I'a Ry'gzengrho.

Player Information ;
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Jayde
OOC Journal: mordoriannazgul
Under 18? No
Email/IM: Email - Jaydepuff@aol.com AIM - Jaydepuff
Characters Played at Singularity: Rookie (huragokwhistler), Anon (traceurmonitor), Barricade (namesnotprowl)


Character Information ;
Name: Jack Walters
Name of Canon: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Game Wikipedia Entry, a page specifically about Jack Walters (some information slightly incorrect, esp. regarding his six years of amnesia), full playthrough of the game (with this video missing between videos 29 and 30), and a script version of the game for good measure.
Canon Point: Game end with “good” ending, i.e. he remembers what happened during those six years he lost to amnesia.

Setting: Jack’s world isn’t too very different from our own Earth in 1922. It comes complete with a young J. Edgar Hoover (and the nascent beginnings of the FBI, who investigate suspicious activities) and fast-talking Private Investigators who have strange relationships with beautiful women in trouble. It’s a pretty familiar place… on the surface at least. If you don’t look too hard or delve too much into the secrets of the world, everything is okay. But there are some places and some things out there that show that everything is not as it seems. The edges fray and there are things that, when learned of, the only sane reaction is to go mad.

One of these places – and the place the game is most concerned with – is the small town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. To say that Innsmouth is a little odd is an exaggeration in the direction of normalcy. The town is mostly dedicated to fishing (though it also has a gold refinery that does decent business)… and the citizens look a little fishy themselves, as a matter of fact. They are an incredibly insular community that dislikes outsiders poking around in their business, or bringing in new stores. Not to mention that at least half of the citizens seem to belong to a cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which worships a demon-fish sea god known as Father Dagon and his consort Mother Hydra, both of whom live in a great undersea city called Y'ha-nthlei and apparently answer to another –older and stronger – entity called Great Cthulhu. This religion got its start in Innsmouth when a ship captain by the name of Obed Marsh brought it back from an island community and began performing rituals – and ritual sacrifices – at an island off the coast called Devil’s Reef. It took over as the major religion in Innsmouth around 1836, when a mysterious “disaster” occurred that left Marsh and his followers to take over the town and impose upon them the Order of Dagon. Unlike other religious organizations however, there is concrete evidence towards the existence of Dagon, Hydra, and Cthulhu: the first two make in-game appearances, even if the strange, horrible fish-human hybrids called Deep Ones and their more human Innsmouth relatives didn’t spend much of their time trying to track down and kill Jack. The major reason that he even came to the town was that he was hired as a private investigator to uncover what happened to a store owner (who happened to be an outsider) there. Jack Walters was uniquely qualified to go to Innsmouth of course, whether the man that hired him realized or not; this was hardly the first time he had encountered something from beyond the normal realm of rational thought.

These other creatures are called the Great Race of Yith, or Yithians. They are, essentially, time-travelling psychic aliens that migrated to Earth in the distant past and, after a protracted war against a race of alien conquerors called flying polyps, banished the polyps to the bowels of the Earth. Even with this victory they knew that the polyps would kill all of them, and so the Yithians had their greatest minds project themselves forward to live in bodies that exist in a time after the polyps are defeated. These remaining Yithians have a habit of projecting themselves out into time to temporarily inhabit human bodies to learn what they have found out about the universe. Unlike most other entities in the universe beyond human understanding, the Yithians are generally benevolent about their body-snatching: the minds they displace end up as “captive minds” in their bodies (who can, if permitted, study Yithian texts in their great library in the city of Pnakotus), and when the Yithians are finished they helpfully erase the memories of the captive mind so they don’t go completely insane. It’s not always a complete process, though, and some memories can come back in nightmares.

Where Jack Walters fits into this is that he was a captive mind among the Yithians for six years, while one of their kind accessed as much information on fringe cults dedicated to the things beyond the stars – such as the Order of Dagon – as it could find. Jack was returned to his body and tried to find out where his body had gone for the last six years (as he otherwise had “amnesia” of the event since his mind was elsewhere), while piecing together strange visions of an alien world. But there is more to him than that: he is part-Yithian himself, conceived when one of the aliens swapped minds with his father. It gives him a unique edge when he is forced to deal with certain horrors in the world… but he is only human, and a human mind is still fragile when confronted with the unnatural.


Personality: Jack, above all other things, is curious about the world. It is part of what makes him such a good police officer, and later a good private detective. He investigates whatever happens to catch his attention… sometimes to his own detriment. He spends the entirety of the game investigating things, in fact – from the house that belongs to the Fellowship of Yith, to what he was up to during the six years he lost to amnesia, to the disappearance of a store owner and the curious history of Innsmouth. It gets him into trouble more than once. His curiosity about the Fellowship of Yith leads to him opening a gateway that brings the Yith down upon him. His investigations in Innsmouth lead to the deaths of several people, including a little girl that his torn to pieces as a direct result of him poking around a little too much. Moreover, trying to cure himself of his amnesia leads to every event related to Innsmouth, and to his own eventual downward spiral into madness.

At heart, he doesn’t mean to let so many bad things happen due to his own actions. Throughout most of the game, he tries to do right by people. He’s generally polite to the people he meets, even when they happen to be the creepy, rude citizens of Innsmouth (though a few of them he’s more than willing to grumble about behind their backs). Jack even worries about J. Edgar Hoover when they assault the Marsh Refinery, in spite of the fact that Hoover recently tortured him and has generally been a complete jerk towards Jack. He is nice towards Ramona Waite, the only child that makes an appearance in the game, and is genuinely apologetic and morose towards her father when she is killed. He tries to help many of the citizens of Innsmouth that he perceives as being decent or innocent, becoming visibly upset when they are harmed or killed.

Though part of this reaction might be due to the fact that Jack is profoundly terrified of dead bodies. He cannot spend much time examining the corpses he comes across without being traumatized, temporarily if nothing else. He also suffers from similar fear of heights and does not handle climbing ladders well… even after he figures out that there are things far more terrible out there. Those monsters are the things that eventually make him go completely insane… though the piles of bodies and scaling up and down tremendously high walls in the underwater city of Y'ha-nthlei don’t precisely help him. By the end of the game he’s a complete wreck, hallucinating the ravaged ghost of Ramona and drawing protective symbols and strange writings on the walls of his asylum cell with his own blood.

Jack ends up as one of those few people that has seen what lies beyond the boundaries set by the human mind, and survives… barely. His body is still intact, but at the end he knows the truth; that humans are a small race with no idea what is out there in the cosmos around them, and that he is not what he used to think he was. He loses all sense of purpose when confronted with this, and eventually he decides that the only way out of the waking nightmare of knowing what is truly out there is through the sleep of death.

How he will handle the realization that even death can’t release him from his knowledge is anyone’s guess.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: He can shove objects without the use of his legs or hands. Jack Walters, thanks to his ancestry, is a little bit psychic. This is what made him such a good police officer when he was on Arkham’s police force – he could ‘see’ into other people’s minds and know what they did or what they were planning on doing. This is especially effective when the other person intends to harm him; it’s shown several times during gameplay that he has visions of being hunted and attacked, even when the other person is only planning to attack him later. This power will only work for whatever zone he happens to be in with a radius of about 20 feet, and only works in cases where he would be directly in danger. However, there is a second part to his psychic abilities, which only happens once during the course of the game. Much like his Yithian relatives, he has the ability to swap minds with other creatures – namely, four Deep Ones that he briefly controlled the bodies of for a time. This is likely to only happen if Jack is under extreme duress and there is a mind animal enough for him to displace. As well, it only works moving his mind from one location in the present to another location in the present – he cannot swap minds into the past or future.

Of course, he’s hardly a powerful man by any stretch of the imagination. His body his just as fragile as any other human’s body and he has as much strength as a normal human. Unfortunately this also means he has just about as much capacity for understanding the bizarre, horrible things in the world, and the last edges of his sanity are incredibly frayed. He’s seen things that humans were not meant to know… and is related to a race of those things humans were not meant to know. While he’s not liable to speak in tongues – unless something comes up that he can translate, in which cases he’s quite good at saying phrases with no vowels in them – he will probably end up drawing protective Elder Signs anywhere he happens to stay at. As per the opening cutscene of the game, he's also fairly likely to scrawl writing in either the languages of the Yith or the Deep Ones in conjunction with the Elder Signs, with whatever fluid happens to be available... even if it's his own blood.

Inventory: Jack’s asylum clothes (shirt and pants, both white, no shoes) and his diary (recreated here), full of his notes and everything else written he’s picked up during the course of the game and a book of translated writings related to the Order of Dagon. If possible, I’d like to also give him back the Yithian Lightning Cannon from the end of the game, with the power level reduced to make it pretty much a big, unlimited-use taser – charging it up would give it a heftier zap more akin to a cattle prod.
Appearance: Given the height of his PB and the average height of American men in the 1920s, Jack is 5’8”. He’s also considerably scrawnier and more haunted-looking than he had been six years ago, thanks to everything he has been through and being in a poorly-kept asylum at irregular intervals; it's unlikely he's eaten much in the six days between his last journal entry on February 10 and his suicide on February 16. The PB being used for him is Henry Nixon.
Age: Jack Walters was born in 1890 and died in 1922, making his age roughly 32.

OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?

Samples ;
Log Sample: He doesn’t have much time, he knows. He can hear the change of orderlies outside the ward, even this far down from the main room. The one coming in will be wandering down the hall to check on the patients soon, and this has to be done before that happens. Before someone can stop him. Hopefully the others in the ward will slow the orderly down enough.

Jack’s hand shakes as he continues writing what will be the last entry in his journal. He pauses to steady it towards the end. … and it is there I have finally glimpsed upon what lives in the dark corners of the earth the scrawl trails off at the end. He stops, rocking as he re-reads the end of the entry, wiping a hand across his face.

Music starts, far down the hall. A song he knows, from his first visit, when he… wasn’t himself. Something that he shouldn’t know, but does, because… because of what had been in his body, while he was. Away. In a borrowed body, living in a city of bizarre creatures for six years. He hadn’t even remembered it, until he went to Innsmouth. Until he destroyed Y'ha-nthlei – that’s a name he remembers again, too – though he’s certain that was only temporary. How do you kill gods, utterly ravage something that you don’t rightly understand?

It doesn’t matter now, anyway, how much of the truth he knows. He didn’t need to know the truth, he knows that now. And he knows the only way to get rid of it. His father – his human father he mentally corrects – showed him that much.

He clambers up from the floor, and climbs on top of the chair set against the wall. A glance is spared down to the girl sitting next to it, with jet-black hair, clothes and flesh all torn and mangled. Oh, Ramona. It was all his fault. But this will be his atonement, and his escape. He rocks the chair back at forth, and eventually it collapses out from under him and he starts to choke. The drop wasn’t enough to snap his neck, but hopefully this will do the job before someone can try to rescue the shell he’s become.

Jack Walters doesn’t entirely notice the orderly lifting him up, his journal finally slipping out of his hands. He only vaguely hears the doctor calling his name, and barely feels the world drop out from below him. What he does feel is the crack as his body hits a jagged collection of… something, drawing a sharp, startled breath from him. Something cold and smooth gathers him up, despite his weak struggles. This can’t be death. He’s still breathing. And this couldn’t be an orderly. What is this? He finally loses consciousness again.

Network Sample: [Someone’s connection to the network opens, but nothing happens for quite a while. Maybe they brushed the wearable on accident? But no, eventually he starts typing.]

I was dragged to this facility by a strange metal creature several days ago. I am uncertain as to the purpose of this, as this situation was not my intent. Then again, this is practically typical of what has happened to me of late.

I have been told that I am no longer in Arkham, Massachusetts. I have also been told that there are others that might answer me through this curious device. How do I return there? There is something I need to complete.