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BELIEF MECHANICS
PHYSIOLOGY
GENERAL TIDBITS
- While Jack is utterly invisible, intangible, and inaudible to people, he's still perfectly tangible to general objects--objects don't care one way or the other whether something exists or not, after all. He can and will interact with the material world, and we several instances where he does so in the movie: he bounces off a car and sets off its alarm near the beginning, and opens Jamie's window towards the end. In a nonbeliever's perspective, anything Jack works with that's grounded (like levers/switches/doors/etc) would appear to be moving by themselves, while anything portable/picked up would appear to simply lift up and vanish into thin air, disappearing and becoming intangible alongside Jack as long as they're in physical contact with him. (ie: His hoodie, which he lifted from some hapless garage sale back in the 70's, is just as nonexistent as he is when he's wearing it around nonbelievers--if he took it off and dropped it on the floor, however, it'd be visible to everyone in the vicinity belief irregardless, and this same rule applies to any of his possessions, including his staff.) Half-believers, on the other hand, would have to rationalize picked-up objects floating through the air, since they're in that fun midway-point.
- This also means he can't pass through walls like Tooth or her mini-fairies do.
- HOWEVER, this whole tangibility to objects thing gets slightly complicated when we refer to objects being held by people. Could someone hurt Jack with a weapon if they're a nonbeliever? Possibly! The object itself is inanimate, but the person holding it has intent, and intent is going to be the most important factor here. If a nonbeliever is just aimlessly waving around a sword, or trying to attack an entirely unrelated target while Jack happens to be standing in the way, the sword would pass through him the same way the individual might. If a nonbeliever is trying to attack him with that sword, or is at least convinced that something's there to be attacked (even if they can't see it or feel it), the sword might actually cut! And the same would go to projectiles, or whatever else a person might be holding. This is a pretty fluid mechanic, though, and might be a lot of fun to play around with, so we can always hash things out more specifically or bend things around a little when it comes to this!
- Due to forced Compass mechanics, Jack is currently fully visible and tangible to all NPC entities in EV, regardless of their belief or spiritual volume.
PHYSIOLOGY
- Everything is ice magic. Everything.
- ...But no actually, in all seriousness, his ice magic's more or less the sole thing holding Jack together at the seams as it stands. The stuff was imbued in him after he fell in the lake and drowned courtesy of the Man in the Moon: it's what keeps his hair white, his eyes blue, and his general person animated and alive and not a drowned corpse--which is essentially what Jack is at the end of the day, when you get right down to it. And so, as it only stands to reason, targeting his ice magic is a surefire way to harm Jack pretty effectively.
- Naturally this basically renders him literally half-frozen in the physical sense. Jack hasn't aged a day since he was raised from the lake, and his core body temperature averages well below freezing (thus keeping his hoodie consistently frosted). This, coupled with the fact that he has no pulse, leaves his blood circulation accordingly sluggish/nonexistent--he'll still bleed when cut, but the output will be a lot slower than normal and the blood will appear darker; additionally, while he is somewhat capable of flushing in small quantities thanks to his ice magic, it shows up lilac/purplish. Another stipulation of this physical stasis is that Jack doesn't need to breathe, and
ironicallycannot drown or suffocate by your typical means. But he breathes on a normal basis anyway out of deeply ingrained habit, to the point that being forced to stop is super uncomfortable and something he'd rather avoid when he can anyway.
- This also skews his sense of temperature somewhat. Jack can still tell when it's 'cold'--it's just that a chilly 32F for us feels like a comfortable 75F for him, and his tolerance thresholds are shifted accordingly. In fact, anything below 32F remains at comfy room-temperature level as far as Jack's concerned, as his body temperature will drop from that point to equalize with any decrease with ease; he could spend hours chilling in Antarctica's subzero climes wearing just that same hoodie and pants without so much as an offhand shiver.
- Jack is quite vulnerable to heat, though. A high surrounding temperature is the number one thing that will wear away at Jack's ice magic the fastest and the most painfully, seeing as it's...well, ice. At up to around 60 or 75F his ridiculous core temperature can keep him tided over without any obvious problems, but anything above will start to be a struggle that only worsens the higher it goes--ranging from tiredness and lethargy to a deep-set ache in limbs to difficulty with motor coordination and concentration, spreading bruising on extremities (fingertips etc), and increased trouble with breathing that maxes out at wetly painful coughing fits. The less his ice magic's able to do, the more Jack essentially thaws out and reverts to the corpse state he's actually supposed to be in anyway, lungs chock full of frozen water included. IT'S NOT FUN. After a certain point he might very well hit a coma state, and stay that way until someone dumps him in a tub of ice water or something; while he can't quite be killed by high temperatures alone, anything super severe would put Jack out of commission for quite some time.
- But in all other areas that don't involve heat, Jack's unnaturally resilient as a natural trait, like most of his fellow spirits! Scarecrow frame considered, he can bounce back from pretty hard impacts with surprising ease, and it's reasonable to assume that it's kind of hard to break his bones or anything like that. (See: getting flopped into a tree by Wind and laughing afterwards; falling several stories and slamming into the top of a dumpster hard enough to bounce off and faceplant on pavement instead, then rolling to his feet with a few bruises to his pride, an A for effort, and not much else.) Injuries of the piercing or lacerating variety are still viable, though! While he has a very mildly accelerated healing factor, he can in fact be stabbed/beheaded/etc. ...Except that, by the standards of his own world, Jack is immortal and cannot be killed by purely physical means. Getting stabbed would hurt a lot and stick around for awhile, but he'd recover eventually. And as to beheading, well...there's spirits that have had this happen in the past.
- Compass has nerfed Jack's immortality in EV, though. The resilience remains, but any injuries that would be fatal to a mortal human will take a pretty nasty toll on Jack too; his ice magic would still kick in, but it would be unable to level the damage, resulting in a very huge and constant drain as spirit mechanics try to do their jobs and the nerf negates them. Jack might last a good half-hour longer than the average human, but without any immediate assistance the drain on his ice magic will get unsustainable and he will die. ...Again. (Jack himself is not yet aware of this fact, whoops...)
- He doesn't need to eat, as he doesn't get hungry and food doesn't do anything for him. He can still taste, though, and he's experimented around a few times here and there. In this vein, Jack's need for sleep is also greatly reduced; he could easily go consecutive months without slowing down a beat, and any drowsiness that does come along will usually be attributed to a change in season, sustained rising temperatures, and/or an especial strain on his ice magic (potentially brought about by the previous two options). On the few occasions he has slept, Jack's pretty spartan and not particularly picky about places to lie down--preferably someplace high up and narrow, like tree branches or rooftop awnings; Jack's never slept on a bed before, and doesn't have plans to anytime soon. When he's unconscious the breathing habit stops, and depending on how tired he is he can sleep for consecutive days at a time. BUT IT JUST DOESN'T HAPPEN OFTEN OKAY...
GENERAL TIDBITS
- Jack really doesn't like rain. It's wet and messy and everywhere, and it sticks on him, and it keeps children tucked away indoors on what might have otherwise been a perfectly good day. Rain isn't snow, which means that Jack hasn't made it so, and if he hasn't made it so then it's because he can't. And that means the season's sliding out of his jurisdiction, and he needs to get ready to wander off elsewhere for awhile. Rain just generally has a lot of mildly negative connotations for Jack, alongside being just generally irritating. He'll take a light drizzle over summer sunshine any day, but it's a 'lesser of two evils' thing...
- As a general rule Jack will try his level best to avoid having to outright write on things to get people's attention, even though he's capable of it (his handwriting's old-fashioned and kind of wavery due to sheer lack of use). He started picking up how to read and write in general by sheer exposure over the decades--reading came first, writing afterwards. But once he had the writing kind of down, Jack made the mistake of trying to write his name in the foggy window of a cottage one evening sometime around the 1790s....and ended up completely terrifying every superstitious body in that little village for a good couple of weeks after the fact. Jack had an aversion to frightening people even back then--he still hates the prospect even today--and so, unsurprisingly, that went over about as well as a sack of bricks for both parties. Jack has basically instinctively vetoed 'write things' from his pool of options in catching people's attention ever since, and most of the time it's not a possibility that even really occurs to him any more. Drawing pictures on fog is fine, in special cases. Texting on a phone is fine. Writing? DOABLE, but it always come with a twinge of uncertainty 8(
- Jack hasn't told any of the other Guardians about the contents of his memory casket yet. It's possible that Tooth already knows, but Jack hasn't spoken about it directly even to her; the only other person in the world that currently knows what he saw in there is Baby Tooth. He's still not entirely sure when he'll break it to them, if ever--still being in the process of absorbing it all himself, the prospect of trying to discuss his past-life in any kind of context is still kind of a daunting one. For that matter, though, Jack actually hasn't viewed all of the memories contained in the casket: the entirety of his childhood from his first lost tooth to his last is accessible in memory form. The thing about memory caskets is that they only show the holder what they need to see at that time, however; while Jack is the only one that can view them at all, he can't just prod it into coughing up more memories whenever, and the circumstances/emotional need will have to be special for him to gain any more additional memories. (Mostly I'm floating this idea around as a placeholder, in case more things about Jack's past come up in canon material, either from the creators or possibly from the next Guardians of Childhood book in which he's featured--if we learn his sister's name, etc)
- He can carry other people with him while flying on the wind, to a certain extent! Ideally by holding their hand; Jack has only recently discovered this ability himself, after taking it on an impromptu test-run with Jamie. He can only support about double his own weight before it starts being a struggle, though. (So basically anybody over 150lbs is going to be rather out of luck on the wind front...)
- Jack has pretty decent knowledge of past- and modern-day media spanning back a couple centuries. He always liked immersing himself in the culture of humanity, because it made him feel as if he belonged just that slight bit more--as we see with how he tends to follow clothing trends and adapt the speech-nuances of the time. He highly enjoys music, no matter what the era, and used to spend hours at a time either singing along or to himself as the mood hit. He's never watched a movie in a movie theater before (what with imminent threat of being sat on), nor absorbed any television that wasn't just periods of spying through windows...but outdoor theaters are still a thing! And he enjoys chilling on a car roof to enjoy the show when the opportunity arises. In fact, due to all of this, Jack knows a decent amount about superheroes especially, and has always been rather envious of the amount of attention/popularity they command with children.
- He has pretty good memory!! It's almost eidetic in some respects, in fact; Jack can summon up lyrics to songs that went out of style decades ago, could tell you where he was and what the weather was like on any given day in the last three hundred years after a few musing hums, and remembers the face and name of every child he's ever had a snowball fight with, if he happens to hear it. It's a weird spirit thing.
- Jack usually tries to avoid fellow winter spirits as a general rule. Oh, it wasn't always like this, of course--for the first few decades of his spirit-existence, Jack would get ridiculously excited running into anybody that could see him, and the discovery of somewhat-kindred spirits was initially a rather delighted one. ...For all of about fifteen minutes, before an attempted assassination was promptly had. Basically--as folklore would have it, incidentally--the majority of the winter spirits of the world tend to be irritable as hell if you're lucky, mean and capricious if you're slightly less so, and downright murderous if it just isn't your day. One could say the rather deathly nature of their existence isn't very conducive to friendliness as a general rule, surprisingly enough!! And with this alarmingly homicidal trend considered, others have always found it strange indeed that Jack isn't in a similar mental state himself...all the makings are actually already there, but in Jack's case they're just buried deep under a strong personal resolve and his own brand of tireless optimism. So yes, tl;dr: running into fellow winter spirits is depressing and mildly stressful and also potentially life-threatening on any given day--and in the end, Jack could never bring himself to consider the hostility worth the break in loneliness.
- Ironically enough, however, Jack actually has a lot more power than the majority of the fellow winter spirits in his world anyway. He's not bound to one specific location and has a broship with the North Wind, alongside his technical status as a replacement to Old Man Winter in the first place; his full capacity for weather manipulation and general freezing is pretty impressive. Jack still hasn't really tapped into all of this potential, though, and honestly doesn't plan on trying too hard unless he absolutely has to (see: icing Pitch's Nightmares six ways to Sunday). He never met Old Man Winter for himself before the guy faded out, but the bits and pieces of stories he could glean from fellow spirits painted all the picture he needed: some really old and really deadly guy that first took up the Jokul Frosti mantle, and tossed about some really nasty winters in his time.
Jack doesn't intend to be anything like him. - He'd always been preoccupied by lakes and similarly deep bodies of water, even before regaining some of his memories. In the past wasn't at all uncommon to spot Jack Frost icing over any given pond in his vicinity at least five times over before being satisfied, and lingering around ice skaters extra long just to...make sure they're getting on alright. He wouldn't have been able to explain why if anybody had ever bothered to ask him. And the habit still persists today, naturally; now it's just a bit more conscious than ever before. Whether automatic or on purpose, Jack will invariably try to ice over any drownable body of water he encounters first thing--unless it's the ocean, but that's just an entirely different bag of beans altogether...
- Jack was actually pretty affected by his time in Bunny's warren during the movie; before that, he'd never been a lucid witness to an area in the full grip of spring before, and the memory of greenery and flowers has stuck with him. In fact, Jack's gotten a lot of subconscious creative innovation from it ever since, and it shows up in his ice even more often now than it has before, when he's just idly messing around (floral patterns, vines and flowers, etc). He's even more curious about flowers and general plant-life that isn't evergreens now, too, and kind of wants to start learning their names someday......but don't expect to catch him admitting any of this to Bunny's face anytime soon!!!
- He talks to himself a lot. It's an old habit; Jack got so good at it that he could hold entire one-sided conversations either with himself or oblivious passerby whilst staying moderately entertained, and even with the believers he's managed to obtain in EV, Jack still slips into it every now and then, usually in the form of thinking out loud when he's by himself.
- The coldest Jack can drop any surrounding climate to is roooundabout -128.6 Fahrenheit (-89.2 Celsius)--which incidentally happens to be the lowest natural temperature ever recorded on Earth's surface, why yes :V If he's getting it this cold and you're around, though, there's probably something horribly wrong.
- Don't call him a ghost. He doesn't like being called a ghost. It might be technically accurate but he doesn't care SO DON'T DO IT ALRIGHT >8( Jack knows what ghosts are, assuredly--mostly from one human to the next--and the context was usually a frightened one, which is a good bulk of the reason that Jack prefers referring himself as a spirit instead. 'Ghost' also implies the identical spirit of a person that's died, living on...which Jack isn't at all sure applies to him anyway, since he's more or less come to the conclusion by now that himself and Jackson Overland are two entirely different people at this point. The term just bothers him a lot, and he will nitpick these technicalities with any challenger into forever if he has to!!
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