Augustin Choudhary

Augustin Choudhary is the ship's resident Beholding avatar, and will go to any length to ensure others are aware of that fact. He was one of the later additions to the crew, signing on as lookout after he'd made a name for himself on shore as a murderer - and madman, though you shouldn't call him that if you want your eyes to stay in their sockets.

His main duty on the ship is to watch for other vessels and storms on the horizon, though he takes it upon himself to spy on every other member of the crew and calls this his "job" as well. Through the carved eyes that he leaves scattered in the wood of the Phoenix, he can see anyone or anything that transpires if he chooses to focus on it - a colossal breach of privacy, according to many crewmembers. He is most often found in the crow's nest, even sleeping there rather than in his cabin. Sometimes, he neither rests nor leaves his post at all.

Augustin's playlist can be found here.

Appearance
Augustin is a tall, muscular brown-skinned man with long black hair and black eyes. His face is angular, with a strong jaw and a prominent nose. He sports thick eyebrows, a small mustache, and kissable full lips. He has two moles on his right cheek, one above his nose, and one below his bottom lip, as well as others elsewhere on his neck and body. His canines are unnaturally pointed. He has several piercings on each ear, alongside a septum piercing, and is tattooed: he has HOLD FAST on his knuckles, with near a dozen swallows on his back and shoulders for the nautical miles he’s sailed. His hair can typically be found in a high ponytail or a braid while on duty.

Perhaps his most striking feature are the eyes that cover his body. Each is fully functional with a black iris and eyelids (but no lashes). Notable eyes appear directly under his original pair, on his throat and the back of his neck, on his right palm, and on his chest (due to his top surgery). Others are scattered elsewhere on his body at random. Aside from the eyes on his face, Augustin—curiously enough—covers up these extra organs with layers of clothes.

Fashion-wise, Augustin can be seen most often in a pair of tight black pants, a white shirt (buttoned), and his signature black coat. He wears boots while on duty. He is almost never found without his large rounded glasses, which have nonfunctional lenses. He is known to wear bindi.

Personality
Augustin is stubborn, strong-willed, and somewhat hard to get along with. He focuses single-mindedly on the things he views as important, such as his job as lookout, and neglects the things he views as unimportant, such as rest and hydration. Despite his claims of omniscience, he can be comically unobservant, especially when it comes to matters of emotion. The near-infinite amounts of knowledge flowing through his head often leave him distracted, prone to spacing out, and generally muddled during otherwise normal conversation; though it's unclear how much of this is due to Beholding and how much is due to his own struggles with mental illness.

He is plagued with paranoia and suspicion, and finds it difficult to trust the intentions of those around him.

He is known to be blunt to the point of rudeness, often making disparaging remarks to his crewmates with the intention of being honest about his feelings towards them. However, he also covers up feelings of affection and attraction with insults, as seen in his early relationship with Micah and Clancy. He expresses most emotions loudly and freely, having almost no filter; he also struggles with volume control, yelling when excited or agitated with little awareness of how loud he's being. He has shown trouble with grasping sarcasm and jokes in the past, expressing confusion when others make clearly sarcastic remarks or taking jokes at their face value. This can translate to telling jokes as well, where he quickly clarifies that he is joking immediately after making one, instead of using traditional tone tags.

Mental Health
Though it went undiagnosed in his own time period, Augustin has schizophrenia, and experiences delusions, hallucinations, and intense paranoia. Due to psychotic disorders not being common knowledge in the 1800s, he was unaware of the root of his issues for a long time, and after becoming an avatar either blamed his symptoms on the Spiral messing with his mind or viewed them as real manifestations of Beholding. Like many people with schizophrenia, he hears voices which remark on his activities or say upsetting things to him; names which he's ascribed to these voices include CJ, Leaf, Jane, and Steven.

Examples of the delusions experienced by Augustin on a regular basis include [cw: unreality]:


 * the voices in his head are gods who control him and his friends;
 * his world isn't real, whether this is because he is a fictional character or a prisoner of the Spiral;
 * he can hear people's thoughts;
 * the people around him are plotting to hurt him or are watching him.

In addition to this, he holds an intense fear of the people around him being replaced by inhuman imitations. His connection to Beholding theoretically gives him insight into the true natures of his crewmates, though this seems to reassure him little; he still shows suspicion for crewmembers that he believes to be acting "off," and held the belief for many decades that both Gall and Eli were decoys sent by their respective entities to toy with him.

Due to being labelled a madman after killing an aspect of the Stranger, he has shown an aggressive and defensive attitude when questioned about his mental health, insisting on multiple occasions that, "I'm not insane!!!" Unfortunately, this also means that he was resistant to seeking help for multiple decades, as he could not handle admitting that some of his experiences and beliefs weren't "real."

His diagnosis stays consistent throughout AUs, though the ways in which his symptoms manifest are tailored to certain universes.

Phoenix Crew
Augustin had a difficult relationship with almost every member of the crew upon first joining. His paranoid, stand-offish nature prevented him from being vulnerable around his crewmates, and his propensity to insult them and their entities did him no favors in their eyes. However, these walls have lowered over the years, leading him to a place in his life where he's comfortable calling the crew his family (though, as he points out, family is still allowed to get on one's nerves from time to time).

He is engaged in romantic relationships with many members of the crew, including:


 * Hezekiah Hill, with whom he bonded over a shared interest in astronomy and spying on the ship's previous captain;
 * Micah Lukas, with whom he had an adversarial relationship until realizing his true feelings;
 * Poemä Morrisey, a fellow himbo and murderer-on-the-run;
 * Zachariah Gall, who he came to trust despite his fear of the Stranger.

His relationship with Clancy Blake remains contentious; though the two have kissed and exchanged mutual confessions of attraction in secret, Clancy is not yet comfortable with relaying this information to the rest of the crew, so they have decided to take it slow for the time being.

Other notable relationships include those he views as threats to himself, including:


 * Eli Whitbeck, horrid creature of the Spiral and danger to the crew whose entity he is terrified of;
 * Joshua Galen, who he distrusts and finds disgusting due to their entity;
 * Cook, whose culinary inclinations gross him out and who he stays awake watching for;
 * Lyon Morcant Wight, who reminds him far too much of himself for his liking.

He had a previously adversarial relationship with Miriam, mostly due to his lack of skill with children.

The crewmembers which he views as his friends are as follows:


 * Kailani Amara, to whom the title of best friend is often applied, and who fills this role in many major AUs;
 * Henrique Thiago Machado, another best friend, whose romantic feelings he remains unaware of;
 * Clarence Bateman, a drinking partner and damn good kisser.

He and Jack Huntley, while interacting little, share a similar love of self-made chaos and connection to the Hunt, and are on amicable terms.

Other
Despite viewing the Eye as the superior entity and often wishing that his crewmates served it as well, in practice he shows a hostility and resentment towards other Beholding avatars that he meets. He harbors a particular animosity for Jonah Magnus, who is he views as a white-boy hack who cheated his way into his position as the Eye's disciple, and August Blakewell, who he dislikes for reasons of jealousy.

He has a sister, Katyayani Choudhary, with whom he was close as a child. He is unaware that she continued to live on as a Hunt avatar long after the rest of their family had died, and it is unknown whether the two will ever see each other again.

Backstory
Augustin was born as the eldest daughter to Mahadev and Aditi Choudhary in Varanasi, India, in 1802. His family had considerable wealth and status in the city, and he had a relatively comfortable childhood, where he helped care for his younger sisters alongside his mother. At the age of 16, however, tragedy struck when his mother fell ill, and though attempts were made to ease her suffering, she eventually succumbed to this illness. Augustin, realizing on his mother's deathbed that the life as a mother and wife was one he didn't want for himself, fled the home with only a few possessions of his own, including several pieces of Aditi's jewelry. After stealing a pair of men's clothes and talking his way aboard a merchant vessel, he left the country and started a new life for himself as a sailor. He would remain on the seas for the rest of his adult life.

At the age of 19, Augustin began experiencing symptoms of psychosis: he saw figures at the corner of his vision that weren't really there, he believed that his crewmates were planning to harm him, and he heard voices that others could not. Frightened of these occurrences and not understanding them, he kept mainly to himself about his experiences, though from that moment on he struggled to connect with and trust the crews with which he sailed. Consequently, he ended up spending only a few years with each crew before finding a new, "safer" vessel to sail on.

At the age of 26, Augustin was employed on a merchant ship alongside sailors of varied backgrounds, with whom he had been sailing for several years. One night, when the crew reconvened after spending time ashore in a port town, he noticed something was wrong with the ship's medic: though he appeared almost identical to how he'd been before, his eyes had been replaced with uncanny, unseeing glass replicas. Uncertain of the reality of this observation, Augustin kept his distance and closely scrutinized the man in the following days, only to come to the conclusion that something had indeed taken the place of his crewmate. Though he tried to inform the rest of the crew of this, no one believed him, treating him with skepticism and concern whenever he spoke of it. Fearing the intent of the imposter, Augustin started sleeping less and slipped further into paranoia and panic over the weeks, becoming visibly unwell as he locked himself in his cabin, avoided the medic at all costs, skipped meals, and neglected his duties on deck. His auditory and visual hallucinations increased in frequency and intensity as time went on, putting further strain on his mind. A month and a half of constant stress and paranoia culminated in a week wherein he received no sleep at all, and, upon seeing the not-medic on deck while at his post one night, confronted the creature. [cw: violence] This encounter ended with Augustin killing the thing with his bare hands, cracking open its skull upon the deck and gouging out its eyes - discovering, in the process, that he was right, and they were naught but glass.

Unfortunately for Augustin, when a crewmate stumbled onto this scene and found him laughing hysterically over a dead body with what appeared to be human eyes clutched in his hands, it didn't end well.

He was imprisoned in the brig until the ship reached shore, whereupon he escaped through unknown means while being transported off deck. In the weeks that followed, Augustin travelled from town to town, keeping a low profile even as wanted posters with his face on them began to crop up. At some point after his escape, he encountered a Beholding avatar in a local bar who ripped his statement about the not-medic from him in what he viewed as a violating and traumatic experience. After the Beholder idly threatened to turn him in should he not run along, Augustin attacked the man, and the two got into a brutal fight. [cw: violence, eye trauma] The Beholder wounded Augustin with a broken bottle while attempting to stab out his eyes, leaving him with two twin gashes above his cheeks, but Augustin managed to gain the upper hand in the fight and break the Beholder's neck. When this failed to kill him, Augustin snapped and used the broken bottle to mutilate the man's face beyond recognition and destroy his eyes, which finally put an end to him.

Augustin had had ties to Beholding before this incident, mainly through his collection of knowledge, habit of obsessively observing his crewmates, and fear of being watched, but this event is what solidified him into a Beholding avatar. It is unknown whether a transfer of power occurred as Augustin took the Beholder's life, or whether Beholding simply chose this time to grant him a place as its avatar, but either way, his transformation had begun. After this incident, the wounds he had accrued in the fight began to itch and throb with an unnatural ache, and he caught snippets of knowledge and sight that he thought impossible. Believing he was losing his mind, he viewed the eyes that grew from his skin as hallucinations, or thought himself to be deluded when his mind opened and told him of gods beyond his world that touched and shaped humanity's nightmares. Notably, he even tried to [cw: self-harm] exorcise the new growths from himself despite the futility of it; whenever he removed an eye, the wound left behind in its place would grow one anew.

Eventually, Augustin came to accept the reality of the fears and became a fully-fledged Beholding avatar, though the abundance of knowledge and sight that was forced upon him only shattered his broken psyche further.

He joined the crew while the Magnus was docked in port, applying upfront to be lookout because he sensed the presence of other avatars nearby.

He still has the Stranger's eyes.

Powers

 * Delayed Aging: Augustin became an avatar at the age of 26, and has not shown any physical signs of aging since. It is unlikely that he will continue to age while he remains an avatar.
 * Near-Infinite Knowledge: Through his connection to the Eye, Augustin can call upon any piece of information he wishes at any time, so long as Beholding is willing to gift it to him. This extends to knowledge of other people's lives, traumas, and thoughts, with exceptions for certain beings of the Dark, Stranger, Spiral, etc.
 * Compulsion: Like Jonathan Sims after him, Augustin can compel others to answer his questions or to tell him the truth.
 * Eye See You: Augustin can use his powers to see out of any depiction, painting, or carving of an eye, and can tap into the sight of other beings. It is as of yet unknown the range to which this extends, though he has expressed being able to see "everything" on more than one occasion.
 * Supernatural Stamina: Augustin has shown himself capable of going without food, sleep, and water for far longer than a normal human, although he is not immune to the effects of sleep deprivation. Like most avatars, he can also survive injuries that would otherwise be fatal.
 * You Wanna Know How I Got These Scars?: Whenever Augustin's skin is broken, in lieu of the normal healing process, an eye begins to grow underneath his skin and eventually pushes out of the wound. Each of these eyes is fully capable of normal motion and sight, and eyelids develop alongside them. The exception to this last fact are the eyes located within his organs, which never close.
 * Augustin has expressed that one way to kill him would be to leave him without any of his eyes. However, because it has been shown that the eyes regenerate at a startling pace when removed, this task is more difficult than it may first appear.
 * Telepathic Teacher: Augustin can place knowledge within one or multiple people's heads, allowing (or forcing) them to capital-K know certain facts. Vitally, the information that he shares must be true and gifted to him by Beholding.
 * He is also able to share his sight with others, though he must be touching them to do so.
 * Mind-reading: Alongside his ability to Know a person's intentions, Augustin is aware at a base level of the thoughts of the people around him. Though not excessively distracting unless he focuses on them, this can, understandably, lead him to snap at crewmembers to "stop thinking so loud."
 *  Knowledge of the Fourth Wall:  Once again because of his ties to Beholding, Augustin is aware that he is a fictional character, and upon occasion hears the voices of the TMA fans who created the crew.

Trivia

 * Augustin, stop editing the Powers section. We can all see it, and whatever Beholding bullshit you did to prevent me from deleting your edits is getting annoying. Just take your meds.
 * Augustin in the cruise ship era and in certain AUs is on Risperdal, a second-generation antipsychotic.
 * Augustin was multilingual before joining the Eye. His first four languages were, in order: Hindi, Bhojpuri, French, and English; he speaks the latter two with a noticeable Indian accent.
 * Due to his Hindu upbringing, he doesn't eat beef. He also refuses to eat his crewmembers' organs, though this is likely unrelated to religion.
 * Of all the other entities, he shows most animosity for the Stranger and the Spiral, respectively. He seems to regard all entities other than the Eye as lesser, showing little fondness for even the ones his boyfriends serve.
 * Though he has few hobbies in canon, Augustin in many modern AUs is a great fan of (and master in) chess.
 * He bears a noticeable resemblance to his mother, Aditi, especially before his transition.
 * Compared to many other crewmembers, Augustin is near-obsessive about his hygiene and cleanliness; he washes himself and his clothes far more often than a normal sailor, and uses oils in his hair to keep it lustrous and strong.
 * Though he has little occasion to show it off, he is an excellent cook.
 * He has ADHD and autism, and often stims by messing with his braid or worrying at the edges and buttons of his coat. He is known to slap his palm against flat surfaces or his own thighs when excited/agitated, and can often be found vocal stimming by repeating phrases to himself or singing out loud.
 * He is ambidextrous.
 * A theoretical Augustin Leitner would take the form of a personal journal wherein Augustin has jotted down extensive ramblings about his beliefs, descriptions of his hallucinations, and transcripts of the voices he hears. As one reads these accounts, they slowly begin to take root in the reader's mind, until the reader too believes in these delusions and experiences Augustin's intense paranoia. It is connected not to the Eye, but the Spiral.
 * After finishing reading the journal, the victim of this Leitner will believe it to be theirs; it contains all of their experiences, after all, and they must just have forgotten penning it. They may attempt to continue the writings, though whether their account will have the same effect as the rest of the journal is unclear.
 * Since Augustin preferred to keep his distance from others in order to hide his trans nature, he always took up jobs as a rigger or lookout while human. His hands are rough and calloused from a lifetime spent scaling ropes.
 * In the canon of the Eeby Deeby, the event that spurred him to accept that he needed help was being physically removed from his dysfunctional mind and placed into another crewmember's body, then hearing that crewmember express his own delusional beliefs.
 * Augustin's family were Shaivites. Ardhanarishvara, the half-male half-female fusion of Shiva and Shakti, remains important to him as a trans Hindu.
 * In canon and in several AUs, he is trained in Kathak, a traditional Northern Indian form of dance.
 * He has expressed the ability to "hear colors" on more than one occasion. It is unclear whether this was merely the sleep deprivation talking, but is possible that he experiences some form of synesthesia.
 * Augustin is greyromantic. Though he experiences romantic attraction, he struggles with properly identifying these feelings or distinguishing them from platonic affection, and would generally be content if many of his romantic relationships stayed close platonic ones.
 * Because he is trans and has not chosen one, he has no middle name.