Ray

"Warning! The following Character Page contains spoilers for ComPostmodern."

Ray is the main protagonist of ComPostmodern, being one of the younger living characters in the series. He is part of the 12th set of Interns sent out by InSpec, the two other members being Vince McMeera and Alex Greene, their objective being to locate and retrieve the Heart of the Greenhouse.

His branch designation is The Pawn.

Appearance
Ray's skin is pigmented a light purple, with is hair being a messy dirty blonde. His lower face is wrapped in bandages at most times, with some bandages wrapped around his forehead to support the lower ones better. He wears purple scrubs over a tan thermal shirt, as well as dark purple pants and slip-on shoes. The ends of all of these have been tattered, with visible stitching across various parts of the clothing to mend it back together, due to the mild corrosive properties of his exhalations. He keeps extra bandages wrapped around his upper arm; just enough to use in an emergency. Under his bandaged face, his mouth has been grotesquely elongated by his corrosive exhalations. These slits are stained in a mix of dried blood and plant matter, which comes off as a mix of red and green. His teeth, while not spikes, are conditioned to eat meat more optimally than plant matter, with a majority of his teeth being sharper, while still having some molars.

Personality
Ray is extremely naïve, optimistic, and gullible, initially being unfamiliar with concepts such as deception, violence, and greed. He has been trained to believe everything he is told by authority, to relinquish anything he owns upon request, and to follow every command given to him.

His belief in the innate good nature of every person he comes across is both his greatest strength as well as his greatest weakness, as it allows him to better empathize with those he meets, however it also leads to his extreme gullibility and near inability to defend himself.

History


Creation & Feral Period
Ray was created by Home as the first Branch, incubating inside the tree for 7 years until he was large enough to hunt his first prey. He started off with small animals such as rats and birds, though eventually he managed to make his way up the ladder to humans, eating some of it himself as well as inserting their biomatter into Home for use in making more branches. It was when his lungs started to convert oxygen into spores rather than CO2 when the pruning truly began, with the high population of the city leading to its quick downfall.

Capture & Containment
Soon however, Ray was captured by Cellar Pharmaceuticals with funding and manpower provided by the US government to assist in finding a way to immunize people to this new biological threat. They believed that by studying him and analyzing the results, they would be able to come up with a way to fight against the airborne spores him and his kind exhaled. However, his hyperviolent state resulted in samples being too costly to take. To try and save their limited manpower from going to waste, they used a combination of brain surgery and drug treatment to effectively erase his memory, leaving him a relatively blank slate on which to sculpt the personality that would make him the easiest to contain and collect samples from. While his instincts still leaned him towards violence, in his new state it was far easier for his captors to dissuade him from continuing such practice through simple pavlovian techniques.

During his time in captivity, his only true form of companionship was in the form of the voice which occasionally spoke to him over the intercom to his room, telling him simplistic and often confusing stories, and teaching him chess, playing it with him audibly through pieces of paper.

When the lab needed to be evacuated due to a breach of subject containment, the voice was the one who informed Ray to enter into the ventilation ducts, giving him an exact map of the route he would need to crawl in order to make his way to the entrance. Due to the length of the ducts, this crawl took almost an hour, with the route leading to the entrance of the lab as instructed, however it was completely covered in rubble. Scared for his life, Ray hastily started climbing the rubble, moving rocks and debris out of the way...

Pheromones
Ray's body excretes pheromones which are capable of controlling semi-sentient plant life in his vicinity. However, as he has had his mind wiped, this fact is unknown to him, and he has no clue how to utilize this ability.

Once he hones this skill, he is capable of controlling up to two plants in a 30ft radius to himself. While he could theoretically control more, he is not a good enough multitasker to give commands to more than two at once.

One of these plants is always Lily.

Receptors
Ray's sense of smell is heightened in order to better receive pheromonal communications, although this fact is similarly unknown to him due to his mind wipe.

Once he hones this skill, he is capable of detecting plant and animal life in a 15ft radius to him as long as there are open airways to their location from his position.

Spores
Ray is the only branch capable of exhaling spores.

Vince McMeera
Vince acts as a reluctant mentor to Ray, having been forced into that position by his introduction into the Internship. Ray, more often than not, needs to be protected by Vince due to his near inability to fend for himself. Due to his requirement to keep Ray alive as part of the Internship, Vince teaches him how to protect himself, putting an emphasis on one's own survival above all odds. Ray disagrees with Vince when it comes to apparent complete lack of empathy for others.

Alex Greene
Alex acts as the midpoint between Ray and Vince's ideologies on altruism versus survival. Her introduction into the Internship has forced her to socially interact with others despite her clear aversion to the idea. While she does not get along well with Vince, she finds herself occasionally dropping her distant and angry persona around Ray in order to console him and help him deal with the stress of the world he's completely unfamiliar with.

Trivia

 * Ray's favorite food is canned peaches
 * The scent of gasoline completely overloads Ray's sense of smell, making it hard for him to focus and see.
 * Ray doesn't understand the concept of waste matter.
 * Ray has won exactly half of the chess games he's played.