characteresque

character :: Dr. Prince Howell

Humans are fickle things - so obsessed with silly things like the state of the world's alliances or involving themselves in cult-like behavior to appease some invisible being in the sky - that they forget to self-analyze, to recognize what strangeness is going on with their own bodies so when those curious feelings became uncomfortable, they have no idea how to cope. This was the story so many years ago, a story that got out of hand so quickly that he could hardly believe it to be true. There was a point that humans could feel and their emotions were as vibrant and interesting as they were...but that was a long time ago and things are much different now, people are much different now, in short, they're boring.

As humans began using more pills to 'cure' what ails them, from mental to physical, the dangerous cocktail of drugs produce various effects that do quite the opposite: it makes people erratic, suicidal and even dangerous so what's a person to do?

They could stop taking the prescriptions, of course, but why do that when there's a new set of pills to help balance those pesky feelings? And as more pills were introduced, need for supply was too great and the rest, well, that's history, bound in some old forgotten text somewhere. But this was the start of it: how people lost their ability to feel and with it, the need to feel something arose.

Dr. Prince Howell was the son of two renowned psychiatrists and chemists, a brilliant pair that spent more time doting on their experiments than their three children, not that Prince minded; he preferred they kept their distance. It wasn't uncommon for the parents to test their experiments on both the body and the psyche, with their children as the unwilling participants in these observations until they finally found the breakthrough they were searching for. With the need for emotion came the need to synthesize, or supply them somehow but production simply wasn't happening fast enough to support the market for them and pharmaceutical companies wanted more: they wanted a quick fix. And what they received from the Howells was nothing less than that. Hormones, they had determined, could be extracted from 'special' individuals often viewed as 'mentally ill', those that they could still feel emotions without needing to take drugs for it, as often as they produced them. These individuals could be used as factories, given drugs to help them produce the hormones at a faster rate and the hormones extracted could even be copied, watered down, strengthened - whatever the companies wanted to do. But there was one question on everyone's mind:
Was there enough 'feeling' individuals anymore for this to be a viable market?

The Howells concluded that children were almost 50% more likely to be born feeling, and have it fade away as they aged, than the regular adult population so if they could simply harness that, there would be a practically unlimited supply of hormones. And it was with this idea that the madness began. Children began to be used to extract hormones that would then be produced into large quantities of pills that were sold to the general population, those looking to feel something other than grey. But the United States soon realized there was a small hitch in the solution: they couldn't use their own children for the extraction, of course not! That would be too close to home and might frighten the concerned parents who felt their children would be taken next by the boogeyman in the night so their military's next assignment was clear: to, in whatever way they deemed suitable, accumulate children elsewhere to be returned to the U.S so that they be used in the extraction plants.

Prince considered himself lucky when he was given word that there were going to new methods of obtaining these specimens: lucky that he wasn't given such a horrific job assignment as that must be. Instead, his job was simple: he was a psychiatrist at the Oneida Asylum and Clinic in New York and his assignment was simple: keep the 'crazy, feeling individuals' in line so that they could complete their extractions at the plant each week, for the good of the U.S, you know. It's here that Prince meets an interesting young woman that keeps him up to his ears with paperwork and file cabinets full of manila folders about all of her progress. Dropped in the aslyum as a young child, Rene, unlike most others, has grown up surrounded by the four white walls and close quarters and has still maintained both her ability to feel and her cunning. And what's better? Her thoughts show the need for change, for chaos, for a revolution and what a coincidence: that's just the kind of person Prince was looking for! Prince can see the fire in her eyes and he most certainly wants to let it burn bright, even if it means she burns the whole world to the ground in the process.

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