Damien Marius

Character name: Damien Marius Player: Relen Zero Gender: Male Age: 26, DOB 25th May Weight: 175 lbs Height: 6'0 Hair color: White Eye color: Light Blue Ethnic origin: Caucasian - Lunar (Raelin) Species Type: Newtype Other Information: - Themesong: Dream Theater - In The Name Of God

Biography: Mass migration from Earth was one thing. An interplanetary war another. Mobile Weapons another still - and all of them played such a melancholy tune to even hear the name. And yet, it was the heart of that tune which struck a chord upon the strings of some.

It is a well-known fact that the spatial awareness of some rose when Humanity moved to outer space. This trait became known relatively quickly, and some had to put it to their own devices. Four families attempted an experiment which genetically-strong people would breed, to attempt to create a bred Newtype child from Newtype parents, to garner power for themselves. The first stage of the program began in OE 170; the four families began to inter-breed to make a combination of children. This only led to two Newtype children, sadly - and as the Diana Institute was apt to do after catching wind of such a project, they kept their probes within those families and coerced them into making the final child. One was produced in OE 201 in Raelin - Damien Marius. The Diana Institute had their results, and they were happy.

However - there were a number of unforeseen problems.

The first was a basic genetic dilemma. The Marius family - the father's side - had a history of albinism, thus granting them a distinctive eye and hair shade of no-pigment white, plus a slightly-debilitating eye condition that caused Damien's vision to be worse than normal. The second was the fact that the Newtype gene was extremely latent. It didn't want to be shown, or so it seemed.

And thus, Diana's plans began forming. Send him to the military when he was of age, and prod and poke at him all the while, so that they could make him into their 'perfect' molded soldier.

And so, every six months, Damien was sent into the local Diana Institute facility to be experimented on by a man named Dunst and his assistants, who were looking over the Marius program with great interest, since they'd actually managed to succeed. For years, Damien led a double life - one in which he was a regular, normal boy, going to school and having a normal social life. The second was the traumatized young child, operated on, and forced kicking and screaming under bright lights surrounded by men in white coats. It was a painful existence, torn between two extremes, given to something he could never truly resist, though he knew it futile in his mind. Over time, they began to cut into his life more, forcing him to ostracize his friends and give up the things he loved, and that was something he couldn't handle. His parents tried to help at times, but they knew how futile it was to resist the titan that was the Diana Institute, after seeing how they interfered with their own lives.

And when he was thirteen years old, he snapped. No more would he stand for Diana's influence on his life, destroying what he wanted to be.

It was at this point that Damien's Newtype abilities began to manifest. His mental will, plus the base genetics involved with specifically breeding a Newtype, began to show - in one rather violent show of force, at that. Professor Dunst had brought along a needle full of a green substance - Gamma Gliphetim - and began to threaten Damien with it, claiming it to be something to shut down his vital systems while they cut him open and operate on him directly. It was at that exact instant that his mind reached out, resonating so much that the machines that he was connected to - and even Dunst, an Oldtype - began to register the increase in mental activity, transmitting psychowaves on a level they'd have never received before. Dunst immediately put down the needle and pulled out his clipboard - The typical whitecoat response.

For months, Damien's visits to the Diana Institute became more frequent, and the kinds of things that began happening to him were even more prevalent. His sense of déjà vu strengthened, finding himself replaying things with his mind more often, and he was beginning to hear strange music with his mind. Ironically, it was this that turned Damien to music. While he had no amazing ability for one instrument, his aptitude for learning music quickly and playing by ear allowed him to learn multiple instruments and combine his abilities that way. Music was his form of self-expression, and he played the violin his parents bought him above all.

And his life only took turns for the worse ever since that development. When his powers first began manifesting, there was always a slowly-increasing level of activity. But after he turned 14...no more. It just kind of stopped. Diana slowly began to give up on him. His friendships had already been damaged. His grades began slipping. Everything began sliding downwards, into an empty spiral of darkness that he could never wake up from - or so he thought.

Damien always wondered how he'd managed to earn that letter from Halsey.

It seemed that Diana had a last-ditch plan to bring out Damien's latent Newtype abilities, and they were going to give him everything they could in their effort to make him into a usable Newtype in the Alliance military. At age 19, he was officially accepted into the Halsey Academy, and began his four years of extremely-stressful officer training. It was here that he met three other officer hopefuls - Amy Moran, and the siblings Tethis and Sera Aresis - and formed a deep and powerful friendship with them. They were all part of the same cadet company, and thus formed a strong sense of teamwork - in fact, during training exercises, Cadet Squad #7155 had the highest test score average of the entire graduating class.

Four years passed, and the four pilots graduated together, and were immediately assigned to a reconnaissance company together to form the 41st Pathfinder squad of the 22nd Recon Company - nicknamed the Vampires, under a Captain Richard Chandra. The five developed a good working relationship - though Damien didn't see eye-to-eye with Chandra on all matters, despite being the nominated team leader. To make matters worse, Diana's meddling came about again - instead of piloting an Ebihru-S like the rest of the squad, Diana wanted Damien to test a prototype unit, utilizing a psychowave amplification system - the RX-93 n Gundam. Damien accepted the Mobile Suit, despite it being slower than his comrades' units - but the fin funnel technology made it so excessively useful in battle that Captain Chandra had no choice but to allow Damien to use the Nu.

However, this did not help him. Time passed, and he met new people during the course of his training. Diana, seeing his lack of use of the Nu, assigned him another unit, to enhance his piloting capability so as to take a roundabout approach to getting his Newtype abilities up to par, by handing him Unit 02 of the XM series. He preferred this unit's speed and weapons loadout, having always had a preference for getting up-close and personal in battle. He developed a strong liking for this suit, and used it well, including its biocomputer technology.

And then, two days later, disaster struck, and Diana panicked.

A training exercise went horribly wrong, and a flash-bang went off right next to Damien's already-weakened eyes - permanently blinding him. Only a day later did he tear those eyeballs out with his issue knife, and was relegated to hospital for a week. Diana, asking for a combat performance evaluation from someone who knew him well, approached Captain Chandra - so that they could design for him a Mobile Suit that played to his strengths, while the push for Mars began. Battles erupted, both over Mars and on its surface, and Damien was swept up in the maelstrom, performing a successful raid on a Martian colony.

Only a day later was he on the surface with XM Unit 03, and beginning standard patrols. The powers-that-be began to assign him to listening training, so that he might be able to compensate for his blindness. The biocomputer technology helped him accustom to his blindness, and a Haro designed for him was given as another token of Diana's want to assist him. Only a month after he was sent blind, a Diana technician by the name of Marian Ware was sent to Mars, bearing a gift in the form of a Mobile Suit for Damien. This Mobile Suit, the NGDIMS-T-03N/UL3 Tempest, was designed specifically for Damien's blind condition. Armed with remote missiles and the zanber technology Damien made use of well in the XM series.

But, as he was soon to discover on a defence mission, it was faulty. The Neuroptic Tracer was still being tested - given that they could not test it without him - and there were some faults they did not know. And he crashed. That, effectively, ruined the last chance Damien had of active duty - and he regretted that.

All hope was not lost, however. While on Mars, Damien had an encounter with a Diana researcher by the name of Kanou Okihara. As fate would have it, Diana had given him something special here: a researcher that did not want to prod and poke him with absolutely no consideration for the feelings that Damien might harbor. It was fortunate that Okihara would be his assigned researcher for a long time to come, for he knew he was already at wit's end with the Institute. However, with Kanou working on his case file, it would be a lot easier for Damien to deal with the Institute's incessant interruptions.

However, upon Damien's return to Mars, he recieved a horrible shock: he was being pulled from active duty to work with IsoTech as a test pilot. Diana had provided him a special flightsuit that housed a Neuroptic Tracer module to allow him to do so, on the stipulation that they were allowed to give his usual checkups. With no choice in the matter regardless, Damien agreed to work with IsoTech, and found flying as a test pilot to be not as bad as he originally expected it to be. He experienced many types of Mobile Suits, and honed his piloting skills while he learned to work with new types of technologies.

Four months passed, and Damien found himself pining for frontline duties. The Imperator's assault on many people of the Alliance made him wish he could be out there fighting it, not just testing weapons that would be used to fight it. Thusly, he visited the commanding officer of the 22nd Recon. Captain Richard Chandra's only reply to a request to be returned to active duty was that he recieve the eye transplant that High Command had instructed for him to receive should he wish to return to combat.

Damien, indeed, got that transplant. Eyes were cloned from his DNA though without the fault they once bore, and he was rather thankful for the powers of modern medical technology.

Damien was allowed to work on reservist duties, while still maintaining his job at IsoTech as a test pilot. It went a lot more smoothly when he had proper vision back, though he did miss being blind sometimes - it brought a sense of calm that could not be replaced. At the end of that period, however, another Mobile Weapon was given to him, based on Tempest's data and a number of captured Mobile Suits such as the Gundam Epyon: Typhon, a melee warrior's Mobile Suit. He was also granted frontline duties as well. Instead, Damien decided to spend the next four months in training. He learned to hone his abilities, his rashness, his...weakness. He came out the other side broken, battered, decimated...and yet, victorious, over himself.

Now, he could fight with the best of them. He had to, for the Alliance's sake. For his own sake.

Affiliation (faction): Alliance of Artemis

Prototype Mobile Suit: MSN-04 Sazabi