Paul

Paul is the player's character (PC) in Saving Chloe (2018), the fourth game set in the Elsaverse, and he also appears in some other titles as a side character. Although players can explore different paths in Saving Chloe, in the Elsaverse canon Paul is a lawyer who currently works for her fiancee, Chloe Reyes. He was the first PC to have a power, as he's a Finder who can detect and track people from the parallel universe.

Personal
Like the rest of the player's characters in the Elsaverse, canon Paul is a nice guy, good-hearted and gentle with women. And, like Lucas before him, as well as Joel Dresden (and, to a lesser extent, Detective Nathaniel Blake) after him, Paul is also a broken man due to a traumatic experience from his past. He was just an ordinary teenager with a nice and sweet girlfriend he loved so much: her name was Chloe Reyes, and he used to sneak into her family's mansion every now and then, to surprise her and enjoy some tender moments with her. Even though they never went beyond kissing, as Chloe didn't feel ready for anything else, Paul was happy to just be with her and was patiently and respectfully waiting for her to take some further steps. But, when they were 17, Morland told Paul to stop seeing his daughter, or else Crow would deal with him. Knowing that family as well as he did, Paul was well aware of the ominous underlying implications of such a threat, and despite his love for Chloe, he obeyed, scared. Paul and Chloe broke their relationship, and he didn't even dare to talk to her again at high school, just in case. Some months later, he started college, and she was forced to enter the family business, totally submitted to her father's control, who abused and whored her out to achieve his personal goals.

This episode deeply affected Paul and, for a whole decade, he was unable to move on from his teen love, destroying every relationship he tried to start with some other girls. Not only he was still in love with Chloe; he also despised himself for being a coward back then and not having stood up against Morland, even though Chloe's father was indeed very capable of making good his threat. And learning that things were going badly for Chloe didn't help him at all. Paul's sense of right or wrong was fueled by that situation: feeling irrationally guilty about it, he unconsciously focused his life on standing up for other victims of abuse and helping them. Still in college, he defended a student he didn't even know, called Serena, when a professor was mistreating her in class; this resulted in a great friendship with that girl but also in Paul being mistreated on his grades. Then, after graduating in Law, he stayed in Sangrive to feel closer to Chloe, rejecting several offers from big firms, and started working with Serena in a small foundation that helps abused women. To better protect them, he attended self-defense lessons at a local gym, where he was trained by Xara; and has learned to cook, trying not to be like those abusive husbands he faces so often.

More than ten years after their forced breakup, Paul was alone, and still dreaming about Chloe. But one Friday morning, about a month after the bombing at the Mayoral rally, their school friend Miranda, whom he hadn't seen either since he started college, showed up on his porch and suggested that Paul should get in contact with Chloe again. And that was, in fact, a life-changing moment for everyone involved, and for many others as well. With the pretext of using Chloe to get some info about Morland out of her, Paul decided to face his past and go find Chloe, as a way to make up for his past cowardice. And, as soon as he managed to see Chloe face to face for the first time in a decade, he quickly understood that she was in a very bad place she wanted to escape from, and he offered to help her not only because she could be useful to stop Morland, as Miranda and her group wished, but also because he genuinely wanted to help that sweet girl he once knew and still loved. By the end of that day, Paul and Chloe were reunited again as a couple, this time with all consequences and fully committed to fighting for her freedom, and Miranda had resumed her friendship with Chloe after all the ill events that had happened between them in the most recent past.

But that was not all. In order to get in touch with Chloe again, Paul had a secret tool: a weird ability he called "Chloe-vision" that lets him see a point of color in the general direction of where Chloe is. This strange condition helped him to endure those long years without seeing her, as he could somehow know that she was still near him. That magical Friday, Paul learned that there are other people with some weird, unnatural abilities too; on Saturday, when he snuck into Morland's mansion with Chloe to try and figure out what her father's evil plans were, Paul was informed about the existence of a portal to a parallel universe from which Morland, Crow, and Xara came, and from where Paul's and others' powers are being leaked into Sangrive. With no time to reflect on that info, on Sunday they had to come back to that mansion again, this time to rescue Xara, as she had just been abducted by Morland's assassin. The rescue mission was a total success, and they even achieved to corner Morland: with her father about to flee through the portal to his homeworld, Chloe couldn't pull the trigger, but Paul didn't hesitate and tackled him down. After knocking him out, Paul kept punching Morland's unconscious body, releasing his pent-up rage for all that he had done to his daughter, and seeing in Morland the reflection of all those abusers Paul had faced during his life.

Hadn't it been for Chloe, Paul might have killed Morland on the spot, with his bare hands. But she stopped him on time, and Xara took care of Morland and Crow, bringing them back to their realm. After that, Chloe decided to take over her father's legit business, using an abandoned hotel to create a shelter for abused women. Paul left his job and started working for her girlfriend, and some time later he proposed to her; of course, Chloe accepted. But this happy event led to a delicate moment for Paul when he had to tell his best friend Serena about it. During those ten years they spent studying and working together, she was always there for him, supporting him and being his confidant, and Paul actually developed some romantic feelings for her; however, he never spoke up as he thought Serena was gay. When he resumed his relationship with Chloe, he felt guilty for those feelings and distanced himself from Serena. Now he was going to marry Chloe and, although he was positive this was the right choice, he wasn't sure whether being close friends with one of these women while being married to the other would be fair for either of them, or even possible at all. So Paul wrote to an advice column in a local newspaper, and it happened that the author of said column was, indeed, Serena's new boyfriend, Joel Dresden. Because, what Paul didn't know, is that Serena wasn't gay, but bisexual, and not only that: she was deeply in love with him, but never told him as she was sure he wouldn't be able to reciprocate those feelings. Now, several months after leaving his work, and with Paul only calling her to announce his marriage, she had realized how much she missed those moments they used to share as friends: Serena was not only losing Paul as a potential couple, a situation she had already accepted and even moved on from, but she felt she was also losing him as a friend. Fortunately, and thanks to Joel, they met again to talk things out, agreeing to keep in touch to preserve their beautiful friendship.

Powers
Paul is a Finder: he can detect and track people from the parallel universe, and their descendants, within a certain range of several miles. At first, he thought his power only worked with Chloe, and that's why he called it "Chloe-vision"; thanks to Xara, he then learned the actual name of his ability, and also that his "Finder-vision" could work on other people too, although it was Chloe who eventually explained the reason to him. The first activation of his power was a shocker for him, as it happened suddenly, in a moment in which he was feeling extremely bad for not being able to see Chloe anymore after starting college: as his vision changed abruptly, Paul thought he was suffering a seizure and panicked, until he realized that the single spot of color he was able to see was, indeed, pointing at Chloe's house.

The power works differently depending on where his targets are: if they are not in sight, Paul is able to focus his vision and, as the rest of the world appears distorted like in the negative of a picture, he can see a splotch of color in the direction to where these people are located (the color itself varies depending on the person), with the shape, size and brightness of this splotch approximately indicating the distance to them; if these people are on sight, he sees them glowing with their personal color, while everything else is normally colored. For his power to work, Paul needs to have personally seen those people first, so that he can 'attune' himself to them, although in Chasing Beth (2021) it's said that other Finders can start tracking people just by seeing them in a picture. This power doesn't work if the targets are too far away, although the exact range is not mentioned; also, it only works on alive people, as Chloe states that the power for locating dead people is a completely different one.

Miscellaneous

 * Not only Paul is the first player's character with powers: his reaction in Saving Chloe canon path's final scene, when he tackles Morland and punches him several times, even when Chloe's father is already unconscious, is actually the first violent act ever performed by a PC in the Elsaverse.


 * Paul is the most liked male character in the Elsaverse, at least by his female counterparts: Chloe loves him, Serena secretly loved him, Xara also felt attracted to him, and Miranda always felt something for him back in high school. Players can explore those feelings on their respective focused paths in Saving Chloe, and also enjoy a dream orgy sequence with the four main love interests from the first four games as a bonus scene. All of these characters remark that Paul's kindness and respectful attitude are one of his strongest points.