worlds most fucked up teenager
~ nearly everyone was fucked up at 16, but he really might be the worst

vern stonoga is a 16 year old boy originating from a tiny village in southeast poland, but now lives with his brother on a random sideroad on the way to gingham, in rural central ontario.
evidently plagued by something, his mere presence is uncomfortable and unnerving. he doesnt speak. his face never changes. you cant startle him. his sign language doesnt make any sense. it’s a jumbled incomprehensible mess of asl and pjm. but somehow you can understand it - at least, until you realize you shouldnt be able to. it seems like somehow, he knows what youre thinking about.
he completely vanishes if you turn your back on him. a cold chill fills the room whenever he walks in. even without looking, you’re always able to tell if the human presence you feel behind you is him. even the pierce of his stare on your back is distinct.

something is seriously wrong with him. nobody acts like that.
he hates everyone, and he hates everything. he doesnt start conversations. he only ever willingly talks to his brother, and sometimes the friends of said brother.
the only time you ever *will* see any shift in his expression is one that says “get the fuck away from me”. its a rather scary one.
„he’s always been like this. he’s autistic, thats all.” ... is what is brother will tell you.

this is all exactly what he wants you to think of him. he just wants to be left alone.

he doesnt hate everyone, and he doesnt hate everything. he likes to draw. he likes to go for long walks. he likes photography. he has favourite foods. he has favourite songs. he loves his brother a lot, despite everything.
he just has a tendency to stop himself once he realizes he’s having fun. in his eyes, nothing is worth anything. everything is going to end eventually.

it is impossibly difficult to find peace if you’ve been living over and over and over and over and over and over and over again since the beginning of life itself. it’s eating him alive. the human brain is the worst thing that could have ever happened to him.

appearance

vern is a rather androgynous looking young boy. he's not the tallest but he has a large frame, and his long thick hair alone takes up a lot of space. his hair is dark purple and more often than not very clearly unbrushed - he’s also never cut it in his life. his face is round - he has a large nose, freckles, and rather dead looking monolid eyes. his intense eyebags are also impossible to ignore.
his skin is so pale that his veins are visible going all the way up the underside of his forearms, although its very rare that his arms will ever be exposed anyway. he has freckles scattered over his body, and his fingers are a bit stubby.

in terms of his fashion sense, every piece of clothing he owns is a dark colour and one size too big. having his arms or legs exposed makes him deeply uncomfortable, so the majority of the time he's wearing a big sweater. he doesnt even like to take it off in the summer. he also refuses to wear any footwear other than his black military boots - he owns a pair of sneakers but they have been worn maybe twice. thats just how it is.

his voice, if ever heard, is low, breathy, and barely any louder than a whisper. germ is the only one ever able to make sense of anything said, if vern does for whatever reason decide to speak out loud. he has apraxia of speech - he is capable of making sounds but struggles majorly with actually pronouncing things. when he was really young, germ did send him to speech therapy but he would never cooperate. vern now regrets that quite a bit but even just the thought of trying again now makes him feel nauseous with anxiety. as much as he leans into his eerie silence, it would be a lie to say he doesnt get frustrated about being unable to speak sometimes ...

trivia

• his birthday is november 13, technically its his anniversary of gaining consciousness as a human being rather than an actual birthday. he says that instead of birthday because people think its weird and/or funny. they dont know its the truth
• his only real aspiration is to one day play an enormous church pipe organ
• he has a little brown kitten plush he named kiciunia which is the only thing in his possession he ever gets sentimental about
• he likes making harsh noise "...music"
• one could say he is passionate about recording(? photography?) as he takes his camcorder literally everywhere with him and has an enormous folder on his computer of short videos, photos, and audio files. he doesnt do anything with them other than look back or listen, its just for his own pleasure
• like germ he is also farsighted (but not nearly as severe), he has glasses but only ever wears them to draw or read books
• he has stolen a decent amount of stef's cigarettes. nobody knows this
• he is in a romantic relationship with a 150 ft tall transmission tower, which he has to climb over the fence of his yard, go across the highway, and walk through the forest for a good while to get to
• mosquitos do not bite him
• he does not go to school. he stopped going in the middle of the 10th grade. he didnt drop out, he just does it all online. he got suspended for a week for beating the shit out of some kid that he despised and he simply decided not to go back once the suspension was over, partially due to shame about this incident but he also just really hated being at school anyway. he felt like the sped program he was in was babying him
• he has owned a lot of cell phones which he tends to destroy out of anger. he's thrown them far into the forest, smashed them with his boot, intentionally flushed down the toilet, buried in the yard, etc. germ just buys him new ones without questioning anything
• he is so very dear to me

relationships

germ
germ is his older brother. they are extremely close, yet their relationship is slightly strained. from an outsiders perspective, one would assume their relationship is a bit off simply due to their cold personalities and their frequent tendency to argue. the truth would never make any sense to anyone if they did decide to explain.
germ basically raised him, and he has been the only guardian vern has ever had. ever. unfortunately germ has been unintentionally somewhat neglectful in some ways (and still continues to be) but neither of them really realize that - this is not the reason for the aforementioned strain.
vern is unreasonably mean to him sometimes but he usually feels pretty guilty afterwards. germ is the only one that vern truly and unconditionally cares about; he is the only one who can ever actually understand vern properly. they've always had each other, and they've been by each others side for as long as life itself.

stef
to this day vern still doesnt really know how he feels about stef. stef is germ's boyfriend, so vern having to interact with him is kind of unavoidable. he doesnt dislike stef by any means (although he used to) but he does find him to be very annoying and he wishes he didnt try to talk to him so much.
he thinks stef is an interesting person. he thinks stef deserves a better partner than germ. he thinks stef's career is very respectable. he also thinks stef is quite stupid. but also kind of cool. sometimes. not really.

angie
vern actually really likes angie and he wishes she was around more. she works a lot and aside from that she’s only stef’s best friend - she and germ dont like each other enough to hang out without stef there.
she's very kind to him and he really likes how attentive she is. she very evidently has trouble really comprehending him but its clear she cares and thats something vern really appreciates. he wants to spend more time with her, but it would be little weird to tell her so because shes a full adult

backstory

what happened in verns current lifetime before this very second is kept under the radar entirely by his own will. he describes his young life in poland fondly (which he begins a story by saying, “when i was a larva”) but anything beyond that is completely made up on the spot or described with such strange wording that makes it seem like he’s just spewing nonsense. ask for him to be more specific, he might tell you about a sandwich he ate yesterday. or he might talk about how he used to stand over germ while he slept at night to see what he was dreaming about (he doesnt do that anymore though, because now germ can detect when he’s there. ruined the fun.)

he rarely acknowledges the fact that he’s transgender either. likely due to the fact that he didnt have any big “revelation” of sorts. his inner debate was moreso the realization that he would much prefer to be seen differently.
germ already knew it was coming and didnt make a big deal out of it. a certain figure putting strain on their lives wasnt around anymore. that was it and its rarely a topic of discussion between the two.

its uncertain why exactly he wont talk about any of the past.
angie thinks something traumatic might’ve happened to him. stef thinks hes just being a jokester.
dont bother asking germ about it either. „why are you asking me?? its his life. i dont know. i dont care.” (he does know, and he does care. thats exactly why he’s not telling you.)

truthfully, its a mix of the two. he, himself, wouldnt consider it traumatic, but there was a great difficulty entirely caused by one person. it affected germ much more than it affected vern - nothing ever directly happened to him and anything uncomfortable was only witnessed, but that doesnt dismiss the fact that it was distressing.
he exhibited a lot of self-destructive behaviour in that time.