Eugene Smith

"Dreams grow in the garden of sins."

Eugene Smith is a fictional character featured in the videogame Dry Drowning. He only appears in Chapter 2 and is the younger brother of Dean Smith.

## Psychological Profile:

Due to his aggressive and ill-tempered personality combined with his unquenchable ambition, Eugene tends to be the total opposite of his brother Dean, in that others find it hard to trust him and his social life is consequentially almost non-existent.

## Biography:

Eugene has been very competitive ever since young age, focusing his feelings of rivalry mainly against his older brother. His inferiority complex towards him has thus been just as instrumental as his natural talent for computer science in shaping his professional success, as both his graduation at the University of Nova Polemos and his employment at Hephaestus Tech were actually nothing but attempts at surpassing his own brother.

## Character overview (spoilers):

Although the first thing in Eugene that usually strikes the eye is his outstanding intelligence (along with the great technological wonders he was able to build thanks to it), his introverted personality deceptively conceals the nature of an individual that is mainly emotion driven and hot-headed. His psychological profile is consistent with the one of a person that has always sought yet never received love and approval, his aggressive attitude towards his brother Dean likely being the result of attention craving (and possibly also of vulnerability to the competition focused values enforced by the city). Since Cornelius Huber acted as a father surrogate for both brothers after they started working at Hephaestus, he incidentally also became the main person Eugene looked up to in his craving for approval. Because of this, the professor's decisions to first choose Dean as his successor and later plan a secret escape with Thalia caused Eugene a visible psychological breakdown, as he felt abandoned and betrayed by the only person he truly trusted and respected.

By his own admission Eugene then became a devastated and twisted mind, meaning all of his subsequent actions were the result of emotion driven improvisation with little to no room left for rational planning. Despite this they still looked akin to very elaborated plans due to Eugene's innate intelligence, compulsive precision and profound knowledge of the context he was moving into (expecially the AquaOS system). At first his thirst for revenge led him to intercept Demetrius Sievers in order to offer him a more profitable agreement that would still let the ambassador have the virus but also let Eugene have the sadistic satisfaction of seeing his former mentor die. Contrary to what Mordred had first speculated though, Eugene had no plan to kill the ambassador afterwards, thus making clear Eugene's intention ever since the start had never been to take back his virus but rather to allow its unleashing (something he later had to supervise himself since Sievers too ended up dying). The ultimate implication is that in his burning desire for revenge Eugene didn't blame just Huber for his suffering but rather Nova Polemos as a whole, in particular its system of values centered around soul crushing labor, the hypocrisy of its society, its corrupted ruling class and most importantly its censorship. All things that in one way or another had increased the weight of the psychological burden carried by Eugene and that he was ultimately looking to wipe out with catastrophic measures (the fact his backup plan relied on ensured mutual destruction through a new world war should not be surprising in this sense).

## Trivia:

* Eugene's mask resembles a ferret. The choice of this animal references his endless running during Chapter 2 and also his attempts at building something while remaining hidden from everyone else's eyes.