Basics

Name:
John Valentine
Nickname/title:
Johnny
Gender:
Male
Age:
35
Build/physicality:
He works out, but that’s only to stay fit, not build up extra muscle. Still, he’s in good condition for a 5’11’’ tall man.
Appearance:


Background

Psychological status:
John is about as sane as can be.
Quirks, ticks, conditions, sensitivities to the paranormal:
He has dreams foretelling the death of those close to him.
Magical potential:
Yes
Personality:
John is a relatively simple man. He wakes up at five, works out for an hour, eats breakfast, then cleans up for work. Shop opens at seven and closes at twelve. He walks the half hour back to his apartment complex and eats a salad before undressing and going to sleep. On Sundays he goes for a stroll around town and treats himself to lunch at his favorite diner. Always the same one. At the end of every month he sends up money to his mother in the nursing home so she doesn’t get kicked out onto the streets. He goes up at least once a year and gets to play pretend as his deceased father.

He’s cordial to anyone he meets but doesn’t put up with bullshit. There are multiple days of the year not related to holidays where he closes up shop and doesn’t leave his apartment all day. Whenever questioned as to why, John dodges the question. He’s spending the day in mourning.
Hometown:
Born in the suburbs around Chicago but moved into the city in his early adult years
Education:
Business Degree
Occupation:
Store Clerk
Achievements:
He’s finally paid the mortgage off on his store and his apartment.
Sexuality:
Bisexual
Religion/philosophy:
John doesn’t really like to think about those sorts of things, but he supposes God is alright. He gives him a day off on Sundays, and that makes Him just fine in John’s book.
Marital status:
His fiancée passed away seven years ago.
Family status:
John’s sole surviving relative is a mother with alzheimer's living in a nursing home. All the rest have drowned.
Biographical writeup:
John learned early on in life that dreams and reality sometimes do blur. At the young age of thirteen he was plagued with horrific nightmares of his two younger siblings drowning in a lake. These strange premonitions came true when the entire family was out at a park to get their photograph taken. The two young girls ventured too close to the nearby lake and fell in, dragged to the bottom by their heavy dress clothes. The next set of dreams started almost immediately, happening on and off over the course of 3 years. In the nightmares his father had gone on a fishing trip with his friends, only to have the boat sink, causing him to drown whilst trapped in the wreckage.

Four months after John’s sixteenth birthday his father announced that he would be leaving for a time to go fishing off the east coast. John had begged him not to go, but to no avail. His father was neither a superstitious man nor a religious one. Once again the terrifying visions proved to be true. Years passed by and John hadn’t a single dream, until he became engaged. This time, the nightmares had nothing to do with drowning. No, this vision was that of the love of his life getting brutally murdered.

Caroline would be walking down the street late at night, before getting jumped by two men and dragged into an alley. First they tried to rob her, and she would not comply. So then they decided to kill her. John regards the fact that she was not molested as a luxury, albeit a small one. John at last confronted Caroline about these nightmares one night, and tried to persuade her to not go out after the sun sets anymore. She thought that he was crazy, especially after he held to his claims with such utter conviction. An intense verbal argument between the two ended with her storming off into the dark. That was the last time John ever saw her alive.

John was grief stricken, and paid very heavy bribes to multiple law enforcers and private investigators to help him track down the killers. He was so rash and bribed so many individuals that that he lost a significant amount of his savings, actually having to sell his house. The money did it’s trick though. The killers were found and brought to justice. Not however, in the typical sense. The two men were brought to John directly, and he himself dealt justice. For those bribes were not just for the apprehension of the criminals, but also to keep quiet as to how they were punished.

The murders were not hidden, not in the slightest. There was, strangely enough, no evidence against John, and no lawsuit was ever filed against him. He had enough of Chicago though, and needed to get away from that damn city. John pooled all of his money together to open up a convenience store in the town of Arkham. Five years have passed since then, five years since his dreams returned. This time he dreams of himself. Yet still John remains, trying to make a new life while keeping the old one secret and buried.

Miscellaneous information

Combative belongings:
He keeps a Colt M1911 .45 ACP under the counter in his store.
Noncombative belongings:
The keys to his shop and his apartment, a deck of playing cards, and a matchbox.
Other information:
N/A
Theme song:

Name
Lord Sebastian Francis Brotherton III

Nickname/title
The Blueblood

Gender
Male

Age
27

Build/physicality
Sebastian's body is slender and light, and not in a particularly healthy or aesthetic fashion. He simply can't keep any weight on his bones or colour to his skin. He stands at around 5'11" and hardly seems to weigh anything. He walks with a cane and while able to function quite well when things are calm and casual, when things get adrenaline-pumping his frailty manifests and he moves like someone much older.

Appearance:


Background

Psychological status:

If an alienist were to examine him, they might declare Sebastian to be morbid, hedonistic and decadent, even deviant. Sebastian claims to have simply accepted the inevitable and is enjoying the ride to whatever is beyond. He doesn't entertain overtly suicidal or otherwise self-destructive thoughts, but much of his behaviour revolves around this fundamental acceptance and even anticipation of his impending mortality. And when it happens, it happens.

Quirks, ticks, conditions, sensitivities to the paranormal:

Sebastian's health was ravaged by the War, leaving him a habitual user of a delicate balance of painkillers, stimulants and a hundred and one sundry medicines of varying scientific validity to address just as many medical complaints. Through his broken body, Sebastian sometimes encounters strange coincidences or perhaps omens - a pattern in the shrapnel-scars across his back, glimpsed in a mirror; a Morse code message being 'tapped out' in the chronic aching of the joints in his left leg.

Magical potential

Yes.

Personality

Sebastian is in many ways the daring dilettante that the Jazz age so adores, a bright young thing with more money than sense and a devil-may-care attitude towards the new pleasures provided by the modern age. He found life in England stifling, stuffy, and adores the richer, brighter quality of life in America (and what Europe is doing with itself as it rebuilds). If he had the energy to really dance, he'd be out at a music hall every night drinking champagne and being the belle of the ball, not so much flirting with scandal as open-mouth kissing it in the middle of the hotel lobby. As it is, his condition and station as the last Lord Brotherton has slightly tempered his raucous nature; while he never wanted the title and certainly never expected it - he was the fourth son, after all - he's British enough to want to at least go through the motions and make sure some things are done properly.

Hometown

Wakefield, Yorkshire, England

Education

Bachelor's in Literature

Occupation

I beg your pardon?

Achievements

Sebastian is almost proud to have accomplished nothing meaningful in his life; no publications, no notable service, no great performance. But then, perhaps someone like him not having caused a major scandal is an accomplishment.

Sexuality

Discretely homosexual, though getting less and less "discrete".

Religion/philosophy

Sebastian had a religious upbringing which lapsed almost as soon as he entered his teens and discovered his penchant for buggery.

Marital status:

Unmarried; he has left a number of illict affairs behind him in England when he came to America, where he fully intends to forge a few more.

Family status

Sebastian is recently orphaned, his elderly parents having passed within a few days of each other from old age. He lost his brothers to the War, leaving the unwanted title of Lord Brotherton resting uneasy on his pretty little head.

Biography
The War ripped through the aristocracy of Great Britain like a wildfire, killing sons and heirs left and right. The Brotherton family of Wakefield, Yorkshire, is in many wars just as much a casualty as any victim of the Somme. Sebastian is the last son of Lord Johnathan and Lady Margaret Brotherton, of Moorview Abbey. The youngest of four boys, Sebastian spent much of his youth in southern English boarding schools learning the classics and spent his summers on the family estate, taking long hikes across the bracing, wind-swept and beautiful but bleak moors of the northern counties. As he grew, his dalliances with classmates became a little socially inconvenient for his parents - what did they expect locking up him up in a school with nothing but other adolescent males? - and they began to put much thought and effort into finding a wife for the young roustabout.

When the War came, of course it was expected that every son of the upper classes should serve. While his elder brothers went straight to service, Sebastian had to spend a year in preparation and training at an officer's college near York. Upon graduation he was shipped straight to France as a minor lieutenant in an obscure little station well behind enemy lines, overseeing the supply and logistics of the local field medics. For a time he thought such a position would be safe and he could sit out the war without having to actually see much killing and spending lots of time staring at men in uniform or getting favours from dashing French lads. But of course it was not to be. Line shifted, fortunes turned, men were reassigned. The Germans encroached. The station came under fire. He's glad he doesn't remember much of those times, to be frank. Head trauma can do queer things to a chap.

His next clear memory is of a French hospital, his head wrapped tight with bandages. Bright lights, a woman's voice speaking French. He'd picked up enough of the language at that point to understand what she was saying, to pick out her part of a conversation happening at the head of his bed. Phrases like 'fished from the rubble', 'better if he died, saints forgive me' and 'but what sort of life?'. A skull fracture, probable brain damage, a hundred and one other ailments, injuries and infections. It sounded half a miracle he wasn't dead. He recovered slowly from that point, spending months an invalid in the French sanatorium drinking watery soup in a bed between a man with no legs and a poor soul whose lungs were half-boiled by some deadly gas weapon, leaving him unable to walk more than a few steps without gasping for air. Despite rapidly reaching state a feeling "quite fine, actually", he was fussed over constantly; it seemed they were worried that any second, he would have some kind of embolism or sudden organ failure brought on from one entry or another in the laundry list of maladies Jerry had inflicted him and he would suddenly keel over. It wasn't until he was well enough to realise the only visitors he got were concerned medics that they felt he was recovered enough to give him the news.

His brothers, his heroic and adventurous brothers, had always been the type to lead from the front. Of course they were cavalrymen. Of course a man on a horse is a ludicrous prospect in trench warfare, up against rifles and tanks and airplanes and artillery shells. There was one son of the Brotherton name left - and he was an invalid catamite at that. Sebastian spent a few sober nights weighing his options. Marriage seemed inescapable now; some well-meaning homely girl upon whom he would have to father some young, presumably after draining the house of brandy to be able to perform. A wife and children to continue the family name, to keep the house lit. He was discharged, returned home to Wakefield to take in the invigorating air, be among family and gather what strength he had left after his long hospital stay. It didn't last very long and soon the parents joined their sons, breathing their last not quite at the same time, but close enough to be a minor news story. As the new Lord Brotherton received his title, without an apparent heir and certainly no inclination to go through the steps to make an heir occur, Sebastian began to look through the family line. He was looking for some obscure cousin to be an escape hatch, to name in a will and then spend the rest of his life - however long that was before the Germans finally finished off their long, slow murder - making sure they inherited as little as possible by drinking away the fortune.

After a time, he found it. It was actually chance, rather than effort, that yielded the answer; two pages in a dusty tome of family history had been pasted together, the pages renumbered to hide the trick, and only age had undone the adhesive. It seemed that there was a family of cousins extant, to whom it would all go when Sebastian finally passed, but not in England. No, there were Brothertons who had left the country in the eighteenth century and sailed west, for Massachusetts. For the Miskatonic Valley. For America. It was a distant family tie, but good enough for the law. Sebastian fired off some introductory letters and telegrams, before arranging to have family estate boxed up and passage booked on an ocean liner. Staff were dismissed, the abbey shuttered. Money was withdrawn, temporary accommodation arranged, storage. And so Sebastian set out for America aboard the liner Majestic, over the grey and choppy Atlantic towards a new world of light and music..

Miscellaneous information
Combative belongings:

Sebastian still has a service revolver, when he remembers to load it, and habitually walks with a cane.

Noncombative belongings:

An Arkham townhouse stocked with imported furnishings, selections from the family library and art collection (and wine cellar). A personal collection of scandalous European plays, poetry and novels. His sizeable inheritance. A silver cigarette case finely inscribed with images of shepherds grazing their flock near a lake.

Other information (optional)
Theme song (optional)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFtHO180tgp