Walter H. White

PLAYER INFORMATION
PLAYER: Erry
ARE YOU AT LEAST 14 YEARS OLD?: Yup.
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: 22, which is over 18, but whatever.
CONTACT: DW: cupiditas cupiditas
PERSONAL JOURNAL: eros_cupiditas
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None.


CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Walter H. White
CANON: Breaking Bad
CANON REFERENCE:
General Canon Overview
Walt-Specific Stuff
AGE: 51
GENDER: Male.
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Science teacher.

APPEARANCE: Here is a very Walt image of Walt. In game, he won’t appear significantly different from how he does in-canon.

PERSONALITY:
On the surface, Walter White is a somewhat nebbish, somewhat socially awkward, very nerdy, middle-aged man. He is polite and far from the type to be aggressive or over-assertive in his dealings with others, content not to rock the boat while doing his part. He’s not a pushover by any means (particularly not with his students, with whom he does his best to be insistent and firm), but he’s uncomfortable with invading others’ social space or making strenuous demands. A nice if somewhat uninteresting guy, with too much of a tendency to go on about his pet (mostly scientific) interests, is the impression most acquaintances are likely to get from him. They may recognize that he's very smart, but they're not likely to peg him for what he is -- a bona fide genius.

What they’re also likely to miss, if they don’t get a glimpse of him outside of everyday contexts, is the swollen, seriously bruised ego and the hunger for power underneath that surface. Walt lives with the constant sense that chance, as well as his own fears, have denied him success, allowed his fate to be taken out of his hands. His actions since his cancer diagnosis have largely been turned to reclaiming a feeling of control over his life and the world around him. Because of that, he’s quick to get wrapped up in his own projects and goals, has great difficulty accepting help from others, and is very protective of credit for his achievements. It’s important not only that he succeeds but that others recognize his success, see him for the brilliant, able, authoritative man he sees himself as. Nothing angers him so readily as the idea of his work (or the people important to him) being stolen from him.

These factors, unfortunately, give Walt a heavily manipulative and anti-empathetic side. Though he’s not at all incapable of caring for other people, he can lose sight of the independence of their wants and needs from his own rather easily. In the worst cases, this reaches to the levels of emotional abuse: it can be justified, in Walt’s mind, if the end result is the other party remaining tied to him, trusting him or going along with what he wants. In point of fact, Walter can justify almost any of his actions, if he sets his mind to it. He’s an arch-rationalizer with the intellectual capacity to argue his way out of any position that might appear, to a less brilliant (or more grounded) person, as morally abhorrent. Honesty, in particular, is the first thing to go out the window for Walter when he feels that it would benefit him, and he’s frighteningly good at spinning falsehoods and keeping track of who knows and who will believe what.

None of this is to say that he’s an out-and-out, malicious guy. Walt isn’t, though he definitely has the capacity to become one. Despite his dark side, he’s also someone willing to go to great lengths to protect or benefit those important to him. As a teacher, he refuses to watch his students underachieve or fail, if he can possibly help it – though he’s often not too great about connecting with those who don’t naturally tend to the academic side of things. And, in the rest of life, he’ll put himself in harm’s way well before he’ll let those he cares about suffer. (The problem here, again, is how easily he can explain away the harm he himself is capable of doing.) He’s perceptive enough to notice the difficulties others are facing and not adverse to lending a hand (or a mind) to helping them. If he cares to.

It’s probably worth noting that a lot of Walt’s motivations are tangled up in some very traditionalist ideas about masculinity. Men, as he sees things, aren’t dependent on others. Men protect those close to them, men lead and create, and so on and so forth. (Thankfully, he doesn’t really fall into the inverse, negative views about femininity.) So, despite his nerdiness, Walt also definitely has an almost stereotypical, masculine side to him, right down to the “Let’s have a beer, watch an old Western, listen to classic rock, and talk about bad-ass cars”-type of behavior. Alas, he can often take the stereotypes in a dangerous direction, when under stress: Men are dangerous, Men don’t admit fault. Men like to blow shit up. And so on.

Again, though, Walter is very, very good at controlling who sees what aspects of his personality, and he’s learned that it’s generally beneficial to stick with his unassuming, public persona. It takes getting close to him, generally, and gaining his trust (or his ire) for more of him than that to flash into view.

POWERS/ABILITIES: (These are completely different from what I reserved him with, sorry.)

Walter possesses a complex mutant power which affects his mental processing, thought, and memory on several levels, as follows:
(1) Under normal conditions, Walt has a genius level intellect and a particularly deft ability to adapt his train of thought to sudden changes. When he activates his mutant powers, however, this is ramped up to superhuman levels. He becomes capable of simultaneously thinking along multiple lines at once, as if he had multiple minds packed inside a single skull, at speeds more akin to those of a super-efficient computer than to a human being's. This allows him (to name some of the basic applications) to assess the likely outcome of any given scenario in a very brief time by rapidly running through the various possibilities, to accomplish intellectual work in record time, and to multi-task without any loss of efficiency (by devoting one or more mental ‘tracks’ to each task). Walt has an eidetic memory when his mutant powers are being actively used but not otherwise.

(2) Walter can use his powers to function on up to five mental tracks (which is generally sufficient for the above tasks) without negative side-effects. But pressing past that limit gives him additional capabilities. Moderately stretching his boundaries allows him to do the equivalent of a “Sherlock stare,” processing all readily available information about what he is observing near-instantaneously. If he pushes himself to current limits, he can use his super-rapid information-processing ability to achieve something like functional clairvoyance, predicting the next move of anyone he can observe a split-second before they actually act.

(3) These latter uses of Walt’s powers come with their risks, however. Moderately pushing himself for more than a half-hour or seriously pushing himself for more than ten minutes at a time results in mental exhaustion and headaches. After these set in, using his powers again on any level before resting becomes very difficult for him. In addition, both pushing himself in this way or using his powers at their ‘safe’ levels for long periods of time (say, the better part of a day) gives Walt a kind of psychological ‘tunnel vision:’ It becomes difficult to pull himself away from the tasks he’s bent his mind to and severely difficult for him to care about the thoughts, goals, or opinions of others, until he’s forced himself to rest and recuperate.)

(4) Finally, Walt’s powers give him the ability to detect and resist telepathic intrusion into his mind. He can sense any mental presence in his thoughts that does not belong to him and limit what mental ‘tracks’ the invader will have access to. (So, for instance, he could notice a psychic peeping into his thoughts and decide to let them only ‘see’ the track on which he’s thinking about what he had for breakfast, while continuing his work, undetected, on four other mental planes.) Nonetheless, he has no psychic powers of his own, and a powerful telepath who devoted him or herself to the task could likely break down these mental barriers.

AU HISTORY:
Walter’s mutant powers first manifested during his early years as an undergraduate chem student at Caltech. His youth up to that point had been largely uneventful, although his father had died when he was young and his mother proved an overbearing, stifling influence. During work as a student lab assistant during his sophomore year, Walt suddenly found himself thinking through every step and detail of the ongoing experiment – all at once. The dramatic onset of his powers was seriously mentally draining, but, thankfully, he recovered after a few days’ rest, blaming the episode on the stress of his studies.

Walt spent the remainder of his academic career carefully testing the limits of his powers. He had always been a highly promising student, but, with his new gifts under control, he quickly became something of a scientific wunderkind. His (already miniscule) social life suffered in the process: By the time he left Caltech with a PhD, his only real friends were fellow student Elliot Schwartz and his former lab assistant and girlfriend, Gretchen. Elliot and Walt founded a research/technology firm, Gray Matter Technologies, after graduation; Gretchen used her wealthy family’s financial connections to give the nascent company most of its start-up capital.

Everything was looking supernova-bright for Walt’s future until, less than a year in, Gray Matter was hired to consult on a secretive, government project – one designed to identify and locate mutants. Walter had always been anxious about the possibility of detection, particularly as the public became more aware of mutantcy, but the nature of his powers had made this unlikely. Now, he seriously feared discovery. So, when he also learned that Gretchen’s family was already harshly anti-mutant, he made a snap decision: he abandoned Gray Matter, Gretchen, and all his ongoing research without explanation.

This move came with significant costs. The projects Walt had started up at Gray Matter would eventually lead to a Nobel Prize (for other scientists) and make the company incredibly profitable (for Elliot and Gretchen). Walter, meanwhile, worked successfully at multiple labs around New Mexico – but never too successfully. He’d become paranoid about being suspected as a mutant and so never applied his powers to his research too freely, never stayed at one position for too long. During a stint at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he met and developed a relationship with a local woman, Skyler Lambert. They would eventually marry.

Skyler soon became pregnant, and this convinced Walt even further of the need to keep his status as a mutant completely hidden. He thus gave up research science entirely to become a high school chemistry teacher. This set the family’s financial prospects significantly backwards…especially when their first child, Walter Jr., was born with cerebral palsy. By the time Walter turned fifty years old, Skyler was in the late stages of an unintended, second pregnancy, and Walt had been forced to take an extra job as a car wash attendant, just to make ends meet.

And then, just as icing, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Besides the threat of Walt’s own imminent death, this seemed to guarantee that he would leave his family in massive debt after his passing. He thus once again made a hasty decision…this time, to enter into the drug trade. Walt had inadvertently discovered that a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman, was involved in the manufacture of methamphetamine. He blackmailed Pinkman into entering into a partnership with him and, using his chemistry knowledge, lab experience, and a liberal application of his mutant powers, designed a variant of crystal meth that was vastly more potent and addictive than anything previously on the market. The proceeds from its sale would go to pay for his cancer treatments (which he publically claimed were funded by his old friends at Gray Matter) and to build up a nest-egg for his family, for after his death.

Unfortunately, actually selling the stuff proved a little bit difficult. The first distributor Walt and Jesse contacted soon discovered that Walter’s brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, was a DEA agent, and Walt was forced to murder the man and one of his associates. They then attempted to do business with the Mexican cartel’s contact in the area, Tuco, who proved extremely violent and unstable. Tuco would eventually kidnap the two partners after the DEA began a manhunt for him, and, following a failed attempt to poison him, Walt and Jesse left him for dead in a shootout with the DEA.

Having gotten pretty much every high-level drug dealer in the Albuquerque area killed at this point, Walter and Jesse were forced to form their own distribution network, made up primarily of local, mutant drug-users. And, surprisingly, they were actually pretty successful in this endeavor…in the short-term. They had little to no local competition, and Walt took pleasure in cranking up prices as high as they could go. Unfortunately, he also made the mistake of insisting on expanding the operation. After the group they’d put together pushed into another dealer’s territory and got one of its members gunned down, the remainder of their employees fled for the hills rather than risk an out-and-out gang war. Walt was forced to sell off the remainder of his inventory to a regional drug distributor (unbeknownst to him, the same man who’d orchestrated the initial shooting).

Obviously, attempting to set up a drug empire had forced Walt to deceive and grow increasingly distant from his family, in order to conceal his illegal activities. Skyler, in particular, had grown highly suspicious of her husband’s behavior. And it was at this point, when Walt’s involvement in the business had collapsed, that she finally began to pry into the various falsehoods he’d spun and discovered that the payments for his treatment had come out of pocket. She eventually concluded that he had to be involved in selling drugs to have raised such a vast amount of money and, confronting him with this, demanded he separate from the family.

That was when the Xavier Institute first approached Walter. The concentration of organized, mutant activity in his and Jesse’s old gang had drawn their attention, and, after some investigation, they confronted him with an offer: Contingent on his giving up all involvement in the drug trade, of course, he would be welcome to take on a faculty position as a science teacher. Walter initially hesitated to accept this proposal but in the end agreed, in hopes that, while the move would distance him from his family, it might convince Skyler that he had broken off his ties to illegal activity.

Alas, the added news that her husband had hidden being a mutant from her for the better part of two decades didn’t lead to immediate reconciliation. On the bright side, though, the Institute did set Walt up for an experimental surgery which greatly improved his medical condition. At this point, Walter has been teaching at the Institute for the better part of the year, more or less cancer free (though always at risk of his disease coming back). He primarily teaches high-school and college-level chemistry but can also do physics and middle-school gen. science, as needed. When not serving as an instructor, he also has a hand in experimentation and research, using the top-level technology available at the Institute.

SAMPLE
1ST PERSON SAMPLE:

[Anyone logging into the Intranet today will find this text-post helpfully marked as urgent, right next to Mr. White’s user-name.]

Students at every grade-level should be advised that the rules regarding fire-starting in or around the Institute’s chemistry labs haven’t changed. They certainly haven’t been loosened at all. So, though I realize this kind of thing can be more of a problem for young, mutant students than for others, let’s all try to be a little more careful here, okay? I don’t want to give another set of seminars on lab safety any more than you want to sit through all of them. But I will, and then you’ll have to.

Fair warning.

THIRD PERSON SAMPLE:

“Mr. Albrecht, eyes on your own paper, please.”
Somehow, no matter how many testing periods go by, there are always students who forget that Walt can read and pay attention to whoever’s gaze might be wandering at the edge of his field of vision. It never quite fails to surprise the perpetrators, when he calls them on it – nor quite fail to annoy their instructor. This class only has to sit through fifty minutes of chemistry at a time, before they’re back to practicing flying around or talking to animals or whatever it is each one does. They could at least try to stay on-task for that less-than-an-hour stretch.

Then again, half the annoyance comes from how hard it is even to blame them. Cheating is a serious fault, and Walt has no trouble putting a snap in his voice for that. But, when he spots daydreamers, middle-school children passing friendly notes, distracted high-schoolers flirting…well, how bitter can he be that they’re not fixated on the periodic table? Outside the lab’s doors and out of their desks, they’re at school mostly to learn the proper management of the superpowers they all happen to have, in effect. It’s laughable to think that any fourteen year-old could fill his life up with that and have space in his head left over. (At least ninety-nine percent of the time. There are always the studious ones, and they’re always a gift. Almost.)

If he thinks about it, he’s nearly jealous. If this had been his youth, surrounded by people like himself – and away from his family, good god – how different might everything have been? Or if Jesse Pinkman had spent his adolescence sitting as a student here, instead of doodling though a normal school’s classes and then sneaking joints out behind the building…

Mr. White raises his head up from his book’s pages and almost smiles, albeit tensely.

“Alright, everyone, five minutes until period change. You can start bringing up your test sheets as soon as you’ve finished.”