Name: Dexter Conroy
Age: Seventeen
Gender: Male
Location: Marquette

Supernatural Affinity
Type:

Medium, human

Powers:

He can see, hear and speak to the dead as easily as he can to the living. He can identify who is dead and they can tell that he’s a little bit different - that he’s nearly one of them, except not. They can touch him and speak to him more easily than they can normal people

Level: N/A

Appearance:

Dexter looks every bit like the child he’s never been. He is tall - as tall as he’d ever be - but he is thin, and adorned with childish features. He has what is often referred to as a baby face, young even at the age of seventeen; not sharp or narrow or firm enough. There is a knowing glint in his eyes, but that knowledge is vacant from his face and it is easy enough to ignore altogether. Dexter is messy. His hair, his clothes, often his speech - there’s an unkempt organization to him that is easily missed. It screams ‘can’t be bothered with this nonsense - there are clearly more important things to attend to.’ His hair is shaggy at best, his clothes are the perfect companion to his shaggy hair. His appearance can be summed up in one word: Boy. He is completely boy. Baggy jeans and hoodies and carelessness in a bottle: boy.

Personality:

Dexter is a failure as far as his upbringing is concerned. He was moderately groomed for a particular life that he ultimately decided not to live. The schools, the lessons, the imagined futures; all of it stopped applying to him when he decided he was going to be who he was going to be. He was going to worry about himself and let other people worry about themselves. He came to find that there was a very thin, translucent line between being helpful and allowing somebody to live vicariously through you, dictating every thing you did and experienced.

For sixteen years of Dexter’s life he lived with his parents and there is a lot of facets of his personality that reflects the thoughts and mannerisms of those parents. Dexter is courageous and determined. If he fears something, he will go out of his way to face and then conquer it merely because he can’t imagine another way to acknowledge a fear - because this was the way his father had taught him. Fears are just mountains to be climbed, and once you’ve climbed them they simply don’t exist.

At the same time, his parents have been teaching him that he is insignificant in the grand scheme of things ever since he was born. There are top dogs in this business and Dexter just isn’t bound to be one of them. He was a pawn, a runt, one of those little people you see from airplanes, in passing. Despite his state of mind, he did feed into that insignificance. Only after moving out did he begin to help himself get over it. After moving out he had to live for himself and develop an unwavering confidence in himself.

He’s a sweet boy prone to saying sweet things if words would help. He’s observant and he absorbs facets of other people’s personality (even if those people are dead) and then he applies them later on, when he sees fit, because knowing people helps him help them. He gets to know people so that he can help them. Dexter - quite simply - exists to lighten the burden. He says what you need him to say at just the right time; he listens and he doesn’t judge, not if there’s nothing lethal going on - he lets people be themselves, focus on themselves, do themselves. That is the only part he requires anybody to play.

History:

Stanley Conroy was a strict and demanding father. He was relentless and uncomforting. Because of this behavior, all of the Conroy children possess a sort of steely outer shell. The house was constantly full of laughter but it was often at someone else’s expense. Stanley treasured courage above all else. The courage to face your fears and challenge yourself and do something. He didn’t kiss boo-boos, and he didn’t congratulate second place. It was either all or nothing. He was crass and brutal but he was also a genius, and most of his children grew up idolizing him, wanting nothing more than to finally please this unpleasable man.

His father, naturally abrasive, had eyes for one person only, and that person didn’t happen to be any of his children. It was his wife, Lillian, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty-two, five years into their marriage. Growing up, it was a taboo topic - the deterioration of his mother’s mind. You did not talk about the voices Lillian heard, but you never forgot about them - about the things she would do merely because they told her to. As Dex go older, that schizophrenia got progressively worst until his mother couldn’t leave the house without causing a scene.

Dexter wasn’t particularly close to his mother, but he was a sweet, empathic boy who always had something endearing to say to ease the hurt tension in the room. As a child, he was happy to help others, to make them feel better, to be useful. Dexter had an unusual charm with the working staff at his parents’ estate. He developed a half joking, half appreciative relationship with the middle aged cook, Agatha; a relationship that didn’t dwindle the older he got.

When Dexter was seven (one brother was attending Yale, one had just graduated high school as valedictorian) there was a small fire inside of the house. The fire was promptly extinguished but one person died - his three year old sister. Several weeks later, he awoke from a nightmare. The charred remains of his dead sister was shaking him awake, telling him that she was cold and she couldn’t sleep - enduring lisp and all. When she’d been alive, she’d always gone to him when she was having difficulty sleeping because this family did not coddle, but Dexter did. It was the first ghost he’d ever seen and he freaked out. His parents wrote it off as shock over losing a sibling. They - like they did with his mother’s problem - pushed it away and ignored it. Dexter was terrified, even at seven, that maybe he was turning out like his mother but there was a deeper terror festering. He didn’t want to go to sleep, he didn’t want to be alone, he hid from what seemed like nothing.

As the shock of seeing his sister faded, Dexter handled his condition fairly well as a child. Ghosts and people blurred into one essential species, but at that age it was acceptable to talk out loud, to have imaginary friends. He didn’t yet understand the weight of his fate.

At the age of twelve, Dexter decided to hide out in his room and leave the house as little as possible. Things reached a suffocating height and he was crumbling beneath the strain of his issues and there was absolutely no one he could talk to about it. Society at large was beginning to terrify him because the ghosts were relentless. He began to beg to stay home from school every day but his father thought it was because of bullying and refused to let him. Because of this his father hired someone to teach him kung fu - he would have no wimp for a child. Agatha, the cook, began referring to these bouts of hysterical anti-socialism as a sickness and provided Dexter with a way to avoid everything. He was just sick. Agatha eased his anxiety by bringing his meals to him while he stayed in solitary.

Nothing seemed to help him at this stage of his life - no amount of coaxing seemed to fix anything, so his father took it upon himself to rectify things. Stanley wanted to make sure it was absolutely impossible that Dexter inherited his mother’s crazy gene, and he refused to take the very simple fact - that no one really knew yet - as an answer. For two entire years, Dexter was bounced from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist. There was nothing wrong with him, aside from the fact that any of Stan’s eleven children had the possibility of inheriting their mother’s paranoid schizophrenia. Possibilities were not concrete enough so Stan saw fit to fix the problem himself. He hired a specialist to perform electroshock therapy on Dexter - as if they could spook away the crazy.

It didn’t fix Dexter, of course. It was a grueling process that left Dexter both mentally and physically scared. It left him weak and damned near mute but from there on after he never again spoke of ghosts to his parents - or much of anything else. From there on after he was finally basically normal. It was only a surface normality; as he aged he began to develop problems linked to the treatment his father had put him through. For unknown reasons, he began to experience crippling migraines, and he lost his trust in people as a whole. If his father could put him through a treatment for a problem that may or may not exist, then what are normal people really capable of?

Frustrated with being weak all the time, Dexter decided to challenge himself several months after returning home as a normal boy. At fifteen Dexter got a job picking corn. His parents disapproved. His father thought it was a lazy way out of making something actual of yourself, and Dexter didn’t argue this point. He didn’t verbally argue much of anything. Despite their beliefs, the manual labor - in the middle of a field - was surprisingly soothing. The ghosts stayed in cities and towns mostly, so out in the middle of nowhere, there was silence. At this job, he first encountered a ghost who didn’t seem to want anything. This ghost was named Marshal and he’d died in the civil war. He was young, barely legal to fight in such a war, and was irrationally impulsive and funny.

Marshal hung around Dexter like a faint perfume. He appeared and disappeared seemingly at random but when he appeared, he didn’t ask for favors, instead he insisted on holding conversations. In fact, he insisted on talking with some sort of equal level and it was something Dexter wasn’t used to. Through this developing friendship, Marshal taught Dexter life lessons and helped him with his homework and Dexter taught Marshal fragments of life Marshal had missed out on.

That same year, Dexter’s father suffered a stroke. The family seemed to momentarily implode and Dexter was sick a lot that year - but it wasn’t because of the ghosts this time. He just couldn’t deal. Such a fierce and opinionated man was abruptly silenced and immobilized. His father didn’t die but he was bound to a wheel chair. He could hardly utter the word ‘no’ and he couldn’t form any words beyond that word. While he wasn’t particularly close to his father, this was a blow to Dexter. He was used to death, and he had gotten familiar with death. He didn’t know how to handle near-death. Torn apart lives that continued to thrive and beat stubbornly and in blooming agony.

At sixteen Dexter left home. He left to challenge himself further, to face his own inherent fear and thrust himself out there, into that swarm of ghosts this time. Yet, in all honesty, he also left to escape his crumbling family. In theory - Dexter really did intend to become independant, and ditch the entire life he'd been born into. In reality - he was too young to manage much on his own. At sixteen (especially with his rather priviledged upbringing) he couldn't get his own loans, his own place of residence, he couldn't even manage his own school records. That would be why he chose to relocate to Marquette - it was far enough away from his parents and it was the current residence of his cousin. His cousin, just turned twenty four, was an adult and barely old enough to take responsibility as his guardian. But he was also estranged from Dex's family and different enough from them that he didn't remind Dex of them at all.

Dexter's cousin, Alfie, also didn't live alone. He lived with his long time girlfriend - Pandora - and together they proved to behave and react much like the parents Dex hadn't ever had before. They expected things from Dex, adult things - like good grades and mature behavior and really, that was all Dexter had ever wanted to be treated as. An adult who could think and act like a conscious individual.

Affiliation:

None

Special abilities and skills:

Intermediate Kung fu, fluent in French and Spanish.

Weaknesses:

- Insomnia/nightmares - Dexter has seen people at their worst. He knows all about what they’re capable of. The ghosts he meet are sometimes in all sorts of fucked up and they each have stories attached to them which he has no choice but to know and quite simply - it gives him nightmares. Ever since his sister died when he was seven, he’s been plagued by violent and persistent nightmares to the point where he goes out of his way to do anything but sleep. Because of this, he is quite the caffeine addict and often times exhausted. He looks like he just needs one amazing night of sleep.
- Bright presence - Dexter exudes self-confidence. He smiles and people feel compelled to unconsciously smile back. When he talks he sounds like he knows exactly what he’s talking about, even when he doesn’t. There is something special about him, something that draws the attentions to him. Sometimes it baffles him because this effect doesn’t work on everyone - such as his parents. But growing up he was the favorite sibling (he always figured it was because he was capable of compassion inside of a compassionless home); growing up complete strangers felt compelled to give him breaks he didn’t deserve. While it helps him sometimes - it also attracts all sorts of unpleasant people as well. Like ghosts.
- Curiosity - Dexter is naturally curious. While he didn’t do extremely well in school, he does like knowing things and having answers for things and coupled with his need to face every fear he feels - often times he plunges head first into dangerous situations to sate his curiosity.
- Fear - Dexter gets scared and instead of acknowledging those fears and moving on with his life, he challenges his fears. He plunges himself into the world of ghosts because ghost are scary; he leaves his home because being alone is scary. It can get increasingly dangerous depending on what he fears.
- enemy - he hasn’t made any large enemies but there are specific violent spirits that specifically target Dexter primarily because he cannot help their situation and they can get at him a lot easier than they can get at normal people. Spirits causing him trouble is a common occurrence to the point that he can meet them with nonchalance - after the fact.
- Migraines - Ever since the age of thirteen, Dexter has been experiencing crippling migraines. The hide in the dark, beneath a heavy blanket, in a soundless room kind of migraines. Because of the circumstances surrounding how he gained the migraines, Dexter has neglected to see anybody about them. He doesn’t know why they happen or how they happen or how to fix them. All he knows is that no amount of over the counter painkillers seems to fix them - only time does. Time and Alcohol.

Strengths:

- Bright presence - Dexter has a particular way with people. People easily forgive him, they go out of their way to give him breaks he never really has to ask for. They take a liking to him and it makes his life easier.
- level headed - his mother was a schizophrenic prone to psychotic delusions; she was over dramatic in every aspect of her life and Dexter is the exact opposite of her. He is level headed, he is calm and collected and he takes things well - often times regardless of the situation. In a crisis, Dexter is the guy you would want beside you. He is the kind of guy that can pause everything and use pure logic beyond the realm of fear and danger. In fact, a lot of the time he under-reacts. He runs into an unfriendly ghost and gets his shit fucked up? All Dexter has to say about that is *Shrugs* “Happens.”
- Do-gooder - Dexter is an eager beaver. He is a pleaser. He helps people who ask him for help. The ghosts that have unfinished business that latch onto him, he does his best - as if it were an actual job - to help them rectify their situations and square away their unfinished business. But his need to please spans beyond ghosts - he helps people. He is receptive and empathic and observant and if he can, he unconsciously lightens the burdens of others. He compliments them, he offers gentle words, he listens to them vent - whatever they need, he’s there.

PB: Michael Seater

Other Information:

natal chart: here

Character Status: Inactive