Moonage Daydreams

Full Name: Mikhail Kusnetsov

Nicknames: Michael, Misha, Mai

Height: 5"10

Weight: Fluctuates

Hair: Red and curly, later white and curly

Eye color: Gold, later green

Complexion: Pale, freckles

Voice: Scratchy

Ethnicity: Likes coleslaw

Sexuality: Ari-sexual. possibly also asexual

Relationships:
Dating: Ari Taniyama
Siblings: Aurelie Kusnetsov
Parents: Fleur Kusnetsov, Gregor Kusnetsov

Born to Gregor and Fleur Kusnetsov, his family was poor growing up and he was mostly left to fend for himself while his parents struggled to earn enough money. This led to him often wandering the streets, breaking into abandoned buildings, and making dodgy friends. Despite this he excelled in school, skipping ahead several grades due to his sheer intellect and obsession. He knew that if he succeeded in school he could escape to the city. He was a bullied kid who had no friends and increasingly violent tendencies. At one point he figured out how to make his own gun, but this project was quickly discovered by his parents and he was sent to counselling.
When he was around sixteen in human years he got a scholarship and moved to the big city to study. Here he was completely broke for most of his degree, sleeping in the streets, hooking up with random people so that he could sleep in their houses, generally just a shitty time. Eventually one of his professors discovered this and told him that he could stay with his friend's son free of charge, who was also studying in the city at the time. This was Io Taniyama, who's apartment was paid for by his rich dad and had no problem hosting a friend.
Michael and Io had a rocky relationship but they eventually became really close friends. Io was training for the police academy while Michael finished his studies. Eventually, Michael started working on his doctorate, and Io graduated to become an officer, but they still continued living together. Io started dating Michael's sister, Aurelie Kusnetsov.
At one point as he was working in the labs, Michael was approached by Ari Taniyama, who he recognised as Io's weird uncle. Ari pointed out a mistake in his work, and was generally an asshole.
Despite this, Michael started looking into Ari's work, and was fascinated by what he saw. He thought that this was the key to understanding the universe. Michael's fear of the unknown and uncontrollable led him to become deeply obsessive. Eventually Ari noticed his stalker, and started breaking into Michael's room to leave him advice about his thesis, including solving a problem that had left Michael stumped for years just before the deadline.
After Michael graduated, Ari offered him a job stealing research secrets and using them to make illegal weapons. Michael accepted. He kept their relationship a secret from Io.
As a gift for Ari's birthday, Michael decided to kill his father, Suki Taniyama. Because of this, Evrim's people began snooping around the crime scene, and Michael's double agent work was in danger of being discovered. Ari told Michael to kill Io, and Michael agreed. His relationship with Io had become strained due to his secrets, so he shot him (though Io survived).
However eventually as the weapons he contributed to started being tested, his secret was discovered, and he was forced to flee to Ari's kingdom.
Eventually the war between Ari's and Evrim's kingdoms broke out. Michael suddenly found himself as a strategist instead of a scientist, but he embraced this role. During this time he and Mowgli became close friends, with Mowgli always encouraging him to leave because he was "too smart to get dragged into all of this", but Michael never did. Instead he suffered under Ari's temper and the strain of essentially running everything.
Around this time he found a woman in the aftermath of a battle who was severely injured. Using advances in biomechanics, he and Ari fixed her up by sewing her together with animal parts, especially bat parts. She was Thumbelina, and she, Michael, and Mowgli became close friends.
At one point Ari was briefly captured and Michael was left to run things alone. This did not bode well for his health.
Towards the end of the war Michael was in battle when he was attacked by Io. The two fought, and both were wounded, but Io won. He tried to help Michael, who was near fatally wounded, but Michael refused and fled, crawling into a cave to hide and die. It was during this fight that Ari was captured and imprisoned, and the war ended, at the cost of turning Earth into a nuclear wasteland.
However, Michael survived. His body was pretty much fucked, and perhaps his mind was only kept alive by the hat lady, but that's just a theory.
Long after, in the 1800s, a much weakened Ari escaped his prison and found Michael again. Using bits of humans and a lot of biomechanics, he essentially gave Michael a new body. But Michael had lost his powers. For a guy obsessed with being perfect and the best this fucking sucked.
Ari told him about his plan to start another war to take control of these humans, and Michael reallyyy did not wanna do that but agreed to help anyway. So he spent several years running Ari's political campaigns, and all his spare time trying to improve on the design of his body in hopes of maybe getting his powers back. Naturally, this was kind of exhausting.
On Earth, Ari found evidence of life that had survived the devastation on Mars and come to Earth instead. He talked about possible pursuing his old passion project of creating a planet with life on it, but ultimately dismissed it because he was supposed to be taking revenge on Earth and his father's creations. He would however still visit Mars from time to time using his powers. Michael could no longer go to Space and was extremely upset over this.
After much campaigning, Ari succeeded in starting his war, but things went wrong almost immediately. The man he'd been manipulating to take control was killed, and Ari no longer had any power. Meanwhile Michael was visiting the western front in France when a fight broke out and he got shot. He managed to stumble away from the fight and was found by a travelling circus who would put on shows for wounded soldiers.
He stayed with them for a bit and they ended up rescuing him both mentally and physically. At the end of it the war he wasn't sure if he wanted to return to Ari or not. He stayed with them for a little longer, but then WW2 broke out, and he heard about the bombings in London. Worried about losing his friends, he left the circus and bribed a P51 pilot named Kitty into sneaking him back to England in a B-25 (Kitty was later left as prey for Thil, but he survived. As a vampire) When he got there Ari blamed him leaving for how out of control the war had gotten and they fought.
Michael told him he didn't care about taking over the world anymore and he felt awful and just wanted to fix himself and do his research. Ari was not too happy about this, even though his heart wasn't really in it anymore either. He took out his own insecurity on Michael and stormed off.
Around this time Ellipse had crash landed on Earth. Ari heard about this and he came to a compromise with Michael. Instead of politics, Michael would be sent to keep an eye on Ellipse to ensure that she didn't ruin any plans. In order to do this he would pose as a scientist at Area 51, and everyone would be happy. Michael agreed.
During his time he mainly joined in on the government and NASA's study of Ellipse's spaceship, and realised that there was enough technology now to go to space. Realising that Ellipse really just wanted to go home and probably wouldn't be a problem, he stole some design files from the government and brought them back to Ari, pitching the idea to start a private space company as the space race began. He phrased this in terms of world domination, even though really his end goal was to go somewhere that felt more like home. Ari agreed because he'd secretly been terraforming Mars and wanted Michael to see it, although he also spun it under the guise of world domination.
So they started their space company. Progress was fast with their combined knowledge. However, Michael's mental health was in the gutter and he was spiraling worse and worse. He had come to realise that it was truly impossible to know everything and perfection was probably unattainable and he'd pretty much wasted his life on an ambition that he didn't even enjoy working towards. He experimented with LSD for a while, and continued trying to fix his body to give himself powers even greater than Ari's, to no avail. Eventually he came to the drug addled conclusion that he had to replace his brain to really get anywhere, because it was himself that was the problem. So he attempted to cut open his head, and died.
Luckily, the hat lady was around. He found himself in her trippy magic world, which didn't really exist outside of his head. They had a conversation, and he came to the conclusion that he didn't really need to be anything at all.
When he woke up, a long time had passed. He told Ari that all he wanted to do was live laugh love, and Ari agreed. He showed him what their company had become, essentially a worldwide cult that people worshiped, similar to Tesla before Elon Musk went crazy, but slightly more cult-y.
Ari hired the movie star Fox to be the their public image guy. However, Fox figured out that these were the bad guys and with Kitty, Ellipse, and Fermat teamed up to try to take down the company. They succeeded, but couldn't catch Michael before he fucking finally managed to get on a space ship to Mars.
So he, Ari, and their friends finally had a whole planet to themselves. And Michael finally learned to stop stressing about how to be the best at everything and start thinking more like a group theorist (silly puzzles go brrr).