The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - coccoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the rooom, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being eaten at exactly this second, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, back out into the night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the huge warehouse, lent only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.
He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into another truck, just a little newer than his own, and it came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.
The truck's doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were, save for the driver, who stepped out and took the few paces over to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the cut of her tailored suit. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.
"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you."
Cameron looked at the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, back at his warehouse. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.
"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"
Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.
"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.
Cameron saw the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. One held a shotgun, another had something wrapped around his arm, three objects pulsing with white light orbiting it with no obvious connection to one another. The woman, though, his attention kept coming back to her. He couldn't help it, something he could no more resist than the pull of gravity.
"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.
"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Morgan. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."
Behind her, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, its legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground Cameron usually associated with forklifts. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood steadfast and turned toward the warehouse. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled, and half a meter of monsterous spider-leg punched through and started slowly tearing the sheet metal toward the ground.
"I wouldn't worry," Morgan said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."
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Hi there!
Welcome to the OOC thread for Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a modern-fantasy RP!
In this story, the players will take the part of people working for the titular Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a small paranormal-detective service operating out of Chicago. You are people from all walks of life, and have come to PHI by various means - maybe you're a police detective who couldn't overlook something that was obviously a monster attack, maybe you're a Real Actual Wizard but still need a way to make rent, maybe you're a park service ranger who's seen one too many Bigfeet. Whatever the reason, you're living in that liminal space between the mundane and the supernatural, and sometimes helping keep people safe from things that they never knew meant them harm.
The tone of this story is going to be along the lines of Hellboy, The Dreseden Files or The Iron Druid Chronicles, probably with a dose of Hellblazer, The Sandman, and because I don't believe in grimdark, Ghostbusters. Depending on what I'm reading at the moment, I'll probably toss different ideas into the pot, and I am also very pleased to hear suggestions and interesting ways to push on the world.
Priest & Hawthorne Investigations is a very small office, perhaps 10 or so people. The founders, Ada Hawthorne and Samuel Priest, are not often around, and the nominal person in charge is a large man named Sol - don't worry, there will be a list of important NPCs toward the bottom of this post. PHI has been a going concern for about 20 years, but you don't have to have been with the organization for that entire time, of course. Jobs are handed out by Sol, and how he gets them is a surprisingly normal combination of referrals, hearing about weird things going on in the area, and people calling PHI with weird problems - you are, after all, on Yelp.
I don't mean to scare anyone off, but I tend to have rather high standards for posts and characters. I'd like this to be quite a small group of people (maybe up to five, including myself), and it will not be first-come, first-served. I don't have specific roles in mind, but I would ask that you consider what makes a good team dynamic and a good story. I am, for example, generally not looking for silent and distant loners, violence-crazed psychopaths, vengeance-driven walking armories, or children.
Other than that, I'm not placing too many restrictions on characters - Fae creatures, Literal Actual Angels, or even Literal Actual Humans are completely welcome. I would caution you that I am personally fairly tired of vampires and werewolves, but if you impress me and make a good narrative case for yourself, I'm very easy. That's really the rule for most things - make a good case for whatever you want to write, and I'm not too hrad to convince. :3
I do have several story arcs in mind, but they're deliberately designed to be flexible and to allow the players to push on the world; I will rarely say "no, you can't do that," since the yes-and of collaborative storytelling is my favorite part. :3 That is to say that this is emphatically not a bring-your-own-adventure sandbox, although I am more than happy (and am expecting to) tailor the world for the characters in it.
Finally, to contextualize the introduction above, the RP starts on a night where PHI has been chasing reports of a gigantic spider across the city. It has, over the course of the night, managed to get away from you a number of times, either directly running away or, in one case, causing a different problem that you had to deal with instead. You've been tracking it (if one of you has a means to do that, great, otherwise I'm totally handwaving how), and appear to have cornered it at a distillery some distance away from the city proper. What happens next is, well, up to you. <3
And now, without further ado, the character sheet and other useful information!.
Name:
Gender:
Race/Species:
Age (Real and apparent):
Appearance: Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but I tend to prefer written descriptions.
Personality: Broad strokes is fine, I don’t need to know every bawdy joke they like to tell. Please don't make this a bulleted list.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Let this cover supernatural powers, mundane skills, and whether or not they’re particularly good at Ski-Ball. Be brief but complete, and include at least one thing that isn't related to fighting monsters - a hobby or passtime, for example.
Background: I do not want a biography here. Write me a scene that tells me the important things someone would need to know about the character. This can be (for example), a police interview, a last will and testament, or if you can squeeze it down that far, a fortune cookie. If there are Big Secrets you don't want the other characters to know, that's fine, but I would like to know them so I can incorporate them into the story. Be direct, be oblique, but above all, be interesting.
Ada Hawthorne - One of the founders of PHI. She is a handsome woman that appears middle-aged, red hair threaded with hard, bright silver. She is not in the office often, and what she does when she's not around is also not entirely clear. Many supernatural creatures in the area seem to know who she - and her Investigators - are, and mentioning her is something that will open some doors and close others violently. Her name is the one on your paychecks.
Samuel Priest - The other founder of PHI, a man with silver hair tied in a tail and a full beard, who wears a bowler hat and the kind of vest that went out of style in the late 1800s. He is in the office more than Hawthorne, but his direct appearances are fairly rare. He will occasionally call in with jobs for the rest of the cast.
Shiloh Cooper - One of PHI's support staff, who is in charge of the company's archives. She organizes the various magical trinkets and artefacts Investigators have recovered, and files records of cases. The PHI Library is by far the largest room in the small office that PHI rents, and Shiloh is its mistress. Taking things without asking can be grounds for something far more serious than a dressing-down. She is approximately five feet tall with dark hair and bright blue eyes, and despite that gives a very strong impression that she is no-one to be trifled with.
Solomon (Sol) Roberts - A great bear of a man with a soothing, basso voice, Sol is the nominal 'office head' of PHI. He is one part dispatcher, one part investigator, one part administration, and in total, a very busy man. All of you have known him for as long as you've been at PHI, and it's possible his was the first face you saw at the office.
Name: Morgan Silas Blackwood
Gender: Female (And female-presenting)
Race/Species: Succubus
Age (Real and apparent): Over 90 years old; appears early thirties
Appearance:
By any measure, Morgan is a striking woman. She is tall, though not quite approaching six feet in heels, with fair skin and a tumble of blue-black hair that falls to her shoulders, tied with a piece of leather cord into a loose tail. Large, blue-green eyes set off the wicked, elegant lines of her face, with sharp cheekbones and a strong jawline that stops just short of masculinity. Her lips, full and inviting, often tilt into an expression of playful mischief, at least when she's not concentrating on something else. She is possessed of a lean, dangerous figure, unmistakably feminine, and she works for it. Morgan moves with a long lifetime's practiced grace, a kind of lazy confidence shared with apex predators.
In her professional capacity, Morgan prefers well-tailored suits in colors that flatter her with contrasting, button-down shirts and slightly heeled boots. What jewelry she wears is typically studs in her many-times-pierced ears, and she has a pendant around her neck on a leather cord. Her shoulder holster is carefully concealed by excellent tailoring and body language, but there is only so much you can do to hide a handgun. Outside of her official capacity, Morgan prefers jeans, old band t-shirts and a battered denim jacket. For reasons that Morgan has only occasionally been truthful about, she has a rich, plummy, London-private-school accent.
Personality:
Playful, flirtatious, and apparently fearless, Morgan is a force of personality. She is gregarious without being boistrous, friendly but not overbearing, loyal, warm, and only occasionally viciously witty. She's kind of person you both love hearing stories from, and telling stories to - entirely without artifice, she is a perfect audience, gasping and all but applauding at exactly the right moments. She is, in general, collected under pressure, and responds to stress with humor and smart-assery. She is neither secretive nor open about the fact that she isn't human, but is careful with the specifics, depending on who's doing the asking. If pressed, she would probably identify as bisexual, but few enough bother to even wonder.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities:
By her nature, Morgan is a manipulator, through psychic weaponry, pheromones, body language and even the timbre of her voice. However, since she believes, at her core, in the primacy of free will, there are lines she will not cross and things she will not do; active choices made consciously out of a sense of responsibility and foundational to her sense of identity. She's not above using her supernatural allure to get a guard to focus only on her if another member of the team has to sneak into a building or to get a better deal on her cell phone plan, but she will not grab someone by the psychic brainstem and dragoon them into her bidding. Though she reins in what she is consciously, it isn't something she can entirely turn off - heads turn, and other supernatural creatures know she's there, and some of them even know exactly what she is by nothing more than the way she smells.
Morgan also possesses a psychometric talent, by which she can make physical contact with an object and discern important events from its past. These do not appear in a linear, digestable narrative, but rather take the form of often-abstract, disjointed visions that express important moments in the object's past, where it received or created a psychic imprint. These images are seared indelibly into Morgan's mind, and she cannot forget them even if she wants to, rendering this a skill she uses carefully.
She is remarkably hard to kill - nobody has managed it quite yet. She doesn't have a mutant healing factor, but her body is very resilient and heals more quickly than one might expect - something that has saved lives, and left her with several interesting scars. And, of course, extended stays in a recovery bed.
In the mortal world, Morgan is an FBI-trained investigator, though she no longer has any contacts with the Bureau. She has kept up on the world of modern technolgy in large degree, but she is not anything like a hacker or digital-forensics specialist. she can drive, call a Lyft, and order delivery with the best of any other mortal.
Outside of her position with Priest & Hawthorne, Morgan is a skilled belly dancer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer, and a vintage hi-fi enthusiast. She has a large collection of vinyl records (most bought at garage sales or thrift stores), and spends a lot of time on her couch, listening to music through a pair of very old, very nice headphones. She has a cat, who enjoys Morgan's music by sleeping on her stomach. She is not particularly good at Ski-Ball.
Background:
"Do you know what you are?"
Morgan lifted her head, tried to blow away the strands of hair stuck to her face. Almost every part of her hurt and the crust of dried blood above her left eye itched and her fingers were almost numb, but she managed to pull one corner of her mouth up in a wry grin.
"Special Agent Morgan Blackwood, FBI," she said, each word made sumptuous by her accent.
Another woman stood in the room, proud and glorious and terrifying. She let out a short huff, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, and shook her head. Her long legs flashed, turning away from Morgan with the scrape of a polished heel on hard ceramic tile. She circled the chair Morgan was cuffed to, every movement a predatory stalk and dipped one long-nailed hand into her jacket. Though her vision was still blurry, Morgan couldn't help but appreciate the way every seam flattered the other woman, tracing and accenting her figure in smooth, dark cloth. The woman pulled something into the light, like a cigarette case. She opened it with a click, and the smell of spices filled the air.
"You're better than this, Sister," the woman said, now to Morgan's left, "We are so much greater than you know. You - we - were meant for such great things." She set something on the ground with a glassy clink, "And here you are, a pet monster. A nightmare on a leash. And happy to be there."
"And your way is better?" Morgan said, turning her head to keep her captor in view, "You're trying to sell me on Juliet's Path to Purpose and Happiness? I'll pass, thank you."
"You really don't understand, do you?" The woman, Juliet, sighed, "We looked for you for so long, Sister. You were the last piece of the puzzle, the checkmate play. But I suppose even we can't account for everything." She set something else down, a rustling noise, "I remember that night - the storms, the summoning, the ritual. But when we came to find you, there were nothing but bodies."
Morgan heard her stand, a few quick steps, and a voice by her ear, "Were those your first, Sister? Did you take them? Can you imagine that feeling, that thrill, whenever you-"
"No," Morgan interrupted, her voice ragged and hard. This close to Juliet, she could smell copper and salt.
"No? Then..." Juliet started, then walked in front of Morgan again. She considered, and then her expression broke into the kind of smile that starts religions.
"Ah...I see. The detective, the raid. It was their doing, yes? And then...of course." The expression became something that was not a smile, "She didn't complete the ritual - but that detective did. You have a conscience." She spat the words.
"They were madmen," Morgan said, her voice quiet, "Working with power they didn't understand. Connor-"
"Is that what you think?" the woman said, incredulous, "Is that what they told you? After all these long years - oh, Morgan."
Her voice softened to a purr, an inch from Morgan's ear, "I'll ask you again, and don't be cute with me. Do you know what you are?"
Morgan looked into Juliet's eyes, the same eyes she saw in the mirror every morning. She saw a certainty there, a depth of understanding, and it called to her across almost a century. There are questions you never really give up on, no matter how distant they might be or how foolish the quest to answer them, and a desire unlike any she'd ever known flared in her chest. She spat the words at the air, hurled them across decades.
"A mistake," Morgan said, "An unintended consequence. A predator."
Juliet pulled away, her expression almost triumphant.
"Oh, Sister, no," she said, chuckling, "That was no barely-literate secret society, luring members with promises of orgiastic rites. They were part of something so much grander than themsleves, a piece of a vast and intricate machine that even now coils across the world." Juliet started walking again, and enough of Morgan's vision had come back that she could see what the other woman was doing.
There were lines drawn on the floor, circles and points and arcs, careful paths of white salt forming sigils and runes. At the edge, a final line that finished the design, containing a figure of five equidistant points. Four of those points already had objects placed there, things that could only be ritual totems. Even in her battered state, Morgan could feel the power thrumming off them, her skin prickling. With a start, she snapped her head to Juliet, standing from placing the final object, and she realized what she was seeing - a Practitioner of the Art, walking deisul around their sacred circle.
"We are their weapons, Morgan," Juliet said, "Their harbingers. We prepare the way for...well. What comes after." She took a long, slow breath, her eyes closed in concentration, "The perfect point of the most subtle spear. What else motivates these mortals but their desires, their hungers, their lusts? The entire race comes with their own bridle and saddle, we need only take the reins." She looked over at Morgan, and crossed the lines of salt with care.
Juliet knelt, brought herself ot eye level with Morgan. Her eyes roved over her sister's face, and she brought one hand up to touch her cheek, cool fingers rough with dried blood. She leaned in with viper-strike speed, and Morgan felt the woman's lips against her own for a moment that lingered like a dying breath. Then she stood, turned, and took two long, delicate steps.
"But none of that is for you, I can see that now. Losing you will be hard, Sister," Juliet said, her back to Morgan, "But the arc of time is long. Another decade will mean little. And with-""
A small sound pierced every other sound in the room - a metallic click, then a rattle. The noise cut off Juliet's words like shears on thread, and time seemed to stop. Juliet spun, and her eyes met Morgan's for the length of an indrawn breath. Then Morgan exploded from the chair, her hair a dark comet trail, and she brought an arm dangling an open handcuff up, fingers clenched into a tight ball. Her fist connected with Juliet's temple, sending her sprawling to the floor with a sharp gasp, the designs beneath her spraying away in a chaos of tumbling grains.
Morgan spun, her shoes further scuffing the careful runes, turned to her left, eyes scanning in a frantic search. There, surrounded by its own tangle of magic, a dagger made of glittering black glass, the handle wound in rough twine. She lunged for it, her hand tingling where she brushed away another magical working, fingers wrapping around the handle in the skin of a second.
When she touched the weapon, Morgan felt a pressure against her mind. The dagger pulsed with history, with fable, with emotion and the weight of time. It dragged at her soul, her vision swam, and she nearly lost herself in that current. With an effort of will, she shoved the sensation away from her mind - there was no time to allow that connection now. She stood, started to turn back, then white light blossomed behind her eyes from a blow to the back of her head. It seemed her sister had recovered more quickly than Morgan had expected.
Morgan stumbled forward, her hands almost nerveless from the blow. She gritted her teeth, tried to swallow down sudden dizziness and nausea, and then she felt something else. Gasping, she managed to stand and turn back to Juliet, who stood with hand outstretched. Morgan could feel power flowing from her, something that should have been a crashing wave; a dark, vicious pull at everything primal and carnal inside her. But she felt all of it split and flow around her, something she was aware of but was not affected by. Morgan shook her head, and she met the other woman's eyes again.
"You really are one of us," Juliet said, her voice tinted with pleasant surprise.
Morgan straightened, stalked toward her, brought the glass dagger up in a hard, sharp punch at Juliet's side. She felt the woman's silk jacket part around the tip, the fibrous tearing of the blade through her skin, the scrape of glass on bone.
She watched her sister's eyes, found herself suddenly lost in those gemstone depths. She felt her lean into a sudden embrace, one arm around her shoulder, the other still wrapped around the dagger's handle. Morgan felt the power sluicing over her mind flicker and back away, but Juliet's eyes didn't waver. They were deep, intelligent, wicked, and when the other woman fell, Morgan found that try though she might, she couldn't pull her own gaze away. Only when Juliet's eyelids flickered closed did the world return, and Morgan realized she hadn't been breathing. She looked down at her hand, saw the blood dripping off her own fingers, and she swallowed against a hard lump in her throat.
A few more unsteady steps took her to the door, and she shoved it open. The hinges shrieked, the heavy metal banging against the wall. Her balance still shaky, she had to lean against the doorframe for support and she paused, her breatg ragged in her throat. She swallowed in a few gulps of air, then she heard a voice from ahead - familiar, with a deep Southern twang.
"Morgan?" Came the voice, "'Zat you?"
"Sam!" Morgan shouted, "Sam, I...give me a minute, I'm just down by the..." Her voice trailed off.
She came into Morgan's view with her pistol at the ready. Her shirt was open farther than Morgan had ever known it to be, the buttons torn, threads dangling. Her eyes were wide, her green pupils dilated, spots of color on her cheeks.
"Best get back in there, Miss Blackwood," Sam said, raising her weapon, "She's got plans for ya."
Morgan felt her shoulders slump. "Oh no, Sam. Not you, too," she managed. Then she stood, straightened, swallowed.
"I'm so sorry."
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An hour later, Morgan pushed her way through another heavy steel door. She felt the oppressive humidity of a Georgian summer evening slap her in the face like a wet towel and in that moment, nothing had ever felt so wonderful. She pulled in first one breath, then another, her throat hot and sore, her body protesting from every muscle and joint. Groaning, she propelled herself away from the wall, digging in her pocket for her keys. They would know what vehicle to track, but Morgan had ben suspecting a day like this would come. She didn't have many options, but she'd made sure she had more than none.
She fell into her car with a hard puff of breath, started the engine, felt the air conditioner struggle against the boiling darkness. She had warned them. There were memos and emails and texts and lunch dates and screaming, arm-waving fights. They knew there were other things like her - myths given life, ghosts, and monsters from folktales. She'd known that eventually, those forces would come for the mortal world, for the Bureau, but they hadn't cared. And now, this.
The air conditioner finally started to catch up with the outside temperature, and Morgan felt the cool, dry kiss across her skin. It was time for something new. She had always looked for answers to other people's questions because she'd already known all her own answers. In the space of an evening, all of that had changed. She wondered if they would look for her, and decided that she didn't care.
With another groan, Morgan straightened, reached up and put the car into gear. She drove into the rising sun, and she didn't look back.
Please do ask any questions you have - I'm happy to answer! :3
Concept: A mischievous arcane shapeshifter and mostly-retired thief, who is currently working off the sizable debt that she owes to Priest and Hawthorne.
Name: Tamara Ivanivna Federova Diminutive: To her friends and family, Tamara has always been known as Toma. Gender: Female Race/Species: Human, however, given her prodigious talent for shapeshifting it is likely that at least some measure of supernatural blood courses through her veins. Taste test pending. Age: Twenty-five. Who's asking? Appearance:
Nearly a head below average height, Toma has a nimble build, supported by hard-won cords of muscle that are only apparent upon a very personal investigation of her body. Scrappy at heart and an ardent pugilist, she has little regard for even large differences in size. Toma perpetuates an air of not-so-quiet rebellion, if not outright challenge. A fact that can be attested to by the many marks and scars that she proudly wears. Her short black hair is full of rebellion and is kept in what might only generously be described as a very messy pixie cut. Her skin is pale enough to leave a vampire seething with jealously and is increasingly adorned with beautiful ink. The work of several master artists travels across much of her form, but given their locations some pieces are clearly intended only for private viewings. Her storm gray eyes are alight with electricity and seem to dance with the ever-changing arcane energies that she commands. Toma has generous lips, that oscillate between a bored frown and impish smile depending on the company. Fond of standing out, Toma paints her lips and nails in dark shades or vibrant hues. In short, she's quite the cherry bomb.
As if anointed by the punk gods themselves, Toma dresses in a manner befitting only the most cultured of punk royalty. She favors t-shirts decked out with punk flair and rude slogans, black jeans, dark skirts, and fashionably torn fishnet stocking. She has a penchant for accessories and to match her clothes she wears spike bands, silver jewelry, and a studded in choker. She values the ability to deliver a good and owns a beloved pair of beaten bovver boots that are only sparingly polished.
However, Toma's most prized possession is a well-worn leather jacket embroidered with a large tiger and a name in Cyrillic. The jacket is never far from her shoulders and anyone that damages it is likely to find themselves facing a recently shifted and furious Toma.
Professional attire is a matter that Toma believes is best left to other people. When threatened with bodily harm or a significant sum of money, she might be convinced to wear a blazer.
Personality:
Spitting fire and vitriol in equal measures, Toma is a former punk rocker, a recovering romantic, a bitter cynic, and in her own words a complete sellout. She has long since abandoned the quest for knowledge and power that consumes so many of her colleagues and traded it in for lump-sum payments of cold hard cash deposited into a Swiss bank account. Along the way Toma has acquired a veritable dragon's horde of treasure that has helped to silence her conscience. Or at at least it would have. If she hadn't made a habit of losing her savings in the best and quickest of ways. Despite her troubles, Toma remains convinced that the best motivation a thief can have is being dead broke.
Beneath a carefully crafted persona, an almost forgotten part of Toma remains hellbent on changing the world through the power of DIY magic, spray painted graffiti rituals, and loud music. She does her best to avoid entertaining such childish notions. However, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, she can't help but act like her old idealistic self.
Young enough to still happily ignore wisdom, Toma indulges in a number of vices that more conventional wizards tend to stay very far away from. Her deep love of alcohol is overshadowed only by her even deeper love for magically infused designer drugs. When asked Toma simply channels her inner Burner and replies that, "Magic is even more fun when you're on psychedelics, babe, don't be such a bore." She does best in loud places that are full of people, greasy food, and brilliant drinks. Left to her own devices she is prone to melancholy, long naps, and pointless thievery.
Irreverent and arrogant, Toma makes few apologies. She's rude, loud, and can hold a grudge for an eternity. Lost in her shadowy profession, she cares for few people and trusts fewer still. She respects only those who have shown themselves to be capable and has little patience for mistakes or weakness. Never staying in one place for very long, the young wizard jumps from one fleeting, superficial relationship to the next. Burying her emotions and regrets in ephemeral pleasure. The words 'damaged goods' have been used to describe Toma more than once. However, for all her flaws, and they are many, Toma possesses a truly terrible ability to charm, beguile, and tempt even the most chaste of scholars.
Perhaps as a product of her frequent shifting, Toma has an affinity for animals, especially cats, and can hold lengthy conversations with even the wildest of creatures.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities:
Toma is a talented mage, chiefly in the uncommon domain of transmutation. Channeling arcane energies she is able to alter her appearance and to assume the form of other creatures. She can transform into creatures both mundane and magical, large and small. The constant flux of shifting form has forced her to develop a strong, if fluid, sense of self and she has learned to adapt quickly to unfamiliar bodies and strange environments. She has a thorough understanding of body language and picks up languages, even inhuman ones, with alarming ease. On rare occasions there is a faint, almost imperceptible trace of a Slavic accent when Toma speaks.
Having escaped her humble wizardly origins in pursuit of a far more lucrative criminal calling, Toma has had to acquire a very different set of skills compared to that of a law-abiding wizard. She can open a locks with magic, cloak herself in shadows, silence alarms, and disable cameras with a wave of her hand. Commanding a patchwork of spells from across several domains of magic Toma proudly refers to herself as an arcane thief and entirely eschews the more traditional titles favored by magical practitioners.
When push comes to shove and her magic fails her Toma is more than capable of using whatever means are available to her to leave her foes spellbound. A taser is as good of a Plan B as any, according to Toma.
Beyond her arcane abilities, Toma is a garden-variety human, blessed only with a remarkably high constitution. A trait which has seen her through many days and nights of drunken and drug-fueled debauchery. Well-aware of the pitfalls of her hedonistic lifestyle, the young spellcaster spends a surprising amount of time exercising for a spellslinger and can run a sub-5:00 mile in her true form.
A passable, but reluctant shot, Toma prefers to avoid using any firearms. Instead, she relies on her magic, her mastery of shapeshifting, and her fists if forced to fight. Like a wild creature, Toma fights with instinct rather than reason, relishing the chaos of battle, and using the powers of her shifted forms to her advantage. Secretive about her magic, Toma rarely discusses the times that she has lost control of herself and succumbed to the inhuman fury that she invokes.
Off the clock, Toma enjoys sewing her own clothes, accidentally killing plants, and playing a mean bass guitar. Documents carefully acquired by Shiloh indicate that in her not so distant youth, Toma was a founding member of the now defunct Eastern European punk rock band Тайные хитрости(the Arcane Tricksters). When pressed, the young wizard simply mumbles something about living the riot grrrl life. Like all proper adults Toma can drive stick shift, but she prefers to take the bus.
Background:
"I won't do it," Toma said, idly spitting onto the ornate parchment that lay carefully unrolled on the table in front of her. Magical contracts were no trifling matter. She'd seen what a proper geas could do. Poor Harold had never been the same since that terrible day. Seeing the vacant, blissful look in his eyes, she'd promised herself then and there that she'd rather die than find her will chained to some fool of a master.
I fought the law and the law won, Toma thought with a bitter smile. It had been a fun adventure.
The grey haired man sitting across from her frowned, casually adjusting a sleeve of his immaculate suit that seemed to meld with the darkness. For all of his composure Toma could have sworn that she saw literal flames flash behind his sunglasses. Accessories she found to be a strange choice given the gloom that surrounded them. It was a plain, stark room, that smelled of disinfectant and death. Even the shadows that danced beyond the light cast by the overhead light were menacing and Toma wouldn't have been surprised if there was an alter of neatly stacked skulls in a corner of the grim room. It was all so predictable.
With a snap of his fingertips the man summoned a long-stemmed pipe, an ornate box of matches, and a small silk pouch into his outstretched hand. It was a neat trick and Toma clicked her tongue approvingly. She couldn't place the material of the pipe, but the stem was amber. A custom job, probably arcane, it had to have been expensive. Paying no attention to Toma, the man gently packed the bowl of the pipe with a measure of tobacco retrieved from the pouch. He shook the box of matches next to his ear, retrieved a single match, and lit the tobacco with well-practiced ease. Placing the stem of the pipe between his lips he crossed his arms and sent a frenzied trail of smoke rising to the low ceiling.
There was a ravenous hunger in his stare, and Toma felt like she being served up as the main course. Worse, she had the distinct suspicion that the hell spawn was terribly cross with her. It was the agitated way that his tail flicked back and forth behind his back that gave it away.
"Hey, goat face, if you're going to smoke, how about a cigarette for me? Last requests and all," Toma said, summoning all the insolence she could muster.
"I'm afraid that given what transpired last time we provided you with fire, management has decided that it's best you abstain," the reddish hued figure replied with a half-hearted and thoroughly unconvincing shrug. Toma knew he was lying. He could have gotten her almost anything. Anything that might get her to talk. Anything to get her to sign that damn contract. Anything to steal her soul. Anything to tell them where she had hidden it. His boss would have allowed it with some minor grumbling. Hell, he'd probably get a medal. He was just making her suffer. He was just doing it to be cruel. He was just doing it because it made him happy. Of course, she'd never expect anything less from a demon, even if he happened to be a bonafide badge carrying g-man.
"I'm not signing it," Toma snapped back, angrily nodding towards the parchment.
"You do understand what happens if you don't?"
"I do."
"Listen, Miss Federov.
"Federova," Toma corrected indignantly.
"Miss Federova," the man hissed. With a cruel grin glued to his face, he leaned in across the table and blew a puff of sweet smelling smoke in the young wizard's face. He raised an inhumanely long finger, and tapped against the large folder, stuffed to the brim with papers, that lay next to him. "In light of your past...indiscretionsI would advise you to reconsider. There's only one way you are getting out of here alive and before your hairs turned grey and that's if you start to cooperate-"
"You know, there's only one thing worse than a rat," Toma loudly proclaimed, leaning back in the hard plastic chair to which she was shackled with a smug look on her face. What she wouldn't have given for a key to the strange restraints that they had chained her with. She could feel whatever wards they had woven into the metal burning against the skin of her wrists. Pulses of arcane energy ran through her, and sent a slow throbbing pain running up through her arms. It had subdued any magic that she tried to summon, and she could feel it weakening her. She couldn't so much as transform her pinky. It was going to make her planned escape that much harder.
The bright eyed fiend interrupted Toma with a loud sigh of frustration, and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingertips. He readjusted his sunglasses, and with the wave of a hand signaled for her to continue, "Please, Miss Federova, enlighten me."
"As I was saying, there's only one thing worse than a rat, and that's a policeman. You know back in the old country they used to call you lot Suk-"
Toma had no chance to finish what she felt was an exceedingly clever joke. Instead, she felt the sudden breeze of the table soaring past her and then a heavy fist hitting her face. With her hands restrained behind her back Toma could do little to keep her balance, and she fell gracelessly from the chair. Cursing, she curled into a ball as searing pain racked through her, and stars danced rapidly in front of her eyes. Panting, she could feel the cold kiss of the concrete floor against her cheek as blood began to pour from her freshly broken nose.
Two impossibly strong hands grasped her shoulders and she could only manage a low pained groan as she felt the bones in her arms begin to crack from the pressure. Hoisted to her feet, she was thrown back into the uncomfortable chair as if she was nothing more sack of slightly bloody potatoes. She glared at the demon through bitter tears, and spat iron onto the table.
Toma's infernal interrogator laughed and flashed an alarming number of perfectly white, pointed teeth in her direction, "Miss Federova, you are spirited, I will give you that much." He dragged his chair painfully across the tiles, and moved closer to her. An offense that would have been enough reason for Toma to end him, beating notwithstanding. He looked far too pleased with himself, and Toma felt a rising sense of nausea at her predicament. The imp chuckled, and sat down in front of her, carefully readjusting his suit, and artfully avoiding the blood that fell from her nose. "However, I think you've mistaken me for someone that I am not."
"I know who you are, you're a fuc-"
The backhanded slap that struck Toma across the face, though measured, was enough to send the chair and Toma in it skidding across the floor. Dazed, she struggled to focus, her left cheek full of fire. Her only consolation was the pipe that now lay on the floor. She hoped it was broken.
"Allow me to finish," the demonic g-man intoned with a sickening sweetness on the edge of this tongue.
Fate, cruel as always, in Toma's humble view, did not favor the creature, and no sooner had he uttered those choice words than the door to awful room was thrown open. In strode a sharply dressed woman, clearly human, but perhaps not quite mundane in nature if Toma was asked to guess. A lawyer, in all likelihood, and an archivist if she was unlucky.
"Tsk, tsk, Otto, you soulless reaper. You know you weren't supposed to rough her up," the woman began, roughly grabbing a hold of Toma's jaw and inclining the young wizard's head towards the light as she writhed in pain. She didn't seem to pleased with the damage Otto had inflicted and she shook her head slowly from side to side. "Not this much at least. Not yet. What is the boss going to say when he sees her?"
"We're just getting acquainted, aren't we Miss Federova?"
"Acquainted, my ass! I'm going to cut you into pieces you-" Toma railed, almost falling out of her chair as she flailed helplessly against the arcane cuffs. A hand clamped solidly over her mouth and reduced her shouting to a series of muffled shouts and desperate gasps.
"Would you kindly shut up for a moment?" The woman commanded more than asked, her icy voice filled with the promise of certain violence. "Now as I was going to say, the Assistant Director, in his infinite, exceedingly infinite wisdom, has decided to cut you loose, to let you go...to allow you to leave in peace or rather in one piece. For now."
"No," Otto hissed and then practically roared. The words were a curse in his shark-like maw. "You can't be serious, Joanna!? She broke into the Vault, you know what she stole! You know what she did! What she risked!"
"Look, you have a problem with it, you can go tell the boss yourself," the woman countered with a deep-seated frown. She menacingly pointed a finger in the direction of the demon, "However, before you do, you should know that we were contacted by the offices of Priest and Hawthorne. They called the boss himself, on his personal, his personal fucking cellphone," Joanna said, guiding Toma to her feet and slowly leading her towards the door. "Not even I know that number, do you understand?"
Clearly deflated, Otto slowly closed his mouth, but Toma could feel the rage, the pure hatred emanating from his body. Had she not been just had her nose broken the feeling of pleasure that coursed through her would almost have been orgasmic. Toma struggled against the firm grip of the other woman, fighting until she could see the hell spawn again, and then she offered her best smile,"I'll be seeing you around, you goddamned-"
The last thing Toma remembered before the darkness overwhelmed her was Joanna roughly guiding her face straight into the nearest wall. "Of course, if you happened to walk into a wall on the way out, well, that would be a shame now, wouldn't it, Miss Federova?"
"You bi-"
The strange, concussion fueled dreams that followed were full of cats, sunshine, and enough acid for a small army. They were wonderful, and for once, even Toma felt content.
Going to get to work on this right away! Might not be up until later this week, as I really like the looks of this and want to put an appropriate amount of effort into my application. Currently thinking of a human inventor/tinkerer type: good-natured, booksmart, but with a tendency to put his foot in his mouth (i.e. a classic nerd).
I’m glad to see a couple folks throwing hats in! :3
I don’t really have a hard and fast date for when I’m cutting off applications, but it may be this weekend. Bank holidays (in the US, anyway) are convenient times to kick off stories!
Definitely gonna draft up something for this. I have a character I like to use for stories like this, but I usually redraft him for the individual setting, so expect a sheet sometime soon, certainly before the end of this week.
It might be a bit sloppy in the appearance and personality description, I was never really good at those, but I hope in general it is acceptable :)
Name: Elena Turner
Gender: female
Race/Species: human
Age (Real and apparent): 29
Appearance: Elena isn’t a type of woman you would find “hot” or “sexy” or even notice her in a crowd and she very much likes it that way. She is about average height and tries to maintain healthy weight (which is constantly threatened by her junk food cravings). Her long dark hair is usually tied into a pony tail or a simple braid, so it doesn’t get in the way. She hates using makeup, eyeliner, lipstick or anything of that sort - not that she would necessarily need it, her complexion is clean and healthy, and her emerald intelligent eyes are interesting enough to not require extra highlighting.
Personality: Elena is a kind and compassionate person, who sees helping people not as her job, but as a life calling. She is very shy and a little socially awkward. She is exactly the type of person which when you force them to go on a party, they spend the evening standing alone in the corner sipping wine or petting the dog. She very much prefers to stay at home reading or watching a movie. She is an excellent listener and always has a kind word or an advice for anyone who seeks it (sometimes also for those who don’t).
She takes the “do no harm” very seriously, considering herself a pacifist and always trying to pick the non-violent approach, if there is one. She will fight defending herself or someone else, but probably will have a bad conscience because of it.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Elena is a fully trained emergency physician, who has experience with treating all kinds of acute injuries and life-threatening illnesses and other conditions. Whether it is a gunshot wound (sadly too common in this part of the world), broken bones or a heart attack, you can be sure that she will always go out of her way to help you.
Aside from her “normal” education, Elena also possesses a “power” of sorts – she is an empath. She could always sense and immediately understand other people’s moods and emotions, sometimes to the point of being called a creepy mind reader by other children. Some might call it a gift, but for most of her life she had considered it a curse. Or the worst superpower ever. As a six-year old she asked her father: “Why does mummy feel love when uncle Derek is around, but only not when she is with you?” And surprise, surprise, few months later her parents got divorced. She tried very hard to stop using these powers, but she could never block other people’s feelings out completely.
She loves animals (especially the cute fluffy ones), but unfortunately her job is too time-consuming to keep one at home, so she at least volunteers for a local shelter. Ski-ball isnt really her thing.
Background: Elena yawned and stretched her back in a series of creepy cracking noises. The night shift on the ER has been unusually quiet so far, making the time pass slower and slower. Most of her colleagues were in the lounge watching some late-night show on TV, but Elena was deeply submerged in a seemingly endless pile of paperwork. ‘One would think that becoming a doctor meant you treat patients, not fill out papers,’ she grumbled to herself. Stamp, signature, ticking one or two checkboxes, stamp and signature again, current date, yesterday date, signature again. Absolutely mind-numbing.
Finally, she sorted out the last document and could take a hard-earned break. She wandered the quiet and mostly empty hallways towards the doctors’ mess to have a cup of coffee, spending a word or two with the nurses and orderlies she met.
‘Isn’t life just better with a cup of hot coffee in your hands?’ she thought with a happy smile, enjoying a sip of the hot beverage. She decided to check on one patient from earlier, a young boy who ended up in an infectious disease department. Poor kid. Her fists clenched when she thought of the conversation she had with his mother.
“Your son has measles. Why isn’t he vaccinated?”
“Oh no, I don’t want him to get autism.”
Elena had to take a deep breath and count to ten. “He has severe ear infection and a risk of losing his hearing permanently.” ‘But hey, he is not autistic,’ she thought, and it took every single grain of her self-control to not yell at this woman. Elena could feel the mother’s fear and desperation and suddenly felt ashamed. “I know you did what you thought was best for him. Doctor Warren here,” she pointed at her colleague who had just joined them in the emergency room, “is a skilled specialist, who will take good care of your son.”
The boy looked so tiny and defenseless lying on the large bed, hooked up to IVs and monitors. Elena was reading his file when her pager began beeping frantically. Quickly putting the pad back into place and sprinted towards the emergency department. The paramedics were bringing a man on a stretcher. Elena cursed, because she could see the blood their clothes were covered in.
“Come on, give me some details,” she shouted.
“Male, in his late thirties, complaining about acute abdominal pain, he seemed to have strong convulsions.”
“Location of the wound?” Elena asked while cutting man’s shirt apart.
The paramedic gave her a strange look. “There are no open wounds. The blood doesn’t seem to be his.”
The patient squirmed and screamed in pain. “Amy, one milligram Midazolam,” Elena quickly instructed the nurse and continued to examine the man. He indeed didn’t seem to have any injuries, aside from a mild irritation in the back of his throat. “So what exactly happened? Who called the ambulance?”
“He called it himself, babbled something about a man attacking him and throwing up blood into his face. We didn’t get anything coherent from him in person.”
“What the…,” Elena hesitated when she saw the movement in the man’s abdomen. She quickly went through all possible diagnoses in her head trying to figure out what was wrong with him, but nothing really matched. That movement didn’t even look like a convulsion, it was more like… “…a fetus moving?” Could it be? The man didn’t show any typical symptoms of previous gender change, but what else was an option?
There it was again, a distinct movement of something solid beneath the skin. “Damn. Amy, two milligrams of Dibucaine into abdomen area and prepare it for an incision.” A minute later she was holding a scalpel right over patient’s stomach. Even though she was confused and (even though she wouldn’t admit it) also a bit afraid, her hand wasn’t shaking. She had only made a tiny cut, when things suddenly turned from bad to utter chaos.
A black sharp… something (a claw?) carved its way out of man’s midsection, tearing Elena’s small cut into a huge hole, severing multiple arteries which immediately started splashing blood everywhere. A spider-like creature crawled out of the wound and let out a creepy clacking sound. With a staggering speed it slashed at Elena, its sharp teeth clattering. She screamed out and jumped back just as the creature leaped towards her. Fortunately, its legs got tangled up in the poor man’s intestines and the jump came out a bit too short.
It angrily turned around, used the claws to free itself and ran towards a closer target, which happened to be the paramedic. Now when it could move freely, it crossed the distance in a fraction of a second and jumped, burying its claws deep into its victims thigs and crotch. The paramedic let out a tortured scream as the creature climbed up, tearing his body apart.
Elena didn’t have any time to think before the critter turned back to her, but some primal fight-or-flight instinct forced her to squeeze the scalpel in her hand tighter and try to hit the creature while it was jumping. At the same time she dashed aside and the claws missed her leg by mere inches. The scalpel pierced what appeared to be the head and the thing squealed loudly. If anything, it seemed to be angrier, not hurt.
Realizing she is in the very corner of the room, with no space to dodge the next attack. She could sense the anger and the endless hunger from the creature. Just as she prepared for what would be the last second of her life, the emergency room door flung open and two people sprinted inside. Without any hesitation they started shooting at the creature until it eventually stopped moving.
“There seems to be one person alive,” one of the men said to someone on the radio. “Correction, make it two, this one is just unconscious.” He leaned over to the nurse on the ground. “The subject and the host are dead and there is one civilian casualty.”
“Hey! W- who are you?” Elena was still stunned by the events in the past few minutes and it was impossible to think straight. “What was that thing?” Who were these people? Any normal being would at least hesitate when entering this room, but these guys didn’t seem to be concerned about the presence of some alien-looking creature.
The man just smiled and gestured her to wait. He listened for a bit and then nodded. “Sure thing.” He took a step towards Elena and she pointed the scalpel at him, her otherwise steady hand trembling. The stranger didn’t seem to be offended. “You are a tough one. Well, I am with the Priest & Hawthorne Investigations. One of my colleagues will come down here and explain everything you need to know as soon as we make sure there aren’t any more of those things.”
Elena slid down against the wall, her legs suddenly unable to support her. She had a feeling that her life was undergoing some major change and it probably won’t be a pleasant one.
Name: Gabriel (Gabe) Boudreaux (Boo-Dro if it's down in Louisiana)
Gender: Male
Race/Species: Human, but there might be some ancient-co-mingling with spirits, fae and werewolves down the line. When your family goes back that far, it's hard to tell what the heck really happened.
Age (Real and apparent): Early 30's, Apparent. A little more than twice that, realistically. Born in the 1940's.
Appearance: Gabe doesn't bother to hide that he's a bit of a crunchy hippie; things happen in cycles and so does fashion, which means that long hair, beards and flannel are back in. He's got thick auburn hair and a slightly redder beard. The nose is prominent but not overlarge, though slightly upturned, and his eyes are startlingly blue. He has despair-inducing natural eyebrow game.
A life spent in the outdoors, hiking around on the job in various functions has left a large frame, six-one or so, with some muscle, especially on the shoulders and back. It's not some weight lifting bro's build, but he is solid.
What sets him apart from an urbanite imitating the look is that he doesn't have new clothing. It's all been washed and repaired many times, fading down to a comfortable second skin. It's cared for and maintained.
Personality: Gabe knows what he loves in life and devotes himself passionately to that. Other things he cares less for, but he is gregarious and surprisingly good at socialization. What he doesn't do is blend in socially but rather tries to come at people honestly. Sometimes, in the case of the small-minded folk you find in any place, that puts noses out of joint. However, and Gabe believes this, you will always find your kind of people, the intellectually curious and the interesting, by being strange but sociable and get a lot out of that. He's not afraid to try people out at a gathering until he finds what he's looking for.
So he's friendly and down to Earth.
He walks into places and buys people a beer and tries to find common ground. He makes jokes about his redneck ways. He could run for Senate on that, "I am just a country boy" bullshit he peddles but he also loves it when someone takes him at face value.
The thing is, a lifetime of investigating poachers, animal parts smugglers and other types in communities, often rural, means that he's got this act down.
Deep down, he loves the outdoors. Politically, he's a staunch conservation guy, green energy causes and so forth. He is no vegan, but feels that good stewardship in hunting is extremely important and believes in a natural balance that is not being adhered to. That is his life's lodestone.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: He's average untrained at Ski-ball, let's get that out of the way.
Gabe grew up hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, lobstering and otherwise doing French-Canadian redneck things in a childhood in Maine. As a veteran and veteran federal agent, these skills were refined, and skillsets in investigation, courtroom demeanor, the law, surveillance, interrogation were added. Gabe also is a repository of knowledge on all kinds of creatures and their habits, both supernatural and normal.
He's not really a practitioner, but he's got enough juice to affect plant life and communicate, empathetically, with animals, including the supernatural kind. There are druidic spellcasting types that are deeply versed in the lore, ritual and prophecy, but Gabe is not really one of those. He has other talents.
He's spooky in the wild as he moves through it, light of foot, and he can shimmy up a rock face with near supernatural agility, but it's actually just a lifetime's worth of skill. He doesn't get lost on trails. He's a superb, supernaturally so, tracker in the wild, but in built up areas it gets too confusing to work the way it does out in nature, with clarity. It's suspected, but not confirmed, that he has a nose like a bloodhound, which may well be why he is known to cover it up with a bandana or surgical mask when the scents get too overpowering, particularly as involves petroleum, coal and various other contaminants. In the city, he often has to contend with a bit of a sinus problem, which means having to reduce inflammation with traditional herbal remedies. That blunts the nose.
His immune system is unbelievably hale and hearty. You can shoot Gabe, but plague and poison is not nearly as effective. There are limitations of course. That may well explain why his family weathered all those centuries fairly successfully, particularly during the Plague(s).
Speaking of that, the story is this: a long while ago in Gaul (France) there was a community of what they called druids that Caesar wrote about in less than glowing terms. Ole Julius (self-servingly) described gruesome rituals, human sacrifice, a culture of fear and rulership. When the same Caesar sacked Gaul on the pretext of civilizing it, but actually was intent on looting it and parcelling out parts of it to his army and enriching his political support base. Caesar and his successors, notably Augustus and Tiberius, supposedly eradicated the worst aspects of this culture. Again, they based some of this on the distaste for human sacrifice, but it was probably rooted more in the Julian Emperors' distaste for challenges to the Principate's authority.
Gabe's ancestors survived through many subsequent purges in the name of politics and religion and eventually emigrated to New France, thence to Maine, keeping the old ways alive, managing to preserve themselves. It wasn't ever a conspiracy, like vampires (who never liked druids much, seeing as they could be an impediment to societal control and feeding) or the fae, who maintained ancient and cordial relations with the oak-knowers.
He's also a motorcycle enthusiast, but stopped riding Harley's a while ago and went with Kawasakis. He's a surprisingly good bonsai gardener, and swears he doesn't cheat but the office doesn't believe him one damned bit.
Background: The smell of her was in his nostrils at this range, even in the city, but it wasn't remotely her fault; he could tell that she worked out this morning, caught a whiff of high end yogurt on her breath and could place the perfume, notes of pomegranate, lemon, rose and jasmine. It was good but not pricey and didn't wrinkle his nose, the way college age dudes would with their tendency to spray the shit under their arms.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, thank you for coming in to interview today. Did you want anything to drink before we started?" She got the name right, which was points in his book. The meeting room was easy to peer into, seeing as the walls were glass, the door was glass, all framed by minimal aluminum, rather than metal. Unlike a police station, it was two way glass. The table was spartan, the chairs modern. So Priest probably didn't get much input on the design of this particular space.
"No thank you, Ms. Cloverpetal, the water's fine, though I hear the coffee is great around here," He smiled at her winningly and made eye contact. His body language was kept deliberately open, perhaps from a lifetime of being a meeter and greeter, a guy that knew how to be public facing. Sure, he was an outdoors guy, but that didn't mean he couldn't provide small talk and socialize. In the supernatural community, there was a bit of a misconception about his kind as cranky recluses, which was often the case. Centuries of tradition could make some people tedious. Ada knew him and knew differently, but others might not. So he put on his best winning way. They might have expected a guy wearing a robe with birds nesting in his beard, or something out of a certain popular show where they shot every animal in sight and wore hunting camo underwear to match their bandanna.
Sure, he had that ruddy sort of look from a lifelong outdoorsman, but he came to the interview in jeans and a tan sport coat and an open collared sky blue oxford, which had a good casual, but sharp urban look for a guy with a beard and a manbun. So sue him, he was tuned into this IPA drinking culture of hipsters. He was actually approving of the water's taste. It was in a recyclable paper carton and tasted good, like the place really cared about where they sourced their water from. He didn't wear a tie, but this interview was a bit of a formality that kept in compliance with the process of hiring law, even though the company contacted him and invited him to apply.
Then again, if you were in the magic business, you had to be wary of your water supply. Any number of people with a grudge would look at that as a good way to mess around. He didn't even need to do a quick magical filtering of the water, one of his go to spells. These days, even creekwater needed filtration. He just had a leg up on it over most people.
Once he finished his sip, Ms. Cloverpetal, who had a hippie name straight out of the late 1960's and, despite the perky, dewy fresh blonde look, might have been born back then, essentially revealed intern status when she said, "So, what can you tell me about yourself?" She asked it earnestly enough, referencing a list printed in Courier on white paper.
But Gabe obliged, "I hold a bachelor's in biology from the University of Vermont and am a 26 year veteran of the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a Special Agent, enforcing laws on the books in wildlife preserves and other federal jurisdictions, as relates to hunting and the trafficking or poaching of protected species. We also did disaster relief operations, specifically relating to handling of animals, and I usually got called in when they needed to find someone in remote places. I was stationed in various parts of the country, notably Louisiana, Texas and New England, but I also covered territory in Northern California and South Florida for a few years, mostly working in conjunction with the FBI branches on smuggling ring cases."
Organized crime shit, sometimes dangerous. She was taking notes on a sheet she had printed out and he had a battered notebook and a cheap pen he was using to take down his own notes, as a way to give his hands something to do.
"Of course," Ms. Cloverpetal nodded, as she read from the script, "So can you tell me about a time when you had too much to do and not enough time and what you did in that situation?"
"Does Vietnam count?" He asked, with a trace of irony to the tone.
This is when the lady got a little flustered, perhaps as he made a cardinal mistake of traditional interviews and gave his age. There was a momentary uncomfortable silence and a mumbled, obligatory and amusing, "...thank you for your service..."
To save her a bit he added, "I went to school on the GI bill as soon as I got out in Burlington. I missed Woodstock, but we had some really good concerts out there. Then, after graduation, I got on a bike with some friends and did the Easy Rider thing. I tried to play guitar, but am not that good. That definitely felt like I was trying to get in a lot in a very limited amount of time, if that helps." He didn't tell her about the drugs. It was still a job interview, after all.
"Oh, wow, so what happened after that?" she asked, a little more naturally.
"Well," he said, warming up to storyteller mode, "I grew up in a kind of traditional household in Aroostook County, Maine, right? And my family, we had our traditions, one of them being a deeply-felt connection with and respect for the land. But not everyone thought it through; they were in a hurry to pull themselves out of a time when disease killed much of the population in childhood, and scarred the survivors. Industrialization, science and technology were used to escape these things, but society overdid it, with immense harm to nature to underwrite societal advancement. Hell, my family always felt that good stewardship was important, but in the 1970's, a lot of people were just starting to realize the cost of heedless industrialization. Acid rain, ozone holes, radical climate change, mass extinction. Have you ever see pictures of what this country used to look like, Ms. Cloverpetal?"
She shook her head, and he continued, impassioned.
"Junkyards everywhere, smog, and all kinds of stuff just floating in ponds. We definitely killed off a lot of species in the process and it was obvious that so many others were about to go. It was a total mess. In the 1960's the activism focus was on Vietnam, but I think we," he meant the generation, "all had to make decisions about what to do with our life after the road trip was over. Literally, in my case. Well, the plan was to kind of get involved in that, and a good way to do it was to join the police force that catches people who dump things on public land illegally, who poach animals without a care and who generally screw up national parks with their beer cans and dumb lighter fluid fires so that everyone else has a huge forest fire on their hands. I'm not a politician, but the one thing Nixon did right was come up with the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a lot of cleaning up and enforcement to be done with various federal agencies and a lot of that had to do with a new generation of agents pushing these laws. I mean, the job isn't all chasing around poachers and finding shipments of smuggled ivory, you got to teach kids about respecting the land too. So we were trying to change things at the grass roots and it looked swell at first, we made a lot of progress. Of course, it's never that easy," he ended with a grunt.
He wasn't sure to encapsulate years and decades of disappointment with bureaucracy, congressional oversight, media misrepresentation and supernatural manipulation for its own ends. He didn't lose the romanticism and idealism, but toward the end, he was drawing heat onto the community he was stationed in, in Louisiana, from a particular cartel of vampires. Thralls, schools, bad stuff. They'd sussed out his schedule, which changed last minute, and thought to pin him down. They shot some school resource officer in a uniform that looked vaguely coplike.
Luckily, the tracks got covered there and the school resource officer survived. But he retired soon there after. He'd started in 1976 and it was 2002. He was drawing too much heat, and he didn't like the feeling of walking away, but the truth was that the bureaucrats were demanding some sort of accountability and he was going to be forced out anyway.
"So you retired in 2002," Ms. Cloverpetal stating the obvious, "But what have you been doing since then?" Apparently, Ada had this young lady doing a very ceremonial 'we did it' screening, but he played along.
"Consulting work here and there, a fat pension and I move around a lot. Back home, they expect me to be gray and old, so I stay away because I hate dyeing my hair," he confided, "So I've been biking around the country and camping out rough in all kinds of places when I'm not raking in consulting fees, including with your agency. Heck, these days I can take a laptop and a phone just about anywhere, so my office is on my back." He sounded smugly satisfied with that pronouncement as he patted the backpack beside his chair, a high end Maxpedition model, thoroughly modern, the nylon thick, durable but well-used. You could only take retro so far.
"So Mr. Boudreaux, what did you like most about your job? What did you like least?"
Gabe cocked his head. It was a bog standard question, but he decided to answer honestly rather than play a cagey game, "What I liked least was political oversight, appointees and unknown agendas that tied our hands. What I liked most was our values and mission. Preserving wildlife, encouraging good stewardship and you got to get out in the community and really work with people. You know, teach them well," he shrugged.
"Did you ever have to deal with someone that was having a difficult day and was not in a good mood? How did you address it?"
"Ms. Cloverpetal, I was a Fish and Wildlife cop, which means that I was often dealing with poachers that did not want to be caught and sometimes had guns. So you know that if you're catching them, they might decide to take a shot. So I always tried to catch them in a friendly way in a friendly place to head off that business. But you know how it is with the bigger fish that think there is no law they're accountable to, that's when it gets hairy. But me, I like it nice and easy. No one wants a war out there," he waved a hand around, vaguely, as if to say, in civilization, with humans, "and I prefer to work it out nicely." But his smile was a bit steely, as if to say that he wasn't going to back down off a principle.
"So what would you say is your weakness?"
He almost laughed aloud, it was a stock question. He was a supervisor and he had to ask people this even back then, "I cannot pass up chocolate chip and pecan cookies or cranberry pumpkin bread. And I like action. And my life is getting too boring and patterned. The last case we worked, the Everglades case, made me feel like I could be doing more," which involved a ring of ritual spellcasters with delusions of Egyptology poaching crocodiles for their body parts, vulnerable species, "so here I am. I got a message from Ada about 'barghests' 'staff turnover' and 'we want to bring you on full time.' And I like the sound of that. Guess I never really learn, huh?"
Age (Real and apparent): Real Age - 30, Apparent Age - late 20s, early 30s.
Appearance: Johann, at a common glance, likely doesn't stand out to anyone who doesn't know him. His face is fairly mundane, a bit wrinkled in some areas, but otherwise unmarred. His chocolate-colored hair is neatly kept and trimmed, with it merging seamlessly into his short, evenly-spread beard. His eyes are an emerald green, and move in a fashion of one accustomed to learning and scholarly studies. Johann keeps himself lean and fit, but not so much that his taller frame looks lanky because of it. He dresses sharply, but still relaxed, preferring long collared shirts and loose slacks, with the occasional coat. He doesn't require glasses for everyday activities, though for reading and writing he keeps a pair on hand, as per a prescription. He often carries a satchel full of books on the occult, supernatural, or otherwise paranormal, most penned by him or another of his family. Johann keeps an assortment of more formal or distressed clothing if the situation requires it, often leaning towards fitted suits or hoodies and cargo pants, respectively. A German by birth, Johann speaks English in an accent, which can make him harder to understand in regards to certain words or phrases, though his enunciation is improving, and he practices this when he can.
Personality: Johann is a scholar first and foremost, and is almost more concerned with cataloging and studying the paranormal rather than fighting it, though he always steps up to combat it directly when he must. He's a bit shy when it comes to casual conversation, though he adores discussing historical topics, or his non-paranormal areas of research, often musing that "If I didn't study the paranormal, I'd be teaching world history." Although Johann is well-accustomed to the paranormal and occult wonders of the world, he has a large fear that frequently gets the better of him: snakes. If it involves snakes or snake-like beings, he wants nothing to do with it and will rush to get away. Being from Germany originally, Johann has a bit of trouble grasping the finer points of English, particularly terms for certain paranormal beings, as well as the culture of living in the US.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Johann comes from a family of paranormal investigators, and so has a wealth of knowledge and resources regarding to the field. He's penned four books on the subject(all privately published for the occult community), and his family have published far more. In more practical terms, Johann has mastered the use of a few magical spells, simple stuff to protect himself and help out in dangerous conflicts, but nothing extreme. He speaks fluent German and decent English, and has a basic knowledge of translating historical languages like Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew. Outside of work, Johann spends a lot of time studying publicly-known world history, and considers it his hobby. He's currently working on a historical fiction novel, set during the Franco-Prussian War.
Background: The following is an excerpt from The Effects of Modern Society Upon The Paranormal, the fourth book published by Johann Weber. "...Modern society holds much grip over the ability of the paranormal to proliferate within our world. Smart phone photographs of a magician casting a spell, digital video of a vampire feeding, and the general spread of conspiratorial information detailing the existence of supernatural elements in our world. All this must be combated as much as any occult threat. The average person must not be allowed intimate knowledge of magic, or poltergeists, or demons, for the average person is a liability too great to ignore. Yes, these mundane peoples must be protected from the dangers of the abnormal, but they should not be aware that the threat exists.
The trouble in this matter, however, is where to draw the line. Should the information collected by organizations or individuals studying and combating the paranormal be provided to national or regional governments? Should those governments be contacted in the event of a crisis? This is a topic myself and my colleagues have debated for years on end, and something I feel has been undecided since time immemorial. However, with the advents of modern technology and the renewed pace at which news travels in our world is making this issue much more prevalent and dangerous to our line of work. This is why I would argue that the operations of government should not be brought into the fold, because that puts the protection of the knowledge out of our own hands, and into that of an external source, something we can't reliably control or protect.
Investigation and containment of the paranormal and the occult should rest squarely in the hands of independent organizations. Governments often have obligations or requirements that can restrict their ability to act directly on a matter, and they often attempt to manipulate these elements of our world for their own gain. I believe that by relying on independent, non-politicized or nationalized organizations, the safety of both the populace and that which we study and combat can be secured, providing both the protection of the average person from the dangers of the supernatural, but also the protection of the supernatural from abuse by the average person."
Nobody's been accepted yet, because this isn't first-come, first-served. :3 I'll happily read sheets until I make my final decisions, but right now the only 'accepted' character is Morgan, and that's because she's my character. And, if she doesn't make sense to have with the cast I pick out, I'm comfortable with taking her out of play, too.
Hey all! I'm going a bit of a weird direction with my character, so if it’s too silly or out there, I'm happy to tweak and edit, or completely scrap it as necessary!
@Naril I took a few liberties, in that my host is a former PHI Agent, so I have a history with the agency, & I used Sol in my background scene, but if that was an overstep I can totally change it around. Hopefully I captured his personality okay. The Dr. Yomoto character was just some throwaway side character within the organization, I'm imagining is in R&D or working on a cure for Alexandra or some such thing.
I tried to leave enough leeway to allow people to influence the history they might have with Alexandra Smalls and whatnot. I'm totally open to conspiring with the rest of you on who gets along or hates my character, or any other kinds of crazy twists and turns regarding my arc, assuming it's accepted. Thanks for your consideration!
Name:
Entity "Husk" S.L.F.(Sentient Life Form)-XJ7L : Currently Inhabiting the Body of PHI Agent Dr. Alexandra Smalls.
Gender:
N/A - Current Human Host is Female
Race/Species:
Sentient Fungus
Age:
SLF-XJ7L is of indeterminate age. Safely regarded as ancient, the sealed cavern tomb where life-form evolved in isolation pre-dates Sumerian culture and even the last Ice Age by thousands of years. (Estimated c. 10,000-13,000 BC)
Age of Verifiable Sentient Consciousness - 3 Years
Age of Host at time of Assimilation - 31 Years
Appearance:
SLF-XJ7L is a singular colony of Coral Fungi that aggressively colonizes in a distinct fuzzy webbed pattern. It emits a soft white bioluminescent glow when stimulated by touch, currently known to be centralized to a cavern tomb located in modern day Borneo. The cavern of it's origin has been sealed and under strict surveillance since the incident involving agent Smalls.
Prior to said incident, Alexandra Smalls appearance was relatively unremarkable, rather typical in a girl-next-door kind of way. Soft blonde hair kept wrapped smartly back in a tight bun, light hazel eyes perched behind thin glass frames of a strong prescription, with a gaunt, hawk-like face, sun-kissed by a handful of freckles. A body built by her habits, very little muscle definition or curves to speak of, though typically any to be found were kept hidden under a lab coat or hazard suit. Her sylphlike shoulders held a slight slouch from too many hours in a lab or at a computer, often with bags under her eyes to accompany it.
Despite the internal changes, XJ7L has altered very little about Alex's outward appearance, though to a careful observer you would notice that she seems to be aging in a slow, but distinct reverse pattern in the 3 years since the incident. From beneath what borders on uncomfortably taught skin, her veins let off a scarcely noticeable glow, seeming to bulge and pulse with energy and life. Reminiscent of the fungal growth itself, this light will increase in intensity when stimulated, struck or otherwise injured, as the entity engages it's healing ability. Blood no longer flows from open wounds, instead a thick syrupy substance resembling luminous Elmer glue oozes out and hardens as the cells regrow.
Those closest to Alex would quickly catch on that the slouch is gone. Along with once necessary glasses, so too has most of the pigment in her eyes disappeared. They gradually transition between levels of a misty opaque hue which would lead most to believe she has gone blind. The blonde hair has been cropped back to a short buzz, which the entity sites as a decision made for 'utility.'
Personality:
After emerging from a weeks long catatonic state, PHI found the young operator Alexandra Smalls had been replaced something altogether alien. Unsettling to those that once knew her best, the entity has found a shaky, if ultimately cooperative alliance within the PHI organization over the last 3 years. Still, there is a largely unspoken tension, as most in the organization are still waiting on R&D to synthesize a cure for Alexandra Smalls, while the entity for its own part has stayed less than forthright about what, if any, it’s true intentions long term.
While interacting with the world at large, SLF-XJ7L is equal parts curious and cunning. Though initially the entity struggled with motor function this period was short lived, the measured cognitive function and reaction times quickly progressing from what was little more than a toddler in an adult's body, to executing advanced & intricate techniques ranging from watch-making to rock climbing, ballet to free diving.
Any physical tasks seem to come relatively naturally to the entity, though even after several years it still struggles to relate and interact with humanity at large, particularly in the fields of empathy and emotion.
Often described as aloof, there is seemingly nothing one can do to rattle Husk's cage, so to speak. Largely because it simply isn't operating within the confines of a human consciousness anymore. There is no fear, no love, no anger. While it attempts to understand the motivations behind these urges, it thus far seems to lack any capacity to experience them first hand. This is most apparent when it comes to magics and technologies geared to affect humanoids and their biochemistry.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities:
SLF-XJ7L's main power comes from the natural properties of the fungus which inhabits the host. Cells mutated by XJ7L replicate at a grossly accelerated rate, allowing a perceivable healing rate to any trauma. This ability to rapidly repair the host body's structure grants it a virtually unparalleled level of endurance, and though not superhuman, certainly capable of feats of strength and speed well past what the body's frame would indicate.
Similarly visual and motor function has improved dramatically past human limits, allowing Husk to aim and throw objects with scary accurate precision, and as such, is very little fun to play skee-ball with.
Worth repeating and of special note : the widespread and unique transformation has resulted in the entity's biochemistry being immune and remaining unaltered by any conventional or supernatural means. Drugs, poisons, the power of suggestion, blood magic, succubi : all find their abilities wanting, the fungus able to adapt and overcome before the entire system is affected. Few produce results and those that do are underwhelming at best, as each fungal cell is able to compensate for any nearby that become afflicted.
Overall Husk is considered a top-flight agent on paper, and has the skills to back it up, but the disconnect between XJ7L and many of the other operatives is considered a liability.
Background:
"I don't know what to tell you, Sol. It is absolutely fascinating, I've never seen an organism that can assimilate a host with such rapid efficiency. There are other fungi that can create zombie like effects in ants, but this… The entire circulatory system is flooded with XJ7L spores, cognitive and motor functions are operating normally despite the sedative we administered." Dr. Yomoto juggled the transparent scans across the back-lit monitor, his eyes wide.
"To hell with your fascination. That's a human being in there, doctor." The tower of a man leaned heavily against the glass, staring in at the woman seated stiffly in the interrogation room, handcuffed to table and wearing only a hospital gown. "Alex was a good agent, and a friend. We already lost two today. How do we save her?"
"I... I don't know that we can."
"What exactly are you trying to tell me?"
"In my professional opinion, that is no longer Alexandra Smalls, sir."
"You're telling me, that mold erased her?"
"With respect, Sol, the scans speak for themselves. Whole body lit up like a damn Christmas tree, she's a walking colony. Look at the difference in these brain images! This one on the left is Alex when she joined.... On the right, I mean..." The doctor squawked out an awkward, disbelieving laugh. "It doesn't even look human in there. Whatever aspects of the brain that made her Alex before she went into that cave, we can't find anything that resembles it now. I can't even begin to speculate if we went in with surgery."
"Out of the question." Sol replied, eyeing the Japanese doctor critically. "What are our options?"
Yomoto sighed heavily, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck as he peered at his shoes, trying to avoid the burden of telling Sol they might as well have lost three agents in a single incident.
A sudden pounding on the two way mirror shook both of their attention back to the room. A glowing smear of brilliant white seeped from the degloved hand which was planted against the glass, as the skin slowly crawled back up the wrist to encase the exposed musculature and bone.
The entity that had formerly been their friend uncannily followed their gaze back to the cuffs hanging uselessly from the table in the center of the room, expressionless. “This one wishes to speak to Ada.”
Appearance: A middle aged man that appears perpetually tired and somewhat disheveled, Jacob stands in at 6'2", putting him typically several inches taller than many of his cohorts. Jacob has a sinewy build and broad-ish shoulders, but is neither bulky nor lanky. His wavy hair is relatively short and generally combed to the side and kept out of the way, the gray and dark brown hair somehow always manages to appear neat, yet casually unkempt at the same time; and his chin often sports a stubble that is likely several days old. His eyes are a sharp gray, and his piercing gaze is analytical and critical but belie a lurking sadness. His facial features were once strong and defined, but have grown gaunt and thin, and his mouth is often pressed into a thin line. His prominent features and build would lead one to believe that in his heyday, many would consider Jacob fairly attractive, though years of work and being a single father have clearly taken its toll.
Most of Jacob's wardrobe consists of well fitted suits, mostly black and gray often with a monochrome tie. The vast majority of Jacob's footwear are leather dress shoes, clean and professional enough to wear with his suits, but comfortable enough to walk or do activity in for days on end. Jacob wears a leather shoulder holster over his shirt, and typically makes no effort to hide it. On his left hand Jacob wears a silver wristwatch, along with a golden wedding band on his ring finger. He keeps a picture of his daughter in his wallet.
Personality: A serious man with a strong work ethic, Jacob often has a no-nonsense demeanor and is typically impervious to the jokes and wisecracks made by his coworkers. Only rarely willing to crack a grin for his close compatriots, Jacob is for the most part incredibly blunt and to the point, though not confrontational. Strong willed, and somewhat hard-headed, Jacob is a man of conviction and his beliefs are hard to shake. Despite his callous attitude, its fairly plain to see Jacob is honest and well-meaning, but isn't afraid to get his hands a little dirty. Jaded, and somewhat cynical, despite possessing a well developed moral compass, Jacob will often ignore morality and act in what he believes are in the best interest of himself and his compatriots.
Generally slow to trust those around him that he isn't well acquainted with, Jacob is skeptical of most strangers, and is a firm believer of "If it seems to good to be true, it is". He takes almost everything with a grain of salt, and rarely accepts things at face value. Jacob is for the most part calm and patient, and requires a fair amount of goading to lose his cool. As a part of his fatherly instincts, Jacob is extremely protective of his daughter, and will often react aggressively when something involving her well-being seems to be threatened. As a result of his wife's murder, Jacob is usually distrusting of humanoid supernaturals- particularly vampires, and is quicker to aggression when one is involved.
Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Jacob possesses an innate magical talent, and has the ability to cast simple charms and telekinetically move smaller objects, such as books, pens, wallets, and coins. He has yet to bother pursuing further mastery of his magical talent, too busy with work and family to take the time to focus on practicing magic.
While by no means an Olympic athlete, Jacob is no slouch. In good shape for someone his age, Jacob possesses a mental and physical fortitude capable of taking a considerable beating and can hold his own in most situations that are physically taxing, from lifting and moving objects, to chasing down suspects and even fist fights. While not a brawler, Jacob knows his way around a street fight and can be a formidable foe when provoked. Though not a marksman, Jacob is well versed in operating firearms and firearm safety, and can be a decent shot with his sidearm or even a shotgun or rifle.
Jacob is a smoker, and smokes several cigarettes a day. Despite his good shape, and regular workout habits, its clear that the years of smoking have taken a toll on his overall stamina. Jacob has also been starting to develop a drinking habit, and has begun using cigarettes and alcohol as a vice.
Street savvy and smart, Jacob knows his way around Chicago, and does especially well at night, when most decent folk have called it a night- his stature and attitude often give the seedy types pause. As an investigator, Jacob is capable of many tasks, from surveillance, to opening doors that aren't meant to be opened, and even a bit of interrogation. As a single parent, Jacob is also fairly adept in common household skills, he knows his way around the kitchen, and can grill a mean steak.
Background: Glazed in the golden glow of midday, the interior of the little shop was absolutely aromatic, a mixture of coffee and baked goods filled the air and almost took Jacob to days long past. Once the sparse cloud cover blocked out the golden sun, Jacob was slowly brought back to reality- a paper cup of the cheapest, strongest coffee he could buy and the loud voice of the Starbucks barista calling out to the next customer. He sat at a short, small wooden table, his knees bumping against the bottom of the wooden surface. Across from him was an empty chair nursing some sort of strange, pinkish-purple and blue concoction that was apparently a frappuccino of some sort.
Jacob took a sip of his coffee absentmindedly as he regarded the pale pink puffy jacket drapped around the back of the chair- Morgan had gotten it for Amanda a few weeks back, said something about him having a terrible taste in children and women's fashion. It wasn't designer, but it wasn't cheap, Jacob was curious how Morgan managed to afford buying gifts for his daughter so regularly- her salary couldn't have been that much higher than his after all.
Looking up as a head of dirty blonde hair skipped back to the table, he couldn't help but touch the golden band on his finger fondly. While Amanda had his eyes, nothing else about his daughter looked anything like him. She did however, take after her mother almost perfectly, the round face and soft features- Jacob liked it better that way, his wife was the pretty one in the family anyway.
"Did you wash your hands?" Jacob asked pointedly as Amanda sat down, grabbing at the drink with notably dry hands and sipping on the straw. Amanda finished a long sip of her drink before she looked away sheepishly.
"Yes..." she lied, not very well. She Also took after her mother in that regard.
"Then why are your hands so dry?" Jacob asked suspiciously, Amanda hated hand dryers, and the brown paper towels only ever got most of the moisture off.
"No they're not!" Amanda insisted, rapidly rubbing the sides of her drink, collecting the condensation onto her hands before shoving them out and showing them to her father, "See! They're still wet!"
"Amanda..." Jacob chided softly as he pulled a small bottle of hand sanitizer out of his pocket and dropped a dollop onto his daughter's outstreched hands. "Now hurry up, we've got a lot to do today."
Half an hour later, and the two McCalisters were at the Pier Park, Jacob watching as his daughter went on a spinning ride for what must have been the fourth time. This was Jacob's first full day off in weeks, so Amanda had written out an itinerary for her self titled 'Best day off day ever, ever'. They were already done with most of the list- breakfast/brunch in bed, followed by a matinee showing of The Incredibles 2, late lunch with 'Auntie Morgan', and a trip to the arcade. After a coffee break, the two came to the Navy Pier, where they'd ride rides to their (Amanda's) content, and watch the sunset.
As Amanda got off her fifth ride on the swinger, she giddily- and dizzily made her way over to her father, giggling all the while. Hugging at her father's waist Amanda let out a tinkling little laugh. "Hey daddy, are you sure you don't want to go on? Its really really really fun!"
"Ah you know me," Jacob said with a nonchalant wave, "I'm not too fond of heights."
"But you're a detective! You're not supposed to be afraid of anything?" Amanda insisted, looking up at her father.
"Now where on earth did you get that idea?" Jacob asked, as he resisted his daughter's pull towards the large swing ride. "Besides, don't you think you've been on there enough? You can barely stand straight!"
"I can so!" Amanda replied with a huff and a stomp, not noticing as she brought her foot down onto her father's shoe. "See! Watch!" She said as she began to walk away from Jacob, standing upon a line in the cement tiles and walking foot in front of foot, her arms out to her sides to help her keep balance. Unfortunately, that type of walking made the already unsteady Amanda even move unsteady on her feet, and after a few short steps, she stumbled forward, catching herself with a few stuttering steps and a pair of hands being thrown forward.
"Well, I don't think we have enough time to go on the ride again anyway," Jacob said as he trotted over to his daughter, pointing at the sun. The sun had dipping closer to the horizon, turning the sky from a light blue into the darker prelude of evening. "If we don't get on the ferris wheel now, we'll miss the sunset.
The threat of missing the sunset must have been a strong motivator, because next thing he knew, his daughter had grabbed his hand and began dragging him towards the steadily growing line of the park's ferris wheel. Through some stroke of divine fate, or perhaps a bit of trickery on Jacob's behalf, the two McCalisters managed slip through the lines and get themselves high into the sky just as the sun began falling past the horizon, the sky now noticeably mixed with a wash of orange and purple amongst the blue.
The younger McCalister stiffled a yawn and leaned against her father. Jacob placed a hand fondly on her head and ruffled it a bit.
"Daddy," Amanda asked, stiffling another yawn, "What was mommy like?"
Jacob blinked a few times, his hand curling up and slowly retreating from his daughter's head. "Hm? Where's this coming from?"
"I've been trying really hard to remember mommy, but I cant remember a thing." Amanda muttered, pawing at her eyes with a small hand. "What was she like?"
"Your mother?" Jacob replied, absentmindedly touching his ring, "Well,"
super interested but I got to be honest, I'm not entirely sure if my writing ability will be up to par as I look over the other characters. but hey ill try. the worst that can happen is you just deny my character right? lol.
I'm going to start making some preliminary decisions starting tomorrow! I've got a new laptop, and I can't let it go too much longer without writing a whole pile of words on it. <3
Here is my application. I hope it's sufficiently tasty.
Name: Jennifer Winters – She also has a ‘true’ name.
Gender: Female
Species: Mirror Phantom
Age: Appears to be in her late 20’s. In actuality, she has existed for approximately 3 years.
Appearance:
Jennifer takes the shake of a relatively young and athletic Caucasian woman. To the casual observer, she wears her shoulder-length sand-blonde hair tied back, and light brown eyes finish a set of modestly sharp facial features. She’s not much taller than the average person. She usually – nearly always – wears faded jeans and a brown bomber jacket with an Air Force patch, with a long beige scarf wrapped around her neck.
The longer you look, however, the more this original image distorts. Her skin seems to shimmer and lose its tone, her eyes slowly fill out to become black voids and her hair loses its luster. Her features will twist and turn gaunt – even sharp as bone. Blinking, or looking away for a brief time, will dispel this trick of the light.
Jennifer is a collected, reasoning individual. Bordering on anxiety, she will ponder any predicament thoroughly before taking any action if left alone. When rushed, she will not hesitate to act, but will not move with the same determination she would if she had the time to prepare. She is a generally calm and friendly addition to a group, and does her best to fit in with others, although this same easy-going style may come off as a lack of personality or social ambition. She isn’t overly jovial however, and often straight the point. She does not particularly like violence, and is hesitant to harm – and particularly kill – others. She is forthright and honest; lying appears to cause her discomfort.
As a being closely tied to mirrors and presence, Jennifer displays traits present in some folklore. She has no real apparent shadow; even in strong light, her shadow is a soft blur at best. She has no reflection in basic mirrors. Furthermore, in recordings and photographs, her form is extremely hard to capture: she comes through particularly blurry and troublesome for professionals everywhere.
When close to a mirror, Jennifer can step through it to the other side, something that should by all accounts be impossible. She will appear in the mirror as though she was being reflected in the same place in the room. Through exerting her willpower, she can move from one mirror to another. This is generally limited to the same building, on account of the labyrinthine nature of her place of origin. One can summon Jennifer to a specific place by performing a specific ritual in front of a mirror. The ritual is not unique to her, unless her true name is used.
Finally, she is able to bring others in or out through mirrors. Doing so will actively drain the other person’s vitality. The Place Beyond The Mirror is not for the faint of heart.
She is terrible at Ski-Ball, but enjoys social activities. She is very intrigued by movies and vlogs.
The candlelight flickered restlessly as she took her time, poring over the weathered pages of the tome a final time. Dusting the attic had taken a back-seat to cosplaying in grandfather’s old gear and flipping through discarded antiques. Jennifer sighed to herself, pausing on an archaic table of symbols to pour herself some more wine. None of this was even legible. She recognized the written Latin, but even that was barely a third of the page. The rest of it was just squiggles. The occasional ‘real’ word would show up in the margins.
She flipped through a few more pages, contented to look at the ancient depictions of old seals, symbols and what she could only conclude were snake demons. She finished her third glass of wine and set the glass aside, glancing up at the dusty old mirror that sat on the opposite side of the room. A grand old thing; gilded and large enough to swallow a six-foot-tall man. How they got it up here in the first place mystified her. It’d cost a fortune to get someone to pick it up. She should call the realtor, see if there were anything they’d do.
Jennifer pushed to her feet, a single hand on the heavy tome. Her fingers strained under the sudden weight, and her brief buzz is tested with the sudden focus required. Her fingers sent a jolting ache up through her wrist. A loud rip as the old paper tore, and a loud boom as the old tome crashed back to the ground on its spine, the ancient binding coming undone and scattering yellowed paper everywhere. She sighed heavily and slowly set about recovering the pages.
Almost done, she staggers over to collect a gloriously illustrated page. Beams of light spray through a doorway, and strike a very muscular man. Under the illustration, a simple verse in Latin. The words seem to call to her, as beautifully written as the page is drawn. Smiling sheepishly to herself, Jennifer read the words aloud.
“Te rogamus spiritus Veritas aperire viam. Ego ambulare ad iter ad virtutem. Sacrifice et ad conteram sigillum.”
A sudden crash of glass erupted about her, and she dropped her collected pages with a startled half-scream. No, wait. She’d knocked her wineglass over when shambling about. Cheeks flushing with embarrassment, she was just about to set to a new task of cleaning when something else caught her eye. A motion. A shadow. Something shifted in the poor view of the dusty old mirror. Jennifer glanced behind her but no, she was still alone. She glanced back at the mirror – there it was again.
Against her better judgement, she wandered over to the mirror. Swept her hand slowly over the surface to clear the worst of the dust. A chill rode down her spine, the air grew cold, and she immediately let go of the mirror.
“Hello,” issued a voice from behind her, giving her another start. Jennifer turned her head, and widened her eyes with fear as the appearance of the creature dawned on her. Black, sinewy, jagged. It was a featureless corpse, an attack on all she knew was right. It tilted it’s head, skipping towards her with disjointed motions.
Jennifer recoiled. Cornered against the mirror, she raised her hands defensively and threw a sidelong stare towards the stairs. “What are you? Stay away from me!” The creature stopped at her demand. Perhaps it would let her go. To her horror, it began to shift. Out of the sinew grew the jacket she wore. The long black strands became paler and warmer, until they matched her hair. Its face warped slowly, filling out with life to reflect her own.
“I have been called.” It responded, tilting its head in the same way she knows she does. Jennifer tore at her own hair in thoughtless despair, throwing her gaze around. That’s when she saw it. The ceiling did no longer exist. It was a void of repeating images. Shifting darkness. Like a mirror trick in the void. She pushed to the side, and realized the same was true for the walls. The being made no attempt to stop her as she barreled for the stairs. Glancing down, she saw the same horror unfold below. She stared back at the creature watching her. That’s when she saw the mirror again. Clean. Untouched by age or use. On the other side lay her shattered glass and the sprawled pages. The pages were no longer on the floor in here. Only in the mirror.
“How do I get out of here? Back.. there?” She managed eventually, staring up at... the fake version of herself. The creature watched her intently, as if drinking in every syllable and motion. Eventually it deigned to speak again.
“I can take you there,” it said, slowly finding the rhythm to mimic her. It was like listening to a recording. A disturbing impersonation.
Age (Real and apparent): Well, age and time are funny things for them, and they don't really count how long they have been around. Comparing time can be different and difficult for them. However, he would be considered a young man by modern standards and looks to be about 28.
Appearance: A striking young lad, with straight shoulder-length golden blonde hair, a perfect smile and a strong jaw line. The young man’s eyes always seem to be a shimmering orange color almost as if there is a fire burning in his soul. He stands at 6’ and looks to weigh about 175 lbs. of lean muscle. His skin a bit pale but not unhealthy, and he always seems to be clean. His build is more athletic with no noticeable scars or markings across his body. Adrian is cleanly shaven, sporting a very professional look about him.
Adrian likes wearing nicer clothes from a time few humans alive today would recognize. A time of great depression and war. He favors a tan 2-piece suit of the 1930s — 1940s era and sports a black trench coat and umbrella during inclement weather. Wearing normally brown or black leather shoes and a matching hat. Keeping a silver pocket watch in his left pocket and a black flip phone in the other, the only piece of technology he has.
Adrian at first glance can be a bit up front and direct. He’s not really the beat around the bush type of guy. The young man is naturally charismatic and can be comforting to others by just his presence alone. This is mostly because of what he is, others can also feel protected and safe in his vicinity. This combined with his natural charm can often times get people to talk to him or at the very least calm down. He always seems to be optimistic even in the most dire of situations.
However, He can be arrogant and assume he is superior towards everyone around him. Truly believing that he is doing them a great service by helping them. Even if it’s a bit delusional, at times. He’s also said to be rather annoying, but does this mostly to mess with other people. Even with his proud exterior, he is very much aware of what his job is and what it means.
In the face of danger when all others fail he knows he won’t, he can’t. He is here to protect and it’s a compulsion not just a job to do. In the face of adversity he is brave, courageous, fearless, a natural born leader. That one guy who will have your back through thick and thin and will not have any regrets to sacrifice himself to save others. To the people he calls friends, he is loyal and his love burns just as hot as the fire inside him. His normally cool demeanor can change quickly to anger if his friends are threatened. However, even though his personality Adrian tries to be friendly towards others and is otherwise just here to do his job before going home again.
Aside from the usual heightened strength and endurance to the point where he could easily outmatch Olympic competitors as well as having a slight healing ability that he can use on himself and others. There are a few other things this young angel has that sets him apart from his peers.
First off Adrian is an angel of holy fire ready to burn the corruption and evil from the world of men. Adrian can generate and control an orange and white flame that is blessed or considered holy. These flames don’t burn the world around him unless he wants them too, the most they do is char. Having a great deal of control and manipulation of his holy fire, one would be smart to think twice before engaging him. His flames do require mechanical control through movement of his arms and body. If he is unable to do so his fire would expand out from him and lash out at anything in the area. In his human form he doesn’t have complete control of his flames, and they can get away from him if he’s not paying attention, but otherwise don’t hurt him.
Now than he does have another form, his true form. His absolute state of being that he hides due to its powerful nature. Char marks follow it wherever it goes. Cracks in its skin reveal glowing embers of pure otherworldly fire. Waves of visual distortion float off of it from the intense heat. It is righteous fury, ready to burn the impurity from the world. Standing ten feet tall with burning wings, he is a thing that must look like what many have envisioned as a true avenging angel. Giving him complete control of all fire within his vicinity not just his own flames.
Nothing about this form is subtle or stealthy. The only place he can hide is within his own flames, and he can be seen from miles away just like one could see a bonfire. It is rare that he uses this form, the last thing he wants is to be worshiped as a god. That is someone else’s job after all. When he is in this form he can’t stop himself from seeking out and destroying evil or demons even if it’s a friend.
Now that the Sirius stuff is out of the way, Adrian likes to help others. One can find him in his spare time helping the poor and the sick, volunteering at community events. At times even taking up some free private investigation for people looking for loved ones. Although the place he’s at now keeps him pretty busy, and he’s not able to do these things he always finds himself reading a good book or two.
A strange occurrence for him, truly strange to be summoned by an arch angel. Soft footsteps echoed down the immaculate marbled halls and into a room with a polished stone table. Another stood at the table waiting. His form masked by a veil of pure white light that the boy could not see through. Only the shape of the humanoid being showed through it as he beckoned the young man to come closer.
With a nervous deep breath he slowly stepped closer and up to the table. “You requested my presence?” he asked. His voice was a bit shaky something about this meeting seemed strange or sudden. Whatever his task was Adrian was sure he wasn’t ready.
The form nodded and a deep calm and soothing voice entered his mind, “yes. I have a task for you.” Placing a scroll on the table and slowly unwinding it. The blank canvas soon gave way to runes and markings that were read, heard, and felt all at the same time. Soon the runes broke for a moment and soon a new color arose almost like another scroll or parchment was placed in this one. This new parchment if it could even be called that looked like dried leather or human skin stitched together with care.
He slowly ran his hand across the strange surface and it felt like it burned him just by touching it. The runes and words were hard to read and almost seemed aggressive. He couldn’t make out what it all said, too many strange emotions weaved into its very being. For a moment he was at a loss before he realized what it was.
“This is a contract from a demon.” He paused for a moment, Adrian was caught off guard. “How did you get this here? These are supposed to be forbidden.” He was more than a little taken back from this. He wasn’t a warrior he was a caretaker. Sure he’s had more than a few years of training, but he didn’t believe he was ready for a task like this.
“Yes. It is a bounty” the bright figures head tilted to the side as it spoke. “Apparently some of this demon's offspring have been brought to earth against their will, and he would like them back. Something about it not being the right time or too soon.” Folding its hands in front of its stomach and looking over the young man before him. “This is your task Adrian, the world of man has changed once again. Just try not to do anything foolish this time.”
Adrian looked up at the being with an angry frown, “Pompeii was not my fault” referring to the foolish remark this one had made. “Then I will go and complete this task for you. I will not disappoint you again.” His head hung slightly low as if ashamed and upset at the others remark.
For a moment they stood in silence before the larger figure turned and began to walk away, “be sure to seek out Ada Hawthorne, she will be able to set you on the right path towards your mission. Who knows you might learn a thing or two from them as well.” After that the bright presence slowly left leaving just Adrian and the scroll in the room. Somehow he felt the scroll itself watching him as he too turned and left the room to prepare himself for what is to come.
