Eσοπτρον

Name: The Corinthian, Cory to friends.
Age: Recreated in 1991. Total recall of the first incarnation created in 10000 BCE.
Height: Typically 5’9”
Sexuality: GayPhysical:
Built for utility. There isn’t a spare ounce in his body that isn’t used for movement. Not overly muscular, but well formed the way dingos and other midsized predators are. Cory has white-white hair, typically short and rough on top. He presents as albino with very fair skin. Angular face, aquiline nose, wide mouth, like if Willem Dafoe was a young 20-something twink. He smiles often and it shows in his face lines. Covered in thin laceration scars from neck to foot.The infamous teeth eyes–even, not pointy, but plenty good at biting. Teeth grinding is a restless tic, and sometimes loud enough to hear coming from his whole face direction. Cory “cries” blood. If you see clear tears–that’s not crying, that’s salivation. That’s hungry.He dresses young. Loose rolled up t shirts, bleached jeans, occasionally denim jackets. White, occasionally washed out grays or blues. Buckskin leather boots and similar tastes in expensive accessories.In nightmares, Cory can and does take the shape most effective for his clients. This can be his usual form (the unfamiliar Stranger), but just as often can be friends, family, or even the person in question. Regardless of shape, in dreams Cory is stark white, clothes and all, no exceptions or variations.Story:
A nightmare as a force of change. Nightmares occur when the client experiences cognitive dissonance, stagnation, or moral injury. Nightmares are a cross between vultures cleaning out rot, and flint and steel causing combustion. It’s useful to think of them as conduits for humans to sort themselves out, and providing the subconscious catalysts for them to begin change. This can be good or bad change, and a good nightmare doesn’t hold stakes in the direction its clients take.Cory is very comfortable with his work as a nightmare. He is the fear of guilt, of taboo and temptation, of becoming monstrous/impotent, of strangers, of being out of control, of the friction between dominance and forced invisibility.His past incarnation thrived throughout the growth of civilizations. Something warped in him with the advent of colonial projects. The quickly rising entity of market enterprise and puritanical norms made the first Corinthian the most popular and influential nightmare from the 1600s onward. But this skewed his priorities and attachment to cultural fears–and by the late 19th century, the first Corinthian had fully embodied and embraced the hunger to freely eat the waking world in his image. Dream would call this pettiness, becoming too human.Present:
Cory follows much of the comic events since his reincarnation. He has recalibrated priorities, emphasizing his reflection and periphery of human experience. He is more and less emotional–now with capacity for remorse, he is empathetic to the human desire to push away/get closer to the power to harm others very badly. Shameless but afraid, no regrets over his past but despises his similarities to the first.He is absent of ambition or conceptualizing true freedom outside of “going astray.“ He often does what he wants, becomes frustrated when he can’t, but rarely feels insult or offense being reprimanded.He frequently scavenges corpse eyes, both human and animal. Sometimes hunger takes hold of him and he becomes very not nice about it. But he has never eaten from or preyed on a waking human. Good for him.He is fond of humans of all stripes, but particularly affectionate in his attention towards the repressed, the anxious freaks, and walking contradictions. He likes to tease, likes to people watch, likes to sit in parks, likes insects.

Name: B, Bruce Wayne, Batman, Malone, oocly "Mountain"
Age: 44
Height: 6'3"
Sexuality: Bi, prefers men.Physical:
Top+bottom-heavy silhouette with most of his weight carried in extremities. High cheekbones, bulky trapezius, sharp obliques without visible abs. His shape is dense diagonal vectors rather than blocky which makes him look softer than one might expect for his weight class. Keeps his hair buzzcut short.Eye contact with him feels like staring at well water: a transparency that lets you see way too far down without any clear sense what's in there.Deep but well-healed scar through the right side of upper+lower lip down to his chin, many healed bite scars and skin grafts over the body. He wears a medical back brace corset under clothes. He favors lounge clothes and cool colors, often accessorizes with bracelets and keepsake pendants. He can be fairly androgynous in styling. Femme cougar in the body of a juiced up gym rat.His batsuit is a high fashion tactical gimp suit and you cannot change my mind.Story:Mostly typical Batman backstory fare, enough said.B takes inspiration from such sources as Zero Year, Kings of Fear, Gotham County Line.Batman as a tightrope between logic vs intuition, deduction vs interpretation, health vs sickness (of a place and self), protection vs vulnerability, connection vs rejection.B had a rocky adolescence, multiple fights and suspensions from school, culminating in hospitalization at 17. Wayne estate money afforded stabilizing in retreat-style treatment instead of running the roulette of inpatient public hospital settings. That said, he didn't click with any long term intervention, hence his ongoing search for purpose leading to vigilantism.B started his mission on the premise of vengeance for the dead, and his early prototypes centered on burial shrouds and phantom/devil imagery as if to be a literal haunting passing judgment on corruption. The early days of Batman were focused on organized crime.The "Rogue" phenomenon in Gotham appeared in several waves, posited as a kind of memetic contagion, beginning with "Wave Zero" which included Joker, The Riddler, and The Penguin. So on and so forth.Though systemic problems absolutely play a role in Gotham's high propensity for Bad Things Happening, it is a baked-in reality that Gotham is built on salted earth in a literal occult sense. City's haunted. City's got ghosts in its blood. It's got it's own patron demon. Everyone is a little crazier because of it.Present:B exists as a low-tech, high-investigation Batman. No super algorithms that can hack anything. Access to surveillance and cloud information is limited and arduous. He is a classic detective and likes to spend his time disregarding personal privacy by sniffing into offices and crime scenes he isn't allowed in.B is a high defense, low offense fighter that prefers pressure holds and clinches to aggression. This applies to his words as much as physical fights. Subdued and sharp. He is highly emotional software running on emotionally flat hardware. He isn't being dismissive or cold, he is using his maximum volume of expressiveness.B has a very complicated and fucked up conceptualization of his identity and humanity that I could go on and on about and eventually will. I play him explicitly with an unspecified dissociative disorder. All of it is B but some parts are more B than others. You know what I mean.What you need to know is he is stubborn, avoidant, obsessive, kind, pragmatic, smart but stupid, skeptical, and has terrible personal boundaries with bad people who he thinks he can save. He is a good person, but a bit of a downer. Good at comforting someone in crisis, terrible at comforting someone's everyday frustration.