A Fantastic Serial Killer As Antagonist.

By "Fantastic" I mean literal.

I was coming up with the motive of my fic's first arc's villain and came up with this.

Here's a bit of explanation on how my verse works because it's quite integral.

My verse is a modern city in Korea where usage of Augmentation is extremely common place.

In my verse, when Augmenters uses spells, they draw energy from within their soul and the environment around them and combine them into a reaction that produces energy for the Augmentation and the Residue, a particle that is converted into a matter in the Tail, the flip side of this world where the bits of Residue, combined with the more repressed emotions and memories of the original Augmenters who used spell, give birth to the Deviants, monsters that are Always Chaotic Evil.

They are compelled to come back to the Head, the main universe, like a salmon to its original stream. They cross the dimension to return, die, and replenish the original energy that is lost by Augmentation.

The problem is, normally they are harmless and has sense to avoid any human, but when they do witness human beings, which the government does its hardest to prevent, they go all out and either kills or take over any human in vicinity.

The villain is someone who witnessed one, and when it attacked, he managed to kill it, which was assimilated to his body. Extremely surprised by the energy, he tests it out here and there, and soon driven to madness by the power and goes on a killing spree.

The MC is dragged into the investigation of this murder case because of one of his friend, who's an Urban Legend fanatic and believes that one of the city's most popular one, a man with a Plague Doctor outfit, knows something about it, wants to solve the case by himself. They are proven correct, because the said Urban Legend is someone who is the only person in planet that can almost predict the cases of murder, even though he never succeeds in preventing it.

There's more to this, but gotta go. How does this sound so far? Anything that bugs you?

edited 11th Jun '11 9:13:51 AM by dRoy

That. You need to flesh out better why he goes on a killing spree.

You could make him someone who always wanted to do that sort of thing but didn't think he could until then. Like a 'functional psychopath', which is a person who has Lack of Empathy but enough impulse control and such to hide it and avoid going to jail. Now he figures no one can stop him, so he'll do what he always dreamt of doing.

Or, if you must go the route of 'driven insane by his powers', please, please figure out the convoluted chains of logic that led to his killing, instead of just hand waving it as 'he's insane'. Like maybe the power makes you paranoid, and he interpreted various random events as indicating that he's living in a simulated world designed specifically to mess with him.

Better yet, combine both options. Have him have certain risk factors for being violent before he got his powers, and the missing risk factors were added once he got those powers. Say, if he was a functional psychopath, and the powers made him impulsive and unable to feel fear, then he'd suddenly be a regular psychopath. Or he had a tendency to be a mysanthrope, and then the powers made him start leaping to illogical conclusions, which made him decide everyone was plotting against him.

edited 11th Jun '11 6:35:24 AM by Ettina