Samson West*

[The Big Eye*]

Name: Samson "Sam" West
Gender: Male
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: Bayview Secondary
Hobbies and Interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Poetry, Music (Classical, New Age, and some Heavy Metal), the occasional video game; also, was a member of the Bayview Secondary Chess Club for Grades 11 and 12, and the Bayview Debating Team for Grade 11

Appearance: Samson is a young man of mixed Caucasian and East Indian ancestry. He has mocha-colored skin, black hair which he rarely if ever styles, aquiline blue eyes, a flat nose, and generally long features. He would describe himself as "quietly good-looking," although his timidity, especially around potential love interests, has prevented this from being a boon to his meager social life.

He is not particularly well-muscled and has a slight gut, but is nevertheless quite well-suited to walking long distances and running short ones. He stands at the slightly below-average height of five feet, three inches, and weighs in at 166 pounds.

He is a casual dresser; his most notable accessory is an unadorned iron ring he calls his "strength ring," which he obtained (from his father, at a machine shop) when he was eight years old and has regularly worn on his ring finger ever since.

Biography: Born an only child into a small household living in the midst of the St. Paul urban sprawl, Samson was something of an unexpected arrival for his financially disadvantaged parents. At the tender age of eight, his parents went through a messy divorce; his father, a policeman, lost custody to his mother, who owned a small restaurant. Three years later, the restaurant closed down and his mother began to spiral into a state of clinical depression.

Although they still managed to keep up the rent, Samson lost many of the amenities of his childhood. He entertained himself by reading, and became interested in philosophy and psychology through such classic and modern works as "Lord of the Flies," "Ender's Game," and "Nineteen Eighty-Four." His mother continued to refuse treatment for her depression, increasingly forcing the boy to fend for himself. At the same time, he began to expand his interest in music as a distraction from the oppressive silence of his life at home. He began to develop an inner rage at the broken state of his family and the childhood he had lost, an emotion which he reflected through an increasing affinity for heavy metal instead of the relaxing New Age and classical melodies that used to represent the entirety of his musical taste. He also developed an interest in writing, in particular poetry, and this hobby began to occupy much of his free time.

Samson was unusually intelligent and consistently excelled during his years in grade school, even in the years following his parents' divorce. He became overconfident in his intellectual ability and as such was often spurned and occasionally picked on by other students. When he began his high school career, his disinterested, intelligently smug attitude would earn him few friends among the student body. He did very well in the sciences, particularly Physics, but in Social Studies and English he began to lag behind due to a combination of overconfidence and simple lack of interest.

He joined the chess club and debating team during his second year, although he left the latter after just a few months due to what he saw as bullying from the other students. One of Samson's more abrasive traits is his feeling of entitlement due to his intelligence and "hard life," which in turn caused him to take defeat very seriously; this contributed to his departure from the debating team more than he would like to admit. He preferred the mechanical, pragmatic nature of the chessboard to true social interaction, and his successes in various championships earned him a reputation as, if nothing else, a gifted strategist. Outside of school, he took an interest in disasters, massacres, and battles, both past and present; because of this, he became quite fixated on the behavior of the human mind under pressure and in extreme circumstances.

Sam never became seriously romantically involved with anyone during high school. The painful divorce he had gone through during his childhood left him with a lack of interest in long-term relationships, although he would usually explain this by claiming, with some irony, that he just couldn't "stay interested" in any particular woman for long. With his secondary education all but behind him, he has set himself to deciding what to do with the rest of his life. Currently, he has absolutely no idea. He remains estranged from his father, who was transferred outside of the state, and harbors some loathing toward his mother for her condition and failure to seek treatment.

Samson has a number of strange personality quirks, probably the most noticeable of which being his tendency to break into a near-incoherent Southern accent when deeply disturbed or emotional, a hangover from an old family joke, and one of his fondest childhood memories. He has pathological fears of vomit, broken bones, insects, and the dark.

Advantages: Sam is a moral pragmatist, preferring to avoid sentimentality or excessive emotion when making moral decisions - though in principle a caring, empathic person, he is willing to "bend the rules" if he thinks it will benefit him in a significant way, particularly if he decides that the benefit to him is greater than the detriment to others. He possesses a caustic wit and acute intelligence, although either one can tend to distance him from others. He is quite durable emotionally, partly due to his unhappy childhood and partly due to the lessons he learned through the written word throughout the latter part of that childhood. His studies have brought him a good understanding of human behavior, especially in the face of mortal danger.
Disadvantages: His emotional insecurity and lack of confidence around women robs him of much of the effect of his impressive wit. He has only a few friends in Bayview (although, fortunately, he has even fewer enemies). He fears scuffles and direct fighting in general, largely due to his experiences with bullying in grade school. Although his young life was emotionally trying, it was not trying physically, so Sam has little tolerance for pain.