AL-X Name: Al-X Melchor RL: Alejandro Melchor E-mail: netlupus@hotmail.com (AIM: Al Melchor) ----- RANK & TRAITS Rank: 7 --- Attributes: Fast+, Resilient+, Cunning, Silly, Creative. --- Skills: Martial Arts, Acrobatics, Senseless Trivia, Strategy, Hammerspace. ----- ATTITUDE Style: Werewolf-fu.- By tapping into the lycanthropic primal fury, it bases on the tenet of "strike fast, strike deadly, retreat, repeat". It's a sneaky art form, bent on harrying the opponent and tiring him out, using the superior speed and stamina of a werewolf. It resembles capoeira in the way the practitioner uses all claw-tipped limbs; the bite is used only on killing blows unless the artist wants to infect another with lycanthropy. Communication Sciences Martial Arts.- A purely mental art with little to no physical techniques, it bends and manipulates the flows of communication between persons, objects and reality itself by the creative and improvisational use of communication theories, media models and concepts, and humanity's collective unconscious. Most effects are quasi-psionic or illusory, but others are very much like magic and plain defiance of physical laws. It tends to have unexpected side-effects, though. Firewater School: It channels emotions, usually anger, into fighting prowess and ki blasts. Al has just started studying, so he's not too good at it. --- Methods: He takes nothing seriously, and most of his attacks, defenses and miscellaneous techniques will have some humorous effect to them. He fights cunningly, trying to trick and cheat his opponent, though not in a back-stabbing way. ----- SPECIALS Advantages: Shapeshifting: He can shapeshift instantly between human, woif, werewolf (think Jon Talbain with glasses) and chibiwolf forms. Regeneration: He will regenerate any kind of damage not dealt with silver, wolfsbane or strong corrosive, radioactive or special mystical materials. Bruises, scratches and cuts will heal in seconds; surface burns and fractures in a minute or two; very serious burns, whether from fire, ki or magic will take some hours. --- Disadvatages: Special Vulnerabilty: Silver will burn him seriously in any form he's in, inflicting excruciating pain and extensive damage; even the proximity of large quantities of silver will nauseate him. Wolfsbane acts like tear gas in all forms but human; he'll cough, gag, throw up and, if the dose is strong enough, even die. Trigger: He'll fly into a blind rage whenever U-chan is harmed; directing that fury to the cause of the harm. He becomes a mindless monster, his speed and strength go up, but his strategy and techniques go out the window. Other things can trigger the rage, but he can supress those. "That time of the month".- He gets frisky around the full moon; his pranks turn practical and his mood jumpy. Unpredictability: His CommSci effects often have results he'd rather not have. --- Techniques Stimuli-Response Hypodermic Needle Injects a determinate amount on information into a victim's mind, triggering a calculated response. The user must know how his victim's mind works in order to trigger specific responses. A random, massive attack can drive the victim temporarily insane or confused. Shannon & Weaver Model Techniques The communication model of Shannon & Weaver consists of the following elements: transmitter, (encoding), channel, message, (decoding), receiver, feedback, noise, reference frame. All these elements can be tweaked, diminished, increased and generally get messed up. It's the basis for many other techniques: Feedback Defense The artist can make an attacker feel what he feels by linking a feedback line. Ignorability Field Cuts off and clutters the perceptions of others; making the user hard to notice and easily overlooked. Empathy Wave Reduces the line noise between transmitter and receiver to zero, so the exact meaning and intention is portrayed. It can manifest as an emotional or mental effect, depending on the message. Subliminal Attacks These include a lot of False Inputs; the difficulty resides on the input per se; a lot of psychology and mindbending ability is required to pull off subliminal attacks, not to mention subtlety. Cognitive Dissonance Inducement The user causes confusion in his victim by introducing an idea that clashes with another in the victim's mind. It's primarily a crippling technique that renders the opponent confused and hesitant about something until he/she has had time to think the conflictive ideas through. Information Overload Works at consecutive and cumulative levels, which correspond to the senses of the victim. It causes an overload of information to "crash" the victim's "system" through his senses. The order of the senses affected is arbitrary. SPAMstorm Causes any technique centered on the Message element to multiply en route to the target. Cliche Summoning The user summons a situation embedded in the collective unconscious; these can go from Jungian archetypes to soap opera formulas. The user states the effect desired; the manifestation is entirely up to Reality (read: random). The participants engage in the roles of the cliche for a short time. An effort of will breaks and dispels the Cliche. McLuhan's Techniques. Marshall McLuhan was a Grand Master; his most widespread technique is also the most flexible: the Medium is the Message Attack, which amplifies a message to adopt the qualities of the medium used. The Global Village Link is a powerful version of a gestalt link, causing an increasing number of people to communicate with each other instantly. Cool/Hot Media Control is a faster and more efficient manipulation of the comm. flow than the Shannon&Weaver techniques. Curse of Communication Deprivement Dooms the victim to be withdrawn from every communication process, until he/she ceases to communicate with reality and fades away. Summon Meme: Similar to Cliche Summoning, it's the closest to Communication Sorcery, as it summons a conceptual being called 'meme' that embodies a concept or idea for a multitude of purposes.