Vita Nexus

Vita Nexus
Player: Kaiser6012
Origin:	Magical
Archetype:	Tank
Security Level:	10
Server:	Everlasting
Personal Data
Real Name:	Robert Spalding
Known Aliases:	Vita Nexus
Species:	Homo Sapiens
Age:	26
Height:	5' 3" / 160 cm
Weight:	110 lbs / 50 Kg
Eye Color:	Pitch black
Hair Color:	Black
Biographical Data
Nationality:	Italian-American
Occupation:	Librarian
Place of Birth:	Warwick, Rhode Island
Base of Operations:	Providence, Rhode Island
Marital Status:	Single
Known Relatives:	Mother, Younger sister
Known Powers
Energy absorption (see Vita Adficio)
Known Abilities
Strong willpower and mental acuity, proficiency with arcane lore and personal control techniques (meditation, chi, etc.)
Equipment
None
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Personal History

Robert Spalding had a relatively normal childhood growing up. A resident of Rhode Island his whole life, Robert knew his grandmother Ruby Spalding had some sort of degenerative illness, but his parents elected to keep her condition out of sight and out of mind, much to her chagrin. Better he didn't question the frail 60 year old with the pitch black eyes and the chill of the grave. Robert grew up a quiet but respectful kid into a young adult with a passion for reading, academics and research. He wasn't bad at sports, but his true passion seemed to be in research. He devoured any and all books he could find, from fiction to encyclopedias to scientific papers as he reached high school. Life was looking like a college degree and a lab job for him.

Then, at age 16, his grandmother died, and his parent's attempt to hide the truth unraveled.

His father, Adam, had to be hospitalized one day while Robert was at school. When he came home the next day, he already looked like he had a foot in the grave. He was always a mousey, slight man, but when he returned home his skin had gone pale and cold, his eyes black as night. With his hand forced, Adam told Robert what he was keeping from him - that his grandmother wasn't sick in a way medicine understood. "We're cursed, Bobby - cursed to have a foot in the grave while we're at our strongest, and to bring everyone else down with us. Soon you'll be cursed too." His father had all but accepted that he was a dead man walking and was trying to steel his son for what was to come. But Robert didn't just receive fatalism and gloom as an inheritance - he had also been bequeathed a sizable trove of research and knowledge from his grandmother, who had kept a collection of papers and notes from a long line of bearers of this curse. "My son's craven attempt to put rose-coloured glasses on my grandsire won't protect the boy, it'll doom him to suffer like his father did. So I leave him what he wanted, and my grandson what he needs. May he put my work to better use than his father ever did."

Adam Spalding didn't last nearly as long as his mother. During the time his father decayed, giving in to despair, Robert consumed his grandmother's last gift to him in secret. She had kept the papers her son had tried to wish away, transcribing the ones he had burned in sullen teenage rebelliousness and holding them until she knew they'd fall on a mind ready to learn. She had histories of their family and their research on the curse, exercises and mantras that had helped his ancestors stave off the worst of the curse and her own musings on where more could be found. She hadn't given up hope, even when her body grew too frail to follow up on her findings. And now Robert held that hope.

When his father died, merely three years after inheriting the Vita Adficio, Robert knew his old life was over as the cold settled on his skin and into his bones. But his skills in research and newfound devotion to honing his body to resist his birthright would be a guiding flame. Ruby Spalding left notes that there might be forgotten grimoires out there that hold the secret to their curse - and maybe even a way to break it. If only for those ahead of him - his little sister, his cousins, and all who come after - he would fight.

Vita Nexus

It took Robert a few years to truly come to terms with his new affliction. The cold and the unusual appearance he could deal with, but his mental and physical capacities suffered for a time, sapping his understanding and leaving him tired after even moderate exertion. But he persevered, training his four energies to be sufficient to withstand the innate pull of the Adficio and learning how Ruby and those before her had learned to shape and channel the pull. The Adficio was dangerous to the frail and infirm, so care had to be taken lest the curse sap the last energies from a person or leave them vulnerable. He honed his ability to control his curse, and soon he was able to alleviate the effect on himself for a time, instead drawing from the healthy and brightest in a crowd, or skimming from a crowd so that the individual effect was subsumed by sheer numbers.

He finished a college degree and then a master's degree in Library Science, allowing him a job in a research library where he can pursue old and rare texts in relative peace. He proved a mildly unsettling and somewhat quiet sort, but very knowledgeable and friendly enough once you got to know him. He settled into his new life, enjoying the freedom but not really knowing where to go from here. Without resources to chase esoteric sources of knowledge, his search for an end to his curse seemed distant.

His entry into heroics was almost accidental. He knew of the best and brightest working to protect the citizens, of course, but never counted himself as amongst their number, even after the Adficio fell. It was like telling someone their faulty heart valve made them a superhero - absurd to the point of mildly insulting. But a night-time encounter with a would-be robber changed a lot of viewpoints when Robert knocked him out with a few moments of concentrated thought, saving a young man from whatever fate the criminal had planned. Soon Robert was unable to not notice the signs all around him. His training with controlling his emotions and drawing them from others allowed him to sense strong emotion and even get a rudimentary sense of what people felt at the time, whether that was joy or sheer panic. His sapping of mental acuity could bring people to the brink of exhaustion, and his ability to stymie motion meant that what was a killer right hook became significantly easier to block or simply take on the chin. His capacity to draw light, heat and power all became tools that could be brought to bear to help those in need.

Soon he was active enough that he felt it necessary to register himself as a hero. Nobody stepped forward to vouch for his work, unfortunately - the Adficio saw to it that whomever was saved had little goodwill to spare their saviour and most considered him the bigger threat in the night - but Robert kept the records and proved that, no, he was doing good work. With that registration Vita Nexus was born. He doesn't earn a lot from heroics, but it's enough to keep his studies into what the Adficio is going. Looking towards the future, Vita Nexus hopes that he can find a breakthrough soon and finally work towards putting this curse on ice for good.

It was a quirk of fate that brought Robert from his

Vita Adficio

"...The Vita Adficio (Latin for "Life Affliction") is a curse - a persistent magical enchantment laid upon a person or object for a deleterious or harmful purpose. It is a generational curse passed down to the eldest child on death of the bearer, moving to the closest blood-related person in age to the bearer if there is not a child to take up the curse. Though it is impossible to know how long the curse has been active, estimates of the style of magic place it as having occult Judeo-Christian hallmarks similar to demonology practiced throughout Europe for centuries. The curse has been with the family for as long as family history has been recorded, which to date reaches back to 1529, though this is merely what is proven...

...The Vita Adficio appears to be an energy siphoning enchantment bound to the bloodline, drawing energy from their surroundings and channeling it... away. To date, no apparatus or reservoir has been identified that accepts this energy and no extraplanar influence has made itself known. The current bearer of the curse has been able to manifest a pull powerful enough to kill a rabbit at twenty paces within thirty seconds, stop an established hearth fire within fifteen, and dim the glow of an oil lamp to darkness with momentary concentration. Historical reports of the curse indicate that the curse is growing in power, as previous experiments listed action times in minutes, significantly lesser magnitudes and no elements of control. The rate of growth is unknown, but it suggests that the energy being absorbed is not filling the space it is going to...

...The energy absorbed is best categorized under five broad types: heart, mind, body, soul, and world energy. These energy types lend further credence to the supposed demonological source of the Adficio, as these roughly correspond to the energies required for manipulation of all within this earthly sphere. Heart energy corresponds to the energy that fuels life - not just the heartbeat, but the flow of air and the movement of food. Absorbing this energy in large quantities is fatal. Mind energy is best thought of as "mental valence" - it is inspiration, joy, happiness and focus. Without this energy subjects are rendered listless, confused and/or act upon only base instinct. Body energy is the movement of any existent thing, living or not. Absorption of this energy renders both living and nonliving matter inert, as if sitting in thick syrup or moving against a fast flowing river. Worldly energy is that peculiar manifestation unique to the Earth herself - fire, sparks and physical heat. Absorbing this energy leeches heat from a subject, rendering them unnaturally cold. But most peculiar is the energy of the soul, here manifesting as the bonds between people and things that make one different from another. Absorbing soul energy primarily renders a subject with sentience rabidly aggressive towards the drawer, as if it recognizes this lack of relationship as a threat. Drawing from an inanimate object renders any connection a living thing had with that object null for a time averaging some thirty seconds...

...The aforementioned control is not a natural feature of the Vita Adficio. The bearer attests to rudimentary thaumaturgical training the family has mastered while trying to find a cure for their affliction, to limited success. They are capable of momentarily stemming the flow of energy, sparing objects or people from it's deleterious effect for a time, but this appears to be at a level of personal cost. They can also direct the flow of energy, 'pulling' energy from particular sources like an engineer redirecting a dam...

...Should this curse find a way to be broken, this power would be incredibly useful to understanding classical arcane practices as well as being a font for research for potentially decades to come. I would advise arranging for arraigning this subject and her family until such a time as we know how to fully tap her power."

Excerpt from a lost letter from John Dee, court wizard to Queen Elizabeth I, dated April 11, 1581