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    1. Leodiensian 11 yrs ago

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<Snipped quote by Leodiensian>

Most relatable thing I've read all day.


Thanks! Since the group is kind of skewed towards Oni I kind of want to play up the "human" elements of Hidari. He gets bored, he's got a dirty mind, so he sings a dirty song..
Sweet smoke drifted up from the supply caravan. Hidari's pipe was a long needle of red lacquer capped with a brass bowl, in which boiled and burned a small clump of fine resin. Neither was his, of course, not originally. But he would honestly be hard pressed to recall which raid exactly had netted him the pipe, the supply of resin, or half the trinkets that waited in his cabin back in his ship. One merchant vessel very much started to look like another after a while. As he smoked he took in the countryside, aspects of which he rarely got a good view of from the sea. The hilly road curved gently around the contours of the province, their caravan tracing along it's flank like a lover's idle finger. Hmm. Probably a few days from the nearest cathouse. He sucked a little more fiercely on the pipe.

The simple fact was that travel was boring, long stretches of very little happening. This appeared to be something of a universal truth, as applicable to caravans inland as it was to sea voyages. But what made it worse were how stuck-up and morbid the other members of Hakumeii were. Of course the mission was important, but they seemed to be using that as an excuse to not talk to each other more than they had to. Hidari ran through the long list of time-killers he'd picked up from his crew-mates; bawdy songs, knife-games, counting challenges. The elf seemed to have a stick up her fundament, so perhaps a few verses of The Maiden's Grove would poke her into doing something entertaining. Elves were so old, maybe it was even about her. He scooted a little closer to the driver of the supply caravan to make sure his voice would carry. "Oi, ji-san, let me sing you a song." He said to the older driver with a smile.

"In old Cobweb Forest / So dark and so cold / There's a maiden, I tell you / Her grove is of gold" His voice carried well as he casually recounted the old shanty which was about exactly what every shanty was about. The story of the song was about a charitable elven maiden who, naturally, was happy to offer a night's rest to the many, many travelling human men that passed through Cobweb Forest, taking them to her golden grove. And quite coincidentally, her hair was also golden. The sort of song that sailors loved to cackle about on long, woman-less nights, and come up with new, rougher verses about. He was just getting to the bit about the spearman, with his 'foe-piercing shaft' when he was able to catch sight of the elf woman's horse. Ears like that, of course she was could hear the song.
...I'm sorry, this I gotta hear. Who is he?


Ball of Arms Man, a Mutants and Masterminds character I ran. All his power points went to the Additonal Limbs power.
Now @Leodiensian's avatar is fuel for nightmares. Just what we all wish for: a bush of violently jerking limbs.


Would you believe me if I told you he was a superhero?
@LeodiensianWhat would you say if Faye Desdemona knew? I mean, from what I read you say earlier I got the feeling that you wanted to investigate Innsmouth? The group ending up there sooner or later was part of my plan (without spoiling anything) either way.


She could work as a way to get him on the right path, sure!

It doesn't have to be specifically Innsmouth, I just wanted to set up a nice red flag to say "dark family secret located somewhere in Lovecraft country" because corrupted family lineage is such a huge part of Lovecraft, and for that to be his main drive to investigate (and connection to) the central mystery. If Innsmouth lines up best with your plans for the story, then great! It's Fishmas Eve.
My thinking on what will tie Sebastian in to the main investigation is his digging into the American branch of the family, to try and find the current living heir of the Brotherton family; the book that clued him in to the American branch was a couple centuries old, so his mission in the states is following up on that geneology to find the more modern relatives. Perhaps he's at the asylum finding out whether the Brotherton descendant contained therein is non corpus mentis and he needs to find someone else.
Name
Lord Sebastian Francis Brotherton

Nickname/title
The Blueblood

Gender
Male

Age
27

Build/physicality
Sebastian's body is slender and light, and not in a particularly healthy or aesthetic fashion. He simply can't keep any weight on his bones or colour to his skin. He stands at around 5'11" and hardly seems to weigh anything. He walks with a cane and while able to function quite well when things are calm and casual, when things get adrenaline-pumping his frailty manifests and he moves like someone much older.

Appearance:


Background

Psychological status:

If an alienist were to examine him, they might declare Sebastian to be morbid, hedonistic and decadent, even deviant. Sebastian claims to have simply accepted the inevitable and is enjoying the ride to whatever is beyond. He doesn't entertain overtly suicidal or otherwise self-destructive thoughts, but much of his behaviour revolves around this fundamental acceptance and even anticipation of his impending mortality. And when it happens, it happens.

Quirks, ticks, conditions, sensitivities to the paranormal:

Sebastian's health was ravaged by the War, leaving him a habitual user of a delicate balance of painkillers, stimulants and a hundred and one sundry medicines of varying scientific validity to address just as many medical complaints. Through his broken body, Sebastian sometimes encounters strange coincidences or perhaps omens - a pattern in the shrapnel-scars across his back, glimpsed in a mirror; a Morse code message being 'tapped out' in the chronic aching of the joints in his left leg.

Magical potential

Yes.

Personality

Sebastian is in many ways the daring dilettante that the Jazz age so adores, a bright young thing with more money than sense and a devil-may-care attitude towards the new pleasures provided by the modern age. He found life in England stifling, stuffy, and adores the richer, brighter quality of life in America (and what Europe is doing with itself as it rebuilds). If he had the energy to really dance, he'd be out at a music hall every night drinking champagne and being the belle of the ball, not so much flirting with scandal as open-mouth kissing it in the middle of the hotel lobby. As it is, his condition and station as the last Lord Brotherton has slightly tempered his raucous nature; while he never wanted the title and certainly never expected it - he was the fourth son, after all - he's British enough to want to at least go through the motions and make sure some things are done properly.

Hometown

Wakefield, Yorkshire, England

Education

Bachelor's in Literature

Occupation

I beg your pardon?

Achievements

Sebastian is almost proud to have accomplished nothing meaningful in his life; no publications, no notable service, no great performance. But then, perhaps someone like him not having caused a major scandal is an accomplishment.

Sexuality

Discretely homosexual, though getting less and less "discrete".

Religion/philosophy

Sebastian had a religious upbringing which lapsed almost as soon as he entered his teens and discovered his penchant for buggery.

Marital status:

Unmarried; he has left a number of illict affairs behind him in England when he came to America.

Family status

Sebastian is recently orphaned, his elderly parents having passed within a few days of each other from old age. He lost his brothers to the War, leaving the unwanted title of Lord Brotherton resting uneasy on his pretty little head.

Biography
The War ripped through the aristocracy of Great Britain like a wildfire, killing sons and heirs left and right. The Brotherton family of Wakefield, Yorkshire, is in many wars just as much a casualty as any victim of the Somme. Sebastian is the last son of Lord Johnathan and Lady Margaret Brotherton, of Moorview Abbey. The youngest of four boys, Sebastian spent much of his youth in southern English boarding schools learning the classics and spent his summers on the family estate, taking long hikes across the bracing, wind-swept and beautiful but bleak moors of the northern counties. As he grew, his dalliances with classmates became a little socially inconvenient for his parents - what did they expect locking up him up in a school with nothing but other adolescent males? - and they began to put much thought and effort into finding a wife for the young roustabout.

When the War came, of course it was expected that every son of the upper classes should serve. While his elder brothers went straight to service, Sebastian had to spend a year in preparation and training at an officer's college near York. Upon graduation he was shipped straight to France as a minor lieutenant in an obscure little station well behind enemy lines, overseeing the supply and logistics of the local field medics. For a time he thought such a position would be safe and he could sit out the war without having to actually see much killing and spending lots of time staring at men in uniform or getting favours from dashing French lads. But of course it was not to be. Line shifted, fortunes turned, men were reassigned. The Germans encroached. The station came under fire. He's glad he doesn't remember much of those times, to be frank. Head trauma can do queer things to a chap.

His next clear memory is of a French hospital, his head wrapped tight with bandages. Bright lights, a woman's voice speaking French. He'd picked up enough of the language at that point to understand what she was saying, to pick out her part of a conversation happening at the head of his bed. Phrases like 'fished from the rubble', 'better if he died, saints forgive me' and 'but what sort of life?'. A skull fracture, probable brain damage, a hundred and one other ailments, injuries and infections. It sounded half a miracle he wasn't dead. He recovered slowly from that point, spending months an invalid in the French sanatorium drinking watery soup in a bed between a man with no legs and a poor soul whose lungs were half-boiled by some deadly gas weapon, leaving him unable to walk more than a few steps without gasping for air. Despite rapidly reaching state a feeling "quite fine, actually", he was fussed over constantly; it seemed they were worried that any second, he would have some kind of embolism or sudden organ failure brought on from one entry or another in the laundry list of maladies Jerry had inflicted him and he would suddenly keel over. It wasn't until he was well enough to realise the only visitors he got were concerned medics that they felt he was recovered enough to give him the news.

His brothers, his heroic and adventurous brothers, had always been the type to lead from the front. Of course they were cavalrymen. Of course a man on a horse is a ludicrous prospect in trench warfare, up against rifles and tanks and airplanes and artillery shells. There was one son of the Brotherton name left - and he was an invalid catamite at that. Sebastian spent a few sober nights weighing his options. Marriage seemed inescapable now; some well-meaning homely girl upon whom he would have to father some young, presumably after draining the house of brandy to be able to perform. A wife and children to continue the family name, to keep the house lit. He was discharged, returned home to Wakefield to take in the invigorating air, be among family and gather what strength he had left after his long hospital stay. It didn't last very long and soon the parents joined their sons, breathing their last not quite at the same time, but close enough to be a minor news story. As the new Lord Brotherton received his title, without an apparent heir and certainly no inclination to go through the steps to make an heir occur, Sebastian began to look through the family line. He was looking for some obscure cousin to be an escape hatch, to name in a will and then spend the rest of his life - however long that was before the Germans finally finished off their long, slow murder - making sure they inherited as little as possible by drinking away the fortune.

After a time, he found it. It was actually chance, rather than effort, that yielded the answer; two pages in a dusty tome of family history had been pasted together, the pages renumbered to hide the trick, and only age had undone the adhesive. It seemed that there was a family of cousins extant, to whom it would all go when Sebastian finally passed, but not in England. No, there were Brothertons who had left the country in the eighteenth century and sailed west, for Massachusetts. For the Miskatonic Valley. For America. It was a distant family tie, but good enough for the law. Sebastian fired off some introductory letters and telegrams, before arranging to have family estate boxed up and passage booked on an ocean liner. Staff were dismissed, the abbey shuttered. Money was withdrawn, temporary accommodation arranged, storage. And so Sebastian set out for America aboard the liner Majestic, over the grey and choppy Atlantic towards a new world of light and music..

Miscellaneous information
Combative belongings:

Sebastian still has a service revolver, when he remembers to load it, and habitually walks with a cane.

Noncombative belongings:

An Arkham townhouse stocked with imported furnishings, selections from the family library and art collection (and wine cellar). A personal collection of scandalous European plays, poetry and novels. His sizeable inheritance. A silver cigarette case finely inscribed with images of shepherds grazing their flock near a lake.

Other information (optional)
Theme song (optional)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFtHO180tgp
That'd be great if you think it could work! Well, here's the concept I've gotten so far. If you like it, maybe I'll work it up to a full profile:

Sebastian Francis Brotherton III is the last Lord Brotherton, of the Wakefield Brothertons. The male side of his family was quite drastically cut away by the Great War; four sons left for France and only Sebastian returned - after a prolonged stay in a French military hospital and even then he was halfway a cripple. While he convalesced and gathered what little strength he had left, finally back at the family estate, his aging parents passed of natural causes. With his own health very weak, Sebastian does not expect to last long enough to marry and have an heir of his own - and, well, he was never that way inclined at the best of times. So he began doing some research into the family history to discover to whom things should go when he passed. He discovered that a branch of the Brotherton family did indeed survive - in Massachussets, America. When he dies, everything goes to them by law. He has shuttered the estate, gathered the valuables, dismissed the staff and set out to America to make contact with the Arkham [possibly Innsmouth? Kingsport?] Brothertons. He fully intends to die in America, and have a good time doing it - as far as what's left of him is capable of having a good time.

Tl;dr a sickly English heir with ABSOLUTELY NO DARK FAMILY SECRET AT ALL NO SIR.
Oh shit, is this some Lovecraft? I suspect it's too late for new characters, so I'll just content myself with reading..
Okay, here are the different areas to collaborate on for the enclave.





Does that all make sense?
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