Veritas Wye

## **General Information**

Veritas is the second main character of the general plot. Born and raised as a test subject in a spaceship, he stumbles upon Hyperborea to find out more about his past.

## **Background / History**

The transformation was massive and so quick her body collapsed, leaving Veritas as a stillborn to deal with the consequences of it: the majority of his organs had failed and needed to be replaced with mechanical parts like his eyes and heart, which now also pumps some specific chemicals in his bloodstream to keep him alive, he suffers from asthma and his body is extremely sensitive to toxins to the point even the smallest amounts of alcohol would give him alcohol poisoning (mostly because said toxins can mess very easily with the chemicals in his blood, making his mechanical heart stop).

Because of this, he has to take several medications to help sustain his body so that it won’t reject the mechanical parts they put in him (for the sci-fi bullshit enjoyers: this medications work by helping his immune system recognise and tolerate the signal proteins, more commonly referred to as antigens, on the surface of the cells coating these mechanical organs as self cells, so that they won’t trigger the rejection attack from the immune response).

As a result of this experiment, he was confined in a containment room to grow up while being observed as a test subject.

Even his meals were delivered to him in an airtight bag so it isn’t surprising to hear that these conditions took a huge toll on his mental state, which was already frail because of his new weird powers: he developed some extremely self destructive behavior like breaking his own fingers just to do and feel something.

He had a caretaker for a little while, but even she was taken away after he bit her finger off.

## CHARACTER INFO

### Location(s)

- Spaceship (age 0 - 15)
- Capital Planet (age 15 - 29)
- Hyperborea (present)

### Connections

- Apate Gadarik (partner)
- Mishka (coworker)
- Thy (coworker)

## STATUS

**ALIVE**

He had absolutely no idea how to act, no intuition to do anything that a normal human would do because his brain never really recovered from his body making contact with **Aletheia**.

Veritas ended up living a terrible life trying to deal with terrifying powers and no one around him knew what to do with him so they decided to take the matter in their own hands: as a panic method to keep him at bay, the med team put him under surgery several times in his childhood and inserted a spike through his ears in his brain, disrupting a part of his brain that they found to be communicating with Aletheia and effectively erasing most of the memories he had about living in the spaceship, along with forcing him to suppress any recollection of how to manipulate said communication to use his powers.

This definitely was a very hideous process because another thing about Veritas was that he was conscious from the day he was born because of the experimentation and trying to erase completely 4 years of consciousness from his mind was definitely not easy, but they did it after a few tries.

Because they needed to polish the technology, the spike had to be taken out, adjusted and put back in multiple times.

Once he woke up from the last surgery he noticed that he had a pair of hearing aids (which were an effective way to cover and keep the spike in place) and he could not remember anything besides knowing a faint familiarity with the name Aletheia.

Veritas knows he was under a lot of medical care on the ship: he has to undergo frequent checkups (that later became a yearly occurrence) in which the med team made sure the spikes and their mind control were doing their job, even though he was convinced it was just regular checkups on his vitals and health: to him, or at least what he can remember clearly, he was just a sickly boy who was saved by his Doctor.

At 15 they decided he was “stable enough” to move from the ship and he was transferred to the Capital Planet. Once there, he was enrolled in a local school (he was homeschooled up to this point), graduated from college and applied for a position in the military at 22 (facilitated by The Doctor’s influence, who wanted to have easy access for his team to keep an eye on him) where he ended up working for seven years.

He went on with his life with nobody to care about or anyone that cared for him. He was alone with many opportunities to have a “good stable life” and be happy, but he had no social connections to people.

Veritas was incredibly depressed with no way to cope or compare his sadness so he ended up feeling hollow for most of his life.

At this point his diet consisted of food bars that tasted like cardboard just to force down the calories and nutrition he needed and energy drinks.

But then he stumbles upon Hyperborea and meets Apate, who will inevitably change his life in ways he could have never predicted: even though Veritas has had a long life, him not really having friends is part of his character as he's essentially been so uninterested in other people that after he moved jobs or positions he would just not keep up with people.

He would not be able to form emotional connections to his coworkers and none of them could get to know him either. He's just always been alone, which is why Apate is such a huge exception to him: Veritas finally knows what it's like to want to know someone, and for someone to know you.

At 29, Veritas applied for a position in Hyperborea’s base and got a job as a combat director by forging some documents since his superiors didn’t want him to leave the Capital for surveillance reasons, but Veritas is very much not their biggest priority so they let it slide.

After years of planning since hearing The Doctor had gotten to Hyperborea, he was finally there. Once he started working stopped going to his regular checkups with his old doctors because he didn't really leave the base that much and the doctors working there already had plenty of experience with mechanical organs since it was fairly common in his field.

What he doesn’t know though, is that these doctors are not aware of his spike so missing his regular checkups inevitably loosened the "screws'' of his hearing aids until they eventually broke in Hyperborea.

Funnily enough, it was exactly Apate that made them snap: when they met for the first time, Apate had accidentally kicked him in the head, triggering a traumatic shock when the spike moved out of place for a second and brought to the surface most of the memories he had buried.

By the time he regained consciousness and was aware of his surroundings again, he noticed that Apate had fled, but it wasn’t going to be long before they met again.

During his research on Hyperborea, Veritas had come across the name of a very influential person inside the network of the planet and made sure to gather what he needed before facing her: he found out that Cambucha was particularly interested in secret government information, hence why he showed up at her desk fully prepared to leak some launch codes, but only in exchange for information on The Doctor’s location.

Needless to say his plan was very successful so Cambucha decided to assign Veritas someone to escort him around Hyperborea into its deeper Layers.

And who else could it be if not Hyperborea’s most feared criminal, Apate Gadarik.

## **Fun Facts**

He’s colorblind and has a terrible sense of fashion.

He is slightly taller than Apate.

He is lactose intollerant, amongst other things.

Aletheia didn't use to be a physical thing but she later on took different forms to try and be in Veritas’ life. She was his pen, his clothes, underneath his skin and when he went off to Hyperborea she became his sword.

He doesn’t really have a sense of taste and suffers from a form of asthma.

He can just pop out his eyeballs any time he wants to since they are also mechanical and don’t really have any feel to them.

Veritas and Apate are two sides of the same coin and they balance eachother out in most things.

## **Notable Items**

His hearing aids that hold the spikes in place.