Alex Nightingale

Name: Alexander Aster, often referred to as Alex Nightingale.

Age: He is in his early forties.

Gender: Male.

Race: They refer to themselves as humans, but they don't quite look the same; they are generally taller than humans, and their skin is white. Their hair and eyes are always very pale colours.

Height: Just under two meters.

Weight: 79 kilograms.

Build: Tall, athletic.

Eyes: Ice blue.

Skin: White

Hair: White, short, and extremely messy. He probably doesn't even own a comb.

Defining features: His skin and hair are white, he is tall and handsome and he has clear blue eyes.

Clothing: He usually wears an old fashioned city-watch uniform (similar to a Roman legionnaire's uniform). If he can, he finds clothes that allow him to fit in with his surroundings.

Weapons/Gear: Usually a truncheon, sword or crossbow. These are the weapons a watch officer is taught to use. He also has a watch uniform, a leather satchel to carry supplies in, and a bell. He doesn't really need the bell; it is a standard issue patrol man's bell. Since the city he used to patrol no longer exists, he just keeps it for sentimental reasons.

Unusual abilities (rate relative power on 1-5 scale):

1: Magic. There are plenty of mages sitting around in his head, with nothing to do. If he needs to do some magic he can ask them for a spell, but they might not help. The magic of the Nightingale mages is very structured and a lot of rules surround it, so there aren't really many things they are useful for (4)

2: Knowledge. The people in his head have a huge accumulated knowledge. However, most of the time they are more of a hindrance than a help. If more than one or two people try to talk to him at the same time it just sounds like buzzing and gives him a headache. The more people that are talking, the worse the headache. Also, there is a lot of conflicting knowledge. Sometimes he will get five or six different answers for a question, with no way to tell which is the correct one. (2)

3: Endurance: He is extremely fit and can walk for hours on end without getting tired. This is due to years spent as a patrol man in the watch (2)

4: Moral compass. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, which is one of the few things that aren't effected by the opinions of the people of Nightingale (1)

Fighting Style: Inconsistent, usually rather hack-and-slash. Mostly instinctive, due to how slow he is at thinking.

Loves: Alex loves his job. He loves walking the streets of his city, he loves the way people react when he helps them. He also loves his Mum's cooking, dogs and children. Lately, however, he just wants peace and quiet.

Fears: That he will never find a place for Nightingale, and that he'll be stuck with all those people in his head forever. He also is scared of drowning, because he doesn't swim very well.

Quirks (at least 5): -He mixes up the meaning of words quite often. He was never all that good with words, and Nightingale just made it worse. -Sometimes he answers questions a long time after they've been asked. Often he forgets the answers to questions he has asked and has to ask them again. -He hates sweet things. They make him sick. -He hums marching/military tunes when he gets nervous. -When he sleeps he curls up in a ball. -He hates being hit in the face. Seriously, don't do it. It'll only make him mad. His race has harder skin than normal humans. -He runs his hands through his hair or messes it up when he's thinking. -When he's eating he gives his food his undivided attention, and shovels it into his mouth as fast as he can. It is unclear why he picked up this habit, because he had no siblings and never had to fight for his food.

-Backstory-

Original setting: The city of Nightingale. It was one of those shining cities where magic and peace reign. An overall nice place to live, with a relatively small population of around 50,000, a good economy based on the city's magic users, two universities and the most efficient and organised city watch in the world.

History: He grew up and led a fairly good life in the city of Nightingale. Despite the death of his father he joined the city watch and made his way through the ranks to sergeant. Then one day the kingdom that Nightingale occupied a corner of decided it wanted to rule the city as well, and gathered an army. The city leaders knew they would never be able to defend Nightingale, so they asked the mages at the Arcana University to come up with a solution. The mages used a powerful and extremely forbidden spell to convert the city and all of its inhabitants into thought and stuff them into the head of a well meaning young watch officer; Alex Aster. He staggered around for a while, trying to figure out what the hell just happened, but then the army arrived and he had to escape. Some of the mages who were floating around in his head helped him create a portal into another dimension, which he fell through and spent the next few days sleeping while his subconscious mended his mind as best as it could.

Family: There was only him and his mother. They lived together. His father was killed on duty as a watchman years ago, which did nothing to dampen Alex's ambition to join the force. At one point he had a fiancée, but her family moved out of the city, and he refused to leave Nightingale to go with her. That was almost twenty years ago, though, so he's over it.

Friends: The standard set of friends; other watch members that he used to have a drink with after work, people who live on his street; no one very interesting.

Pick one thing your character IS and one thing he/she IS NOT:

He is durable. He is extremely fit and can withstand fairly heavy injuries. He is mentally durable as well; he has to be to survive Nightingale with his sanity intact and not let his mind be dissolved under the force of all the others.

He is not wise. He allows himself to be ordered around by people he doesn't or shouldn't trust, he gets confused easily, he makes mistakes because he doesn't think very well. He likes to give people the benefit of the doubt.

List the three most important things about your character:

1. When the minds of fifty thousand people aren't clouding his thoughts, he is kind, charismatic and thoughtful, with a strong sense of justice. It takes him a lot of concentration to keep them completely out of his mind, though, so often he doesn't bother.

2. With the entire population of Nightingale in his head, it takes him a long time to think of anything, and he often forgets things or gets mixed up. Sometimes he forgets who he is and simply introduces himself as Nightingale. Usually he lets the city leaders tell him what to do because it avoids any strenuous thinking on his part. The city leaders are less than scrupulous.

3. He is fast becoming disillusioned with his city. Being able to see what the people are really like forces him to see that not everyone is as good a person as he is. For the most part the people of Nightingale are selfish, greedy, cunning and spiteful. This makes him feel even more lost and alone than ever, and resentful as well. After all, he gave up so much for these people, and he could always just have the whole city erased from his mind. It would be easier to find a mind-bender than a new world for the city.

History after entering this universe:

Alex showed up on Earth just in time to help fend off an invasion from another dimension.

Because the invaders were all magic users, and the general public had no idea that magic even existed, America had no defense against the invasion. Magic users from all around the world showed up to help out, but they were fast losing until Alex showed up to help. The invaders were unprepaired for his type of magic, and this combined with his unimaginable power of the mages of Nightingale made him much more powerful than the invaders. He teleported all the people out of the city that the invaders had entered before magically levelling it and killing the invaders.

The whole battle was caught on video by news crews and broadcasted to the entire world. This had two after effects: The world now knows of the existance of magic, and the world powers are creating ways of dealing with it, and this made Alex a hero in the eyes of the public. The US Government felt the pressure of public opinion and gave Nightingale permission to rebuild itself in the ruins of a city that was destroyed in the invasion, so long as the city was open to anyone who wanted to live there. It wasn't long before both the people of Nightingale and the citizens of the destroyed city had rebuilt and were living in harmony--more or less.

Alex, at the last minute, refused to let any of the mages to leave his mind. He knew what they were like, and decided they were too dangerous to let loose on Earth. Now that there are less than a hundred people occupying his mind, he is able to think almost normally, and has complete control over the mages, making him the most powerful magic user in the world.