Apollo Tzenith D7

Kiss-ass is the only way he can be described really. Alright, well he tries to be a kiss-ass ok? He's been practicing the "I'm so damned impressed" wide eyed, head nodding combo for quite a while now, and if he doesn't say so himself, he's got it down to a science. Why does he try so hard at it? Well he's figured out that making people feel better than they really are is a good way for everyone to love him...and not remember his name at the end of the day. That's why his other name is often "That guy over there" *points*. He wants to fit into the crowd, melt into it and not be discovered again. He wants to be the guy people glance at but don't recognize, and the best way to do that is to get people so focused on themselves that they don't remember to ask any details in particular about him. Mr. Invisible Man a.k.a the average Joe is what he strives to be, on the outside at least.

Reasoning behind wanting to be so inconspicuous? Well he's not very fond of his family. Ok screw it, he hates his family and is embarrassed to even speak his last name in public, so the less people who know who he is, the better. Heck, he even pretends to come out of a different house every morning, so you know he's serious about being mysterious. The less likely it is that any of his family members will be caught and punished, the better, and if they are, he sure as hell won't be there with them to take the fall.

No he doesn't really like your hair, and your smile isn't that amazing, and he really doesn't want to know all about you, but he's going to stand there with his hand running through his short-cropped hair and stare into your mouth while you talk with an eerie smile on his face and pretend that all of those things are true for both his sake and yours. Ironically, he is very outgoing, just for all of the wrong reasons. He's often been described as "approachable" and "a good listener". Just be prepared for an empty stare and a long list of practiced, generic answers if you ask him about his family or his life. Maybe a smile that looks too sincere to be real, and a chuckle in between sentences. If you're lucky, you might get a flash of his pearly white teeth and a "I'll tell you the rest later".

Now I can get down to the science of Apollo's "average guy" act. First of all, Tzen actually grew up in a pretty stable household. His mom and dad were regular citizens of District 7. His father a carpenter and his mother a painter. His little sister was the prime example of an innocent little girl. Heck, he had happiness at his fingertips, and each and every day he'd come home to his perfect little family and live his perfect little life and go to his perfect little bed and start right back over again the next day. Everything was just peachy. Except for the days when his father wouldn't come home at all, or the days when his mother would bring home a few cans of unused paint and his mother would sit around and take deep whiffs of the lethal substance to escape reality: the reality that her marriage was falling apart. Because while they'd been busy relishing in their happy little lives, they'd forgotten to add in extra factors...like paint. Yeah, unlikely right? Well however unlikely it is, it happened. There was an accident at his father's workplace. A building structure collapsed in the midst of a beam replacement one day, leaving quite a few people dead, and while Tzen's father didn't die, he was left with a horrible curvature in his spine and a near useless left leg, crushed by pieces of falling rock. Tzen's family wasn't that wealthy to begin with, and couldn't afford the intense debt they'd have to go into to get his father any kind of real medical treatment. So Tzen's mother did the best that she could, cleaning his wound and attempting to sow it back up, though it kept reopening and soon became infected. For days all Tzen could hear was the screaming, the agony of his father's pain. His mother started using the only thing she had to sedate him...paint. It would get him high, keep him in another world, but even better still, keep him quiet. But not long after that, he became addicted to the substance, going as far as to crawl through town and scrape specs of it off of walls...anything to make the pain go away. His mother soon took to the substance as well, using it to escape what had become a nightmarish reality.

Honestly, it wasn't that big of a deal at first. Because Tzen still had his little sister, who remained virtually unaffected by the whole thing. As long as some small piece of his household remained intact, he didn't need a full belly every night, or a mother who was making an attempt to live. He could maintain the illusion that everything was alright. Sure his house from the inside was covered with splatters of paint, wood furnish, and other substances. Sure his mother was starving herself and using up all of the money they had to feed her need and his father's, but he could simply pretend that none of that was happening and he'd be fine.

Or so he thought.

He stopped being 'ok' the minute his sister starting having her seisures and going into raging fits. It was that day, the day his sister killed a friend and nearly herself, that he realized what the high was doing to all of them, that he realized he had to do things differently. He couldn't let what was left of his family go completely to ruin. His father died of infection. No surprise there. It didn't even phase him. He knew he'd lost his father...his real father long ago. So he got a job as a novice lumberjack, working extra hours so that he wouldn't have to be home. He became the sole breadwinner of the family, the cage to his sister's bloodthirst, and the only thing keeping his mother from drowning herself in paint. He had to fight the addiction to though. Coming home was enough to get him high. The scents that radiated from that house were enough to get anyone high and dependent.

So that's why he likes being invisible. That's why he tries to be so average, with no significant characteristics of his own. He likes being the guy that no one really remembers, because things are simply easier that way. No friends means no one to take care of, no one to worry about constantly. No one to feel sorry for him, or mock him, or feed his fear. He lost almost everything. But not anymore. Because invisible people don't have anything to lose.