Spotlight: Ian Dunn

I have my new work schedule but it's pretty much all over the place. So I have Blogger on my phone now, so maybe I'll be making spotlight posts or something that way (because I also have Twitter and Tumblr on there are well...the LiveJournal App just sucks, though). I'll make it work somehow. We'll see.

Anyway, today's spotlight continues the Cabal theme with Ian Dunn.

Name: Ian Dunn
Codename: Cuboid
Power: ability to make anything (people, things) into 3D cubes/abstractions
Team Affiliation: Cabal

So, originally Ian was created as kind of Dean's lackey. I've been writing this story, and characters, since...hellfires. My final project for my playwriting class back in ... 2009. Then in 2010 I wrote almost nothing but these guys for my fiction writing class and then my advanced fiction writing class. And it's really evolved from there. Ian has as well, which is to be expected.

Dean was originally just a hero gone bad, no excuse. He just...didn't feel like being a good guy one day and worked at tormenting Medic endlessly. Ian was there as Dean's liaison, almost, between him and the Cabal. He liked Dean (who was much younger) and liked the destruction that Dean could wreck. He was a very minor character with not a lot going on besides being a lackey and sucking up to Dean and doing glass (which is one of the drugs in the book which I'll explain). As Dean and Medic and the world evolved into what it is now, Ian got redefined and fixed and tweaked as well. I actually have a background and some idea of who he is now.

Ian Dunn was an artist. Specifically, he was an abstract artist. His power had a lot to do with his art and he used it to the best of his abilities. He can turn normal objects into something abstract and then put that into paintings or keep adding things to that abstraction and make it a sculpture. He got himself through college on his ability, but once he graduated he found the world not quite as nice to him as he'd hoped.

He hadn't picked up any sponsors and galleries, while interested, didn't have time/space/etc for him. He'd also picked up a nasty habit of doing glass while in college and it made him angry and bitter and he was eventually found by the Cabal (when he started turning people into abstract images...which killed them, obviously) and was given an outlet (and all the glass he wanted) for that unhappiness. In a way, Ian found his sponsor. So he gets to hang around the Cabal's tower and make art and do glass and just generally be whatever he wants with no pressure from himself or anyone else.

And now to say what "glass" is. This draws back on the creation of my new world, on the nukes hitting and the world heaving and convulsing from the idiocy of humans. While the Alliance from then did absorb as much of the radioactivity and nuclear material as that person could (omg I can't remember who it was who did it if I even ever specified D:) there was still some that fell in some areas. A lot of those areas are gone, or under water, but still. The land is infected. Most of these places already got destroyed so they're not too decent to go to, but people are people. You tell them "don't go there" and they go there. So some people have collected "artifacts" from those places that got hit with nukes and use the particles to create glass. They cut the radioactive dust with hallucinogenic plants that were gifts (hah) from some alien race that came in the early days to try and help out. These guys are not the Elendi. Essentially what glass does is that it let's one's mind cross dimensions and you can live in another world, another life, depending on the time-space continuum. You're just a passenger, really, not in control of what you do or see over there, and no one is really aware of it, but it gives you an escape. Sometimes those worlds aren't very pretty and those alternative lives aren't all they're cracked up to be, but it's an escape if you need one. It's about as close to another world as most people will get since the Alpha Corps refuse to let anyone pass through to other dimensions and times unless there's a damned good reason/have been authorized.

There's another drug, black, but we'll save that one for another time.