Salam Chowdhury
From UTRPG
Salam is a character in the FATE: Dream/Wake campaign. He is a fifty-something marketing director for Pfizer Canada who is so terrified of his dreams that he keeps himself constantly medicated to stay awake.
Contents |
[edit] Character Sheet
| Salam Chowdhury | |
|---|---|
| Aspects -- refresh rate 5 | |
| Under the Shadow of Islam | |
| Afraid to Sleep | |
| "I've got all the best drugs" | |
| "I can't save them all" | |
| "Morpheus can take you in my stead!" [-1RR] | |
| [empty slot] | |
| Skills | |
| Great +4 | Contacting |
| Good +3 | Mysteries, Resolve |
| Fair +2 | Science, Academics, Resources |
| Average +1 | Alertness, Endurance, Leadership, Rapport, Fists |
| Languages Spoken | Arabic (native), French (fluent), English (fluent) |
[edit] History
The following is the result of the character creation session:
[edit] Childhood
Salam was born in Algeria in 1955. His family moved to Scarborough in the early 70s, where he did an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He went on to get a diploma in Pharmacology, and in 1980 did an internship with a Croatian company named Pliva, developing new kinds of antibiotics. He returned to Toronto in 1981 and started working as a research chemist for Searle.
Salam's childhood was overshadowed by the religiousness of his family. He was raised as a child to be Muslim, but harbored serious doubts about religion since a young age. By the time the family moved to Canada Salam was an atheist -- and terrified of discovery. So it was with some relief that he found that in his new home people could allow themselves to be known to be atheists without any serious repercussions. He never told his family he was an atheist, and still feels he can't broach the subject with them. Even now, the intimidation he felt as a child from an entire society manifests in an irrational uneasiness around people of Muslim faith.
Aspect: [Under the Shadow of Islam]
[edit] First Nightmare
Salam describes a nightmare that changed his life.
- On May 31, 1985, I got really tired in the early afternoon, and took the afternoon off from work. I went home and immediately fell asleep. I had a dream that I was running away from something that was constantly right behind me -- I could smell its breath, hear its breathing. I was too afraid to look around. I was running through thick hedges and thorny bushes, and the sound of a horn was in the air. At some point I tripped on a low branch and saw a glimpse of red eyes as this big dark thing jumped on me.
- Then I woke up, and heard scratching on my door. I could hear the same breathing of the thing that was chasing me in my dream, so I started running again, and I was back in the hedges. The thorns were scratching my arms and my face, and I ran until I came to a tall cliff, and fell over. Then I woke up again. This happened over and over again. It felt like I was running for weeks, exhausted, until I started to wish I could just let the thing catch me to end it.
- Eventually I woke up for real, I guess. I wasn't sure at first, because I was covered in blood. It turns out that the high winds that day had shattered my window, showering me with shards of glass. It took me a long time to decide to trust that I was actually awake -- I'm still not entirely convinced. I worked out that I had been asleep for over twenty hours -- fortunately the next day was a Saturday.
- Shortly after that I started taking uppers to keep from sleeping.
Aspect: [Afraid to Sleep]
[edit] Adulthood
Salam was working for a US pharmaceutical company called Searle, which merged with Monsanto, which eventually merged into Pfizer. At Pfizer he eventually met some of the people he was working with on his internship, as the drug he had been working to perfect now was patented by Pfizer. Over the years, encouraged by his supervisor and good friend Nicholas Flores to climb the corporate ladder, he took management classes and worked his way into supervisory positions. He used his pull and contacts throughout the company to encourage the development of a division dedicated to studying sleep and dreaming, and to developing pharmaceuticals that alter the body's sleep cycle -- ostensibly to aid patients with sleep disorders, but also to help keep himself medicated enough to rarely ever sleep.
After a while, Salam was sleeping only a few hours at a time, at most once every couple of days. Even when he did sleep, he made sure to keep his sleep light enough that he didn't go into REM sleep. On the rare occasion when he did sleep deeply enough to dream he was wracked with horrific visions, and generally upped his dosage the following day.
Eventually, seeing his sleep research flagging, Salam started alliances and cooperative links with other organizations. He spoke to pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers such as Kraft, and even a few religious organizations to try to determine the nature of sleep and dreaming and to try to better understand and control it. So far this has yielded little fruit.
Aspect: ["I've got all the best drugs"]
[edit] Regrets
Nicholas Flores was the first and only person Salam told about his nightmares and his fear of sleep. Flores was very understanding, even going so far as to help him develop the sleep research division, and helping him get enough medication to balance his sleep cycle out to near-zero.
In 2005, Salam had one of his then exceedingly rare bouts of dreaming sleep, and found himself face to face with the monster that had been chasing him. It told him that if it couldn't get at him it would take those around him, one by one.
Soon thereafter Flores reported that he was having nightmares. Initially Salam thought it was nothing to worry about, but when Flores started sleeping twelve hours a day Salam got worried. He realized that whatever it was that he had seen in his dreams was going to take Flores unless Salam gave himself up. However, as much as he wanted to save Flores, he couldn't bring himself to sacrifice himself, and no matter what drug cocktails or experimental treatments he tried, Flores just kept sleeping longer and longer, and being more and more scared when he woke up, until he fell into a coma and died a few weeks later.
Salam deeply regrets not having the strength to save his friend, and not doing enough to bring him back. Most of all, he regrets whatever it was he did to bring all this upon himself in the first place.
Aspect: ["I can't save them all"]
[edit] Nightmare
[Editor's note: the following is a recounting of a shared nightmare, from the point of view of one of its participants. Factual accuracy is not guaranteed.]
[edit] Session Advancement
[edit] Dream/Wake Session 1: Chain of Events
Salam puts his pharmacology to good use, and displays the unnerving ability to transfer his own missed sleep to someone else.
Aspect: [tba]
Skill: There was a fair amount of rough-and-tumble involved in tracking down, subduing and exorcising Tricia Gauss. Salam gains Fists at Average.
