Steven Strait

Steven Owen Strait is an ex-Mormon and a player character from SPC.

Description
Steven is a tall white man with straight blond hair, a Roman nose, light freckles, and an angled face. Before becoming a camion host, he had brown eyes and wore glasses; he now has bright blue ones and does not.

He can typically be found in a buttoned white shirt with short sleeves, black dress pants, and an off-black tie.

Early Life
[tw: child abuse, homophobia]

Steven was born to Andrew Seymour Strait and his wife in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 18th, 1994. He was raised within the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) alongside his siblings Lucas, Juniper, and Morgan. His father was verbally and physically abusive to the entire family, though Steven, as an effeminate, sensitive child, bore the brunt of this abuse.

Like many Mormons, Steven embarked on a mission to spread the "good word" after graduating high school. He was sent to the suburbs outside Paris, France, where he and his fellow missionaries were intended to stay for two years. During this time, he made the acquaintance of a young French waiter at a cafe the Mormons would frequent, named Jean-Pierre Arseneau. Jean-Pierre was charming, funny, and his English was almost as bad as Steven's French, and the two formed a bond in the two years that Steven stayed in the city. The night before Steven was meant to return to America, he snuck out and visited the cafe one last time, where he and Jean-Pierre shared a short kiss; however, unluckily for Steven, his mission companion had followed him, and discovered the pair.

[tw: physical abuse, homophobia] Steven's family was informed of this infraction in the time before he returned to Salt Lake City, and his brother, Lucas, picked him up from the airport. Upon returning home, he was shouted at, beaten, and choked by his father, who broke his glasses and told Steven to grab his things and leave the house. At the age of 21, with no college education, very little funds, and nowhere to go, he was kicked out of his home and his church.

After driving back to his own house with a shaken Steven in tow, Lucas handed him the keys to his Prius and went inside without a word.

Steven spent the years following this incident hopping from town to town, picking up work wherever he could and staying in crappy places or just sleeping in his brother's car, with the unspoken goal to get as far away from Utah as possible.

Spirit Phone Campaign
At the age of 24, Steven found himself settled in the town of Strowger, Pennsylvania. He was financially stable enough at that point to afford a single-bedroom apartment, though it was sparsely-decorated and minimal. He had few to no friends in the town. One night in September, Steven went for a walk in the woods outside Strowger, during which he witnessed a meteor shower unlike any he'd seen before; more specifically, because one of the meteors flew overhead and crashed further in the forest. Driven by curiosity, he headed deeper in to find its landing point: a clearing with a strangely crystalline rock imbedded softly in the ground, with an unearthly blue glow emanating from it. Compelled in some way he didn't understand, Steven approached the rock and grasped it, only to inexplicably lick the geode.

Unbeknownst to him, this rock had been the receptacle for an alien prince, and licking it had allowed the spore to transfer itself into his body and begin the conversion process. Suddenly feeling a shooting pain in his head, Steven dropped the meteorite and stumbled away from the clearing, only for the pain to worsen and his balance to fail him. Once he returned to his apartment, he could barely think except for the overwhelming urge he felt to get someplace dark and solitary. Locking himself in the bathroom, he fell to his knees and began to throw up blood into the bathtub.

Somewhere between three and six days later, he awoke with no memory of this incident, only to find himself irrevocably changed. His eyes were blue where they'd been brown before, he had no need for his glasses, and he no longer felt pain, hunger, or thirst. What was more, he felt strangely that his body was no longer his own, and caught fleeting impressions of another presence with him, or a voice, though these feelings would quickly disappear. While panicking over what had happened to him, a knock came at his apartment door, and a woman with equally bright blue eyes introduced herself to him. Strangely enough, he already knew her name: Helen Heterosexual.

In the following weeks, Helen would spend more time at Steven's place in order to look after him, and the two became boyfriend and girlfriend (though Steven's recollection of when this happened was... fuzzy). He began to notice more and more strange things about himself, including the disappearance of certain imperfections, no need to use the bathroom, and a violent bodily reaction to sodas. With each of these incidents that he brought to her attention, Helen would do her best to reassure him and provide logical explanations. More concerningly, however, was the fact that he had also begun to lose time; large chunks were missing from his memory, spanning from several hours to several days, and he would often black out and awaken in places unfamiliar to him. His girlfriend assured him that he was acting normal during these periods, but he was still understandably shaken, having the feeling sometimes that he was losing his mind. However, he tried his best to act as if everything was normal.

During SPC
Steven was a timid, self-conscious man who didn't like to impose on others. His anxiety disorder often plagued him with worry and doubt about his usefulness on the team or his relations with the other players, and he had low self-esteem in part due to internalized homophobia. Despite this, due to his Mormon upbringing, he was in the habit of repressing his negative emotions and putting on a cheery facade, and was often found with a fake smile during the beginning of his time with SALAD. He had been ignoring the side of him that was attracted to men since he was in his teens, and was not ready to accept that he was gay; he believed that if he could refrain from acting on those feelings, he could still be a virtuous man. Despite being ostracized from his community and the church, he had not yet himself renounced the Mormon religion, and did not challenge its ideals.

Trivia

 * Before being camion'd, Steven was colorblind.
 * Steven in his first iteration was conceptualized as a much more mean-spirited character, and would have had a stuck-up, rich frat-boy-esque personality, with the propensity to insult or belittle his teammates. This was changed after the text AU was born.
 * As a child, he wished to be a geologist.
 * He sang in church choir and was a boy soprano; he still maintains his astoundingly-high range as an adult, and though too nervous to show it off, has a clear and pleasing voice.
 * Steven used to have a scar on his right leg from a fall off his bike in the fifth grade; this was "fixed" by Gary upon his arrival.
 * He is naturally left-handed, though he was forced to use his right growing up.