Tolys Mareika
atroscence
- Created
- 8 months, 26 days ago
- Creator
- atroscence
- Favorites
- 24
Profile
01 — Profile
Charismatic and friendly, Tolys's academic brilliance shines through in nearly everything that he does. He's almost always seen with a smile on, talking to others, making connections and maintaining the threads in his never-ending network of people. Regardless of the cost, he's determined to accomplish his goals and get the recognition that he thinks he deserves.
-
Wears a cross tie; the ends are hidden under his suitvest.
-
EQE glove is only on his right hand. The “Q” in the symbol glows yellow when he’s channeling essence.
-
Armbands are on both sides of his coat jacket, and have the Investigators’ symbol printed on them.
-
Investigators’ symbol is printed on both sides of his briefcase.
-
Important to draw with collar chain, since it marks him as part of the Investigation Division.
02 — Personality
It’s hard to picture Tolys without a smile. Incredibly sociable and highly charismatic, it’s easy to skip hours of time just talking to him: how he laughs at the right moments, constantly engages you in the conversation, never quite feels like he’s taking over your time, it’s just a quick chat... until you realize that it’s six in the evening and you’ve missed an appointment or two and lost your whole afternoon. He has a way of insidiously working his way into becoming a part of people’s daily routines, a presence just subtle enough not to be noticed but just constant enough to be missed – which is why he constantly receives comments on how he’s been gone so long or always asked where he’s been. He’ll always say that he’s been “busy” in response to the first question -- and shrug off the second with a grin and an ambiguous laugh.
Opinions on him are always highly divided. The people that he talks to once or twice, that share a lunch with him and move on -- those are the people that genuinely enjoy his presence. The people that are willing to take his friendliness at face value, who see his charisma as natural, rather than trained -- they tend to like what they see. The people that don’t realize they’re being pulled to stand in certain ways, manipulated to respond in specific ways or answer questions they didn’t intend on answering -- they like Tolys, but they’ll never see him for who he truly is.
Anybody who bothers to dig under Tolys’s bright, talkative facade quickly see a man that would be nearly hollow -- if not for the ambition, the drive, the determination that haunts almost every move he makes. To Tolys, every person that he meets is somebody that can, one day, spread his name. Every action that he takes serves to cement the legacy that he’s determined to leave on the world around him. Terrified of ever being forgotten, Tolys wants to be able to make such a big impact on the world and the people around him that his name is still being said years after he’s gone, written in the pages of history until the end of time -- regardless of what he has to do in order to actually make it there.
Armed with his Machiavellian ways of thought, Tolys fully believes that no sacrifice he needs to make is too great for the lofty goals that he’s genuinely convinced himself he’s capable of achieving. Sure, this encompasses a level of sacrificing others and letting them die for the cause -- but to Tolys, the effort he’s willing to put into his work through self-sacrifice is what’ll really make his legacy worth it. When pushed to the brink, he always finds a way to be the last one standing; when entirely exhausted, he always finds a way to write and work another hour; when anybody else would give up on themselves, Tolys doesn’t -- he can’t -- allow himself to. The impossibly high standards he holds themselves to are stretched thinner and thinner with every victory he allows himself. He’s not sure when his thirst for more will ever be truly sated.
-
Flowers -- particularly oleanders and tiger lilies.
-
Anatomy textbooks.
-
Libraries.
-
The sound of clocks ticking.
-
Being compared to others, especially his family.
-
Classical music.
-
Bitter foods.
-
Being stuck on a puzzle.
03 — Background
Past
Born to a family of powerful espers intimately involved in the EQE industry, it was a disappointment to his father when it became evident that Tolys had no natural ability to control any essence of his own. Sure, EQE was something that he could be trained in once he turned 18 -- but the pressure for him to become “just as much of a natural” as his parents were had been imposed on him since he was a child. He knew that he would be fully expected to pick up EQE the moment he turned of-age, and he threw himself into its study -- its design, its use, its improvements. He would spend hours reading and studying every single aspect of essence he possibly could in an effort to prepare himself for his eighteenth birthday.
Despite his lack of natural essence use, he was, from a young age, brought into the fold of the rich and powerful: the industry magnates, the government politicians, the EQE corporation board members that his father socialized with on the regular. Tolys quickly learned to put on a mask and a smile every time he went out in public, coming off as a devoted son with a burning ambition to take his father’s place in the future -- no matter how much he wanted to be something more than “just the next Mareika.” He would preen himself under the praise of these people that seemed to be so much greater than he was, imagining himself taking their places -- but every time he was compared to his father or grandfather, he had to push down the urge to drop his smile entirely.
When he turned 18, he was given the money to purchase an EQE glove that he’s barely taken off ever since. Throughout his college years, even as he was studying the biology of the organisms that fed on the essence of the world around him, Tolys would spend nearly all of his free time in essence-use classes: learning how to fight, how to use it in day-to-day life, how to manipulate essence just as naturally as he had learned to manipulate the people around him. He was fascinated by the sudden power he held -- and, deep inside of him, felt the urge to prove his father’s childhood disappointment in him wrong.
In the search for a research project that he could use to start publishing in his field, Tolys would be introduced to the Virion Project by a mysterious figure he's still not sure the name of. Ultimately, he'd end up applying to there, being quickly admitted to their Forensics Division. To this day, he’s not sure if it was his actual application (as outstanding as it was) or the Mareika name that got him into the Project. He’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to distinguish the two.
Virion Project
Tolys was never squeamish about bodies or blood, and the cadavers that he was exposed to during his time in the Forensics Division only further heightened his natural insensitivities. While he wasn’t the lead coroner the way Matvei Alexeyev was, he was the one performing nearly all the tests and experiments on the samples that Matvei would cut away from the flesh, attempting to isolate particles of viscerosis without infecting the rest of the lab with it.
He thrived in this environment, working closely with the Research and Investigation Divisions in order to publish his first papers; as the Virion Project grew bigger and bigger, he was the first name credited on most of their research papers. Despite his successes, his family continued to call him back towards the EQE industry -- he was, after all, their only heir, and the childhood image that he’d created for himself as the devoted Mareika son was finally coming back to haunt him. Tolys needed some kind of break: a clean break from his family, a chance to work on something that could change the world in a way that EQE already had.
Upon meeting Lucius Zuciane and re-meeting the mysterious figure from his college years, Tolys knew that he’d finally found a subject of his very own. He and Lucius began working together closely, observing the Virion Project and collecting data about it to serve their own ends -- and, in Tolys’s case, to feed the incessant desire for knowledge that his growing ambition had slowly become.
The Outbreak Incident was tragic, but to Tolys, the data that he gleaned about Vessels and their development was worth the sacrifice. Afterwards, he and Lucius (alongside Tolys’s newest interest, the esper Nikolai Korobeiniki) would fill in the slots of the suddenly-empty Investigation Division, accompanied by the only remaining original Investigator, Aaron Vesre. Even as he betrays the Virion Project, Tolys is sure that the research he and his collaborators -- new ones, this time -- will produce is more than worth the sacrifice. He’s sure that he’s going to make his work into something far greater than the EQE industry could ever have dreamed of.
04 — Trivia
-
When he was a kid, he would intensely study black magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and other superstitions in an attempt to make up for his lack of natural essence. He feels somewhat nostalgic for it, now, but dismisses it largely as a waste of time.
-
Falls asleep with his glasses on all the time. He's had them since he was in college, and it's a miracle they haven't shattered or been bent beyond repair yet.
-
Only drinks when he's with other people to make himself feel closer with them. He has a medium alcohol tolerance, but he doesn't particularly like the feeling of being drunk -- he thinks he looks stupid because of how tongue-tied he can get.
-
His briefcase contents consist of loose pens, packs of cigarettes, notebooks, chemical equipment and samples, and the oldest, most beat-up laptop in the world.
-
Started smoking when he was underage as a way to make himself look mature, trying to fit in with the people that his father would socialize with. Now he can't seem to kick the habit, chainsmoking when he's stressed and always carrying a pack or two in his pocket.
-
Writes in clean, neat, loopy cursive with small flourishes everywhere he can fit them. Somehow still manages to write long notes much more quickly than he should be able to.
05 — Relationships
”Ah, Kolya... Well, I’m sure that there’s little that I could say that you haven’t heard about him already! What a fascinating specimen of an esper. The look in his eyes whenever he’s on the hunt....”
While Tolys had built up a slow friendship with Nikolai over their years smoking together in the Virion Project, seeing him working as an Investigator was an entirely different phenomenon for Tolys to comprehend. To him, it was like... fascination at first sight. Nikolai was more than just powerful, with a skill in using essence that Tolys highly respects -- and yet he never chose to be ruthless or cruel with that power the way that Tolys would’ve expected him to. He had a surprising kindness to him, and yet he would throw himself into the line of fire for anybody that he considered a friend.
He was... someone unlike anybody that Tolys had ever met. Tolys can’t help but try to make his life easier, even if just to get closer to him to figure out what it would take to bring out the harsher side of Kolya that he’s sure has to exist under the mask.
”Well, I can’t say that he’s ever wronged me. Can I call him a friend? I’d like to think that someone I share cigarettes with regularly is.”
Sure, Tolys knows that he can’t necessarily trust Lucius -- after all, the two of them have been betraying the Virion Project for years on end. At the same time, however, he feels a strange sense of familiarity and kinship with him.
He knows that Lucius wants something more out of the Virion Project than it seems to offer, at first glance; he does too. He knows that Lucius sees something in Aaron and Nikolai that neither of them see in themselves; he does too. He knows that both he and Lucius are hiding things from each other... but that doesn’t stop them from sharing a smoke at the end of the day, contemplating their mutual betrayals.
”I’m not quite sure what to make of Aaron, at times. Someone with the determination to just... move on? What a delight! I wish I’d talked to him more in the past, so I have a better frame of reference.”
While Tolys doesn’t explicitly go out of his way to comfort Aaron, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious about how the breakup of Aaron’s old Investigation Division affected his psyche. He’s here -- working with them, as if nothing’s even changed (besides his personality), but Tolys doesn’t miss the way that Aaron distances himself from him, sometimes.
He wishes that the viscerosis hadn’t taken away Aaron’s more talkative side. Maybe then he would finally be able to puzzle out the answers that he’s trying to get.
Comments