Nick
From The Official GPF Wiki
Vital Statistics
First Appearance: The Beginning (November 2, 1998)
Full Name: Nicholas T. Wellington
Known Aliases: Nick
Status: Alive
Species: Human
Gender: Male
Height: 5' 9" (175.26 cm)
Weight: 200 lb (90.72 kg)
Hair: Black
Distinguishing Characteristics: Glasses, freckles, characteristic cowlick
Marital Status: Married
Character Description
Nick is the primary character of the strip. He's a relatively short, quiet, and, well... nerdy kind of guy with quite an imagination. He enters the strip on his job interview with GPF Software, and it is through his eyes that we meet and view the rest of the crew.
Nick is a former "shy nerd" who has become one with his geekiness and has embraced it openly. He loves science fiction and craves computers, and has little (i.e., no) experience with women. He is far more comfortable traversing a circular, doubly-linked list in a queue of B-trees than talking with the female species. But he is open and friendly and quite sociable... if you can keep the topic on his software.
Nick has a insatiable imagination, and is prone to daydreams and zany ideas. Expect him to occasionally slip into a fantasy sequence, turning a file search into a quest for hidden treasure. (He often places himself into other personae during such sequences, such as the infamous Oklahoma Nick, cyber-treasure hunter.) He has a dry, witty sense of humor, and occasionally pretends to plan to take over the world (a daydream that would eventually have ominous consequences).
Nick has a stable (albeit occasionally rocky) relationship with his friend, coworker, and now wife, Ki. However, we do know that Trudy took great pains to prevent this relationship from forming, to the point of sabotage. Her manipulations somehow continued to keep Nick on her side, while the rest of the cast viewed her as the resident evil. Nick's stubborn refusal to accept Trudy as the "resident evil" of the company had placed a strain on his relationship with Ki relationship, until Trudy's twisted plots were finally revealed to him. Now that Trudy is out of the picture, the pair have overcome the last of their rough edges and settled in for a nice, healthy relationship. In fact, Nick and Ki eventually became engaged and recently tied the knot.
During Surreptitious Machinations, Nick became the key to Trudy's ultimate plan for world domination. Playing off his surfacing Inventor's Gene, Trudy planned to use his abilities to build a weapon by which she could conquer the world. However, through the determination and perseverance of his friends, Nick finally saw through Trudy's lies and deceptions and denounced her. With the rebuilding of GPF Software, Nick hopes to settle down and get back to his old programming stomping grounds... but we all know things are never quite normal around here, are they?
Nick's relationship with Trudy graphically demonstrates one of his more annoying personality traits: he always tries to see the best in people, sometimes to the point of naivety. Shaken by Trudy's betrayal, however, he seems to have swung in to the opposite extreme, especially when it comes to a certain other shady female character, Trish....
To Thine Own Self... focused primarily on the events surround Nick and Ki's wedding, as well as the unexpected excursions that occur between the rehearsals and the actual event. Like all members of the cast, Nick eventually came face-to-face with the specter of his darker, inner self, which in his case took the guise of Emperor Nicholas the Puissant. Kidnapped by Duchess Ki Oshiro on the eve of his wedding, Nick was forced to attempt to replicate the inter-dimensional transport capabilities of the MUTEX to allow the Emperor to conquer other universes. Although he attempted to stall the process, he ultimately failed to reproduce the transport's functionality. Nick and his friends eventually returned to their home universe relatively unscathed, if a little unsettled by the experience of meeting their alternate selves.
Unknown to Nick, he has been given the nickname "Mirage" by one faction of the Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair. The Brothers began watching him after discovering that his IP address sporadically used tons of encrypted bandwidth for unknown reasons. (Presumably this traffic must be generated by the MUTEX, which uses the Internet to generate virtual reality data.) After he defeated "Lord Catastro", a hacker who cracked and radically altered one of the Bog of Bloodbath game servers, the Brothers stepped up their surveillance, noting that Nick must possess "considerable skill".
Selected Milestones
- Nick joins the GPF crew
- Nick first encounters "Pookel" online
- Oklahoma Nick and the Server of Doom!
- Nick Dreams of "Geek Wars" (a "Star Wars" parody)
- 2001: A Space Oddity
- Nick bristles as Dexter makes moves on Ki
- Meet Nick's uncle, Professor Wisebottom
- The Movie Date leads Nick and Ki closer together
- Nick tackles the Y2k bug
- Fooker spies on Nick for Ki, with unusual results
- The moment you've all been waiting for... The Date!
- A look at Nick and Ki on the dating scene
- A peek at Nick's college yearbook
- Nick's confusing, frustrating refusal to see Trudy as "evil"
- Nick plays hero...
- ... And learns a few surprises about his genetic history
- Surreptitious Machinations:
- Haven't we been through this before...?
- The Inventor's Gene strikes again
- Nick finally meets Ki's parents
- Pre-marital perturbation
- What happens when Nick's comic books and his Inventor's Gene collide
- To Thine Own Self...:
- You know Nick and Ki can't have a "normal" honeymoon...
Relationships
- Ki Oshiro Wellington, Nick's wife
- The Wellingtons, Nick's parents
- Lori, Nick's sister
- Professor Otto Wisebottom, Nick's great uncle
- The Oshiros, Nick's parents-in-law
- Yoshi Oshiro, Nick's nephew
- Todd, Nick's son from an alternate future time line
Group Affiliations
- GPF Software: Employee, Software Engineer
Miscellaneous Notes
Some people have accused me of basing Nick on myself. I say this is purely hearsay. As proof, I give you a picture of Nick, and a picture of me. I'll let you be the judge:
Note the conspicuous lack of mustache on Nick, and the missing cowlick on me. No matter that I retouched the photo, so the cowlick is gone; it's not there now. Nick is also suspiciously missing a mouth. How he eats is beyond me.
See, I figured you'd agree with me. No resemblance whatsoever.
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(ungeek this Geek Code courtesy of the Geek Code Decoder Page)




