Avery Ganon

"Holy Moses!"

Background
Avery Ganon was supposed to be a girl. At least, that's what the doctors told his parents. But Dan and Elaine were hardly the sort to be bothered with something as trivial as an extra chromosome in the newest addition to their family, and besides, why waste the perfectly good name they already had picked out? This was the world Avery was born into; one with little regard for things like social norms and expectations. Mom was a reformed hippie and dad was always spouting off the benefits of transcendental meditation, and it was assumed little Avery would fall right into line with that sort of free-spirited, progressive world view.

And he did, to a point. Sort of. A little.

For any other child, growing up with limited boundaries and rules would probably be a godsend, but Avery was one of those kids that actually liked having structure. He excelled at school academically but didn't have many friends; the other kids were into things like running around and getting dirty outside and being loud, and oh, how droll. Fortunately, as he got older he started to loosen up some, and his parents would frequently compare their son to a cat; stand-offish and snooty at first, but the more he warmed up to someone the better the chance he'd stick around and grace them with his presence. Again, note the "loosen up some" bit.

By the time Avery hit his teens he had settled comfortably into the role of cynical, douche bag teenage boy, selective with his friendships, outspoken about his passions, and quick to dismiss anything he didn't agree with. Passions he had plenty of: while he didn't always see eye to eye with his parents, one thing that managed to stick was their 1960s world view. That is, peace, love, and harmony for everybody. Still, Dan and Elaine were idealists, and their son was a realist, so while the notion that the world's problems could be solved by smoking pot, meditating, and waxing poetic might have worked for mom and dad, it wasn't quite enough for Avery. If you wanted to make the world a better place you had to work for it, as far as Avery was concerned, and so when it came time to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, the choice wasn't hard. He wanted to help people, doctors helped people, and with his grades Avery was fairly confident he could pull it off.

Grades were only half the battle, however. The Ganons lived in the magical bracket of 'we make too much money for our kid to get financial aid but not enough to pay for college out of pocket'. Which left Avery-- who had been accepted to Berkeley, whose per-semester tuition could only be described as asdfghjklasdf-- with two choices, neither of which were especially appealing. One, work full time and try to keep up with a full course load, or play the waiting game. He ended up doing a bit of both, working and saving until he was old enough to be considered emancipated from his parents, enrolling for half-time when his funds allowed it.

But being enrolled full-time wasn't as exciting as Avery had hoped. The classes themselves weren't the problem, but his living situation was; he had been paired up to room with the type of guy his parents would call a 'skuzz', or, in less flower child-friendly terms, 'a total douchebag'. A room transfer was made and Avery was hoping to get a roommate he could at least tolerate for round two. What he got instead was a tall, noodly spazzoid named Herbert who had an unhealthy obsession for the holy entity known as Queen Bey, which was, miraculously, an upgrade. It was also the unexpected start to what would become a rad bromance; Avery and Herb hit it off almost immediately, much to Avery's surprise, and the following three and a half years of university life ran much more smoothly.

Or they did, until his fifth semester. It was during a diagnostic lab that he Awakened, the point of which had been to diagnose a set of fictitious patients based off a list of symptoms and slides of various samples, and while everyone around him was carefully considering what the slides showed them and what the list suggested, Avery guessing the answers almost immediately. No, not guessing, he knew, without any hesitation, without second guessing his answers. Strep throat, pneumonia, otitis externa, one after the other, this was was kid's stuff, this was easy, why couldn't everybody else see how easy this was--

Oh, crap, no one else was getting it that quickly. Maybe he should have been proud of how quickly he was catching on, but there was something decidedly not right about how fast he was processing the information, and Avery had an odd feeling that he wasn't. It felt ingrained, like he had known this sort of thing all along and was just now realizing he had the knowledge at hand. He excused himself from the class, telling himself it was just some weird fluke while inherently knowing that it wasn't. It wasn't long before a group of students in some super-secretive on-campus group came calling at his door, and after agreeing to meet with them after they had hinted that they had an idea of what had happened in the lab, Avery learned he was something a bit more than human. Enlightened, they called it, he was gifted with an awareness most people would never possess, an awareness that had started some sort of ancient war between different factions of Enlightened, and--

No, nope, that wasn't for him. The Enlightened bit he could believe, after all he experienced it firsthand himself, but he was the child of war protesters, a man decidedly against the idea of pitting men against one another. If old men pretending to be wizards wanted to duke it out in some sort of Gandalf-versus-Saruman battle of superiority, that was their business. Avery could instinctively tell if someone was ill and potentially help cure them even without the aid of medicine? Then that's exactly what he was going to do, use this new Enlightened side of himself to assist with his goal of helping others.

A secret that big wouldn't stay a secret for long, of course, and Avery eventually broke and told Herb, hoping his best friend wouldn't call him crazy. It turned out that there was an odd chemistry between them for a reason; Herb's entire family was Enlightened and he was what they called an Acolyte, someone aware of the existence of magic but not gifted with the ability to inherently use it themselves. Well... awesome. With that potentially big hurdle out of the way, they fell right back into their usual routine, only this time with the added fun of 'lol majick'.

After his awakening, the final few semesters of being an undergrad were a veritable cake wal. But a bachelor's degree wasn't quite enough to cut it if you wanted to be a physician, and when the hunt for a grad school started, Avery found that the most promising candidates were out on the east coast. Which meant packing up and moving across country. But no big deal, he was an adult, there really wasn't anything tying him down in California, he could come home to visit and there was always the Internet to keep him connected with his parents and Herb, and it would only be until he graduated, really not so bad...

...He was hardly surprised to wake up and find Herb standing outside his apartment a few months later, luggage in one hand and a transfer letter to Cornell in another. Four years of grad school and one residency later, Avery found himself working as an ER doctor at the New York Presbyterian University Hospital, where he's still employed today with-- surprise surprise-- Herb on board as a medical examiner. He uses his Progenitor abilities sparingly when dealing with patients, or at least he tries to, but that big old bleeding heart buried deep under that indifferent front has coaxed him into making a paradox or two during his tenure. But then again, New York is a city with quite a lot of bizarre, hard-to-explain things going on, and Avery has a funny feeling that people running around casting magic is only the tip of the iceberg.

Continuing Adventures
'' To be added. ''

Death
'' To be added. ''

Personality
Highly educated with the ego to prove it, Avery is as quick to share his knowledge on any number of topics with any interested parties as he is to offer a snide, sardonic observation on the situation at hand. There's a slight trace of a superiority complex kindling under the surface, and while he won't outright mock someone for being intellectually inferior to himself, Avery unabashedly carries himself as a man who's "book smart." Big words are a cheap export from the land of Ganon, and they are assuredly not in small supply. But with the curse of intelligence often comes loneliness, and in Avery's world, that tends to be the case.

Smarts don't necessarily equal aloofness, of course, and Avery is never one to be needlessly detached or haughty. Emphasis on the needlessly bit; if he feels someone is trying to undermine him or move into his turf, he'll throw on the bitch switch fast enough to cause whiplash. The older he gets, however, the less he feels a need to go tromping around proving himself, and here in his thirties he's learned to rely less on one-upmanship and more on his dry, blunt nature to fight his battles.

Still, it's hard to tell how much of that glib, couldn't-care-less attitude is actually Avery and how much is a carefully constructed front. Underneath that quick wit lies a caring and compassionate individual; the world may be going to hell but there's a deeply instilled and hard to shake idealism that lives in Avery. It was no coincidence that he chose to use his Enlightened status for good, and had he not become a physician there's a good chance he would have ended up in another altruistic field of some sort.

The air of indifference he keeps up around himself often has him claiming not to be a "people person", but in reality Avery has no problem starting, holding, or even dominating a conversation. Quick with self-deprecating quips, Avery is a man with a bit of a morbid sense of humor, more than comfortable with the idea that, well, shit happens. He may be all about equality for all mankind and saving the world one patient at a time, but that only gets you so far when reality is there, ready and waiting in the wings with things like disasters, disease, and death.

Appearance
'' To be added. ''

Spheres

 * Life: 3
 * Time: 1
 * Prime: 2
 * Spirit: 2
 * Forces: 2

Avatar
Heathcliff // Pattern

Relations

 * Dan Ganon (father)
 * Elaine Ganon (mother)
 * Herbert Silverman (the missus)

Quotes

 * "Cookies and sodomy? My god, two of my favorite things, all in one place."
 * "Yeah? Well this is called an acquired brain injury, asshole. Look it up."
 * "I'm really very boring, you'd get better stories out of a Brownsville junkie."
 * "Oh my god."