The Beginning

The truth, should one have interest and persistance enough to pry for it, is that Nicholas remembers where he came from, and his life there, perfectly well. He was born in Victoria, Australia, and his life there was, as lives can be, full of the good as well as the bad.

His mother was a painter, mostly of surrealist scenes bare of people, though she did a handful of human figures. His father committed suicide when he was four years old, though at this time the boy had not formed much of a bond with the oft-distracted man and regarded his death as one might that of a minor celebrity. Still, the drifting about family friends' homes that came after his demise would introduce him to the piano, for which he showed an immense talent. This talent was well-nurtured by his mother, who taught him that creative output would save his life, and that his father would still be with them if he had indulged in this outlet.

His childhood was spent doing well in school, and drinking the works of old masters into his physical memory--works that, come adolesence, he would not touch again until his time in Muserae. For with adolesence came the search for individuality, for an identity that was self-created. Passionate about piano-playing as he was, he had also branched into writing, and eventually the writing of songs. Doubt about the quality of these works, as well as a general yammering of creative voices, plauged him and was, at the advice of fellow students, stamped down through heroin use. This afforded him some small control over his muse, enough that a band was formed when he was around the age of fifteen.

Initially intending to be merely a song-writer and play the guitar or something, he was pressed into the role of singer with some protest, the others arguing that they didn't have the personality for it--and he did!? Noisy and filled with a playful violence, the band was called SCUM, intended to be an ironic reference to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. However, this is something that, in the pretention of youth, they never said directly. Though the band name always appeared in capitals, they scoffed at the notion that it stood for anything. This band garnered some interest among certain sects of the student body but was, by and large, regarded as rubbish--too noisy to qualify as much beyond, well, noise.

In his later years of high school, Nick continued to struggle for creative diversity, and joined the drama club in a move of intentional irony. Among other small plays, he most notably played the titular character in Hamlet. It was at this performance that he wound up meeting the older sister of the girl playing Ophelia, a woman named Keira Slade. They would come to share a passionate romance, albeit one filled with worry for his indulgences (in the realm of drug use).

Once high school was finished, he and his bandmates quickly realized that the musical environment in Australia at the time would never nurture them, and headed abroad, first to Europe, then to the US. These tours saw a build of success into a small underground notoreity for performances that were wild and often violent. He would call Keira often, yet she continued to harbor a misplaced distrust in Nick's self-control, convincing herself that he surely fell into the vices of a traveling musician, and that there were nights in which he washed her over with the body of some other woman. Of course, she was misguided as to the number of women available to him to begin with--the times in which he'd find some hopeful girl waiting for him were few and far between, and proved easy enough to shoo away.

Regardless, she was so bothered by this idea that she could barely stand for him to touch her when he returned home after years abroad. She requested time, and space, something with which Nicholas did not cope well, feeling absolutely starved for female affection (and, of course, sex). He retreated to some abandoned shack in the woods, taking in ill-recommended mixtures of alcohol and drugs. One night he left this shack, presumably intending to go and 'make amends' with Keira, but found himself stuck in a swamp--one whose presence didn't seem in line with the surrounding environment. Already quite comprimised by his inebriation, the added struggle to free himself from the muck proved too much, and he fell unconscious.

When he awoke, something was most assuredly different. He couldn't put a finger on it--not aside from the obvious fact that it was raining buckets on him, anyhow. He found himself on a river bank and fled from it as best he could, the rain already soaking into his bones. There were no cars parked outside of the building he approached, and stables could be seen to the side; no electric light shone from within. Eventually he would learn that he was in the Lowcountry, on the planet of Muserae--and that no one knew what he was talking about when he mentioned Earth.

PS: Epic hair. I really don't care that Anita Lane is in it, or there's the tattoo the character doesn't have. That hair is crucial.

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