Aberrant RPG - Shades of Gray

[Matt]

Who the hell is this guy," you may be wondering. "What kind of authority does he have to write squat about the state of nova life today?" As my first article for this wondrous little façade, I'd like to lay it all out on the table. My whole life will be laid bare on the slab for all of the rubber-neckers to gawk at.

Maybe you're not asking any of that. Maybe you don't care and are simply one out of a million sheep looking for a little entertainment or someone to give you your opinions. It all amounts to the same thing in the end. Never fear, I'll try to keep you as informed, inspired, or paranoid as you wish to be. A word of caution before you read on, faithful readers…I'm fresh out of rose-colored glasses, so you had better have your own.

My childhood was alright I guess. Rich parents who let their little boy have the run of their Garden District home. We had a little place near Napoleon and Prytania. If you know the area, the term "little place" is relative. To put it more appropriately, it was small for the neighborhood. It would have been an idyllic life, but for a series of "little" things.

You see, I also had this uncle who liked little boys and girls. A little too much, if you get my meaning. He had two sons and two daughters. The boys were his late wife's from a previous marriage and were a little old for him. The youngest was a great guy, really easy to get along with. He died in the same auto accident as his mother. Unfortunately, the oldest was a mirror image of my uncle, psychologically that is. It's pretty scary when you think about it, considering the fact that they weren't actually related and all.

Anyway, my monthly weekends at their place were pure torture. I won't go into the details here, but I really felt sorry for the girls. They had to live there, for God's sake. They never left any marks or anything, so I got the idea that they had practiced on the girls until they got pain without marks down to an art form by the time I came into the picture. Unfortunately, all this happened in the 70's and 80's and there wasn't a chance in hell that I would erupt like a lot of kids are starting to do today. It does my heart good to see some sadistic bastard get smoked by some newly erupted kid that he's screwing around with. It really does.

Anyway, I didn't remember any of this stuff until just recently. I was in therapy having my head examined to find out why I tend to lose chunks of my life when I erupted. My therapist is a nova and she was taking me back into my childhood using some funky psyche power. It happened when I happened to land smack in the middle of a memory of those sick, twisted SOB's. I would have blown her walls down, but she had them reinforced years earlier. It seems that a lot of people erupt in a psychologist's office, go figure. Anyway, she made sure that I headed over to the local Rashoud Clinic to have my powers checked out. It was there that I was finally informed that I had MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) and that they wanted for me to stay at the clinic to be tested and studied further.

To make a long story short (too late), they discovered that all of my personalities had developed their powers differently…As though they were all different people. Needless to say, Project Utopia was highly interested. So interested, in fact, that they have made no steps in the past 5 years to relieve me of my psychological problems. Instead, they have tried to teach each of my personalities how to best use their powers. They keep telling me that I have great potential that I must learn to harness. They were probably hoping that when they do go the distance and merge my personalities, I will be the most powerful nova in existence or something, and feel indebted to them enough that I would become their poster child as another of their shining achievements. Whatever…

Needless to say, I am now making the bucks working for DeVries and doing this little column for N! Prime. It's a living. Well, now that's out of the way, you won't have to hear much more about it in the future. I just figured that you would want to know the poor bastard that's on the other end of the screen before he starts invading your happy little world with his own little form of enlightenment. You can just listen to me rant about the state of the world today and get paid for it and feel confident in the fact that I'm, at the very least, as screwed up as you are. Ain't life grand?

- Damon Gray

There's a chill about us

and there's a sadness with us

and deep within us

lies this shade of gray.