Lou Cuvier [+]

Lou Cuvier

Street Name

Chercheur

Metatype

Human

Gender

Male

Age

33

Appearance

Standing at 5’6” with a slender build, Lou wears his black hair relatively long and loose. A nose dominates his otherwise sparse face while facial hair proves an impossibility for the man, cut away as it were by the frown lines which now marr it. His eyes, a deep enough brown to be mistaken for black, are often closed in thought. A number of scars are notable about his body, primarily cuts, to which he has not put the effort into in order to remove by less natural means. Lou does have a good, light step compared to a great many others, though by any measurement he does take the effort to cast prior to anything requiring such a light step.

Awakened

Y

Archetype

Mage (Hermetic / Theurgist)

Cybernetic or Bioware

Bioware [+]

---Basic

---Cultured

UNK Standard-Grade Sleep Regulator

Personality

Intense, introspective, and motivated with few equals, Lou is fervently dedicated towards his own goals; he believes that God has called upon him to help mankind, that he must find the lost, heal the sick, and likely arrange many meetings with the sinners to the lord. To this end, he is more than willing to break any number of manmade laws should they not violate his own personal ethics. Self control in the face of that which violates his morals is difficult, yet can be done for the sake of the continuance of that work; God helps those who help themselves, Lou believes, and thus will not save one who is careless or relies unduly upon his aid. He does not, however, preach often as a realization has dawned upon the man that those who act in accordance to the will of the lord shall be saved, and those who do not shall be damned. The belief is, as far as Lou’s determination, not necessarily required.

Equipment

Personal [+]

---Weapons

Beretta 201T
Colt New Model Revolver
Lapel Dagger
Foci (Cross necklace)

---Clothing

Armor Clothing (Cassock)
Clothing (Greca)

---Magical

Broom, Enchanted
Notebook
2x Bags, various reagents

---Other

Fake SIN (3)
Fake Gun License (2)
Duffel Bag
Respirator (2)
3x Medkit
3x Credstick, Standard

Background

Born in Verteillac, France as a SINless child, Lou’s family largely worked among the rest of the rural population as agricultural workers in the countryside. Subsisting off of this work and a good enough barter system among the commune, which by and large had grown distant from the normal prejudices which marked between those who had SINs and those who did not. They all went to church and, small and heretical as may be, that church espoused that all were equal under God. His life in this, which would have struggled throughout under any normal circumstance, would be drastically altered by the intervention of a traveler.

The old man, dressed as he was in a suit and tie, took notice of Lou immediately. He spoke privately to the boy's parents, as he wasn't of a great age to be given the choice directly, and after an hour's conversation emerged to talk to Lou. There was a choice to be had, a place to go that would teach him how to use a power he didn’t even know he had. It was a curious choice, the capability to wield the Art, one that inspired terror and confusion and questions to Lou. Not a person forgot the stories of the chaotic years when magic was birthed onto the world stage, a grand force, a strange force, and yet the old man gave a great number of answers and a great number of them were satisfactory for the young French boy. In the end, he departed with the man away to the Massif Central region, to a lodge there, to the Order of St Flamel.

He would learn the Art, the way to determine the world and all things in it, the way to learn how to seek hidden truths. The Order, named for that famed scholar of ancient times, was one dedicated to the seeking of knowledge, had never precisely focused on the most combative forms of magic, on evocation and destruction, Lou instead becoming immersed in divination, healing. It was a rewarding experience, a grand experience, one where he was even provided with a far greater education than anyone else might have in his hometown. The young boy learned of history, science, mathematics, and more, a fairly good event. The worst issue at that lodge would be the harsh punishments, the fairly breakneck pace, which pushed Lou to his limits of absorbing such. Despite all these difficulties, however, he would gain a good degree of respect from his teachers, the same given to them, and grew close as might be expected with one Nathan Milhaud, the very man who recruited him. Lou would even be provided for a cheap SIN, fake as could be in the interests of keeping loyalty through other means should the child run-off or disappear some way.

At the age of seventeen, however, Lou experienced something which could only be described as an upturning of his life. He had been directed to recover some reagents among the mountainside, flowers connected to one spirit or another of nature, and on returning found that the lodge had turned to chaos. A fire engulfed half of it, the other drifting amid the air as though gravity itself ignored it, and a storm seemed to linger over the entirety of the site. Bounding forth, extinguishing a portion of the fire to gain entry - for there was none outside and he had to rescue those within - Lou found Shedim, agents of another plane who had taken the bodies of members of the Order to disrupt a ritual. Entranced as they were in further opening the rift and bringing yet more Shedim into the world, Lou struck quickly. Using whatever was nearby, reagents of vintages he had never learned and those he had collected before, it soon turned into a desperate combat as the spirits realized what was occuring. The young mage succeeded in keeping their distraction, true, keeping them from continuing their work with the rift, though he was pushed back and back again. Soon yet, he found the dying Milhaud, bloodied and faltering, who gave Lou a hand in burning his soul into a reagent. The young mage detonated it, ran from a lodge that no longer existed.

There was but one thing to do, honoring the ultimate sacrifice of his friend and mentor by helping others, by using what he had been taught for others. As he worked away, moving from one commune to another to another and healing any he could, Lou found that he would need a far better disguise than any excuse he might bear. The young man would join the Église Catholique de France, the French Catholic Church, working with that moniker and among those goodwill groups to try and give back. Following that, with all the talks he had with the truly faithful, Lou would experience a revitalization of his faith, that the obligation from God to perform his works, to help people. Lou enter seminary, a process accelerated by his charitable works, wishing as he did to further his relationship with God and help others do the same.

Such would falter after seven years there, moving as he had throughout the process of his education to shift from traditional training to working as a missionary or aid worker, dressed as he was in the traditional cassock. Lou found himself needing to aid another in one of the more secluded communes, a mother whose child had disappeared without a trace. The others said that he would need to simply let it all go, that one day the mother would be reunited with her daughter, and that all of it was within God’s plan. Refusal to accept this, something which could be altered, ran deep in Lou’s mind. In secret, he summoned a spirit of guidance, unbound as it was, and bargained with it for the location of the daughter. It was difficult, a negotiation the young mage was ill-prepared to navigate, yet he gained that location nevertheless.

The others discovered such, how such happened Lou never did discover, and his ejection from the seminary quickly followed. He had disobeyed the orders of those above, thus disobeying God, and practiced that which he should not know. With the clothes on his back and little else, save for a renewed belief that they did not know what God wished, that Lou was aware of that and more, and that his skills were an instrument of that will, the young man disappeared among the cities of Europe. He grew to become a shadowrunner, albeit one of a more moral basis whose interests lay in the recovery of those lost, finding individuals, and healing those others of the team. Lou worked alongside a good number of others, his skills expanding as the man grew comfortable in learning more practical, flexible street magic alongside his traditional education.