Friend, Role Model, Inspiration to Write

I missed the boat with the "You Were Never Really Here" challenge. Here's the guy that I would have entered in that challenge (although I'm making no attempt to conform with the entry requirements).

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Way back in the days before the invention of electricity and the Internet, I used to play tabletop role-playing games. Unlike most gamers, for me, the games were just an excuse for creating characters. Character generation was great fun, especially the backstories. I know, I know . . . character generation usually consisted of rolling dice for each attribute and trying to create a cohesive character out of random numbers. Once you decided on the character class and alignment, it was pretty much over. All you had left was the character description: "Shareen Silverleaf is a Sylvan Elf fighter/mage (short bow specialty), daughter of an elven lord. She left home to join a band of mercenaries after a dispute with her father. She is short in stature, with striking green eyes and light blonde hair, which she typically wears braided. She tends to hang to the rear of the party."

That was it. Nothing about how she harbored a deep crush on the human barbarian that led the party. Nothing about how she thoroughly despised the druid healer. Nothing about how she hated everything about living in the forest, breaking the rules of her player race. Nothing about how, despite having a sister who was the archer version of Annie Oakley, Shareen was not great with a bow. I will admit that this last trait eventually made it into the character description. In one dungeon, Shareen shot one of her own party in the back with an arrow during a battle because I blew it on the roll for her attack. Heymar (human bard) only survived due to a lucky saving throw. It was a long time before either Shareen or I lived that one down!

In addition to being a gamer, I also enjoyed collecting comics, particularly X-Men and a whole variety of independent lines (Miracle Man #1, anyone? Yeah. I thought not). When my GM discovered a game called "Champions," it was right up most of the group's alley. It was a generic hero game, not based on any particular company's mythos. We created a bunch of "Next Gen" X-Men. One was Wolverine's daughter, Lynx. One was Nightcrawler's son, Nightcross (who also had a sister, Nightmane). The GM created a few new NPC characters, two of which were Moonmane (Suzanne, Nightcross' mother) and her brother, whose heroic name I forget, but whose real name was "Tim." Overall, there were probably a dozen of these characters, for whom we all established a bit of a history. Unfortunately, the characters were more interesting than the game and, after a few rounds through comic book-style adventures, we abandoned Champions.

As much as I was happy to leave the system behind, I was less than happy to abandon Johann. He was an interesting guy, with my typically expansive character history. He was almost born in a restaurant, something of a dive that Kurt and Sue liked to frequent for their Reuben sandwiches. Johann's first language was Bavarian German, despite being born in New York state, with Romani, then English, then Spanish being his next languages, in that order. Over time, he picked up French, High German, and Russian. By the time he was five years old, he knew he was going to be a priest, much to Kurt's dismay. He was a brilliant and dedicated student, with a high IQ. He collected languages and degrees like I collected comics and dice (IYKYK). He graduated from Xavier's School early, entered the seminary early, became a bishop "early." In exchange for being a part-time counselor at the school, Xavier gave him a few acres of land and built a retreat--which they both know will go to Johann's order after he dies. In short, I knew Johann's trajectory from birth until death. In a world that was just beginning to hate Catholic priests, he was someone I admired. Johann was an amalgamation of Father Mulcahy and Father Stephen from St. Pius X Church in Middletown, CT, where I had gone to church in the 1970s, with just a touch of Father Dowling, Father Koesler, Gambit, and Nightcrawler thrown in.

However, in the Champions system, every power/positive attribute a character has must have a countering negative. In the game, Johann was not limited by line of sight teleportation, as Nightcrawler is. He could travel just about anywhere, as long as he had the breath to handle it (think "going between" in the Dragons of Pern series). He was a mid-level empath, which he went to great lengths to keep hidden from his parents. His intelligence and agility were also mutant power level. He was strong, although not super-strong. And, like his grandmother, Johann had innate magic. He rejected it after entering the seminary, but it still lurks, tempting him under the surface.

With all of these attributes, you know that he had a boat load of Champions-determined limitations. Johann had difficulty interacting with other people. His parents were content to describe it as "Johann doesn't think like other people," even though his "Uncle Charles encouraged them to get him examined or diagnosed. I never decided if he was simply out of touch due to his IQ or if he was possibly a very high-functioning person with Asperger's Syndrome. What was important was that he saw everything through a literal lens. Idioms were difficult for him to grasp. He disliked reading fiction and had little interest in television or movies. He dated frequently as a teenager but never had serious relationships. He rode his motorcycle a little too fast. He played cards with his Uncle Remy and his Uncle Logan. He developed a distrust for "normals/normies" after some loser thought that he shouldn't be dating a "normal" girl--after all, as Nightcrawler's son, he had the blue/furry/tail/fangs thing going on--and tried to shoot him dead at the one and only movie he was ever going to attend at the movie theater. After that, he drank a bit too much. It never interfered with his living his life, but after his mission to Russia, during which it approached excess, he gave it up completely.

And then there were the relationships! He loved his extended family, but especially his "Uncles," Charles, Logan, Remy, and Eric. That last one is a tad problematic, if you are at all familiar with the Marvel comic universe of the time. If you are and I told you that he spent some vacation time on Asteroid M, you'd understand the issue even better. After the shooting incident, he almost transferred from Xavier School to the Massachusetts Academy. In gaming terms, Johann has spent his entire life as a chaotic neutral trying to jam himself into lawful good. Most of the seminaries to which he applied weren't ready for a blue, furry chaotic neutral priest representing them, so after order after order rejected him, he was finally accepted by the Jesuits. It was really the perfect landing place for him. They loved his focus on scholarship at the seminary and taught him how to channel some of his more negative traits into positive ones.

I am not, however, a huge fan of writing "fan fiction" for the sake of fan fiction. If I'm going to write something, I want it to be publishable. After Champions was done for us, Johann became a normal looking man with Romani heritage, Suzanne developed Calo heritage, and the school for mutant children became a school for troubled youths. I wrote an (absolutely terrible but potentially salvageable) novel called Between Worlds about Johann, which was way too close to fan fiction to be remotely publishable. I'm doing something fairly Monty Pythonesque by writing the second novel in the Between Worlds series because the second (maybe third?) novel has been dying to get out for a while and needs writing. So far, so good, although I'm not proceeding nearly fast enough. I have way too many words to share about him, who I would consider one of my best friends if he could be in the same room with me.

I've often said that if I get an afterlife, I'd like to be able to meet a bunch of people that I never got to meet in real life. Steve Irwin. Leonard Nimoy. Anna Pavlova. And, maybe, Johann. After all, none of us will have physical bodies in that plane of existence. I'd like to think that, after almost four decades of him being in and out of my life, that I'd finally get to speak with the friend I never met.