PLAYER NAME: Lone Sheep (aka Sheep) CONTACT: PM this account or via plurk lonesheep
CHARACTER: Number Five Hargreeves CANON: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix version) CANON POINT: Near the end of Season 2, just before their last time jump
BACKGROUND:
The premise: Five comes from a fun universe where 40-some-odd children were born all over the world at the exact same moment with a variety of special abilities. One eccentric billionaire named Sir Reginald Hargreeves decided to adopt seven of them to assemble his own superhero group: the Umbrella Academy. Theoretically, he assembled them to save the world, and he trained them relentlessly for that one purpose. Instead of giving the children names, they were given numbers, thus Number Five.
Mishaps of time travel: Just at the start of their fame as a superhero crime-fighting family, Five's ambitions got the best of him. Being overconfident that he could push his abilities and travel through time, he soon found that he only knew how to go one way. That first test led him to be trapped in a post-apocalyptic future with a handful of dead siblings and no human contact for 45 years. He lived like a scavenger to survive in the wasteland, with his only company developing into a longstanding romance with a mannequin that he named Dolores. Convinced he was the last living person on earth, he had nothing else to occupy him except finding a way back—the answer buried in complicated mental equations he could never quite solve. While it might have driven him mad, he miraculously never gave up or stopped trying. Which is the definition of insanity anyway, so that checks out.
Career Assassin: Eventually his existence in this desolate timeline caught the attention of the Temps Commission, an organization that helps to maintain order in the timeline and eliminates any threats that would keep what's supposed to happen from happening. They do this specifically through the use of time traveling briefcases and monitoring the timeline, then sending agents to kill off any outliers. Rather than eliminate Five, presumably they saw potential and offered him a job.
Originally he took the line of work out of desperation, but as he honed his natural abilities it wasn't long until they turned him into a cold-blooded killer. He was their most lethal assassin, and quickly became deeply admired in the organization. But his old obsession never died. He couldn't give up his desire to get back to his original timeline to prevent the apocalypse and save his family, and once he thought he finally worked out a solution, he immediately defected. Of course in doing so he broke some major rules, not to mention his contract, and not long after a hit went out for his life. (They get over it eventually. Sort of.)
The man in a boy's body: When Five managed his breakthrough of how to go backwards in time, his calculations were slightly off. He succeeded, but when he met his living siblings in 2019, the now-58 year old man regressed physically to his 13 year old body. For added hilarity, becoming roughly the age he was when he first disappeared from the Umbrella Academy. He retained his memories and mental age, but it eluded him how to return to his fully-grown self. Even more awkward was that in 2019 he was physically 17 years younger than his brothers and sisters, who were equally shocked to see him alive.
All that became secondary to the news he brought. In what turns into a routine for him, Five had to break the prophecy of the end of the world. And in another common theme, he had apparently only given himself eight days before it was supposed to happen. Perhaps it was intentional that it happened to coincide with the sudden death of their father, which had the siblings gathered for the first time in years. Five then needed to force his estranged siblings to help find what caused the apocalypse so they could do what they were always supposed to and save the world. (Which should have been super easy, barely an inconvenience.)
Why have one Apocalypse when you can have two?: Long story sort, they fail to stop the world from ending. A series of events leads to one of their own siblings shattering the moon and sending craters hurtling towards earth and wiping it out. Minutes before their untimely deaths, Five gathers his siblings and uses his power once more to attempt to go back in time. And once more his calculations are off. They wind up scattered years apart from each other in the 1960's, and what's more, their disruption in the timeline triggers yet another apocalypse. Since Five has a knack for timing these things, he travels to moments before a nuclear bomb goes off.
Five manages to be saved by his friendly ex-agent, who is killed shortly after sending him back mere days earlier. Yet again he has to find his siblings, make some unfortunate connections with the Commission he really wanted to avoid, and save the world. It's all pretty stressful for the guy.
A continued history (to sidestep one or two spoilers) can be found on the TUA wiki. I didn't even get into the fact that his mother is a Stepford robot and was also partially raised by a talking chimpanzee, but I'm keeping this to relevant history only.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Five has the ability to manipulate time and space... no really, stay with me.
Spacial Jumping/Teleportation: This is the ability you'll see Five use most often, to do everything from stealth and murder to mundane things like reaching for something on a high shelf. (He is in a much shorter body than he's used to.) According to him, that skill is the primary reason he was the best assassin the Commission ever had. The act of teleporting usually is tied to movement, as Five has to work up momentum to do a spacial jump, and continues that movement when he reappears.
Of course it has limits. He usually teleports relatively short distances, but he's also seen going through walls and buildings with relative ease. For any longer destination, cars are a more useful mode of transportation for him. And though his ego may say otherwise, doing too many jumps in a row is physically exhausting for him, and he can be worn down to the point where his powers fail him.
Time Travel: It seems logical that someone who could manipulate space could also manipulate time, but this ability is a lot more volatile. It's far easier to move forward in time, but he has little control as to how far he would jump. It took decades for him to learn how to undo his mistake of taking too great of a leap (and even when he managed to go back, there was that pesky age-miscalculation). By the end of the second season, Five has begun to attempt going back in shorter jumps. 'Seconds instead of decades.' As it stands, he hasn't mastered time travel and the rumors of its negative effects on his mind might be warranted.
In both spacial and time travel, Five is able to take others with him. Teleporting just one or two people short distances seems to take no more effort than doing it himself. Actual attempts to take others back in time has proven to be extremely unpredictable with mostly devastating consequences. Even if this ability is limited for him in the game, he wouldn't think to use it for more than a few seconds out of fear of what he could trigger.
Non-Super Abilities: Five is an aforementioned master assassin and has been trained in combat since childhood. Combined with his spacial jumping, he can be unfair in a fight. He's highly intelligent and speaks several languages, quick thinking in tense situations, and he's an excellent tactician. He is also very aware of these things and likes to remind people. Add to that the ability to be kind of a jerk.
PERSONALITY: Since Five was young, the first time, he's always had a healthy ego. Not one of the Hargreeves children weren't somewhat traumatized from their abusive adoptive father, and Five got a share of his issues from him. While they received most of their parental love from a robot (oh hey I am going to bring her up after all), their father only saw them for their powers and how far he could push them. Throughout his early years, the Hargreeves children were conditioned to be perfect superhuman soldiers and became relative celebrities in their time. Five never had a chance. He did, and does, think he's better than the rest of his siblings and he seemed to be the one who really wanted to reach the limits of his extraordinary abilities, even beyond what his father was comfortable with. His arrogance is often his downfall, but because he's had some successes to counter the massive failures, he never quite shakes it.
It should be mentioned that Sir Reginald himself was never particularly impressed with Five. While there have been some major changes from the comics to the series, his notes on his children in the original fits with what we've seen, and included the line: '(Five) disappeared several days ago. No great loss.' Though perhaps he was simply annoyed that he disobeyed him in his pursuit of time travel and believed he got what was coming to him. Five himself mentions to his brother that he would think of his father daily and imagine what he would say. "I told you so."
Surprisingly, Five seems to have become the most similar of the children to his father, possibly growing even more like him after the decades he spent in isolation. If anything, Five grew to be even less tolerant and more disassociated with humanity over time. Not to mention having dealt with his share of PTSD from finding all of his family dead, among other things. As mentioned, his longest relationship was with a mannequin, so it's fair to say his social skills are stunted with just an edge of insanity.
Holding any long conversation shows that he doesn't play at a very convincing 13 year old. Five often feels like the old man who is far more wise and mature than most he encounters. No one else knows him well enough, or has seen the things he's seen and done, so of course none of them could really understand the big picture. Considering the extreme pressure he puts on himself to literally save all of humanity, he's almost always wound so tight that he can snap at any moment. He struggles to empathize with people who aren't outwardly useful and he's deeply untrusting to the point of paranoia. He's sarcastic and dismissive, and endlessly frustrated when he isn't taken completely seriously because of how he looks.
At the same time, he's fiercely loyal to his family, and would give up anything to spare their lives even if it meant dooming his. Despite all outward appearances—his constant mocking, occasional threats, and seeming to have no qualms with hurting them or seeing them hurt—they're all that's left in the world that matters to him. The reoccurring storyline of having to stop various apocalypses is driven by his desire to keep his family alive. Or reverse time to bring them back from the dead, as the case may be. (Which is a little ironic, considering that he and his siblings are the exact reason the world keeps ending in spectacular fashion. But that's besides the point.) Without his family around, he's likely to spiral further into his psychopathic tendencies. He was so close to fixing... everything.
As an assassin, he didn't have any remorse for taking sometimes innocent lives, even when confronted afterwards. To him it was just a job, and he mostly goes by a 'means to an end' philosophy. He doesn't particularly like killing, at one point saying he was done with it after he brutally assassinated a room of a dozen board members in another gamble to right the timeline, but that comes across as simply being tired of the monotony of the Commission rather than feeling any sort of guilt for what he did.
A side effect of his superiority complex, naturally, is that it's difficult for him to rely on others. He knows how ruthless he is to a point of pride, and he's aware that there's little he won't do to complete his mission. And while it would be easy to call him cynical, he has an obsessive mind that never quite accepts defeat. No matter the situation, he's going to find the solution, and be damned if anyone is going to stand in his way.
Number Five | The Umbrella Academy (1/2)
CONTACT: PM this account or via plurk
CHARACTER: Number Five Hargreeves
CANON: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix version)
CANON POINT: Near the end of Season 2, just before their last time jump
BACKGROUND:
The premise:
Five comes from a fun universe where 40-some-odd children were born all over the world at the exact same moment with a variety of special abilities. One eccentric billionaire named Sir Reginald Hargreeves decided to adopt seven of them to assemble his own superhero group: the Umbrella Academy. Theoretically, he assembled them to save the world, and he trained them relentlessly for that one purpose. Instead of giving the children names, they were given numbers, thus Number Five.
Mishaps of time travel:
Just at the start of their fame as a superhero crime-fighting family, Five's ambitions got the best of him. Being overconfident that he could push his abilities and travel through time, he soon found that he only knew how to go one way. That first test led him to be trapped in a post-apocalyptic future with a handful of dead siblings and no human contact for 45 years. He lived like a scavenger to survive in the wasteland, with his only company developing into a longstanding romance with a mannequin that he named Dolores. Convinced he was the last living person on earth, he had nothing else to occupy him except finding a way back—the answer buried in complicated mental equations he could never quite solve. While it might have driven him mad, he miraculously never gave up or stopped trying. Which is the definition of insanity anyway, so that checks out.
Career Assassin:
Eventually his existence in this desolate timeline caught the attention of the Temps Commission, an organization that helps to maintain order in the timeline and eliminates any threats that would keep what's supposed to happen from happening. They do this specifically through the use of time traveling briefcases and monitoring the timeline, then sending agents to kill off any outliers. Rather than eliminate Five, presumably they saw potential and offered him a job.
Originally he took the line of work out of desperation, but as he honed his natural abilities it wasn't long until they turned him into a cold-blooded killer. He was their most lethal assassin, and quickly became deeply admired in the organization. But his old obsession never died. He couldn't give up his desire to get back to his original timeline to prevent the apocalypse and save his family, and once he thought he finally worked out a solution, he immediately defected. Of course in doing so he broke some major rules, not to mention his contract, and not long after a hit went out for his life. (They get over it eventually. Sort of.)
The man in a boy's body:
When Five managed his breakthrough of how to go backwards in time, his calculations were slightly off. He succeeded, but when he met his living siblings in 2019, the now-58 year old man regressed physically to his 13 year old body. For added hilarity, becoming roughly the age he was when he first disappeared from the Umbrella Academy. He retained his memories and mental age, but it eluded him how to return to his fully-grown self. Even more awkward was that in 2019 he was physically 17 years younger than his brothers and sisters, who were equally shocked to see him alive.
All that became secondary to the news he brought. In what turns into a routine for him, Five had to break the prophecy of the end of the world. And in another common theme, he had apparently only given himself eight days before it was supposed to happen. Perhaps it was intentional that it happened to coincide with the sudden death of their father, which had the siblings gathered for the first time in years. Five then needed to force his estranged siblings to help find what caused the apocalypse so they could do what they were always supposed to and save the world. (Which should have been super easy, barely an inconvenience.)
Why have one Apocalypse when you can have two?:
Long story sort, they fail to stop the world from ending. A series of events leads to one of their own siblings shattering the moon and sending craters hurtling towards earth and wiping it out. Minutes before their untimely deaths, Five gathers his siblings and uses his power once more to attempt to go back in time. And once more his calculations are off. They wind up scattered years apart from each other in the 1960's, and what's more, their disruption in the timeline triggers yet another apocalypse. Since Five has a knack for timing these things, he travels to moments before a nuclear bomb goes off.
Five manages to be saved by his friendly ex-agent, who is killed shortly after sending him back mere days earlier. Yet again he has to find his siblings, make some unfortunate connections with the Commission he really wanted to avoid, and save the world. It's all pretty stressful for the guy.
A continued history (to sidestep one or two spoilers) can be found on the TUA wiki. I didn't even get into the fact that his mother is a Stepford robot and was also partially raised by a talking chimpanzee, but I'm keeping this to relevant history only.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Five has the ability to manipulate time and space... no really, stay with me.
Spacial Jumping/Teleportation: This is the ability you'll see Five use most often, to do everything from stealth and murder to mundane things like reaching for something on a high shelf. (He is in a much shorter body than he's used to.) According to him, that skill is the primary reason he was the best assassin the Commission ever had. The act of teleporting usually is tied to movement, as Five has to work up momentum to do a spacial jump, and continues that movement when he reappears.
Of course it has limits. He usually teleports relatively short distances, but he's also seen going through walls and buildings with relative ease. For any longer destination, cars are a more useful mode of transportation for him. And though his ego may say otherwise, doing too many jumps in a row is physically exhausting for him, and he can be worn down to the point where his powers fail him.
Time Travel: It seems logical that someone who could manipulate space could also manipulate time, but this ability is a lot more volatile. It's far easier to move forward in time, but he has little control as to how far he would jump. It took decades for him to learn how to undo his mistake of taking too great of a leap (and even when he managed to go back, there was that pesky age-miscalculation). By the end of the second season, Five has begun to attempt going back in shorter jumps. 'Seconds instead of decades.' As it stands, he hasn't mastered time travel and the rumors of its negative effects on his mind might be warranted.
In both spacial and time travel, Five is able to take others with him. Teleporting just one or two people short distances seems to take no more effort than doing it himself. Actual attempts to take others back in time has proven to be extremely unpredictable with mostly devastating consequences. Even if this ability is limited for him in the game, he wouldn't think to use it for more than a few seconds out of fear of what he could trigger.
Non-Super Abilities: Five is an aforementioned master assassin and has been trained in combat since childhood. Combined with his spacial jumping, he can be unfair in a fight. He's highly intelligent and speaks several languages, quick thinking in tense situations, and he's an excellent tactician. He is also very aware of these things and likes to remind people. Add to that the ability to be kind of a jerk.
PERSONALITY: Since Five was young, the first time, he's always had a healthy ego. Not one of the Hargreeves children weren't somewhat traumatized from their abusive adoptive father, and Five got a share of his issues from him. While they received most of their parental love from a robot (oh hey I am going to bring her up after all), their father only saw them for their powers and how far he could push them. Throughout his early years, the Hargreeves children were conditioned to be perfect superhuman soldiers and became relative celebrities in their time. Five never had a chance. He did, and does, think he's better than the rest of his siblings and he seemed to be the one who really wanted to reach the limits of his extraordinary abilities, even beyond what his father was comfortable with. His arrogance is often his downfall, but because he's had some successes to counter the massive failures, he never quite shakes it.
It should be mentioned that Sir Reginald himself was never particularly impressed with Five. While there have been some major changes from the comics to the series, his notes on his children in the original fits with what we've seen, and included the line: '(Five) disappeared several days ago. No great loss.' Though perhaps he was simply annoyed that he disobeyed him in his pursuit of time travel and believed he got what was coming to him. Five himself mentions to his brother that he would think of his father daily and imagine what he would say. "I told you so."
Surprisingly, Five seems to have become the most similar of the children to his father, possibly growing even more like him after the decades he spent in isolation. If anything, Five grew to be even less tolerant and more disassociated with humanity over time. Not to mention having dealt with his share of PTSD from finding all of his family dead, among other things. As mentioned, his longest relationship was with a mannequin, so it's fair to say his social skills are stunted with just an edge of insanity.
Holding any long conversation shows that he doesn't play at a very convincing 13 year old. Five often feels like the old man who is far more wise and mature than most he encounters. No one else knows him well enough, or has seen the things he's seen and done, so of course none of them could really understand the big picture. Considering the extreme pressure he puts on himself to literally save all of humanity, he's almost always wound so tight that he can snap at any moment. He struggles to empathize with people who aren't outwardly useful and he's deeply untrusting to the point of paranoia. He's sarcastic and dismissive, and endlessly frustrated when he isn't taken completely seriously because of how he looks.
At the same time, he's fiercely loyal to his family, and would give up anything to spare their lives even if it meant dooming his. Despite all outward appearances—his constant mocking, occasional threats, and seeming to have no qualms with hurting them or seeing them hurt—they're all that's left in the world that matters to him. The reoccurring storyline of having to stop various apocalypses is driven by his desire to keep his family alive. Or reverse time to bring them back from the dead, as the case may be. (Which is a little ironic, considering that he and his siblings are the exact reason the world keeps ending in spectacular fashion. But that's besides the point.) Without his family around, he's likely to spiral further into his psychopathic tendencies. He was so close to fixing... everything.
As an assassin, he didn't have any remorse for taking sometimes innocent lives, even when confronted afterwards. To him it was just a job, and he mostly goes by a 'means to an end' philosophy. He doesn't particularly like killing, at one point saying he was done with it after he brutally assassinated a room of a dozen board members in another gamble to right the timeline, but that comes across as simply being tired of the monotony of the Commission rather than feeling any sort of guilt for what he did.
A side effect of his superiority complex, naturally, is that it's difficult for him to rely on others. He knows how ruthless he is to a point of pride, and he's aware that there's little he won't do to complete his mission. And while it would be easy to call him cynical, he has an obsessive mind that never quite accepts defeat. No matter the situation, he's going to find the solution, and be damned if anyone is going to stand in his way.