Allan Winston

The less-empowered types, the undecided, the morally shifty and most mundanes who get slapped around by greater powers go here by default.
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IamLEAM1983
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Allan Winston

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Name: Allan Winston
Age: 43 years old
Gender: male
Species: anthro hippo, superhuman

Strengths: like his boss, Nigel, Allan has a lifetime's worth of knowledge in escaping dodgy situations as well as entering areas he should normally be denied access to. The catch is that unlike his boss, no lock-picking tools or electronic tampering are required. As visible and difficult to miss as he may be, Allan is a teleporter.

Through a process Terran and Karthian scientists are still trying to crack, he seems to be able to open something like a man-sized wormhole that's designed to snap shut as soon as he passes through it. As the “opening” and “passing through” events seem to happen instantaneously, observers only see a sudden distortion and collapse in the air around the hippo – who plainly and simply vanishes from view with a sound akin to that of a shotgun blast. There's no real concussive force or danger associated to this, as this sound is only the product of air violently being forced back into the space Allan's body previously occupied. The exact opposite happens at his intended destination : air is suddenly pushed away and warps as if it were a fluid substance being broken through, and he suddenly is there, occupying the space of the millisecond-long distortion that preceded him.

Through a minor break in the normally observable laws of physics, Allan seems able to conserve any acquired momentum while jumping from one point to another – to the point where a slight multiplication effect becomes observable. Tests have shown that his bone structure is genetically similar to Ethan Alderan's, in that he seems built to withstand short and tremendously strong applications of force. The reason behind this becomes understandable once you see him “skip” his way towards his first golf round's strike in a rapid succession of teleportations – the last one enabling him to put so much strength into his swing that despite not passing tests related to super-strength, this physics exploit enables him to potentially deliver hay-makers that would enable him to bring down behemoths like Bucky.

“Skipping” also offers a useful few ways to defeat an opponent that's stronger than him. All he has to do is teleport the unlucky schmuck inside a wall... Voilà, instant and fairly gross bisection! That is, if the wall is thin enough. If not, said poor schmuck has to look forward to a small eternity of trying to kick or punch his way out of some drywall, mortar or bricks. If there's hollow space there for him to exist in. If not?

If not, well – Poor Schmuck can consider himself amalgamated with whatever constitutes the wall. It's not as gross as a bisection, but it's still pretty unsettling, as far as deaths go...

In practice, being able to teleport freely means he's able to dodge gunshots or survive lethal drops. In some select cases, this has been proven to be true. Anything that is sufficiently slow-moving is something he can potentially dodge, and falls that are long enough for him to stop panicking and actually pick a destination for himself while in his descent are eligible for this exploit.

Outside of his extraordinary abilities, it doesn't take much to understand that his specialty in stealth is of the social variety. Normally an incredibly outspoken man with about zero back-door shyness, his naturally expansive personality belies some informal and yet very effective acting chops. He's very good at blending in, but also at standing out in one way or another, typically in order to purposefully misdirect someone's attention before his planned teleport into a sealed vault full of cash.

He can be slick, he can be sleazy, he can be uptight or chronically loose; he can look like a Saturday night swinger or a Thursday morning plus-sized bespectacled office worker – whatever makes people see him as just another guy, goes.

Considering his abilities, he does have some lock-picking and pick-pocketing chops – as his previously illegitimate career would suggest – but not quite as much as his boss. He hasn't even been hired for his specific experiences as a burglar, but more because Nigel believed an actually visible sort with flawless people skills would do great at consumer electronics shows.
Weaknesses: on simple PR weekdays and lazy Sundays, Allan tends to stick to the kind of diet you'd expect an anthro hippo to stick to. Being an absolute borderline pure vegan, he tends to consume an impressive, if still natural amount of vegetables – as well as a few protein sources that aren't related to meat groups. Unfortunately, the more he teleports on any given day, the more his metabolism seems to be taxed. The added qualificative of borderline vegan then becomes understandable, as those specific power-heavy days will force rather strong cravings for meat onto him. In these instances, his food intake jumps out of what you'd consider to be natural limits and dips into the unnatural : severe teleport binges will see him down enough chow for a family of four in virtually any restaurant. No-one has studied him so far as to crack the odd association between this kind of power and his metabolism.

As far as he knows, severe uses of his ability appear to be extremely taxing on him, and on various levels. Those recuperation-associated meat cravings typically tend to be followed by atypically profound naps. Studies performed in sleep clinics show that for some reason, he tends to tap into his triglycerides in a rather frightening proportion when skipping around. As triglycerides are part of the building blocks of your typical Terran body's metabolism, maybe his meat binges are part of a desperate effort by his body to replace his stores of basic energy. The associated and hard-to-break ultra-naps seem to be where he enters a sort of Energy Storage mode, the conscious mind essentially clocking out so the rest of the body can go on a fuel-producing overdrive. Time-lapse one of these napping sessions and you'll notice his saggy post-telefrag-battle clothes being filled in, months of weight gain occurring in hours. This would hint at some form of fuel-multiplication ability, but nobody's quite sure of that one.

Attempts to diet paired with severe teleporting have had serious effects on him in the past. Like Mayor Doherty, Allan is built from the ground up to carry a generous amount of fat, to the point where his body requires it in order to function properly. High 'porting habits and low red meat intakes have previously combined into a noxious and organ-crippling combination that has managed to get him to the ER a few times. He seems to be fine, however, as long as his body doesn't try to compensate for a lack of fuel by burning through his muscle tissue.

The problem is that with Allan being a high-Ego type, his self-image is apparently quite important; important enough that he'll sometimes deny himself the use of his abilities to maintain some perceived figure. As he believes, the world of plus-sized anthros demands that he tries to ascribe to the rather hazy concept of “sexy fat”. Anything past that is a fashion and social disaster waiting to happen and, irrationally enough, immediately condemns him to Fat Slob status. Most of everyone has a hard time understanding that, but he (wrongfully?) believes that it takes one expansive fellow to know when another's been overdoing it. He's managed to devastate himself in the past because he'd gone five pounds over his personal and obsessively observed plateau of 310 lbs.

Vanity issues aside, he can only blink his way out of sources of harm he has enough time to see coming, and to rationalize as a threat. He could conceivably dodge an RPG by thinking fast – but dodging bullets would be much more difficult. Escaping short and fast falls would be another impossibility. He honestly needs enough time to pick a destination he's internalized, and focus on it.

As this is the Achilles' heel of what he's capable of. He can teleport through walls – but only if he knows that what's on the other side has enough space to contain him. As such, he needs to have access to floor plans in order to prepare his 'porting route during any heist, and ideally to screenshots as well, to know if there's a risk of his arrival point clipping through walls or furniture. He can survive intersecting with objects – they simply get cut through a bit like objects that are intersected in the Terminator series' time travel bubbles. Still, molten slag or hissing cutting marks left on burnished wood tend to act as tangible evidence. Even as a legitimate worker, he tends to remain concerned about those risks, and will try and home in on the widest expanse of cleared space in his target room.

Considering this, anything he hasn't seen internal photographs of or at least a blueprint are things he's leery about jumping into. He can handle cars and most passenger planes just fine and isn't too adverse to the idea of teleporting ten thousand feet above the ground (hard falls knock out the seemingly unkillable types nicely enough), but you couldn't show him a windowless metal door to a windowless space and expect him to jump into it.

Well, he could, but his inability to judge distances correctly could lead to some catastrophic failures. Early childhood experiments have led to him missing part of his left hand's pinky finger.

That's not terribly deadly, but it's still a lot of pain and one of the weirdest injuries to explain to a bemused doctor, ever.

Appearance: at three hundred and ten pounds for a little over five feet five inches, there's a lot of hippo to Griffin's Communications Director and the invisible man's occasional Human Resources head honcho. He's quite large and quite comfortable with it, moving with the proportional ease and fluidity of a middle-aged man in peak physical condition.

Being what he is, his soft brown eyes are slightly off-center in a face that's dominated by his fairly large snout. With almost comically tiny ears, expressive and generally somewhat sultry eyes and a mouth that manages to combine the characteristics of “snaggle-toothed” and “charismatic”, he's oftentimes been considered by gossip magasines as being one of the sexiest plus-sized former criminals – a rather rare combination if there's ever been one. Publications destined to young female anthros of the appropriate demographic love to publish snapshots of him with some cherry-picked human female entrepreneur, and his past tends to prop up his physique with something naive sorts would consider to be a bit of “bad boy charm”.

For someone like him, a round and adequately flattered gut is as essential as a six-pack is to a human male that's managed to turn the collective eye. Hope and the remainder of its universe have developed two complementary aesthetic schools, in a sense : some breeds are expected to be thin, while others are expected to be pleasingly plump. As far as hippos go, Winston is a regular male centerfold. This is the product of as much training and dieting as it would be for humans – albeit in different proportions and with differing goals.

You'd expect a company's public face to put some care into its appearance, but Allan seems to take it one notch further than that. With an eye for fashion that leads some to believe that he might have chosen the wrong career, Al tends to mute his body's curves with shirts in dark or pastel blues and pinks, sometimes choosing pin-striped models to double down on the slimming factor if he knows he'll be talking in front of an all-human crowd, for instance. Preferring the casual look, he never wears any ties and usually keeps the first one or two buttons of his shirt brazenly undone – even in the most formal of circumstances. An assorted pocket square fits in the breast pocket of his universal black jacket with straight shoulders, as he take great care to add a few stark angles to his round curves, smoothing out the bigger picture. When fully dressed with dark business slacks and shined leather shoes, the effect is one of rectangular poise, rather than spherical dominance. It helps to emphasize his more masculine traits, as you have to admit that he doesn't behave in a way that's wholly masculine. For instance, the human genes he's inherited from his father have gifted him with a mustache, but he refuses to give it a full trim. Instead, he's espoused the Spencer Tracy or Vincent Price-alike ultra-fine cut, which tends to underline the way his mouth tends to move in decidedly... unctuous ways.

Considering his sartorial choices, there's a bit of modern-day preciousness to the way he moves. Still, he manages to balance that, his severe lack of inhibitions and his occasional overpowering need for prime ribs and T-Bones slathered in barbecue sauce somehow coming together in a manner that feels quirky and casual, always staying well South of being awkward. He'll somehow manage to look as clean as ever even after driving Coach up the wall with his behemoth orders – maybe coming neck-and-neck with Cody in the theoretical competition for the title of the Classiest Finger-Licking Epicurean.

Point in fact, the only time you'll ever see him stained or dusty will be if his teleporting paths led him through some sealed-off spaces or caused the untimely demise or unfortunate disabling of a guy who – hopefully – had it coming. Lack of fashion sense definitely qualifies as a crime in his book, but you'd be hard-press to justify telefragging someone with that...

Normally, he tends to exist as a perpetually energetic type, who's ready to start networking or to get freaky with the new kid from Accounting. Even when normally tired, he tends not to pull off more than one or two quick yawns and a few ear twitches. When he's prepping for a Good Fat-boosting power nap, however, his normally quick-witted self seems to slow down to a crawl. When that's the case, Allan can fall asleep virtually anywhere. There's nothing quite as comfy, he reasons, as a locked-down bank vault past 2 AM. All the cameras are out, nobody's in until 7:30 in the morning, and you can actually creatively pile wads of cash into an easy chair, if you've got the time... The end result is that either because of the last night's wild romp or because of some rare bout of vigilantism, he tends to sleep on his bed, rather than in it, and with most of the previous day's clothes on. One quick shower, a couple brushed teeth, one bowl of All-Bran and new clothes from the dry-cleaner are all he needs to start his day.

Still, these strong uses of teleportation tend to leave visually identifiable marks on him. Before his restorative binge and his rebuilding nap, you'll typically be able to remark that he suddenly looks a bit floaty in his clothes, or that he should consider cinching his belt one hole tighter. He's never managed to look bony, but sheer exhaustion and utter, desperate hunger are both things Nigel has seen on his protégé before.
Behaviour: if he were the one writing this bio, Allan would want to get one thing out of the way straight away, a fairly obvious one at that.

He's gay.

Not gay in the socially manageable way, however. He isn't the kind of guy whom you could possibly mistake for a heterosexual, or even the kind of recognizable homosexual whom you'd consider as being pleasantly balanced. Rather, Allan is the kind of gay man who broadcasts his state as widely as possible and without the least bit of restraint or concern for others. Being also known in Hope as the outspoken president of the local LGBT association, he's probably the one and only guy in town whom you wouldn't offend by opening a conversation with a flat or potentially stupid assessment of the way he swings. If anything, he'd warp the expected sarcastic retort into a kind of endeared response, as though you're being genuinely cute by affecting surprise at his deeper nature.

The truth is that he doesn't mean it, but nearly everything he says and does tends to carry some sort of psycho-sexual undertone. A grocery list might dip just shy of sounding like off-kilter innuendo, and the appraising tsks or little appreciative grunts he gives when presenting a new release from the company also seem to carry the sense that he can't help himself but to look at inanimate objects as having some sort of deeply codified eroticism. If there was ever a speaker who uses the old trick of mentally turning all of the audience members naked, it's him. He's really not using it to reduce stress, though... Chances are if you're a guy and you've talked to him, he's mentally undressed you. He isn't even remotely afraid of admitting that he tried that on his direct boss – except the whole “invisible” thing short-circuited whatever end process would have been expected...

With that in mind, him being a bit of a gleeful motor and potty-mouth wouldn't surprise anyone. Sex, guys, sex, security systems, the layman-level physics behind teleportation, sex, guys and sex tend to comprise his most common set of conversation topics, about in that order. That is, until some obviously important issue comes up, in which case he reveals himself to be actually competent, beyond his apparent ability to assess a female employee's worth by her resumé and a male employee's by his package. However insatiable he might be, this also applies to his job. He's really more of a headhunter than a sciencey type, having only ever bothered to understand that when he thinks about being somewhere else, he can end up there by flicking a mental switch. Even so, he clearly loves his job and is fond of saying that Nigel saved his life. While this didn't happen in the literal sense, he needed to meet the Voice to understand that the illicit gravy train he was riding was eventually going to end, and that it might end badly. Sidekicking beside him for a few heists showed him that there was something deeper in life than the warm fuzziness of excess wealth and the many debaucheries it could afford.

You could say Nigel snapped him out of the #YOLO crowd and introduced him to the somewhat nobler notion of Carpe Diem. Between seizing the day to be remembered for something greater than himself or dying an STD-riddled former Yuppie agonizing his days away in a luxury clinic, the choice was fairly clear. That essentially caused the colder facts of Reality to slam into him, with the insane lifestyle he'd acquired for himself coming to screeching halt.

There's some moments where you begin to understand that his flaming persona is the result of a complete and painfully acquired sense of self-assurance, a kind of positively reinforced egotism fueled by good deeds. He used to have something close to it before meeting Nigel, but finding the Voice had the same effect for him that supposedly finding a higher path has for born-again types.

Purpose was gifted to him – something he considers to be greater than any superpower. Between trying to get one of the rookies into his penthouse and his bed or spending the night on a stakeout, he'll choose Option B. He doesn't ever see himself joining the ranks of Shield officially – as it's hard to make investigations or raids coincide with CES keynotes – but he's well-known in town for his propensity to suddenly jump into the fray, ready to pitch his own skills in.

A bit like Nigel, there's a kind of playful haughtiness at work when he actually starts dealing out momentum-boosted punches or dragging flunkies literally into walls. He's on top of his game and loves every second of it, his skill set not even requiring of him that he be a particularly skilled fighter. All he needs is cool enough nerves to see the punches or kicks coming, and a good idea of the place's layout so he can blink to safety in the event that firearms get involved. If he has these things, you get the very clear sense that humility has no real place on the impromptu battlefield. He can strut his stuff he wants to and he certainly will, even while doing his damndest to humiliate movement-challenged types who were idiotic enough to bring a knife to a teleport-based brawl.

Considering, he's marred his precious physique with a few easily concealable scars. Coming out of his first scrape with a bloody nose and a black eye was of tremendous use for his ego : you could say he does blow a lot of hot air, but that most of that big sense of Self is purposefully wasted space. At the core of it waits a hard nugget of gold, a generally nice guy who just has a chronic problem of not being able to stick to just being nice. He'll always and forever slip-double entendres or eyebrow waggles or off-kilter jokes, even if he's trying his damndest to be earnest. As Nigel is known to say to the Shieldies, it's best to just accept it. He's not trying to annoy them – it's just an old defense mechanism he hasn't learned to disarm yet.

Given that he's a fairly young superhuman, he has all the time in the world to figure out how to fuse his cheerfully deviant interests and an increased dose of earnestness together. The constant libido-battering simply serves as an adequate protective armour he hasn't found a replacement for, as of now.

Goals: on the surface, his goals are as shallow as shallow goals get. Not sleeping alone for tonight is a good start, and so is not going to bed too early... It doesn't take Einstein's brain to figure out he has a bit of a compulsive need to seek the approval and love of others, and that he does it in all the wrong ways – even if the end result remains charming to a certain degree.

Get him talking about his job, however, and you realize that he actually is a man who's found his calling. He wants to keep earned wealth in the hands of those who earned it, power where and whom with it belongs, and anything dangerous or forbidden properly contained. He wants all classes in town to have access to the services they need, which explains his almost compulsive philanthropy – as though there were a contest going on between Nigel and he as to who could be the city's biggest benefactor.

Dig deeper still and you realize that his childhood must have been particularly unfulfilling on the emotional level. All the empty, wild sex in the world won't equal five minutes of being honestly, meaningfully hugged, and all the smart backroom deals in the world won't give you the kind of bone-deep approval you typically find early in life. There may or may not be a special someone out there who'll pair the exact characteristics needed to push past the “fun-loving hunk of man-flesh” act and bring him more than Nigel's offered intellectual epiphany. If that ever happens, you can assume he'll begin the painful process of learning to speak with his brain and his heart, as opposed to his brain and his hormones...

History: born in 1982, Allan was the son of Kevin Winston, a human, and Latasha Franklin, an anthro hippopotamus. Raised in Queens, New York, his upbringing wasn't terribly different from what you'd have found with the local kids, except perhaps for the fact that things he did inexplicably fostered some amount of cold between him and his parents. He couldn't elaborate on that, nowadays – all he remembers is a distant sense of his parents looking at him with maybe just a tad of wistfulness as he played with his toys. Only now would he admit they probably hadn't been terribly tolerant of his early signs of difference but that instead of rejecting him, they gave him something that felt just a little too lukewarm to feel like honest support...

At first, that didn't mean much. As time went on and he grew up, however, his questions and statements around the dinner table sometimes happened to be awkward. He wondered if looking at Mr. Yorke, his Math teacher, and feeling “funny inside” was appropriate. He wondered what one boy would think if another one kissed him on the mouth, or why he inexplicably felt the need to lie, to cover it up with jokes about girls and trying to laugh louder than the other kids.

Around 1993, as he recalls, a swimming class was in order for the day. He remembers climbing the diving tower and looking down on his gym instructor, only to feel a most peculiar warmth as he leaned forward to let himself fall...

Gasping for air, he found his first erection waiting, and in the midst of boys who were just as awkward about it as he was. They laughed at him and taunted him all throughout the rest of the lesson, to the point where he found himself in the showers, desperately wanting to be somewhere else -

He doesn't specifically remember flicking his mental switch – it simply happened. He was back home and in his room, still soaking wet and wearing nothing but his swimshorts. This resulted in him being grounded for a week once his parents inexplicably found their son at home. Later events would first convince him that shame was the catalyst for his ability to teleport himself, but some personal and quiet practice would convince him of his ability to blink between two memorized spaces on his own.

By 1998, he hadn't exactly come out of the closet but he at least wasn't denying it in himself anymore. His late high school and early-college experimentation only cemented his sexuality, while the campus' gay scene was carefree and shame-free enough for him to assume these traits for himself.

Coming home one summer, he opted to try and introduce his boyfriend of the moment to his parents. The end result was devastating. Latasha had hoped, even foolishly prayed that her son's “peculiarities” would be fixed over time, defending herself from bigotry but not having expected this out of him. Kevin wasn't much more supportive. A few days later, his boyfriend would call it quits over the phone, claiming that meeting his parents had been much too uncomfortable.

Allan felt as though someone had smashed his heart to pieces. He angrily rejected his ex, blinked the phone into the Hudson and, driven by rage, teleported for the one space he'd found himself in, during his childhood, that didn't have emotional or sexual connotations. It was where his father had worked and, coincidentally, his father had been one of the vault keepers for a Manhattan banking outlet.

The vault having never been physically opened, no alarms were tripped. He simply stuffed his pockets full of wads of cash and before realizing what he'd been doing, blinked back into his closet. Several passes were made which allowed him to empty the vault, at which point one quick Web search for Miami penthouse prices and photographs was conducted.

About twelve hours later, he was in possession of sixty million dollars of cold, hard cash, a lavishly furnished penthouse with deliveries on the way, and an unlimited horizon of Miami seaside vistas to explore.

It'd be years before he'd give any signs of life to his parents or former friends. In the meantime, he took refuge in the old collegiate lifestyle. Being able to hit virtually any bank vault in impunity, the cost of living was a bad joke for him. Drugs, boys, fineries diverse and trips around the world were his for the taking. There wasn't anyone he couldn't fleece, any safe he couldn't crack. If he could fit in it, he could empty it.

By 2015, he'd finished growing up and had filled out to his current proportions – but something was missing. He was one of Miami's Hot Eligible Bachelors, he was a billionnaire in the making and there wasn't much he couldn't purchase or simply take – but he felt empty. Walking the walk and talking the talk came easily enough, but being a flaming sexpot felt natural to him, now. It was something he could do without the least bit of passion, while still faking the kind of burning lust you typically found in doujinshi publications. If anything, managing all that cash and his 'porting itineraries made a decent legitimate moneymaker out of him, as speculating in stocks was a sure-fire way to conceal some of his ill-gotten gains.

Then the Voice hit him. By 2016, he woke up after New Year's Eve to find that all his scheduled payments had bounced back. Each and every figment of his wealth was gone – but the signature name card he found next to his laptop was different from the other ones the news sometimes dredged up.

There was a message on the other side, the Voice urging him to make contact. Why would he? He asked that question both to himself and to Griffin once he actually did call, only to be told that for once, someone was willing to make him a very decent proposal between friends... Catching the innuendo and assuming he was about to be recruited for a lucrative job, he agreed to a meeting.

The meeting, as it turned out, was a circus-worthy beatdown on the rooftop of his penthouse's tower. The invisible man wanted him to remember what it felt like to be reduced, to be mocked and jeered. Things escalated as, rather mercilessly, Griffin began to slap him harshly several times, asking him each time if he knew why he was stealing things from others.

By the time that ended, Allan's cheeks were badly swollen and he'd been forced to dig deep within inside – only to come out with the understanding that he had no idea at all why he was stealing from others. Griffin told him that if he ever wanted to find out why, all he needed to was to teleport inside his office in Hope. While Allan knows Nigel didn't just disappear from his rooftop, it still more or less felt exactly like he had. One moment an intangible man was pinning him down on the floor in one of the few non-erotic contacts of his recent life, and the next, he was gone.

At first, Winston curtly blew off Nigel and his offer. What would an old cat burglar have to tell him, anyway? The more he thought about it, however, the more he began to hit against something. As he finally dredged up enough guts to research Hope's history and Griffin's personal origins, he felt as though someone had finally pulled the wool from his eyes.

He teleported to Hope four days after his meeting with Nigel.

Everything changed.

He'd been shown too much in too little time to suddenly become someone else. Besides, the more he thought about acting humbly, and the more he felt puzzled. For most of what he considered as his defining life, he'd been a raging extrovert and a proponent of the Me, Me, Me School of Social Networking. Nigel's history as the Voice shook those egotistical foundations to their core – but he had nothing else to build on top of. Sensing that a total reconstruction would be impossible, he opted to latch onto the one central pillar in all of what he'd been shown : having a sense of purpose. To that end, Nigel took him out on a few heists and busts so he'd end up feeling something deeper than the shallow excuse for gratitude he was used to when he bought one of his female sweethearts a new designer dress. It worked. Personally dropping money in a soup kitchen's funds felt awkward at first, but the oddity of the situation turned into something approaching a chest-based version of the warm fuzziness he'd experienced as a child. Being nice came to feel genuinely and seriously good, to the point where any and all attempts to return to the wild romps of before felt – empty.

As empty as they were, his loins kept churning and crying for more and more and more, as they'd always had. He discovered that he could be nice, he could even be a visionary under Nigel's supervision and could honestly be liked – but some primeval part of him still wanted and needed nothing more than guilt-free joyrides. To this day, he compares himself to a Ramen noodle addict who has come to appreciate the taste of fine pasta : he'll appreciate a good and lovingly prepared fettuccine carbonara as much as anyone else, but his churning guts still cry out for the ol' dried sauce and oodles of salt. Meaningful people and relationships are things he anchors himself to with all the good cheer in the world; but he's still too much of an unsatisfied and insatiable Yuppie, somewhere down there, to reject those lovers of which he consistently forgets the name and address the morning after.

If anything, 2025 finds him precariously, if pleasantly balanced between a meaningful position and a continued and unashamed love for philandering. He has purpose, of that he has no doubt, but he also has needs...

Unless the old man suddenly switches over and figures that going through the Kama Sutra's Zero-Light-Refraction Edition would be swell, these are needs that are likely to remain unfulfilled. As to the likelihood of his mind and gherkin finally reaching some sort of consensus between seriousness and juvenile bacchanalia – he really has no idea when and if that'll ever happen.
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