[attr="class","hopelovetitle"]APPEARANCE

[attr="class","hopelovetop"][attr="class","hopelovesub"]HAIR // black here[break]EYES // blue[break]SKIN // white[break][break]ATTIRE[break][break]Arthur is the fashionable and expensive type, favoring darker colors and with a special preference for navy blue. A little vain, he spends a fair amount of time on his appearance and spends more than a little money on clothes. You can count on his doing his best to look his best.[break][break]GENERAL[break][break]When not modifying his appearance, Arthur stands six feet tall and weighs 183 pounds. He is generally clean-shaven, with neatly combed hair and well done nails. When using his powers in combat, he tends to resemble a giant monster with claws, teeth, and multiple bladed limbs.

[attr="class","hopelovetitle"]PERSONALITY

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If you looked at Arthur's life, what you'd probably see is a man who could, if he wanted, be one of the idle rich, but who chooses not too. By day, he works as a consultant for the FBI and a occasionally other law enforcement agencies, doing work related to the psychology of serial offenders, and also does pro bono mental health work with law enforcement officers as well as some offenders- or potential offenders. His day looks much like any other worker of those jobs, except that when he goes home, he goes to his lavish, inherited mansion, and when he goes on vacation, he takes his private jet to whatever exotic location strikes his fancy. He could retire tomorrow and never work another day in his life, but he chooses not to.[break][break]



Arthur is a man of refined and distinguished tastes, especially about clothing, food, and art. A bit of a dandy, he makes it his goal to wear the best clothes, eat the best food, and know the best people. He thinks of himself as refined, graceful, and above the common mass of humanity. From one perspective, this feeling is justified; being born into wealth and privilege has given him access to a part of the human experience that few others can hope to attain. The dark side of this, of course, is a contempt for people he perceives as “lesser”. To reach Arthur's notice, it helps to be “exceptional” in some way, whether that is in intelligence, accomplishment, or some other skill. On top of that, you have to be “refined” in a nebulous sense that for the most part Arthur has made up himself. Although Arthur prides himself on being outwardly polite to everyone, his condensation to others often comes through. Arthur has a need to demonstrate his intelligence and often tries to show that he is the smartest person in the room. It should be noted that, for Arthur, intelligence isn't just about knowing facts- in Arthur's words, “Intelligence should win”. To Arthur, your ability to do things with your intelligence is at least as importance as pure knowledge. A person who had brains but wasted them would be nothing to him, beneath contempt.[break][break]



An immense lover of art (with an encyclopedic knowledge of it and its history), Arthur sees the meaning life as a work of art in progress. He describes art in terms of constructing meaning out of chaos, calling it the process by which brush strokes become a painting, notes become music, or a block of marble becomes a sculpture. Art, he explains, has meaning because of how it is entangled into the webs of meaning we build for ourselves. Consider the swastika, he says. On its own, it is a pair of intersecting bent lines, nothing more. Yet place it into the web of meaning our minds have constructed and few symbols can provoke such a strong response. Consider the cross, he says. A even simpler symbol. An alien visitor would see nothing but a pair of sticks. Yet men have died for that symbol, have submitted to horrible tortures rather than dishonor it. So it is with our lives, he says. The meaning of live is not in ourselves. It is in how our lives touch and cross and intertwine each other. The way they play into the tapestry that all of us are weaving day by day. Life is art, and death can be a symphony. And if our lives are threads in a tapestry, if they get their meaning from the shape that they weave, then it follows that an ordinary life can be lifted out of its normal line and woven into some greater picture. The act of turning it can elevate a hopeless, meaningless existence into something rare and beautiful. This is what Arthur has explained many times. This is what he tells people before he kills them.[break][break]



Oh, yes, he's killed lots of people. Somewhere in his house there is a secret journal where Arthur describes every picture he's painted with the end of a life. Perhaps someday the world will see it. Arthur hunts people of all ages, sexes, and stations. He seeks out lives he sees as lacking meaning, and makes them into something more. They become part of his story, a stone in his path towards immortality. “Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly,” he says. “Simple London prostitutes. Nothing we would remember today. Yet in 1888 their lives intersected Jack the Ripper, and now history will never forget them. I am giving you a gift, little one. When I cut the line of your life, I am binding it to mine. In me, part of you will live forever.” Part of that sentiment is disturbingly literal, as Arthur often cannibalizes parts of his victims. Arthur's MO involves posing the remains his victims in complex patterns, demonstrating a dramatic and artistic flair, which has given his the nickname, “The Fatal Painter”.[break][break]



But, really, if you ignore all that stuff, Arthur's not so bad. He's a patron of the arts, has practiced kenpo since he was a child, donates generously to environmental causes, and invests in minority-owned businesses. He strives to present himself as emblematic of the “responsible billionaire” class. He's very conscious of his image, and his PR firm helps keep his image where he wants. He cultivates an image of a refined and caring wealthy individual in order to hide his other hobbies- kind of like Bruce Wayne, if Bruce Wayne was the Joker instead of Batman.

[attr="class","hopelovetitle"]HISTORY

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Arthur can trace his ancestry back to the tenth century. His ancestors were originally Berber nobles who sided with the Spanish during the reconquista; indeed, his surname, “Rachade” is a corruption of the Arabic “Rashidi”. The stories of Arthur's ancestors represent the sort of decadence, intrigue, and conspiracies of which stories like Game of Thrones are made. The general impression one gets is of a thousand years of psychopaths, and Arthur proudly displays dozens of portraits of his ancestors in one hall of his mansion. As a result of the kind of intermarriage common to European nobles for most of the early modern period, Arthur is distantly related to the King of Sweden as well as the former royal houses of Italy and Greece. He is proud of this fact, not that it comes up much in daily life.[break][break]



Where Arthur's story really begins, though, is with his father, Joseph Racahde. Joseph Rachade was born in Germany in 1890, already part of a wealthy family, and by 1940 was a high-ranking member of the SS. Joseph was a member of the Families, albeit one outside the normal bounds of the other Families, who considered him both unstable and dangerous. Joseph had the power to completely control the minds of others, making their every action completely subject to his whims, and was capable of putting someone under his power with a simple glance. He also possessed an extreme longevity, and apparently stopped aging around the age of 40. Due to some quirk of his power, it was ineffective on close relatives, including siblings and children. It is unknown exactly when Joseph Rachade began committing murders, but in later years he bragged of a body count in the thousands- not including those whose deaths he helped bring about in the Holocaust. After the war, Joseph faked his own death and claimed to be his own son. He suffered no consequences whatsoever for his involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, and profited greatly from the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. By the 1960s he was an extremely wealthy man.[break][break]



Joseph was married ten times and had nearly thirty children during his lifetime, but he had a habit of murdering both wives and children and it is very possible Arthur is the first of his offspring to survive adulthood. Several of Joseph's wives were daughters of wealth, but Arthur's mother was a Romanian sex slave that Joseph kept in a cage in his basement. She bore him five children, two girls and three boys. Arthur was the middle boy. Joseph killed the two daughters shortly after birth (finding them, as female children, to be unworthy), and both of Arthur's brothers he killed during childhood after finding some fault in them. Arthur, however, Joseph delighted in, spending lavishly on him and practically spoiling the boy. It is easy to imagine that Arthur's skills as a student of human nature were honed by living in the same house as Joseph- a house in which the momentary rage of his father could easily mean the end of Arthur's life. Yet Arthur still, for most of his childhood, loved his father, strange and twisted as it was.[break][break]



Joseph introduced Arthur to killing when Arthur was eight. In the basement of their mansion Joseph had Arthur strangle the Romanian woman who was his mother to death. Arthur never even knew her name; Joseph only called her “the woman”. Thereafter, Arthur began assisting his father in killing, often acting as bait to lure in unsuspecting victims and then helping his father torture and then kill them. It amused Joseph to hunt and kill with Arthur as bait, without resorting to his ability except in emergencies. By this time, the most recent spate of Joseph's crimes had become known and he had been christened the Black Forest Ripper by the media. Arthur and his father both ate portions of their victims.[break][break]



Arthur's power manifested when he was eleven. Joseph Rachade saw to it that his son had the best possible training, dipping into the resources the Families had available. It was here that Arthur first began to form a picture of his father as crude and course man. The disdain the other Families had for Rachade was palpable. Somewhere in his heart, Arthur bent himself to become better.[break][break]



Arthur spent his high school years at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, rubbing shoulders with the children of other rich and powerful families. He was glad to go; he had become deeply resentful of his father. During his time there, rumors swirled about a monster that stalked the girls' dorms at night. Several students claimed to have encountered a semi-quadrupedal creature with long teeth and fangs, whose hide changed colors and to blend in like a chameleon. One student disappeared over a weekend and was later found dead at the foot of a nearby cliff; the official verdict was that she had wondered off after drinking too much and fallen off the cliff. Her death was kept from the media so as not to damage the reputation of the school.[break][break]



Arthur attended Oxford University as an undergraduate, where he received a degree in mathematics. Afterwards, he received at dual MD and PhD, getting his PhD in psychology. During the years he was at Oxford, England, especially the area around Oxfordshire, had a surge in unexplained deaths; a number of bodies appeared to have been mutilated and partially consumed by a large animal. Conspiracy theorists took this as evidence for the existence of alien big cats in the United Kingdom; the official position was that the deaths were caused by one or more illegal big cats that had been kept as exotic pets and then released or escaped after adulthood. The big cats in question were never found.[break][break]



Soon after this, Arthur returned to Germany and reunited with his father. His father clapped him on the shoulder and told Arthur how proud his was of him; but Arthur had changed in his years away, and he now regarded his father as filth. He killed Joseph, making the death appear as an accident. A few months later he published a book, Child of the Ripper, where he described his journey investigating his father's past and his conclusion that his father had been the Black Forest Ripper. Arthur's own part in his father's acts was excluded, of course. The book was an international bestseller and brought Arthur to at least temporary prominence around the world. It also, however, brought his family's Nazi connections to light, with the result that Arthur decided to leave Germany and settle in the United States. He began to conduct psychological research at the University of California Berkeley, publishing a few well-received papers on his special interests of hypnosis and the psychology of violence. During this time, Arthur met the director of the FBI at a party, who had read his book and asked him if he wouldn't mind taking a look at a set of murder cases. Several families had been murdered, all in the same fashion, hundreds of miles apart, with no known connection between them and no sign of forced entry into the home. Arthur correctly predicted that the killer was a truck driver who entered suburban neighborhoods and tried doors until he found one that was unlocked, then murdered everyone in the house. And so his relationship with law enforcement was born. He continues to make use of it, helping catch other killers even as he commits murders of his own. He finds saving life and ending it equally intoxicating, in different ways. He is a creature of fate, dealing out life and death according to his own designs. The FBI has a file on his murders, but since he can read it, it's unlikely they will find much of use. And since he owns hundreds of acres in dozens of places around the world, he has plenty of private spaces to use in his hobbies...

[attr="class","hopelovetitle"]POWER

[attr="class","hopelovetop"][attr="class","hopelovesub"]ABILITY[break][break]Biological Metamaterial Production and Manipulation[break][break]



Arthur has the ability to produce a novel fibrous polymer from his skin. Under a microscope, the polymer resembles polyaramids such as Kevlar or (especially) Nomex, but it is in reality a blend of a number of different polymers that give it properties similar to a metamaterial. Arthur refers to this polymer as his “plasmid”. The chemical composition of the polymer is highly complex, but by mass consists primarily of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, meaning that Arthur can draw most of the necessary matter from the air around him. It does sometimes require other materials, which my be drawn from Arthur's body or from the area around them. Arthur has the power to consume most physical objects that he or his polymer touch and process them into material to make the polymer out of. Arthur can use this ability to break down and disintegrate objects that he or his polymer are in physical contact with. Used on a human being, this produces an injury something like a burn but with chunks of the flesh missing; the resulting wounds can be quite terrible. His polymer essentially has the ability to act as an extremely strong oxidizing agent, liberating elements in chemical bonds with each other, then seize the elements thus freed to produce more of his polymer. Arthur is at the mercy of the laws of chemistry during this process; see the limits section for more details. Like the polyaramids, Arthur's plasmids have an extremely high tensile strength and resist fire and chemicals.[break][break]



Arthur can extrude his material from any point on his body and and shape and control it using his nervous system. The extrusion process is extremely quick, allowing Arthur to put out nearly nine hundred cubic inches of polymer every second. Once extruded, Arthur can form it into a variety of shapes and objects, provided that the shapes are relatively simple: He can form clubs, hammers, spikes, or razor blades. He can make his plasmids soft and pliable, or with a hardness and stiffness comparable to carbon nanotubes. He can form hands and tentacles and use them to grab things or smash them as a distance. He can control the shape and color of his plasmids; by sounding his body with a thin, transparent layer he can protect himself from casual attack and small arms fire; by deliberately thickening it he can create quite formidable armor. He can make it extremely slippery and almost impossible to hold on to, or extremely sticky and very difficult to let go of. He can also perform such feats as making himself the same color as the background in a form of camouflage, or use contractions of his polymer to increase his own strength. The number of shapes he can form is practically limitless, although there are a number of practical limitations that come into play. By removing a portion of his plasmid and attaching it to something, Arthur can track that thing until his polymer degrades.

[break][break]LIMITS[break][break]Although Arthur can shape and mold his polymer into practically anything he can imagine, he begins to lose control with larger constructs. These take more time to build and more concentration to control. Also, they must be physically connected to him in order to control them. He therefore either needs to be inside his constructs of connected to them by a line some other way. He cannot form complex machinery and is limited to such things and clubs. Arthur needs mass to form his polymer, which is where the ability to break down chemicals comes in, but he is not immune to chemistry and this action may produce heat or unpleasant byproducts. In some cases these byproducts may expose Arthur to danger if he is not careful. There are some substances he is entirely unable to break down, most notably teflon, which is renowned for the strength of its chemical bonds. If he lacks the ability to borrow matter from his surroundings, Arthur has to take it from the air and his own body, which can be painful, and, long-term, harmful. Although his polymer can be used to make armor, they can't alter the fact that there is a human being inside them, which places an upper limit on Arthur's durability. In general, wile he can shrug off small arms fire relatively easily, he needs at least some preparation to armor himself against more severe threats. A good strategy against him would be to just get a bigger gun. Portions of Arthur's polymer degrade after a few hours separated from him. Arthur can usually control around eight tendrils at once, fewer if he's doing bigger or more complicated things with them. If properly braced, Arthur can use his plasmids to lift a car or throw a motorcycle.[break][break]WEAKNESSES[break][break]Arthur's control of his plasmids is dependent on his nervous system, which results in a few natural weaknesses. Electrical currents disrupt the nervous system and can disrupt his control, as can substances or powers which inhibit his neurotransmitters phenethylamine and dopamine. Neurotoxins will inhibit his powers as well.



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[attr="class","hopelovebot1"]PLAYED BY TWO MCMILLION

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