupting a discussion between Szilard and Gerd, the younger brother of the group's leader, Maiza. He did not only voice his support for the ritual, quoting the Emerald Tablets to disperse the doubt of some of the present alchemists, and giving as reason for his support simply that the experiment and its effect on the people was interesting to him, but also was the first and only one of them all to claim that the demon they were planning to summon did not necessarily have to be evil - claiming that for alchemists using black magic, it all came down to the same thing anyway.
Later, when Maiza performed the ritual as it was taught to him, it indeed proved successful: the demon appeared, at least in voice, and freely offered the group his immortality elixir. Szilard, previously critical of the whole plan, was the first to claim his part of the elixir, claiming that it was only to end the farce. When he felt no effect after drinking it, the demon simply and brutally murdered him. However, much to the surprise of nearly everyone present, Szilard came back to life a few moments later, completely healed, and most of the group stormed forward to take their share of the elixir, despite the demon's claim that there was enough for everybody. Huey and a few others, on the other hand, waited calmly, then drank their share. Afterwards, the demon told them the secret to end their immortal existence, should they become tired of it: an immortal could "eat" another by putting his hand on their head, and simply thinking, "I want to eat" - a process through which also the victim's memories and knowledge would be transferred to him. He also informed them that the one who had performed the ritual, Maiza, was capable of recreating the elixir himself. Of course, it was only a matter of time now until things went horribly wrong.
The ritual was followed by yet another discussion - this time about whether or not the newly gained knowledge should be shared with the rest of the world. Szilard was all in favour of it, others (most notably Maiza himself, Gerd, and Huey's friend Elmer) spoke out against it. When the discussion turned into a vote, Huey, speaking last of all, announced that he would be suspending his vote, explaining that he neither believed that this problem could be answered so quickly, nor that it could be answered by a majority vote. When asked when he intended to let the others know his decision, he simply answered that it might be in a hundred as well as two hundred years - which for immortals would not be too late either. The group ended agreeing, again.
That night, however, Szilard began pursuing Maiza's knowledge. Maiza had expected a turn like this, and had intended to rid the world of Szilard and the danger he posed, but was stopped by Elmer, who - as usual - was convinced that everybody should be happy. Maiza realised too late that Szilard had tricked them and left his room long ago, and after "eating" Gerd had started assaulting the rest of the group one by one. It was Nile, another alchemist, who stopped him when he attacked Gerd's fiancée Sylvie, and Huey and a few others pursued him until he jumped into the water to escape. While trying to distract both the group and Szilard from their fighting, Elmer had fallen into the water, too, but could be rescued.
During the time the alchemists needed to do that and wait for Elmer to wake up, Huey had withdrawn and was watching the scene from the ship's crow's nest. There, the demon approached him. Talking very familiarly, the demon, after voicing his own surprise about how quickly things had gone wrong, told Huey that the two of them were quite alike, watching things from above and only being interested in what was going on in an unaffected observer's way, and should get along. He also announced that they would meet again, being stuck together for a long time, before disappearing.
When the ship returned, the alchemists all split up, going different ways. Huey (as well as Szilard, who had, of course, survived) started his research to recreate the elixir. He used knowledge he had stolen from Szilard in order to create homunculi, which he called "Lamia". These homunculi, human in appearance (with the exception of a few having some inhuman traits, such as Christoper Chareau de Red, who sported red eyes and sharp teeth) were used as test subjects for his experiments. A few of them indeed lost the ability to age, some lost other abilities, such as the ability to feel pain.
Huey himself became the leader of a group called Lemures, who were considered terrorists, as well as two other groups of his followers - the Larva, led by a man only known as "Tim", a genius Huey had recruited at a young age, and the Lamia, a group that most of his homculi belonged to, led by the eccentric Christopher Chareau De Red. By the 1930s, Huey was a feared criminal, considered a "menacing traitor to the U.S.", and was hiding in Canada. He also had at least one son and two daughters at this point, all from different women, but - with exception of his son Luchino Campanella, whose mother was another student at Huey's school - raised by him: Chane and Liza. While Chane did not know about her half-sister (OR her half-brother), she is the only of Huey's children actually treated like a daughter by him, even though he raised her as a soldier in his private army, as his protector as well as his secret-keeper. His manipulation of his young daughter went so far that when asking her to keep a secret he would tell her and not share it with anybody, for which he would treat her one thing - anything she liked - the girl only asked that he would take her voice, so she could not give anybody information about him or his secrets, ever. That was, of course, a full success in Huey's experiment, and even later, he would refer to Chane as his "animal experiment", a "pitiful guinea pig". Chane, however, was always perfectly loyal and devoted to him, even as an adult, considering him the only one who would ever love her. He also told her that she was named by her mother, whom she didn't know. His other daughter, Liza, was less lucky when it came to meeting his expectations and winning his approval; childish and overall less effective than Chane even though skilled at fighting with chakrams, she wanted to be treated like his daughter as well, but never succeeded.
In late December, 1931, Huey was arrested in Canada thanks to a traitor in his group. It was no secret to him or Chane that the Lemures were in truth only after Huey's secret of immortality and had no affection for either of them - going as far as to planning Chane's death in case they could free Huey. While Huey was being held in prison in Newfoundland and waiting to be transported to New York to be handed over to the U.S. government, the Lemures and Chane boarded the continental train "The Flying Pussyfoot", which would go from Chicago to New York, planning to take the passengers (including the wife and daughter of Senator Beriam, who appears to have a rivalry with Huey) hostage to demand Huey's freedom in return.
When that attempt failed and ended bloody in the Flying Pussyfoot Incident, there was nothing stopping Huey's transportation and trial any more. He was sent off to be locked away in Alcatraz, while the next plans to free him were already being executed, this time by another group of his followers (and among them quite a number of his homunculus "children"), the Lamia.
First Person Sample:
[audio]
[Here's a calm, bored voice, after a while of silence and then a deep breath; almost like a sigh, almost with a tinge of resignation.]
This is more luxurious than what I expected. How interesting...
[And here, the dictating voice gains a bit of a sharper tone - not aggressive, but with a challenging king of mockery.]
You didn't even lock the door. So, I'm permitted to leave my cell now? Alone even?
[There is a pause, and then an audible, cold smirk in his voice.]
Senator Beriam? This looks almost as if you're expecting something from me.
Write it out Sample: Here's a fairly long log I had with him?
Other Notes: Uh... Going by anime dub, he still has a French accent, for some reason. Although his French is heavily accented, too, and sounds like Acadian French, due to him having been born in 1690.