Name: Antonio Victor Barnes
Age: 65
Gender: Male
Breed/Species/Type/Lineage: Lycanthrope; were-lion.
Physical Description:Talents:- Beastman form; deadly and effective, but terrifying and very, very, very obvious. It is a combination of a Lion's instincts and muscle density and natural equipment with the upright stature of a human being and a degree of their thought processes melded with the instinct of the animal. It is monstrous and the reason the legends exist.
- Full African lion form - like the cat. Not nearly as useful as, say, a wolf form that could be written off as a dog.
- Fast-healing in man-beast. In other forms, he takes damage normally.
- If hit with anything silver, he is immediately shifted back into normal human form. Also, if a silver bullet is in him, he is unable to shift.
- Rage; in enough pain, he'll see red and there is the potential to start killing indiscriminately to escape this. On the other hand, he's had years to learn how to control this.
- As the moon cycles, his abilities wax and wane; at full moon, he has a hard time controlling said abilities. Nearer the new moon, he finds it requires an extra degree of effort to use his abilities and he tends to tire out easier.
- Even as a human, he has increased senses that allows him to detect things with his nose; for example, sweat and various other secretions, and where they are emotionally based on that. It's a combination of animal magnetism and animal instinct.
History:Antonio Victor Barnes was born to a Afro-Cuban mother and a half-white father in New Camden, in the Dorset neighborhood, which was once home to the Cardinal's Point General Motors factory. His father, Joe, had a good job there, though he worked very hard for it. He'd come to Camden from Virginia. His mother had very little to say about the country she left or the circumstances back there.
In 1967 Uncle Sam decided to draft Antonio into the Vietnam War. He arrived in December of 1967 and saw service right as the Tet Offensive started up in February of 1968. He served in the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta, fighting near the Cambodian border. Serving as a cherry (replacement) in his new platoon, he served for five months of his tour, watching guys get blown up by booby traps, wounded by mortar fire, shot by Cong and NVA and otherwise chopped up in a futile-seeming war in the jungle; waist deep in the muck of the Mekong Delta. His battalion suffered repeated Viet Cong and NLF/PAVN attacks one night and the next put his company out on the outpost line, which was then overrun by a particularly savage attack by the Vietnamese. Terrified, with his squad dying and dead around him in the jungle night, he changed into the man-beast form and mauled a number of VC and NVA regulars, even as the A-6 Intruders dropped napalm and cluster bombs all over the jungle when the company CO called down the strikes inside his box, on top of the heads of friendlies.
His position took a hit, but he survived, to the astonishment of the reinforcements combing over the battlefield, policing up the weapons and the mauled bodies; the Vietnamese were dumped into a mass grave, the Americans taken to graves registration. But no one could figure up what tore up all these people -- some of the bodies were ripped to shreds.
"Shrapnel, napalm, fuckit," they said.
Barnes was MIA.
He spent time in the jungle, hunting, killing and learning his abilities, and eventually had a sense of how to control them enough to shift back to human form and find help. During that time, the legends were rife in VI Corps and Viet Cong alike of a killer tiger running about in the Delta, a huge, dangerous beast. So it was considered a miracle when he finally was found by the Army; presumed to have escaped POW captivity among the Viet Cong as well as the man-eater of the Mekong, he was evacuated out and then honorably discharged at the end of his draft service in Fort Polk.
His return to the World, coincided with the start of economic hard times in Camden, especially as Cardinal's Point started to lay people off and he flirted around with various dissident movements like the Black Panthers and other organizations that were concerned with the plight of the black man in America, especially after Vietnam. Every full moon, there was the potential for devastation and destruction, and he isolated himself to keep from having another situation where he killed people indiscriminately.
He bummed around the country and, ironically, ran into the Courts in New Orleans of all places, where the supernatural are able to move about a little more freely, and the mortals know a little more than they ought to. His girlfriend at the time, Marie, a Creole, introduced him to the Courts and the supernatural community, though she was somewhat shaky on how things worked because she wasn't entirely clued in, but steered him to people who definitely were.
He learned that he wasn't alone, wasn't the only one and there was a world out there with laws...and that if his black ass felt discriminated against before, wait until he met the Nobles of the courts.
New Orleans wasn't the worst place to lay up and learn things, the Court there was not one of the worst and he used his GI benefits to enroll in Tulane University, where he majored in social work, and carried that into a Master's in Business Administration while working in social work all over the State of Louisiana, where it was needed.
In the course of time, he returned to Camden when his father got sick to help take care of his parents, sometime in the early 1980's, and found that that Camden was as economically depressed as New Orleans. He quickly got to work with local activists and other like minded folk and started trying to find ways to work the system and rebuild the thriving middle class neighborhood he lived in, even as yuppie white fuckers exported all the jobs to places like China, and, ironically, Vietnam.
Fast forward decades later, and Antonio still looks rather young (magical energy tends to sustain a longer lifespan anyway) and has no idea how long his life is going to be, but he's spent a lot of it building the Horizon Foundation, a large not-for-profit that is devoted to preserving New Camden's cultural history and finding new ways to turn old buildings into something profitable within the community as well as retraining and employing locals, particularly out of economically depressed areas like his native Dorset. He paid his tithe, avoided Court politics and was trying to do something good with his life when Nemsemet came to town.
Not liking the injustice of the Court, he didn't really care what Nemsemet did to the likes of Caradoc de Lacy. The only problem is, of course, that Nemsemet is a crazy motherfucker and he's not stopping there. . He's also rallied a lot of lycanthropes to the cause, men and women that are a lot less controlled than Antonio is, raised in clans together that distrust the outside world and are indoctrinated against normal humanity. It's understandable, they've been hunted, persecuted and have lived on the margins. Antonio has some sway with them, in that they are not enthusiastically hunting one of their own, but they aren't listening when he tries to rally these various lycanthrope clans.
Nemsemet is bad news. Now he's on the run like a lot of other people.
Psychological Profile:Deep down, Barnes is still guilty about what he did in Vietnam, flying off the handle, killing a bunch of people indiscriminately. While time has healed some of it, he left the 'Nam resolved to do something worthy and good with the rest of his life, and got into the nitty gritty of social work and entepreneurial neighborhood development. He's always been careful to avoid getting overly involved in Court politics. The Court, so long as one pays tithe and avoids breaking the Concealment Edict, really doesn't care.
On the other hand, the injustice of the Court rankles Antonio, and he's happy to see it gone. But he has a regard for human life that most lycanthropes don't, and is one of the few standing against Nemsemet.
Possessions:A nice house, inherited from his deceased parents that isn't really safe to stay in any more. He's socked away money wisely invested, as well as his considerable salary as the CEO of Horizon. He has a particularly nice 1969 Pontiac Firebird and a shotgun at home that, quite frankly, he doesn't use.
He has a nice cell phone though and some authentic Vietnamese Buddhist prayer beads he picked up in the 1990's when he travelled back to 'Nam to make his peace with the past. They have supernatural significance that he doesn't really understand.
Yes, and:...Flint and Antonio had a run-in in 1987 or so, when Flint suspected Antonio in a grisly series of murders that involved the consumption of corpses after digging into his Vietnam War history. Antonio was charged by the court, though his innocence was proven when the murders continued with him in custody. Flint and Antonio worked together grudgingly to catch the werewolf family responsible for it, but there's no love lost there.
