Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burngoddamnyou) wrote2010-09-14 02:44 am
burngoddamnyou) wrote2010-09-14 02:44 am
Entry tags:
[OOC: Application]
Series: Spontaneous Combustion
Series' Medium: Movie
Character: Sam Kramer (birth name "David Bell")
Age: 34
Sex/Gender: Male
Canon Role: Protagonist, though he unwillingly (at first) murders people with his abilities
History:
[NOTE: The period from Brian and Peggy's combustion to Sam at age twelve is based on educated guessing and off-hand comments in the movie. The period from there up to the film's "present day" is a mixture of canon facts and speculation. Orlander's master plan is confusing and not well-explained, making it hard to pin down a lot of hard facts about Sam's life. Also, some guessing about what the f*** Sam did to Lisa at the very end of the movie. I mean seriously. If you see it, you'll go "What the f***?" too, even with my theory. o_O]
David Bell was born on August 6th, 1956 to Brian and Peggy Bell, two researchers at Modern Atomic Technologies. He had a fever of 100° F and a burn-like birthmark on the back of his right hand, but was otherwise healthy. Unfortunately, Brian and Peggy didn't get to spend much time with their newborn son. A few hours after David's birth, the two of them suffered simultaneous SHC - Spontaneous Human Combustion. David was put up for adoption following the tragedy, and told later in life his parents had drowned.
The odds of SHC would normally have been millions to one against. In Brian and Peggy's case, however, their chances for such an occurrence had been brought down to virtually 1:1. In their work with M.A.T., the pair had volunteered as test subjects in a nuclear research project known as Project Samson. Their job was to stay in an underground bunker while a hydrogen bomb went off over their heads, then live off supplies inside the bunker for seven days afterward. As well, for months prior to that test, they were instructed to inject themselves on a regular basis with an experimental anti-radiation vaccine. For nine months following the blast, the vaccine appeared to be working as intended. What nobody knew, however, was that Brian and Peggy's cells were bottling up and shielding radiation inside, effectively turning all their cells into ticking time bombs.
David was not supposed to have been conceived as far as M.A.T. was concerned. Sometime during their stay in the bunker, however, Brian and Peggy did what many restless young people do when alone and in constant proximity. What barely anyone at M.A.T. knew, however, was that the chairman of the company, Lewis Orlander, had wanted something like this to happen. In fact, he was entirely responsible for it happening. He paid Brian a large sum of money to get Peggy pregnant in the hopes that a so-called "atomic man" might be born, not caring much for the eventual fates of the parents so long as their offspring was something special.
Following the apparent setback of the project, David was put in an orphanage under a new name, "Sam Kramer" ("Sam" after Project Samson). He was monitored there for years through doctors secretly in the employ of M.A.T., who checked in frequently for abnormalities. By some miracle, the radiation and chemical bonds in Sam's system were stabilized, and no abnormalities beyond his birthmark or unusually high temperature were found. By the time he was three, all researchers deemed non-essential to the continuation of Project Samson were informed of Sam's death and let go from the company. The project continued in top secret, and many of its former team members were hunted down and assassinated to make certain that no information got out. Only a few, including a close friend of Brian and Peggy's, Nina, eluded the hits and dropped off M.A.T.'s radar. The new Project Samson was no longer concerned with anti-radiation vaccines; Orlander's obsessive focus on crafting a living atomic weapon came to the forefront instead.
Sam continued languishing in the orphanage until age twelve, when Orlander stepped in to adopt the boy as his own, taking him to live at his mansion in Trinidad, California. Presumably, Orlander had blocked all outside adoption requests for Sam up until that point; he likely wanted to make certain that Sam would be incredibly grateful and indebted to whoever finally adopted him. And just as predicted, Sam grew to love Orlander (whom he called "Lew") like a grandfather, trusting him deeply from that point onward.
At the direction of Orlander, just about all the people who would become important to Sam were secretly connected to M.A.T. in one way or another. "Doctor appointments" continued throughout his life, with one of Sam's preferred doctors in college being a man named John Marsh; he became friendly with most of the employees at Orlander's large estate, including the doorman, Mr. Fitzpatrick; even the woman who would eventually become his wife, Rachel, was Orlander's granddaughter. From the way the two interact in the film, it is implied that Sam and Rachel never had a strong connection. Rather, they likely got together due to the sheer amount of time they had known each other ("Lew" did some encouraging on that front as well).
Sam studied education in college and went on to become a high school teacher. It is unclear how long he and Rachel were married, but by the time they were divorced in 1988, things had clearly gone sour between them. Rachel rarely asked him about anything before acting, leaving him with the bills on dinner dates and making major financial decisions without consulting him. Even after their divorce, this trend continued, and Sam could barely put up with it. He suspected her of cheating as well, noticing that she seemed to "bump into" Dr. Marsh with alarming frequency. As if marital woes weren't enough, Sam was starting to receive some bizarre medical advice too. The strangest came from a doctor at his school, Dr. Simpson, who told him that he needed to have his tonsils out; that maybe would not have been so strange if Sam hadn't already had his tonsils out when he was seven. As the icing on the cake, Sam suffered from migraines too, which had been getting stronger and more frequent for years and showed no signs of abating.
In the spring of 1990, a new staff member, Lisa, joined the faculty at Sam's school. She and Sam became friendly in a way that was unprecedented in Sam's life, and before long, the two started dating. They had much better chemistry than Sam had shared with Rachel, and Lisa cared more about him than Rachel ever had. She respected his interests, laughed at his jokes, supported him at school, was willing to listen to him gripe about his ex-wife, and even seemed to care enough about his health to encourage him to take new pills for his migraines.
It was not long after Sam started taking the pills that everything started to come crashing down. On the night of August 5th, he had a fight with a friend, Amy Whitaker. Amy was gloating about the Trinidad Beach Nuclear Power Plant being approved to go online, something Sam had fought strongly against. Sam got so angry with her at one point that he could have killed her, and right at that bursting point, a short bolt of static flashed between them. Sam left Amy after that without apologizing.
Then, it was August 6th - Sam's 34th birthday. After spending the morning at school with Lisa, Sam met Rachel for a lunch date. After some strained talk, Rachel informed Sam that Amy had died the night before. Sam was shaken and remorseful that he never made peace with her. The ex-couple didn't talk long, though, before Orlander arrived to pick Rachel up. Sam greeted his benefactor, but was interrupted by a news report in the old man's car about Amy. The report stated she had died from "smoking in bed" and had been found by none other than Rachel. Orlander and Rachel left in a hurry following that. Sam was left to pay the bill at the restaurant, and while he sat at the table fuming, a jet of flame shot from the tip of his index finger.
He drove back to the school to get his finger looked at. Dr. Simpson insisted the injury looked like a cigarette burn, despite Sam's counter-insistence that he didn't smoke. In his ensuing irritation with Simpson, a static shock jumped from Sam to Simpson. Sam left for home following that. Once there, he lit a fire in his fireplace while listening to the radio. Soon, he started to see flashes of people he didn't recognize, a man and a woman wearing dated clothes. Sam was so entranced by the vision that he didn't immediately notice his finger re-igniting.
Growing increasingly distressed, Sam went to Lisa's apartment. Lisa told him that Dr. Simpson had just been found burnt to death. The strange part was that at the time, Simpson had been in the shower with the water running. Sam couldn't deny the connection between himself and the burn victims any longer. Two people he knew had died in the span of less than a day, and two other unexplained burn deaths had occurred previously in the year as well. A believer in psychic phenomena, Lisa called in to a radio guru, Dr. Persons. While she was on the phone, Sam noticed a basket of flowers bearing a card: "Lisa, thanks. Love, Lew Orlander."
Sam tried to confront Lisa about how she knew Orlander, but before she could answer, she put him on the line with Dr. Persons. Sam told Persons about his vision, and Persons said he saw a woman singing to him as a baby. Sam started to remember a lullaby about saving the world, and felt somehow that his mother's name was Peggy. When Persons asked Sam his name, he answered that it was David Bell. The birthmark on the back of Sam's hand started to sizzle then, growing to over twice its normal size. The call cut out, and while Sam was dealing with the pain, another caller came on to the program claiming to have known David Bell's parents and urging him to call back in to the station. Sam tried to call back, but Persons's program was ending, and he was answered by an obnoxious radio technician telling him to call back the next week. Sam shouted into the phone and inadvertently sent a psychically-powered electrical charge travelling down the phone line, shocking the technician and causing him to spontaneously combust.
The same power that sent the charge down the phone line also made a large hole tear open on Sam's arm, gushing blood and spewing fire. Sam and Lisa tried to douse the fire in the bathtub, but water only seemed to make it worse. The flames only stopped when Sam forced himself to set his mind on controlling the burn. Lisa took him in the car and drove for the hospital following that. On the way, Sam called her out on knowing Orlander; she admitted that her parents had burned to death, and that she had been in Orlander's care ever since that happened. Orlander had set her up at the school in the first place just so that she and Sam would meet. She had wanted to tell him, but didn't for fear of upsetting him.
They arrived at the hospital and Lisa brought him to Dr. Marsh. Marsh took him and Lisa to his office, asked to see Sam's headache pills, and then made them wait while he slipped into a back room. Through the door, the pair could hear him talking on the phone, mentioning SHC and something the sounded like: "I'll handle this my way. It's time this project was ended." After that, Marsh left Sam in the care of another doctor, Cagney, and took Lisa out of the office with him. Cagney left Sam alone for a short period while he went to prepare something.
Through watching TV in the waiting room, Sam found out about the technician's death and the real name of Dr. Persons. He put in a call to an operator asking to speak to Persons right away, and through him, Sam got a hold of the woman who had called in to the show, who gave him an address. He then slipped into Marsh's back room, finding files on the desk about himself and Lisa going back to when they were both children. Cagney came back then holding a syringe filled with glowing green liquid. Sam attacked the man and demanded to know what was in the files, threatening to jab Cagney with his own syringe. Cagney called Sam a freak and before he knew it, Sam was burning Cagney to death.
Sam escaped the hospital and went to meet the woman from the program - Nina. She marvelled that he was still alive and started to tell him everything she knew. She showed him items from around the time of his birth, then put on an old home movie showing footage of his parents. Sam realized that the car he owned matched Brian and Peggy's exactly, which only added to his mounting paranoia. When Nina mentioned Modern Atomic Technologies, which Sam knew to have been "Lew's company," that clicked many of the pieces together in Sam's mind. He left in a mess of confusion and anger. After he left, Nina was gassed to death by Marsh, who had followed Sam in secret. Marsh, a former collaborator with Orlander, was out for revenge against everyone involved with Project Samson, and was hellbent on seeing its atomic abomination destroyed. His method for achieving that would be injecting Sam with a concentrated dose of the formula in his "migraine pills," causing him to burn up all in one go with no possibility of being used as a weapon in the future.
Sam called Lisa, who insisted they get Dr. Marsh's help. Sam tried to warn her about Marsh at first before remembering that she was probably in on the conspiracy herself. He threatened to hunt her down if she was in on his kill and demanded to know what had been in his pills. Lisa answered that she didn't know, and admitted that Orlander had instructed her to make Sam take them. That was too much to hear, and Sam's entire arm flared up, charring it to a near-unusable crisp and burning one of his eyes shut. A psycho-electric burst went down the phone line, this time causing a hand made of fire to reach out of the phone for Lisa, who narrowly avoided it.
After Sam got back into his car, a pair of police officers approached and asked for his license and registration. Out of sheer frustration and spite, Sam set them both ablaze, which in turn caused even more of his body to burn up. Somehow, though, he was able to keep himself going until he reached Orlander's estate. At the door, he was greeted by Mr. Fitzpatrick, who acted happy to see him until he slipped around the back of Sam's car, pointed a gun, and told Sam to put his hands on his head. Laughing, Sam stepped out and raised his working arm, daring Fitzpatrick to shoot. The old man shot in a panic, then apologized and ran forward. Without meaning to, Sam set him on fire as well.
He made it in the front door and was met by Orlander. Sam demanded to know about Lisa and accused Orlander of killing his parents, which sent Orlander into a spiel explaining the major parts of his plans, including the part about him being the instigator of Sam's birth. Not only had he wanted Sam to start displaying fiery, nuclear abilities, but he had tried to repeat the tests with Lisa's parents, who died after the last of M.A.T.'s above-ground tests in 1965. He hoped that someday, Sam and Lisa would learn to manifest and control their abilities, and then one day produce a child whose abilities were refined further still, and so on. Lately, however, he had been growing impatient waiting for something to happen, and knew he didn't have long left to live in his old age. He had given the pills to Lisa, hoping that they would kick-start their latent powers (though, as it turned out, only Sam had been taking the pills). The reaction was far more dramatic than expected, but Orlander was still pleased by it.
At that point, Sam's pocket watch (really Brian Bell's watch, which Sam had found earlier under mysterious circumstances) rang out midnight, the time at which the Trinidad Power Plant was set to go online. Sam could feel a psychic connection to the nuclear core, building as it powered on and spurring a similar burning within his own body. He started loading himself with power and electricity, and as Trinidad went online, Sam went with it, taking himself and Orlander out in his most violent blaze yet.
Amazingly, Sam survived his combustion, though he was burned to such a degree that he might as well have been a walking corpse. Acting purely on instinct, he shambled back to Lisa's apartment building, where he found her with her arm on fire and Rachel trying to exacerbate the combustion with an extinguisher. Rachel had been working with Marsh to bring down Project Samson, and Sam and Lisa with it. Marsh had managed to stick Lisa with a syringe of the green liquid, setting off her own combustion at a rapid rate before she killed him. Sam only took in the basics of all this. All he saw was that Rachel was killing Lisa, and he could save her. He set Rachel ablaze, and then told Lisa that he could take her fire. Sam was practised enough with his power now that he could see a way to use his gift to help her. Cornering her outside in the rain, Sam let himself melt down into a pool of pure psycho-nuclear energy. A ghost-like hand reached out, pulling all the heat and nuclear power from Lisa's cells and taking it back into the pool with him. After that, Lisa's arm was healed, the pool of energy vanished, and Sam was left a pile of ash.
Canon Point:
Sam will be taken from after his death/psychic melting trick.
Personality:
Aside from literally being the world's first and only atomic man, Sam is, at core, a man who has a problem with emotions. Specifically, though he has tried to keep himself in control for the sake of social decency most of his life, he has always had a terrible time with faking emotions he doesn't feel and with suppressing ones that he does. He wants to be in control of himself, but when push comes to shove, Sam often cannot help shoving right back at anyone who might have shoved him first.
Most of the time (in normal circumstances, anyway), Sam seems a nice, friendly person. He comes across as a little cheeky, even playful if he's around the right people. Whenever he can slip a little joke or anecdote into conversation, he will. He has a liking for sarcasm, usually of the lighthearted variety (but not always, as we'll soon see). He can be forgetful, and doesn't always think before he speaks, though he does make an honest effort for people he cares about. He's also an educator, which implies he enjoys learning and sharing what he has learned with others. He has learned when to be grateful to people who have helped him, and he has a great loyalty and love for the people who get close to him, so much so that it takes betrayal on a grand scale to truly nullify his feelings.
He tries to be a rational person when he can. Before August 6th, he was not taken at all by psychics, astrology, or similar supernatural phenomena. He was forced to accept those phenomena only as they proved themselves to him before his eyes. As well, he is very wary of nuclear power, both his own and in general. In his opinion, people don't know enough about it yet to harness it safely, and as it exists now, it is extremely dangerous.
Where things go really wrong with Sam is the fact that he is easily annoyed. In his life up until the events of the movie, he has tried to bottle up this annoyance when he can and just deal with things. As most anyone with a basic knowledge of human psychology will tell you, however, bottling up feelings like that only makes those feelings worse over time. Sometimes, Sam vents his frustrations at people he trusts, joking sarcastically and calling people names behind their backs (e.g.: spoke of meeting Rachel as "doing battle with Mata Hari", then outright called Rachel a bitch). He'll do this in a tone of good fun most of the time, probably to convince himself and others that he's not really so vicious a person. That kind of venting doesn't do nearly enough for him, though. When circumstances and emotions are right, Sam will simply erupt at people (sometimes literally, as the film demonstrates), and there is no way to stop him once he's started. In describing his fight with Amy Whitaker, Sam said that he got so angry at one point that he could have killed her. And lo and behold, he really did kill her. He didn't realize that until the day afterward, but that doesn't matter; that very real and potent killing thought was still there. Whether a real death had occurred or not, that kind of thinking is a bit extreme considering Amy was essentially only saying, "Nah-nah-nah naaah nah."
When in that state of anger, Sam can get very unbalanced if he's not careful. This is meant both in the literal and figurative senses of the word. When severely angered, Sam sometimes begins staggering around, having to reach for walls to keep himself standing. Also, as the night of August 6th wears on in the movie, it becomes apparent that Sam has started to go a little loopy ("As you can see, I'm not all here.") A good deal of this unbalanced mental state will remain in Landel's, given that Sam's whole life was de-constructed before his eyes in just one day and that kind of experience not going to heal overnight. He will sometimes be prone to laughing at the sheer absurdity of his own situation and the patients', making cutting comments and daring people to cross him. Other times he will be stone-cold serious, saying very little until he unleashes his power on someone. Other times still, he will simply fly off the handle in dramatic, fiery fashion, plain and simple. Which mode he ends up in depends a lot on how other people are acting toward him, how much he has already had to deal with recently, and various whirling thoughts, fears, and frustrations inside his own mind.
The whole situation with the conspiracy and his body and the betrayal by "Lew" has understandably made him very hurt and easily paranoid. He will be loath to trust anyone new after his experiences in the movie, making it easier for him to project his issues and fears onto the patients at Landel's. He may even manage to delude himself at times into thinking that the patients couldn't have gotten stuck in the Institute if they didn't deserve it in some way. Even Landel he doesn't really trust, though he is forced to work with him through sheer demonstration of power (see justification for fighting on the Institute's side).
Physical Description:
Sam is 5'9", Caucasian, and of average build. His hair is light-brown, curly, and a tad shaggy in length. His eyes are blue-grey, on the large side, and very expressive. He keeps his face clean-shaven. On the back of his right hand is a dark, perfectly circular birthmark resembling an old burn. For his whole life up until the events of the movie, it was only about an inch in diameter. As of right now, it covers most of the back of his hand (sans fingers). He'll be wearing the same outfit he wore on the day of his meltdown, an off-white dress shirt and matching pants, an open black blazer, a dark brown belt, and worn-in black shoes.
Powers:
Sam's nature as a "nuclear man" grants him several powerful but very unstable abilities. The first and most obvious is the ability to raise his body temperature to such extreme degrees that he begins to burn from the inside out. This unique, complex burn (the kind found in naturally-occurring SHC, as described by a doctor in the film), affects only specific materials - namely, human flesh, bone marrow, hair, and plastic. All other materials are only mildly affected or not touched at all by the flames; cotton is particularly invulnerable. It is possible for only one or two parts of Sam's body to rise to those extreme temperatures at a time (usually the lower arms), making the burn only manifest on those areas. The burn is very much tied to Sam's current mental and emotional states, being a bit more likely to manifest in times of annoyance, and virtually guaranteed to burst out when he is angry or in anguish. Likewise, the angrier he is, the more flames there will be. Traditional fire dousing agents such as water and liquid nitrogen only serve to make the burn stronger and more painful. And, needless to say, even without an agitator, the burn is very, very painful.
He also has an ability to generate some amounts of electricity. The bolts Sam generates never appear larger than powerful static, such as the kind produced by large Van de Graaff generators. Earlier in the film, they mostly generate from his hands or arms, but as the film progresses, it becomes clearer that they can come from any exposed part of his body, including his head. The bolts are more than simply electricity, however; they are also a means by which Sam is able to transfer his fire to other people. If Sam gets within at least a foot or two of a person, or he and the person are connected by an electrical wire of some sort (say, a phone line), he can send a powered bolt into that person's body, which triggers an SHC in that person. These bolts are not always produced of Sam's will, sometimes generating by accident when he is caught off-guard or in an unstable emotional state. Depending on what emotional state that might be, the resulting SHC may not take effect until a few hours later (i.e.: he is merely annoyed or frustrated) or it may be instantaneous (i.e.: he is very angry, caught off-guard, or consciously willing combustion to happen).
As August 6th went on, Sam gradually learned to control his abilities. It started with him being able to stop flames from spewing out of his forearm by concentrating hard enough. Later, he was able to consciously shock and burn a police officer, and following that, was able to set the officer's partner on fire from several yards away with only a psychic command, no electric shock needed. By the time he confronted Orlander, he was able to not only set his whole body ablaze on command and send jets of fire out toward Orlander (again a couple yards away), but also to keep enough of himself alive that he could still move afterward. In Landel's, he will retain this knowledge, making it easier for him to call on and direct his fire. Thanks to Sam's inability to control his emotions, however, he will still be unable to prevent any anger-related or power-usage-related flare-ups.
The rise in his nuclear abilities also seemed to trigger some latent psychic capabilities in Sam's mind. In the film, he displays some mild clairvoyance (e.g.: seeing his parents' faces, knowing somehow his mother's name was Peggy), spiritual communication (e.g.: when he heard his parents trying to tell him something), projection of his pyrokinesis across great distances via electrical current (e.g.: killing the radio technician; sending the fire hand at Lisa), and a psychic connection with other sources of nuclear energy ("Time to go online. Just me and Trinidad. Nuclear meltdown! I can almost see the core.") As well, by the end of the movie, he has gained enough control over his abilities to shift his body into a mass of pure energy with some ability to manipulate nuclear energy and fire; this leaves him as nothing but a pile of ash when it is done.
In the case of all abilities that Sam can consciously control, the more often and the more intensely he uses them, the more unstable it makes his internal temperature and the chemical bonds in his body. His flare-ups become more frequent, intense, and harder to stop in proportion to his ability usage. Particularly, if he performs a full-body combustion on a person, it is almost guaranteed that at least part of his body will flare up. When he lit two people on fire in rapid succession (the police officers), his whole head and torso went up for a few moments. Presumably, the more people he lights in short spans of time, the worse this gets.
Modified Powers at Landel's:
If you can believe it, granting Sam extra control over his powers will actually weaken him to desirable levels. He understands his no-kill orders and wants to follow through on them; he does not want to be a killer if he can help it. Granted some extra control on which body parts on his victims burn and which don't, Sam will be better able to stick to those orders.
The maximum distance Sam can be apart from a person and be able to SHC them through psychic projection alone will be four yards. Psychic projection will be harder to aim and prone to missing if Sam gets distracted. Players can generally judge for themselves if the attacks hit or not, with the typical likelihood of a hit being about 4/7 (reduced to 2/7 when distracted).
SHC delivered through an electrical shock, conversely, will be virtually guaranteed to hit if Sam is close enough. The only way the shock can misfire will be if the other person is showing very little exposed skin. Electric shock SHC will only work from a maximum distance of two feet, though, making it a very short-ranged attack that leaves Sam open to retaliation. The only way to get distance out of an electric shock will be if Sam and the intended victim are both touching the same piece of conductive material, such as a wire or a metal pipe.
If Sam successfully SHC's someone, one or two parts of the person's body will start to burn. Which parts and how many will be selected by the victim's player. Most commonly, the choice will be between hands, lower arms, or lower legs, though other body parts such as upper arms/legs, torso, or face can be selected by the player involved if they are feeling really sadistic. Feet, weirdly enough, are not allowed; feet are mentioned specifically as being unaffected by SHC in the film. Water and other fire dousing agents will have no effect on the burn. There will still be a few ways in which the burn can be stopped, though:
As in canon, the more people Sam SHC's in a night and the longer those SHC's last for, the more unstable his own body gets. Between 2-4 regular burns (2 super-short/mild burns count count as one regular burn), one of his arms will start to flare up sometimes until he can consciously wrestle the flames back down. Between 5-7 regular burns, both arms will light at some point, and if the SHC's were strong enough, his head and/or torso will flare up temporarily as well. 8 regular burns burns and beyond, and flare-ups of all kinds ranging from small to full-body will start happening at random, completely out of Sam's control. If the flare-ups become frequent and severe enough, Sam will go full-body burning man and reduce himself to his his shambling, corpse-like burn victim mode from the end of the movie. If he tries to use his power in that state for too long, he will burn out completely, reducing himself to ashes. In addition to all that, the angrier Sam gets, the lower on the above scales he has to be to achieve more severe effects.
If Sam is already on fire and right up close to another patient, he can inflict surface burns on areas of exposed skin. Clothed areas are immune. If Sam wants to send powerful jets of fire at someone out from his own body from a distance, he will have to set himself completely on fire, which will in turn take him to Shambling Burn Victim Mode. A fire jet will be able to reach a maximum distance of five yards. The fire hand Sam is seen sending to Lisa in the movie will be lumped in with the fire jet rules for simplicity's sake.
To be further on the safe side, I will also introduce an auto-limiter to Sam's power that will make it extremely difficult for him to perform a full-body SHC on another person. If he really wants to set a person's whole body ablaze, he will have to throw all his power into the act, to the point where he is guaranteed to go up with his victim. If Sam wants to survive this, he can only keep the full-body burn going for five seconds maximum. This will leave the patient with several painful burns all over their body (see the attached "burnfacesam.png") but they will survive and heal at the normal Landel's rate with no permanent scarring; after the other person stops burning, Sam will continue to burn until he reaches Shambling Burn Victim Mode. If Sam truly wants to kill, then he will burn the patient until he reaches his pure energy state and reduces himself to ash and bone.
Full-body combustions resulting in death will only be performed against patients whose players want to kill them off for the purposes of dropping. In all cases of full-body combustion, they will only be performed with expressly communicated permission from the victim's player. In either case, he can only perform one full-body combustion per night. If he performs the non-fatal version and tries to perform another, his body will proceed straight to the energy/ashes phase without harming anyone else.
For the sake of simplicity, the non-fire-related psychic abilities Sam displays in the movie such as clairvoyance and spirit communication will be nullified in Landel's.
Non-otherworldly Abilities:
Sam is a high school teacher, though I doubt his educational abilities will be put into play much as an NS aggressor. Also, he is a hilariously bad actor. He can maybe stun people with his awful renditions of Shakespeare?
Series' Medium: Movie
Character: Sam Kramer (birth name "David Bell")
Age: 34
Sex/Gender: Male
Canon Role: Protagonist, though he unwillingly (at first) murders people with his abilities
History:
[NOTE: The period from Brian and Peggy's combustion to Sam at age twelve is based on educated guessing and off-hand comments in the movie. The period from there up to the film's "present day" is a mixture of canon facts and speculation. Orlander's master plan is confusing and not well-explained, making it hard to pin down a lot of hard facts about Sam's life. Also, some guessing about what the f*** Sam did to Lisa at the very end of the movie. I mean seriously. If you see it, you'll go "What the f***?" too, even with my theory. o_O]
David Bell was born on August 6th, 1956 to Brian and Peggy Bell, two researchers at Modern Atomic Technologies. He had a fever of 100° F and a burn-like birthmark on the back of his right hand, but was otherwise healthy. Unfortunately, Brian and Peggy didn't get to spend much time with their newborn son. A few hours after David's birth, the two of them suffered simultaneous SHC - Spontaneous Human Combustion. David was put up for adoption following the tragedy, and told later in life his parents had drowned.
The odds of SHC would normally have been millions to one against. In Brian and Peggy's case, however, their chances for such an occurrence had been brought down to virtually 1:1. In their work with M.A.T., the pair had volunteered as test subjects in a nuclear research project known as Project Samson. Their job was to stay in an underground bunker while a hydrogen bomb went off over their heads, then live off supplies inside the bunker for seven days afterward. As well, for months prior to that test, they were instructed to inject themselves on a regular basis with an experimental anti-radiation vaccine. For nine months following the blast, the vaccine appeared to be working as intended. What nobody knew, however, was that Brian and Peggy's cells were bottling up and shielding radiation inside, effectively turning all their cells into ticking time bombs.
David was not supposed to have been conceived as far as M.A.T. was concerned. Sometime during their stay in the bunker, however, Brian and Peggy did what many restless young people do when alone and in constant proximity. What barely anyone at M.A.T. knew, however, was that the chairman of the company, Lewis Orlander, had wanted something like this to happen. In fact, he was entirely responsible for it happening. He paid Brian a large sum of money to get Peggy pregnant in the hopes that a so-called "atomic man" might be born, not caring much for the eventual fates of the parents so long as their offspring was something special.
Following the apparent setback of the project, David was put in an orphanage under a new name, "Sam Kramer" ("Sam" after Project Samson). He was monitored there for years through doctors secretly in the employ of M.A.T., who checked in frequently for abnormalities. By some miracle, the radiation and chemical bonds in Sam's system were stabilized, and no abnormalities beyond his birthmark or unusually high temperature were found. By the time he was three, all researchers deemed non-essential to the continuation of Project Samson were informed of Sam's death and let go from the company. The project continued in top secret, and many of its former team members were hunted down and assassinated to make certain that no information got out. Only a few, including a close friend of Brian and Peggy's, Nina, eluded the hits and dropped off M.A.T.'s radar. The new Project Samson was no longer concerned with anti-radiation vaccines; Orlander's obsessive focus on crafting a living atomic weapon came to the forefront instead.
Sam continued languishing in the orphanage until age twelve, when Orlander stepped in to adopt the boy as his own, taking him to live at his mansion in Trinidad, California. Presumably, Orlander had blocked all outside adoption requests for Sam up until that point; he likely wanted to make certain that Sam would be incredibly grateful and indebted to whoever finally adopted him. And just as predicted, Sam grew to love Orlander (whom he called "Lew") like a grandfather, trusting him deeply from that point onward.
At the direction of Orlander, just about all the people who would become important to Sam were secretly connected to M.A.T. in one way or another. "Doctor appointments" continued throughout his life, with one of Sam's preferred doctors in college being a man named John Marsh; he became friendly with most of the employees at Orlander's large estate, including the doorman, Mr. Fitzpatrick; even the woman who would eventually become his wife, Rachel, was Orlander's granddaughter. From the way the two interact in the film, it is implied that Sam and Rachel never had a strong connection. Rather, they likely got together due to the sheer amount of time they had known each other ("Lew" did some encouraging on that front as well).
Sam studied education in college and went on to become a high school teacher. It is unclear how long he and Rachel were married, but by the time they were divorced in 1988, things had clearly gone sour between them. Rachel rarely asked him about anything before acting, leaving him with the bills on dinner dates and making major financial decisions without consulting him. Even after their divorce, this trend continued, and Sam could barely put up with it. He suspected her of cheating as well, noticing that she seemed to "bump into" Dr. Marsh with alarming frequency. As if marital woes weren't enough, Sam was starting to receive some bizarre medical advice too. The strangest came from a doctor at his school, Dr. Simpson, who told him that he needed to have his tonsils out; that maybe would not have been so strange if Sam hadn't already had his tonsils out when he was seven. As the icing on the cake, Sam suffered from migraines too, which had been getting stronger and more frequent for years and showed no signs of abating.
In the spring of 1990, a new staff member, Lisa, joined the faculty at Sam's school. She and Sam became friendly in a way that was unprecedented in Sam's life, and before long, the two started dating. They had much better chemistry than Sam had shared with Rachel, and Lisa cared more about him than Rachel ever had. She respected his interests, laughed at his jokes, supported him at school, was willing to listen to him gripe about his ex-wife, and even seemed to care enough about his health to encourage him to take new pills for his migraines.
It was not long after Sam started taking the pills that everything started to come crashing down. On the night of August 5th, he had a fight with a friend, Amy Whitaker. Amy was gloating about the Trinidad Beach Nuclear Power Plant being approved to go online, something Sam had fought strongly against. Sam got so angry with her at one point that he could have killed her, and right at that bursting point, a short bolt of static flashed between them. Sam left Amy after that without apologizing.
Then, it was August 6th - Sam's 34th birthday. After spending the morning at school with Lisa, Sam met Rachel for a lunch date. After some strained talk, Rachel informed Sam that Amy had died the night before. Sam was shaken and remorseful that he never made peace with her. The ex-couple didn't talk long, though, before Orlander arrived to pick Rachel up. Sam greeted his benefactor, but was interrupted by a news report in the old man's car about Amy. The report stated she had died from "smoking in bed" and had been found by none other than Rachel. Orlander and Rachel left in a hurry following that. Sam was left to pay the bill at the restaurant, and while he sat at the table fuming, a jet of flame shot from the tip of his index finger.
He drove back to the school to get his finger looked at. Dr. Simpson insisted the injury looked like a cigarette burn, despite Sam's counter-insistence that he didn't smoke. In his ensuing irritation with Simpson, a static shock jumped from Sam to Simpson. Sam left for home following that. Once there, he lit a fire in his fireplace while listening to the radio. Soon, he started to see flashes of people he didn't recognize, a man and a woman wearing dated clothes. Sam was so entranced by the vision that he didn't immediately notice his finger re-igniting.
Growing increasingly distressed, Sam went to Lisa's apartment. Lisa told him that Dr. Simpson had just been found burnt to death. The strange part was that at the time, Simpson had been in the shower with the water running. Sam couldn't deny the connection between himself and the burn victims any longer. Two people he knew had died in the span of less than a day, and two other unexplained burn deaths had occurred previously in the year as well. A believer in psychic phenomena, Lisa called in to a radio guru, Dr. Persons. While she was on the phone, Sam noticed a basket of flowers bearing a card: "Lisa, thanks. Love, Lew Orlander."
Sam tried to confront Lisa about how she knew Orlander, but before she could answer, she put him on the line with Dr. Persons. Sam told Persons about his vision, and Persons said he saw a woman singing to him as a baby. Sam started to remember a lullaby about saving the world, and felt somehow that his mother's name was Peggy. When Persons asked Sam his name, he answered that it was David Bell. The birthmark on the back of Sam's hand started to sizzle then, growing to over twice its normal size. The call cut out, and while Sam was dealing with the pain, another caller came on to the program claiming to have known David Bell's parents and urging him to call back in to the station. Sam tried to call back, but Persons's program was ending, and he was answered by an obnoxious radio technician telling him to call back the next week. Sam shouted into the phone and inadvertently sent a psychically-powered electrical charge travelling down the phone line, shocking the technician and causing him to spontaneously combust.
The same power that sent the charge down the phone line also made a large hole tear open on Sam's arm, gushing blood and spewing fire. Sam and Lisa tried to douse the fire in the bathtub, but water only seemed to make it worse. The flames only stopped when Sam forced himself to set his mind on controlling the burn. Lisa took him in the car and drove for the hospital following that. On the way, Sam called her out on knowing Orlander; she admitted that her parents had burned to death, and that she had been in Orlander's care ever since that happened. Orlander had set her up at the school in the first place just so that she and Sam would meet. She had wanted to tell him, but didn't for fear of upsetting him.
They arrived at the hospital and Lisa brought him to Dr. Marsh. Marsh took him and Lisa to his office, asked to see Sam's headache pills, and then made them wait while he slipped into a back room. Through the door, the pair could hear him talking on the phone, mentioning SHC and something the sounded like: "I'll handle this my way. It's time this project was ended." After that, Marsh left Sam in the care of another doctor, Cagney, and took Lisa out of the office with him. Cagney left Sam alone for a short period while he went to prepare something.
Through watching TV in the waiting room, Sam found out about the technician's death and the real name of Dr. Persons. He put in a call to an operator asking to speak to Persons right away, and through him, Sam got a hold of the woman who had called in to the show, who gave him an address. He then slipped into Marsh's back room, finding files on the desk about himself and Lisa going back to when they were both children. Cagney came back then holding a syringe filled with glowing green liquid. Sam attacked the man and demanded to know what was in the files, threatening to jab Cagney with his own syringe. Cagney called Sam a freak and before he knew it, Sam was burning Cagney to death.
Sam escaped the hospital and went to meet the woman from the program - Nina. She marvelled that he was still alive and started to tell him everything she knew. She showed him items from around the time of his birth, then put on an old home movie showing footage of his parents. Sam realized that the car he owned matched Brian and Peggy's exactly, which only added to his mounting paranoia. When Nina mentioned Modern Atomic Technologies, which Sam knew to have been "Lew's company," that clicked many of the pieces together in Sam's mind. He left in a mess of confusion and anger. After he left, Nina was gassed to death by Marsh, who had followed Sam in secret. Marsh, a former collaborator with Orlander, was out for revenge against everyone involved with Project Samson, and was hellbent on seeing its atomic abomination destroyed. His method for achieving that would be injecting Sam with a concentrated dose of the formula in his "migraine pills," causing him to burn up all in one go with no possibility of being used as a weapon in the future.
Sam called Lisa, who insisted they get Dr. Marsh's help. Sam tried to warn her about Marsh at first before remembering that she was probably in on the conspiracy herself. He threatened to hunt her down if she was in on his kill and demanded to know what had been in his pills. Lisa answered that she didn't know, and admitted that Orlander had instructed her to make Sam take them. That was too much to hear, and Sam's entire arm flared up, charring it to a near-unusable crisp and burning one of his eyes shut. A psycho-electric burst went down the phone line, this time causing a hand made of fire to reach out of the phone for Lisa, who narrowly avoided it.
After Sam got back into his car, a pair of police officers approached and asked for his license and registration. Out of sheer frustration and spite, Sam set them both ablaze, which in turn caused even more of his body to burn up. Somehow, though, he was able to keep himself going until he reached Orlander's estate. At the door, he was greeted by Mr. Fitzpatrick, who acted happy to see him until he slipped around the back of Sam's car, pointed a gun, and told Sam to put his hands on his head. Laughing, Sam stepped out and raised his working arm, daring Fitzpatrick to shoot. The old man shot in a panic, then apologized and ran forward. Without meaning to, Sam set him on fire as well.
He made it in the front door and was met by Orlander. Sam demanded to know about Lisa and accused Orlander of killing his parents, which sent Orlander into a spiel explaining the major parts of his plans, including the part about him being the instigator of Sam's birth. Not only had he wanted Sam to start displaying fiery, nuclear abilities, but he had tried to repeat the tests with Lisa's parents, who died after the last of M.A.T.'s above-ground tests in 1965. He hoped that someday, Sam and Lisa would learn to manifest and control their abilities, and then one day produce a child whose abilities were refined further still, and so on. Lately, however, he had been growing impatient waiting for something to happen, and knew he didn't have long left to live in his old age. He had given the pills to Lisa, hoping that they would kick-start their latent powers (though, as it turned out, only Sam had been taking the pills). The reaction was far more dramatic than expected, but Orlander was still pleased by it.
At that point, Sam's pocket watch (really Brian Bell's watch, which Sam had found earlier under mysterious circumstances) rang out midnight, the time at which the Trinidad Power Plant was set to go online. Sam could feel a psychic connection to the nuclear core, building as it powered on and spurring a similar burning within his own body. He started loading himself with power and electricity, and as Trinidad went online, Sam went with it, taking himself and Orlander out in his most violent blaze yet.
Amazingly, Sam survived his combustion, though he was burned to such a degree that he might as well have been a walking corpse. Acting purely on instinct, he shambled back to Lisa's apartment building, where he found her with her arm on fire and Rachel trying to exacerbate the combustion with an extinguisher. Rachel had been working with Marsh to bring down Project Samson, and Sam and Lisa with it. Marsh had managed to stick Lisa with a syringe of the green liquid, setting off her own combustion at a rapid rate before she killed him. Sam only took in the basics of all this. All he saw was that Rachel was killing Lisa, and he could save her. He set Rachel ablaze, and then told Lisa that he could take her fire. Sam was practised enough with his power now that he could see a way to use his gift to help her. Cornering her outside in the rain, Sam let himself melt down into a pool of pure psycho-nuclear energy. A ghost-like hand reached out, pulling all the heat and nuclear power from Lisa's cells and taking it back into the pool with him. After that, Lisa's arm was healed, the pool of energy vanished, and Sam was left a pile of ash.
Canon Point:
Sam will be taken from after his death/psychic melting trick.
Personality:
Aside from literally being the world's first and only atomic man, Sam is, at core, a man who has a problem with emotions. Specifically, though he has tried to keep himself in control for the sake of social decency most of his life, he has always had a terrible time with faking emotions he doesn't feel and with suppressing ones that he does. He wants to be in control of himself, but when push comes to shove, Sam often cannot help shoving right back at anyone who might have shoved him first.
Most of the time (in normal circumstances, anyway), Sam seems a nice, friendly person. He comes across as a little cheeky, even playful if he's around the right people. Whenever he can slip a little joke or anecdote into conversation, he will. He has a liking for sarcasm, usually of the lighthearted variety (but not always, as we'll soon see). He can be forgetful, and doesn't always think before he speaks, though he does make an honest effort for people he cares about. He's also an educator, which implies he enjoys learning and sharing what he has learned with others. He has learned when to be grateful to people who have helped him, and he has a great loyalty and love for the people who get close to him, so much so that it takes betrayal on a grand scale to truly nullify his feelings.
He tries to be a rational person when he can. Before August 6th, he was not taken at all by psychics, astrology, or similar supernatural phenomena. He was forced to accept those phenomena only as they proved themselves to him before his eyes. As well, he is very wary of nuclear power, both his own and in general. In his opinion, people don't know enough about it yet to harness it safely, and as it exists now, it is extremely dangerous.
Where things go really wrong with Sam is the fact that he is easily annoyed. In his life up until the events of the movie, he has tried to bottle up this annoyance when he can and just deal with things. As most anyone with a basic knowledge of human psychology will tell you, however, bottling up feelings like that only makes those feelings worse over time. Sometimes, Sam vents his frustrations at people he trusts, joking sarcastically and calling people names behind their backs (e.g.: spoke of meeting Rachel as "doing battle with Mata Hari", then outright called Rachel a bitch). He'll do this in a tone of good fun most of the time, probably to convince himself and others that he's not really so vicious a person. That kind of venting doesn't do nearly enough for him, though. When circumstances and emotions are right, Sam will simply erupt at people (sometimes literally, as the film demonstrates), and there is no way to stop him once he's started. In describing his fight with Amy Whitaker, Sam said that he got so angry at one point that he could have killed her. And lo and behold, he really did kill her. He didn't realize that until the day afterward, but that doesn't matter; that very real and potent killing thought was still there. Whether a real death had occurred or not, that kind of thinking is a bit extreme considering Amy was essentially only saying, "Nah-nah-nah naaah nah."
When in that state of anger, Sam can get very unbalanced if he's not careful. This is meant both in the literal and figurative senses of the word. When severely angered, Sam sometimes begins staggering around, having to reach for walls to keep himself standing. Also, as the night of August 6th wears on in the movie, it becomes apparent that Sam has started to go a little loopy ("As you can see, I'm not all here.") A good deal of this unbalanced mental state will remain in Landel's, given that Sam's whole life was de-constructed before his eyes in just one day and that kind of experience not going to heal overnight. He will sometimes be prone to laughing at the sheer absurdity of his own situation and the patients', making cutting comments and daring people to cross him. Other times he will be stone-cold serious, saying very little until he unleashes his power on someone. Other times still, he will simply fly off the handle in dramatic, fiery fashion, plain and simple. Which mode he ends up in depends a lot on how other people are acting toward him, how much he has already had to deal with recently, and various whirling thoughts, fears, and frustrations inside his own mind.
The whole situation with the conspiracy and his body and the betrayal by "Lew" has understandably made him very hurt and easily paranoid. He will be loath to trust anyone new after his experiences in the movie, making it easier for him to project his issues and fears onto the patients at Landel's. He may even manage to delude himself at times into thinking that the patients couldn't have gotten stuck in the Institute if they didn't deserve it in some way. Even Landel he doesn't really trust, though he is forced to work with him through sheer demonstration of power (see justification for fighting on the Institute's side).
Physical Description:
Sam is 5'9", Caucasian, and of average build. His hair is light-brown, curly, and a tad shaggy in length. His eyes are blue-grey, on the large side, and very expressive. He keeps his face clean-shaven. On the back of his right hand is a dark, perfectly circular birthmark resembling an old burn. For his whole life up until the events of the movie, it was only about an inch in diameter. As of right now, it covers most of the back of his hand (sans fingers). He'll be wearing the same outfit he wore on the day of his meltdown, an off-white dress shirt and matching pants, an open black blazer, a dark brown belt, and worn-in black shoes.
Powers:
Sam's nature as a "nuclear man" grants him several powerful but very unstable abilities. The first and most obvious is the ability to raise his body temperature to such extreme degrees that he begins to burn from the inside out. This unique, complex burn (the kind found in naturally-occurring SHC, as described by a doctor in the film), affects only specific materials - namely, human flesh, bone marrow, hair, and plastic. All other materials are only mildly affected or not touched at all by the flames; cotton is particularly invulnerable. It is possible for only one or two parts of Sam's body to rise to those extreme temperatures at a time (usually the lower arms), making the burn only manifest on those areas. The burn is very much tied to Sam's current mental and emotional states, being a bit more likely to manifest in times of annoyance, and virtually guaranteed to burst out when he is angry or in anguish. Likewise, the angrier he is, the more flames there will be. Traditional fire dousing agents such as water and liquid nitrogen only serve to make the burn stronger and more painful. And, needless to say, even without an agitator, the burn is very, very painful.
He also has an ability to generate some amounts of electricity. The bolts Sam generates never appear larger than powerful static, such as the kind produced by large Van de Graaff generators. Earlier in the film, they mostly generate from his hands or arms, but as the film progresses, it becomes clearer that they can come from any exposed part of his body, including his head. The bolts are more than simply electricity, however; they are also a means by which Sam is able to transfer his fire to other people. If Sam gets within at least a foot or two of a person, or he and the person are connected by an electrical wire of some sort (say, a phone line), he can send a powered bolt into that person's body, which triggers an SHC in that person. These bolts are not always produced of Sam's will, sometimes generating by accident when he is caught off-guard or in an unstable emotional state. Depending on what emotional state that might be, the resulting SHC may not take effect until a few hours later (i.e.: he is merely annoyed or frustrated) or it may be instantaneous (i.e.: he is very angry, caught off-guard, or consciously willing combustion to happen).
As August 6th went on, Sam gradually learned to control his abilities. It started with him being able to stop flames from spewing out of his forearm by concentrating hard enough. Later, he was able to consciously shock and burn a police officer, and following that, was able to set the officer's partner on fire from several yards away with only a psychic command, no electric shock needed. By the time he confronted Orlander, he was able to not only set his whole body ablaze on command and send jets of fire out toward Orlander (again a couple yards away), but also to keep enough of himself alive that he could still move afterward. In Landel's, he will retain this knowledge, making it easier for him to call on and direct his fire. Thanks to Sam's inability to control his emotions, however, he will still be unable to prevent any anger-related or power-usage-related flare-ups.
The rise in his nuclear abilities also seemed to trigger some latent psychic capabilities in Sam's mind. In the film, he displays some mild clairvoyance (e.g.: seeing his parents' faces, knowing somehow his mother's name was Peggy), spiritual communication (e.g.: when he heard his parents trying to tell him something), projection of his pyrokinesis across great distances via electrical current (e.g.: killing the radio technician; sending the fire hand at Lisa), and a psychic connection with other sources of nuclear energy ("Time to go online. Just me and Trinidad. Nuclear meltdown! I can almost see the core.") As well, by the end of the movie, he has gained enough control over his abilities to shift his body into a mass of pure energy with some ability to manipulate nuclear energy and fire; this leaves him as nothing but a pile of ash when it is done.
In the case of all abilities that Sam can consciously control, the more often and the more intensely he uses them, the more unstable it makes his internal temperature and the chemical bonds in his body. His flare-ups become more frequent, intense, and harder to stop in proportion to his ability usage. Particularly, if he performs a full-body combustion on a person, it is almost guaranteed that at least part of his body will flare up. When he lit two people on fire in rapid succession (the police officers), his whole head and torso went up for a few moments. Presumably, the more people he lights in short spans of time, the worse this gets.
Modified Powers at Landel's:
If you can believe it, granting Sam extra control over his powers will actually weaken him to desirable levels. He understands his no-kill orders and wants to follow through on them; he does not want to be a killer if he can help it. Granted some extra control on which body parts on his victims burn and which don't, Sam will be better able to stick to those orders.
The maximum distance Sam can be apart from a person and be able to SHC them through psychic projection alone will be four yards. Psychic projection will be harder to aim and prone to missing if Sam gets distracted. Players can generally judge for themselves if the attacks hit or not, with the typical likelihood of a hit being about 4/7 (reduced to 2/7 when distracted).
SHC delivered through an electrical shock, conversely, will be virtually guaranteed to hit if Sam is close enough. The only way the shock can misfire will be if the other person is showing very little exposed skin. Electric shock SHC will only work from a maximum distance of two feet, though, making it a very short-ranged attack that leaves Sam open to retaliation. The only way to get distance out of an electric shock will be if Sam and the intended victim are both touching the same piece of conductive material, such as a wire or a metal pipe.
If Sam successfully SHC's someone, one or two parts of the person's body will start to burn. Which parts and how many will be selected by the victim's player. Most commonly, the choice will be between hands, lower arms, or lower legs, though other body parts such as upper arms/legs, torso, or face can be selected by the player involved if they are feeling really sadistic. Feet, weirdly enough, are not allowed; feet are mentioned specifically as being unaffected by SHC in the film. Water and other fire dousing agents will have no effect on the burn. There will still be a few ways in which the burn can be stopped, though:
- As part of his extended control, I will allow Sam to stop the burn with a psychic command (in Landel's, I plan to have him cause some short, relatively mild burns just to unnerve people).
- The patient gets to a certain distance away from Sam. If he is in a large room like the Sun Room or Cafeteria, the patient will have to get to the opposite side of the room. In smaller areas, they will have to get at least one room/area away.
- If the patient or someone nearby possesses an applicable healing power, that can be used to stop the burn and get a jump start on healing any surface damage it might have caused.
- The patient must overcome their panic/pain and use their own willpower to control and snuff the burn. Patients will get a clue to this fourth method in seeing how Sam deals with his own burning limbs (he will clearly be concentrating hard to get himself under control when he flares up).
As in canon, the more people Sam SHC's in a night and the longer those SHC's last for, the more unstable his own body gets. Between 2-4 regular burns (2 super-short/mild burns count count as one regular burn), one of his arms will start to flare up sometimes until he can consciously wrestle the flames back down. Between 5-7 regular burns, both arms will light at some point, and if the SHC's were strong enough, his head and/or torso will flare up temporarily as well. 8 regular burns burns and beyond, and flare-ups of all kinds ranging from small to full-body will start happening at random, completely out of Sam's control. If the flare-ups become frequent and severe enough, Sam will go full-body burning man and reduce himself to his his shambling, corpse-like burn victim mode from the end of the movie. If he tries to use his power in that state for too long, he will burn out completely, reducing himself to ashes. In addition to all that, the angrier Sam gets, the lower on the above scales he has to be to achieve more severe effects.
If Sam is already on fire and right up close to another patient, he can inflict surface burns on areas of exposed skin. Clothed areas are immune. If Sam wants to send powerful jets of fire at someone out from his own body from a distance, he will have to set himself completely on fire, which will in turn take him to Shambling Burn Victim Mode. A fire jet will be able to reach a maximum distance of five yards. The fire hand Sam is seen sending to Lisa in the movie will be lumped in with the fire jet rules for simplicity's sake.
To be further on the safe side, I will also introduce an auto-limiter to Sam's power that will make it extremely difficult for him to perform a full-body SHC on another person. If he really wants to set a person's whole body ablaze, he will have to throw all his power into the act, to the point where he is guaranteed to go up with his victim. If Sam wants to survive this, he can only keep the full-body burn going for five seconds maximum. This will leave the patient with several painful burns all over their body (see the attached "burnfacesam.png") but they will survive and heal at the normal Landel's rate with no permanent scarring; after the other person stops burning, Sam will continue to burn until he reaches Shambling Burn Victim Mode. If Sam truly wants to kill, then he will burn the patient until he reaches his pure energy state and reduces himself to ash and bone.
Full-body combustions resulting in death will only be performed against patients whose players want to kill them off for the purposes of dropping. In all cases of full-body combustion, they will only be performed with expressly communicated permission from the victim's player. In either case, he can only perform one full-body combustion per night. If he performs the non-fatal version and tries to perform another, his body will proceed straight to the energy/ashes phase without harming anyone else.
For the sake of simplicity, the non-fire-related psychic abilities Sam displays in the movie such as clairvoyance and spirit communication will be nullified in Landel's.
Non-otherworldly Abilities:
Sam is a high school teacher, though I doubt his educational abilities will be put into play much as an NS aggressor. Also, he is a hilariously bad actor. He can maybe stun people with his awful renditions of Shakespeare?