[ cw: mentions of CSA, repressed memories ] Freddy Kreuger was a child molester, pulling victims out of Quentin's preschool class, where Kreuger worked as a gardener. The parents came together to kill to avenge their children's innocence–and all of those parents agreed to never speak of the abuse again, hoping to drive it out of their kids' minds. This scheme worked; the kids all forgot until Kreuger came back as a dream demon. Learning the truth about what happened turned Quentin's whole world upside down and decimated his trust in his father, the driving force behind Kreuger's murder. In the aftermath, Quentin remains paranoid about keeping all his memories in place and extremely suspicious about anyone trying to gain trust simply for their authority.

Without robust childhood memories, Quentin relied on his relationship with his father and friends to keep him grounded. All but one of his friends were killed, and that last one was locked away. His father hid a life-changing secret from him until it turned lethal. For a frenzied period of time, finding and killing Freddy was the only thing he had to live for. His obsession with Freddy has left a mark on his psyche; it showed him a far-flung part of himself that he'd never known before, a part that frightens him horribly. He knows what he's done, but–worse than that–he knows the things he wanted to do.

Quentin's incandescent rage and desire for revenge were the reasons that the extradimensional Entity pulled him into the Fog for her unending life-or-death trials–Freddy was just a psychic stowaway who came along for the ride. Being in the Fog with other survivors allowed Quentin to rebuild some parts of himself: the team player, the altruist, the teenager trying to have fun. But he can't forget that he brought Freddy with him when Freddy should have died. Beyond the endlessly repeating trials, Quentin fought endlessly with himself: be a victim or protect your friends? let obsession drive you to greater extremes or drown it out with other hopes and fears? run through the pain or lay down and finally finally die? There was very little room for in-between in the Fog–or at least it felt that way. While he's been able to recover much of himself, Quentin has never recovered a sense of balance. He's not alive in between.

As zadza builds up in him, Quentin's transformation starts with electric blue crackling in his soft tissues and pain points and escalates to translucent chunks of his body that show his insides, particularly in the parts of his body carrying stress. Unchecked, the build-up will start to soften those parts of his body, turning them dark as a bruising fruit, then translucent, then into a clear, crackling gel–until he's a luminescent ooze with too many bones and a live current riding through it.

RECONSTITUTION | Being mostly slime in its complete form, the Oblex can be split/smashed into pieces and reconstitute itself. Killing it requires wrestling through a fair amount of goop to crush Quentin's original skull.
ELECTRIFICATION | The goop can cause varying degrees of electrical shock when it comes in contact with a living person.
PSYCHIC TAP | Each electric shock steals something from the victim's brain; a light buzz might take a surface-level feeling, but a real lightning-bolt charge might steal a memory. Depending on my partner, they can choose if they want their character to LOSE whatever the Oblex takes or keep it–the flavor could be yummy either way! Whatever the case, Quentin keeps those feelings, memories, skill knowledges, etc., even after he returns to his original form. Skill knowledge is not the same as skill HAVING. He may know the feeling of being able to run a 4min mile, but he can't abruptly run one. Maybe he understands how any given superpower feels to use physically or emotionally, but he can't suddenly use that power. Skill knowledge feeds his dreamwalking abilities by adding to his experience and imagination, but not his real-world abilities.
REPLICA | With its accumulated mental material, the Oblex can create cheap replicas of the person it siphoned off of. These replicas will not hold up to scrutiny, and they can't freely travel from the Oblex's body–but they are pretty spooky and possibly insulting.

The Oblex is driven to absorb others to increase its knowledge and decrease its loneliness. Unless approached with hostility, its efforts will start light; a person might almost think it means no harm! But the input it receives from light static shocks and nine-volt buzzes is never enough. Contact and aggression will increase the long it stays engaged with a single person OR if the person it encounters comes at it intending to fight. It doesn't stop until its prey stops. It's relatively slow-moving in big spaces, but watch out in close quarters–it could be anywhere.