Post by fappy on Mar 25, 2023 6:48:26 GMT
General Information
Full Name:
Jason Wyngarde
Codename or Alias:
"Mastermind" “Lord Imperial”
Anonymity
Wyngarde himself is a businessman with ventures spanning the globe; as the Lord Imperial, his movements are discreet to the point of being clandestine to the real world - a cipher, celebrated by the rank and file members of The Hellfire Society.
Gender:
Male
Race:
Human
Age:
41
Place Of Birth:
Columbus, Mississippi
Occupation/Status:
Businessman, philanthrope, and vaunted criminal
Alignment:
Villain
Factions:
The Hellfire Society
Canon Or Original?:
Canon (X-Men)
Powers/Abilities:
Illusion Casting
[spoil]Jason Wyngarde’s mutation grants him the powerful ability of crafting psionic illusions. Though these illusions themselves pose no physical threat, the victim(s) will sensate (hear, touch, feel, smell, see) what has been presented to them, regardless of whether or not they are aware of the trick. If, for instance, Jason were to manipulate a group of people into perceiving themselves locked in an iron room, despite them being in an open field, only their perceptual reality will alter to Jason’s specifications; physically the environment itself would remain the same
The difficulty of creating these illusions falls on Jason’s inherent charm and humor. To initiate them, Jason must first lull his targets through tact, be it simple conversation or more forceful means such as sedatives or psychological taunting. Once settling on a theme or subject, Jason subliminally focuses on a series of words and phrases relating to such, until their conscience projects what’s intended.
There are limits to his mutation. Just as Jason cannot simply quell an entire city block just be thinking it, he also is incapable of crafting an illusion which lasts longer than his physical presence in the vicinity, unless through means of amplification (via telepathy or self-designed modifications).[/spoil]
Memory Manipulation
[spoil]A more specific usage of his mutation tailored for individual cases, the crux of Wyngarde’s memory manipulation itself relies on three specific tenants:
1.Only select, recent memories (i.e. interactions with Wyngarde outside of illusions) are subject to manipulation.
2.The victim’s memory can’t be erased if in a crowd, or during a mass illusion.
3. Single memories are feasible, an entire history can’t be erased. Must be performed separately multiple times to erase multiple memories.
Although his prowess for manipulation itself is highly noted, memory erasure or adjustment is difficult, even on the most gullible of minds. Jason Often avoids using this ability altogether unless a matter of need arises. The effects of his memory manipulation can be reversed by a psychic/telepath of mid-level skill.[/spoil]
Sensory Deprivation/Sensory Overload
[spoil]Simplified illusory states used specifically for torture and information gathering. These states rely on simple sense relays (hands, feet, eyes, nose, tongue) picking up on a subliminal message delivered orally by Jason and transmitting them to the subconscious, which after a series of repetitious declarations process the messages as sensory feelings.
Deprivation is the loss of senses. This state is brought on a specific set of keywords (drought, dry, loss, thirst) spoken in repetition, framed usually in sequence, with which the subject responds in kind to a loss of sight, smell, hearing, touch, or taste. Individual manipulations are often the most practical application of this ability.
Conversely, sensory overload equates to the overwhelming of senses. The keywords (sprawl, full, collide, now) are delivered in the same fashion as with deprivation, with the exception that the result is in itself the reverse - the total realization of all sense to the point of anguish.
Both deprivation/overload are in themselves worthless on a crowd, as the individual messages can be lost, mistranslated, and misinterpreted. Both sensory states are reliant on his presence in the immediate area.[/spoil]
Weapons/Items:
A cane and whale-bone cigarette holder
Appearance
Image:
Physical Appearance:
Jason Wyngarde carries with him a rustic charm. Handsome, a rounded face bluntly composed to accent his difficult to place cheekbones, tawny in hue, and groomed fervently, Wyngarde displays the characteristics of a dandy. His limbs are of average make, his torso clean but also round from too much fine eating, if his stature paled in comparison to his character, he’d be fat; yet, Jason stands at 5’8’’, and boast the build of a silent film actor.
His eyes are of light blue and combat the constant lines of age and smoking which batter his face when he scowls. His hair is a dark brown, Jason preferring to keep everything exactly as it is. If a man must sell himself, let him sell himself as he is, and not he perceives himself to be - perception ultimately is the door that’ll fail him.
Clothing and Armor:
Jason adorns himself in various fineries, though he’s most often seen wearing a velvet vest or herringbone blazer. It all depends on the setting: if it’s a fine lunch, a red tux and white loafers; if it’s an interrogation, a grey tweed jacket and steel toed boots; if it’s a festive evening of drinking and scheming, then perhaps he’s best suited mixing and matching his endless closets for something as flamboyant as possible.
Personality
Bad Habits:
Sociopathic tendencies, illusions of grandeur, growing paranoia
Sexual Orientation:
Straight
General Personality:
Self-assured, flamboyant, and silver tongued, Wyngarde is the archetypal southern dandy. Entire parties position themselves around his presence, leaders of industry clamor for a moment of his conversation; he’s an influencer, an old fashioned gentleman. Words flow from Jason’s mouth like the soothing trickle of a brook. People often remark about the transitive qualities of his diatribes, long winded, delivered in sticky patois dissimilar to the local flavor of speech from his old stomping grounds.
Wyngarde is drawn to the nature of control, and how to wield true, definable power to his advantage. This interest has rotted him from the inside, no longer is he the smooth, charismatic dandy presented by his simulacrum: he’s vain, jealous, easily angered and frustrated, impulsive, and slowly slipping into a state of egotistic delirium. Ambition faults no road taken to its end, less that road veers to the conceptual foreground of the doomed, a path which Jason has averted prior when he was a young man; now this ambition wells from within, threatening to burst.
Paranoia paints his recent activities. Jason has become increasingly sensitive to remarks, often driven to anger if insulted even in the slightest. Drawing the wrath of the Red King is as good as signing your own death certificate; Jason’s fits are stuff of legend, almost always someone is bound to turn up missing. Even his schemes are less concise - he’s sloppy, with frequent Freudian slips.
Character's History
Siblings:
Quentin Wyngarde Jr. (Brother), Taylor-Marie Wyngarde (Sister, deceased)
Mother:
Anna-Beth Wyngarde
Father:
Quentin Wyngarde
Other Family:
Regan Wyngarde (Daughter)
Martinique Wyngarde (Daughter)
History:
The tract of the old Wyngarde farm spans two ends. The first is the physical end, Jason’s ancestors purchased the farm for an infinitesimal fraction of the land’s present value. His great grandfather brought in farm hands from Virginia, of the slave variety and over a thirty year span and one war built a fortune out of cotton, sorghum, and sugar cane. In 1905, his grandfather inherited this tract, but lacked the initiative to do anything more than drink their patents and bonds away. By 1934, all but the big house was sold. He was dead before the second world war, leaving it all to an unborn son.
The second end is more contrite in form, though pathos dictates it must be explained - for a tale is a tale. Quentin Wyngarde, by the by, hated his father, and like all good sons diverted from their fathers path. Fortune sought him in spite of the times: the 50’s prosperous, the 60’s steady, and by the time of Jason’s birth, the 70’s shaking up and tearing down dreams of antebellum and re-establishing the Wyngarde brand under a modern industry, banking.
Jason grew up between several beautiful homes. The family homestead itself, resting in the heart of rural Mississippi, harbored the likes of distant and close relatives, shifting through the home as if they were wet bags caught in a gale. Quentin intended this house to be a palace for the family; Jason, as he grew older, wished to tear the damn thing down and kick all the freeloaders out.
Jason was the youngest of his siblings; an older brother, named after their father, already built his way into the family business and lived in New York, visiting occasionally and often gifting Jason with trinkets and junk from his trips abroad. Their sister lived the life of southern belle. Jason was quite fond of her despite her tragedy: murdered and left on the side of the road when he was around ten. It effectively left him a single child.
Hiding his mutation from his kin was quite easy at first, though over time maids, gardeners, and other general members of the help staff grew weary of this charming child’s manipulations. His parents were susceptible to his illusion; at first innocuous, these illusions became commonstance enough that his mother suffered flashbacks of strange happenings as old age brought her nearer to death’s doormat. Jason never thought twice about testing his powers on his parents, relatives, or really anyone he could trick into partaking, the child a curious sort, never malignant, at least at that time. Consider childhood a time where our best and worst tendencies are sorted out on a plate and we’re given the opportunity to pick and choose between them to our heart’s content. Our venerable criminal here just happened to pick the wrong pieces.
Control, be it physical, emotional, material, or ethereal, grew to be an obsession of his. While mistaking him for a great student is in itself a mistake, a grave, unfortunate mistake should one consult his various teachers, Jason learned from his mishaps like a naval fleet learned from sinking ships: never err twice if could be helped. Ego, his constant friend and colleague, guided him from childhood to adulthood blindly.
What Jason was incapable of learning in school, he picked up in his father’s love, money. Money signified the cure all for Quentin Wyngarde, more than happy to help his son through the ranks as he did with Jason’s eldest brother. An important distinction between Quentin’s sons happened to be ambition; one with a marked loss of such (Quentin, predisposed to comfort), one with too much (Jason, sweet, sweet Jason).
Praeteritio, full stop. Full stop before departing for the fall. For Jason, he’s never reached the bottom; just kept on descending, until it was just him, pilfering through industries, searching in some sense for the god shaped hole. If it wasn’t money, it was power; something he learned from his father’s wing, never take your hat off until you knew who was in charge. At sixteen, while still in prep school, Jason landed an internship at one of his father’s municipal projects. Steady slow work, he didn’t mind it, his mutation granted him the leeway of charming everyone without ever having to say a word. This was where he first thought of the nom-de-plume, Mastermind.
Mastermind, by and by, grew out of a need to finally stop playing it safe. Crimes and schemes weren’t easy to come up with, time could tell you as much. Police busted Jason’s first scam, the federal government his second. Neither brought charges to his feet, instead throwing them off to the local courts to deal with - a minor, why, who the hell wanted to send him to prison, his father contributed his share, why bother that family? Mastermind grew out of the weakness of those and a vast amount of other authoritative bodies, unable to arrest him because of his father’s looming reputation, unable to prosecute or even get a look at his smug face as he cleared the lobbies of courthouses time and time again.
At 23, his father passing away the year before while golfing, Jason assumed the Wyngarde crest. All contacts, contracts, and seedy deals under his father’s name became his, much to Jason’s surprise the latter was its own warehouse in Richmond, Kentucky. As he later would repeat as a personal mantra “I don’t think I existed until I took a bolt cutter to that lock and saw how much there was to pick up.” And piece by piece, he built an empire - banks, venture capitalist firms, serious off the books investments in weapons, chemical, and “other” conglomerations. Each an avenue to hone in his craft.
Which brings me around to The Hellfire Society. When a man pushes himself so far into the abyss, something is bound to push back, to paraphrase that hack of nihilist compunction. Found, vetted, and groomed by Sebastian Shaw after a particular shake up on Jason’s part ( Shaw saw though Jason’s attempt to glad hand him with an illusion of a buxom blonde as part of pitch for a shady acquisition), these two were a hand in glove fit. Shaw liked Jason’s spry and concise manner of going about things, Jason admired Shaw’s experience and ambition. The Hellfire Society welcomed Jason’s wallet with open arms, and Jason with slight apprehension.
Power is an unnatural salve to the restless soul. Power begets ambition, ambition begets conspiracy. Sebastian Shaw warranted Jason’s unbridled thirst for control by bringing him into the society and eventually seating the young southerner as his White King. With free reign to do as he please, Jason saw the position of Lord Imperial as the ultimate consolidation of his goals. Ends meeting ends. Shaw was old hat and stale, despite his fearsome abilities; Shaw’s fading frontier threatened the luxury looming on the horizon.
Of course, it only takes a few broken eggs...or in this case, a coup on the eve of Jason’s thirty third birthday. Convincing those who were loyal to Shaw was easy: most were disgruntled or weary of Shaw’s decorum. Yes, fresh leadership! Yes, more material wealth! Like cattle bought and sold by a thousand head, they fell to Jason’s charms. On the night of Shaw’s ousting, Jason assumed the roles of both Judas and Brutus, a traitor with a smile; he acted as if he were still in Shaw’s pocket, paraded the former Lord Imperial around and around, promising his complete and utter fealty. Then, knives out. Figuratively, of course. Even if they are uncouth criminals, The Hellfire Society forbids to this day violence during their meetings.
With Shaw stripped of his mantle yet allowed to remain a member of the society (A Wyngarde always remembers his friends), Wyngarde ascended. He’s brought himself to the height of his dreams, commanding legions of foul bastards to do his foul bidding, toppling governments, holding entire industries in the palm of his hand. However, one can only live their dreams for so long before the act of looking over your shoulder becomes more than just a nervous tick; after all, someone is bound to come for a king’s head. Eight years in, with the eve of his forty second birthday close at hand, Wyngarde has made strides to clear his cellar of those proverbial rats. His actions have divided members of the cabal, and whisperings of another coup have reached Jason’s ears. Whether or not his paranoia is warranted has yet to be determined. Something, mind you, is stirring, and far be it from Jason to miss a party if he’s the guest of honor. Let Shaw be a warning: it’s easy to convince a man if he’s hungry. It’s easier to take his food away after he’s full.
Role Play Sample: (Required for all canons and powerful/significant OCs)
“Gentleman”
And there he was, all smile. All calm hand; an executioner in a red suit. Composed, passionate, speech so smooth he could overthrow a government, if such were his intentions. Not tonight, however, tonight was clean and gentle, tonight was lark warble. Tonight was christening the ship that would take to them to the promised land, to the furthest regions of illustrious wealth and power hitherto undreamt of by either present or past members of their little coterie. Sebastian! Time certainly does destroy more than it heals. Time and effort; he should have erased that coward from their minds, but those matters can come much, much later. First there was legacy to discuss. “Gentleman, may I have your attention? Or, if you’d prefer me to be a little more direct, now that I have your attention, I pose to you all a little question. What is legacy?” Jason clears his throat for effect, eyes picking through the gathered members of The Hellfire Society in the brief silence while he gathered some loose thoughts into a secular frame. “Legacy is what we have in front of us. Not the men we leave wasted in the weeds, not the tyrants we manipulate, not the agencies we’ve toiled, tussled, and ultimately have beaten time and time again. Your legacy, is what you have sitting in front of you right now.”
“Gentleman, why are we throwing our time away on minutiae? Morsels, scraps, I inquire, just why are we content to waste away in vile luxury?”
Jason stands up, a modest build for a (modest) man of his societal placement, far enough up the ladder that fear of the eventual fall never went away. He wears a red blazer with a china white pocket square, his beard is trimmed sharply, Jason insisting on facial hair which compliment the miniscule demeanor of his muscles as they bob and weave with the manner of his speaking, and despite his sticky southern drawl everything he says is concise. The limits of control, mind you, force Jason to approach his manipulations like a clockmaker to an antique gear, steady hand, steady face. Don’t say too much. All along the tables delicately put together to resemble the Society’s logo from above, Jason at the very head of the room, icons of greed and villainy lapped up his words - after all, he was their Lord Imperial. Jason Wyngarde was like honey caught in the creases between their teeth, or a bitter psychological pang that will always drive you to commit sin. He never expressed doubt, he never showed his hand, and never once did he drag them along into endeavors which found them caught up with the kind of altruistic forces pure, unshakable power could never contend with. They were back in the shadows, just as he hoped, leeching away the world’s resources - money, political power, technological industries - to fund their little vanity projects.
“Clearly I’m not content, otherwise I wouldn’t be addressing each and everyone of you wonderful, wonderful souls. I would be sitting down and enjoying this fine meal paid for by the power of truth. That is my legacy, wielding the power of the mind, and any weaker man would be fine with just that.” Jason huffs, wiping away crumbs from his left shoulder, “Why just last week I padded our good old American coal industry by paying some very good friends of mine to collapse several mines throughout South America. I made a lot of money, as did many of you.”
To his left is Veidt, the magnate and steadfast beacon ascending through the ranks at the same speed as Jason. If only he could trust Veidt... instead Jason kept him close at hand, keeping his machinations away from Adrian altogether and allowing the Black Rook his own agenda. Presently, as always, Jason failed to read Adrian, and avoided eye contact altogether. This wasn’t for him anyways. He was here for show. To distract from the whispers of Jason’s strange behavior as of late, rumors put out perhaps by the Lord Imperial himself to weed out those with ambitions succeeding his own. Veidt was one of those types, and there was enough rope - so Jason thought - provided for Adrien to hang himself when the goals aimed too high. Gravity, as the southerner likes to say, never fails anyone in need of it. “Money is fine. I have more than enough to keep my body and soul purified from the demon known as “want”.
The Lord Imperial climbs atop his table, scattering plates of food all over their respective massicators as he steps to his right and paces back and forth, raising the tone of his voice to match the spontaneity of his actions. “Now I ask again, and will give as much time as it take to describe to me what you think your legacy is?” In between the silence he hums an Appalachian folk tune, fingers skipping along his knees as if they were a washboard. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Everyone was still silent. “So I’m right. What we have in our ranks, is a lack of ambition. As I said earlier, we’re content when we should keep striving!”
At the snap of the finger, the life of the party is essentially nullified. Sotto voce, Jason intones, “Let’s all (look) at the (fire) future. Perhaps (feel) I mistook this lot for my own,” before speaking up, “Striving, and not end up like this poor fellow here.”
In a cage carried out by men in white vests a former member of The Society recently captured by the authorities screams in agony. “THIS HOUSE IS ON FIRE, THIS HOUSE IS ON FIRE.” Jason hops from the table and signals to the center of the room. “I provide here, a fine specimen of American ingenuity. Brash, loud, and apparently insane.” He runs his fingers along the bar, antagonizing the shouting man inside. “Now I’m going to ask you to stop yelling.” With another snap of the finger the man quiets down, cradling himself and rocking back and forth, sobs of anguish filling up the room. “Now normally, I’d open up the bidding process, but since our man here has thrown all sense of importance away by telling his secrets to some nasty international agency, what fun would it be take his life, even if the means are inventive?”
“What we should do…” Jason grins, “Is throw him back to his friends with a little bow attached.” He finally glances at Adrien, bored beyond all belief in his chair, never once a fan of Wyngarde or his crude plays. “What (you) do (are) you say (stone), hmm?”
“Stop it Jason.”
Having had enough of The Lord Imperial’s shenanigans, Adrian breaks the festivities with a scowl. Jason replies, “Oh, that’s ’exactly where I’m going with this. We need to stop doing nothing. I propose a plan, which by all means you are free to oppose if the labor is too intense.”
Clapping his hands together, Jason continues, “I say we break up the world economy, piece by piece, a slow, painful plan, yes, but fruitful enough for a serpent like me to sell to our...benefactors.”
“And before I go any further, we should have cake. Decisions are best made after dessert.”
Cart after cart, cake is served to the audience; conversation bursts from each table, most enthralled or entertained by the spectacle, though some are not quite sure of the inherit meaning behind the outburst. After returning to his table, the man in the cage hauled out at
Jason’s request, Jason squeezes Adrian’s shoulder, whispering into his ear, “You’re getting restless now. I like that.”
“You’re insane”
“I have to be, Adrian, otherwise none of us would know which jar was piss and which was marmalade, and I don’t want you specifically to drink a jar of bodily fluid because you had a bad idea. Now cheer up and eat your cake.”
