Elliot Zielinski began life as random crap. Now he is something else entirely. Though this was not my intention starting out, an easy ("easy") way to understand him is:

( MATH )

Please let me know if he is too aggravating or I have some historical details (for example, about Poland, WWII, life in the U.S. from the 50s onward) wrong.

Christopher M. Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus:

Imagine a ship, whose sole function is to make a yearly voyage to a neighbouring country in order to honour a heroic deed from the past. The ship in question is composed of wooden planks, and her shape might be described as very distinctive. After a few years of making her yearly voyage, the ship's planks begin to weather. The crew decides that henceforward, before the ship sets sail each year, they will replace the weathered planks of the ship with new ones. Eventually, all of the planks of the original ship are replaced.

Now someone (say her name is Merry) collects the planks that are disposed of from the original ship each year, until some years later, Merry has collected all of the planks from the original ship. Furthermore, Merry decides to put the planks she has collected together in her back yard, giving those planks the same distinctive configuration they had when they composed the original ship at the time of her first voyages.

Given the information in this story, someone might well wonder which ship is numerically identical to the original ship. Is it the continuous ship, which continues to make the yearly voyage to the neighbouring country and whose spatio-temporal history is continuous with that of the original ship, or is it the reconstructed ship, which is composed of the same set of planks as the original ship? Indeed, they cannot both be numerically identical to the original ship, since the continuous ship is out to sea, and the reconstructed ship resides in Merry's (very dry) back yard!

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See:

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.

"So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.

"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.

"But it's been burnt down?"

"Yes."

"Twice?"

"Many times."

"And rebuilt."

"Of course. It is an important and historic building."

"With completely new materials."

"But of course. It was burnt down."

"So how can it be the same building?"

"It is always the same building."

I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survived. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

David Wong, John Dies At the End:

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

Let's say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don't worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you're the one who shot him.

He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know the type. And you're chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you're pretty sure he's about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.

On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand new handle for your ax.

The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the next spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.

Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He's also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it's wearing that unique expression of "you're the man who killed me last winter" resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, "That's the same ax that slayed me!"

Is he right?

NAME/ALIAS: Elliot Zielinski
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: A white man who appears to be in his mid twenties, Elliot is 5'11" and 170 pounds, with short blond hair and brown eyes. He tends to look a little disreputable, somehow. There's just something about him — certain versions of him, anyway.
HISTORY: Elliot's history is deeply entwined with his mutation, to the point where the nature of his existence is incredibly bizarre and difficult to track in a linear fashion. An individual with his genetic code and mutation was born in 1924 in Poland, but the person who calls himself Elliot right now did not exist until the 90s. This is because Elliot's mutation is a sort of extreme regeneration: like a starfish, if you cut bits of him off, and leave them alone, all the bits will regenerate into individual Elliots. Furthermore, all these Elliots share a mental connection that can range from mild and mostly unconscious to experiencing memories that his other selves have to experiencing in real time sensations/emotions his other selves are feeling to outright hivemind psychosis. Unfortunately, this mutation does not come with intuitive knowledge of what's happening (though this changes a little bit later on). That did not matter for much of Elliot Prime's early life, as being maimed/dismembered was not really a common occurence. He was noted as a particularly healthy child, but the way he never got sick, never seemed to have scratches or bruises, and ate voraciously were not seen as especially strange. There were a few childhood accidents — he crushed his finger in a door but by the time the doctor came around, it wasn't broken as badly as it should have been, he fell down a steep, rocky hill without serious injury, that kind of thing.

When Poland was invaded in 1939, he was fourteen, and by the end of 1940 had joined the Wawer branch of the Armia Krajowa. By 1943, most of his immediate family had been killed. In 1944, he was also killed — his arm was shot off, and he was dumped in a mass grave. Elliot Prime regenerated first, having less to do, and crawled out of the grave to fight again another day. Elliot-regrown-from-the-shot-off-arm, however, took longer and then crawled out of the grave to also fight again another day. They ended up in separate parts of Poland, and both were unaware of each other's existence. By the end of 1944, Elliot Two had been arrested and sent to the Stutthof camp; in 1945 he died again during the winter evacuation, but awoke later and was picked up by Soviet forces. Meanwhile, Elliot Prime survived in Warsaw, living through the Soviet occupation in the anti-communist underground. In 1945, he was arrested during the Augustów roundup, and detained in a Russian internment camp until 1956. Elliot Two had that by that time emigrated to England, joining the Polish government in exile in their losing battle to maintain Polish sovreignty. While still unaware of his other self, by 1954 Elliot Prime knew that something was wrong with him. He was 29 and had lived through some hard times but still was and looked perfectly healthy, like someone in his early to mid-twenties, and he had been tormented for years by dreams of Elliot Two's time in the forced labor camp. He had married a fellow Polish citizen-in-exile, Alicja, but the mental strain of his other life as well as their apparent inability to have children troubled their relationship. That was, in fact, Elliot's fault and not hers, and even if he hadn't suspected that was the case, he wouldn't have blamed or or whatever, but she felt the social pressure very keenly.

In 1955, Polish Prime Minister Hugon Hanke and some supporters of the Government-in-Exile returned to Poland, and many countries had long ago stopped recognizing their existence. Elliot and Alicja adopted an orphaned seven year old boy, Marek, and moved to Erie, Pennsylvania. The increased distance between Elliot Prime and Elliot Two eased the frequency and intensity of his dreams and memory bleeding. It would have been a pretty quiet life, if not for the car accident. No one died, but while extracting Marek from the wreckage, Elliot bled quite a lot onto his open wounds. While Elliot was of course fine, Alicja recovered slowly, and Marek healed with strange quickness. Prior to the accident, Marek had been dark-haired, but after, his hair lightened to blond. It would not be totally obvious to others for a year or two, especially people who didn't know he was adopted, but he was growing to resemble Elliot.

Elliot, however, could tell almost right away, and he was horrified. He could no longer pretend that nothing was wrong, because it wasn't just him anymore, it was his poor goddamn kid. Marek seemed psychologically unaffected, but he was still quite young. And the 50s were not a good time to be a mutant. Arguably, it has never been a good time to be a mutant, but the 50s were a pretty bad time all the same. There was no one to go to, and he was afraid to go to a doctor. Meanwhile, Alicja was beginning to be seriously weirded out. It was something they both had a great deal of trouble discussing, and they started to have fights about other things, or using only oblique terms — perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising when neighbors began to gossip about whatever it could have been that Elliot had "done" to Marek. This was not a time when people called the police over these matters. The federal Children's Bureau had been established in 1912, but US states generally did not pass any child abuse report laws until the mid 60s, and it was also a bit of a cultural minding your own business thing.

If Alicja and Elliot had not still loved each other, if their love had turned to bitterness and fear, things might have gone differently. But it hadn't, and it was hurting them both as well as Marek to go on as they were. Elliot agreed to discreetly seek help while Alicja and Marek went to stay with a family friend. Six months later, Elliot disappeared from their lives and from many public records.

It wasn't that the doctors he'd gone to had been untrustworthy. They simply hadn't been equipped to deal with him. They'd asked for help, they'd talked to other doctors and scientists, word had spread, and then, one day, they came for him, and he was taken away to a lab where he was tested on continually. At this time, Elliot Two began to have troubling dreams and strange phantom pains. Whoever the lab worked for — something many Elliots have tried to work out over the years — they were not necessarily anti-mutant, but they were definitely pro-scientific-advancements-even-if-it-means-sacrificing-people and pro-making-money-from-aforementioned-scientific-advancements. Of course, in 1957, scientific advancements were going to be a bit more limited as compared to the twenty-first century.

One of the first things they did was grow another Elliot. One thing he does owe to the lab is a greater understanding of his own mutation, and the things he can do with it. He'd figured out about the healing and limited regeneration, but he hadn't known it could go this far. And he hadn't known that when it did go that far, the other Elliot would have his memories, his feelings, and that they could be shared. One thing the scientists could not tell is that a certain part of Elliot's powers were also enhanced by proximity to other versions of himself. If they had been able to tell that, they certainly wouldn't have gone on to make three more of him.

The aspect of their powers that had been strengthened was the ability to affect other Elliots. Elliot Two had had only vague suspicions about his regenerative power, but by the time there were four Elliots in one lab, he was hearing their thoughts, feeling what they felt, and his memories were starting to get fucked up. In fact, all their memories were starting to get fucked up: their experiences at the lab are directly responsible for the strain of imbalance and emotional problems that persist in Elliots budded from these versions. Marek-Elliot and Elliot Two are, in comparison, much calmer, less prone to megalomania or grandiose plans for random shit, just way more stable.

Unfortunately for the Elliots trapped in the lab, Elliot Two had made a fairly normal life for himself over in England, and he wasn't about to go running off to America on the basis of what he considered delusions. He sought psychiatric help at a time when that kind of thing carried a serious stigma, and received a whole bunch of nonsense because that's mainly what psychiatric help consisted of in the 1950s. He came close to being institutionalized, which would have been a disaster of "hey, why aren't these frontal lobotomies working OH MY GOD HIS BRAIN HAS REGROWN."

There was also the matter of Marek. Any child would be disturbed by the sudden unexplained disappearance of their father and the huge upheaval of their life, but he was having the worst nightmares, and beginning to become confused with his memories. Suddenly he had two sets: one as Marek, an orphan whose parents were now Alicja and Elliot, and one where he was Elliot. This second set of memories was emerging slowly and insidiously, popping up about 50% of the time whenever he tried to recall past events. At first he would ask Alicja about it, but she was upset enough that he began to keep it to himself, trying to sort out which were "real."

So at this point in the late 50s, there are 6.5 Elliots: Elliot Prime and four lab-grown Elliots, Elliot Two in England, and Marek-Elliot still growing up. It only gets worse from here on out.


IF YOU CAN SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING

I'M SORRY

Time made two things inevitable: Marek became an Elliot, and Elliot Two came to the U.S in search of answers to whatever the heck was going on. At which point, shit got real down at the lab.

With their ability to hivemind coordinate enhanced by the closer presence of two additional outside Elliots, the four lab Elliots engineered one hell of an escape. It did not end well for anybody there, including most of the Elliots, only one of whom got away alive and whole. If you try hard enough, it turns out, you really can stamp out Elliot's regenerative processes, mostly if there are explosions and things like that. The problem then is that the one remaining Elliot had, via hivemind psychosis, experienced three deaths. He was already not well from being a lab experiment and now he was super unwell. He went as far away as he could from the other Elliots and attempted suicide, which was successful in the sense that he, that individual iteration, was destroyed, but unsuccessful in the sense that he still spawned one more Elliot, the one labeled on the chart as Tyrant Elliot. This is the unstable, delusions of grandeur, terrorist, bent on world domination Elliot.

So we've hit the mid-60s. There are now 3.5 Elliots in existence: Elliot Two in England, Marek-Elliot in the U.S., Tyrant Elliot somewhere in South America, and a "bud" of Elliot who, in the lab escape/destruction incident, was implanted in one of the scientists who escaped, later extracted (scientist was killed), and kept in a small vat of acid strong enough to impede regeneration. This vat would be stored away in some warehouse/vault for almost 30 years.

It took some time for Marek-Elliot and Elliot Two to find each other, and that did not go down well with anyone, especially Alicja, who, frankly, is the victim in all this. MORAL: do not marry an Elliot.