Personality

Despite hardly talking to anyone outside his patients, Doctor Marvello is known among them as an outgoing, albeit somewhat eccentric individual, his lively personality matching his quick way of doing things. During his sessions, he’s often talkative and even telling jokes, which makes it easy for his patients to open up to him.

Deep down, however, he isn’t quite as great as he makes himself out to be and has a pretty short temper along with a hard time letting go of grudges. He is also fairly arrogant, reactive to anything that even feels like a jab towards his pride, and rarely actually does things in the interest of others. Most people won’t notice these darker edges of his personality from just small talk, however. It doesn’t help that his friendly demeanor makes it easy for most to assume he’s better than he really is.

Appearance

Marvello is a mouse with greenish-brown fur, a long hairless tail, and somewhat long, thick brown hair and a mustache. His eyes are somewhat unique, with an orange and yellow iris and light blue pupil. His eyebrows are very long and there's some wrinkles at the ends of his eyes. In terms of build, he's fairly tall but scrawny and pretty weak, and as a mouse he's pretty small still at 5'3. Admittedly, he's not a particularly attractive fella, and has a bad case of snaggletooth. The formal clothing he usually wears can slightly distract from it, at least.

His main outfit consists of an expensive, somewhat Victorian-esque orange-yellow coat with a patterned flap that goes from the shoulders to around the back of the neck. The bottom of the coat has frills that are buttoned together and the back has an intricate sun-like design. He has a frilly white collar around his neck along with a dark brown bowtie and frills on each sleeve of his coat. The rest of his outfit consists of a brown collared shirt, dark brown pants, and small brown boots. He also has an orange-yellow tophat with a white feather attached. Three of the diamond symbols are evenly placed on the hat around the rim, two more are on the flap close to his shoulders, and the last two are on the back of his coat above the sun design, of which the seven is in the center of.

Early Life

When Alfred first appeared in the world, he was taken in by a fairly wealthy family who already had several children of their own. He was originally given the last name Shore and was soon raised just like the rest of them. It wasn’t long before he was the second youngest to Jackson Shore, who’d soon become his closest friend while growing up. Jackson, however, was a very bright child, where Alfred on the other hand was not. Due to praise from his parents that his younger brother often received, Alfred began to grow jealous of him over time, especially when they became teens and, soon, adults.

As they did so, their friendship began to fall away and they grew less and less close to each other. Jackson got his own dreams of becoming a famous inventor, and with his smarts and several friends to watch his back, this would likely become true before long. Alfred, meanwhile, found it hard to make any friends, and his aspiration to become a magician proved to be a pipe dream time and time again. Even his parents began to pay less attention to him anymore, and all eyes were on Jackson. Although he said nothing of it, a deep resentment was starting to rise inside of Alfred, but that doesn’t mean he felt no pity for what was about to happen next.

Later Years

At this time, Alfred and Jackson were 28 and 27 respectively. At such an age, Jackson was already on the rise, and his most recent venture was his biggest one yet. Taking a job at a non-profit organization, he started single-hand work on a machine to help aid children and teens in warming up to their adoptive parents, along with treating any depression that they could have from past trauma. It was an ambitious project that would require many more years to complete, but unfortunately, there wouldn’t be any time for that. One day he’d turn up dead in his home after not showing up for work, and although the exact cause is unknown, an underlying medical issue seemed to be at play that was sadly not noticed soon enough. Many mourned the loss of the inventor, and even Alfred certainly wasn’t glad to hear the news. Then again, though, he didn’t know how to feel.

But as with any death, people soon moved on. Jackson’s project was shelved by the company, but that got Alfred curious, and he soon looked further into it. He wasn’t planning on stealing his brother’s invention, or at least, not at first. When he booted up the last prototype that Jackson had made, however, lightbulbs went off in the mouse’s head. This wasn’t any old machine that could help the lives of children. This machine could work wonders... and make a whole lot of money. And so, he snuck out with it. Surely Jackson wouldn’t mind if he borrowed it for just a little while, right? It’d do better in his brand new magic trick than sitting around in a warehouse all day.

Over the next year, Alfred ended up breaking all contact with his family, afraid of the possible repercussions if they found out. Then again, they never truely cared about him, did they? He moved somewhere isolated far up north where he could never be found, and vowed to never reveal even his first legal name to his patients. He made his brother’s machine his own: a machine that can kindle love between two people. A machine to make the world happier. The machine became inseparable from the image he was beginning to make of himself, not as a magician, but as a man of pure wonder. It was, however, still a prototype, years before it would’ve been complete. There was no guarantee that it wouldn't have its flaws, just waiting to appear…

Sessions

Although Marvello will often pretend that he made it, not even he totally knows how Jackson’s machine works. It mainly creates high-quality projections in a single enclosed space, however, and said projections can be modified by the mind. These projections are often so realistic that most of his patients assume they’re real and that they’ve actually entered their minds. This was, of course, the most studied and finished part of the machine. The other part, however, was less completed, that being the literal effects that the machine had on the mind. Although it fulfills its purpose of bringing two closer together, it's often found to make patients strangely cheerful as well, perhaps uncannily so. It only gets worse over time, and the changes the machine makes are permanent.

That is not the only thing Marvello takes credit for, however, as there are plenty of additions that he made himself. Back from when he wanted to be a magician, he figured out several tricks and scents to make the projections more believable as well as increasing upon his patients’ feeling of wonder. Everything's better when you add a little magic to it, after all. One iconic piece is his interesting triple-lense glasses, where he managed to reuse a bit of Jackson’s invention to create them. With just a little intricate light-refracting materials, the image inside is always completely different, but so vague that it becomes whatever the viewer wants it to be, or whatever Marvello says it is. All in all, he put a lot of work into creating his sessions, but it would be nothing without Jackson’s machine.

Other trivia

• - The home he lives in appears to be an old, almost dilapidated wooden house on the outside and aside from being somewhat creepy, it's rather unassuming. As soon as one enters, however, the interior is a grand mansion with golden, gem-plated pillars and framed paintings decorating the walls. Safe to say it gets a little lonely in there, but only sometimes.
• - He canonically has bad breath and hates children.
• - Despite being a freak in almost every regard, he has a very just-some-guy voice.
• - Some common nicknames (before he became known as Doctor Marvello) include Alfie and Al, but never Fred.
• - He was originally based on the song Doctor Marvello by Klaatu, and his species, being a mouse, was due to this inspiration with the band's mascot being one.