maxwell milgram d6 | fin

[Lyn𝛿is]

00d6ff 68ff6e daff44 a5ffa8 68ffff
headings, third person, speaks, first person, first person

Maxwell Gottfried Milgram
18. male. district 6

Appearance:

At five foot ten, Max leans slightly towards the tall end of the students at the College. A light smattering of freckles dots his pale face. A pair of thin, rectangular glasses frames his dark gray eyes, which angle slightly downwards. They're perched atop a triangular, prominent nose and slightly pointed ears half hidden by his hair.
His reddish-brown hair is long, curling down messily to his shoulders. Thick sideburns appear on either side of his face before sloping down to a full, bushy beard, making him look much older than his eighteen years. His lips are small and easily overshadowed by his abundance of facial hair, but they often curl into a warm, easy smile.

Moving down to the rest of his body, his fingers are smooth and pale, his nails kept neat and short. Being more focused on academic pursuits than physical ones, he's fairly flabby, not having much in the way of muscle. The one exception are his thick calves, thanks to a rather long daily commute up and down the steep hill the College and the Institute of Psychology are built on, one that he's constantly sprinting on due to his tendency to lose track of time and end up running late for classes.

He prefers dressing casually, often wearing a T-shirt or hoodie paired with jeans and sandals in the warmer months, and bundling up with thick jackets during the snowy winter. Most of his wardrobe consists of simple shirts and pants that are easy to match. When the weather is warm, he'll sometimes be seen in the College's quad, sitting cross-legged with a guitar around his neck and strumming a few favorite songs. It tends to be a good conversation starter.

Personality:

Max is outgoing and sociable, looking forward to meeting new people and hearing different perspectives. He has a very active imagination, equally adept at painting hopeful wonderlands as it is envisioning the worst possible despair. His rich internal dialogue mirrors the exuberance he tends to bring to his external world as he weaves stories from the circumstances around him. Maxwell is a storyteller at heart and enjoys fantasy and creating new worlds and people inside his mind. Psychology in particular fascinates him because it seeks to explain the behaviors and archetypes displayed by people around him.

Max can be quite superstitious, and he mentally prays to Ripred before each Reaping and other events involving luck. He believes that even though psychological or scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena exist, they do not preclude the existence of spirituality. He loves to hoard knowledge and gets enthusiastic about what he's studying, sometimes to the point of losing track of his surroundings. A true investigator, he's very open-minded, constantly willing to change his opinions based on what he learns or discovers. On the other hand, this trait also makes him gullible and easily swayed by convincing arguments.
Hey. Speaking of psychological phenomena, aren't you going to tell them about me?
Um, hi? You're... not Max. Maybe you should introduce yourself.
Well, I'm Asch and I'm the second presence in Max's brain, so to speak.
Here, I can take over the explanation from here. I'm Max, by the way. In psychological terms, Asch is what's known as a tulpa - a separate consciousness living inside my mind. Asch is fully sentient, which means that he can have separate thought processes from myself. 
Psychologically, I was formed from portions of Max's subconscious, but only partly since I've developed quite a bit since then. If it helps, you can think of me as one of Max's characters coming to life.
Well, that's only partly true, but let's go with that. For what it's worth, Asch isn't my doppelganger - in fact, he forms his own opinions about a lot of things.
Praying to Ripred isn't going to change how the escort feels around inside the Reaping bowl, you know.
Let's not get into that again. Anyway, Asch and I have known each other for quite a while now -
Eight years, to be exact.
That sounds about right, on my end, although Asch's world doesn't really have a concept of time. It's like in dreams - an hour can be as short as a minute, or as long as years. You can simulate passage of time in your head without the real world moving, you know.
Yes, that is frequently useful.
Anyways, most of the time we get along pretty well. I mean, you know what they say - two heads are better than one.
...heh.

History:

Well, for starters, I was born on a Reaping Day. My dad thinks that's a good sign - it means I'll go far in life, get in a good position at the Institute, that sort of thing. My mom seems to think it's a horrible omen and the Capitol will be out to get me. Personally, I think both of those are sort of extreme. It could easily mean either, or nothing at all.
Nothing at all, of course. There's no evidence to suggest it affects anything. Maybe you'll have an advantage from being the oldest in the Arena if you're reaped, but I doubt that will matter.
Perhaps not. Anyways, hmm... where should I start?
You could start by telling them how I came into being. You really were a very interesting kid, you know.
Ah yes. See, I tend to be an imaginative person, I have been since I was a kid. I had this whole world in my head, of heroes and monsters and adventures, but mostly people. Asch is a product of that world.
If I recall, you named your fantasy city "Smileytown".
In my defense I was ten, all right? I mean, there were a whole lot of other characters in there, as well, but Asch was the one that really stuck. Like, sometimes I would just talk to him, and one day he just randomly started responding. I guess he surprised me a bit, especially at first.
You kept asking me if I was real for a while after that. I'll have you know that I'm as real as your mind is.
Heh. I didn't find out there was an official classification for these types of phenomena until I read about them in a psychology book. Even then I didn't think I really fit a lot of the things it said, at least not the parts about being withdrawn and traumatized or whatever. I got my hands on a bunch of psychology books at that point, and they all said different things. I don't think psychologists agree on very much, and a lot of the time they even write in their textbooks that they don't really know a whole lot about how people work. Then again, nothing that Asch has said or done has been problematic, so there isn't anything unhealthy about having him live in my head.
Still, it certainly did explain a lot.
Maybe that's why I like psychology so much. I've already got this person I've modeled inside my head enough for him to achieve sentience, and here's a science that's all about modeling and analyzing people. And, well, now I'm a college student studying psychology and on my way to hopefully working at the Institute after I graduate. They're always publishing papers with such fascinating experiments, and I can imagine myself among them one day, coming up with my own ideas to publish papers about. I've applied for an internship this year, but I'm not sure I'll get it since they take a lot more juniors and seniors than they do freshmen. Still, there are so many interesting directions in psychology I can continue to explore.

Other:
faceclaim: Jonathan Coulton

[Lyn𝛿is]

Finished

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