Cillian Bukowski

## Ozymandias

"Not everyone has the luck to start off so close to the top. Some of us have to swallow our fear of falling and leap past a few rungs if we wanna end close to where you started.”

### Occupation

Trainee superhero, inventor

**Cillian** **Bukowski** is a major antagonist from ***Sierra Team,*** an OC project created for Multiverse Paradise***.***

## Canon

Cillian Bukowski has been a member of Sierra Team for six years. Though he tells everyone he has been an orphan all his life, and that his power is merely his intelligence, this is a lie created to sell an image and conceal the truth behind Cillian's life.
Cillian's true power is to convene with an unknown entity inside of his shadow, allowing him to freely control it for a variety of purposes—though the shadow is, to some extent, symbiotic, and possesses some will of its own.
His birth placed significant strain on his parents, both emotionally and financially—both gave up pursuing their passions and surrendered their social lives in order to take any work they could get to provide for each other and their son. As a result, Cillian often spent many nights as a child alone in his house—located in a ghetto in one of the rougher parts of town—with nothing but the whispers of his shadow to keep him company. His ability greatly distressed him, and yet he had no one to talk to about it—so, instead, he absorbed himself in reading and browsing the internet, slowly gaining the knowledge he would later employ to engineer technological marvels like the Ikaros Drive.

Cillian's life would continue in such a routine for many years of his childhood, as his parents continued working themselves nearly to death. The health of both, both mental and physical, began to deteriorate. Sickly, exhausted and coming out of the bank they had just cashed their paychecks in, they were the perfect targets for a mugging—but the crime went wrong. The shock and stress was too much for Cillian's father, whose weak heart finally gave in. As he suffered a heart attack, his mother was shot in the stomach during a struggle for the mugger's weapon. An ambulance was called by bank staff, but took over an hour and a half to reach the pair. On arrival, paramedics pronounced the two dead on the scene. The mugger, meanwhile, was never caught: The police halfheartedly concluded the root of the attack to be drugs, citing Mr. Bukowski's heart attack as exacerbated by stimulants he was taking to manage the hefty overtime he had taken on; the 'mugging' was stated to be a drug deal gone wrong, and the case was open and shut like that.
Alone and traumatised by what he had endured, the state passed Bukowski off to his uncle to care for him.

While his parents were at home for a very short time and didn't see much of their son, they still cared deeply for him: Not so for his uncle. He resented Cillian, blaming him for the deaths of his sister and her husband. He had loaned the couple hefty sums of cash to help them stay afloat, and was now never going to see that paid back—without financial security, the already rocky uncle Bukowski fell into destitution. After learning of the project to create a new team of superheroes, Cillian's uncle began crafting a cover story for his nephew; one which wiped away his true past and his cursed power to create the image of a squeaky clean, poster-boy superhero. In a world where superheroes and powers had became almost totally commodified, it was the heartless but logical move.

Shipped off to the home, a fire was sparked in Cillian's heart with the potential to burn it all down: He had seen enough to know that the system he was forced into was a deeply exploitative one, and one that could only be destroyed through violent revolution. Superheroes, powered and non-powered, the hierarchies in societies between those with powers, those without, and those who stand to profit from it all; he would scorch everything, and wipe the slate clean.
He just needed to bide his time.

## Pre-Paradise

Cillian was preparing for his grand reveal when he was brought to the hotel from his sleep. Now displaced, he has decided to seize this rare opportunity to deal with his greatest opposition—his fellow members of Sierra Team—once and for all, and return to his home ready to enact his plan.

## Character Relationships

* *Seth Ali -* A character from ***Sierra Team***. Cillian is inherently distrustful of Seth due to his constant probing regarding his health, but nonetheless presents a veneer of affability around him. He is, rather conveniently, clueless to Seth's long-running crush on him, and tends to have a habit of severely embarrassing him as a result.

* *Dean Schmidt -*  A character from ***Sierra Team.*** Cillian despises Dean—despite his modest intelligence and weak power, he is incredibly succesful socially, and perfectly secure, which irritates Cillian to no end. He also has a habit of enjoying the same hobbies as Cillian—which drives the latter insane, causing him to see everything as a challenge he must rise to.

* *Dove Fullonum -*  A character from ***Sierra Team.*** Cillian is close to Dove, and protective of her in the face of the mysterious new location they have arrived in. He holds her as the perfect example of who his plan intends to save—a young, naive, powered child—from the exploitative system he has identified.

* *Tony Stark -*  A character from the ***MCU.*** Cillian initially revered Tony, marvelling at the prowess of his technology. Soon, however, he found himself irritated by the Iron Man when he was confronted after the destruction of his Experimental Gauss Cannon: He sharply criticised Tony's perceived overbearing, authoritarian attitude, and made efforts to distance attempts at sympathy by pointing out the incredible wealth Stark Industries had amassed. Tony's murder of Thanos drove the two even further part, and pushed Cillian to go renegade from the Sierra Team to work on his own for a brief time—a decision motivated by spite, and the desire to prove he didn't need anyone in order to survive.

## Trivia

* Cillian is canonically gay, and transgender: He began his transition when arriving at The Home, under the supervision of Seth, and received gender-affirming top surgery shortly before arriving to the hotel.
* Cillian was the first character to reach the barrier around the hotel in the sky. This required him to fly into the hotel's equivalent of the Kármán line, where space begins.
* Cillian's hair was stained green as a child due to a copper leak in his house's water supply. This is what eventually inspired him to dye his hair fully green, in an effort to cover this up.
* Cillian is incredibly adept at spinning his guns and baton, and does so to charge their power cells. His gun-spinning is modelled after popular Japanese airsoft reviewer, T.K. Hero.
* Cillian is, along with Seth, one of the only two active player OC antagonists—however, their status as "villains" is debatable, due to their fundamentally good intentions.
* A character playlist for Cillian was created by Udon, and is available to listen to on Spotify here.