Will Chase

WHO YOU SEE

Will suffers from a burning curiosity that leaves him almost totally unable to leave anything be, always following through on a line of inquiry even when the opposite would be advised. Though he is normally relatively quiet, when he finds something he wants to know he becomes significantly more outspoken, frequently pushing people over and over until they either give in or punch him in the face, whichever comes first. He despises lying in all of its forms, even the little white lies people tell, because he believes that it causes more problems than it could ever possibly solve.

He loves his sister a great deal, regularly going above and beyond what is needed in order to make sure that she is happy. This has had the unfortunate side effect of making him massively over-protective, and this extends, at least in part, to other people her age. He has had fourty years to come to terms with his faults, and though he cannot extinguish them he has managed to gain partial control of them, enabling him to avoid offending people if he tries; unfortunately, when he is at his most obsessed he tends to forget that other people can be offended and so tends to bulldoze his way through conversations and, on more than one occasion, people themselves.

William 'Will' Chase had a fairly unremarkable childhood, at least at first. His father was a teacher, his mother a businesswoman and between them they owned a rather nice house in the suburbs. He was a relatively happy child, with a quite happy home life. True, his mum wasn’t home nearly as much as he would’ve liked, but she tried her best and his dad always seemed happy to pick up the slack.

It all fell apart when he was six, after his dad ran off with one of his coworkers and left his mother trying to juggle a serious career and a child, while trying to deal with the fact that the man she married had cheated on her right under her nose and she’d never noticed. She managed it however, and after a few difficult years things were almost back to normal.

Will was a studious child, and was always ahead of his year group in both his comprehension of the topics at hand, and in his reading. Indeed, he was so far advanced of his peers academically that he skipped a year, though this had the unfortunate side effect of parting him from the few friends he had managed to make.

Nothing else of note came of his years in school, and after going to university for a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, and later doing a PhD in Law Enforcement, he entered Police Academy. Fast forward a few years and he was a detective in the SFPD and had a sister, Ashley, born when he was twenty to his mom and her new husband.

He had a successful time in the SFPD until he eventually quit when he was 38, following the attempted cover-up of a murder by an officer. To Will, who prised the truth above all else, such an act was abhorrent, and shortly after he left the local news received an anonymous tip-off and the whole case was blown wide open, resulting in several law-suits against the SFPD.

Will set up a small business as a PI, using the skills he had developed in over a decade of work as a police detective to solve petty things like whether a husband or wife was cheating. His mum had retired a few years earlier, and his sister was doing fairly well on the music scene as an up and coming star. Such was the state of the world when the crash happened, but when his eyes opened again it would be forever changed in ways he couldn’t yet comprehend.

Will is a telepath, and would potentially be able to read minds, communicate entirely through thought, manipulate memories and even exert some rudimentary control over a person’s actions and behaviour by embedding commands into their subconscious.

While he has a great deal of potential abilities, he has only manifested two of them at this point; he is able to ‘force’ people to tell the truth, essentially compelling them to answer truthfully where instead they would lie or attempt to evade the question, and he has the ability to sense whether a person has or would have hostile intentions towards him.

Will has only manifested two of his abilities so far, and has no idea of his true potential at this moment in time.

Both of Will’s current abilities have major limitations. His danger sense is limited to a fifty metre omnidirectional sphere with him at the centre, while forcing people to speak the truth requires both eye contact and a distance of less than five metres

When Will uses his ability to force someone to speak the truth they can still lie by omission, refuse to answer his questions, or be mistaken.

Will’s danger sense is still only rudimentary, for it doesn’t tell him what the exact intentions of people are but only that they are hostile, and nor does it have any true combat applications beyond knowing when threats are coming.

Should Will ever manage to manifest his full range of abilities, he would need immense concentration to use most of the more advanced techniques and, if his concentration is disrupted violently, he could potentially suffer a backlash that could have potentially serious consequences, with anything from a migraine to a permanent coma.

Mark Meer as Will Chase