MAIN GOAL ⫻ Basil wants to turn his life around. He knows he’s been a piece of shit in the past, a mightily terrible person who doesn’t deserve forgiveness and he doesn’t ask for it, and there are problems with him he’s still trying to work out. But if for no one else, he wants to be better for his daughter and to keep her safe from it all so that she can grow into a genuinely good person. If that means finding a way to get her out of this town, then so be it.

PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Two things are simultaneously true: bad people can and do improve themselves and deserve the ability to do so, but even if they improve themselves, they are not entitled to the forgiveness or second chances of those they’ve hurt.

SEXUALITY ⫻ Heterosexual

FEARS ⫻ He's really just afraid for the safety of his daughter and the possibility that she might inherit the mistakes of her parents. This extends to him being afraid for his own life, because if he dies, then what does that leave for Abby? Also cockroaches. He fucking hates cockroaches.

REPUTATION ⫻ Among Araminta? Mixed, probably. He's on the good side of some people, on the bad side of quite a few. However, that's just on the east and west ends of town who know him as kind of a bastard, but also as a bastard you can bargain with. The folks on the North and South sides don't need as much policing and haven't seen him nearly as often and don't know much about them; and there's something to be said about the privilege of not having to interact with the police very often and the luxury of being able to greet them with a wide, happy smile. As far as the Vanburens? No personal connections with any of them except for Eve, who was estranged from the family. He doubts they have much of an opinion of him. It might be a sore awakening for them to find out he doesn't bend the knee to the family name.

THOUGHTS ABOUT FATHER ⫻ Well James ain’t his dad, so he ain’t got much reason to care for him aside from the man being Abby’s grandfather. The street says he’s good, Eve says he ain’t shit; neither one is necessarily a reliable source of information.

FLAWS ⫻ Basil’s just a piece of shit. Granted, he’s getting better. He’s a far cry different from the abusive drunk he was back in the day, but he still has issues with his temper, and he finds himself bending the rules and being far more morally flexible than he ought to be. He makes snap judgements about people, he’s difficult to befriend, has trust issues, and he relies on alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to get through the day. Just because he found his nurturing, softer side for his daughter doesn’t mean he wouldn’t put the fear of pain into someone if it meant getting what he wanted.

Basil was a runaway kid. A violently abusive and later absent dad and drug-abusing mother does not lend itself to a happy childhood. Apparently pops left a trail of kids in his wake, including a pair of half-sisters he didn’t know very well. Having to take care of himself while mom was high didn’t leave much energy for caring about his school grades, and he fled Maine, and ended up being picked up by officers in Massachusetts to be put into a foster care program when he was around 15 years old. He was a difficult kid to wrangle and get to behave, he had an attitude even when he was this young and he made it deliberately difficult for foster parents to take care of him because, in his experience, he couldn’t rely on authority figures and caretakers. The kids he associated with weren’t that different from him either; they all had troubles at home and hated being told what to do by adults who were ruining their own lives—what could they possibly know? So, when you’re told not to smoke when you’re 16 years old, you take that as a challenge and as an order to blatantly refuse.

Having teenage gangs skating downtown on skateboards who break into cars to steal shit they can pawn off isn’t a rare occurrence. Running interference for actual crooks was part of the gig. Basil wasn’t much of a brain for these types of ops, and he wasn’t much of a muscle; he was just one of the goons who was willing to do the stupid shit, like being a distraction or taking the fall for others. The very least he managed to do was study enough to get his GED, because as he started getting older, he had to have an actual job because foster agencies let you out on the street when you’re 18, and as reality began to sink in and hit him, it took at least a GED to get any decent-paying, braindead job. So, for a few years he managed to land a dockworker job driving forktrucks out in the cold and moving shipments back and forth. This was supplemented by his more illicit activities on the side, such as playing enforcer or thug for some slighted crook and collecting debts via intimidation, vandalism, or roughing someone up. Basil’s street smarts helped him here though, always being able to play the card of plausible deniability. The local cops knew of course he was no good, but without catching him in the act of having evidence of wrongdoing, they couldn’t arrest him for anything.

He never worked the same job for very long. Coming into work either intoxicated, shitty behavior, or simply not doing his work would find him fired after a few months, and he’d find someplace else that would take him. A warehouse or a dock of some kind since they pay better than most beater jobs with low requirements. He’d eventually find his way into the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania looking for work, eventually finding it in West Araminta when he was just a little older than 22 years old. The problem though with living the kind of life Basil has in a smaller town like Araminta is that people notice when you’re an outsider, and they notice quickly. One of the first of these people was one beautiful mistake by the name of Eve Vanburen. Apparently, she was one of the many kids of some big shot Basil didn’t know or care about, a man not so different from his own father, and she was estranged from the family for a very long time. She was a mixed woman about as inked up as he was, and at first it was simply a physical relationship. Then it went on to be his first long-term relationship. Then it became his worst relationship.

It turns out that putting two people together who’ve never had long-term relationships, both had family traumas, and unhealthy coping mechanisms, poor communications, and a reliance on soft drugs, it doesn’t lend itself to a healthy relationship. Full of yelling, manipulation, hurtful words and tears, stealing from each other, breaking up and hooking back up again—but it wasn’t physical then. Not that it made the relationship any healthier of course, they were both awful and spiteful people and perhaps they deserved each other in that regard. Besides that, the makeup sex was always pretty amazing. To think that they lasted year without throwing hands was a miracle.

The second time someone noticed him, after a life of being a professional piece of shit, he and a friend got caught stealing a package from someone’s porch. The po-pos start blaring their whoop-whoop horns. He takes the package to let his buddy get away, he gets tackled, and put in handcuffs. He’s been in them before, but he was a kid all those other times and they returned him home, to foster care, or let him off with a warning or something. The adult world was different—had consequences, and he spent the night in the city jail.

The third time someone noticed him was when he was approached by Lieutenant Kreese while sitting behind those bars. He kept asking Basil for the name of his buddy in exchange for going easy on him, but Basil didn’t budge. When asked why he wouldn’t turn in a good-for-nothing like the guy who left him behind, and why Basil would take the fall for someone who didn’t think twice about him, he answered it was because you don’t turn on a brother. This prompted a sympathetic nod of respect from the lieutenant, and it was then he learned that they ran his name through the system and found the trail of misdemeanors he left as a kid, but more importantly, Kreese was interested in the backgrounds of people like him. Found everything he could ever want on his parents—his father the abuser, his mother the vegetable stoner—and suddenly Basil found Kreese’s sympathy that he didn’t really deserve. Sacrifice was an admirable trait, he said, but only if it’s in service to something greater, and the past doesn’t have to define your future.

“I think you’re here because no one’s ever given you a chance,” he said, “and I want to be the one to give you that chance.”

It was probably the most memorable thing anyone’s ever said to him, and since the package as returned and no harm was done, he was offered to let this whole ordeal pass by without going on his record and personally appeal to waive his past misdemeanors as a kid if he made an attempt at attending the police academy. He didn’t even have to pass—just make an honest effort, and if he failed, he would at least walk away with a tempered discipline and self-respect, and if he failed, he’d have a promising career ahead of him. Either way, it was an opportunity to live honestly.

So, he took Kreese up on the offer. The report was basically thrown out, and Kreese would send a trooper out to make sure Basil attended the academy. Which he did as he worked his dockworker job. His relationship with Eve was as tumultuous as ever, the stress of what was basically two jobs weighing on, but before the year ended, he graduated the academy as a cadet. By no means was he the top of the class, and it was incredibly grueling, but he was already physically active and that gave him a slight edge relative to some other cadets. He finished out that year with additional training as an officer under sergeant Kreese. He stopped hanging around the bad influences of his life which helped his mental state and the camaraderie of the police force was a refreshing feeling for him—it was like having a family. There were some negatives of course; suddenly he wasn’t welcome at his regular haunts since he was the new bad guy.

Training drilled into his head a “me-versus-them” mentality against the citizenry, and he started off with a chip on his shoulder already, and here he was with a gun. Having been on the opposite side of the police, it was a moment of cognitive dissonance for him. He knew what it was like on being the other end of pepper spray and the like. His career began as a beat cop, where he’d walk around the poorer parts of town and getting to know the community, stationed at a different location from Kreese. He had a regular set of rounds, and here Basil’s street-smarts payed off, because he had an empathy for people on the west and east ends that other officers on the force didn’t have. The ability to make friends with even the slimiest meant he had his back covered, and if he needed something, he knew who to talk to. It wasn’t even a year into new career though did things begin to go south for him.

He was dispatched at night to answer an emergency call. Someone brandishing a knife broke into a woman’s house. Basil and his partner, Officer Dennings, were the first ones at the scene with sirens in the distance. The front door was broken down and there was a commotion inside, which meant that there might’ve still been someone inside. Hands on their guns, they approached, and Basil announced their presence, trying to coax everyone out. Only one man answered, and it was by sprinting around the corner, covered in blood, and lunging straight toward him. Hundreds of hours of muscle memory spurred Basil to drawing his gun and firing half of his magazine into the man’s body in a second before they were on top of each other, the former apparently unable to feel the pain. Basil barely managed to disarm him and throw him off with the help of his partner, and, driven by fear, adrenaline, anger, and a desire to survive the night, beat the man to death with his baton. Then came an inexplicable guilt. Even with all the adrenaline pumping through his body and emotions swirling onto him, he could feel as if something latched onto him. They later found out that night that the woman who called the emergency line was dead.

So that is when his life and relationship went from shit to worse. He was increasingly irritable and short fused, and the stress of policing was slowly taking its toll on him. He’d find ways to blow off the steam whether it was at the gym, tracking down suspects, or an increased use of force. At first it was on drunkards and thieves and the like—people he could get away with it on, with practiced plausible deniability and a culture of brotherhood on his side of the force to help him get away with it. “Those bastards had it coming,” they’d say. He had dozens of people behind his back, even if they understood him as the precinct’s resident “bad boy.” He was offered to be put on light duty, but Basil insisted he’d be too restless.

Worse yet, he’d come home and release his stress on Eve. As if following in the footsteps of his father, the fights intensified as he became physically abusive. It was a trend that became more frequent, and occasionally fueled by alcohol. She’d fight back too, sometimes even starting the fights, but never able to fend off Basil who was much larger than she was. Stealing and cheating became more frequent as well, which in turn fed itself into more fights. With either one too afraid to leave, this cycle of abuse would continue for two years. The number of times he’d walk into work with bruises on his face and been asked if he was alright and needed to be checked on, he lost track, but he always declined their offers and said everything was fine. Occasionally, he’d tell them it was a sex thing and that’d be enough to get those squares to shut up for a week or so. Mostly he just didn’t want them to see the sort of shape he left Eve in.

Then, of course, Eve got pregnant. It was enough to spook him, and he suggested to Eve that she should get an abortion, but she felt too afraid and too guilty to follow through with it. So, halfway through the pregnancy, Basil chickened out and bailed, leaving Eve to deal with the coming child on her own—just like his own father did with his own mother. To distract himself from that reality, he drowned himself in his work. He isolated himself from others to try to get a hold of his emotions now that it was clear that leaving Eve didn’t help him at all, and he was finding other people’s voices to be an irritating itch he wanted to scratch out. Being alone was the safest option, but in drowning himself in work, he managed to bring in a record number of criminals, getting him a reputation for being a VPD hound dog.

His previously built rapport with the community, including its rotten parts, meant people owed him favors for looking the other way over petty drug use, spray-painting a building. He was in business with some crooks who’d pay him to stay off their backs and occasionally thin out the competition with anonymous tips—his corruption ran deep. He had a nose for trouble, having been on the other side of the chase before, too. Also helping him was a liberal use of force, having brought in more than just a few guys with black eyes. He was as guilty of profiling as any other cop, and one of his chief strategies was making one of his suspects a living hell by writing citations, tickets, or even slashing tires (and when confronted about it, he simply told them to come down to the station and write a police report) until they finally gave him a confession or the information he wanted. Any one of the multitudes of Vanburen kids running around, still embittered by his relationship with Eve, Basil had a tendency for treating them worse than the usual citizenry.

A turning point in his life was when he received a call about a little over a year later. Eve Vanburen was in the hospital for drug-overdose, then currently comatose. Assuming she wakes up, she was to be forcibly admitted to a strict rehab facility. Leaving behind her a baby, barely a year old: Abby Baker. Apparently even after everything Basil’s done to her, she’d still rather the child have his name before her father’s, but more glaring to him was the chain of events that ran parallel to his own life: absent, abusive dad and a drugged-out mom. The guilt was… overwhelming, and now that life had finally caught up with him, it was time he faced some consequences and accepted responsibility. The child was to be under his custody, and he submitted himself to becoming a father at 25—not that the courts would’ve given him an option anyways.

The next three years had its ups and downs. Basil had no idea how to be a father while starting out, and he spent his only two paid vacations weeks that year trying to learn how to be one. He spent quite a few sleepless nights trying to do his research while Abby ate baby food from a little jar on top of his lap, carrying her everywhere he went before he learned to buy a stroller—but it was a long three years, and he had a lot of time to think about himself and his life up to this point. Becoming a father? It changed him. At least that’s what he wants to think. That guilt he remembers feeling when that child was left alone reminded him of himself, and if he didn’t do something about it, Abby could one day end up just like him.

So, even if fatherhood didn’t change him, he forced himself to change. Just because he was a piece of shit didn’t mean he had to pass that on to an innocent little girl. He grew to love her. That much was clear when he nearly had his head cleaned off his shoulders when he was dispatched to remove a fired worker refusing to leave company property while he was taking a joyride in a forktruck. Suddenly, he finally felt the fear of mortality since it would have meant leaving the kid behind. He was put on light duty ever since then and worked primarily as a dispatcher for the last two and a half years. He relies quite a bit on babysitters to take care of Abby while he’s at work, and he makes sure to let Abby visit Eve every week or two in the rehab facility, and although he still hated the woman and she rightfully hated him back, they were at least civil while in front of the child. He just couldn’t bring himself to forgive her, as hypocritical as it was, for leaving the child the way she did. He might’ve failed Abby, but he thought that didn’t give Eve the right to neglect her too in the way she did.

Some weird things happened a year ago though. It started with some strange reports—crime scenes that didn’t make sense. Stolen goods with no signs of forced entry and the store workers themselves having alibis. Crime scenes that left no clues. Arson without evidence of accelerants or electrical malfunction. People appearing in places they shouldn’t be in. The force was stretched thin and it was one of those rare occasions that Basil had to be put to work in the field again. All evidence pointed to an animal mauling, but there were no animals around here who could do that much damage. The only thing that came close was a black bear, but they typically came nowhere within city limits. Stomping through the forest to the east, it seemed he came across the suspect: there was a rabid dog covered with blood from its face to its shoulders. It lunged, and Basil discharged his firearm as it bit into his arm. From that moment, he felt something latch onto him. That was his first experience with an apparition.

He could see it whenever he gazed into a mirror. It looked like a dog… sort of. It was at least dog shaped. Whatever he was seeing, it didn’t go around hurting people around him, but he did feel something in himself change. Not bad or evil necessarily, just different. He was a bit hungrier, ran a little hotter, but he hadn’t felt so physically strong in a long while, if ever. He could eat just about anything, but vegetables never did sit quite right with him again. He has no idea what the hell happened to him since then, but it’s been nearly a year ago from today and things are just getting weirder in Araminta, and he’ll be damned if he lets anything happen to Abby. With this weird shit happening to the Vanburens suddenly turning to stone around the city limits, he’ll have to sit tight in town until he figures out a way to get Abby out of here. That is one risk he is not willing to take.

TYPE ⫻ Affixed Aberrant

ABSTRACTION ⫻ Predation

ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Predation is a type of Abstraction where the apparition affixes itself to the aberrant and usually imbues them with rabid aggression and ravenous hunger; where seemingly anything can provoke and light the aberrant’s shortened fuse and cause them to violently lash out at others. This was seen when the apparition affixed itself to an animal, being attracted to adrenaline, hunger, and survival. It affixed itself to Basil the moment the dog was killed as it bit him, drawn to his own survival impulse. Being a human with greater control over his base instincts and impulses, Basil doesn't suffer the same consequences as an animal would, and he has learned how to managed his own aggression even before becoming affixed.

The Abstraction comes with a set of benefits too: The apparition imbues the aberrant with a highly corrosive digestive acid that can enable them to digest nearly anything, a stronger, break-resistant skeleton including his teeth to endure greater bite forces that can shatter bone, and a denser muscular system which grants greater power and speed. He also has a sharp sense of smell that is sensitive enough to detect and differentiate the differences in sweat. This essentially enables him to become an apex predator to hunt down prey, which is also useful for literally sniffing down criminals and suspects. On the flip side, he can't stomach fruits and vegetables like he used to, and anything that's overcooked tends to give him a stomach ache too. So, he uses drugs like alcohol, caffeine, and cigarettes to help him suppress his appetite. He can recover from injury faster if he eats raw meat or blood, but because the thought of it makes him gag, that's a facet of his abstraction he will likely never utilize.

AURA SENSING ⫻ Basil senses people by smell, and he smells people through fear and adrenaline. While ordinarily he could do this anyway, its usually a subtle difference. A change in acidity, slightly sour. But when that person has an aura, it is distinct, pungent, and nearly overwhelming. It weakens with distance, but he can smell a fearful aura from a half-mile away.

LIMITS ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)

Basil drives a shitty old beater car with a child seat in the back, and he likes to play music like...