Steve (The Coma Guy)
Childhood and “The Coma”
Steve was Arthur’s best friend and classmate growing up… until 1993, when Steve lapsed into a coma. The doctors were never able to clearly explain why Steve fell into a coma, however Art always blamed himself for it – earlier that afternoon they had gone and seen “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie” at Art’s insistance as part of his ongoing war on bad movies, and following their viewing Steve had commented that he felt like he ‘needed to take a really long nap to get that out of his head’.
After 15 years in a coma, almost everyone who once visited Steve had given up hope that he would ever awake again… his parents retired moved to Florida, leaving his sister Molly and Art as his only regular visitors.
Waking Up
After multiple failed attempts to wake his friend, from playing SMB:TM backwards to pouring hot coffee down his feeding tube accompanied by a 21-alarm clock salute, Art eventually gave in and accepted the help of his brother’s Science teacher and mentor… Dr. Anto Hubris… and talked Steve’s parents into allowing Hubris to use him as the subject of one of his experiments.
The experiment was a success and, after a brief period of time, Steve did regain full consciousness. Hubris’ method of waking Steve is still classified (patent still pending, of course), however he is on record it involved nanites and that Steve probably should be kept away from any AI systems, less they go insane and start trying to kill people.
Life After The Coma (The Birth of Coma-Man)
The after-effects of the coma still plauge Steve – he suffers from occasional short-term memory loss, headaches, and the irrational fear that he is trapped in an alternate dimension ruled by dinosaurs. He is now also a full-blown insomniac, in no small part due to his fear of going back to sleep and not waking back up again.
In addition to the physical effects, the psychological impact has been profound as well – due to missing out on the formative last few years of high school as well as most of his young adulthood, Steve never learned how to drive, cook, pay bills, go on dates, work at a crappy job, or a number of the other “shared” experiences that most Gen-X-ers his age have gone through.
Rather than move in with his younger sister or leave everything he knows (or at least used to know), he opted to stay in the area and move in with Arthur. Art has been doing his best to re-introduce Steve to the world in as non-traumatic of a manner as possible… well, mostly. There are a few things that Art is of the strong opinion that Steve needs to discover for himself.
