Entry tags:
App for Altered States
Player Information
Name/Alias: Sceadu
Personal Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amphibologies
Email: dracogriff (at) gmail.com
Do you have other characters in game? Yes! (Irving Braxiatel/needsmust)
Character Information
Character Name: Nikola Tesla
Canon: Sanctuary
Canon Point: Post-Sanctuary for None, part 2
Appearance: Tesla comes in at 5'11", with a build that could best being called sort of angular, and medium brown hair that's usually kept swept back. Beyond that, however, he mostly tends to stand out thanks to his habit of wearing (presumably expensive) suits; on the few occasions where he doesn't, his dress tends towards the professorial. When he's fully vamped out, his teeth sharpen into fangs, he grows nasty talons on each finger and his eyes go pretty much completely black.
Over on the more physical side of things, he tends to be inclined to speak with his hands, especially as he gets either more invested in a topic or more worked up and most of his emotions are similarly clear on his face - although he locks up hard on both when he's feeling out of sorts, and can be prone to emotionally withdrawing a little when he's in the grips of depression or anything reasonably similar. Additionally, while he is not natively an English speaker, he's lost the accent of his homeland at some point over the last century and now sounds more or less like what you might expect for someone who's been bouncing across various part of the primarily-English speaking world. When he has his fangs out they do affect his voice, mostly tended to make it sound gruffer, for lack of a better word.
normal Tesla: one, two
vamped-out Tesla: here
Age: 155
History: Nikola Tesla was born in 1856. However since it’s implied that his early life is much the same as that of his historical counterpart, we’ll instead jump to the point at which canon starts to take a turn from history as we know it. Namely, the point at which he entered university. Oxford, to be precise, although how and why he was there is a question that has yet to be addressed. Nonetheless, he soon fell in with a group of fellow scientists: Montague John Druitt, Helen Magnus, James Watson, Nigel Griffin. Together, they became known as The Five (and were, for a brief moment, very nearly The Six), a group of scientists dedicated to pushing the boundaries of known science.
And then, one day, their lives were changed. You see, they’d come across a sample of rare, untainted vampire blood (hereafter referred to as the Source Blood) and had managed to create a serum of it. With opportunity thus in front of them, each of the group chose to take the next step into evolution. Helen gained the gift of amazing longevity, Griffin became able to turn invisible, Druitt became able to teleport, and Watson’s intelligence grew to superhuman levels. But it was Tesla who changed the most - the serum reacted with his then-as-unknown latent vampiric genes. Effectively, he became a vampire. He also began to display a sort of minor ability to control electricity, but whether or not this was a side effect of the source blood is less then clear. None the less, life (and science) continued on. For a while, it was even relatively calm. And then, things began to go somewhat pear-shaped. A killer was loose on London, a killer that history would come to know as Jack the Ripper. Given his uncommon gift for detective work, Watson took the problem into his own hands; putting all if his mental powers to work in the search for the culprit. In the end, the culprit proved to be none other than Druitt himself, a fact that rather left significant cracks in the bond The Five had known.
But there was little time to dwell on this development. Another specter of The Five’s past had sprung up, this time in the form of Adam Worth, the man who had once made The Five nearly The Six. Bitter over the loss of his daughter, and his mistaken belief that Helen had refused to help save her when she had been dying of a rare blood disease, he had become a monster. Or rather, he had developed a second, much more monstrous personality. And when that second personality was poised on the threshold of destroying England itself, The Five were called in to see to it that he didn’t. Despite some initial disinterest in the idea, they were eventually swayed by the promise of an official pardon for Druitt as well as the backing of the King for Helen’s Sanctuary network. And so they saw to it that Worth was chased very nearly across the entirety of the countryside - the last they saw of him was him throwing himself over a steep cliff to avoid being shot by Magnus. And so it was that life again went on.
The next time Nikola Tesla stepped into the limelight was during World War 2. He was the one to first crack the Enigma code, and his autotype - which could pass secret messages that couldn’t be intercepted - helped the allied forces. Admittedly, even then it wasn’t fool-proof - and on least one occasion it was by a mole to almost disastrous effect - but there was no denying that his work had a great effect on the war. And none of these were more notable then his attempt to foster peace by selling the plans for his death ray to every Allied nation. Unfortunately, while Tesla’s attempts to make good on his invention could possibly have been considered kind-hearted, the fact of the matter is that it backfired. Rather spectacularly, as a matter of fact, and in relatively short order, he found himself a wanted man by every major spy agency. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well, and with pressure mounting from all sides, he did the last thing he could think of. He died. Or at least, that’s what the world was led to believe. He’d actually gotten in contact with Helen Magnus and arranged to fake his own death. Thus, he ‘died’, a bitter old man without a penny to his name.
And then he promptly dropped out of sight for the next sixty years. No one saw him, no one heard of him, and not even the rest of The Five heard from him.
As a matter of fact he didn’t resurface until 2008, at a conference in Rome that Helen was speaking at. However, he himself didn’t enter the conference room. Instead he sent a note to be delivered to her: a note along the lines of the fact that her very life was in danger and that she needed to leave the room immediately. With no real reason not to distrust him, she did so, and just in the nick of time as no sooner had she done when agents of one of the enemies (known simply as the Cabal) of the Sanctuary came rushing into the room. Conveniently enough, Tesla knew a way out through the catacombs of the city. Naturally, the agents of the Cabal followed them, and the less-than-friendly conversations that ensued revealed their true intent. They weren’t after Helen; they were after Tesla, and with good reason. He had discovered a method to turn newly-dead corpses into vampires. But there was a side effect he hadn’t intended. He could raise the dead, and grant them the abilities of sanguine vampiris... but the new vampires were as dumb as a sack of bricks.
It was for this reason that he’d gotten back in contact with Helen, since he’d hoped that he’d help him come up with a strain of vampires that was all that they had originally been. Unfortunately for him, Helen had no interest in ruling the world. Tesla, in turn, took this less then well and things might well have gotten more than a little bit violent had it not been for the timely arrival of Druitt, who managed to severely wound Tesla and whisk Helen to safety.
Given the severity of the wound, it took even Tesla’s supernatural healing ability to bounce back and the next time he appeared was several months later. While he was recovering, the Cabal had created a virus intended to induce violent insanity in all abnormals. The test run only affected a few communities of abnormals, but the Cabal were paused to launch a second, and even greater dispersion bomb. With the world poised on the brink of all out war between humans and abnormals, what remains of the Five convened to recover the last remnants of the ancient vampiric blood that had given them their powers, on the basis that it may have contained some manner of antigen to the disease. The only problem? They’d need all of the Five to reclaim it, and Griffin had been dead for decades. However, as things happened to turn out, his granddaughter was alive and well - and more importantly, bore the legacy of her grandfather.
Tesla, however, was yet again nowhere to be found and with no time to hunt him down, an expeditionary force was mounted to the last resting place of the Source Blood: Bhalasaam, the last great city of the vampires, and nothing more than ruins when the assembled group arrived. The destruction wasn’t recent - appearing to date to approximately the turn of the twentieth century - but it did make finding the entrance to the subterranean labyrinth that held the Source Blood a daunting task, until at last Watson managed to recognize a small part of the architecture and used that to extrapolate the entrance to the labyrinth. And who should they find once they reach the bottom but Tesla himself?
As it turned out, he’d gone there to learn what he could of his ancestors... and more than likely scope out the trials required to acquire the Source Blood. Thus, with The Five more-or-less reconvened, they set out to their respective trials. The trials were brutal, and in some cases very nearly fatal, but for a few slight errors they managed to pass the trials and gain access to the source blood.
The trip, however, was not without casualties. Shortly after they’d reclaimed the Source Blood the machine that had been keeping Watson alive failed, and so with a heavy heart the remaining members of the group returned to the Sanctuary. To add insult to injury, shortly after they returned, the source blood was stolen by a sleeper agent of the Cabal - Helen’s daughter herself.
Six weeks later Tesla had, after much work, managed to create a cure for the Cabal’s virus neutralizing that particular problem. Yet there was still the matter that the Cabal had not only Helen’s daughter but also the Source Blood and, worse still, appeared to be after several young people with perfectly normal DNA. The reason for this becomes apparent after following a potential lead leads Helen, Druitt and Tesla neatly into a trap. They find Helen’s daughter, yes, but she’d been turned into a sort of superabnormal with the combined abilities of both Tesla and Druitt and all three are forced to retreat. Worse still, the Cabal had copied that same DNA pattern onto that of the young people they had kidnapped, leaving them with a veritable troupe of superabnormal soldiers.
Furious over the state of things, Helen manages to get in touch with one of the members of the Cabal who informs her that they would be glad to return Helen’s daughter in exchange for the Sanctuary Network. Helen, quite naturally, refuses and instead tasks Tesla with creating a weapon that will disable her daughter’s new abilities but leave her unharmed while the rest of the Sanctuary prepares for war. Meanwhile, the Cabal strikes, taking out the Tokyo Sanctuary before Helen is even able to send back-up. And so, the Sanctuary Network goes to war. However, the superabnormals prove too powerful a threat to handle, and after more than a few Sanctuaries are destroyed, Helen and the rest of her team move to the UK Sanctuary, where the superabnormals are believed to strike next.
The battle that follows is something of a trial by fire. Tesla’s hastily built weapon proves to be ineffective, and only the fact that the superabnormals’ healing factor proves to be unable to keep up with a fire element ultimately saves the UK Sanctuary. The superabnormals are still very much alive, for all that they’ve been forced to retreat and that leaves just one thing for Helen and her team. Protecting their own home. This time, however, Helen gives Tesla a vial of her daughter’s blood, after admitting that what she’d asked him to do before was an impossible task. With the last piece of the puzzle in place, Tesla sets about modifying the weapon while the rest of crew bring up the Sanctuary’s defenses.
The Cabal, however, are prepared for this, and manage to sneak a virus into the system, bringing down the Sanctuary’s shields moments before the superabnormals attack. This time, however the Sanctuary holds the advantage, thanks to Tesla’s weapon. It’s a small advantage, but it lets them hold their own until they can bring the shields back online. This in turn negates the superabnormal’s teleportation, and within a relatively short time, the only two remain: Helen’s daughter and one other. Faced with the prospect of either killing her mother or letting the other remaining superabnormal do the same, Helen’s daughter manages to break through her conditioning just enough to grab the other and teleport the both of them into oblivion courtesy of the Sanctuary’s shields.
And so it is that yet again life settles into the general everyday business of the Sanctuary, as gathered forces disperse back to where they’d come from.
Of course, neither is this the last time Helen and company run into Tesla. Several months after the death of Helen’s daughter, a series of cases in which dead teenagers are refusing to stay dead leads to drug clinic in Mexico, run by one Dr. Baumschlager. Or, as they happen to know him better: Nikola Tesla. He’s once again been up to his usual tricks, and in the course of curing drug-addled teens of their addictions he’s also been turning them into vampires. However, according to him none of them should have been turning into vampires so soon, since he’d had the foresight to put a time-lapse trigger on the transformation. But there was one very important thing he’d forgotten: death. A violent death, in particular, would be more than enough to force the vampiric genes into the forefront. However, he and Helen are unable to start discussing how to reverse the situation before the newly-minted vampires arrive and kidnap Tesla. With his blood and his knowledge of their species, they now have everything they need to take over the world... and Tesla’s not invited, a fact that he takes less than well, given that he’s the one who masterminded the whole affair in the first place.
Helen, meanwhile, has returned to the Sanctuary in search of the failsafe that she knows Tesla would have built. After very nearly turning the Sanctuary inside out, she finds it, although she’s at a loss as to how to use it. So she does the only thing she can think of. She takes the weapon to its creator, and promptly finds that Tesla has somehow managed ingratiate himself to the young vampires and directs them to escort her to a small room in the back of suite and tie her up. However, it turns out that was just a ruse, as Tesla himself follows not long thereafter and asks for the failsafe.
Under the circumstances, she has little choice but to give it to him, and with it in hand he proceeds to de-vamp the newly minted vampires. However, the final vampire to be de-vamped pulls him into the de-vamper’s effective range, depowering Tesla as well. Depressed over the fact that he’s now effectively normal, Tesla returns to the Sanctuary with Helen, in the hopes that the de-vamping process can be reversed. Unfortunately, this is not to be the case - the de-vamped genes reject any attempt to change them to their original state. However, at the last moment, Tesla develops a sort of magnetic ability and decides that he ‘can work with that’ before setting out into the world at large again.
However, it’s not long at all before he lands himself in trouble yet again, this time while exploring a series of caves in the Columbian highlands. Taking advantage of the caves’ natural magnetism (the reason he was there in the first place, or so he claims, although this is not strictly the truth) he sends a message to the last remaining autotype in existence: ‘SOS’. Conveniently, the autotype happens to be in possession of Helen Magnus, and she mounts a rescue, even knowing full well that it might be a trap. It turns out to be no such thing, since she and the others arrive to find Tesla quite literally tied up. Cocooned, really, in what seem to be almost abnormally strong natural fibers.
While they’re working on cutting him loose, Tesla explains that the caves are inhabited and that the inhabitants are more than a little territorial. As a matter of fact, they’ve no sooner cut him down then the inhabitants in question show up: centipedes that are both abnormally large and abnormally smart. In order to stem the tide, Helen brings down part of the wall to act as a barrier, but while it does keep the centipedes at bay it also leaves them with no way out of the caves. Tesla however, mentions that there’s a secret Cabal base hidden not too far from where they are which may be able to offer some idea as to they way out. However, once the arrive they find themselves again swarmed by the centipedes. The base is their nest, and worse yet, they have been altered by the remnants of the source blood that had leaked into the walls of the site.
Not wanting to let anyone else get their hands on the remnants of the Source Blood, Helen decides the only course of action is to blow up the nest along with the centipedes. However, the centipedes prove to be less than willing to come inside the nest, so Tesla stays behind to lure them in with his own blood, effectively sealing himself in at ground zero. However, he manages to save himself just in time by making a crude blast shield with his magnetic abilities.
This time, he decides to return to the Sanctuary for the time, mostly on account of a rather bizarre holographic map that Helen’s dad has bequeathed her. More interestingly, the city the map shows is not of earthly origin. After spending days poring over its secrets, they discover that there are further levels to the map, provided they can guess the password. Tesla naturally assumes that this will prove little problem after cracking the Enigma machine, despite the map’s being written in cuneiform, and proceeds to set about working on the password, despite Helen’s protests. As one might expect, he doesn’t guess it right on the first try and the map reacts with an electromagnetic pulse, knocking out the Sanctuary’s electronics. Tesla insists this is only a manner set back, but Helen tells him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to do something he can get the electricity running again.
The next morning, Tesla does indeed manage to get map running again. This time, however, it scans the both of them before promptly denying them access due to their vampiric blood. Where once the map stood, there is now a particle accelerator, which is slowly gathering enough power to destroy the entire Sanctuary. Tesla is able to slow the reaction, but only by keeping a hand on it. Unwilling to leave Tesla to his death, Helen suggests that he use his powers instead to create a shield around them and thus turn them ‘invisible’ to map. No sooner has he done so when the next level of the map opens up to them, leaving a 3D map of the world, with what seem to be miles of underground caverns beneath it. A map to another world, hidden away inside their own.
However, neither of them have much time to examine the map, because only a scant few days later a specter of their past arrives almost on their door step: Adam Worth, very much alive and just as unstable as ever. Or at least mostly alive, as the man is in dire need of medical attention. Once he awakens, his darker half informs them that Druitt holds the answers to their questions. This is a problem, however, since as far as Helen is aware none of them knows where Druitt is. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Tesla unhappily admits that he does, in fact know Druitt’s whereabouts. Druitt had come to him hoping that that Tesla’s electromagnetic abilities would be able to help him deal with his problems, and had made him promise that he wouldn’t tell Helen. Now that Helen knows his whereabouts, she wastes no time in going to find him.
While she’s out, Tesla and the others come to a rather sobering conclusion: Helen is dying of a rare form of radiation poisoning and the only cure lies in the city their map leads to - the city Adam Worth wants to return to. And with Helen ill, the Sanctuary charter says that the decision to go or not will fall to the Sanctuary’s second-in-command. In the end, the decision is made to go. They’ll show Adam the map, provided they can deal with his better half. However, even then, this is a process easier said then done, although Adam does seem to be better able to manipulate the map then they are. More to the point, in order to get into the tunnels themselves, they’ll need a keystone to unlock the way. Helen and Druitt head to track it down, leaving Will and Tesla to deal with Adam. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be too interested in causing blatant havoc, and within relatively short order Helen and Druitt return with the keystone in hand. However, Helen also insists on the fact that she be the one to go. After all, they know that whoever they may find will not be particularly tolerant towards those of vampiric blood, and Tesla was only able to make a single bracelet meant to shield the effects of the source blood. So with keystone in hand, Helen and her second-in-command are teleported to the main doors courtesy of Druitt.
Tesla meanwhile, is left behind to keep things more-or-less running at the Sanctuary while not only keeping an eye on the tracking device Helen has but also Druitt and Worth, neither of whom particularly like each other. This is not the worst thing he has to deal with either, as not long after Helen enters the tunnels the signal cuts out. All three men are aware that there are any number of relatively mundane reasons this might have happened, but Druitt insists on going in after her. However, in order to do so, he needs to know where he’s going - jumping in blind could easily end with him entombed in rock. Adam, meanwhile, claims to have a better viewpoint of the tunnels, but they’ll need to be able to see through his eyes. In the end, they essentially download Adam’s memory to a computer and then feed the resulting information into the map to create a more visual map of the tunnels. However, in one last moment of assholishness, Druitt teleports away with Adam mere moments before Tesla grabs on to his hand, leaving Tesla all alone - and annoyed - in the Sanctuary.
Several months after the excursion to Hollow Earth, Helen and Tesla again join forces, this time to explore an ancient stronghold that they believe has ties to the culture of Praxis, the greatest city of Hollow Earth. However, they arrive to find that at some point the stronghold had been taken over by vampires and before Helen has time to finish telling Tesla to remove the shield bracelet that’s hiding his vampiric blood, he’s shot in the chest by an automated beam weapon. To make matters worse, the door then closes behind them. Fortunately, Tesla is able to use an electromagnetic shield to keep his internal organs where they ought to be, but the fact of the matter is that he’s still dying. Perhaps not as fast as he would otherwise, but dying none the less.
Tesla is willing to accept his death at this point, but Helen doesn’t share his sentiments, and turns to trying to find a way out. What she finds instead is the ancient queen of the vampires, resting in stasis inside of what appears to be a cocoon of crystal. If Helen can just manage to extract a small amount of her blood, then she should be able to re-awaken Tesla’s vampiric genes, or so she figures. She hadn’t planned on the crystal being as resilient as it was, though, and before she’s able to break through it, Tesla faints. Luckily, she is ultimately able to break through enough of the crystal to extract a small sample of the vampire queen’s blood and manages to reactivate Tesla’s vampiric genes just in the nick of time.
Within a matter of moments, Tesla’s once again on his feet, but there’s a more immediate problem facing them - Helen’s attempts at breaking the crystal have broken it’s structural integrity. Getting it’s occupant out, on the other hand, seems to be a daunting problem at best until Tesla puts his hand on the crystal and it quickly falls to pieces. Unfortunately, the newly-awoken vampire queen doesn’t take too well to learning that all that remains of her race are herself and Tesla (who she considers nothing more than a half-blood mutt) and decides that it’s high time that she awakens the rest of her court in order to reclaim her rightful place. Helen is somewhat less than pleased by this idea, and while Tesla is generally alright the idea, the fact that the vampire queen proceeds to throw him down a pit trap doesn’t do much for his opinions on her and in relatively short order, a fight breaks out.
In the end, Helen offers to give the vampire queen the map to Hollow Earth along with the password to unlock it in exchange for information on how to leave the crypt. Somewhat mollified by the peace offering, she tells them how to leave, and Helen and Tesla proceed to hurry out, much to Tesla’s consternation. He needn’t have worried; as soon as the vampire queen unlocks the map it proceeds to scan her much like it had once scanned them before moving directly to the same particle accelerator that had nearly killed Helen and Tesla earlier. The only difference is that she can’t slow the reaction and the pair of them just manage to escape before a massive explosion puts an end not only to the queen and her court, but also to the stronghold itself - not to mention much of the surrounding area! Shortly thereafter, Tesla once again fades from the limelight, as he’d done so many times before.
The months that followed, however, were more than usually eventful - due largely to events within the Sanctuary and without - until at long last Helen made the decision to reveal the existence of abnormals to the world at large. Needless to say, this is not well-received by the government, and between one thing and another, Tesla rather falls off the radar. At least, he does right up Helen until finds herself needing to infiltrate the headquarters of the government’s new abnormal hunting division... only to find that Tesla himself is the head of this new division. As he begins to explain, he’s really only in it for the funding they’ve promised for his research. Sadly, this does not exactly endear Helen to him, and she turns to leave, only to find herself running into a problem. In this case, a problem that involves alarms and something with more tentacles than is really healthy.
A discussion with Tesla about the affair turns up that the creature first appeared twelve hours ago as well as the fact that Tesla has been using the government’s money to fund his own research. In this particular case, what he calls a “rift field generator,” which is intended to create a limitless source of clean energy. More interesting, however, is the fact the it was first turned on almost exactly twelve hours ago. Tesla is at first inclined to pass it off as mere coincidence, but Helen isn’t so willing to believe his words.
As it turns out, she has every right to. The creature turns out to be using the rift field created by the generator to infiltrate the building. The logical option - albeit one that Tesla is vehemently against - is to turn off the generator. However, once Helen manages to get him to agree to it, the simple answer turns out to be anything but - while he does successfully deactivate the rift node, the rift field (and thus the generator) has become self-sustaining. Worse still, the rift field is growing, something which may well call more of the creatures. Fortunately, between Tesla, Helen, and the tech guy that Helen has brought with her they manage to come up with a way to stop the generator for good. Less fortunately, in order to get it to work, they need something for the other side of the facility... which means crossing the territory the beast has claimed as it’s own. While they do manage to get what they need, Helen’s coworker is taken by the beast.
Helen naturally, takes this rather less than well, until the two of them pick up on a signal from her coworker’s tracking beacon, deep within a cave inside the rift field. Using the rift field and locking on to the signal, Tesla braves the rift to rescue Helen’s coworker, with her left to deal with the beast. It’s a very narrow thing, but in the end the rift is closed and Helen’s coworker is saved from the beast. With the trouble out of the way and the rift generator shut down for good, Helen and Tesla part ways... but not before Tesla manages to secretly pass information to Helen about the various abnormals held custody by the government.
So it is that time moves on, until a chance computer glitch brings Tesla once again to Helen’s door - and in the middle of the night, no less. As it turns out, earlier events had forced him to leave a sentient organic nanite buried within the Sanctuary’s computers. Thinking ahead, he’d left it contained behind a series of firewalls - firewalls that have just recently come down for a flicker of a second due to some reshuffling of data. With the nanite not only free to spread throughout the Sanctuary’s system but adapting to take on anything thrown at it, Helen and Tesla come to the conclusion that they’ll simply have to go inside the computer to deal with the problem.
While getting their consciousness into the computer proves to be a relatively simply task, what they find once they arrive is somewhat less so. This is partly due to the fact that the digital landscape appears to be a version of the Sanctuary, and partly due to the fact that they find a digital version of Adam Worth waiting for them. At first, this version of Adam seems perfectly willing to be friendly, but when it comes time for them to leave, he traps them in the system instead. Worse, the longer Tesla and Helen stay in the digital world, the more Adam seems to remember his history with the pair - not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. In the end, it takes a handful of fights, and some quick thinking, but between the both of them, Helen and Tesla manage to not only isolate the nanite, but to regain control of the system from the virtual Adam, once again allowing them to return to the real world. The nanite, meanwhile, is transferred to a system that has absolutely no connection to the outside world and normality once again descends on the Sanctuary.
Or so it is for a time. With the government becoming increasingly aware of abnormal presence and tensions on both sides running higher then ever, an all out confrontation seems to be inevitable. And who should happen to turn up in the wake of a pending disaster but Tesla himself. As he explains out, the government has finally caught on to the fact that he'd been using the money they gave him for basically everything but what they’d hired him for and have proceeded to fire him. Worse still, for all that Helen has been doing everything in her power to forestall the looming war, the government is a step ahead and - under the promise of a “homeland” manage to gather all the abnormals in one place… and then close them in. And just in case that wasn’t enough, SCIU has also commandeered the technology that Tesla has been making and mean to turn what he intended as a multi-spectrum containment field into a giant electrified web - leaving the government with a neat and disturbing answer to the problem of what to do with the captive abnormals.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Sanctuary team is working frantically to both get the captive abnormals out of military custody and at least attempt to neutralize the weapon Tesla has unintentionally handed to the government. As for Helen, with the government metaphorically knocking on her door, and the most of the Sanctuary network dismantled sometime prior, she takes a rather more drastic approach to being seen as public enemy number one - after making sure there will be no further casualties she blows up her own Sanctuary, which has been her home for decades at the least; Tesla himself is one of the last few people to leave the Old City Sanctuary, with the team in charge of rescuing the abnormals held hostage by the government arrive just in time to see the building go up in flames. The Sanctuary, it seems, is no more.
(There is a coda that indicates that Helen has simply relocated the Sanctuary, however Tesla is unlikely to be aware of this fact as of his arrival, and the coda seems to take place some weeks later besides.)
Personality: Nikola Tesla is not really a nice man. As a matter of fact, he tends to be something of asshole. The fact that he’s also arrogant and just a little self-centered doesn’t really help matters any. You see, the man is a genius, knows it, and sees no reason that shouldn’t keep him from reminding people of it should the opportunity arise (which it rarely does - genius or no he doesn’t deliberately go out of his way to bring it up). On the other hand, he has shown distinct disdain for that which he considers “ordinary” or boring and is not really inclined to hide it either. In short, he’s not really the kind of person who most people enjoy seeing, and his frequent attempts to recreate the vampire race certainly don’t help matters any. This tendency has abated a great deal as of his canon point, but the fact of the matter is that he tends to be somewhat self-centered at best. Add in the fact that half of his conversational gambits tend to come mildly laced with snark and that when he’s not spending it being generally dismissive and it’s easy enough to see why he’s never had much luck with friendship.
This is not to say that he doesn’t have friends, or at least, people who are willing to tolerate him and everything that goes with it. However, that these are by and large the people who know him the longest - the members of the being chief among them - and have thus seen through the snark and arrogance to the fact that he can be trusted to come through in the end, and that there is in fact a (somewhat) helpful person underneath it all. Which doesn’t exactly stop him from being blunt, occasionally deliberately provocative and over all generally a difficult person to get along with - to the point even one of his oldest friends has referred to him as something of an acquired taste. Still, he can usually be trusted, even if he gets himself into various sorts of unusual scrapes and tends to come across as a harbinger of trouble at the best of time - something that he will argue is almost never his fault. Whether or not this is truly the case is another matter entirely, but there is something to be said for the fact that he occasionally fails to realize some critical flaw in his own work or otherwise overlooks a way something could be used, just because it isn’t what he happens to have made it for. One thing, however, is certain: he has a distinct tendency to make life a good deal more interesting for those who are involved with him, be it directly or somewhat less than directly.
To make matters worse, he isn’t particularly good at straightforward either - to the point that even the people of the Sanctuary who haven’t spent several decades getting used to him start to assume that he does nothing without having something else going on. This is not, precisely, wrong. He is the kind of person to be working to his own agenda, whether that be trying to revive the ancient vampires or simply using government funding to fuel his own personal projects. At the same time, however, he’s not precisely incapable of something like altruism. Whether he’s ever doing it out of the goodness of his heart… that’s hard to say, but he’s willing to help people out from time to time, usually when his goals happen to align with those of whoever he’s helping out, although there have been a few exceptions to this rule.
This is the Tesla that most people see. An arrogant, self-centered man, who is possessed of a casual sort of grace and is more than willing to to trade a jibe for a jibe - and can be absolutely incorrigible besides. And yet, even then he's a man who can be prone to a sort of mercurialness, being quick to anger at a genuine insult to him or the quality of his work (or by what he sees as a perversion of his work), who has still not quite entirely forgiven Edison even after very nearly a century, and who is not incapable of sinking into a sort of soul crushing depression. This is paired with an equal temper of scientific curiosity - to the point that it’s implied that Tesla has, on more than one occasion, gone without bothering with things like showers while in the grasp of some problem that needs solving (whether he has similarly gone without food is not made clear, but given the intensity of focus he seems to display, it would hardly be a surprise).
It is, however, not all of who he is - there’s a more human side to him as well, rarely seen but no less present for it. This is the side of him that comes out most clearly with his fellow members of the Five; the part of him that is a decent man, a man who cares, in his own odd way, who genuinely appears to miss people from time to time and the part of him that absolutely means when he gives his word. If it’s to the right people anyway. He’s no liar, that much seems to be true, but there’s only one person to whom he’d make a promise to not drink human blood and then continue to keep that promise over the stretch of long decades and that one person is Helen Magnus. Who Helen is to him is a long and complex story, but the most of it can be summed up as the fact that he appears to genuinely love her. Possibly in the purely scientific sense and not so much as a factor of emotional entanglement, but regardless of what it is, there is very certainly some kind of bond between the two of them. Albeit one that comes with a side of banter even on the best of days - which is part of the fun, for Tesla.
Powers/Special Abilities: The most immediately noticeable of these is the fact that Tesla is a vampire. As a result, he has pretty much the standard toolkit for Sanctuary-style vampires - in addition to being generally more agile and stronger than the average human, he is also possessed of a incredibly powerful and fast-acting healing factor, may be immune to most common types of poison (he claims to - and genuinely appears to - be immune to radiation poisoning and is completely unaffected by alcohol), and doesn’t age besides. Like all vampires in Sanctuary, the “traditional” vampiric weaknesses hold no sway over him; Tesla is fully capable of walking around in the middle of the day to no effect, and stakes/silver bullets are unlikely to do much more than irritate him. On the flip side he also can’t undertake any of the assorted form shifting common to vampiric mythology.
He also possesses a set of retractable talons (one for each fingernail), which are as durable as the rest of him is, and are remarkably sharp besides as well as a set of fangs that are similarly retractable.
Beyond this, the Source Blood has also granted Tesla the gift of electromagnetism. While this has previously come down more heavily on the “electro” side of the equation, as of his current canon point it has shifted more to the magnetism side of the scale. While this can and does use this a sort of lesser version of Magneto’s abilities, he’s also capable of putting it to other means, from creating electomagnetic shields to interacting with the data on computer drives. He’s also highly resistant to electricity-based damage, possibly as a side effect of his electromagnetism.
Meanwhile, over on the less supernatural side of things, Tesla is every bit the genius his historical counterpart was, and is a natural polyglot (historically speaking eight languages and possibly more besides, although canon doesn’t mention) as well as a multidisciplinary scientist, displaying familiarity with engineering, electronics, and biochemistry.
River Power: The river will return the bio-electricity he displayed prior to his de-vamping. While he isn't going to be throwing lightning bolts around any time soon, he'll eventually be more than capable of acting as a sort of living battery as well as manipulating existing electrical fields; he has used this in canon to turn on light bulbs with a single touch as well as to make a sort of crude Tesla coil (all this latter did require him access to live wiring beforehand). He can also manage a crude - but effective - sort of electroshock therapy and this can presumably be extended to lesser sorts of electric shocks, although in either case he needs to be touching the person or object he means to shock.
Reason for Character Choice: Tesla has long since been my favorite character from Sanctuary, and is an incredibly interesting character besides, ridiculous and sincere by turns. Also seeing how he reacts to an alternate version of a place he knows reasonably well sounds like it could be incredibly interesting.
Additional Information: n/a
Name/Alias: Sceadu
Personal Journal:
amphibologiesEmail: dracogriff (at) gmail.com
Do you have other characters in game? Yes! (Irving Braxiatel/
needsmust)Character Information
Character Name: Nikola Tesla
Canon: Sanctuary
Canon Point: Post-Sanctuary for None, part 2
Appearance: Tesla comes in at 5'11", with a build that could best being called sort of angular, and medium brown hair that's usually kept swept back. Beyond that, however, he mostly tends to stand out thanks to his habit of wearing (presumably expensive) suits; on the few occasions where he doesn't, his dress tends towards the professorial. When he's fully vamped out, his teeth sharpen into fangs, he grows nasty talons on each finger and his eyes go pretty much completely black.
Over on the more physical side of things, he tends to be inclined to speak with his hands, especially as he gets either more invested in a topic or more worked up and most of his emotions are similarly clear on his face - although he locks up hard on both when he's feeling out of sorts, and can be prone to emotionally withdrawing a little when he's in the grips of depression or anything reasonably similar. Additionally, while he is not natively an English speaker, he's lost the accent of his homeland at some point over the last century and now sounds more or less like what you might expect for someone who's been bouncing across various part of the primarily-English speaking world. When he has his fangs out they do affect his voice, mostly tended to make it sound gruffer, for lack of a better word.
normal Tesla: one, two
vamped-out Tesla: here
Age: 155
History: Nikola Tesla was born in 1856. However since it’s implied that his early life is much the same as that of his historical counterpart, we’ll instead jump to the point at which canon starts to take a turn from history as we know it. Namely, the point at which he entered university. Oxford, to be precise, although how and why he was there is a question that has yet to be addressed. Nonetheless, he soon fell in with a group of fellow scientists: Montague John Druitt, Helen Magnus, James Watson, Nigel Griffin. Together, they became known as The Five (and were, for a brief moment, very nearly The Six), a group of scientists dedicated to pushing the boundaries of known science.
And then, one day, their lives were changed. You see, they’d come across a sample of rare, untainted vampire blood (hereafter referred to as the Source Blood) and had managed to create a serum of it. With opportunity thus in front of them, each of the group chose to take the next step into evolution. Helen gained the gift of amazing longevity, Griffin became able to turn invisible, Druitt became able to teleport, and Watson’s intelligence grew to superhuman levels. But it was Tesla who changed the most - the serum reacted with his then-as-unknown latent vampiric genes. Effectively, he became a vampire. He also began to display a sort of minor ability to control electricity, but whether or not this was a side effect of the source blood is less then clear. None the less, life (and science) continued on. For a while, it was even relatively calm. And then, things began to go somewhat pear-shaped. A killer was loose on London, a killer that history would come to know as Jack the Ripper. Given his uncommon gift for detective work, Watson took the problem into his own hands; putting all if his mental powers to work in the search for the culprit. In the end, the culprit proved to be none other than Druitt himself, a fact that rather left significant cracks in the bond The Five had known.
But there was little time to dwell on this development. Another specter of The Five’s past had sprung up, this time in the form of Adam Worth, the man who had once made The Five nearly The Six. Bitter over the loss of his daughter, and his mistaken belief that Helen had refused to help save her when she had been dying of a rare blood disease, he had become a monster. Or rather, he had developed a second, much more monstrous personality. And when that second personality was poised on the threshold of destroying England itself, The Five were called in to see to it that he didn’t. Despite some initial disinterest in the idea, they were eventually swayed by the promise of an official pardon for Druitt as well as the backing of the King for Helen’s Sanctuary network. And so they saw to it that Worth was chased very nearly across the entirety of the countryside - the last they saw of him was him throwing himself over a steep cliff to avoid being shot by Magnus. And so it was that life again went on.
The next time Nikola Tesla stepped into the limelight was during World War 2. He was the one to first crack the Enigma code, and his autotype - which could pass secret messages that couldn’t be intercepted - helped the allied forces. Admittedly, even then it wasn’t fool-proof - and on least one occasion it was by a mole to almost disastrous effect - but there was no denying that his work had a great effect on the war. And none of these were more notable then his attempt to foster peace by selling the plans for his death ray to every Allied nation. Unfortunately, while Tesla’s attempts to make good on his invention could possibly have been considered kind-hearted, the fact of the matter is that it backfired. Rather spectacularly, as a matter of fact, and in relatively short order, he found himself a wanted man by every major spy agency. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well, and with pressure mounting from all sides, he did the last thing he could think of. He died. Or at least, that’s what the world was led to believe. He’d actually gotten in contact with Helen Magnus and arranged to fake his own death. Thus, he ‘died’, a bitter old man without a penny to his name.
And then he promptly dropped out of sight for the next sixty years. No one saw him, no one heard of him, and not even the rest of The Five heard from him.
As a matter of fact he didn’t resurface until 2008, at a conference in Rome that Helen was speaking at. However, he himself didn’t enter the conference room. Instead he sent a note to be delivered to her: a note along the lines of the fact that her very life was in danger and that she needed to leave the room immediately. With no real reason not to distrust him, she did so, and just in the nick of time as no sooner had she done when agents of one of the enemies (known simply as the Cabal) of the Sanctuary came rushing into the room. Conveniently enough, Tesla knew a way out through the catacombs of the city. Naturally, the agents of the Cabal followed them, and the less-than-friendly conversations that ensued revealed their true intent. They weren’t after Helen; they were after Tesla, and with good reason. He had discovered a method to turn newly-dead corpses into vampires. But there was a side effect he hadn’t intended. He could raise the dead, and grant them the abilities of sanguine vampiris... but the new vampires were as dumb as a sack of bricks.
It was for this reason that he’d gotten back in contact with Helen, since he’d hoped that he’d help him come up with a strain of vampires that was all that they had originally been. Unfortunately for him, Helen had no interest in ruling the world. Tesla, in turn, took this less then well and things might well have gotten more than a little bit violent had it not been for the timely arrival of Druitt, who managed to severely wound Tesla and whisk Helen to safety.
Given the severity of the wound, it took even Tesla’s supernatural healing ability to bounce back and the next time he appeared was several months later. While he was recovering, the Cabal had created a virus intended to induce violent insanity in all abnormals. The test run only affected a few communities of abnormals, but the Cabal were paused to launch a second, and even greater dispersion bomb. With the world poised on the brink of all out war between humans and abnormals, what remains of the Five convened to recover the last remnants of the ancient vampiric blood that had given them their powers, on the basis that it may have contained some manner of antigen to the disease. The only problem? They’d need all of the Five to reclaim it, and Griffin had been dead for decades. However, as things happened to turn out, his granddaughter was alive and well - and more importantly, bore the legacy of her grandfather.
Tesla, however, was yet again nowhere to be found and with no time to hunt him down, an expeditionary force was mounted to the last resting place of the Source Blood: Bhalasaam, the last great city of the vampires, and nothing more than ruins when the assembled group arrived. The destruction wasn’t recent - appearing to date to approximately the turn of the twentieth century - but it did make finding the entrance to the subterranean labyrinth that held the Source Blood a daunting task, until at last Watson managed to recognize a small part of the architecture and used that to extrapolate the entrance to the labyrinth. And who should they find once they reach the bottom but Tesla himself?
As it turned out, he’d gone there to learn what he could of his ancestors... and more than likely scope out the trials required to acquire the Source Blood. Thus, with The Five more-or-less reconvened, they set out to their respective trials. The trials were brutal, and in some cases very nearly fatal, but for a few slight errors they managed to pass the trials and gain access to the source blood.
The trip, however, was not without casualties. Shortly after they’d reclaimed the Source Blood the machine that had been keeping Watson alive failed, and so with a heavy heart the remaining members of the group returned to the Sanctuary. To add insult to injury, shortly after they returned, the source blood was stolen by a sleeper agent of the Cabal - Helen’s daughter herself.
Six weeks later Tesla had, after much work, managed to create a cure for the Cabal’s virus neutralizing that particular problem. Yet there was still the matter that the Cabal had not only Helen’s daughter but also the Source Blood and, worse still, appeared to be after several young people with perfectly normal DNA. The reason for this becomes apparent after following a potential lead leads Helen, Druitt and Tesla neatly into a trap. They find Helen’s daughter, yes, but she’d been turned into a sort of superabnormal with the combined abilities of both Tesla and Druitt and all three are forced to retreat. Worse still, the Cabal had copied that same DNA pattern onto that of the young people they had kidnapped, leaving them with a veritable troupe of superabnormal soldiers.
Furious over the state of things, Helen manages to get in touch with one of the members of the Cabal who informs her that they would be glad to return Helen’s daughter in exchange for the Sanctuary Network. Helen, quite naturally, refuses and instead tasks Tesla with creating a weapon that will disable her daughter’s new abilities but leave her unharmed while the rest of the Sanctuary prepares for war. Meanwhile, the Cabal strikes, taking out the Tokyo Sanctuary before Helen is even able to send back-up. And so, the Sanctuary Network goes to war. However, the superabnormals prove too powerful a threat to handle, and after more than a few Sanctuaries are destroyed, Helen and the rest of her team move to the UK Sanctuary, where the superabnormals are believed to strike next.
The battle that follows is something of a trial by fire. Tesla’s hastily built weapon proves to be ineffective, and only the fact that the superabnormals’ healing factor proves to be unable to keep up with a fire element ultimately saves the UK Sanctuary. The superabnormals are still very much alive, for all that they’ve been forced to retreat and that leaves just one thing for Helen and her team. Protecting their own home. This time, however, Helen gives Tesla a vial of her daughter’s blood, after admitting that what she’d asked him to do before was an impossible task. With the last piece of the puzzle in place, Tesla sets about modifying the weapon while the rest of crew bring up the Sanctuary’s defenses.
The Cabal, however, are prepared for this, and manage to sneak a virus into the system, bringing down the Sanctuary’s shields moments before the superabnormals attack. This time, however the Sanctuary holds the advantage, thanks to Tesla’s weapon. It’s a small advantage, but it lets them hold their own until they can bring the shields back online. This in turn negates the superabnormal’s teleportation, and within a relatively short time, the only two remain: Helen’s daughter and one other. Faced with the prospect of either killing her mother or letting the other remaining superabnormal do the same, Helen’s daughter manages to break through her conditioning just enough to grab the other and teleport the both of them into oblivion courtesy of the Sanctuary’s shields.
And so it is that yet again life settles into the general everyday business of the Sanctuary, as gathered forces disperse back to where they’d come from.
Of course, neither is this the last time Helen and company run into Tesla. Several months after the death of Helen’s daughter, a series of cases in which dead teenagers are refusing to stay dead leads to drug clinic in Mexico, run by one Dr. Baumschlager. Or, as they happen to know him better: Nikola Tesla. He’s once again been up to his usual tricks, and in the course of curing drug-addled teens of their addictions he’s also been turning them into vampires. However, according to him none of them should have been turning into vampires so soon, since he’d had the foresight to put a time-lapse trigger on the transformation. But there was one very important thing he’d forgotten: death. A violent death, in particular, would be more than enough to force the vampiric genes into the forefront. However, he and Helen are unable to start discussing how to reverse the situation before the newly-minted vampires arrive and kidnap Tesla. With his blood and his knowledge of their species, they now have everything they need to take over the world... and Tesla’s not invited, a fact that he takes less than well, given that he’s the one who masterminded the whole affair in the first place.
Helen, meanwhile, has returned to the Sanctuary in search of the failsafe that she knows Tesla would have built. After very nearly turning the Sanctuary inside out, she finds it, although she’s at a loss as to how to use it. So she does the only thing she can think of. She takes the weapon to its creator, and promptly finds that Tesla has somehow managed ingratiate himself to the young vampires and directs them to escort her to a small room in the back of suite and tie her up. However, it turns out that was just a ruse, as Tesla himself follows not long thereafter and asks for the failsafe.
Under the circumstances, she has little choice but to give it to him, and with it in hand he proceeds to de-vamp the newly minted vampires. However, the final vampire to be de-vamped pulls him into the de-vamper’s effective range, depowering Tesla as well. Depressed over the fact that he’s now effectively normal, Tesla returns to the Sanctuary with Helen, in the hopes that the de-vamping process can be reversed. Unfortunately, this is not to be the case - the de-vamped genes reject any attempt to change them to their original state. However, at the last moment, Tesla develops a sort of magnetic ability and decides that he ‘can work with that’ before setting out into the world at large again.
However, it’s not long at all before he lands himself in trouble yet again, this time while exploring a series of caves in the Columbian highlands. Taking advantage of the caves’ natural magnetism (the reason he was there in the first place, or so he claims, although this is not strictly the truth) he sends a message to the last remaining autotype in existence: ‘SOS’. Conveniently, the autotype happens to be in possession of Helen Magnus, and she mounts a rescue, even knowing full well that it might be a trap. It turns out to be no such thing, since she and the others arrive to find Tesla quite literally tied up. Cocooned, really, in what seem to be almost abnormally strong natural fibers.
While they’re working on cutting him loose, Tesla explains that the caves are inhabited and that the inhabitants are more than a little territorial. As a matter of fact, they’ve no sooner cut him down then the inhabitants in question show up: centipedes that are both abnormally large and abnormally smart. In order to stem the tide, Helen brings down part of the wall to act as a barrier, but while it does keep the centipedes at bay it also leaves them with no way out of the caves. Tesla however, mentions that there’s a secret Cabal base hidden not too far from where they are which may be able to offer some idea as to they way out. However, once the arrive they find themselves again swarmed by the centipedes. The base is their nest, and worse yet, they have been altered by the remnants of the source blood that had leaked into the walls of the site.
Not wanting to let anyone else get their hands on the remnants of the Source Blood, Helen decides the only course of action is to blow up the nest along with the centipedes. However, the centipedes prove to be less than willing to come inside the nest, so Tesla stays behind to lure them in with his own blood, effectively sealing himself in at ground zero. However, he manages to save himself just in time by making a crude blast shield with his magnetic abilities.
This time, he decides to return to the Sanctuary for the time, mostly on account of a rather bizarre holographic map that Helen’s dad has bequeathed her. More interestingly, the city the map shows is not of earthly origin. After spending days poring over its secrets, they discover that there are further levels to the map, provided they can guess the password. Tesla naturally assumes that this will prove little problem after cracking the Enigma machine, despite the map’s being written in cuneiform, and proceeds to set about working on the password, despite Helen’s protests. As one might expect, he doesn’t guess it right on the first try and the map reacts with an electromagnetic pulse, knocking out the Sanctuary’s electronics. Tesla insists this is only a manner set back, but Helen tells him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to do something he can get the electricity running again.
The next morning, Tesla does indeed manage to get map running again. This time, however, it scans the both of them before promptly denying them access due to their vampiric blood. Where once the map stood, there is now a particle accelerator, which is slowly gathering enough power to destroy the entire Sanctuary. Tesla is able to slow the reaction, but only by keeping a hand on it. Unwilling to leave Tesla to his death, Helen suggests that he use his powers instead to create a shield around them and thus turn them ‘invisible’ to map. No sooner has he done so when the next level of the map opens up to them, leaving a 3D map of the world, with what seem to be miles of underground caverns beneath it. A map to another world, hidden away inside their own.
However, neither of them have much time to examine the map, because only a scant few days later a specter of their past arrives almost on their door step: Adam Worth, very much alive and just as unstable as ever. Or at least mostly alive, as the man is in dire need of medical attention. Once he awakens, his darker half informs them that Druitt holds the answers to their questions. This is a problem, however, since as far as Helen is aware none of them knows where Druitt is. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Tesla unhappily admits that he does, in fact know Druitt’s whereabouts. Druitt had come to him hoping that that Tesla’s electromagnetic abilities would be able to help him deal with his problems, and had made him promise that he wouldn’t tell Helen. Now that Helen knows his whereabouts, she wastes no time in going to find him.
While she’s out, Tesla and the others come to a rather sobering conclusion: Helen is dying of a rare form of radiation poisoning and the only cure lies in the city their map leads to - the city Adam Worth wants to return to. And with Helen ill, the Sanctuary charter says that the decision to go or not will fall to the Sanctuary’s second-in-command. In the end, the decision is made to go. They’ll show Adam the map, provided they can deal with his better half. However, even then, this is a process easier said then done, although Adam does seem to be better able to manipulate the map then they are. More to the point, in order to get into the tunnels themselves, they’ll need a keystone to unlock the way. Helen and Druitt head to track it down, leaving Will and Tesla to deal with Adam. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to be too interested in causing blatant havoc, and within relatively short order Helen and Druitt return with the keystone in hand. However, Helen also insists on the fact that she be the one to go. After all, they know that whoever they may find will not be particularly tolerant towards those of vampiric blood, and Tesla was only able to make a single bracelet meant to shield the effects of the source blood. So with keystone in hand, Helen and her second-in-command are teleported to the main doors courtesy of Druitt.
Tesla meanwhile, is left behind to keep things more-or-less running at the Sanctuary while not only keeping an eye on the tracking device Helen has but also Druitt and Worth, neither of whom particularly like each other. This is not the worst thing he has to deal with either, as not long after Helen enters the tunnels the signal cuts out. All three men are aware that there are any number of relatively mundane reasons this might have happened, but Druitt insists on going in after her. However, in order to do so, he needs to know where he’s going - jumping in blind could easily end with him entombed in rock. Adam, meanwhile, claims to have a better viewpoint of the tunnels, but they’ll need to be able to see through his eyes. In the end, they essentially download Adam’s memory to a computer and then feed the resulting information into the map to create a more visual map of the tunnels. However, in one last moment of assholishness, Druitt teleports away with Adam mere moments before Tesla grabs on to his hand, leaving Tesla all alone - and annoyed - in the Sanctuary.
Several months after the excursion to Hollow Earth, Helen and Tesla again join forces, this time to explore an ancient stronghold that they believe has ties to the culture of Praxis, the greatest city of Hollow Earth. However, they arrive to find that at some point the stronghold had been taken over by vampires and before Helen has time to finish telling Tesla to remove the shield bracelet that’s hiding his vampiric blood, he’s shot in the chest by an automated beam weapon. To make matters worse, the door then closes behind them. Fortunately, Tesla is able to use an electromagnetic shield to keep his internal organs where they ought to be, but the fact of the matter is that he’s still dying. Perhaps not as fast as he would otherwise, but dying none the less.
Tesla is willing to accept his death at this point, but Helen doesn’t share his sentiments, and turns to trying to find a way out. What she finds instead is the ancient queen of the vampires, resting in stasis inside of what appears to be a cocoon of crystal. If Helen can just manage to extract a small amount of her blood, then she should be able to re-awaken Tesla’s vampiric genes, or so she figures. She hadn’t planned on the crystal being as resilient as it was, though, and before she’s able to break through it, Tesla faints. Luckily, she is ultimately able to break through enough of the crystal to extract a small sample of the vampire queen’s blood and manages to reactivate Tesla’s vampiric genes just in the nick of time.
Within a matter of moments, Tesla’s once again on his feet, but there’s a more immediate problem facing them - Helen’s attempts at breaking the crystal have broken it’s structural integrity. Getting it’s occupant out, on the other hand, seems to be a daunting problem at best until Tesla puts his hand on the crystal and it quickly falls to pieces. Unfortunately, the newly-awoken vampire queen doesn’t take too well to learning that all that remains of her race are herself and Tesla (who she considers nothing more than a half-blood mutt) and decides that it’s high time that she awakens the rest of her court in order to reclaim her rightful place. Helen is somewhat less than pleased by this idea, and while Tesla is generally alright the idea, the fact that the vampire queen proceeds to throw him down a pit trap doesn’t do much for his opinions on her and in relatively short order, a fight breaks out.
In the end, Helen offers to give the vampire queen the map to Hollow Earth along with the password to unlock it in exchange for information on how to leave the crypt. Somewhat mollified by the peace offering, she tells them how to leave, and Helen and Tesla proceed to hurry out, much to Tesla’s consternation. He needn’t have worried; as soon as the vampire queen unlocks the map it proceeds to scan her much like it had once scanned them before moving directly to the same particle accelerator that had nearly killed Helen and Tesla earlier. The only difference is that she can’t slow the reaction and the pair of them just manage to escape before a massive explosion puts an end not only to the queen and her court, but also to the stronghold itself - not to mention much of the surrounding area! Shortly thereafter, Tesla once again fades from the limelight, as he’d done so many times before.
The months that followed, however, were more than usually eventful - due largely to events within the Sanctuary and without - until at long last Helen made the decision to reveal the existence of abnormals to the world at large. Needless to say, this is not well-received by the government, and between one thing and another, Tesla rather falls off the radar. At least, he does right up Helen until finds herself needing to infiltrate the headquarters of the government’s new abnormal hunting division... only to find that Tesla himself is the head of this new division. As he begins to explain, he’s really only in it for the funding they’ve promised for his research. Sadly, this does not exactly endear Helen to him, and she turns to leave, only to find herself running into a problem. In this case, a problem that involves alarms and something with more tentacles than is really healthy.
A discussion with Tesla about the affair turns up that the creature first appeared twelve hours ago as well as the fact that Tesla has been using the government’s money to fund his own research. In this particular case, what he calls a “rift field generator,” which is intended to create a limitless source of clean energy. More interesting, however, is the fact the it was first turned on almost exactly twelve hours ago. Tesla is at first inclined to pass it off as mere coincidence, but Helen isn’t so willing to believe his words.
As it turns out, she has every right to. The creature turns out to be using the rift field created by the generator to infiltrate the building. The logical option - albeit one that Tesla is vehemently against - is to turn off the generator. However, once Helen manages to get him to agree to it, the simple answer turns out to be anything but - while he does successfully deactivate the rift node, the rift field (and thus the generator) has become self-sustaining. Worse still, the rift field is growing, something which may well call more of the creatures. Fortunately, between Tesla, Helen, and the tech guy that Helen has brought with her they manage to come up with a way to stop the generator for good. Less fortunately, in order to get it to work, they need something for the other side of the facility... which means crossing the territory the beast has claimed as it’s own. While they do manage to get what they need, Helen’s coworker is taken by the beast.
Helen naturally, takes this rather less than well, until the two of them pick up on a signal from her coworker’s tracking beacon, deep within a cave inside the rift field. Using the rift field and locking on to the signal, Tesla braves the rift to rescue Helen’s coworker, with her left to deal with the beast. It’s a very narrow thing, but in the end the rift is closed and Helen’s coworker is saved from the beast. With the trouble out of the way and the rift generator shut down for good, Helen and Tesla part ways... but not before Tesla manages to secretly pass information to Helen about the various abnormals held custody by the government.
So it is that time moves on, until a chance computer glitch brings Tesla once again to Helen’s door - and in the middle of the night, no less. As it turns out, earlier events had forced him to leave a sentient organic nanite buried within the Sanctuary’s computers. Thinking ahead, he’d left it contained behind a series of firewalls - firewalls that have just recently come down for a flicker of a second due to some reshuffling of data. With the nanite not only free to spread throughout the Sanctuary’s system but adapting to take on anything thrown at it, Helen and Tesla come to the conclusion that they’ll simply have to go inside the computer to deal with the problem.
While getting their consciousness into the computer proves to be a relatively simply task, what they find once they arrive is somewhat less so. This is partly due to the fact that the digital landscape appears to be a version of the Sanctuary, and partly due to the fact that they find a digital version of Adam Worth waiting for them. At first, this version of Adam seems perfectly willing to be friendly, but when it comes time for them to leave, he traps them in the system instead. Worse, the longer Tesla and Helen stay in the digital world, the more Adam seems to remember his history with the pair - not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. In the end, it takes a handful of fights, and some quick thinking, but between the both of them, Helen and Tesla manage to not only isolate the nanite, but to regain control of the system from the virtual Adam, once again allowing them to return to the real world. The nanite, meanwhile, is transferred to a system that has absolutely no connection to the outside world and normality once again descends on the Sanctuary.
Or so it is for a time. With the government becoming increasingly aware of abnormal presence and tensions on both sides running higher then ever, an all out confrontation seems to be inevitable. And who should happen to turn up in the wake of a pending disaster but Tesla himself. As he explains out, the government has finally caught on to the fact that he'd been using the money they gave him for basically everything but what they’d hired him for and have proceeded to fire him. Worse still, for all that Helen has been doing everything in her power to forestall the looming war, the government is a step ahead and - under the promise of a “homeland” manage to gather all the abnormals in one place… and then close them in. And just in case that wasn’t enough, SCIU has also commandeered the technology that Tesla has been making and mean to turn what he intended as a multi-spectrum containment field into a giant electrified web - leaving the government with a neat and disturbing answer to the problem of what to do with the captive abnormals.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Sanctuary team is working frantically to both get the captive abnormals out of military custody and at least attempt to neutralize the weapon Tesla has unintentionally handed to the government. As for Helen, with the government metaphorically knocking on her door, and the most of the Sanctuary network dismantled sometime prior, she takes a rather more drastic approach to being seen as public enemy number one - after making sure there will be no further casualties she blows up her own Sanctuary, which has been her home for decades at the least; Tesla himself is one of the last few people to leave the Old City Sanctuary, with the team in charge of rescuing the abnormals held hostage by the government arrive just in time to see the building go up in flames. The Sanctuary, it seems, is no more.
(There is a coda that indicates that Helen has simply relocated the Sanctuary, however Tesla is unlikely to be aware of this fact as of his arrival, and the coda seems to take place some weeks later besides.)
Personality: Nikola Tesla is not really a nice man. As a matter of fact, he tends to be something of asshole. The fact that he’s also arrogant and just a little self-centered doesn’t really help matters any. You see, the man is a genius, knows it, and sees no reason that shouldn’t keep him from reminding people of it should the opportunity arise (which it rarely does - genius or no he doesn’t deliberately go out of his way to bring it up). On the other hand, he has shown distinct disdain for that which he considers “ordinary” or boring and is not really inclined to hide it either. In short, he’s not really the kind of person who most people enjoy seeing, and his frequent attempts to recreate the vampire race certainly don’t help matters any. This tendency has abated a great deal as of his canon point, but the fact of the matter is that he tends to be somewhat self-centered at best. Add in the fact that half of his conversational gambits tend to come mildly laced with snark and that when he’s not spending it being generally dismissive and it’s easy enough to see why he’s never had much luck with friendship.
This is not to say that he doesn’t have friends, or at least, people who are willing to tolerate him and everything that goes with it. However, that these are by and large the people who know him the longest - the members of the being chief among them - and have thus seen through the snark and arrogance to the fact that he can be trusted to come through in the end, and that there is in fact a (somewhat) helpful person underneath it all. Which doesn’t exactly stop him from being blunt, occasionally deliberately provocative and over all generally a difficult person to get along with - to the point even one of his oldest friends has referred to him as something of an acquired taste. Still, he can usually be trusted, even if he gets himself into various sorts of unusual scrapes and tends to come across as a harbinger of trouble at the best of time - something that he will argue is almost never his fault. Whether or not this is truly the case is another matter entirely, but there is something to be said for the fact that he occasionally fails to realize some critical flaw in his own work or otherwise overlooks a way something could be used, just because it isn’t what he happens to have made it for. One thing, however, is certain: he has a distinct tendency to make life a good deal more interesting for those who are involved with him, be it directly or somewhat less than directly.
To make matters worse, he isn’t particularly good at straightforward either - to the point that even the people of the Sanctuary who haven’t spent several decades getting used to him start to assume that he does nothing without having something else going on. This is not, precisely, wrong. He is the kind of person to be working to his own agenda, whether that be trying to revive the ancient vampires or simply using government funding to fuel his own personal projects. At the same time, however, he’s not precisely incapable of something like altruism. Whether he’s ever doing it out of the goodness of his heart… that’s hard to say, but he’s willing to help people out from time to time, usually when his goals happen to align with those of whoever he’s helping out, although there have been a few exceptions to this rule.
This is the Tesla that most people see. An arrogant, self-centered man, who is possessed of a casual sort of grace and is more than willing to to trade a jibe for a jibe - and can be absolutely incorrigible besides. And yet, even then he's a man who can be prone to a sort of mercurialness, being quick to anger at a genuine insult to him or the quality of his work (or by what he sees as a perversion of his work), who has still not quite entirely forgiven Edison even after very nearly a century, and who is not incapable of sinking into a sort of soul crushing depression. This is paired with an equal temper of scientific curiosity - to the point that it’s implied that Tesla has, on more than one occasion, gone without bothering with things like showers while in the grasp of some problem that needs solving (whether he has similarly gone without food is not made clear, but given the intensity of focus he seems to display, it would hardly be a surprise).
It is, however, not all of who he is - there’s a more human side to him as well, rarely seen but no less present for it. This is the side of him that comes out most clearly with his fellow members of the Five; the part of him that is a decent man, a man who cares, in his own odd way, who genuinely appears to miss people from time to time and the part of him that absolutely means when he gives his word. If it’s to the right people anyway. He’s no liar, that much seems to be true, but there’s only one person to whom he’d make a promise to not drink human blood and then continue to keep that promise over the stretch of long decades and that one person is Helen Magnus. Who Helen is to him is a long and complex story, but the most of it can be summed up as the fact that he appears to genuinely love her. Possibly in the purely scientific sense and not so much as a factor of emotional entanglement, but regardless of what it is, there is very certainly some kind of bond between the two of them. Albeit one that comes with a side of banter even on the best of days - which is part of the fun, for Tesla.
Powers/Special Abilities: The most immediately noticeable of these is the fact that Tesla is a vampire. As a result, he has pretty much the standard toolkit for Sanctuary-style vampires - in addition to being generally more agile and stronger than the average human, he is also possessed of a incredibly powerful and fast-acting healing factor, may be immune to most common types of poison (he claims to - and genuinely appears to - be immune to radiation poisoning and is completely unaffected by alcohol), and doesn’t age besides. Like all vampires in Sanctuary, the “traditional” vampiric weaknesses hold no sway over him; Tesla is fully capable of walking around in the middle of the day to no effect, and stakes/silver bullets are unlikely to do much more than irritate him. On the flip side he also can’t undertake any of the assorted form shifting common to vampiric mythology.
He also possesses a set of retractable talons (one for each fingernail), which are as durable as the rest of him is, and are remarkably sharp besides as well as a set of fangs that are similarly retractable.
Beyond this, the Source Blood has also granted Tesla the gift of electromagnetism. While this has previously come down more heavily on the “electro” side of the equation, as of his current canon point it has shifted more to the magnetism side of the scale. While this can and does use this a sort of lesser version of Magneto’s abilities, he’s also capable of putting it to other means, from creating electomagnetic shields to interacting with the data on computer drives. He’s also highly resistant to electricity-based damage, possibly as a side effect of his electromagnetism.
Meanwhile, over on the less supernatural side of things, Tesla is every bit the genius his historical counterpart was, and is a natural polyglot (historically speaking eight languages and possibly more besides, although canon doesn’t mention) as well as a multidisciplinary scientist, displaying familiarity with engineering, electronics, and biochemistry.
River Power: The river will return the bio-electricity he displayed prior to his de-vamping. While he isn't going to be throwing lightning bolts around any time soon, he'll eventually be more than capable of acting as a sort of living battery as well as manipulating existing electrical fields; he has used this in canon to turn on light bulbs with a single touch as well as to make a sort of crude Tesla coil (all this latter did require him access to live wiring beforehand). He can also manage a crude - but effective - sort of electroshock therapy and this can presumably be extended to lesser sorts of electric shocks, although in either case he needs to be touching the person or object he means to shock.
Reason for Character Choice: Tesla has long since been my favorite character from Sanctuary, and is an incredibly interesting character besides, ridiculous and sincere by turns. Also seeing how he reacts to an alternate version of a place he knows reasonably well sounds like it could be incredibly interesting.
Additional Information: n/a