Naril — Roleplayer Guild

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations
I'll get a nice graphic up later. Probably!

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No matter where you go, you’ll hear stories. If you get enough drinks in him, an old man will talk about a night out on the Sound when he pulled something up in his nets that nobody could explain. Something with too many arms and not enough eyes; something that smelled like burning leather and dying dreams. Not far away, there’s a Ranger for the Forest Service who’s stopped telling people about the day she saw a figure, ten feet tall if it was an inch, covered in hair and with vicious, glittering black eyes. A boy from Alaska at a juvenile detention facility will tell a story about his family walking deliberately into the cold waters of the Pacific to drown, their eyes glassy, their movements slow, called by a shrill, echoing ululation offshore. Sometimes the boy says he saw a sea creature out in the water, all wet fur and sleek body. Other times, the boy says he saw a man, body lifted above the waves, his eyes filled with malice. In Pioneer Square, tourists pay well to hear any of the dozens of ghost stories, and there are places under the oldest parts of the city where you know someone - or something - is watching you, and you feel the hairs on the back of your neck prickle.

Some people, the long-term residents, blame the weather. Months of flat, grey light and maybe your mind starts playing tricks on you and makes the shadows and falling water twist into a half-seen face. There’s been radiation coming out of the Columbia river for decades, surely that’s mutated a few fish out there. It seems like everyone has a story, everyone has something they’ve heard in the dark or caught for the barest moment in the dying light of of a summer afternoon. Everyone has a story, and they all tell it with a little bit of a wink, a little bit of a smirk. They know it was just the light playing tricks on them; all of them know that there are no monsters out in the forest, and there’s nothing in the oceans but fish. They tell the stories, get goosebumps, and go home, and on the way they know that shape in the alley is just a stray dog.

 For the most part, they’re right.

But not always.

That’s where you come in.

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Welcome to the world of Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - a world quite like our own, but, as ever, with some important differences. Magic, monsters, and ghosts are all real here - though they are uncommon enough that the general population still writes most fantastical things off as something that can’t possibly have happened. Companies like Priest & Hawthorne - and even a handful of clandestine government agencies - exist around the world not necessarily to enforce a divide between normal people and the paranormal or supernatural, but more to protect people who are completely unprepared to deal with these things themselves. Working in the background and behind the scenes, they keep their hands full exorcising ghosts, banishing demons, and keeping an unwitting public safe from creatures they never knew meant them harm. 

PHI and their contemporaries are certainly not out to “destroy” the paranormal; instead, they exist to keep the balance of power from getting too out of hand. If a coven of vampires makes enough trouble or someone takes a daughter’s disappearance hard and starts to look for answers beyond the comfortable ignorance of conventional wisdom, they might find their way to the comfortable leather chairs of the PHI offices. When ghouls or imps start getting noticed at the University of Washington campus, Priest & Hawthorne usually get the call to investigate. They’re problem-solvers, guardians of the comfortable lies built around centuries of reason and rationality. PHI’s investigators can’t always make the problem go away as completely or as silently as everyone might like - but even the worst cases tend to be written off as “funny ol’ world, isn’t it,” to the blissfully unaware.

The company itself is run out of an impressively-historical building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, and has a reputation as the premier paranormal and supernatural investigation firm in the Pacific Northwest. The founders, Samuel Priest and Adelina Hawthorne, went into business in the late 1800s and though they’ve both moved on since to open other branches, the Seattle office remains the original and largest, with its handful of agents and assorted staff. Exactly how it is that people come to be aware of PHI is a matter of considerable debate -  the company doesn’t exactly advertise in the Yellow Pages - but despite the mystery, business is steady and reliable. Most of the people who work there have their own theories as to how PHI’s gold-embossed business cards find their ways to clients. No two theories are exactly the same - and none of them are completely correct.

At PHI, you keep the supernatural and mortal worlds safe, not only from one another, but from themselves. Maintaining that balance is often a delicate, headache-inducing job, and even bigger than you might expect.

And lately, business has been good. Maybe a little too good. There have been more hauntings lately, but more troubling are reports of madness, of inexplicable suicides and even the marks of true dark, dangerous magic. You’ve had your hands full already, but there’s bad news coming in the door…

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Hi!

Okay, so, let’s try this. I’ve always had a soft spot for urban fantasy, and I’m hoping this will be a lot of fun. From a purely out-of-character perspective, this setting should wind up feeling more like Hellboy, B.P.R.D., The Dresden Files, or even a little bit of Ghostbusters or Tad Williams’ Bobby Dollar books. You should expect mystery, having to find and follow clues, a certain noir atmosphere, and plenty of character interaction. I will, as the GM (and with a character in the mix) drop guideposts when I need to, but generally it’ll be up to you to figure out where to go next. You’ll have to talk to one another, argue, fuss, make decisions and have agency.

There is a story, but I like to think I’ve written something pretty flexible. Still, this is a two-way street - I can adjust the story based on what the characters do, but as players, you in turn have to realise that the story probably won’t stretch to you having a “lol random” moment and driving the Mystery Machine off a cliff. I don’t necessarily expect anyone to do do that, but…well. Communication is important, for partners of any kind. :3

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And now, some character information!

I want to be very clear that your characters are [i[all[/i] going to be the protagonists of this story. They’re the good guys - or, at least, the less-bad-guys, depending. I don’t expect everyone to get along all the time, but at the same time your characters work together regularly and have to at least be civil with one another and, as it were, face the same direction when the time comes. You’ve all known one another for at least a little while, and are probably reasonably close-knit. You are, after all, doing a dangerous job that almost nobody would believe you actually have. Just imagine the cast comparing notes on how to avoid being audited - for those of you who have social security numbers, anyway.

This means that no, your character is not a moody loner who can’t stand people, communicates only in ironic sneers, or is so withdrawn they stand by the wall and do nothing but observe. Your internal monologue does not look like “bloodpaindeathbloodfleshbloodpaindeath.” You are also not a “sleeper agent” unless you really really really impress me with the whys and wherefores. 

I’m expecting your characters to be old enough to be out of college. Unless you give me a really good reason, you should also expect to have a body of knowledge as well as the physical and mental maturity of at least a human in their mid-twenties who has either grown up in or adapted to the modern world. Not knowing how a smartphone works is funny exactly once, you know?

You also - and this might be the exciting part - don’t have to be human! Priest & Hawthorne is a very inclusive bunch. Still, remember that this is, in many ways, a clandestine organization. Your characters will, to one degree or another, have to live and work in a large and modern city. If they’re twelve feet tall and covered in scales, that’s going to be something of a trick - but if you convince me how that works, I’ll totally let you do it! I’m not exactly limiting you on what myths, legends, fairy tales or whatever else you might like to draw inspiration from, so tell me a compelling story. I am more interested in what is interesting, both alone and in a narrative sense, than anything else. 

That said, I am going to limit outright non-human creatures.  Monsters and faerytale creatures are uncommon, and ones that want to work for PHI are even less so. The supernatural world probably looks on PHI and their peers with a certain amount of suspicion, if not outright hostility. This means you’re really going to have to impress me with a non-human character.

There will, however, be far fewer limits on the various flavors of human! Wizards and witches? Sure! A character who found a mystical artifact and is empowered by it? Go ahead! A human carrying an inherited curse where they become a man with a pig’s brain by day and a pig with a man’s brain by night? Um…well, sure, go ahead, I’ll read it, at least. A pyromancer, an exorcist, or a telepath? Why not! I would even encourage a plain, vanilla human, because I want to know how they fell in with PHI. :3 I don’t plan on killing anyone unless we have a fairly serious discussion beforehand, and there’s plenty of room to tailor our adventures so that everyone will have something to do.

Now, this is important: This RP is not first-come, first-served. Think of this like an audition. Impress me with your cleverness, with your writing, with your ideas. I want to see that you have a reasonably complex version of who your character is, why it is they work at PHI, or even what they think of the explosion in IPAs at every bar in Seattle (As a woman who does not care for IPAs, I personally find it a little depressing). Show me something you’re proud of. I’m not promising that everyone will get in, but I encourage effort. The cast is in all likelihood going to be fairly small, as well.

I don’t really have a set of “roles” for the cast members in mind. I’m really hoping for a group of characters that can work together well, and allow that to form sort of dynamically, or with a little bit of mutual cooperation once the cast list is finished. 

And now, a character sheet!

Name: What you call yourself, nicknames, what we should call you, what your landlord calls you when you’re behind on rent...

Gender: Boy? Girl? Sexless being of pure thought inhabiting a construct made of cocktail onions and toothpicks?

Race/Species: If you’re not human, do we know about it? Bear in mind it’s quite difficult to keep secrets from Mr. Priest…

Age (Real and apparent, if applicable): Are you fifty and look fifty? Are you twenty and look ninety?

Appearance: Please only use a picture if you’ve got something that perfectly describes your character, or you’ve had art commissioned of them, or you’ve drawn them yourself. Otherwise, give me a good description.

Personality: Broad strokes is fine, I don’t need to know every bawdy joke they like to tell. This should not just be a list of character traits; tell me how they see the world, how they think, how they act.

Powers, Traits, and Abilities: Let this cover supernatural powers, mundane skills, and whether or not they’re particularly good at Ski-Ball. As above, this should not only be a bulleted list of specific powers. Enough specificity to give me the shape of their abilities is good, a spreadsheet is not.

Background:  Take this opportunity to show me where your character came from, why they’re working for PHI, and where it is they learned to play “Bohemian Rhapsody” on kazoo. This can be a biography, a short story, a comic strip, or whatever. 

And if there are parts of your character’s backstory you want to expose through the game, that’s fine, they don’t need to be here. Leave us some surprises if you like, but still make sure there’s something to sink our teeth into. As it were.

Samuel Priest - Co-founder of Priest & Hawthorne Investigations. A slender man of medium height, he is not terribly imposing. He owns a collection of tailored vests, a bowler hat, and an improbable Cockney accent. He has dark hair, greying at the temples, and apparently always has. What, exactly, he does for the company isn’t immediately clear. He currently lives in Philadelphia.

Adelina Hawthorne - Co-founder of Priest & Hawthorne Investigations. Motherly and pleasant, with chestnut hair and dimples, it’s hard to believe the stories about how dangerous she is. She oversees day-to-day operations for the company, from ordering the silver bullets to browbeating banks into delivering checks in envelopes made of leaves from a very specific oak tree in Waukegan, Illinois. She lives in Philadelphia.

Solomon (Sol) Tanner - Current head of the PHI office in Seattle. A bear of a man with a sleek but very thorough beard, intense eyes, and a voice like industrial machinery, he is deliberately pleasant, refined, and genteel. He has overseen operations at PHI in Seattle for twenty years, has a vast network of contacts, and nobody has ever seen him sleep. He lives in Seattle.

Shiloh Grey - Archivist and researcher at PHI. She is strong, statuesque, often quiet, but anything but mousy. Her glare has been known to even silence Sol, on the occasions when they’ve been at odds. Her hair is wolfs-mane grey, and her features have a timeless, though not necessarily youthful, beauty. She has forgotten more about the supernatural world than many others, even immortals, have ever known. Taking something out of the archives without asking might be a fairly terminal idea.

Name: Morgan Blackwood        

Gender: Female

Race/Species: Succubus, but it’s complicated. The company’s founders know exactly who and what she is, as well as where she came from, but some mysteries remain. Most others have figured it out, either through stories or firsthand experience, that she isn’t human, though only a handful of people she likes and trusts know more than that.

Age (Real and apparent, if applicable): As a corporeal being, about 100 years. As a formless consciousness in a crushing, dark void, considerably longer. She appears to be in her early thirties.

Appearance:

Slightly over average height, Morgan is definitely not the kind person who fades into the background. Not out of brashness or a sense of constantly being in the spotlight, but more that her body language suggests effortless, lazy, near-perfect confidence. She is built like a martial artist or professional dancer, every line dangerous and elegantly feminine. Her skin is fair rather than unhealthily pale, and she has a tumble of dark, wavy locks that she keeps tied into a loose ponytail, though some hangs down to frame her face. Morgan's features are striking, with a strong jaw and sharp cheekbones, just short of being masculine and with a constant, mischievous tilt to her inviting, playful lips. Her eyes are deep, crystalline blue-green, glittering with intelligence and, deep within, slow promises of wicked sensuality. She moves with a predator’s perfect, captivating grace, and though she's capable of startlingly fast motion, she tends to move at a relaxed pace unless otherwise required. Morgan is, by any measure, attractive, but people tend to remember why differently. They do, however, agree that she's beautiful in the same way as a sword - captivating, but with the subtle menace of dark purpose. Her hands are strong and quick, with long fingers tipped with a perfect manicure. Of her handful of scars, the small one that cuts through her left eyebrow is the most visible, and she has no tattoos.

Morgan tends to dress in well-tailored suits with button-down shirts and cufflinks, though she often leaves one more button undone than propriety might require. Most of her shoes and boots have at least some kind of heel, though not so much that she's in danger of tottering off them to break her neck on the pavement. She doesn't wear a lot of jewelry, but she does have a pendant around her neck and several studs in each ear. She is deeply self-conscious about the fact that she needs reading glasses to see small print, but still carries a pair of round, brass-wire-rimmed spectacles with her in a jacket pocket.

It’s very difficult to see her shoulder holster, but she usually has one.

Personality: Morgan is pleasant, gregarious, more than a little bit of a smartass and has a wicked, playful sense of humour. She likes people, she likes their stories, and she likes the stories they think they aren't telling best of all. She tends to be direct and forthright, though rarely rude or blunt, and subtlety is not always something that she excels at. Despite that, there are things - particularly about herself - that she doesn't talk about, secrets she would prefer not to throw about with no regard to who's listening, and those subjects will meet with anything from polite rebuff to an occasional harsh word. She tends not to bend the truth too much, as Morgan is a terrible, terrible liar. Perhaps somewhat unusually, she has a well-developed sense of internal morality - Morgan very much knows the difference between right and wrong, and prefers to 'do the right thing,' though for more complicated reasons than simple schoolhouse lessons. She is fiercely loyal, though not blinded by those attachments, and is possessed of an iron-bound sense of willpower and self-control. Perhaps important for those endless stakeouts waiting for something to happen, Morgan is intelligent, not easily bored, an excellent conversationalist, and a rather good singer.

Finally, Morgan has the kind of rich, plummy, upper-crust British accent that you might associate with an expensive boarding-school education. The silken, wicked edge her words sometimes carry is likely not from the same place.

Powers, Traits, and Abilities: In terms of supernatural abilities, Morgan has a powerful psychometric talent. In other words, by touching something, or in certain circumstances, someone, she can get a look at important moments in that thing's past as a kind of disjointed series of vignettes. These are not complete, "like she was there" recollections, but can provide invaluable information - at the expense of those things being imprinted, indelibly, in Morgan's memory. She can, in general, control when to use this talent - save in some specific circumstances.

Like many of her kind, Morgan is, at a very deep level, a kind of predator - one that hunts for a very particular kind of prey. She possesses a combination of pheromones and psychic weaponry to manipulate desire and arousal, though she rarely makes use of it anymore. When she does, though, the effect can be devastating - to the point of rendering whoever she has her attention on incapable of anything save involuntary orgasm. It isn’t manipulation or persuasion, it isn’t nice, and, since there are times when Morgan isn’t the kindest person in the world, the person on the other end can know exactly what’s going on, but be more or less incapable of stopping it. Provided, of course, that person is a more-or-less-average more-or-less mortal - there are certainly creatures that can rebuff her…”charm.”  This kind of psychic hammer-blow is something she does not do often, as she doesn’t like the way it feels, and she doesn’t like the way it makes her feel about herself. She can’t turn off the psychic come-hither, not completely (She IS a succubus - she gets a lot of stares and come-ons at the bar, from most of the men and some of the women) so any creature that has psychic feelers or supernatural senses will probably be able to sense her, one way or another.

The reason that she doesn’t switch on the supernatural sexiness is complicated, and related to her psychometric abilities. The problem is that when the fun starts, that talent flares into brilliant clarity, which is also when her natural instincts to devour the soul, or life force, or whatever of the person she’s with becomes almost too much to ignore. The result is that she gets a crystalline, piercing look at who that person is, who they want to be, and who they wish they were in startling, clarion clarity and indelible detail. In other words, she’s certain that she will psychically maim, or kill, people she’s intimate with, and not only does she have a conscience about that, but she gets a brilliant, beautiful look at that person’s story, one that she can’t believe should end with her.

The result is that she goes through life in something like a permanent addict’s withdrawal - a deep, powerful craving that she knows could be sated by just taking one tiny action, but one she’s unwilling to perform. She has largely learned to wall the feelings away from her thoughts, but there are times, especially on the long and lonely Seattle nights…

While not supernaturally quick, Morgan does have a nearly-perfect sense of balance and grace, and she is considerably tougher than she looks. Not tough enough to survive a bullet to the head, but enough that it would take some considerable effort to kill her, and she heals fast. Not mutant-healing-factor fast, but faster than a human would under similar circumstances. Despite that, she is fiercely protective of her life, because she knows exactly what will happen to her if her body dies, and she has absolutely no interest in returning to that empty space behind the eyes of humanity.

She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, powerfully allergic to silver, and even alloys containing silver, to the point that she has to be rather careful around PHI’s preferred ammunition, or handle it with gloves. If that silver is, for example, something that's been handed down a family line or has been made holy by any number of means, much worse things will happen to her if she's hurt, or even has contact with it. This does not extend to holy symbols, holy words, or holy swords - unless they happen to be made of, have filigree made of, or contain silver. She stays away from Irish girls with claddagh rings for this very reason.

Background:

Morgan was used to surreptitious glances, barely-controlled stares and even seething scowls charged with hostility. Still, she had to admit that, perhaps this time, something beyond her natural charms brought that attention on. To begin with, none of the other patrons had come in with a long, shallow cut over one cheekbone, which still left bright red marks on the stolen napkin she pressed there. Pale skin showed through a constellation of tears and rips in her close-fitted suit, a few seams split. Dark char and scorch marks rimmed some of the more shredded areas, silk fibers frayed and bobbing as she moved. As Morgan walked, she favored one leg, her movement painful and hitched with every other step. Even her hands stood out, nails still shiny with the remnants of a manicure, fingers stained with unknowable grime, her slim, gold watch holding a shattered faceplate. Despite her appearance, the maitre d’ had withstood Morgan’s glare for only a handful of seconds before he decided that seating the woman would be less trouble than trying to throw her out. If he led her to the back of the restaurant, away not only from the windows but every other patron, then that was perfectly fine with her. She had done her best not to snarl her order to the waitress, but the poor girl seemed terrified all the same.

Half an hour later, Morgan sliced a piece off of the steak on her fine, bone-white plate and chewed with the careful, deliberate delicacy of someone who has recently been hit on the jaw. Swallowing, she took a deep breath and stuffed down the urge to pick the meat up with her hands and tear at the steaming flesh with her teeth; a hundred years and that instinct bore down with an almost physical need. Still, with the evening she’d had, a few old habits lurking beneath the surface couldn’t be that surprising. Her knife squeaked against the plate as she cut down again, bloody gravy leaking out of the expertly, if only barely, cooked dish in front of her.

“I see you started without me,” came a pleasant, smooth alto as a figure settled into the chair across from Morgan.

“Mm,” Morgan said, swallowing down a bite, “Don’t be like that. I ordered you a glass of wine. And don’t you dare make the ‘I-don’t-drink-vine” joke. You’re on your own from there.” She smirked, but with a deep tiredness behind the expression, her glittering eyes a little duller than usual. “You’re Hawthorne, then, I take it?”

“Ah,” the other woman said, taking an appraising look at Morgan’s bedraggled state. As Hawthorne tilted her head, a lock of hair fell across one bright green eye, an echo of Veronica Lake’s glamour. “Yes, quite. And you would be…ah, how to phrase this delicately-“

“The FBI’s pet monster?” Morgan interrupted, skewering an asparagus tip with her fork, holding it up with an uncertain expression before putting it in her mouth.

“I was going to say ‘an agent of the government,’ but I suppose that will do just as well.” A waitress arrived, carrying Hawthorne’s drink on a dark wooden tray. The pair watched, variously impressed, with the way she delivered it from tray to table without taking her eyes off a hole in Morgan’s jacket and shirt, one that showed a square inch of the slope of her left breast. Her fingers lingered on the glass for a long moment before she shook her head and pulled herself away, her expression slightly confused.

Morgan looked over at Hawthorne and waved her fork, swallowing the asparagus tip with a deeply suspicious shudder, “Let’s say that’s…no longer an operative statement.”

“Indeed?” Hawthorne replied as her long-fingered hands wrapped around the glass, cradling it as though it might break, “And are your previous employers…ah…aware of that?”

“I should imagine so,” Morgan sighed. She reached into her jacket and tossed a thin leather wallet onto the table. A small, round hole had been punched neatly through one flap, a coppery glint catching the low restaurant light through the puncture, “It was the way they shot me that gave me a clue. But the real hints were probably the car chase and the grenade.”

“Do you mind if I ask why your employers felt the need to make your evening so exciting?” Hawthorne said, her tone carefully neutral. She picked up the wallet and flipped the cover open. The badge inside, with its ornate border and the fact it omitted “Federal” from “Bureau of Investigation,” looked to be a relic from a bygone era. Just left of centre, the metal bowed inward around a sharp divot, the engraving distorted. Hawthorne turned the badge over and her fingers found a dent, the metal rippled and cracked. The bullet strike had missed the ID photo, and Morgan’s face looked out, an impish smirk on her face even there.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Morgan sliced another strip of steak away from the bone on her plate, “I did shoot the director of the Paranormal Intelligence Commission.” She looked sharply at Hawthorne, “Now don’t take this the wrong way, but the Bureau asked me to hunt down a vampire who was causing all kinds of trouble, and I found him in the middle of having a college basketball player as an after-dinner snack.”

“Ah,” Hawthorne replied, drawing the syllable out, “You know that bullets don’t stop-“

“I wasn’t trying to stop him, just get him away from that kid,” Morgan broke in, “Besides, I think he might have been about as old as…” She hesitated, “…you are. I couldn’t have stopped him if I wanted to. But,” Morgan studied the dripping piece of meat on her fork, “That meant he could get on his radio and call for help.”

Hawthorne took another drink of her wine, contemplative, “Hence this meeting.”

“Hence this meeting,” Morgan said, putting the bite in her mouth with a slow and almost exaggerated, care.

The older woman lifted her glass to a tiny pinprick of light, as though it might reveal something about the dark, rich liquid. She swirled it, a thoughtful look on her long and not unpleasant face, her bright eyes examining Morgan as she took another sip.

“I heard that you asked for my colleague when you called,” she said at length.

Morgan smirked, a glimmer of wickedness in her eye, “Yes, I did.”

“Can I ask why?” Hawthorne said, the ghost of a smile tugging at one side of her mouth.

“I wanted to see how good you were,” Morgan replied, setting her knife down. The bone in front of her could only have been cleaner if it had been given to a group of carrion beetles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The pile of asparagus, other than the single spear she’d eaten, lay untouched.

“We do actually know what you are,” Hawthorne said, her rich voice low, “In the past, we’ve had…dealings with someone like you.”

Morgan grinned and leaned forward a little, crossing her arms beneath her chest on the tabletop, “Not like me,” she said, her voice a smooth, playful purr wrapped in wicked promises neither of them would keep.

“Do you have anything you want to collect?” Hawthorne said, the lopsided smile still on her face, “It’s a long flight.”

Morgan grin remained, “I’m already packed. I know how long it takes the Bureau to freeze assets, but I left them enough to feel good about themselves.”

“Then welcome to Priest & Hawthorne,” Hawthorne said, holding out her hand, “I think we’ll get along just fine.”
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