Vincent Law

PLAYER INFO.

✖ Handle: Mishi
✖ Contact: plurk: mishisings
✖ Are You Over 16: yep!
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: none

CHARACTER INFO.

✖ Character Name: Law, Vincent, also known as Ergo Proxy
✖ Canon: Ergo Proxy, post-canon
✖ Character Appearance: Link or embed an image of your character's appearance.
✖ Character Age: Indeterminable. Assuming it was Proxy One who built Romdeau, assuming Romdeau counts years from the date of its founding, assuming Vincent isn't younger than he looks, the most I can narrow it down is anywhere between 300 and 20 years old. And none of those assumptions are safe bets. More to the point, Vincent himself can't know. Physically, he appears to be in his early 20s.
✖ Pick A Number: 301 and 13

✖ Canon Setting:

Ergo Proxy is a story about the end of the world. Really, truly the end of the world. Earth has already been a post-apocalyptic wasteland for over 5000 years, but now the domes are finally collapsing. The action follows Vincent Law escaping Romdeau Dome in search of his past, while those left behind witness the progressive ruin of their home, the last bastion of civilization. Vincent travels with Pino, a child robot with a soul, and later with Re-L Mayer, love of his life and HBIC extraordinaire, while the home front is held by Daedalus Yumeno, Chief of the Health and Welfare Bureau, Raul Creed, Chief of the Security Bureau, and a collection of Descartes-quoting robots built in the likenesses of the statues decorating Lorenzo de Medici's tomb. (These robots are referred to as the Collective. Sadly, they are not Borg.)

Earth is an environmental ruin almost beyond repair, scarcely inhabitable to humans. The sky is perpetually overcast, everything is grey and lifeless. And there are no true human inhabitants. Humanity took to the stars long ago, but before it did, it left behind 300 proxies, immortal, godlike beings tasked with safeguarding the Earth until their return. The proxies were to build domes and populate them with new humans, or robots (called AutoReivs). But these new humans were flawed. They were sterile, because the information that the proxies received from their Creators was incomplete. But that's not all.

The real cruelty of the Proxy Project is that the Creators built self-destruct mechanisms into their experiment. Proxy One, first and most powerful of the proxies, was given the title of Agent of Death and designed with an extra ability called the Pulse of the Awakening, also referred to as the Proxy Annihilation Program. In short, once this ability was unleashed, proxies would turn on each other, destroy one another the moment they came into contact. Proxies were the key to the survival of the new humans, so with the proxies gone, the people would follow, and all of their work would be annihilated. The answer seems simple, doesn't it? If every proxy stayed at home, they wouldn't have to destroy each other, right? Unfortunately, the Creators had thought of that too. Proxies are vulnerable to sunlight. When the environment was viable again, the clouds would part and they would all die anyway, thus leaving the Earth nice and uninhabited to make way for the return of the Creators.

Cheerful, is it not? It gets worse.

Life outside the domes is nearly impossible. Most new humans exposed to the polluted air don't survive. The ones that do can only live by scavenging from the waste of the domes. Life is nasty, brutish and short. (See Ergo Proxy, I can quote philosophers too!) Life inside the domes... well, each Dome was built and ruled by its own Proxy, and most were in various stages of ruin when Vincent came across them in the show, so I'll settle for describing Romdeau Dome.

Romdeau Dome was built by Proxy One, and was a busy futuristic metropolis governed by a man called the Regent. It seemed peaceful and prosperous, but was actually very tightly controlled. Most citizens owned at least one AutoReiv, which was connected to the global information network and could be used to track and observe its owner if necessary. It was not usually necessary, because, these people being sterile, every citizen was conceived in machines called WombSys, with which one could control and monitor every aspect of the process. Each citizen was created for a purpose; Daedalus and Raul were specifically engineered to hold the positions they hold. The only individuals who did not fit rigidly into this mold were the immigrants. A few years prior to the events of the series, Romdeau attacked Mosque Dome. (Ergo Proxy is frustratingly vague about time, see my fuzzy response to the question of just how old Vincent is, so I'm not sure how many years. Could be as many as 15, could be as few as 2, who the hell knows?) Vincent seemed to believe the destruction of Mosque Dome was an accident, so it appears the survivors didn't know it was Romdeau that was responsible, and they turned to Romdeau for help. Immigrants from Mosque were viewed as second-class citizens, and given dangerous or undesirable jobs and crappy housing in the worst parts of the city. An immigrant could apply for full citizenship, but the process was a long and difficult one. There did not seem to be much room for error.

Fellow citizens were expected to maintain tight control of their emotions at all times, even if they had just been attacked in their own home by a monster, or witnessed the sudden, violent death of their wife and infant son. (Yes, these things happened.) They were expected to obey the law without question. Public service announcements urged citizens to consume and make waste. Most people depended quite heavily on their AutoReiv entourage. This became a problem when the Cogito Virus began to spread and more and more AutoReivs turned homicidal. (The Cogito Virus was a computer virus designed to give sentience to AutoReivs, so that they could replace their masters if anything befell the new humans. The robots turned against humans because Cogito-infected AutoReivs know they'll be dismantled.) You'd see people signing their tables because they expected their entourage to give them papers to sign off on, like a printer running with no ink... but I'm getting ahead of myself. For the most part, although Romdeau's rulers like to throw around existential buzzwords, the people of Romdeau were kept in soporific ignorance. They knew little of the Creators, less of the world outside the domes, and nothing at all about the Proxies on whom they depended. Those few who were privy to the truth often became bitter and jaded in peculiar ways. It is for this reason that no Chief of Security, who by virtue of his duties may sometimes come across those terrible secrets, has ever lasted very long. Those who misbehaved or became enlightened soon found that they no longer had a place, and every one of the main characters in this story sooner or later becomes enlightened. Or misbehaves. One is usually a consequence of the other.

One last thing: every proxy has mind powers. They are able to send dreams to anyone with a soul, or create waking illusions, or go into a person's mind and make them believe they're a kumquat. (Not that anyone ever does that last one, but it would be within the realm of possibility.) This wouldn't be that big a cause for concern, except that Ergo Proxy delights in mind-screw episodes, and as the main character and an amnesiac confused about his own identity, Vincent is a prime target for some seriously surreal shit. As a result, it's sometimes difficult to determine what actually happened and what was just in someone's head. You'll notice I use a lot of maybes and apparentlys and I apologize for that. I'm doing the best I can to interpret things in a way that makes sense when what I have to deal with is an anime that threw the characters into a gameshow with no warning and no explanation, where characters go off on tangents about the meaning of the word 'bios' that have no evident bearing on the plot while in another episode an android dreams about cartoon dogs. Thankfully I don't have to cover the dogs because that wasn't Vincent's dream for once, but you see my point.

✖ Character History:

Once upon a time, Proxy One grew bitter about the cruel and ultimately pointless duty he was tasked with. His lover, Proxy Monad, who ruled the faraway dome of Mosque, tried to comfort him, and he found some solace in her, but eventually he could bear it no longer and sought to escape his fate. So he created a clone of himself, Ergo Proxy. He gave his entire life to Ergo, from the care of Romdeau dome to his title of Agent of Death to his very memories, and even his relationship with Monad. And then he disappeared, leaving his poor clone holding the entire bag in his hapless claws. Monad's reaction to this switcheroo is never explored, but she loved Ergo too, and apparently didn't tell him he wasn't the original. Unfortunately, after an unspecified period of time, Ergo fell into the same despair as his progenitor, and went to Mosque to see Monad and ask her help in erasing his own memories in his own attempt to escape.

In retrospect Proxy One should have seen this coming. Ergo Proxy was created to be essentially identical to him; what made him think that Ergo would be any more equipped to deal with the tragedy of the Proxies' existence than he was? In fact, Ergo was less so. It wasn't enough for him merely to give his duty to someone else, he could no longer bear the mere knowledge of the Creator's sins. At any rate, it was Ergo Proxy's abdication that set in motion most of the events of the anime. In retaliation for 'stealing Ergo away', Romdeau, led by its Regent Donov Mayer, destroyed Mosque and captured Monad. Some time after that, Re-L Mayer was born. Though she was raised as the Regent's granddaughter, she was in fact created in the image of Monad as bait to lure Ergo home. This both worked exactly as expected, and was pointless.

Upon losing his memory, Ergo Proxy became Vincent Law. After the 'disaster' in Mosque, this seemingly human nobody made the journey to Romdeau among all the other survivors of Mosque, and was registered as an immigrant along with the rest. No one had any idea that he was anything other than an ordinary man, and despite having precious few memories to draw upon, Vincent never doubted it himself. Thus Ergo Proxy returned home without anyone realizing, rendering the purpose of Re-L's creation irrelevant. But it worked pathetically, embarrassingly well. Vincent would first cross paths with Re-L while he was looking for work in the temporary immigrant section. Despite not remembering a blessed thing about Monad or anything else of his former life, never suspecting that she was meant to provoke this reaction in him, he fell completely in love with her at first sight.

During the next few years Vincent worked hard at becoming a fellow citizen; suppressing his emotions, keeping his head down. Always obeying the law, never asking questions. He got a job in an AutoReiv Disposal Unit, destroying Cogito-infected AutoReivs. He tried to be the person he thought they expected a fellow citizen to be. We get a peek at his profile in an early episode: it says his case would come up for review in 998 days and in the first episode Dorothy (Vincent's AutoReiv entourage) says that his hearing is going to be soon, so Vincent spent at least two years trying to become a fellow citizen. It may have been longer; we're never given a good picture of the usual process for becoming a fellow citizen. Possibly promotions are involved, but Vincent would never get one. Not that he wouldn't have earned one, but because the system was designed to reject him, or because he wasn't truly the docile, unthinking sheep they expected him to be.

In the first episode, the Pulse of the Awakening was activated within Proxy One. It was a literal awakening for Monad Proxy, who was mutilated almost beyond recognition at the behest of Donov Mayer, and kept dormant with sedatives in Daedalus Yumeno's care. She effortlessly broke from her restraints and escaped. For Vincent, the effects would be less obvious. He was out chasing an infected AutoReiv that night when his vehicle caught the Cogito virus and nearly killed him. It's this incident that leads him to cross pathes with Re-L once again. Re-L was looking into Cogito-infected AutoReivs as well, specifically, a series of murders believed to have been committed by AutoReivs, and asked for information about the previous night's events.

After that, he was sent after another infected AutoReiv, and the course of his pursuit took him near Re-L's appartment that evening. There Vincent's memory had a hole. When Ergo erased his memory and created the Vincent Law persona, he ended up giving himself a split personality. Vincent couldn't know he was a Proxy, so whenever he switched from human form to proxy form, he also stopped being Vincent Law, and resumed being Ergo Proxy. Not that Ergo at this point knew his own name, or that he was a proxy, or even what a proxy was. He was mostly a bundle of proxy instincts and subconscious desires, in other words, the inhuman parts of Vincent that he could not afford to acknowledge. So when Vincent blacked out that night, Ergo Proxy took over. He had seen Re-L, and she looked familiar to him, though he couldn't remember why... so he fell through the roof of her apartment. The two stared at each other but Ergo did nothing but run a thumb on her lips. It was at this moment that Monad Proxy decided to crash the party. The Pulse of the Awakening was in effect, so even though she used to be his lover, she was nevertheless compelled to kill him, although I imagine that even if this was not the case, she'd still be pretty angry to catch her man macking on a younger clone of herself. In any case, both proxies jumped out of Re-L's appartment, and that was the last Re-L saw of them that night.

The next morning, Vincent Law was found unconscious a short distance away from her apartment, and Monad was nowhere in the area. But she wasn't done with him. She caught up with him in a shopping center, and chased him through the crowd, killing everyone who got in her way. As he passed by an escalator, a woman and her infant son died at Monad's hands. Out of the corner of his eye, Vincent spotted the woman's child-type AutoReiv, Pino, falling to her knees and praying, as AutoReivs do when they are first infected with the Cogito Virus. Monad cornered Vincent in the lower districts of Romdeau and it was at this point that Ergo Proxy killed her. Vincent later woke up on the metro with blood on his hands and no memory of turning into Ergo and killing Monad.

Now, both Re-L and Raul Creed, Romdeau's newly minted Security Chief, were investigating proxies, Re-L because being having her apartment trashed and her face touched by a monster raised questions she wanted answered, and Raul because it was his job, and because that woman and her baby were his wife and son. Because Raul had seen Vincent pass by his family and indirectly cause their deaths, and because Re-L had found something that belonged to Vincent in her apartment, they both set their sights on capturing, or at least interrogating him. Vincent got a call from Dorothy, and when he returned to the AutoReiv Disposal offices, he found that she had been destroyed, and nearly got killed by Romdeau security forces. Raul was especially upset, and had framed him for the destruction of his Entourage as a pretext for his arrest.

Panicked, Vincent packed a few essentials and managed to evade capture long enough to make his way to the service tunnels. There he ran into Pino, who was herself on the run from an AutoReiv Disposal squad. Pino led him down a path that, it appeared, only infected AutoReivs knew about, specifically, to an airlock that led outside the Dome. Meanwhile, Re-L had been trying to reach Vincent's cell phone, but he had been busy dodging security guys. She eventually reached him, and he begged for her help. Re-L promised him she would do everything in her power to help him, and managed to figure out where he was. But she only beat the Security Bureau by a few minutes. Before they could effect an arrest, Pino opened the airlock, and the force of the wind sucked her, Re-L, and Vincent outside. Re-L was saved by her Entourage, Iggy, but Vincent could only hang onto the railing. As he looked down into the abyss, he reflected that the last couple of days had demonstrated just how huge a failure he was. He had tried so hard to become a fellow citizen, got nowhere, and though he hadn't done anything wrong, Romdeau repayed him by treating him like a criminal. His despair was such that he deliberately let go and fell to the surface. Pino followed him.

Vincent thought that would be the end of him, but a proxy doesn't die from a mere fall. Nor did he die of the illness he suffered from breathing the poisonous air of the world outside Romdeau for the first time, although it did keep him bedridden and feverish for ten days. He was taken in by a man called Hoody, the de facto leader of a commune composed of exiles from Romdeau, most of whom were old men and women. Vince and Pino stayed in the commune for a while during which he recovered and tried to figure out what to do next, but fate wouldn't let him rest for long. An automated scout vehicle from Romdeau spied Pino while on its regular patrol. It would have killed her if Vincent hadn't shot it down first. Before it crashed to the ground, it managed to broadcast its last few seconds of video footage to its masters at the Security Bureau. Thus the people of Romdeau learned of the fugitive immigrant's survival, and of the existence of the commune.

Re-L enlisted Daedalus' help to retrieve Vincent. As it was forbidden for anyone to leave the dome, she had to do this illegally. Raul meanwhile had ordered an attack on the commune. It was while Re-L was arguing with Hoody about Vincent's return that the attack began. She tried to drag Vincent away, but he refused to leave when the members of the commune were endangered. The attacking patrol crafts damaged Re-L's hazmat suit in the ensuing confrontation. The only way she could move was by discarding the suit, but once exposed to the outside air, she succumbed to illness and she did not have the advantage of a Proxy's immune system. She would have to be returned to Romdeau in order to survive. While Hoody used her ship to ferry her back to Romdeau, Vincent, Pino, and the surviving refugees escaped the commune on Hoody's airship, the 400 Rabbits, or Centzon Totochtin, depending on who you ask. (Vincent calls it the Centzon, Pino calls it the Rabbit.)

Now Vincent throughout all this had mostly taken a WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME, I AM SO PERSECUTED attitude. But what with the black-outs he'd been having whenever he turned into Ergo Proxy, and the strange dreams of stars shooting into the sky, he was clueing in to the fact that not all was quite right with him. And after both Re-L and the Security Bureau had tracked him to the commune, he figured he had better find out just who he was soon, before he endangered anyone else. Having nowhere to go and no better destination in mind, Vincent and his companions set a course for Mosque, the place he believed to be his homeland, and, perhaps, the place where he would find some answers to his questions. It bears repeating that all of his human companions were old and frail, so none of them were able to survive past the next episode. Naturally, seeing everyone around him dropping like flies got Vincent all depressed and he spent the next episode whining about how alone he was and indulging in grimdark narration while Re-L and Daedalus and Raul furthered the plot back in Romdeau. Even if he wasn't alone at all. What was Pino, chopped liver?

They sailed in the darkness for so long Vincent had run out of food, when Pino spotted a beam of light in the distance. They sailed toward it and ran smack in the middle of a raging battle between a group of human soldiers and a platoon of AutoReivs. The soldiers picked them up and took them to their base in the ruins of Karos dome, where they fed Vincent and offered to repair the 400 Rabbits, which had gotten damaged in the attack. They also expected Vincent to offer his assistance with their war against the AutoReivs from Asura. Vincent realized how much more agreeable Pino was in comparison to these men who were drafting him into a pointless conflict and immediately regretted his AutoReiv-dismissing ways. He was all for grabbing Pino and getting the hell out of there as soon as his ship was repaired, but as Karos was a dome, it contained a proxy, whom the Pulse of the Awakening had roused from a centuries-long sleep. She killed a couple of soldiers. Their leaders, having not witnessed the deaths of their men, and not believing the legends about a monster who sleeps underground, blamed Vincent and locked him and Pino up. The cell next to them contained a madwoman who rambled cryptically about [rewatch that episode] in a cell next to one of those pertinent madwomen, the type that spout nothing but the most cryptic and foreshadowy nonsense. As she babbled, Vincent began to feel anxious and frightened; he was feeling the Pulse of the Awakening as the other proxy drew nearer. After slaughtering most of the soldiers, the other proxy finally made her move on Vincent, but he turned into Ergo Proxy and fought back. He killed her easily, and then fell unconscious.

Then a fancy-looking man brought Vincent, Pino, and the 400 Rabbits as well, to Asura Dome. Vincent was quite surprised to wake up in opulent surroundings and be wined and dined by a man who seemed completely unconcerned about the war that had been raging between the men from Karos and the AutoReivs from Asura, despite claiming to be Asura's master. The man's name was Kazkis, and he would turn out to be a proxy. The proxy Vincent had killed in the last episode was called Senex, and she and Kazkis were lovers. But Kazkis, initially, didn't seem particularly upset at his lover's death. He practically declared his love for Vincent... but when he realized that Vincent didn't remember killing Senex or even who he used to be, that was when Kazkis became frantic. He didn't blame Ergo Proxy for carrying out his duty as the Agent of Death and acting as the Pulse of the Awakening dictated, but Vincent Law, the coward who had run away not only from his duty but also from his memories and his very self deserved no forgiveness. He chased Vincent halfway across the dome, badgering him about being a Proxy and running away from his duty while the hapless wanderer denied the truth in vain. Eventually Vincent had to stop running and fight back and this was the first time he was aware when he once again involuntarily switched to Proxy form. The process looked painful and traumatic, and this fight was much more evenly matched. But Ergo did kill Kazkis at last, and as he was dying, Kazkis asked Ergo one last time: "What are you the agent of?" And Ergo finally remembered his name: Ergo Proxy, the agent of Death. After Kazkis was dead, and Vincent and Pino were sailing away from Asura, she told him she knew all along that there were 'two of him'. And that she wasn't afraid, because Vincent was the one who always protected her.

You'd think Vincent wouldn't have to learn his lesson more than once, but you'd be wrong. In the next episode featuring him, Vincent stumbled across a bookstore in the middle of nowhere, he was looking for Pino and for the 400 Rabbits, and he decided to stop to ask for directions. The bookstore owner sat him down and made him tea, and encouraged him to take a look at one of the books, which had Vincent's name on the cover. At this point, the clerk snapped his fingers and addressed the audience directly to explain to us that we were in "the theatre of Vincent's mind". Then someone who looked just like Ergo Proxy/Proxy One went on about perspective and Descartes and the Pulse of the Awakening and took Vincent back through his own recent memories, the ones with relevance to his existence as a proxy. This was probably Proxy One, sick of his wayward progeny swimming headlong up denial, deciding to use his mind powers to hurry Vincent's epiphany along. "WHO WAS VINCENT LAW, WHAT WAS HE AFRAID OF? WHAT DROVE HIM TO ERASE HIS OWN MEMORY?" (This episode is hells of pretentious and meta it's kind of embarrassing.) Whereas the incident with Kazkis had confronted Vincent with incontrovertible proof of his being a proxy, this episode was dedicated to Vincent's actually coming to terms with the fact that he was a proxy. And then Re-L found him laying on the ground crying because of this revelation. At first he thought this was a dream too, but as it turned out, Re-L actually was there. She insisted on him telling her everything he knew about Proxies, but since he had only just realized he was one himself, he didn't have much else to tell her.

Now, Re-L had brought with her a gun loaded with special bullets called FP shells, given to her by Daedalus, which were made to kill Proxies. She snuck up on Vincent while he slept and contemplated shooting him - she was having a hard time believing that Vincent was a Proxy, and since the shells were harmless to humans... Ultimately she wasn't reckless enough to go through with it. Instead she sat down beside him and started talking about how she had followed him all this way and how she felt 'strangely drawn' to him, so he got the wrong idea. He pulled her down with him, which knocked the gun out of her hand. He was busy awkwardly confessing his love to her, and hadn't noticed it yet. Re-L decided the best way to keep him distracted was to kiss him, while using her foot to kick the gun out of sight. After the kiss they just sort of stared at one another. It was incredibly awkward and they never spoke of it again.

Later on, they ran into a Proxy and an infected AutoReiv. Vincent went Ergo and while they were locked in combat, Re-L took her opportunity to shoot the other Proxy. She told Vincent that one day she would kill him too, and could he still love her knowing that? Spoiler: Yes. He's that much of a schmuck. Re-L decided she was going to travel with Vincent and Pino, and ordered Iggy to take the Proxy's body back to Romdeau with him. Little did she know that Iggy had been infected with the Cogito Virus ages ago and decided to kill Vincent and kidnap her instead, since he figured she'd be safer in Romdeau than with a monster. To this end he swiped her gun and succeeded in imprisoning her, but the dead Proxy's AutoReiv tried to kill her. In the end he sacrificed himself for his selfish mistress's sake. Vincent, who had taken the gun back from Iggy when he tried to kill him, gave it back to Re-L to show her that he trusted her, and trusted her to kill him if it ever became necessary.

After burying Iggy, they made a stop in Ophelia dome to gather supplies. It was completely deserted, though they found a supermarket that was still completely stocked. The reason it was deserted was that all of its inhabitants had been killed by a shapeshifting proxy. It tried to kill Vincent and Re-L and Pino, and turn them against eachother, and pretend to be Vincent and convince him he was suicidal, not necessarily in that order. Pino and Re-L caught on first, and Vincent managed to defeat it by realizing that he did want to live after all. In the next episode, don't ask me how, they got sucked into this gameshow run by a Proxy called MCQ. Most of the questions had to do with the Proxy Project; this was also the first time Proxy One was directly referred to in the show. Vincent won the game, and MCQ seemed thrilled to die. I'm inclined to think this episode actually happened because the show was broadcast to Romdeau and Daedalus and Raul both saw it.

Then they were becalmed for a few days and Vincent and Pino took it easy while Re-L went stir-crazy, and when the wind picked up they arrived at a cave system populated by Morlocks who were allergic to fresh air. On their way out the spotted a missile flying in the direction of Mosque, and when they got there, Mosque was pretty much annihilated. Vincent found an old room with a broken AutoReiv that was supposed to be the guardian of his memory; but something had clearly been there not long before and trashed the place so that Vincent would not be able to learn anything there. That, though they didn't know it, was Proxy One, who took care to leave a clue that Vincent would find what he was looking for back in Romdeau. So after all that, they finally turned around and set a course back to Romdeau.

On the way back, they came near a dome called Smile Land as Pino was recharging her batteries (which was her equivalent of sleeping). Smile Land's proxy sent her a dream to warn her and her companions away from his home, since he knew the end was coming, but didn't want to fight Ergo. He wanted his citizen's deaths to be peaceful. Pino succeeded in convincing Vincent to navigate away from Smile Land and they went on their way.

As they neared Romdeau dome, Vincent's mind was once again attacked by a proxy. This one tried to convince him that he was a fragment of Re-L's imagination, conjured by her guilt at betraying him. The scenario she presented was one where, on their return to Romdeau, Re-L allowed Vincent to be recaptured. She posed as Re-L's therapist, Swan, and told Vincent that for Re-L's own good, he would have to be removed from her consciousness. First she asked Vincent to imagine his ideal life (which was so embarrassingly banal, but more on that in the personality section), then she told him that because of him, Re-L had lost sight of the difference between fantasy and reality, and the only way to remove himself now was to kill her within the fantasy world. Even in fantasy, however, Vincent could not bring himself to kill her. He eventually caught on and snapped out of the entire dream, though the proxy behind this particularly nasty bit of mindfuckery was never confronted in reality.

When they finally returned to Romdeau, it was falling apart. The Cogito virus had become a veritable plague, and without AutoReivs, the citizens were completely helpless. Vincent disappeared almost as soon as he and Re-L entered the Dome. In the next few days, there were sightings of Ergo Proxy all over the city, but never of Vincent. Ergo had regained his memories and the shock, as predicted, had submerged the Vincent Law persona. Ergo went to see where Monad's corpse was being kept, and wept. Although he acknowledged that he was the one who killed her, he could not forgive Donov Meyer for the horrors Monad had been subjected to while in captivity. While he was paying his respects to her, he was interrupted by a girl who acted like she knew him, wasn't at all afraid of him, and claimed to be Re-L Meyer.

See, in the real Re-L's absence, Daedalus went a little nuts and force-grew another clone of Monad, which he treated as a replacement Re-L. It's unknown precisely why it happened to her and not Re-L, but this new clone became Monad reincarnated. When Ergo expressed his confusion as to why some other girl was claiming to be Re-L, the clone got flustered and ran away. But Ergo hadn't seen the last of her.

Ergo's next move was to visit the Regent. While the Regent's Entourages criticised him for leaving and informed him that the Regent hated him for abandoning Romdeau, Ergo Proxy advanced, unconcerned. He killed Donov Meyer right before Re-L's eyes. Meanwhile, Raul Creed was lying in wait in the shadows. While Re-L confronted Ergo, he shot the Proxy in the arm with an FP shell, but Ergo survived by ripping off his own arm, and then promptly growing it back. Horrified, Raul emptied his gun, trying to score another hit, but Ergo wasn't going to let himself get shot a second time. Raul escaped to find some more ammunition, and Ergo left soon after. He wandered Romdeau, taking in its imminent destruction, the total collapse of its civilization. Meanwhile, Re-L was asking her grandfather's Entourages for information on Ergo Proxy and Romdeau.

Ergo Proxy returned to the Regent's sitting room and Re-L pointed her gun at him. She figured he had to know that if he came back she would hold him at gunpoint. He told her that was precisely the point. Ergo Proxy wanted to die. But Re-L, ever difficult, refused to kill him. Instead she told him she'd figured out who the real mastermind of this whole story was: Proxy One. At this point, Proxy One's laughter echoed throughout the chamber. They followed the sound of his voice.

Ergo went into shock upon seeing his progenitor: he really had had no idea that he wasn't the original. Proxy One was only too happy to monologue about the purpose of the Proxies and the malice implanted by the creators and also to accuse Ergo of running away, an irony which was not lost on either of them. He goaded Ergo Proxy into fighting to the death, and Ergo ripped a hole into his progenitor's chest. As he was dying, he entrusted the burden of shaping the world to his shadow, and that was when Monad II showed up. Now fully grown into her Proxy powers, she pleaded with Ergo not to listen to Proxy One. He didn't have to take up the burden of life again, she said. He was tempted to take her up on her offer. There was just one catch: it entailed flying through the clouds and into the sunlight. Suicide, for a Proxy.

Vincent recalled that Re-L had asked him to find her, when she left him and his original to their confrontation, and he wasn't ready to die just yet anymore. So he apologized to Monad, left her to fly into the sun on her own, and went back down to pay his respects to Proxy One, who with his dying breath, told him he could think of no fitter punishment for the Creators than Vincent's survival.

✖ Character Personality:

>On Vincent's Memories:

I guess the first thing I should clear up is this. At the point in canon where I am taking Vincent, he has recovered his memories. The series doesn't get much time to explore what this means for him, so some of my portrayal of him might be a little different from what we see in canon.

Vincent now remembers both his life as Ergo Proxy, and the memories Proxy One implanted in him. But some of these memories may be hazy, as if belonging to someone else. Which in a sense is true: Vincent is quite different from both his former self and his progenitor. There's also no clear demarcation between Ergo Proxy and Proxy One's memories (otherwise Ergo would eventually have figured out that he wasn't the original). This is also the reason Vincent doesn't know his own age. How can he remember when he was created if he can't tell the difference between his own memories and Proxy One's? The only memories he can be sure are his own are those of his final descent into despair, and those he created after he lost his memory. Not that Vincent remembers much of those final days where he was mired in depression and desperation. It's not something he'd want to remember, and anyway, he was half-crazed at that point.

So what's the point, if his memory is still treacherous? What's changed is that Vincent now has enough answers to decide who he is and what he cares about. He knows he's a clone of Proxy One. He knows what his purpose was in the Proxy Project, he knows he loved Monad and was forced to kill her by the Pulse of the Awakening.

"I am myself. I no longer care who I was before I became who I am."

His past doesn't matter. He is Vincent Law, who is kind to little robot girls and forgets to put the toilet seat down and hits his thumb with a hammer because he's daydreaming when he shouldn't be, who is desperately in love with a girl who thinks he's an idiot. And he is also Ergo Proxy, Agent of Death, shadow and successor of Proxy One, last of the proxies, final consequence of the crimes committed by the Creators, who can stand in the sunlight and survive its punishing rays. But in order to decide who he is, he had to know who he used to be.

>On Vincent's Development

"This is the face of an ideal Fellow Citizen. A dull face."

This was our first real introduction to Vincent. He was being chastised for a blunder he made the night before, and Re-L is telling us that he is plain, unremarkable. Dumb. Obedient. The impression that Vincent was very careful to give off during his days in Romdeau. He slouched and sat with his shoulders hunched. He hung his head. He spoke softly, and squinted his eyes, and plastered his misbehaving hair to his head in an unflattering style. He cultivated this impression of dullness and unremarkableness. He desperately wanted to become a Fellow Citizen, so he was willing to "constantly suppress himself, all the time, everywhere." He also may have had another reason for behaving this way. From hints dropped by more than one proxy, it seems that proxies in general had been burned pretty badly by humans in the past, and not just by the creators. This may have been something that lingered subconsciously even after Vincent's memory loss and informed his behaviour. Whatever the reason, his Mr. Cellophane act got him nowhere. The mask was too different from who he really was, even if at that point he had no inkling of his true identity.

The strain of this gave him a rather bad case of low self-confidence. This identity of Vincent Law was all he had, and everything in his life was telling him Vincent Law wasn't good enough. Even after he realized that becoming a Fellow Citizen was a lost cause for him and that Romdeau was kind of a shitty place anyway, even when he was exiled, he didn't change that much. Though he was free to be himself, though he did stand taller, and apologized less, though the animators even started to draw him less derpy and more handsome, he was still humble and soft-spoken and easy-going.

He'll always be a little awkward. Reclusiveness and solitude are intrinsic to a proxy's being, and for Vincent that translates to shyness and introvertedness. And absent-minded clumsiness. He'll get distracted by his own thoughts and fall down a pile of rubble, or he'll not be paying attention to his surroundings and Re-L will kick him off the ship. (Can't blame her, Vincent is pretty kickable.) He's easy-going, so he lets these things happen because they don't matter, and his pride has already taken a lot of beating. And because his most fervent desire, all along, has been love and acceptance. When the Swan Proxy told him to imagine his ideal life, the life he imagined was one in which he was engaged to Re-L, where he was Chief of Security in Romdeau, where everyone loved and admired him. I cringe in secondhand embarrassment whenever I watch it.

This sounds so cheesy, so banal, and so very human. But despite his lofty nature as a proxy, this is all he ever craved. That's why he was so focused on becoming a Fellow Citizen. He wanted to be human, he wanted to be normal, he wanted to belong. It's why he was so terrified of regaining his memory and becoming a 'monster'.

"If I can't be me anymore, I'd rather it end. You understand? I'll need you to shoot me."

This is why it took him so long to accept that he was a proxy. He would deny it vehemently each time it was hinted at, and when confronted with actual evidence he would try his best to repress it. His encounter with Kazkis Proxy was fairly traumatic for him. But Pino's acceptance was crucial for him. After this and Anamnesis, the episode where Proxy One goes into his mind and forced him to accept that he was in fact a proxy, Vincent seemed calmer and more at peace with himself. The other shoe had dropped, and Pino was still with him. Pino had known all along and still she was his friend. He had finally accepted that he didn't belong with everyone, but that all he needed was the love and support of his friends. Pino and Re-L were with him because of who he was, and not who he pretended to be.

> On who Vincent is right now

So Vincent doesn't have to be a doormat, and he isn't. For the things that matter, Vincent will stand firm. He showed bravery and quick thinking in saving Pino's life from the automated patrol. He stood up to Re-L when she tried to take him back to Romdeau at the expense of the people of the commune, who were about to be killed. He has a backbone and a strong sense of right and wrong. Because of his experiences of being Vincent Law, he's got a much more human perspective on morality than most proxies. Proxy morality seems pretty skewed in general, which is par for the course when you consider the futility of their purpose. Proxies were created with the task of creating a new race of humans, but not given the information to make those humans viable, and then tasked with DESTROYING those humans and themselves when the Creators returned. A lot of proxies justified their fulfilling of that purpose as 'well, we're all gonna die anyway, so who cares?' And no one was a more bitter nihilist than Proxy One, who engineered the destruction of Romdeau in a fashion more brutal than entirely necessary, simply out of spite for the imperfect creatures he had created. Vincent knows that life is tough, often dark and full of suffering, but he believes it's also worth living. If Ergo Proxy once hated his creations, this is no longer the case.

"The living have no choice but to go on living," he says. He would never kill anyone, human or proxy, if they didn't truly deserve it, unless it was to protect himself or those he cares about. Killing humans simply because they're flawed, destroying the dome simply because it was destined to be destroyed, these things didn't sit well with him. It's not so much a question of love as of justice, for the Proxies as well as the humans, and he intends to see that the Creators answer for their actions. This is his new purpose.

He's not sure how yet. He trusts he'll know what to do when the time comes. Vincent sees the big picture, and tends to be vague on details. Re-L at one point accuses him of making up his journey as he goes along, and that's certainly true. He just set out in the direction of Mosque and played it by ear. When they were becalmed, he figured they would just sit tight and wait for the wind to come back. When Re-L got on his case, he started yelling at the wind to come back. He probably didn't really expect it to do so, but he figured it was worth a shot. (See, Re-L, he is doing something about the wind!) So he's kind of dorky, but in a sweet way. He listens to his heart. It never occurred to him to question why he was in love with Re-L. He had no way of knowing that the initial reason he was drawn to Re-L was because she was made to look like Monad, but he's clever enough to have worked it out by now. But he doesn't care. He loves Re-L (and it's Re-L he loves, not a shadow of Monad, whom he had no memories of until revently) because he loves her, and that's all there is to it.

Which isn't to say he's not smart or doesn't use his head. He's the guy who figured out that all the infected AutoReivs employed similar escape routes. In the final episodes one of the guys in AutoReiv Disposal even said that he predicted the explosion of Cogito Virus infections long before they happened. A hard worker when he needs to be, he's very thoughtful and conscientious. Sometimes too thoughtful, to the point of moodiness. He tends toward self-deprecating humour, though he's not immune to silliness. (This side of himself he mostly shows around Pino.)

>On being Ergo Proxy

Now that Vincent has recovered his memories, there is no more need for the Vincent and Ergo personas to be seperate, so they have nearly completely merged. Since Ergo was mostly the collection of proxy instincts and subconscious sorrow that he wanted to hard to repress, all this means is that Vincent's mask of human meekness may slip a little more often. Proxy instincts are stronger when Vincent is in proxy form, and his form governs his thought to a certain degree. He'll certainly be more fierce and wild and 'godlike' as Ergo Proxy then he is as Vincent Law. There's no significant separation in thought, understand, just a slight difference in behaviour and presentation. Kazkis Proxy had a habit of staying in human form unless he needed to fight, now that Vincent has control over his transformations, that he would adopt a similar modus operandi. If only because Proxies are giants, there won't be much room on the rovers, and Vincent bangs his head on the ship's ceiling often enough without adding about three feet to his height.

✖ Character Powers:

Proxies are canonically referred to as gods, but gods in the sense of the greek pantheon. They are corporeal, they can be killed, however with difficulty, and they are not omnipotent. They are, however, vastly more powerful than a regular human being. The full extent of their abilities are never outlined, and they seem to vary from proxy to proxy, but they have demonstrated several abilities that seem consistent across all Proxies. It's implied that Proxy One, as the first and last of the Proxies, is the most powerful of all, and as his shadow, Ergo Proxy shares in that distinction.

> Physical: Proxies are way stronger than human beings. Things thrown by a Proxy have been known to make dents in solid stone upon impact. They're also much faster than human beings, so much so that they sometimes move faster than the eye can see.

> Mind games: Proxies seem to have the ability to create visual and auditory illusions, as well as the ability to create visions and dreams within another person's mind, such as when Proxy One projected himself into Vincent's mind, or when the Swan Proxy managed to convince Vincent he was just a fragment of Re-L's mind, or again when the Proxy, Will B. Goode, showed Pino a dream to warn her away from his Dome. It's shown they can do this from quite a distance, since they had barely come into sight of the dome when Pino awoke from her dream. I don't expect Vincent to be fond of using this power after all the times he's been on the recieving end of it, though.

> Force field: Ergo Proxy has shown himself capable of releasing waves of energy powerful enough to knock combat AutoReivs aside.

> Teleportation: The journey from Romdeau to Mosque took Vincent and his companions months to complete by windship. Proxy One used this power to beat the his shadow to the punch and was gone before anyone was the wiser.

> Human Form: Proxies can take on a human appearance. Pretty straightforward.

> Proxy Awareness: When they come to within a certain distance of one another, perhaps the span of a Dome, or a city, Proxies can sense each other's presences.

> Immortality: The source of a Proxy's immortality is the fact that they are made from Amrita cells, which have an impenetrable membrane and can reproduce indefinitely. They don't age, they don't get fatally sick, they can't be killed by normal means. They can regrow limbs and recover from injuries that would kill a regular human being. There are only three ways to harm them: sunlight, FP shells, and another Proxy. An injury inflicted by a Proxy neutralizes the Amrita cells, and the wound will have to heal normally. FP shells that hit a vital area will kill in a matter of seconds, though if it hits a limb, like when Raul shot Vincent, the proxy can save itself by ripping off the offending limb. The limb will grow back in a matter of seconds, and now you have a pissed off proxy to deal with. For some reason, Vincent appears to be more resistant to sunlight than most Proxies. I assume it would still weaken him, but it didn't appear to be killing him to be standing in the sunlight at the end of the final episode.

As for skills:

> Mechanics: Vincent seems to be pretty good at fixing machines. He was part of the AutoReiv Disposal unit, which was mostly about destroying robots, but he was also trained to provide maintenance to them, and he fixed up the 400 Rabbits, which apparently no one else in the Commune could do.

> Marksmanship: As a member of AutoReiv disposal, Vincent was often called upon to apprehend Cogito-infected AutoReivs who escaped. To this end, he was issued a gun in order to shoot down his targets. He appears to be competent at it, though he's a much more effective fighter in Proxy form.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.

✖ First Person POV: Link us to a voicetest post or thread!

✖ Third Person POV: Write us, in prose or brackets, how your character is recruited by the CDC. If your application is accepted, this section of your app will become part of your character's game canon.

CHARACTER ITEMS.
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✖ Character Inventory:

INVENTORY GOES HERE