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Player.

Name: coffee
Contact: PM or coffee#6251 on Discord
Current Characters: n/a

Character.

Name: Klaus Hargreeves
Canon: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
Canon Point: End of S1E10; immediately as the siblings attempt to time travel after failing to save the world from the apocalypse.
CRAU Timeline/Game(s): Klaus has been in Hadriel for approximately two months, and will be coming from the end of Hadriel's endgame.

World Description: n/a
Character History: Klaus at Umbrella Academy Wiki. This link only has Klaus-specific synopses of the first four episodes, so I'll list out other important details from before canon and the remaining six episodes below:

Pre-Canon:

• As stated in the wiki, Klaus was born to a mother who had not previously been pregnant, at the same time as 42 other children born to different mothers around the world in the same way. He and 6 other children were adopted by Reginald Hargreeves.

• The children were not treated as family by their adoptive father, but rather as complicated science experiments. They were well-educated, mostly cared for by an android 'mother' and Pogo, a monkey with the ability to speak (origin not explained). Their brainwaves were monitored as they slept, and every moment of their lives spent in the house were recorded by surveillance cameras placed around the house. One of the things that happened to Klaus as an adolescent was that he was repeatedly locked in a dark crypt to 'cure' his fear of the dead - this only succeeded in making him scared of the dead and of enclosed dark spaces.

• The siblings were debuted at around 13 as a superhero team called the Umbrella Academy that stopped crimes with their super powers, often violently. Through this, they rose to fame and were featured on TV, in magazines, etc. Throughout his adolescence, Klaus struggled with substance abuse, which he used to keep his ability in check and dormant, a pattern that continued into his adulthood.

• At an unspecified point, Klaus left home and the Umbrella Academy. All his siblings except Luther left in similar ways, drifting away from home and each other.

Episodes 5-10

• When the briefcase he stole from Hazel and Cha-Cha turned out to be a time machine, he accidentally jumped back in time and found himself in Vietnam during the war. While there, he became a soldier and joined the fight with the unit whose barracks he woke up in. He was in Vietnam for 10 months, during which time he fell in love with a soldier named Dave and had a relationship with him, and got a tattoo of the unit's insignia and name. When Dave was killed on the front lines in battle, Klaus used the briefcase to travel back to the present, where he destroyed it due to his grief over losing Dave before going home to the house. His time in Vietnam has added flashbacks of helicopters, gunfire, and Dave's death to his pre-existing PTSD symptoms.

• After returning to the present, he gets a ride with his brother Diego and ends up at a bar for Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he goes inside and finds a photo that includes Dave, and while he's tearfully looking at it, a veteran gets in an argument with him about whether he belongs there. After a bar brawl that Diego helps him get out of, the two talk about losing people before seeing Hazel and Cha-Cha at the donut shop and following them to the hotel they are staying in. After a short gunfight, the two steal an ice cream truck and follow the assassins out to where they've arranged a meet up with Luther and Five for the (fake) briefcase. Another gunfight ensues.

• One episode of the series is a day that is eventually erased via time travel. During the Day that Wasn't, Klaus asked for Diego's help to get clean so he can see Dave again by using his ability, and spends the day tied to a chair detoxing. At the end of the episode, he sees Dave's ghost coming toward him as time rewinds. Klaus won't remember the Day that Wasn't.

• During the Day that Was, which is the day Klaus will remember, he discussed saving the world with his siblings before they parted ways. Instead of asking Diego to help him sober up, he tries to ask Luther, who he finds drunk and depressed. After Luther goes into a rage and almost chokes Klaus to unconsciousness, Klaus comforts Luther and tries to talk him out of going on a further bender, with no success. Klaus and Ben follow Luther around, trying to find him because he's not suited to the bender lifestyle, and end up finding him at a rave, where Klaus almost caves in and takes drugs before seeing a hallucination of Dave's death, triggered by the bright lights in the club. Luther is almost attacked by some gangsters before Klaus intervenes and ends up hitting his head hard enough to send him into the afterlife.

• While he's in the afterlife, he has a short conversation with God before finding his father in a barber shop. While giving Klaus a shave, his father reveals that he had killed himself in order to bring the siblings back together, and confides that Klaus has barely scratched the surface of his abilities. Klaus wakes back up on the floor of the rave and Luther is gone - he finds Luther with a woman in his room the next morning and teases him before trying to tell Luther and Five that he spoke to their father and about the suicide. Neither believes him until Pogo confirms it.

• Klaus has a short conversation with Five and decides he wants to participate in saving the world. Shortly afterward, Allison is brought home in critical condition after her throat is slit in a moment of fury by Vanya. Klaus tries to donate blood to save her life stating that he loves needles, but is turned down because his blood is too polluted. After this, he goes looking for drugs again because his siblings don't take him seriously and he can't manage to connect with Dave, but Ben confronts him and ends up punching the drugs out of his mouth. This gives Klaus another reason to stay sober, as he starts training to try to recreate Ben's physical manifestation.

• After being threatened into helping his brothers save the world, Klaus goes with his brothers to Vanya's fake boyfriend's house, who they believe is the reason the apocalypse happens, only to find him dead. Assuming that the apocalypse has been averted, they part ways, though after asking Five how to start training with his powers and being rebuffed for being an addict, Klaus confronts Five about how they both have an addiction, Klaus to drugs and Five to the apocalypse.

• Vanya comes back home, grief and guilt stricken over having (she thinks) killed Allison, and Luther meets her. Instead of forgiving her, he tricks her and knocks her unconscious before locking her in a soundproofed room where he thinks she can't use her powers. Klaus, along with Allison and Diego, beg Luther to let Vanya out so they can talk about it, but Luther refuses. Vanya finds a way to use her powers and destroys the house, and all the siblings escape though Mom and Pogo are killed - Diego barely escapes with his life after Klaus allows Ben to materialize and pull him from under falling rubble. They realize that Vanya is the cause of the apocalypse.

• The siblings regroup at a bowling alley where Klaus tries to tell them that he can see, speak to, and have physical contact with Ben, but they don't believe him. The group is attacked by assassins from the Collective, and flee the bowling alley to go to Vanya's concert, where Klaus is left outside to be the lookout, as the others don't believe his abilities to be useful. After seeing Cha-Cha approaching the theater, he goes inside to warn his siblings and is almost shot. The group is pinned down and Klaus manages to allow Ben to manifest visibly, so the others can see him, and Ben uses his eldritch horror tentacles to take out all the assassins.

• After Allison stops Vanya from using her abilities to cause the apocalypse by deafening her with the sound of a gun, Vanya accidentally breaks off chunk off the moon while startled. The piece of the moon hurtles toward Earth and the siblings realize that this will cause the apocalypse. Together, they take Vanya's unconscious body and all of them start to travel through time with Five. This is where Klaus' canon point is.

CRAU History: Klaus was only in Hadriel for a couple of months, but quite a bit happened. After being rescued from the coliseum where he arrived, he got settled in and made a few friends, and discovered that he'd arrived in Hadriel during the build up to a final war between the gods who run Hadriel and the Null, a robotic enemy race bent on killing them all. He was involved in an event where his fears were heightened and fought the ghosts of the Hosts that he could see, and this spurred him into asking whether anyone could help him train with his abilities so he can make a bigger difference during the final battle. When the Null arrive, he is participating in the guerrilla warfare taking place in the jungle, where he is using the knowledge he gained in Vietnam to help weaponize the terrain. He is going to be evoking two monster ghosts during the battle.

Personality: Klaus is a highly emotional and sensitive person who isn't afraid to express his fear or affection, and doesn't try to stop himself from crying. He also has a tendency to be very open about less appealing reactions, frequently pouting, becoming stubborn, and throwing tantrums. He can be a handful with his quickly changing and explosive emotions, but he can also be incredibly warm and soothing with his capacity to care and forgive.

Sensitive and compassionate (at least when he's sober), Klaus is always the first to comfort his siblings with a gentle touch or a hug or even by pressing a hand against their shoulders during times of stress. Both through his words and actions he shows a lot of empathy for the people he cares about, and has a very powerful capacity to forgive. Klaus is an addict, and with addiction comes a whole slew of terrible habits and traits - stealing from people you care about, being flaky and out of contact, relying too heavily on the kindness of family. Klaus has done bad things, and so he understands how people can do bad things, and is far more likely to overlook or forgive bad behaviour on the part of people around him. Klaus gets it, how people can mess up spectacularly and still not be bad people.

Klaus takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin' both mentally and physically - during the show, he's kidnapped and tortured, goes through withdrawals twice, and survives 10 months in the Vietnam war. Despite all this, and despite a lot of complaining, whining, and often crying, he's on his feet, mobile, and ready to help save the world, even when his siblings don't necessarily think he's capable of helping them. Klaus might not be ambitious, but he's willing to try new things, and if they backfire, he's got a high tolerance for the fallout. He might want to quit, but he very rarely actually does.

Klaus is adaptable, but the other side of that coin is that he's also inconsistent and unreliable. He has a tendency to wander off when he's on lookout duty, to not show up, to change his mind and swing rapidly back and forth between opinions. Everything about him is built on this changeable base, and as a result, he tends to be unstable, flaky, and erratic. It's chaotic and not always enjoyable to either for Klaus himself or for the people around him. Also, while Klaus is intelligent enough, but he's always a little fried, a little frazzled, a little distracted, either by intoxicants or seeing the dead, being dope sick or grieving or in pain or any number of other things. He tends to live his life by impulse, driven by emotion, jumping into things full throttle, changing his mind on a whim and diving into things whenever he wants. Klaus isn't the type to move through life methodically, with a plan or any perception of actions and consequences, he just barrels forward, stumbles through life and goes with the flow.

Finally, while he is incredibly resilient and has a great capacity to survive, Klaus is not exactly an optimist. His default is to assume that things are going to turn out for the worst, and he frequently voices it in a sarcastic, slightly cynical way. Klaus plays it off as a joke, but he genuinely seems to think that life is inherently difficult, the future is not bright, and people are going to be assholes. As much as he likes being proven wrong, he doesn't ever really expect to.

CRAU Development: Not a lot has changed in Hadriel to alter Klaus' personality itself. He's gained a bit of confidence in himself and his abilities after spending two months alone in a strange alternate world - he's made his own friends, kept himself mostly sober, lived in an apartment by himself without burning it down, trained to use his ability, and used his knowledge to help fight a war. In canon, Klaus said that he wanted to be taken seriously, and some of the people in Hadriel have done so, which has given him the push he needed to advance himself a little. Still, he's only at the very beginning first few steps of that particular character arc and has a long way to go still.

Powers/Abilities: Klaus has the ability to see and interact with dead people. When he isn't inebriated or in an altered state of mind, Klaus can see people in the afterlife, and interact with them visually and verbally. The spirits take a variety of forms - most often semi-transparent horror visions of the dead that scream and whisper his name or apparitions that seem to interact with him verbally and visually as if they were actually present with him. Most of these apparitions show any visible signs of any injuries or conditions that led to their deaths and speak the languages that they spoke in life, which sometimes means that Klaus can't understand them. The exception to his is his brother, Ben, who he has been seeing whenever he was sober since shortly after Ben died. Ben appears perfectly normal with no outward sign of how he died, and seems to be solidly visible, audible, and present sooner after Klaus stops drugs than any of the other apparitions.

Klaus also has the ability to interact physically with the dead, and to conjure spirits and allow them to manifest into the physical world. He has, at several points, allowed Ben to interact with the physical world - Ben punched him in the face, he allowed Ben to drag Diego to safety, and in a fight where the siblings were badly outnumbered, Klaus pulled Ben into the physical world and allowed Ben to use his eldritch horror ability to save them. This physical use of Klaus' ability is rare, takes a lot of effort, and requires at least a day or two of solid sobriety to manage.

Having spent most of his life trying to dull his abilities, not train in them, he has very little control beyond the passive seeing of spirits that he can't 'turn off' without being intoxicated. It is stated by his father that he has barely scratched the surface of what he can do, but at this point he (and the audience) is unaware of what else he might be capable of.

Klaus trained a bit with his ability in Hadriel, but it was very short-term training and didn't advance his abilities much. It's slightly easier for him to physically manifest ghosts, and he managed two evocations of ghostly monsters in extremely desperate circumstances. If he was a level 1 before, he's now a level 1.5. Maybe 2, tops.

Inventory: Items currently on his person: grey V-neck T-shirt, Vietnam-era US Army jacket with sleeves torn off, dog tags belonging to his dead lover Dave, black leather pants that lace up the sides, floral-print Doc Marten boots, a small hand axe, several knives, a half-empty lighter, two and a half joints; a beat up black canvas backpack containing some extra clothing and items from home: his Walkman and headphones, a couple mix tapes of assorted music (mostly oldies), a pair of beaded womens sandals, a pair of off-brand Converse-style canvas shoes, a bottle of black nail polish, a pink cap-sleeve crop top with the word 'UGLY' in black text across the front, an oversized bright blue mesh tank top, a gothic style black mesh crop top, a black and grey striped long-sleeve T-shirt, a pair of knee-length pink sweatpants, a pair of distressed black skinny jeans, a few pairs of underwear and socks, his patchwork jacket with fur trim from home.

Anything Else? Klaus has a couple of issues that are worth mentioning but that aren't exactly personality aspects.

Addiction: For basically his entire life, Klaus has struggled with addiction. He's addicted to pretty much any substance you can be addicted to, and the moment the going gets tough he tends to default to a desperate scramble for drugs that overrides most other instincts he has. This is something he's been (moderately) successful in fighting, though it's still an ongoing problem. He managed 30 days of sobriety in Hadriel before he backslid into using pot on a semi-regular basis, but hasn't resumed alcohol or any harder drugs. Arguably, he hasn't had the temptation since there aren't harder drugs in Hadriel, but it's something.

PTSD: Whenever there are loud noises, flashing lights, or he's confined in a small dark place, Klaus starts getting flashbacks - visual, auditory, the whole works. These episodes can cause him to panic and completely lose the thread of whatever he's doing, generally rendering him incapable of standing or moving or doing anything but crouching down with his arms around the back of his neck crying.

samples

Network Sample: Klaus' tag on the Hadriel network comm.

Prose/Brackets Sample: Klaus' tag on the Hadriel logs comm.