[OOC] App

[finalrequest]

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Higgs Monaghan
Canon: Death Stranding
Canon Point: Episode 9, right after confronting Sam outside the distribution center

In-Game Tattoo Placement: the back of his neck
Current Health/Status: Alive
Age: early 40s
Species: Human

Content Warnings: Discussion of child abuse

History: here

Personality: Higgs is, simply put, what happens to a person when he confronts a Lovecraftian horror and is unable to process what he’s seeing. He went from being a man who, despite the grim circumstances of his past, genuinely wanted to help others, to a madman who wants nothing more than to help trigger the apocalypse and hurry humanity and the world at large towards the final extinction upon first coming in contact with the Extinction Entity. She wormed her way into his mind by playing off his worst attributes of desperately needing attention and affection from others, and the deep loneliness he feels.

It’s likely he was always going to end up filling the role as Sam’s opposite, as both men were easy for Amelie to manipulate, for very different reasons.

Discussion of child abuse warning: Before Higgs was even born, his father died, and he his mother died soon after his birth. He was raised by his maternal uncle, who was not a good man. His earliest memory is of his uncle abusing him for crying as a baby, and it’s far from the only time he was harmed by his uncle.

He was convinced from a young age that he and his uncle were the only two people alive, and when he started wondering about the rest of the world, he was beaten as a result. This went on for years; he wanted to see the rest of the world, and even the physical beatings he would get as a result of wanting to go outside weren’t enough to really stop him from wanting to know more. It eventually came to a head when he was caught hoarding supplies. His uncle tried to kill him, with young Higgs fatally stabbing his uncle in self-defense. His age is never stated, but given his wording in his journals, he was probably between the ages of eleven and twelve, maybe thirteen at most. His childhood experiences left him with incredibly low self-esteem, and a powerful sense of worthlessness he’s never quite able to shake.

While he doesn’t dwell on his past much, the end result was him learning about his powers over death, and how going some time without being exposed to a death weakened his DOOMS, making him vulnerable to exploitation in his desire to remain aware of the BTs that exist alongside people. He calls it “a fair exchange”, but all it really ends up being is a unique ability that put him on a collision course with the Extinction Entity. Content warning end.

Long before he met Amelie, Higgs was an altruistic man, wanting to help people, and scorning those who would hide away from the world. He seemed to be purposefully be fighting against what he was raised to be. Though he wanted to be left alone, he did what he could to help out people in need, though never to the extent that it could be considered selfless. He did what he could to keep himself alive and healthy, and if that helped out other people, great! He saw it as a plus, helping himself and other people; the EE caused a dramatic change in personality indeed.

During his slip into madness, he came across information about the Ancient Egyptians, and independently from the main cast comes to the conclusion that Ha and Ka (body and soul) are a reality, and took it upon himself to hide away from the world. He hates his face, and based on his life experience, it’s something of a paradox. He thinks very highly of himself, while simultaneously having some serious issues with self-loathing. With the connections between people being pretty close to physical strings, it’s his way of absolutely closing himself off to the living, and it’s something he does for much of canon. He starts to seem himself as the only person worthy of starting the country anew, as a way to make himself feel powerful.

While under the influence of the EE, Higgs has trouble with seeing the things he’s doing as real; it could be a defense mechanism from the knowledge he’s been given, but he has a tendency to think of what he’s doing as a game. He often speaks about it in terms of video games. He refers to himself as a boss fight, as his battles to the death with Sam as a “game over”, and very much seems to see himself as the person who is meant to be the antagonist. His obsession with Sam doesn’t stop there— he spends an enormous amount of time stalking the man, and it could be inferred that the quipu he gets from Amelie is his way of connecting himself to Sam, as Sam was the one to give it to Amelie in the first place.

Under the control of the EE, Higgs was morphed into a calculating and malicious man. He used Fragile to grow his own powers by tricking her into delivering a nuke into Middle Knot city, leading people to label her as a terrorist, and giving him incredible powers as a result of the mass deaths. He did the same thing with South Knot city, though he was unable to destroy the entire city. Being a man who gets his powers from death, he seems to have very little regard for the living, and sees no value in people who want to keep on living despite their imminent deaths.

He’s slavishly devoted to her, constantly singing her praises, though his haughty attitude and arrogance might lead a person to believe he’s in more control of the situation than he actually is.

Higgs is a meticulous planner, not acting unless he has a complete idea of what he’s going to do, and how he’s going to do it. As he has more information about the oncoming apocalypse than anyone else, save for Amelie herself, it means he knows about what’s to come. Despite his level of bloodthirst, it appears that vicious levels of violence aren’t exactly what he’s after. Killing people, absolutely—he did drop a nuke on a city— but the apocalypse that he saw from Amelie’s nightmares is one of total annihilation of antimatter and matter colliding. It’s death, but not a torturous kind, which counts for… something, probably. It’s a death he implores others to accept, to save themselves from the pain that comes with denying a fate that’s right in front of them.

He’s boisterous and arrogant, and manages to be incredibly charismatic when he’s not talking endlessly about death and destruction. At one point, he was a savvy people-person who people requested by name, and at one time was business partners and good friends with Fragile. Higgs also manages to have a dark sense of humor, something he laces with his charismatic speeches without much in the way of effort.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping: Higgs is, simply, insanely overpowered. Within the world of Death Stranding, there are characters who have psychic powers known as DOOMS (the acronym is never elaborated upon), with levels being used to describe how powerful a person is—level 2 DOOMS can enable a person to sense, but not see BTs, a sort of ghostlike type of entity. As a level 7, though possibly even higher level than that, Higgs can do way more than just sense BTs. He can see them clearly, control them with his will, summon them to his side, and manipulate the tar that follows BTs to use it as a weapon.

While it’s not entirely clear how much of his power comes from the Extinction Entity, Fragile talks about his powers in a very off-hand manner, indicating that while being able to summon storms and enormous BTs from nowhere might be a result of his connection with Amelie, to some extent that the powers he’s shown using are natural abilities to him, as Fragile would have been introduced to Higgs’ DOOMS abilities long before he came face-to-face with Amelie. Without her, his powers would be seriously limited even without the warping.

His strength comes from death; with the cycle of life and death irreparably broken, the dead remain stranded as monstrous, vengeful entities—the BTs, being around a death strengthens his abilities, and he learned this the first time he experienced it. It’s also outright stated that voidouts (essentially a human and a BT coming into contact with each other in a massive explosion) give him enormous amounts of power.

He’ll outright not be able to do any of this, with the exception of being able to see and interact with ghosts. Not control them, but he could hold a conversation with one if wants to get within ten yards of him for whatever reason.

As it’s related to the Death Stranding that’s brought BTs into the human world, Higgs can also summon timefall, a rain that causes anything it touches to age whatever it touches dramatically. Steel will rust, grass will grow and wither within seconds, and unprotected from timefall, people will age. There’s no real reason for him to have access to this ability, so he can do without it and be annoyed later.

He’s also shown to have some amount of telekinetic power, being able to manipulate objects, and raise platforms into the air. When warped, he won’t have access to this.

As well, he’s shown to have a bizarre ability to be able to apparently smell death on people? I honestly don’t know if he’s just fucking with Sam in that scene or not, but it’s creepy so in the event that it’s an actual ability I’m going to nerf it.

Higgs is heavily implied to be a repatriate, which in the canon means he cannot die. Or, rather, when he dies, he simply comes back to life a few minutes later, after spending some time in an in-between world called the Seam, which looks like the place where he died, though underwater. He’ll be cut off from the Seam with powers warped, so in terms of function, he’s your average mortal guy stuck in a jamjar.

And of course since he needs to be OP as hell, he’s also shown to have some ability to predict the future, or at least, to anticipate his own defeat. With powers warped, he won’t have access to this either.

The one ability I’d like him to keep is his ability to warp. In canon he can warp anywhere from a foot in front of where he last stood, to miles away within a split second. It’s a sort of fast travel system, involving accessing a personal pocket dimension as a conduit between the two points. As long as he can picture the location, he can go there. With his powers warped, he won’t be able to do this, instead he’ll only be able to warp somewhere within his immediate field of vision. He could warp from one end to a room to the other, but not to a different room in a house, unless he’s standing in a hallway and can see it from an open door.
Inventory:
-his raincoat and armor
-his gas mask
-his golden mask
-his chiral-gold knife

Writing Samples: Higgs on the tdm

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Nin
Player Age: 21+
Player Contact: kamex

Other Characters In Game: Lucifer Morningstar
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Higgs Monaghan: Nin
Permissions for Character: here
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes. Higgs does that thing a lot of villains in Hideo Kojima games do where they lean very heavily on the fourth wall. And while he doesn’t go so far as to tell people to turn off their Playstation, he does ramble on about things between him and Sam being a game, monologues about game overs, and calling himself a boss battle.

Finding out he’s a video game character is probably not the weirdest thing that’s happened in his life.
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Copy-pasting this from Lucifer’s app because I’m lazy: Psychological horror is my absolute favorite, and that accounts for everything from the doubting of reality to lingering and prominent dread.

I’m also especially partial to body horror, whether than be more Cronenberg/Junji Ito flavor, or slowly turning into something else without the gross-out factor, like werewolves or something similar.

For Higgs in particular, I also really like the idea of something superseding his own will.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: N/A
Additional Information: Higgs Monaghan is a completely sane man with no problems at all.