Owen Vanderstraaten's Questionnaire

Owen lives in a duplex on the outskirts of Gresham, Oregon with one roommate. After moving to the US, he traveled around the states for a couple years before settling down with a hitchhiker that he met along the way. The downstairs is typically a chaotic mess, with no rhyme or reason when it comes to how the furniture is arranged, no household item aside from the refrigerator being in a logical place, and a vague smell of a meat locker throughout the home. Contrasting the lower floor, upstairs is extremely orderly and well-kept, almost looking like something one would see in a tour of a freshy-built open house. Tasteful paintings line the hallway, the bathroom is kept perpetually spotless, and the bedroom looks like it's never been slept in.

Owen covers his share of the mortgage with rent from the next door neighbors  supplemented by a day job at a small coffee shop working as a barista. Most of his monthly funds go into purchasing copious amounts of raw meat, covering his part of the mortgage, or surgical and lawncare tools. When they had first bought the duplex Owen had insisted on sinking most of the development money into a large basement for the home, resulting in him having to do nearly all of the repainting and interior design himself instead of hiring someone to do it for him.

Owen's ultimate goal is to not only truly understand the spiritual and physical makeup of biological life, but to learn how to harness and manipulate it for his own gain, sacrificing whatever he has to in order to obtain this knowledge. Unlike most others with similar aspirations, Owen doesn't seek to harm anyone that doesn't oppose or obstruct his goals, simply seeking and obtaining knowledge of this subject is his path as he sees it, anyone within the path may be trampled, but those without may prove useful. Owen will stop at nothing to obtain the knowledge he seeks, in the past going so far as to trade his family's souls for an eldritch tome that records its contents into the bearer's mind.

While on a hike in the Norwegian woods, Owen came across a strange formation of dark stones where he was approached by an unfathomable creature that seemed to tower above the sun itself. It whispered into his mind of hunger, it whispered into his mind of a bargain, it whispered into his mind of knowledge. He entered the forest several weeks later with his immediate family along with several friends from work. He came home clutching a gargantuan tome with a patchwork leather cover and pages of living skin with silent screams etched into his mind. Their disappearances were ignored by the general public, who went along as if they didn't exist in the first place.

The person Owen looks forward to interacting with is his roommate Jessie, who he met as a hitchhiker while traveling the states. He met her when he still knew very little English, and with her help he greatly improved to the point of near fluency. Jessie is on the shorter side, with a slim build and a head of frizzy red hair. She works night shifts at a nearby warehouse.

Jacob is Owen's renter and next door neighbor. A balding man in his late forties and the owner of a furniture company, Owen sees him as somewhat of a mentor, distasteful as his mannerisms may be.

Sammy is the owner of the coffee shop that Owen works at, an overbearing, whiny manager that insists on micromanaging everything that she can. Owen mostly spaces out when speaking to her and plays it off as him being oblivious or not being able to understand what she says.

Owen grew up in a small mountain town in Norway as a bit of a social outcast, not that it mattered to him. His classmates saw him as the butcher's kid who spent more time working for his mom than attending school, frequently skipping class to do so. With a recovering alcoholic father and his mother owning the town's butchery, he felt obligated to help her run the store, often preparing and packaging the meat to be sold. Many years of interacting with only his mother and rarely his father fostered a general sense of disinterest fore the lives of those around him, beginning to view them as nothing more than slightly more sophisticated, self domesticated farm animals. During grade school, he allowed his curiosity to get the better of him, killing one of his classmates and dissecting their corpse, taking notes on their organ structure and disposing of them with the other unusable meat.

Owen sees love and intimacy the same way an average person would see a pitchfork or hoe, an integral tool for some that allows them to perform their job, but completely unnecessary for their day to day life. Owen simply sees people either for how useful they can be to him and his goals or for how much he may be able to learn from them, like a scientist and their test rodents. Though that isn't to say he wishes meaningless harm upon those around him, Owen views himself as an observer or researcher in a complex, self-maintaining ecosystem, with many small nuances and details that may be overlooked if he isn't careful with his approach.

Due to Owen's upbringing and how he views other people, he feels that he is alone in the world. He hopes that through sharing his research and recording his endeavors for others to see may spark some interest in a potentially likeminded individual. He truly fears that when his studies are completed that he'll learn that he truly is alone, and there is no other like himself. He's also gotten the feeling in the past that a familiar presence has been observing him in the back of his mind, shadows who's faces he's seen in the past, a nonexistent voice calling out his name. His past might be catching up to him, and may prove itself to be a disruption to his ongoing research. He's afraid of what may happen when it does eventually catch up to him, what adverse effects it may have on his progress, possibly erasing years worth of work, obstructing future research, or calling in some external organization to implement so much red tape around it that it's nigh impossible to perform any future tests without bringing some sort of three letter agent to his door inquiring as to why he did literally anything with his projects.

Owen covets the tome granted to him by the Presence in the Woods in exchange for hiss family and friends. Similar in size to a Webster hardcover dictionary, the Fleshbound Tome's covers are made out of calloused skin wrapped around cartilage, with three bindings of a sinew like material keeping the pages and covers together. The pages are wet and sticky, like burned skin, and feel warm to the touch. The tome seems to "breathe" slightly, subtly expanding and contracting like the chest of a living creature. The tome's contents go into painstaking detail about the inherent properties of flesh and various uses for it, such as manifesting flesh from nothing, creating life tailored to a specific purpose, and warping existing flesh into a more suitable form. When in possession of the tome for an extended period of time, it begins to take knowledge from its bearer that it deems useful or relevant to its current contents, inscribing it on the pages in blood as it does so.