Declassified. [hider=Clancy Patrick][CENTER][hider=obligatory theme][youtube]https://youtu.be/RU0G0IWe4H8?si=FbiqqMJdphM9-hOz[/youtube][/hider][h1][img]https://txt.1001fonts.net/img/txt/dHRmLjExNi5hY2FjZWYuUTJ4aGJtTjVJRkJoZEhKcFkycy4x/burn-out-fade-away.regular.webp[/img][/h1][/CENTER] [table][row][/row][row][cell] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/CxjQhph.png[/img][img]https://i.imgur.com/v8T7QRA.gif[/img] [sup]_______________________________________________[/sup] [sub]Clarence Patrick He & Him [b]|[/b] 12 ½ [b]|[/b] Irish-American [b]|[/b] 4'9 [b]|[/b] 84lbs [sup]_______________________________________________[/sup] Lonely [sup]_______________________________________________[/sup] Skills & Talents[/sub] [sup]___________________________________[/sup][/center][hider=] [sub] [b]Lockpicking ⫻[/b] Surprisingly, Clancy has some nimble fingers and can pick through some of the more basic locks out there. [b]Outdoorsman ⫻[/b] Hitchhiking hundreds of miles from home, and being raised by a military man with some hard [i]old-fashioned values[/i] has taught Clancy a ways of how to behave in the wilderness. If you left him out in the woods, odds are he wouldn't struggle too much. Clancy's hiked his way far enough to at least have a rough idea of what's safe and sane. [b]Grift ⫻[/b] Clancy has a natural grift for getting a hold of items & getting into places he shouldn't. Lifting stuff off shelves, climbing into locked buildings, slipping under a gap in the fence to get into private property. [/sub][/hider] [/cell][cell][sub][b] Appearance[/b][/sub] [sub][sup]▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔[/sup][/sub] [indent]Clancy carries the frame of a pubescent boy, no older than twelve or thirteen, with a voice that just about veers on the cusp of breaking. His features are smooth, with not even a wisp of body hair apart from that found on his head - an unkempt mass of charcoal fuzz. His eyes possess a dull, ice blue tone, resembling flinty chips of ice - and his skin is a pasty white, more likely to burn than tan. A length of puckered skin runs along the underside of his left arm, from the elbow to halfway up the sleeve; a consequence of a bicycle mishap when he was a little younger. Some time on the road had taught him to dress sensibly; Clancy wore a mottled-green flannel lumberjack hoodie over a khaki-tone undershirt, with navy cargo pants & a laced pair of sneakers. Sometimes with a pair of gloves, if the weather wascold. Among his possessions was a denim knapsack which he was often seen lugging about, containing whatever goods he can snag off store counters when nobody's looking. Since the incident at the strip club, he's been forced to undergo a change of clothes, wearing a green hoodie bearing the likeness of a state [url=https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/58/b4/9458b46183ea73572b2ab2db9ebb8c81.jpg]sports mascot[/url] best described as a poor man's Donald Duck, and a pair of oversized denim pants with sleeves that have been obviously torn at the edges in an amateur attempt to adjust them to the wearer's shorter height. When [i]not[/i] containing his inner-self, Clancy's monstrous form hides within his body aa a skeletal shadow, oily black, with sharp and angular features. Fingers and toes become claws. His face a featureless oval that opens to form a jagged maw. [/indent] [/cell][/row][/table][sub][b] Psychology[/b][/sub] [sub][sup]▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔[/sup][/sub] [INDENT][b]MAIN GOAL ⫻[/b] Clancy had sought out one of thw few family connections he had left in Ashley, only to lose her. His upbringing and background has left him missing out on the much needed familial ties and friendships. Now? He wants the person who killed her, and to make sure they [i]pay[/i] for what they did. Once Father Wolf is dead, he wants the Apparition Killer in hopes of finally [i]ending[/i] the entity which forced this 'life' upon him, and then find a way to end his own perpetual existence once and for all. [b]PHILOSOPHY ⫻[/b] Self-reliance is something Clancy has come to depend on as a consequence of his upbringing, even to a fault. Trust is something he struggles with, as his own family situation made it difficult to make connections, and the only person he really connected to - his sister - died after a long battle with a terminal illness. He's still going through the grief of losing a sister and working it out in his own complex way. Authority figures aren't something which carry an automatic respect. [b]SECRETS ⫻[/b] Clancy isn't just a child, not anymore. He looks like a child, but his mind is far older than what anyone would guess. Some time in the sixties, he was taken, subsumed and spat out to serve as the puppet of a greater predatory entity. His family died out over the years, starting with his brother in Vietnam, his parents in the nineties, and his elderly sister a year ago. [b]SEXUALITY ⫻[/b] Not something Clancy even considers. [b]FEARS ⫻[/b] Failing to find the person who murdered Ashley, and by extension failing to find a way to end his own perpetual existence and the entity which made him what he is. [b]REPUTATION IN OLD COVEN ⫻[/b] He's an unknown to the Coven, having never been around during the fight with the Stygian Snake. [b]ROLE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST THE STYGIAN SNAKE ⫻[/b] N/A [b]FLAWS ⫻[/b] Despite his age, in many respects Clancy is still very childlike, approaching the world from a perspective that was twisted and contorted at a key developmental stage in his life. Emotional baggage stemming from a loss of his childhood, family and the tiring perpetual existence of predation also weighs upon him to the extent that he forces himself to project an emotionless facade, but the truth is that he is a 12 year old boy who was subjected to a nightmare beyond human understanding and never had much of an opportunity to grow past it. [/INDENT] [sub][b] Backstory[/b][/sub] [sub][sup]▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔[/sup][/sub] [indent]Clancy's upbringing wasn't anything outstanding, as the youngest of a brood of three. His parents were old fashioned, but not outright abusive - having undergone their own formative trials in Europe during WWII. His father, an Irish-American serviceman, was present at European theater, present at the discovery and liberation of a concentration camp , while his mother was a Polish Jew who lost most of her family to the Holocaust.The family they raised consisted of three children; their eldest son, Frank, their daughter Judith, and their youngest - Clancy. Self-reliance was a simple fact of life for the time, although Clancy's relationship with his family was healthy, and normal by the standard of the times - the sixties. He got roped into stupid stunts by his brother. His sister looked out for him. He had friends, and did things that most children did, like riding through a suburban forest trail on his bike, and it was on such a normal occasion that he happened to stumble across an entity that far outlived the European settlement of the Americas. This entity, itself a powerful being in its own right, [i]consumed[/i] Clancy in a tortorous, agonising experience, feeding on body and soul. As part of its 'lifecycle', this entity would periodically use the memories and consciousness of those it consumed to dispatch puppet [i]hosts[/i] that, while not directly under its control, were driven by an instinct to hunt, kill and feed, which would in turn nourish the host. This was a matter of pragmatism, not kindness; the homonculi it released would return to their communities to predate upon their fellows, and in truth that was the origin for many of the local folklore in the Americas around wendigo and other monstrosities. Clancy was selected as one such example, essentially spat back out into the wilderness as a hollowed out instance of his former self, with memories and consciousness the only true thing remaining, his maker buried at the base of his mind. He [i]looked[/i] like a child - that was the point - but he was in truth a hollow shell, timeless, cold to the touch, and driven by base instincts. At first, he stumbled through the wilderness in a state of disorientation, cold, hungry, [i]alone[/i]. Desperately trying to return home, the first thing that he stumbled upon was another family on the trail, and the imperatives branded upon him drove him to tear them apart and feed on their fresh corpses. Terrified, the thoughts of his family came to him as just [i]meat[/i] - he purposely exiled himself into the wilderness, slowly losing himself into a devolved, half-feral state, driven by instinct and automated function. His conscience and other thoughts remained repressed, months stretched into years, the body count extending past the double digits. Hikers, hunters, the odd family - it didn't matter. He tried to die, several times, throwing himself in front of cars, off bridges, under trains, each time coming back with [i]worse[/i] consequences for anyone close enough at the time For periods, Clancy found a part of himself, but without any ability to control the urge to feed, the cycle would repeat - and the only thing he knew was that he [i]would not[/i] inflict himself upon his own family. H What [i]truly[/i] broke this cycle was a chance event. As another hiker fell victim to his [i]imperatives[/i] to feed and nourish the ancient entity which had forced this existence upon him, the sound of [i]music[/i] from the cassette player his victim had been carrying. A song he and his brother had listened to together, enough to bring him back from the brink. It formed a window which allowed Clancy to claw his psyche back from the repressed, feral abomination he had become. He sought to try and impose limitations upon himself, with some initial failures. He could not refuse to eat - that would invoke the imperatives to feed, and he would have no control over that part of his self. He could choose his victims. Not always - sometimes desperation forced his hand, but he [i]tried[/i] desperately not to slaughter random people en-masse. He shifted tack to the cities, wandering the streets as a homeless child amidst the crack epidemic. Sometimes it was a drug pusher or a gangbanger. Sometimes it was a homeless person. Through trial and error, he selected those targets he felt were more acceptable - less likely to be missed. Criminals. Scummy people. Sexual predators became a favourite target, if for nothing else then because it felt as close as he could find to hitting back at the entity that had targeted him. He had [i]rules[/i] and a working system. He didn't stay in one place for long. He shifted, town to town, city to city, carefully quieting his appetite for temporary periods. It was a lonely existence, but he had no other choice - kill a few people, or kill many people. It was the lesser of two evils. Over time, he tracked his family. He learned that Frank had been drafted and died in Vietnam, just over a year after he disappeared. His parents, grief-stricken, would spend their last days in nursing homes, perishing in the mid and late nineties respectively. His sister - the last [i]real[/i] connection he had, would eventually suffer from alzheimers that would rob her of her mind, and later a terminal cancer that would rob her of her body. Though he had forced himself apart from his family, both for fear of traumatising and harming them, he broke the rule just the once for Judith's sake, visiting her on her deathbed. Several months after Judith's death, he learned that she had surviving family - a granddaughter, his great-niece, Ashley Stone. Clancy did his homework, and broke another rule. He reached out to her, and with slow progress, a trust of sorts formed between them. As it happened, Ashley herself had experienced a lifetime of horror in her hometown of St. Portwell through the Stygian Snake, and the shared struggle was a bonding point of sorts, although neither explicitly spelled out the step-by-step details of their lives. Clancy knew Ashley had wielded power, and been involved with a group of similar people. Ashley came to realise that Clancy was not the anonymous cousin he had claimed, and that he himself was cursed with some affliction that could not be cured by conventional means. Clancy, through Ashley, learned of the Apparition Killer. Learned of a possible means to [i]end[/i] the entity which forced this malformed existence upon him, finally [i]end[/i] the tiresome existence he'd suffered. Except, Ashley was murdered. Clancy found out the hard way, losing contact until he stumbled upon an obituary about the murder. Seeking answers, he travelled to St. Portwell, learning of the Father Wolf case. Learning of Ashly's old friend circle being picked apart. His arrival in St. Portwell was not without noise. Within 48 hours of arriving, he'd proven himself to be [i]far[/i] different to the expectations of any onlookers, with a trail of blood and broken bodies following him. He was present at the death of the Wolfpack's Club "President", Judas, and subsequently evaded the PRA raid on the Reformed Coven's hideout. A week in, and still, very little is known about him - save that he isn't just a kid. Surving gunshot wounds and a wooden cane through the eye was proof enough of that. More encounters with Ashley's old coven led to him inserting himself into their ongoing investigation, willing or not. He was present at the church raid, at the decimation of Kari Wilson's house by 8th Street, and later formed some [i]connections[/i] of his own, perhaps for the first time in decades. That also brought him into conflict with St. Portwell's less svaoury denizens. His investigation into the Dollhouse lead, prompted by Judas, put him in conflict with Shayton, and later incurred the wrath of their agent Shaquita - spearing him with a crystalline shard that invoked pain and neutralised his strength. Were it not for the intervention of Luca, he might have been incapacitated. Clancy's motives remained unchanged, but as he joined the group on a raid, he found himself questioning whether it was just retribution he sought. His accent is hard to place, save that he comes from same place north of the Ohio River - possibly Chicago or Cincinatti? Maybe even further out west, like Bellevue[/indent] [sub][b] Abstraction[/b][/sub] [sub][sup]▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔[/sup][/sub] [INDENT][b]ABSTRACTION ⫻[/b] Cannibal [img]https://i.pinimg.com/236x/5d/fc/3e/5dfc3e9396b12b0897aea1ba19752a10.jpg[/img] [b]ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻[/b] A long time ago, Clancy took a wrong turn on his way home and fell into the awareness of an old, predatory entity of inhuman origin. Strigoi, Jiangshi, Wendigo - different cultures would've named it thus. The entity devoured Clancy, and salvaged his consciousness and memories to create a 'puppet' of sorts - a shell with the memories and appearance of a 12 year old boy, the Cannibal entity sat somewhere.deep within as a core imperative. If you wanted to be coy, he's perhaps as close to the urban legends as you can get. He doesn't age. He doesn't change. In a somewhat uncanny sense, any damage or change afflicted to his body gradually shifts back into the form he had when he was subsumed in the wilderness - an effect which works to a fault. That scar on his arm would've probably faded if he'd aged out naturally, but instead he's stuck with a personal reminder that he is frozen in time. He doesn't sleep, he doesn't need to breathe, and his skin is cool to the touch. A few half-hearted attempts at dying over several decades have proven that he can't naturally die; falling off a bridge into a frozen river and being hit by a train among the two that stand out, with the only thing to remember either being his own scathing memories of the experience. That, and a distant vestigial view of the Void are generally not good for one's mental health. Uncharacteristically, while his form is that of a child, his actual capacity is... more so. He can handle heftier burdens than a boy of his age and height should, and has a stamina and dexterity that would put an athlete to shame, able to run, vault and climb into spaces. But the [i]true[/i] power, or whatever one would call it - Clancy's core self is a vaguely humanoid shape of skeletal shadow that alternates between bipedal and quadrupedal movement, buried beneath the facade of a child. It's faster, stronger and [i]hungers[/i] - projecting a form of around five feet, depending on Clancy's hunger and stress levels. While Clancy in his original body is strong enough that, bare handed and with some effort, he can crack bones to get at the marrow, his exposed-self can uproot trees, bisect mammals and twist an adult human being's head clean off. It can scale trees and buildings, and slip through grating and fences due to its somewhat intangiable nature. [b]LIMITS ⫻[/b] Clancy has to [i]feed[/i] on others. If you wanted to get into the science, or specifically, the [i]Lux[/i] behind it - the material isn't so much the physical matter as the essence behind it. Fresh blood and meat, it's all part of a living creature's experience. Who they were, where they want, their memories - it feeds the entity which malformed him. Gutting a rabbit is some base sustenance - like eating a cracker, or stale brea, but [i]people[/i] are inherently nourishing - even to the point that for a moment, he retains a brief glimpse into the mindset & warm sense of self of those he consumes. A cooked meal, or a candy bar, on the other hand, is about as nourishing as eating flavoured sand Additionally, longer he remains in this form, the more Clancy's sense of self-control and identity begins to loosen, and if he doesn't feed, then the point that the smoky shadow projection that uses him as a sheath starts to manifest without regard for autonomous control in an effort to sate his appetite. The hunger doesn't discriminate either - animals, children, decent people and otherwise are all just [i]prey[/i] - so the less he manages it, the more likely he is to start indiscriminately lashing out and feeding on others. It's happened before, and at this point, he has a body count to rival the combined figures of some of the world's worst serial killers. [b]WEAKNESSES ⫻[/b] [youtube]https://youtu.be/KSdLKHGBqeU[/youtube] [/INDENT] [sup][b] Other[/b][/sup] [sub][sup]▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔[/sup][/sub] [indent]Clancy knows.[/INDENT] [/hider] [hider=PRA casefile][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8WSUa4KrNw[/youtube] Anecodtal commentary on Case 74-00184 from an unknown PRA official. [img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/MKNSO5HUWFCGDF6FBHQTL5BWBE.jpg&w=1440[/img] For as long as records last, the PRA and its preceding agencies & organisations have been [i]aware[/i] of paranormal activity stretching from the Midwest to the Great Lakes. Among these, a range of perculiar sightings and events have occured, poorly documented due to the vast expanse of wilderness between developed urban sprawl. One such case that has arisen from this region, with sightings said to go back almost fifty years, is that of C74-00184, where victims have been found dead. In each instance, the victim(s) were mauled, dismembered and partially consumed, with injuries comparable to wolf & bear attacks. Although one could easily dismiss these as a consequence of animal attacks in the wilderness, evidence tampering and eye-witness accounts of a humanoid presence close to the scene suggest otherwise. A key example is that of a party of four hunters, of whom three were found dead in late November 1968. The sole surviving member of the party reported that one of his companions had encountered a child who fled upon being sighted. Although a description of the child has not been consistently captured, the second-hand description suggests they were a caucasian male aged somewhere between nine and thirteen years old, wearing torn and bloody clothing and in a state of apparent distress. Although the survivor was not present during the attack, having remained at camp while their companions formed a search party, they reported hearing' panicked screams for help and arrived on-scene to find the rest of the party dead, exhibiting injuries consistent with being violently mauled and partially consumed. Although the sighting of this child was among the earliest sightings, other sightings have been recorded in the following decades, most prevalent between 1968 - 1982, with the last known sighting being recorded by a Wisconsin park ranger in 1987. Although the number of deaths in the wilderness matching this profile have decreased rapidly since this period, the agency has now linked a spate of murders along the Great Lakes region within developed areas of urban sprawl, most of which span from Erie to Duluth. In each instance, the attack profile remained similar; violent dismemberment, remains partially consumed. While the victim profile seems to make no discernment between age, occupation or race, most if not all victims documented since 1982 have been identified as adult males, with approximately 42% of subjects holding some form of criminal record tied to organised crime, gang-affiliation, or sex crime. Subsequent review of witness accounts, surveillance footage and the implausability of animals in such a location (as per the case of C74-00184-69, where the victim's remains were found on-scene in the bathroom of a Detroit gas station) indicate a clear link to C74-00184. Strigoi, Jiangshi, [i]Wendigo[/i] - different cultures would've named them thus, but the latter of the three is perhaps the best match for this case. Such instances have historically been documented among the Algonquian peoples in the form of oral storytelling and cultural mythology, and it is expected that C74-00184 is a direct manifestation of one such regional myth. The concern here is - contrary to the theory that victim numbers are decreasing since the 1980s - the subject of C74-00184 may be simply getting better at covering their tracks. For this reason, I would like to make the case for the agency increasing resources towards addressing this issue. We are dealing with a body count that dwarves that of some of North America's worst serial killers and have nothing to show for it, nor any counter to prevent further deaths occuring. In the absence of reliable intelligence, the agency should shift investigation towards urban sprawl and co-operate with local law enforcement wherever possible.[/hider]