Application - LifeAftr

[enhancements]

cw: body horror; cannibalism

Player Information
Name: Dal
Age: 33
Contact: Plurk: InstantEternity | Discord: Dal#6219
Current characters: Alexei Dinoia | Tales of Vesperia | ideismo

Character Information
Name: Albert Wesker
Series: Resident Evil (Anderson films)
Appearance: Here.
Age: The virus has completely stopped his aging, so it's difficult to tell. Physically, he appears to be 25. According to the presented timeline, however, the youngest he can conceivably be is 45; for Trustfell's purposes I set him at 50.
Canon Point: Post-series
Transferring From: Trustfell, Round 5 / Previous time in LifeAftr
Canon History: Here. Generally speaking, the history is correct. Everything else is...varying degrees of not correct, but if the history section is what matters then this one is accurate.

Canon Personality:
As the person left in charge of the Umbrella Corporation for the past decade, Wesker has been personally tasked with overseeing and carrying out their largest and most ambitious project – namely, orchestrating an apocalypse designed to wipe out all of humanity, killing everyone by way of global pandemic and wiping the slate clean so Umbrella High Command can take over whatever's left and have it for themselves. Seeing as he apparently just looked at all of that and decided that that sounded both totally legit and honestly kind of fun, it's entirely fair to say that Albert Wesker is not a nice person.

Seeing as he actually managed to wipe out almost all of humanity, it's also entirely fair to say that Albert Wesker is both highly efficient and more than slightly insane.

Granted, those are likely the qualities that ensured that he was left in charge in the first place; over the course of his time both working with Dr. Isaacs separately and while he was with the Corporation, he showed himself to be both rather bright and capable of doing more or less anything he can be made to put his mind to. For example, he's incredibly technologically adept, capable of hacking mainframes that are specifically shown to be nearly impossible to break into even with the help of technology designed to do that very thing; he also manages to temporarily seize control of buildings, knocking out power grids remotely and reprogramming entire automated systems to do pretty much anything he wants. (Honestly, technology seems to be one of the only things he legitimately enjoys; he also has an affinity for purge bombs and the programming thereof, and usually when he's on his own he's shown messing with some sort of massive technological display or another.) He's good at micromanaging, resource allocation, and strategy, he adheres to protocol and is good at enforcing rules, and he's more than capable of making difficult calls regarding people's lives – namely, he's the guy who can decide very quickly what should be done when everything goes to hell and you're going to lose people either way. He's a good employee, especially by Umbrella's standards; he's apparently loyal to Dr. Isaacs, and he doesn't seem to question very much – he's told to do something and he does it, even when that something is "destroy humanity."

A lot of this sort of behavior can largely be attributed to the notion that on the pragmatism/compassion scale, Wesker skews heavily toward pragmatism; he doesn't hesitate before doing whatever he deems logically necessary at the time, and while he can and does get angry or frustrated with things, his feelings very rarely bleed into his actions. However, this has more negative connotations than it does positive, in his case; while he does believe that empathy and compassion may have had a place in the old world before everything went to hell, he doesn't believe that they do anymore – such things are liable to get people killed, and generally speaking they're designed to instill and draw responses from emotions that he simply doesn't have himself. He's never cared for or loved another person in his life, and he blatantly refuses to put anyone before himself; he plays the game of life to win, after all, and he's going to do whatever he deems necessary to come out on top. If that means dragging the rest of the Umbrella Corporation along for the ride with him, then so be it, and he'll just do whatever gets everyone from Point A to Point B with no regard for how many people might die along the way; if it means abandoning or killing them so at least he'll end up victorious in the end...well, he's fine with that too.

Honestly, Wesker has always been noticeably strange even by his coworkers' accounts of him, and Umbrella isn't exactly a place full of empathetic individuals. He has no moral qualms regarding pretty much anything – as long as it's part of the plan or otherwise serves a purpose, he isn't morally opposed to murder, cannibalism, betrayals that result in everybody dying, and the complete global annihilation of the human race. He just does whatever is deemed necessary, rather than whatever would be considered the right thing to do by moral or ethical standards, and he's oddly mechanical about it. He takes pleasure in results, but not often in actions, and he generally behaves in a manner that's obviously and almost alarmingly poorly-socialized. He doesn't seem to really have any interest in talking to people on a personal level, nor does he seem like he'd know how to even if he tried; he's a very guarded person and he likes it that way, and on the off chance that he does decide he likes someone, he shows it in ways that are sort of disturbing – namely, he'll either do everything he's told by that person without question or he decides he wants to fight them all the goddamn time. He also just doesn't physically express himself very well; his posture is unnaturally tense and still most of the time, his face tends to be very blank and expressionless, and while his voice seems to be trying to sound pleasant in that it's soft and measured, his tone comes across as stilted and odd. He's also prone to bouts of silence where he doesn't answer anything that's said to him and then doesn't understand why people don't just magically intuit what he's thinking, and while he does have a sense of humor in there...somewhere, it's a very dry one. Bluntly put, he's socially awkward to an extent that isn't quite debilitating, but ensures that he doesn't know how to act around most people; he just...doesn't interact with people very well.

It also doesn't help that one of the things he seems to lack completely is a sense of fear regarding dangerous situations. That isn't to say that he won't act in his own interest when facing down a threat – his sense of self-preservation is intact, it just seems to be based entirely in logical calculation as opposed to any sort of fear of consequences, and his fight or flight response (when it seems to be working at all) leans heavily toward fighting. This is weirdly a fairly positive trait when one is dealing with the zombie apocalypse, where succumbing to large fear responses tends to result in people being very dead, and given that most of the threats to Wesker personally tend to be other humans it works out well for him to run at them and just punch them in the face until they die. On the other hand, this is the sort of shit that leads to you getting injected with experimental viruses because you think they can give you superpowers, which is something he absolutely did. It's blatantly implied over the course of the films that Wesker was experimented on (for example, he mentions being like the protagonist even knowing damn well what she had done to her, and he also knows what being stripped of one's powers and having them given back feels like), but he seems to enjoy his powers and the fact that he's not really human anymore; he acknowledges that he's had a long time to cure himself, and he even carries vials of the cure with him sometimes, but he never uses them on himself and he's generally all right with the prospect that it's been so long that the cure wouldn't work on him anymore.

However, just because he doesn't experience proper fear responses and is generally okay with the virus doesn't mean that he doesn't experience some degree of anxiety regarding death. He doesn't regret anything he's done to himself and he fully believes that there's no point in living if there's no risk involved, but he rather plainly fears and dislikes the idea of the virus taking control of his body - to the point where he started cannibalizing people in an attempt to stop himself from turning. (To be fairer to Wesker than he really deserves, it actually worked; just the same, that's still a course of action that most people will recognize as "completely insane.") Furthermore, while most of his cold demeanor is just his personality, he's also intentionally deadened a lot of his emotions for the sake of having better control over the virus.

Of course, that's also probably not the best way to deal with his problems, viral-based or not, but it does seem to be working for him to an almost alarming extent; the T-virus that Wesker is infected with is considered uncontrolled – he's physically incapable of bonding with it fully, and he's taken such a large amount of damage over the last several months that it's turned against him and is effectively constantly attacking his body from the inside. It's something that he's learned to live with, and he has a few stopgap measures in place to keep it from consuming him entirely; the first is that he apparently just possesses a downright heroic amount of willpower. He's capable of keeping the virus in check most of the time by sheer force of will alone, not giving into overemotional urges, and keeping himself strictly focused.

The other thing he's got going is the aforementioned eating people, which he decided was a great idea for some reason known only to him.

How much he actually minds eating people is debatable; he's surprisingly open about it when he's directly confronted about it, but he doesn't bring it up himself and it's noticeable that while he's generally a straightforward person, he's constantly using euphemisms to describe the act itself and doesn't approach it with quite as much candor as he does pretty much everything else. It seems to be something he's not particularly crazy about doing, but he's doing it anyway through necessity and self-preservation – and hey, if he's got to do it anyway, he might as well not bother having too many feelings about it, right?

But then, he was put in charge of destroying over seven billion people, and over the course of ten years he actually succeeded in doing that. So it's not like a few more added to the tally to keep him alive was really going to bother him, anyway.

His reasons for going along with Umbrella's orchestrated apocalypse are never really elaborated on; he doesn't seem to take their actual reasons for doing it in the first place seriously at all, and generally speaking their plans are going to end with him dead. This is something that's made rather plain – his coworkers don't believe him fit to inherit their pure new world given that he's infected. They're willing to use him for as long as he's willing to be useful and have him carry out their plans, but the final part of those plans (releasing an extremely potent airborne cure that immediately kills the infected and purges the world of the virus) will absolutely end with him dead. However, he does seem to harbor a large amount of disdain for human life in general – at best, he sees them all as property, things he can play with and experiment on as he pleases; at worst, he's unfathomably spiteful toward them. The novelization of the sixth movie goes into a bit more detail about this, explaining that he's always very much been the Other among his peers; he's never been straight-up ostracized, but instead his presence is merely tolerated – his mentor and his coworkers make no secret of the fact that they find him unbearably creepy, often comparing him to animals or objects as opposed to acknowledging him as a person, and furthermore they all rather obviously find him to be completely expendable, a tool that's good for being used and discarded and generally nothing else of value. Generally being dehumanized for most of his life like that has led him to embrace his own loss of humanity – after all, it never really did anything for him anyway.

It's also notable that he seems to just generally like zombies better than humans; he surrounds himself regularly with the infected with no fear of them, he pushes people in Umbrella to try to "domesticate" them and seems convinced that even if the person is dead, the zombies can still be taught into being worthwhile people in their own right. He's shown to train some of them to listen to him; he keeps infected dogs as pets. So honestly, most of his personal motivation seems to come down to a desire to discard his own humanity, just kind of embracing the zombie life and willingly remaking the world into one that he likes far better than the one he started in. That world just...happens to be full of the undead.

Which, you know, still doesn't justify killing more than seven billion people for the sake of "my friends, the undead"? Thankfully, he never really claimed to be well-intentioned.

Personality Shifts:
The first thing to be noted about Trustfell as a whole is that it was a murdergame, meaning that it had a dwindling-party mechanic in which two or more people died every week, either by way of getting murdered or public execution in front of the rest of the group. Wesker did not survive the experience; he died after five weeks, though he was ultimately revived along with the others after the fact. The other thing that's relevant to the experience is that there was a memory-loss element to the game; at the time the entire incident began, Wesker had had ten years' worth of memories supressed, to be regained over the course of the game. As such, he had no memory of important things like the ongoing fight with the protagonist of the series (he remembered her vaguely as a security guard at the facility he used to serve at, but that was all), his infection with the virus getting exponentially worse, the eventual fall of Umbrella, and his own death.

To be clear, the setting of Trustfell itself didn't bother him - that particular round was set in an abandoned hospital, where they were locked in and not allowed to leave the premises, and there was a perpetual snowstorm outside that kept them from ascertaining their surroundings. Seeing as Wesker ultimately spent ten yeas underground in the Hive in Tokyo, he wasn't precisely bothered by the claustrophobic surroundings; he was somewhat annoyed, but generally speaking he was able to handle that aspect of it reasonably well. He was also able to rationalize himself into a nonresponse to all the murder, even if it was someone he happened to like; of course it was irritating to lose people he was fond of, but it was more a case of simply noticing their absence and not preferring it to their presence, and otherwise dispelling all agitation with the notion that people die around him all the time.

The thing is that he was fond of some of them, in a weird, stunted sort of way; bluntly put, this was the first time he'd generally been around normal people that weren't insane or out to kill him in some way in a very long time. While he was very obviously socially stunted and resisted interacting with most of the group willingly for several weeks, he would generally attend group activities anyway (usually after being personally invited to his face and then cajoled into it for twenty minutes in the hallway, but eventually he did go), where he was treated very well and everyone made sure he was as included as he wanted to be without trying to force him to do anything. He originally gravitated toward the people that were inhuman in some way (e.g., Asgore, Wheatley from Portal, another Resident Evil villain named Jack Krauser who was infected with Plagas), though he eventually did form generally positive relationships with a few of the humans as well; despite the murdergame setting, it was a surprisingly gentle introduction to proper socialization with people who aren't...well, everything Umbrella decided to be, and who came from worlds where treating each other well still had merit over breaking necks and stepping over bodies to get what you want or need out of life.

While he was generally accepted by everyone on a social level and was decently-liked by several people, however, he was generally prickly about things involving compassion and friendship; he mentioned to several people that he'd never loved or properly cared about anyone in his life, and he made it very clear to the entire group that compassion had no place in the world and was a surefire way to get yourself killed. He received a lot of pushback regarding those views, and one woman in particular became determined to teach him that compassion was going to save everyone. He did eventually become fairly fond of her, as much as he was capable of being fond of anyone - he found her attempts at changing his worldviews to be amusing, and she managed to have enough genuine conversations with him that he came to prefer her company over her absence.

Which is why it was kind of a shame that the attempts at teaching him compassion backfired so badly, and they ended up mutually killing one another after he got it into his head to murder her.

In fairness, he was going to murder that week anyway; an incentive to kill was provided by their captor, and it was enough to make Wesker realize that his plans had failed back in his own world, therefore leaving him with...well, nothing. He had worked toward those goals for most of his life, they were more or less all he cared about, and the notion that that had been taken away from him by a bunch of goddamn humans was enough to make him want to act out in some way; as such, he orchestrated a plan to spread a T-virus infection throughout the hospital, turning all the humans into zombies (and therefore making them superior and preferable to what they were, in his opinion) and leaving the nonhumans as they were. He started with the person that had been so kind to him by injecting her with his own infected blood and expressed that her lessons in compassion actually managed to take in the most messed up manner possible, telling her that it was good that he found her first, because this way she wouldn't have to watch her friends die.

She managed to get away from him, keeping a recording of what happened with her, and he pursued her in order to finish killing her properly to get the virus to activate; she was able to defend herself, and ended up crushing him from the waist down with a massive statue that she was able to hit back onto him. She then fled the scene; Wesker managed to survive until morning, where he was found by a number of people, denied the ability to eat anyone so he could regenerate and save himself, and died before they could actually get any useful answers out of him regarding what happened. A short time later, his body reanimated due to the virus, though "Wesker" was not conscious in any way and his soul was confirmed to not be in his body anymore; the resulting zombie was promptly beheaded and killed.

Trustfell also had a separate location containing the souls of the dead, identical to the hospital they were kept in while they were alive; Wesker spent most of his time there having a lot of existential problems, due to the fact that he was returned to a fully human state and wiped clear of the T-virus for the duration. He didn't handle it well, and he didn't handle the notion of being permanently just in limbo here, either – he dealt with it by way of risk-taking behavior, trying to do dangerous things just to see if they would kill him permanently one way or another. When confronted about this, he stated that he found existing like this to be worse than any sort of actual death he may suffer; he also admitted that he'd been killed so many times that he tended to forget that other people saw death as a traumatizing thing to be avoided – he tended to just take it for granted that everything would be fine and he would come back if he died, and he didn't really remember what it was like to know that if something bad enough happened to him that that would be it and there would be no other chances.

Meanwhile, the other dead souls continued to be decent to him; they were angry with him for trying to infect everyone for a while, but generally speaking they continued to treat him well enough and he spent a long time talking to a few of them in particular – largely about his world and his thoughts on it, but also just having surprisingly normal conversations once in a while. He came to rely on several of those conversations and interactions with people to keep himself sane and not just go off the existential rails, and for the most part he was able to just keep himself still and not do anything stupid. He ended up finding himself set up on dates with someone he was particularly fond of; they ended up discussing it eventually, with Wesker making it plain that he wasn't capable of the sort of compassion or emotion required to love someone properly, but they both decided for the time being that they would be together anyway and just...not worry about that for now. (It worked out in the end, and they were pretty happy with this arrangement altogether, though incidentally they were both bad at actually expressing literally any of that.)

The end of the game saw everyone revived, though the memories and experiences of what had happened remained with them; some found it more traumatizing than others. Wesker personally wasn't straight-out traumatized, both because of the extreme desensitization to everything due to his own world being what it was, and also honestly just because of who he is as a person; saying he came out of it as a better person would be a bit of a stretch, honestly. But he did come out of it slightly more willing to actually interact with people in a positive manner; he still doesn't like humanity but he's more willing to tolerate them, and he actually has a vague idea of how to socialize with them – when he first entered the game he literally didn't know how to talk to anyone outside of a way consistent with Umbrella protocol, he was unsure of how to act around people for whom society hadn't collapsed and everything wasn't just about getting ahead and trying to survive. He was incredibly poorly-socialized and the game helped him come out of that a little and actually interact with others on more or less the same level. He was shown kindness in ways that he wasn't used to, and while that didn't fix any of his problems it did sort of help him deal with them, if only by giving him an outlet to take his mind off of them for a while.

Basically, the experience was harrowing but it actually allowed him to be a somewhat normal person for a while, something that he'd generally been denied his entire life without realizing it. And at the end of the day...well, on the one hand he has his viruses back, he's no longer human and he still really prefers it that way. On the other, he's dating someone, he's much better-socialized, and he actually has some idea of how friendship works, even if he still hates the whole compassion thing. Oh yeah, and he's decidedly less fixated on, you know, annihilating everyone. That's probably important to note.

Following all of that, he spent a few months in LifeAftr, though really not long at all in the scheme of things; it was long enough to verify what has already been stated (his social skills are less abysmal, he's having a decently easier time talking to others unprompted, he is still seeking out every inhuman thing in his immediate vicinity and trying very hard to talk to them) and also to verify that he really isn't interested in working through pretty much anything that happened at Beacon. Whether his stay in LifeAftr will change that or not has yet to be seen; either way, his story isn't quite over yet and is probably due for continuation, whether he actually likes it or not.

Abilities:
Physical Combat
Because this series more or less runs on the notion of Authority Equals Asskicking, as the CEO of the Umbrella Corporation, Wesker is the strongest fighter they've got. He has military-grade training in both hand-to-hand and weaponry, though he prefers hand-to-hand; he likes to attack people head-on instead of trying to dodge or evade, and once he starts he doesn’t often stop until whomever or whatever he's fighting stops moving or is otherwise contained.

Weaponry
While Wesker is presumably capable of using the same wide array of weaponry as the rest of Umbrella's combatants, he prefers handguns. He's capable of dual-wielding with larger handguns like Desert Eagles and magnums, and his aim with such things is shown to be exceptionally good – in one particular firefight, he's the only person to manage to hit their assailants, and he hits them both in vital areas on the first try. He also likes designing and creating large-scale weapons; he was responsible for the creation of purge bombs, which are...well, exactly what they sound like – detonating one of them in a building tends to leave a massive sinkhole where a few city blocks used to be.

Technology
The one thing Wesker actually seems to like that isn't "killing people", technology is something that he's surprisingly adept with. He likes finding ways to track and identify people over massive distances just for the hell of it, messing with satellites that aren't his, coming up with ways to crack mainframes and shut down buildings, and generally ruining people's day by hacking into pretty much everything connected to a system. Again, as far as he's concerned, people are toys, and he likes finding new and creative ways to break their toys just because he can.

Virus-Based Changes: Physiological Alterations (cw: body horror in image link)
Wesker has experienced a fair amount of physiological changes and alterations due to his infection with the T-virus. The most superficially noticeable are the reasonably little things – his temperature is constantly elevated to the point of fever (usually low-grade, but if he isn't careful with himself it'll rise sharply), his breathing tends to be labored even when he's not doing anything in particular, and when he's badly-off he has physical tics affecting his face and the left side of his body that pass quickly but are strong enough to momentarily interrupt whatever he's doing at the time. The most pressing concern, however, is that his organs are... There's no really nice way to say that his organs are kind of Eldritch-y, but his organs are pretty much horrorterrors. Once in a while, this just sort of comes out of his face and tries to eat whatever's in front of him, presumably because God is dead and the world is cold and uncaring; it's speculated in the novels that the cure will straight-up kill him because his organs are incompatible with human life. When it comes to normal food, he doesn't have to eat anything of the sort at all; he won't get any sustenance from it even if he does, though he technically can eat if he wants to - there's just very little reason to and so he normally doesn't. Generally, he's a zombie in all the ways that matter, and he's required to feed on humans if he wants to keep his infection controlled and not starve out; as such, he'll be marked with a sigil as per the FAQ to keep him from needing to do that.

Virus-Based Changes: Enhancements
The T-virus has also given Wesker a fair number of gifts, along with stripping him of his humanity. His strength has been boosted to well beyond human levels, giving him both a lot of enhanced force and a lot of stopping power – trying to punch him is far more likely to hurt you than it is him, he's capable of snapping people's bones with very little effort, and he's capable of grabbing two people by the arms at once and throwing them across a room. His speed has been enhanced to levels imperceptible to the human eye, which basically means he has ridiculous flashstep skills that allow him to dodge bullets at close range; his vision and reflexes have been accelerated to match this capacity for high-speed movement. Due to this being frankly ridiculous, all of this will be subject to the physical exhaustion toll as outlined by the FAQ.

Virus-Based Changes: Regeneration and Revival
Wesker's regenerative abilities are actually perhaps surprisingly low-leveled, given that he's a major antagonist in this series in particular; this is generally explained by a difference in the way the virus and his personal abilities work as compared to the games. His regenerative abilities frankly don't work quickly because they simply don't have to – instead of immediately repairing his body, the virus immediately sets to reanimating the brain and getting his neurons firing again. This means that even after sustaining a fatal injury, he'll normally regain some semblance of consciousness after about 15 seconds and immediately attempt to get up again, whether to feed, to continue fighting if he needs to, or to get somewhere away from whatever is happening so he can recover properly. If he's capable of doing that, he will not turn into a zombie proper, though his level of consciousness will be extremely low and basic for as long as it takes him to heal properly. However long that takes depends on the injuries sustained – to use examples from the series, he's more or less fully conscious and functional immediately after being stabbed once in the head, albeit not pleased, not speaking, and really wanting to feed; however, after sustaining a shotgun blast to the back of the skull and being subsequently shot in the chest multiple times, he "wakes up" within a brief period of time but he isn't moving well, there are no real signs of conscious awareness at all, and he just staggers around until he manages to feed, at which point his body heals more easily and he comes back into himself and regains proper consciousness.

That isn't to say that he can't be killed properly, because he certainly can. Destroying the brain stem and decapitation are two definite ways to do it, in standard zombie fashion, though it's also possible to bleed him out – if he loses too much blood too quickly, he's starved immediately after sustaining a critical injury, or he's otherwise prevented from regenerating in some way or another, his body can't recover from it and he'll die. So he definitely can take death penalties along with everyone else, it's just somewhat more difficult to accomplish on a regular basis. It's also worth noting that his infection doesn't grant him increased durability – he's just as easily injured as your average human being would be.

That said, I imagine that if this is permitted to be kept at all then recovery from light injuries at a somewhat accelerated rate would bring an exhaustion toll with it; recovery from severe injuries will come with an extremely heavy exhaustion toll and he won't be too generally conscious or aware of very much until exposure to a mana pool happens, and it will likely require at least a full recharge period's worth of time at best.

Virus-Based Changes: Potential For Infection
Okay, so this is generally the main problem with apps like this: how the hell do we keep the literal zombie from causing an outbreak just, like, all over. His strain of the virus is capable of being transmitted through fluid transfer – so it's primarily blood and bites that anyone would have to be worried about. Fortunately enough, Wesker doesn't bite people just on principle, and it's usually pretty easy to keep someone's blood out of your damn mouth or away from any open cuts you may have; just the same, accidents do happen, and he's been tempted to try to cause an outbreak before in his CRAU and he eventually went ahead and did it. As such, I'd like to ask if we could remove the potential for infection – just completely discard that as a possibility somehow, seeing as there's nothing that I'd actually want to do with it in gameplay itself? I don't really mind whatever means by which this is done, whether it's just deemed that the T-virus is nontransferable to anyone here or if a property of the sigil he's marked with would make that so, or anything else you deem fair and viable. It's just better to completely remove the possibility entirely, I think.

As always, should this not be sufficient, I am amenable to further discussion and suggestions regarding nerfs and the like.

Inventory:

• Midnight Outfit: As depicted in the reference link.
  
• Samurai Edge: A modified Beretta 9f. Fully loaded with the factory-standard 15 rounds.
  
• Clips: Two extra clips for Samurai Edge; 15 rounds each.

Sample - Thread
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