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Razputin "Raz" Aquato
Known Aliases - Eggbeater
Identifies As: He/Him
Age: 23
Hair: Reddish Brown
Species: Human
Ethnicity: Grulovian, ItalianHeight: 7'3"
Weight: 275 lbs.
Eyes: Green
Place of Birth: America
Occupation: Therapist, Psychonaut
╾╾╾╾ Psychological Profile ╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾╾
Raz is a good soul, if somewhat of a walking contradiction. He believes in second chances, self love, and healthy boundaries, but sometimes falls into the trap of forgetting to take his own medicine without friends and family around to remind him. He works hard and often gets sucked into that work, giving himself a sense of stability by stabilizing other people's lives, while he himself misses meals or skips out on sleep.
Thankfully he's not an overly sensitive soul, and he can take healthy critique on the chin. He also dishes as good as he gets it. One does not want to enter a verbal sparring match with Raz unarmed. He's pretty good at knowing who can take it-- Raz has a remarkable sense of insight that's almost supernatural-- but he loves a bit of good banter.
Despite his gentle nature, Raz is a fierce fighter. He tends to think outside of the box by nature rather than necessity, and as such can be a hard opponent to predict. In terms of raw power and talent, his arsenal is impressive, and his natural insight and willingness to pierce straight to the heart of an individual can be terrifying to some. He has quite a reputation among his enemies, and sometimes even his friends.
Raz rarely employs violence if he has an option not to. Instead he is very much a cunning, trickster personality, and without ever having laid an actual finger on his opponents, he tends to leave them crawling away, wrung out and confused and questioning their choices in life.
A lot of people would rather you just punched them.
Strengths & Weaknesses*Note: I write some of these abilities a little differently than you'll see in the game so that they'll make more sense in a more interactive setting.
Psychic Strengths
👁 Clairvoyance/Insight
👁 Empathy/Telepathy
👁 Hydrokinesis
👁 Cryokinesis
👁 Psychic Combat
👁 Telekinesis
Mundane Strengths
👁 Acrobatics
👁 Hand to Hand Combat
👁 Detective Work
👁 Situation De-escalation
👁 Psychology & Parapsychology
👁 Psychic HistoryStruggles With
👁 Confusion
👁 Psychic Manifestation
👁 Invisibility
👁 Energy Shields
Abilities In Depth (Click to Expand)Mundane Abilities
AcrobaticsRaz grew up traveling with his family's circus, which means that he's been practicing various acrobatics from a fairly young age, both for show purposes, as well as the climbing about and flexibility it takes to set up for those shows and take things down again after. He's skilled in hand balancing, tumbling, juggling, trapeze arts, and to a lesser degree, contortion. His gymnastic abilities might even be arguably more useful than that of a traditional gymnast due to the fact that he's far more used to working on harder surfaces rather than soft mats, and it has transferred well into the more physical aspects of his Psychonauts work.
Hand to Hand Combat
Raz has been taught a blend of fighting styles, including both armed and unarmed combat. He favors a mixture of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a custom blend of kick-boxing techniques. When forced into physical confrontation in a space where negotiation isn't possible, he likes to distract his opponents with verbal jabs and chatter while coming at them hard and fast until he can get them onto the ground and into a lock, or otherwise render them unable to fight any longer. He often uses his telekinesis to aid in this, which to those capable of seeing such things, can manifest itself as glowing, free-floating hands. Despite his habit of fairly quick, intense take-downs, he does do his best to minimize injuries wherever he can.
Detective WorkThe Psychonauts offered formal training in this category-- after all, a lot of working with psychological problems both in and out of mental worlds is mostly detective work, but Raz has always had a knack for figuring out mysteries. He's got keen skills of observation, and an almost intuitive ability in knowing exactly which questions to ask, even without his telepathy at play. Working with the Psychonauts over time has simply honed this skill to a keen edge.
Psychology & ParapsychologyOutside of his natural affinity for understanding the minds and motivations of the people around him, Raz has been working with the Psychonauts since he was ten. He's a trained Psychologist, a powerful telepath, and an active international agent. The inner workings of the minds around him have become almost second nature to him at this point, and have always been a point of fascination. Raz is always keen to learn more, and that thirst for knowledge is part of what makes him so good at what he does. Having worked with the Psychonauts, this knowledge also extends fairly deep into the far stranger world of psychic phenomenon.
Psychic HistoryPsychic history is somewhat of a special interest for Raz. Even with his shiny world view on them having faded somewhat over the years, he can recite to someone the full history of the Psychonauts just off the top of his head, as well as plenty of important landmark historical events involving the Psychic community in general, and what aspects of it continue to be a point of contention-- as well as almost any and all relevant topics concerning more modern issues too. Don't get him started, because he'll never shut up.
Psychic Abilities
ClairvoyanceRaz is particularly gifted with Clairvoyance-- an ability that literally allows him to see the world through another's eyes. In order to do so, he must be either in visual range of the target (television screens and photographs don't count) or he must have direct contact with something with a strong psychic connection to them, like a feather or a lock of someone's hair, or an object that held some sort of emotional significance to them. Once these criteria are met, Raz can slip into a target's mind, and not only see through their eyes, but register surface thoughts and the general emotional perceptions of the world around them.
Empathy/TelepathyAnother skill Raz is a particularly skilled at is the good ol' general, run of the mill kind of telepathy. He's got a great range when it comes to general mind-to-mind communication, as long as he's established some kind of connection before hand, and he's got defenses like a fortress. Raz was considered a psychic prodigy when he was young, and he's only had time to hone those talents from there. He exceeds at empathic connections, and is very good at bringing the emotional energy in a tense situation down again, sometimes even subconsciously.
Hydrokinesis/CryokinesisRaz comes from a family line with a rare kind of telekinesis that manifests itself through water. The events of his childhood and his family's past prevented him from connecting with this aspect of himself for a long time, but he eventually did make peace with it. He'll probably never be as strong in this area as he might have been-- trauma likes to linger like that, and he's still a little nervous around large bodies of water-- but the ability to control water as if it were your own limb, to any amount, is no small talent. He is also capable of turning that water to ice by telekinetically slowing down the molecules within it, though this does take some measure of concentration and it doesn't come easily.
TelekinesisRaz's telekinesis can take on many forms-- including the aforementioned hydrokinesis. More traditionally, it is a force capable of lifting, pushing, pulling, crushing, or throwing objects, visible to some, and invisible to others. To those with a measure of psychic abilities, it may be visible as a faint glow around an object-- or to those with stronger gifts, a pair of glowing, free-floating hands whose color matches Raz's psychic aura. When he's levitating, they may see a similar glow, or even a small balancing ball or bubble like structure, depending on how lazy Raz is feeling at the time. Those with no psychic sensitivities whatsoever will simply experience it as an invisible, though very much felt force.
Raz is fairly strong where his telekinesis is concerned, but there are certainly stronger contenders out there. He could probably give an average car a good hard shove and send it flying, but he might struggle to actually lift it into the air for long or very high. He can levitate himself into the air for a good distance if he's well rested, maybe for about the length of a few city blocks, but it takes up energy, and it's often far more economically sound to just roll along on a ball of psychic energy-- or frankly, just to drive.
Other GiftsThe Psychics of Raz's world are powerful and talented in many ways. There are reasons that the non-psychic populations are often prejudice against them. Besides the skills listed above, Raz is capable of the following to differing degrees, though he's not nearly as strong or talented with them (without outside aid) as he is with his other gifts...
Psi-blasts allow the psychic to release a concentrated blast or beam of psychic energy from their minds into the physical world, resulting in a brief, concussive force that carries some heat, but is mostly pure kinetic energy.
Pyrokinesis occurs when a psychic telekinetically excites the molecules of a person or an object, eventually heating them up and then setting them ablaze. Raz can start small fires, but he's not capable of the raging infernos that Lili is well known for.
Psychic shields, much like psi-blasts, work forcing psychic energy to manifest within the real world, forming a protective bubble around the target. Raz struggles with this ability.
Some psychics can cloud the minds of others, rendering them invisible to that person's senses. This is another skill that Raz struggles with, and he vastly prefers to utilize more traditional means of stealth instead.
Affectionately nicknamed the Time Bubble by many psychics, this ability allows a psychic to slow theirs or others perceptions of the world, or speed them up, making the environment or people around them seem slower or faster in turn. This allows for vastly quicker reaction times, but it cannot break the laws of physics.
Some particularly talented psychics, such as Helmut Fullbear, are able to use a similar ability, but utilizing telekinesis instead of one's own perceptions, actually slowing down or speeding up the movement of a small portion of the world around them for a time. Raz learned this particular technique from Helmut himself, and was able to utilize it to some degree when when he was younger, but the energy cost is simply too much now that he's older. He theorizes that Helmut's continued ability to do so at his age may be because of some property unique to him, as he seems to be the only currently known psychic to be able to employ this ability past childhood.
Limitations & Weaknesses
Confusion & Energy ShieldsSome psychics can distill the essence of an emotion or mental state into a small nodule of energy which can then be thrown. Confusion is the most common choice, taking on the form of (to those with psychic gifts) a poison green globule of energy that then explodes into a similarly colored miasma that lingers in an area for a few minutes, causing symptoms like blurred vision, vertigo, and extreme disorientation. Raz struggles with psychic manifestation and constructs as a whole, and this ability is no exception, but he can still eek one or two confusion grenades out if he really tries, usually in his free time, and save them up for later. It's just a lot of effort and there's often no point when other techniques will serve better.
The same goes for energy shields and similar manifestations of psychic energy into the physical world. Raz is powerful, but his psychic skills tend to lean more towards talents employed within mental worlds rather than outside of them.
Psychic ConstructsSome psychics are capable of altering portions of a person's mental landscape in order to extract information from them or to keep them calm, creating within their minds scenarios and worlds that feel as real to them as the real world. Sasha and Milla, two of Raz's mentors and some of his closest friends, were particularly adept at these constructs. Raz's own talents stretch more towards uncovering truths than creating deceptions, and while his own physic defenses are so impressive that it would have to be a powerful mind indeed to employ this sort of technique on him-- he also is not very good at employing it himself. Raz's mental illusions always seem to give themselves up sooner rather than later.
Psilirium
Psilirium, a sickly yellow mineral with psycho-radioactive properties, is a bad day all around for psychics. It distorts psychic energy within the brain of a psychic, causing delirium, disorientation, memory loss, paranoia, and the suppression of psychic abilities. Those with strong psychic defenses, like Raz, are capable of resisting its effects for a time, but even they eventually crumble with enough exposure. Short term exposure is reversible. Usually if removed from the area the subject will recover on their own with time, but long term exposure risks brain damage and lingering psychosis.
The mineral is rare, but several kinds of anti-psychic weaponry and restraints have been manufactured from it. In the wrong hands, this technology is deadly. In more responsible hands though, the anti-psychic effects of psilirium can be focused and shielded to temporarily disrupt a pyschic's abilities in a way that is minimally harmful to them long term.
Smelling SaltsWhile a well trained psychic can resist the disruptive effects of smelling salts for a short time, exposing one to them or similar extreme sensory stimuli while they're in a meditative psychic trance can break the connection between themselves and another, pulling them out of the psychic world and back into their own bodies.