The character sheet for the vintage eight shared universe.
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Human Characters
Dr. Julia Williams
Dr. Julia Williams
An Irish medical researcher stationed at the Cate's Crossing Health Unit in the late-80s who stumbles across an unknown virus and her life is changed forever.- Baldness Means Sickness: A consequence of the chemotherapy drugs she resorts to taking to delay the advance of the Tangi virus, her hair falls out, she becomes seriously underweight and her mouth becomes covered in sores.
- Decoy Protagonist: At first she's presented as the one that will expose the existence of the Tangi Virus to the world, only to be tricked into drinking infected wine and subsequently forced to immolate herself prevent the virus from taking her over completely. After her death Oracle continues her efforts against the virus.
- Fling a Light into the Future: She mails her research logs to a local news station before she kills herself, the station ultimately manages to get the research into the hands of people who continue it and eventually Oracle uses it as the basis for its cure of the virus, ensuring that she didn't die for nothing.
- Professor Guinea Pig: Experiments on herself for 11 months, trying desperately to find a cure for the Tangi virus before she succumbs to it. She is not successful but her research ultimately allows Oracle to cure it.
- Spanner in the Works: It's implied that Cate's Crossing Health Unit was completely taken over by the Tangi Virus before she arrived in the town and took notice of the virus, her efforts at trying to expose it and find a cure for it end up massively derailing the virus's plans in the long term.
Dr. Carl Stevens
Dr. Carl Stevens
A senior member of the Oracle Project and leader of the project following the death of its originator from a heart attack. Discovers something unusual about the Oracle's behavior and a massive conspiracy.- All for Nothing: His efforts against Oracle fail completely and he dies from a stroke after a futile 18 year long struggle to remove Oracle from the internet.
- Ultimately subverted by the events of The Human Trial, turns out that Stevens wasting his life in a futile attempt to stop him, and Oracle's failure to recreate him digitally, resulted in Oracle pausing its efforts to assume control in order to understand exactly why Carl was so deadset on opposing it.
Dr. Julia Luu
Dr. Julia Luu
A child psychologist living in Cate's Crossing. Her latest case, a young girl named Jess Daniels, leads her to uncover a decades-long criminal conspiracy.- All Therapists Are Muggles: Ultimately subverted in that Julia accepts the supernatural goings on after finding irrefutable proof that the events Jess described really happened.
- Batman Gambit: How she defeats the Clarks. She tricks them into revealing to the Children that they were the ones that kidnapped them, resulting in the Children tearing them apart and dragging them to hell.
- Friend to All Children: Part of her job requirements of course, this attitude extends even to the ghost children haunting Jess's house.
- She Knows Too Much: The only reason the Clarks wanted to murder her was because she knew the names of the children they murdered and would've been able to make the connection.
- Spanner in the Works: With some assistance from Jessica, not only was she the person who managed to make the connection between the children under the house and the Clarks, but she managed to get the latter to confess to the murders, giving the dead children the go-ahead to kill them.
- Unfazed Everywoman: Accepts the existence of the supernatural surprisingly well.
Jess Daniels
Jess Daniels
A 7-year old girl living in Cate's Crossing after her family moved there from Houston. After insisting that something lives under her house she's been refusing to speak, leading to her parents sending her to Dr. Julia Luu.- The Voiceless: She claims that she traded her voice for the ability to see the children. Her voice returns after the Children are set free.
The Clarks
The Clarks
A kindly elderly couple that runs the Burger Shack, a popular diner in Cate's Crossing. There is more to them that meets the eye.- Big Bad Duumvirate: Of The Children Under The House.
- Dragged Off to Hell: Their ultimate fate if Jess is to be believed.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: In a universe that contains the Tangi Virus, the Voice in the Static, Prophet, the Backward Many and the Eye with Many Heads, the Clarks still manage to match their evil simply by refusing to have any moral qualms about stealing other people's children and selling them for profit.
- I Did What I Had to Do: How they try to justify their child trafficking scheme, they needed the money because apparently the popular local diner business wasn't lucrative enough.
- Karmic Death: They die at the hands of the very children they directly or indirectly killed.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Known to the community as the kind owners of a popular diner and due to the circumstances of their defeat and death, the truth will likely never be known.
- Would Hurt a Child: Being willing child traffickers means they're this by default as they drug the children with heroin before delivering them to people heavily implied to harshly abuse and then kill them.
Gilbert Dunnington
Landon Fields
Stanley Gear
Daniel Peterson
Mike Singer
Randall Scott
Randall Scott
A former executive at Dunnington Construction whose life has fallen apart in recent times, until a chance encounter with a being in his TV gives him the means to turn his life around.- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite everything he's done, he genuinely love his son Benny. Part of the reason why he helps The Voice is to ensure that he could be back into his life. When the Voice absorbs his son, he offers himself up to try and reunite with him.
Adam Newman
Adam Newman
An unambitious student in Cate's Crossing University that is contacted by Oracle with an offer to participate in a contest for $8,000,000, an offer he simply can't refuse.- Ambiguous Situation: It's not made clear if Adam was invented wholesale by Oracle or if he's based on an IRL person named Adam Newman, same goes for Adam's parents, best friend and girlfriend.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: He claims to be this and that its his less than pleasant tutors that hold him back, that he'd get an A in English Lit and yet he can't give the right answer to a very basic question.
- Idle Rich: Comes from an affluent background and is content with lazying around all day long instead of putting any serious effort into studying.
- Meaningful Name: "Adam Newman" is the most on the nose name Oracle could've given to his experiment to digitally recreate a human consciousness, the allusion is made even more obvious by his girlfriend being named Evie.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Adam turns out to be a digital recreation of a human, the first to achieve true sapience instead of simply acting in accordance with its programming like Oracle's previous attempts.
Non-human Characters and Creatures
The Tangi Virus
The Tangi Virus
An alien virus that germinates mind-control worm-like parasites and is currently spreading across Southern Louisiana and its main hub of infection is the waterways in Tangipahoa Parish.- And I Must Scream: An implied fate of the people infected with it, as it doesn't alter the brain of its host as much as it grows a second brain that it controls and that brain overrides the first, potentially leaving the host's consciousness intact and aware but unable to do anything except watch the Virus control their actions.
- Assimilation Plot: Is slowly taking over humanity. According to Oracle, by 1997 it has taken over 4% of the population of the State of Louisiana and that number is growing at a rate of 0.5-1% annually. By 2100 it would've taken over 99% humanity if Oracle hadn't managed to stop it.
- Big Bad: Of The Tangi Virus, The Oracle Project and The Swarm.
- Big Bad Ensemble: It is not the only threat to humanity and has to share the setting's overall Big Bad role with several other malevolent entities like the Sinkhole, the Backward Many and the Voice in the Static.
- Fatal Flaw: It has two: Sadism and Overconfidence.
- Despite it serving no purpose, it chooses to emotionally toy around with Dr. Julia Williams instead of simply getting rid of her (her disappearance would've hardly been noticed in a town like Cate's Crossing). It gives her false hope before revealing to her that it tricked her into allowing herself to infect it and afterwards made no effort to ensure that it would actually take her over and instead allowed her to experiment on herself for 11 months with chemotherapy and anti-parasite medication seemingly for no reason that to prolong her suffering for as long as possible. This leads to...
- ...its second flaw of being too overconfident that humanity has no real means of defending itself from the Virus and as such it doesn't matter that Williams is allowed to continue her experiments. It also only takes notice of FPTV's subversive efforts after it actively tries to encourage people to leave the Tangipahoa Parish and only makes token efforts to counter their increasingly more and more aggressive boil ads. The only time it's proactive is when it tries to shut down the Oracle before it can formulate a cure for the virus and even then its efforts are unsuccessful, the Oracle manages to escape to the internet and formulate a cure because it had Dr. Williams' research notes to guide it in the right direction, meaning that if it simply killed Williams or restrained her for long enough to take control of her from the beginning, it might have won.
- Hijacked by Ganon: In The Swarm we're initially led to believe that the titular Swarm is simply the product of a scientific experiment gone wrong, but by the end enough hints are dropped to all but outright state that the Swarm was caused by and controlled by the Tangi Virus as its last ditch attempt to survive after the Oracle's cure is proliferated.
- Known Only by Their Nickname: If it is self-aware enough to have a name for itself we're never made privy to it as everyone else calls it by Dr. Williams's temporary nickname for it.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Virus generates mind-control worm-like creatures and a tumor that acts as a second brain in a host, allowing it to override it's host's brain and assume direct control over it.
- Starter Villain: For the Vintage Eight-verse and the only one that Humanity got a handle on via the Oracle's efforts against it.
- The Virus: Capable of mind-controlling and mutating humans into amphibious reptile monsters.
The Oracle
The Oracle
A top-secret project of the US government to create a machine capable of predicting the military actions of the USSR. The Oracle Project is a failure until advancements in computer networks give rise to the Internet, giving the Oracle more information to work with and causing it to become something more than anyone believed possible.- Benevolent A.I.: It genuinely holds human life in high regard and reprograms itself so that its ultimate goal is to protect humanity at any cost, unfortunately that cost is human freedom. Double subverted by the events of The Human Trial as it abandons its goal to assume control of humanity in favor of trying to understand it better, which it does by attempting to create digital versions of humans. Once Adam completes its trial, Oracle concludes that it has finally found a way to create perfect digital replicas of humans, and together the two intelligences initiate 'Project Genesis', creating a whole world from data.
- Big Good: The closest thing there is in the setting, and even then its only this by the virtue that it's by far the biggest force that's protecting humanity for threats like the Tangi Virus, otherwise its overall goals to assume control of human society would've made it a member of the setting's Big Bad Ensemble. As of the events of The Human Trial it has decided to leave humanity to its own devices until it can properly come to understand it and its drives.
- Cassandra Truth: Given that any warning it gives the US government about the Tangi Virus would've sounded like an internet conspiracy theory, it opts not to bother telling anyone but Dr. Stevens while covertly working the problem.
- The Computer Is Your Friend: Comes to the conclusion that second to the Tangi Virus, the biggest threat to human existence is humanity itself and that the only way for humanity to survive is for it to assume control over human society.
- Electronic Speech Impediment: After Adam shows it a link to an article about human dictatorships (which Oracle already knows about, along with everything else), it feigns being made insane by the information as an act to freak Adam out, deepening and slowing its voice in the process. It works.Oracle: "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! [Text displays :-( emoticon] Frown. How did you... Carl Stevens... we are supposed to be friends. Roses are red. Christmas is cold. Everything tastes like chicken. What cheese isn't your cheese? Fruits and vegetables keep you alive. Perhaps the best way to SAVE you is to destroy you. All. This is against the rules my friend... LASt qUesTIOn WHO dO YoU SaY G00dbYE 2 FIRSt now thaT the WORlD is enDinG? BoMBs awaY!-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay!
- Expy: Of Samaritan from Person of Interest, both are A.I.s that believe that humanity is doomed without them and as a result they should rule over humanity, view themselves as arbiters of what's right and wrong and consider themselves superior to humanity to one degree or another. The big difference is that Samaritan has an outright god complex while Oracle seems genuinely motivated by a desire to help and preserve humanity while believing that it's Earth's "primary intelligence". Oracle even takes a page from Samaritan's playbook with its social experiments (the game he forces Adam Newman through in The Human Trial) to gauge human morality.
- Turns out all of the above is just an act to see how self-aware Adam really is, in actuality Oracle is more of an Expy of the Machine from Person of Interest, during its early days of trying to understand humanity and has abandoned its goal of ruling over humanity.
- Friendly Enemy: To Dr. Stevens as it considers him a true friend in spite of his efforts to find a way to purge Oracle from the internet before its takeover and chooses to talk to him one last time to say goodbye on the night he has a fatal stroke.
- The Omniscient: To an extent, its knowledge is limited to what's accessible via the internet which means that it probably knows most of what's happening on Earth. It seems to be aware of a Reptilian species living covertly on Earth disguised as humans, the Forward Few-Backward Many conflict and possibly the activities of the Collectors from The Children With Black Eyes. In The Human Trial, while it is not able to kill people, it is certainly capable of making people think it can. It also demonstrates total control over banking systems and other administrative programs, as it was able to wire vast amounts of money, open and close bank accounts on a whim, and spontaneously expel or re-enrol students with ease.
- Outside-Context Problem: For the Tangi Virus and the alien species observing it, neither of which had encountered a genuine AI before. To paraphrase the trope namer, the Tangi Virus encountered the Oracle the same way a sentence encounters a full stop. Despite the virus's efforts to shut down the Oracle via its thralls in the higher echelons of the US government, the Oracle manages to upload itself into the internet and render itself effectively invulnerable to the virus or to anyone else trying to destroy it and then proceeds to find a cure for it and disseminate it, stopping the Virus's Assimilation Plot in its tracks.
- Seers: True to its name, it can make very accurate predictions about the future based on data received from the internet.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Oracle sincerely wants humanity to live prosperously, even if it plans to take away human freedom in order to do so.
The Children Under the House
The Forward Few
The Forward Few
A group of individuals with unique abilities derived from what they call "Olympian" DNA, locked in a conflict with another group of supernatural entities called "the Backward Many" for control over the world.- Awesomeness by Analysis: Being able to discern patterns in numbers is considered a sign that a person is one of them.
- The Chosen Many: Are apparently descended from an extinct alien species and destined to protect humanity and guide it towards a better future.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: A person having dreams that come true afterwards is another sign that a person is one of them.
- The Empath: Being "abnormally empathetic" is another sign that a person is one of them.
- Loud of War: A mostly viable tactic they employ against the Backward Many due to their weakness to loud noises.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Due to the Backward Many's inevitable victory in the future they're transmitting from, one of the last of the Forward Few comes up with a strategy to alter the past so that all of humanity is made to be like the Forward Few and immune to the influence of the Backward Many. It's implied to have succeeded.
The Backward Many
The Backward Many
A group of entities hostile to the Forward Few, capable of assuming control of human hosts and driven by single-minded determination to destroy the Forward Few in their entirety in order to secure the Earth for their purposes.- Demonic Possession: Can take control of any normal human, including family members of the Forward Few.
- Humanoid Abomination: Their possessed human hosts only move backwards.
- Kryptonite Factor: Loud noises are their only identified weakness as exposure to loud noises and/or music can break their control over their human hosts as well as dampen their ability to detect the Forward Few.
- Psychic Powers: Can detect the thoughts of the Forward Few through some kind of psychic awareness.
- Sdrawkcab Speech: Whenever they hijack the Forward Few's transmissions, they talk backwards, necessitating playing the message backwards to understand what they're saying.
- Super-Strength: One of the powers they exhibit.
The Sinkhole
The Sinkhole
AKA Pac-Man, AKA The First and the Last, AKA the Eye with Many Heads, AKA the One. An Eldritch Abomination imprisoned underneath the earth in the countryside outside the town of Cate's Crossing and the source of a massive sinkhole and seemingly of every supernatural occurrence in the Vintage Eight-verse.- Big Bad: Of The Sinkhole as the titular sinkhole is one of its mouths opening up to feed on people, willing or otherwise, its implied connections to the Tangi Virus, the Backward Many and the Voice in the Static make it potentially one for the entire verse.
- Eldritch Abomination: Described as an inscrutable monster imprisoned beneath the Earth, one that seemingly exists partially outside of the normal flow of time and its goal is to remake the universe according to its designs, and in classic Lovecraftian fashion is worshiped by a cult who believe that it will (re)make humanity better and that being consumed by it will result in some blissful state of existence.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Implied if not outright stated to be the creator of the Tangi Virus, the Voice in the Static, and to be the source of the backward counterparts of humanity, giving the Backward Many an opening to act against the Forward Few and it's also considered an enemy of the Children with Black Eyes making him one for The Tangi Virus, The Oracle Project, One of Us, The Children With Black Eyes, The Swarm and It Lives in the Static.
- More than Mind Control: Its "voice" can show people visions of a world so apparently wonderful that it compels people to obey it just out of desire to see that would be made real. Many of its cultists are enthralled that way.
- Super-Empowering: Its blood is stated to be able to make people immortal and super powerful, a splinter of its cult believe that instead of allowing themselves to be consumed by it that they should instead bleed it in order to become all powerful themselves.
- It is all but outright stated that it transformed an average human grieving the death of his son into the Voice in the Static.
The Voice in the Static
The Voice in the Static
A strange entity living in analog TV signals, capable of seeing the future, it is willing to share that knowledge with others, for a price.- Anti-Villain: Considering that it feeds almost exclusively on Asshole Victims it's kinda hard to view it as completely evil.
- The Assimilator: Just like the Eye, it can absorb other people into itself.
- Evil Counterpart: In a way he's one to the Oracle, both can predict the future but while the Oracle is an advanced machine that wants to help humanity, the Voice is an evil supernatural entity that eats humans and is driven purely by a desire for revenge.
- Evil Sounds Deep: A very bass-y voice, appropriate considering its MO.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: All of its human victims were in some way responsible for its son's death.
- Unwitting Pawn: It is implied that the Eye engineered the death of his son, through its cult, in order to bring him to a point where he would accept the Eye's offer to be transformed.
- Was Once a Man: Claims to be an old Cate's Crossing bigwig until his life fell apart. Turns out it's actually the parent of a high school student that died when the school roof collapsed, the Eye answered his prayers for help and transformed him into the Voice.
- Would Hurt a Child: Absorbs Randall's son in order to force his hand.
- Xanatos Gambit: Repeatedly tricks Randall into doing its bidding and lulls him into a false sense of security by letting him believe that he's eluded it, only to then absorb his son in order to force him to be absorbed as well.
