horrid donut earth truther lad

Name/Nicknames/Alias: Isaac Kaplan (real name), @RoswellReject (Twitter username)

Age or Date of Birth: 25 years old, born in the summer of an unspecified year because I forgot to ask my Keeper what year his campaign is set in.

Gender: Male

Pronouns: He/him

Nationality/Birthplace: An as-yet-unspecified small town in Kansas

Weight: 110 lbs, scrawny as hell.

Height: 5’5″, shorter than both of his companions

Physical Description: Isaac Kaplan very much looks like a man obsessed to the detriment of every other part of his life. His naturally slight frame is bony from poor nutrition, his pale, freckled skin is near translucent from how little sunlight he gets, his ginger hair sees a comb once a week at most, there’s always a bandage somewhere on his jawline from his most recent attempt to shave his patchy stubble, and his wild, bloodshot green eyes have deep dark circles beneath them. His usual attire is tattered jeans, a military surplus jacket that was beat to shit when he got it and has only seen worse days since, a pair of off-brand canvas sneakers, and one of a rotation of band t-shirts (common sights are Weezer, Nirvana, Green Day, and several extremely mid local bands). Dude looks rough.

Playbook: Flake. I probably could have left it “Class” but he is a Monster of the Week character and I am pedantic.

Intelligence: To his credit, Isaac is genuinely a very clever guy, he just applies it in the worst possible ways usually. He has a particular knack for investigation and “connecting the dots” so to speak, and often notices things most people don’t.

Wisdom/Charisma: Isaac Kaplan handles social situations about as well as you would expect from a high-strung conspiracy theorist who doesn’t get out much and doesn’t have much in the way of a “filter”. Mechanically he has a -1 to Charm. He has horrible mental blinders that cause him to assume everything fits into the conspiracy he’s obsessed with and will usually attribute anything obviously supernatural (and many things that aren’t) to aliens first.

Talents: Inexplicable affinity for magic despite no formal training. He’s as confused as his cohorts are.

Bad Habits: As previously stated, he has no filter and will frequently say whatever comes to his constantly racing mind. Also he is very quick to distrust answers that seem “too obvious”, which is sometimes a boon and sometimes a gigantic pain in the ass.

Backstory:

• Age 0: Isaac Kaplan is born to Gregory and Rebecca Kaplan in the summer of [whatever year would make him 25 at the start of the campaign]
• Ages 0-8: relatively normal suburban american upbringing. Isaac is described by most of his teachers as “a bright and curious boy, although it worries me that he doesn’t play much with the other children”.
• Age 9: Isaac meets his eventual best friend Eric Meade for the first time. They bond over a love for video games and astronomy.
• Age 10-11: More normal upbringing stuff.
• Age 12: Isaac finishes the sixth grade. He does have a small group of friends at this point, although they’re more Eric’s friends than his. The moment the bell rings to end the last day of school, he grabs his overnight bag from his locker and piles into the back of Eric’s dad’s SUV with his friends, ready for a night of pizza, video games, and movies beyond any twelve-year-old boy’s wildest dreams.
• Age 12, 12 hours later: Isaac wakes up at three in the morning and has to pee. When staggering back to his sleeping bag afterwards, he sees a strange light through the backyard window and steps outside to investigate.
• Age 12, 6 hours later: The boys all wake up for breakfast. Isaac is nowhere to be found. The search for him begins. The police also begin investigating Eric’s family as suspects in Isaac’s disappearance.
• Age 12, three days later: Isaac Kaplan is discovered in Eric’s backyard. He is dehydrated, hungry, dirty, and terrified, but alive and, as determined by an examination at the hospital, unharmed save for a few minor cuts and scrapes. When he can form words well enough to explain what happened to him, he claims he was abducted and experimented on by aliens. The doctor tells his parents that trauma to a young mind can sometimes cause them to repress the true events of the trauma and replace them with something easier to understand, and that therapy should be able to help uncover the lost memories.
• Age 13, a month after Isaac’s disappearance: The police are unable to find any evidence that either Isaac’s or Eric’s parents had anything to do with what happened. Isaac finds himself alone again, as the adolescent minds of his friends find it easier to cast him out than to contend with the fact that their friend now fervently believes he was the victim of an alien abduction.
• Age 13-18: Life is rough for Isaac Kaplan. A string of therapists who give up on him because he’s “resistant” to their treatments, being politely avoided at best and bullied relentlessly at worst by his peers, and having his parents grow from worried to frustrated by his stubborn insistence that the story he told is true will have that effect. But luckily for him he’s found a space for people like him. An online forum specifically for people who have experienced extraterrestrial encounters and lived to tell about it. His story, for the first time in his life, is met with sympathy and understanding rather than mockery or an endless probing to get through the “repression” or “for the love of god, Isaac, this shit is getting old. You’re not a child anymore, tell me the goddamn truth!” Hearing the stories from other abduction victims who were treated the way he does begins to harden his heart. He also begins to pick up a few strange beliefs.
• Age 19: Isaac is thrown out of his college’s astronomy program after he gives a presentation about the shape of the earth actually being toroidal. He changes his major to computer science.
• Age 20-22: Isaac graduates with a bachelor’s in computer science and moves into a crappy apartment. He affords the rent with random under-the-table coding jobs and otherwise throws himself headlong into trying to understand what happened to him.
  Age 23-24: Isaac falls deeper into his obsession. He comes to the conclusion that world leaders are deliberately spreading disinformation to paint him and others like him as crackpots, lest their own dealings with the aliens (voluntary or forced? He’s still unsure) come to light. He doesn’t understand what the aliens want. He doesn’t understand what the people in power have to gain from working with them. But he has to find out.
• Age 25: Isaac is summoned to a small town in Canada by a mysterious employer and finally meets his long-time Twitter mutual, the half-demon Douglas (Monstrous), and his long-time online nemesis, the government agent Hugh (Professional), in person. The story begins…

Other Traits and Creator Notes:

• Isaac is bisexual but nobody wants him
• Isaac does not believe in the moon but DOES think the Earth is toroidal
• Isaac has a pocket of his military jacket that is just for knives
• Isaac was directly inspired by my enjoyment of the conspiracy debunking podcast QAnon Anonymous, but he himself believes QAnon is disinformation and that people who believe in it are a special form of bootlicker.