Culluket

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka threw up her hands, the fog trailing the motion in swirling, eerie patterns.

"The knights hand you a young woman, and you are miserable," she said, "You find three dead bodies torn to pieces on a road in the middle of the night, you cannot stop smiling! That is what. Now I am here again, helping, actually, and you are miserable again!"

She gestured to the slaughter with both hands, palms up.

"If it will bring you cheer, then tell me about this creature."

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka stepped from the carriage, swinging the door shut and crunching toward the press of torches, grey fog swirling like river water around her legs. Trunks groaned and the twisted treetops shivered noisily in the night breeze, black and indistinct against the hazy moonlight. She tilted her hat back, in a casual gesture, parting the crowd with a gentle push of the back of her hand. She looked from one to the other, critically, as if daring them to say something, before giving Gregor himself a hard, searching once-over.

"I'll tell you later." was all she said in dismissive answer to his returned look.

"You sure she's not your wife, friend?" murmured the gravedigger quietly.

Loka ignored him and peered over the scene, her lips twisting sourly at the gruesome sight of the carnage. Several bodies, one now difficult to distinguish from another. Rent limbs and ruined torsos. She had seen her share of blood, of course. But there was something obscene about the human midden, torn apart, half-eaten and left to rot.

"Who were these people, that they were on the road at night in such a place?" she asked, "Travelers? On foot? That is very odd."

Her head cocked, birdlike, and she bent down with her legs remaining straight, plucking a broken length of slim silver chain from the blood-wet mud. A fat, golden ring set with some elaborate sigil hung from the loop; the signet of Doloureux.

"...And why did this one wear a ring on a chain?"

The Elder Scrolls: Rage of the Waves

Well, I guess I'm in charge for now...

@Leidenschaft

Brynned IRL. Life imitates art.

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

And so she travelled on, locked in her gleaming nobleman's cage.

At first she took some pleasure in the Empire's green vales and towering woods, the call of a mourning-dove or glimpse of a beautiful stag, bounding through the bracken and ivy off the side of the road. But at the middle point between the capital and their destination Montegarde seemed to grow damp and wretched. The road was swallowed up by puddles and mud, in places little more than slats of rotting wood over a burgeoning moat, and she could taste the hard misery of the shuffling figures bearing loads of firewood, glancing at them expressionlessly as the horses drew them past.

And when night fell, even the lovelier face of the countryside changed. The sprawling hills vanished into a pall of fog and shadow. The woods and thickets blackened into threatening silhouettes, their tops swaying in the chill night wind. The moon shone down, pale and bright, glowing sparsely through a drifting sea of heavy, soupy clouds. The temperature slowly dropped as they travelled further and further from her home, and she slumped in the corner of the carriage, huddled under her coat, staring forlornly out of the window with her eyelids slowly dropping, opening with a faint start as the carriage went over some rut or pothole, dropping again as the rock and sway and rattle of their journey lulled her back to sleep.

She blinked herself awake when they stopped, rustling under the coat and slurring a vague question in her own language as to whether or not they were there yet. She sat herself up, suddenly alert at the mention of torches and pitchforks. Foreigner though she may be, she had heard stories, all of them with highly specific endings.

Gregor, however, only looked at her grimly as he swung open the door and got his foot on the step, admitting a grey wisp of coiling fog into the carriage.

"...And you --" he ordered, "Stay inside."

Loka immediately bristled at the command. Getting out of the now stuffy and confining transport suddenly seemed of paramount importance. She waited, fidgeting, listening for the sound of raised voices or conflict, but none came.

...Yes, she had waited long enough. It had to have been at least forty seconds. She sat forward, still listening as best she could, shrugging into the heavy coat with some difficulty, buttoning the collar up to her chin and pulling on her gloves.

"Miss?" murmured the driver uneasily, glancing back through the tiny, tilted rectangle of glass.

"Shut up." Loka replied.

She unlatched the window and swung it open, supporting herself on her hands, leaning out at an angle and trying to see through the press of shadow on shadow, the torchflames shifting like wisps in the middle of the black road. The smell of dried fear and clotting blood oozed between the flickering, firelit shapes, and there was something else, a faint, rank odour twisting amidst the mud, manure and stagnant water, the cold, wet greenery and rotting bark and faint scent of animal musk, torchsmoke and human unease. Familiar and unpleasant. She licked her lips sourly as she tasted pain and disgust. She knew it well and yet couldn't quite place it. It was maddening.

She could hear Gregor murmuring between the crowd. There was tension in them, but it was blanketed beneath a heavy weight of resignation. She watched as their bleak, faded colors turned from suspicion to shared, guarded commiseration. Loka took a breath of crisp, wet night air.

"Firqah!" she called, sharply, "What is it? Why are we stopped? Why are they gathered here?"

Mass Effect: Brink

I was going to say, I look forward to having her onboard as a recurring antagonist. It can't hurt our prose, at any rate.

Mass Effect: Brink

@Howler All good and well, but you need to know that I cannot, on principle, allow anyone to kill off a character named Emily Short.

God Neon

Harry Baker: Crime Wizard

---

Name: Harry Baker
Nickname: Crime Wizard, Wizard, The Wizard, various Wizard-related epithets

Age: 40
Gender: M
Ethnicity: British Thug

Physical Description:
Harry Baker is a burly, hard-nosed bruiser, the sort of glowering, red-knuckled ex-skinhead you expect to see tearing up soccer stadiums or glassing people in the pub. What hair he now has is prematurely grey and his skin is covered in tattoos -- once purely the kind of lowbrow gangland trash you'd expect from a hooligan of his caliber, now outnumbered by random occult symbols copied from alchemical texts, the Key of Solomon or some random Thelemite coloring book.

In his new career, he wears a blue smoking jacket sewn with glow-in-the-dark moons and stars, an actual wizard hat, a pair of 1980s wraparound shades, and a patterned, stand-in thug bandana somewhat pointlessly disguising his features. He also sports a number of heavy rings set with various runes and symbolically significant stones. While their magic powers are up for dispute, the rings are heavy enough to double as bone-cracking knuckledusters, and when it comes to conflict, Baker is never far from his roots.

Skillset:

• Occult knowledge: Okay, well, yeah, this one's kind of useless. But if you need the stars consulted or a curse lifted, he'll do it for a cig and a beer.
• Crime Wizard: while Baker is never safe from the snickering cries of "Yer a wizard, 'arry!" he is still a career lawbreaker with a savage criminal mind, and has pulled off a string of successful hits, robberies and getaways even after his transformation into a laughing stock.
• Battlemage: A veteran of armed, unarmed, military and low-down dirty combat, Baker can fuck up just about anyone or anything -- Neon or no Neon.

History:
Let's get this out of the way: Harry Baker was always a piece of shit. His father was a working-class arsehole and his mother was a forgettable, chain-smoking hag. There's no secret origin or 'sympathetic villain' angle. He was bigger, stronger and meaner than everyone around him and he learned life's lessons accordingly. The. End.

He's ex-British military, for all that he didn't stay in the forces long, and he was a piece of shit there, too. When he was deployed to some of the worst fighting in the Middle East and most of his platoon came back with PTSD, Baker came back with illegal souvenirs and a couple of new friends. Friends with a special club they thought Harry would be a good fit for. And they were right. Before long, Baker had moved house and become an upstanding and valued member of the Hringhorn Brotherhood, your everyday, run of the mill right-wing nationalist group -- a polite name for a legitimized gang of gay-hating, ultra-racist neo-nazi extremists. Like everyone with a street-level agenda, the Brotherhood was determined to crack the Neon sequence and get hold of a stable supply of every psychopath's favorite new wonder drug. Baker wanted first in on that little number, and like a true fucking idiot, he tested every remotely promising batch on himself.

The first time round, it didn't work. It didn't work the second or third times, either. It didn't work so many times that Baker's brain chemistry pickled like an egg and he is now bat-fucking insane.

it was after his last trip to Yinfu privatized correctional facility for robbery and aggravated assault that Baker finally saw the light. You know the story: Some people get Jesus. Some turn to Allah. But Baker? Baker got magic. Instead of religious pamphlets, some joker smuggled in a bunch of Crowley, the Golden Bough and that joke paperback copy of the Necronomicon, and Baker devoured it all, experiencing one lunatic epiphany after another.

Harry Baker is now a magician. He has cast aside his former goals and repudiated his old allegiences, much to the anger and embarrassment of his former Hringhorn comrades-in-arms, who want to see him erased from the public eye for good. Meanwhile, the man himself only gets bigger and louder, pulling off daring raids while releasing manifestos, videos and youtube broadcasts that resemble terrorist statements more than enlightened sermons of arcane knowledge. He has a gang of his own, if you can call it that: a trio of violent lunatic bikers wearing black leather and skull-painted motorcycle helmets that he calls -- and I swear to god, I couldn't make this up -- the Darkwraith Covenant.

Psychological Profile:
As the saying goes: "Plus ça change." Despite his dimestore apotheosis, Baker remains a basic, violent, amoral thug, now with a newly minted and increasingly undeserved superiority complex topping it off. He wants to advance his goals, but nobody's quite sure what those actually are. The one positive aspect to this landslide of human failure is that Baker is no longer racist or excessively homophobic, instead looking down on the unenlightened, non-magic practitioners, and people with weak auras. "Looks like a fuckin' dishrag, mate." That sort of thing.

Powers:
Chaos Magick -- Baker's experiments with Neon have left him... kind of a little fucked up. His genetic code looks like the back of a cereal box. You could make turpentine out of his blood plasma.

The fact is, when Baker takes Neon, real Neon, nobody knows what it's going to do to him. Nobody. Not even Baker himself. It's always different. That makes him unpredictable, and it makes him dangerous. If he juices up, stand the fuck back. Especially if it looks like it isn't working.

_{(OOC note: In keeping with the spirit of CHAOS MAGICK and to avoid any possibility of powergaming, the effects of a Neon hit on Baker will be determined by Howler or a random delegate of his choosing. Embrace the wheel.)}

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

The priestess's eyes dropped, trying to keep her expression neutral; not quite able to return the smile but unwilling to unleash the quills of the hundred sharp remarks pricking at the end of her tongue and sour the taste of the wine, to say nothing of her keeper's improved mood. She finished off the glass instead, drowning her sorrows.

"I don't want to die," was all she said. "If there is no dessert, then I am ready to leave."

She sighed, placing the fluted glass carefully down on the perfect white tablecloth.

"Perhaps the sunrise will be beautiful."

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

"Kill people like me," she replied, easily, wiping up the gravy and popping the last morsel of birdflesh into her mouth. She washed it down with a delicate sip of the overpowering wine. "But quietly. Not loud, as the others do."

She angled her head to better catch her reflection in a hanging silver mirror, along with a surreptitious view of the rest of the chamber, measuring brief, unseen glances thrown her way.

"You said we were being used," she said, laying her cutlery down on the plate. "Both of us. I hope you will tell me, if we are to walk into a pit."

Rain's Hand [ Culluket x Hank ]

Loka held up her hands in mock surrender, strolling to Gregor's side but unable to stop her lips twisting into a rueful little smile. This might be easier than she thought.

He did say please, she admonished herself. We must reward that. And we do need real food.

"Of course," she said aloud, "I said I would follow your instructions." She smiled, adjusting her hat another inch in the windowpane, "And I think I like this one."

---

"I was only looking. I was imprisoned, you know."

The restaurant was bright, spacious, twinkling with faceted polished glass and uncountable white candles. It was a feast for the eyes, but colorless, calculated, without true life.

Gregor, through some subtle means, had secured them a small, slightly more private table in a shaded alcove, a place where they could see without, so much, being seen. Though they drew second glances from some of the patrons -- who found reasons to look away as they met eyes with the hardened nobleman -- the staff were trained like veteran fighters, and they never wavered as they glided between the tables like immaculate, dead-eyed swans.

Silverware clinked and clattered against exquisite porcelain dinnerplates and the low murmur of polite conversation rose over the subtle music of a string quartet. The air roiled with the aroma of a hundred different mouth-watering dishes, the perfumes, powders and sweat of the highly-bred patrons, the scent of dry, dying flowers in their perfect glass flutes. Loka took slow, regular breaths, trying to expand her senses and control the torrent of sensation at the same time. The influx, stale as it was, though welcome, was making her faintly dizzy. In the Templar's abyss, there had been nothing. No light. No scent. No touch but her bonds and no sound but the muffled suffering of broken creatures that were no longer human.

She took a strong mouthful of olive wine from a snowflake-thin drinking glass, savoring the heavy taste and pushing the memory from her mind.

"They do not know who they see when they look at you," she said, idly, resting her cheek on her fist and gathering the last of her food, gravy-soaked roast partridge and herb-baked potatoes, to the corner of her plate with feigned lack of appetite. "...This is good. If you instruct me to have dessert, I will of course obey."

She laced her fingers together and lowered her voice, watching the immaculately-mannered patrons set about their suppers and conversations, the muted, blurry color of their aspects and interactions.

"Where are we bound next?" she asked, softly, "...What sort of 'threats' would have them think someone like you will need someone like me?"