Greyhound Investigations
Basic Info
- Age: 26
- Occupation: Private investigator
- Appearance: 5'11", 155 lbs. Julian has a lean, wiry build – more academic than athletic. He carries himself carefully, like someone who’s hyper-aware of the ground beneath their feet. Julian is built for slipping through crowds, not standing out in them. He tends to wear muted greys, dark blues, and shades of charcoal. His hair is a dark shade of blonde, or perhaps a light brown, worn in a forgettable style that’s neither too long nor too short. Julian’s eyes – an icy blue – are perhaps his only striking feature.
- Scent profile: Stale coffee and cheap detergent and ink and paper and basement concrete and other people's cologne and unscented bar soap and food grease and mud on rubber soles of shoes and dust from a ceiling fan and car exhaust and gasoline and alleyway trash and sweat and...perhaps he's the only one who smells it all.
Abilities / Skills
Julian has heightened senses. He sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels far more than any typical human. While his baseline senses are already exceptional, he also has the capacity to dial in on one sense at a time – at the expense of the remaining ones. When he pushes his vision to its limits, he is rendered temporarily deaf, anosmic, and numb. When he heightens his sense of smell, he loses his vision, along with all remaining senses. While he can switch between focal senses at will, switching too frequently or focusing on one sense for too long can trigger an overload. During these episodes, his capacity to tune out irrelevant stimuli collapses. All his senses are heightened beyond the threshold of comfort, and his pattern recognition breaks down – Julian senses everything, but understands nothing.
Vision
Baseline: Julian can typically read a page of text from across the room, recognize a face from a few blocks away, and pick up minute details - scuffs, wrinkles, stray hairs - that most detectives would only note in a thorough investigation. He has excellent low-light vision, a dimly lit alleyway is no different from a daytime street to him, and he can rapidly acclimate between bright and dim conditions.
Focal sense: When his other senses are dampened, Julian's eyes can discern incredible details. He has been known pick out fingerprints, forgeries, and surveillance footage tampering. With extreme focus, he can access wavelengths in the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum, allowing him to perceive trace heat signatures or evidence of bodily fluids. However, when his other senses are rendered non-existent, Julian becomes extremely sensitive to bright lights or changes in lighting.
Hearing
Baseline: Julian's hearing is sharp even at rest. He can easily listen to conversations in another room and hear movement behind walls. Even before he sees someone, Julian can usually identify their particular pattern of footsteps, the cadence of their voice, or even their breathing.
Focal sense: When his other senses are dulled, sound becomes Julian's entire world. Not only does he hear more, but he is better able to process and disentangle the waves of sound that wash over him. He can isolate conversations from a noisy environment, hear heartbeats, and perceive ultrasonic or subsonic frequencies. Although he can't see, Julian is able to retain some perception of his surroundings through a rudimentary form of echolocation. When sound is his focal sense, Julian is overly susceptible to loud noises.
Smell
Baseline: Julian has the nose of a trained scenthound. He can smell perfumes and colognes from several rooms away, and smell traces of chemicals, food, cleaning solutions, or environmental contaminants long after exposure.
Focal sense: When smell is his focal sense, Julian can paint a map by scent alone. He can track someone over several city blocks based on their signature scent alone, and substantially farther if they do him the favour of wearing too much cologne. He can read layered scents within a room, identifying who was there, and roughly how long ago. Despite its utility, smell is one of Julian's most disfavoured senses. Scents are too closely entwined with memories and emotions, and an unexpected scent can be overpowering.
Taste
Baseline: Under normal circumstances, Julian considers his sense of taste to be more of a hindrance than a boon. He has no tolerance for spice, sourness, or bitterness, and foods often taste rancid days before they'd be likely to cause him any real harm. His typical diet consists of buttered toast, mashed potatoes, unseasoned vegetables, and black coffee. Lots of coffee.
Focal sense: When taste is his focus, the sense heightens into an analytical tool. He can break apart the components that make up a flavour, or identify poisons, drugs, and organic compounds with unnerving specificity. Even the air is laced with particles that impart information onto his tongue. Like scent, Julian avoids focusing on taste when he can avoid it - when you taste everything, it's difficult to feel at ease with the flavours you're ingesting, and even after letting the focus go, it often takes hours for unpleasant 'aftertastes' to clear from his mouth.
Touch
Baseline: Julian is highly sensitive to textures, pressure, and temperature. He can determine if an object was recently handled through residual heat, detect tension in someone's shoulders through a handshake, or feel the tumblers in a lock sliding into place as he picks it.
Focal sense: With heightened sensitivity to tactile evidence, Julian can detect even the slightest alterations in texture; indentations of a pen on a pad of paper, the residue of a fired gun, or the altered materials used in counterfeit documents. But without the rest of his senses to orient him, any movement comes at high risk. In this state, even a stubbed toe feels like bones are breaking.
Background
Julian was always sensitive. As a child, he complained about buzzing electronics that no one else could hear, refused to wear sweaters or tight socks, and was notoriously fussy about the foods he ate. His parents thought he had sensory processing issues. Doctors gave him noise-cancelling headphones and an ever-changing schedule of diagnoses.
College was supposed to fix things. And for a while, it seemed like it might. Despite the flickering fluorescents and the noise and smells of rooms full of students, Julian excelled academically. He studied neuroscience, with the goal of learning more about perception and cognition, and gaining an understanding of why he’d always seemed so much more aware of the world than others.
At the end of his third year, things began to change. Without warning, his senses would spike, jumping from acute to truly superhuman. Minor noises in the library turned deafening, while his vision blacked out and then exploded into hyperpigmented spectrums of colour. Unable to control his senses, he’d get nosebleeds, migraines, or even blackouts. Once, he collapsed on the street – unable to perceive anything beyond the overwhelming flavour of a pepperoni pizza slice he’d consumed three hours ago.
His academic performance plummeted, and he dropped out a semester before graduation.
It took months to recalibrate. Months spent locked in an unlit apartment, crying whenever trucks roared by on the street outside, forcing himself to eat when even the flavour of plain rice was overwhelming. Eventually, things settled. His senses were sharper than they’d ever been before, but he learned to manage the input. The spikes too, he learned to control, discovering that he could enhance a single sense while dampening the rest.
Instead of returning to college, Julian decided to put his strange new mind to work elsewhere. He rented a small office, and opened Greyhound Investigations, a one-man private investigation agency. Most of his cases are small stuff: cheating spouses, missing pets, basic surveillance work, serving subpoenas. Small potatoes for someone who observes the world the way Julian does. As far as his clientele is concerned, there’s nothing meta about him – he’s just a good investigator, with a strictly-enforced ‘Scent-free workplace’ policy.