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 slippers. 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.

Past


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 until finally...

Escape
Ray emerged from the rubble of the lab, climbing through a crack in the metal girders and concrete until the blinding light of the sun hit his face. After searching around the rubble aimlessly for a little bit, he found a medkit and made his way into the outskirts. After coming across no signs of life beyond the increased plant growth for two days, he finally noticed some movement through an alleyway, and just before he could follow it and yell out to see who it was, Vince grabbed him from behind, shushing him until the movement passed. Ray then proceeds to follow Vince despite his repeated threats, having nowhere else to go and not having seen any other human beings.

Eventually Vince reaches his breaking point with Ray, turning around and yelling at him to get lost, which confuses Ray, as he explains to Vince that he is lost. Vince’s earlier yell attracted the attention of some InSpec goons, which swiftly make their way to the pair, incapacitating Ray quickly.

Internship
Vince and Ray are strapped with modified house arrest anklets, designed to kill them upon any tampering or at the press of a button. Here they meet the third person who was captured and assigned to their Intern team, Alex. The CEO of InSpec, Sarah Spec, informs them that they are tasked with entering the Greenhouse in search of the rumored "Heart", which many believe is responsible for the extreme growth of plants. If they return, they will be set free and compensated for their work.

They are given a week's worth of food as supplies, and escorted out of the building, making their way towards the center of the city.

MacArthur's Park
Cornered by an oncoming horde of leaves, the trio run into a nearby gated park, which to their surprise has been trapped with an assortment of spinning blades, crushing machines, and the like. After nearly dying from these multiple times, they finally are met with a small child pointing a shotgun in their face. He forces them inside, and introduces himself as MacArthur, telling them that in order to make sure they're not "goons lookin' to steal our food", he won't disable the traps until his father arrives.

The Cascades
In order to get deeper into the city, the Interns need to cross a quarter mile of river, but every bridge has been destroyed by falling buildings and overgrowth, meaning they must go by boat. Luckily, they were able to find one that with just a few repairs would be able to get them across the currents. All appears to go well at first, until Vince starts to notice movement under the waves, causing him to realize the kelp below has been following them. In this arc they fight a Knight Branch.

Chapel Perilous
The Interns are captured in their sleep, and forced to be props for a stage play performed by the leader of a cult, worshipping him and his abilities as an actor. They are bound and placed in cloth sacks, and told to be the still writhing corpses of those who had fallen to a powerful demon who had rampaged across a medieval empire. After the play, the leader informs his stagehands that the old props had gotten "stale", and as such they should be disposed of. Escaping from his sack by breathing heavily until it dissolved enough for him to squeeze through, Ray cuts off his bindings on a nearby shard of glass from a broken light, and frees the other two. Searching through the backstage areas, they find enough food to feed a large settlement for a month, as well as several other people bagged in a similar way to how they were, some of them moving while others lay completely still. Over the course of the arc they discover that the cult does not include the audience, and that the leader has taken their food stores by force and will only relinquish rations to those who attend his "performances."

Burn a Picture (Working Title)
The Interns descend a sunken building, the layout shifting more and more the further they go. In reality, they are inside the trunk of a large tree, being controlled by a Bishop Branch. It is capable of reading Ray's thoughts through the pheromones he unintentionally exudes.

Danse Macabre (Working Title)
The Interns discover a private militia, lead by wheelchair-ridden Achilles, an ex-military operative who was discharged due to his sudden development of lung cancer. Achilles was recovering from surgery when the world ended, and as such he assumes his son had been killed the day it happened. He sees Ray as a second chance to keep his son, and when Ray gets incapacitated and taken to their on-site infirmary, he makes a personal visit to speak with him. A majority of Achilles' actions in this arc are an attempt to persuade Ray to stay with him, which ultimately ends in Ray and Vince being trapped in a dark basement while Achilles slowly searches for them with a loaded revolver, ready to take him by force.

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.

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.