a whole slew of assholes

Saturday at 10:17 pm November 5th, 2011

x 7

paul lejeune

age: 22

Paul Lejeune was the canonical example of the worst-case scenario.

He’d been dragged fighting and screaming from a lost war and sunk his fangs into C Company when they grabbed him, then found he liked the taste of it well enough and stayed on. It was, in the end, a matter of survival.

He had a natural talent for absorption, for knowing just enough to get people to like him, for fitting in. Anyone else in the company would have said that Paul Lejeune was very nearly the beating heart of the company. Even years later his name was attached to the story just as strongly as Jean Chauvin’s when all others had been forgotten, and sometimes that keeps Vat up at night, never certain whether he ought to be furious or merely depressed.

Vat never gave Lejeune more than a single inch of trust. C Company only fit Lejeune so well because Lejeune had made the decision between assimilation or annihilation and warped himself accordingly. He looked and sounded and acted just like the rest of them, so much that they took him at face value, every last one of them. But from the edges of the company Vat had always seen that Paul Lejeune would never be scrubbed clean of the urban wildness that had borne him to life: it was always there, glittering hard and hungry in his mismatched eyes, right up until the day that it broke free and killed him.

Lejeune was the poster child of the new world, all bright smiles and white grins and black eyes, all the while harboring a deep and horrific capacity for violence and a tragic inability to comprehend his own motives. He fought because the world had taught him to fight and nothing else beyond that, and sometimes it confused him, and sometimes it hurt him in turn, but he could never find the words to formulate the question why.

So it broke him, in the end. It drove him right back to the black and wordless void that Victor Tash and Shawn Kelly had tried so hard to drag him out of, and would have dragged him out of again, had they still been alive. But they were both long gone and now the only one left was Vat, who had predicted this moment years ago, who had just enough sympathy in him to understand fully, but not enough to show the slightest bit of mercy.

Vat still maintains to this day that Paul Lejeune had been trying to kill himself. He just hadn’t known how.

Tuesday at 2:18 am November 1st, 2011

x 9

art credit: 2 → crownorth

viktor chistyakov

age: 32 (?)
nicknames/aliases: ”visceral”

chistyakov arrived from nowhere, did nothing, and went nowhere. he was always pleasant and frequently kind and always an unknown.

he was jordan sinclair’s last friend and worst enemy though only one of them knew that, while jean chauvin knew both facts well. and though he never said a word it was clear that chauvin held that hard against them both.

when chauvin and stacha finally chased chistyakov down and shot him dead he had a gun on him, too, but he never once reached for it. they never understood why. the fact of it hangs over vat’s head and chases him from highway to highway and it keeps him awake at night just one step away from a scream. because in the end, no matter how many wars they fought and won, no matter who lived and who died, no matter what sacrifices they made and how hard they tried, vat is growing sure and sure of one thing only: that in the end, viktor chistyakov won.

thrice chistyakov

Sunday at 11:49 pm October 30th, 2011

x 16

art credit: 2,3 → nessicake
6 → ashcap

catsovi e viciro / catsovi e enoc

age: immortal, appears mid 20s
nicknames/aliases: cirovi, chaska, wretch, chainlord, con, (lord) blackguard, cat
origins: enoc, sachra circa ~800 years before the present
otherworlder: the suffering
appearance: (also) 5’10”, on the slim side, pale blue eyes. has a mark branded onto his forehead (see last picture above), and that same mark sans the inner circle branded on the inside of his right wrist. at one point has full vision in both eyes, later goes completely blind, later regains sight in just the right eye.

personality:
catsovi is: vicious, self-serving, and distant. he doesn’t take any particular joy in fighting or killing but those are the only two things catsovi knows how to do. in fact, he gets antsy when he isn’t preparing for that next battle and on a subconscious level, he is constantly on the hunt for a new opponent to fight.

catsovi has little, owns little, and is beloved of few: he’s lost all contact with his family, doesn’t make friends, and has effectively cut all ties with his past. the only thing he does have for certain is his pride, of which there is quite a lot, and which is easily wounded. the surest way to provoke catsovi into making rash and stupid decisions is via humiliation.

bariyan says that there is quite a lot more to catsovi that is simply overshadowed by his surface evil, and claims that there is something in catsovi worth saving. this is an observation that has not been successfully replicated in anyone else’s eyes.

relationships:
catsovi makes enemies easily, but few archenemies or obsessed nemeses or even rivals. he may have a lot of hatred in him, but it is all impersonal. catsovi hates because it makes killing easier, and he kills because that is what he has been doing all his life. so: he dislikes satero e ankhar simply because satero is a horrible person and doesn’t deserve to live, and he dislikes blackened for exactly the same reasons.

his relationship with corosa e ankhar is slightly more complicated as corosa was the one who released him from slavery, and looked after him afterwards. in fact, at one point catsovi liked and respected corosa. however, soon after that corosa started to deteriorate and became something that catsovi found intensely disappointing, to the point that catsovi has tried to disassociate himself completely.

d and catsovi have a very straightforwards relationship. d is incredibly distant from everyone and probably cares not a whit one way or another, and catsovi hates d. for nebulous reasons that catsovi himself can’t identify: mostly the fact that d’s very existence simply makes catsovi’s skin crawl. in fact, the same goes for ro, though since her personality has given catsovi no reason to dislike her, he is only wary of her instead.

bariyan e kodhi is a conundrum in catsovi’s worldview.

he is the one and only person that catsovi trusts and loves and holds dear, and also the one and only person who values catsovi at all. catsovi would certainly kill for bariyan, but catsovi also kills for himself and for no reason at all. but bariyan would and has killed for catsovi’s sake, which is quite a lot, coming from bariyan.

however, bariyan and catsovi hold a very different set of morals and beliefs. this is frustrating for both of them. catsovi thinks that bariyan is weak, and bariyan thinks that catsovi is simply horrifying. but bariyan also thinks that catsovi is redeemable, and has his heart set on proving to the world and to catsovi that there is some good in him.

catsovi, for his part, is doing his very best to prove bariyan wrong. and as with most of catsovi’s actions, he is motivated solely by his pride.

catsovi cycle of shades

Tuesday at 10:57 pm October 25th, 2011

x 63

David weighs one hundred and forty two pounds, and is exactly six feet tall. He is brown-haired, hazel-eyed, and clean-shaven. He is twenty years old. He will not grow any older.

He rarely speaks these days. There is a very sharp sense of separateness about him, such that you would never sense him entering or leaving an empty room, even if you were paying close attention. Places and people grow dim and transparent when faced with his presence. His gait has developed a strange sort of edge that suggests it is taking him conscious effort to make contact with the ground. His hands are usually in his pockets. His eyes are very clear.

The worlds do not move for him except in flashes. He is looking at the prairie, and the house he shared with his brother is just a black speck on a bluish horizon — he blinks — now he sees the empty corridor of his high school — he blinks — an overturned bicycle on the highway — he blinks — he moves — he wanders, from scene to scene. To him, the universe is a set of discrete points. Countably infinite.

Shane Lysander is terrified of him and, if asked, can articulate some very good justifications for said terror. Chief among them the belief that David is no longer anything even close to human.

Death was never a blessing for David, and it didn’t turn him into a better person, and it didn’t change his perspective or grant him any sort of omniscient wisdom. If anything, he narrowed his views significantly, and systematically, and quietly completed the process of folding every aspect of himself, into himself.

saturn sleeps david

Tuesday at 11:37 pm October 18th, 2011

art credit: 1 → tasper, 2 → pidie

owen

Owen O’Faolain weighs one-hundred-fifty-three-point-three-three pounds and is five feet and ten-and-a-quarter inches. These measurements are precise to two significant figures, and entirely made up. The same applies to his name, although names are rarely judged by precision.

On the whole, Owen is cheerful and blithe and very rarely angered. He is gregarious and easily led off-topic and capable of expounding upon any subject at great length. He has a fondness for wine, poetry, and the entire field of mathematics, the art of probability holding an especial place in his heart. David has a fondness for vast, sprawling worlds, and an equal fondness for walking in them and reshaping and altering as he sees fit, when he sees fit. He puts Owen in mind of a distant and mildly cruel God. Owen is of the opinion that David is overly callous, and has very little concern for the terrible long-term consequences of his actions.

Owen plays the fiddle badly and speaks too fast and wears sweaters that smell like old books in attics. His favorite pattern is argyle. He is in possession of an enormous appetite. He has tried, on repeated occasions, to count his freckles, and comes up with a different number each and every time. This vexes him greatly.

Owen is of the firm belief that sudden changes are a peril to the integrity of all things. When Owen finds that his input is required, he chooses subtle methods, modest, entirely incremental, only noticeable in their aggregation. There is a precise art to these things. Therefore, David’s heavy-handed work upsets him in ways that even Owen has trouble articulating.

Owen keeps track of many things, the continuing efficiency of the network first and foremost. And though it would take a will of iron to persuade Owen into stepping back and examining the data on himself, it would not take him very long to make a single important observation on the state of things. There is a building rage, here.

owen saturn sleeps

Tuesday at 10:41 pm October 18th, 2011

x 5

art credit: 2 → mynameismad@dA

bariyan e kodhi

age: immortal, appears mid 30s
nicknames/aliases: kodhiyan, lord bastard, king of all-or-nothing, blacklord, king, valor, variyan (not one of his most creative moments), valentio
origins: kodhi, sachra circa ~800 years before the present
otherworlder: the valor (coincidentally one of the only halfway-decent otherworlders, too)
appearance: 5’10”, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned. his eyes are supposed to be gold but i keep coloring them blue anyway.

background:
bariyan was born in a brothel to a sachran woman and, by the looks of it, some khartan man. he doesn’t speak a word of khartan and barely knows anything about the place as he grew up entirely in kodhi. where he was eventually taken in by the lord of the city and raised amongst the lord’s own children! whom didn’t get along with bariyan. so when the lord died and his sons inherited the city, bariyan schemed and plotted and then led a successful coup against them, and took over himself.

once in power bariyan appeared to crave more power, which severely worried some of the neighboring cities and caused all sorts of crazy political strife. long story short, bad feelings abounded, and bariyan unintentionally sparked a civil war.

it ended rather badly on all sides. bariyan lost, his only son was held hostage and killed, and bariyan himself was set up to be killed on the spot until some mercenary objected to the execution with his swords.

said mercenary was catsovi e viciro, working under the command of corosa e ankhar, though rescuing bariyan had been entirely catsovi’s own idea and corosa was rather displeased by the consequences. but since the deed had been done and corosa rather liked bariyan anyway, they decided to keep him around.

catsovi and bariyan grew to be very close to one another! very close indeed. then unhappy circumstances led to them being separated for hundreds of years until mukhari sharak dragged bariyan back out of hiding and reunited them out of the goodness of his heart. and also the fact that he wanted them to protect him from satero. and possibly feed him too.

personality:
bariyan is quite possibly the most decent person in the entire cast. he is probably the only one who would save a cat from a burning tree!! and not just because it is his job to do things like that. ( he has, at previous points in his life, worked as: fireman, EMT, police officier, animal researcher, park ranger… and once a college professor, though he’s still confused as to how he even wound up in that job)

he’s very dedicated and very stubborn and very high-minded and will not sit down and shut up if he is witness to something that disagrees with him. he’s got a strong leader-mindset and likes being in power and control, and tends to clash with his superiors unless they happen to agree with him 100% on every matter ever. he’s disagreeable! in an agreeable sort of way.

bariyan typically is, above all things, pleasant. and tender-hearted, and sympathetic. he is generally inclined to like people or, at the very least, get along with them. bariyan is of the firm opinion it’s good to have friends everywhere. besides, bariyan has had enough of enemies for even an extended lifetime.

he has an especial weakness for anything he sees as weaker than him. in fact, bariyan gets antsy when he doesn’t have something to protect and will then proceed to get sad and depressed and go out searching for something to occupy his time and heart with. this is probably why at one point in bariyan’s life he was living in a household of 20+ stray cats. also probably why he has a lot of children, most of whom think he’s dead by now.

somewhere on the inside bariyan is rather obsessed with death. he’s entrenched in the belief that there is an end to all things, though he has trouble deciding whether this is good or bad. right now he’s of the mindset that it’s inevitable and that alone makes it right, at least. however, he disagrees violently with the idea of killing people. he disagrees so violently. as in, he will do everything in his power to save a life when he can, including things like bulling into burning houses and running out into peak traffic and putting himself in between a bullet and its target. (he also turns into an utter wreck when he does have to kill people.)

relationships:
satero e ankhar and bariyan were friends at one point! they were alike in personality, and the two of them played off one another quite well with their shared extroversion and talkativeness and good humor. unfortunately satero started to go crazy and when bariyan got to know him a little bit better, bariyan decided that he didn’t want to touch that shit with a ten-foot stick. and so he distanced himself from satero as discreetly and politely as possible, such that satero never quite saw him as an enemy. until centuries later, when satero discovered that bariyan was still very much alive and furthermore, very happy. that pissed satero off. they don’t get along anymore. (see: 6.)

corosa e ankhar was likewise once a great friend of bariyan’s. when they were working as a mercenary company together, bariyan was his second-in-command and right-hand man. though they did disagree violently on certain decisions and policies, for the most part they maintained a good working relationship, and corosa valued bariyan’s friendship a lot more than he ever let on. unfortunately, once they reached kharta corosa started to deteriorate into something that bariyan simply could not stand. he made corosa an ultimatum, corosa refused it, and from there on out they were technically enemies. truth be told, they weren’t very good at it. what they were good at was politely avoiding conflict and edging around one another and being sad and pensive over their lost friendship.

ghost and bariyan were slightly conflicted, as neither of them really knew what to think of the other. there were certain qualities about ghost that bariyan liked and admired; on the other hand, there was also a hell of a lot about ghost that made bariyan balk. then there was a healthy dose of confusion dumped in when bariyan realized that he simply didn’t understand ghost — he saw a lot of good in ghost and, therefore, didn’t understand why ghost had to be so awful. ghost, on the other hand, thought bariyan was rather silly and naive and occasionally contemptible for his indulging of what ghost perceived as enormous weaknesses.

soothe was a little girl whom bariyan all but adopted back in kharta. he loved her exactly as if she were his own daughter, and indulged her, and spoiled her rotten, and probably threatened to punch blackened right through a wall when he learned how and why blackened was terrifying her. unfortunately, he and soothe were later forcibly separated and never saw one another again. he missed her terribly, but after a couple hundred years his grief had mostly dwindled away. until he discovered that she’d been alive all this time — up until the very recent day that satero e ankhar killed her.

mukhari sharak always got along swell with bariyan, until he figured out the exact nature of bariyan and catsovi’s relationship and then shunned both for it. in the modern era, though, mukhari sharak realizes that bariyan is probably the only other immortal who a) isn’t insane, b) is mature and capable, and c) would actually be a good ally/friend to have, and so he goes running to bariyan and makes fast friends with him again. mukhari looks up to bariyan and feels safe when bariyan’s around, knowing that bariyan is strong and smart and capable and can be counted on to look out for mukhari. bariyan thinks that mukhari is like a stupid smelly teenage asshole and loves him anyway, kind of like a stray cat who occasionally drops by to be fed.

ian e kodhi (or e ankhar, depending on his mood) is bariyan’s adopted son and, by a series of freak coincidences, satero’s biological child. bariyan was responsible for raising ian into the fine young slightly eccentric man he is today, and also responsible for introducing ian to the whole messy world of immortality and otherworlders and satero-taking-out-his-problems-on-everyone-else. their relationship was slightly shaky at one point as bariyan had faked his death, causing crushing depression to settle over ian until he ran into bariyan by chance many years later. but they’ve gotten over that and are back to having a healthy father-son relationship in which ian bangs on bariyan’s windows at 3am demanding to be let into the house and bullies bariyan’s boyfriend and eats all of the houseplants. and feeds the dogs. and takes out the trash. and fishes drunk mukhari out of the trash too when necessary.

bariyan is also d’s best (and only) friend, which is very bizarre. no one’s quite sure about how this came to be as both of them are very secretive about their friendship, and when they do meet up to chat or catch up on one another they always wander away to do it alone. (this is the part where mukhari makes some muttered accusations.) however, d has certainly gone out of his way to help bariyan out when he can and these days he seems to confide in bariyan even more than he confides in ro.

ro is also one of bariyan’s friends (at this rate, who isn’t). she’s confounded by his friendship with d and constantly hounds bariyan for explanations, though bariyan’s grown very good at waving them off. otherwise she thinks bariyan is a riot and admires the fact that he has managed to not turn into an insane, unstable douchebag like so many of his peers. she hopes this does not change in the future!! she really, really hopes, which is also why she hopes that he and d stop being good friends too and is doing everything in her power to bring this about.

catsovi e viciro is the mercenary who saved bariyan’s life. many times. they bonded quickly and strongly and were near-inseparable — it got to the point where catsovi was practically bariyan’s shadow. and eventually his boyfriend! bariyan was very much in love with catsovi, so much that he broke and breaks quite a few of his own moral/ethical codes for catsovi’s sake, including backing down on his oath to not kill.

as with ghost, bariyan sees a lot of good in catsovi and deeply cherishes it all. but there is also quite a lot about catsovi that outright terrifies bariyan. so bariyan wants nothing more than to scrub all the flaws off catsovi’s tarnished soul.

unfortunately catsovi doesn’t see it the same way at all and thinks that his aforementioned bad qualities are at the very least necessary. in fact, catsovi actively fights against all of bariyan’s attempts to make him into a better person, which in moments of frustration can lead to him doing terrible things out of sheer spite. and then bariyan gets upset and catsovi gets upset that bariyan is upset even though he knew it would make bariyan upset and now everyone is upset.

catsovi is difficult.

bariyan cycle of shades

Monday at 1:11 am October 17th, 2011

x 5

ghost (korost sharak)

age: immortal, but late 20s when he disappears
nicknames: goes by ghost! that’s all folks
origins: kharta circa ~800 years before the present
otherworlder: shatterface (seventh)
appearance: pretty badly scarred, and though he has been in lots of fights, most of those scars aren’t on his face. the ones that are on his face are from when one of his friends thought it’d be funny to push him down a hill. a really rocky hill.

background:
oldest of the sharak kids, and perhaps a little bit guilty for the fate that befell his brothers kherat and mukhari as teensy little days-old babies. but he tried his hardest to make things right and really, he did a pretty good job of it. still he wished that he could have prevented the whole catastrophe in the first place and was so guilty that he finally simply up and ran away from home one day, thinking that it was for the best.

then he went adventuring as a mercenary. he spent quite a lot of time in both symesa and sachra, but eventually he wandered back home to kharta. there he was part of the team that found and awoke corosa and company from their 50-year long sleep and subsequently brought them back to kharta proper, and there ghost met his little brothers again, after they were all grown-up. they didn’t recognize him and he kept it that way.

but his being in kharta made him severely uncomfortable, and also severely introspective, and there he came to a lot of big heavy life-changing conclusions that he tried to articulate to corosa, who probably didn’t quite understand. in any case, whatever realizations ghost made there eventually led him away from kharta again. and this time he didn’t come back.

he disappeared with hardly a warning and hardly a trace and then he never turned up again.

personality:
ghost appears to be fairly standoffish at first, especially when meeting new people. this is because ghost is a very careful person and likes to figure out what sort of situation he’s dealing with before he makes any moves. when he does make his move, he tends to upset everything. he is a difficult person.

and at the core of it, ghost is a nasty piece of work. like so many of his peers he doesn’t feel much remorse about slaying other people and he’s picked up some questionable habits, like scalping his enemies. he doesn’t usually torture people but he does think it necessary sometimes and won’t go out of his way to stop it. ghost has a very matter-of-fact attitude towards these things and none of it bothers him much.

he has lightning-fast reaction times and moves very decisively. he is competent at most anything he puts his hand to. people like him for that, despite the rest of his flaws. it’s good to have someone like ghost around, because ghost gets things done and he does them well.

ghost can be massively intolerant about certain matters and unbearable to be around when those matters are brought up, because it is impossible to get him to even think about changing his mind. he also feels very strongly about matters of faith, belief, and religion, though not about pushing his own beliefs onto anyone else. but due to his own particular beliefs, he is of the opinion that everyone should have some greater power to answer to. ie, ghost can tolerate all sorts of religions — but he can’t tolerate a lack of one.

relationships:
mukhari and kherat sharak were ghost’s younger brothers, whom ghost never got to know well. their souls were stolen a few days after their birth and destroyed and it was all ghost could do to get one soul back to them, which they had to share up until kherat died. ghost felt badly about his role in this disaster and left home to escape his guilt. when he came back to kharta, both his brothers were grown up and very different people. ghost spent some time with both of them, and could be uncharacteristically cordial around them, and also uncharacteristically distant. but in the end, he seemed faintly proud of both of them.

satero e ankhar and ghost hated each other, though ghost’s hatred wasn’t very particular — ghost hated quite a lot of people, and satero happened to be one of them. but satero hated ghost like burning and carried that hatred away with him even hundreds of years later, long after ghost had disappeared. this is quite possibly because satero and ghost were very similar, though mostly they shared the unpleasant character traits.

corosa nyem saw in ghost some strange sort of transcendence, despite all of ghost’s unpleasant qualities. in corosa’s mind ghost was something bigger than life, and fated to reach some greater end than the rest of them. ghost, however, was mostly unaware of all of this. he liked corosa because corosa was intelligent and ruthless and capable, and ghost was glad to follow behind him.

cycle of shades ghost

Sunday at 11:30 pm October 16th, 2011

x 10

ian (e ankhar, kodhiyan)

(definitely a work in progress)

age: 33
origins: a hospital!! just a normal hospital where sometimes ladies give birth!!! (somewhere on the threan continent)
appearance: inherited a lot of his physical traits from satero, including satero’s teeth, which aren’t even physically inheritable given that satero filed his teeth down himself. the red/yellow eyes are courtesy of his mother’s genes, though.

background:
son of kitka and satero, or: the sum of some drunken misguided escapades, a sudden onset of moral and ethical struggles, a whole slew of suspiciously lucky coincidences, and one huge pushover of an ex-boyfriend.

kid had the luck to be raised by bariyan instead of by either of his biological parents! as a result, he grew up in an extremely healthy and stable and happy household of two (him… and bariyan… and well lots of animals too I guess) and grew up to be a mostly functional human being, with some quirks.

but then bariyan faked his death since he didn’t want ian to know that he was immortal. ian was pretty sad about this! at least, he was sad until he ran into bariyan again by complete accident years later. at which point he was just angry and betrayed and followed bariyan to hell and back until bariyan finally explained things to him.

now that ian knows all about the immortals and kharta and his biological parents, he’s retreated away and off to do research and investigation of his own. he seems very keen on the otherworld and the immortals and everything tangentially related to those things. no one’s quite sure what he’s planning and that is actually highly worrying all around.

this is especially worrying since ian appears to have inherited a little bit of his father’s good fortune: as in, things just work out for ian without him really having to try. he’s almost guaranteed to succeed at whatever he has half a mind to do.

personality:
he’s a strong independent woman!! man. strong independent man. he’s headstrong and strong willed and very unforgiving when it comes to failures of any sort. ian doesn’t believe in his own weakness. in fact, ian quite possibly believes in his own invincibility strongly enough that it practically makes him invincible.

he is also a weird guy with a lot of weird quirks. the worst of these quirks is probably his fixation on using physical pain as reminder/confirmation of his existence. so ian is pretty much eternally injured in one way or another. he also occasionally injures other people, though only when he doesn’t like them much (ie: not at all). he’s pretty self-aware that this is not typical behavior. he indulges in a lot of atypical behavior.

but ian relishes his eccentricities and likes using them to his advantage! mostly this means weirding people the fuck out and then taking advantage of their utter confusion. he’s bossy. he likes to start roaring commands and terrify people into running around carrying out errands for him before they finally wonder wait, who the fuck is this guy?

while he may be slightly unpleasant to interact with he is actually a fairly decent person on the inside. he cares about people and their problems and he cares about the world and all its problems. he wants to help everyone. he’s selfless! he’s nearly as selfless as it gets around these parts!

that probably unsettles the rest of the cast way more than anything else he could do, actually.

relationships:
bariyan e kodhi is ian’s adopted father and, as far as ian is concerned, his real father. he was very close to bariyan growing up and adored him to bits. after the whole debacle with bariyan faking his death and abandoning him ian is slightly less happy with bariyan and grumps at him quite a lot, but he’s mostly gotten over that now that he understands why bariyan thought he had to do such a thing. bariyan, for his part, cares about ian just as much as he cares about the rest of his children, but ian also worries him quite a bit given ian’s heritage and his headstrong nature.

catsovi e viciro showed up at bariyan’s house one day and suddenly ian had to deal with the fact that his father was apparently in a relationship? with some snippy ill-tempered blind guy? ian didn’t take this very well (he thinks bariyan could do a lot better!!) and made it his personal mission to make catsovi as uncomfortable as possible, much to both catsovi and bariyan’s displeasure. bad first impressions aside, ian actually grows to like catsovi and vice-versa, a little bit. mostly catsovi thinks ian is a man-child with behavior problems.

satero e ankhar is ian’s biological father, who was always totally unaware of ian’s existence until ian was about thirty. that was when ian tracked satero down and decided to say hello by stabbing satero through the hand. they don’t like each other very much. satero is still kind of confused by this weird red-eyed thing that looks uncannily like him and ian thinks satero is a big stupid lout and is embarrassed to be related to him.

mukhari sharak is utterly bewildered by ian’s very existence and sometimes refuses to believe that ian actually exists (which sometimes he genuinely believes, due to hanging around satero all the time: satero and his contagious miasma of insanity). he also gets really upset when ian starts to get in contact with some of mukhari’s children, for all sorts of reasons. actually mukhari just gets upset wherever ian is concerned, in general. but ian thinks mukhari is a riot! in fact ian likes mukhari quite a lot! enough that he hits on mukhari despite the both of them being really incredibly straight, and also enough to do stuff like break into mukhari’s house and gaslight him and then steal all his potato chips. they’re friends. they’re good friends. definitely.

cycle of shades ian

Sunday at 5:31 pm October 16th, 2011

x 9

soothe

age: ~20 when she turns immortal
origins: kharta circa ~800 years before the present day
otherworlder: the solitude

background:
orphaned early in life and lived on the streets until she attached herself to corosa nyem and company. she was closest to corosa, satero, bariyan, and mukhari, though she did get along well with everyone except blackened.

later circumstances separated her from the rest of the cast, and took her far away from kharta. she snuck herself under the wing of several people until she was old enough to fend for herself, at which point she made an immortality contract and set out to try and track down her old friends and see what had become of them. she found most of them, was displeased by their choices in life, and changed course to try and rescue corosa instead.

along the way, she met ro of the non and may or may not have begun a relationship with her!! soothe was always sort of embarrassed around ro and didn’t like to talk about the status of their relationship much. she had more important things on her mind.

personality:
soothe turned out to be highly judgmental, and easily disappointed, mostly because she always had high hopes of everyone and thus was always let down. she found everything depressing and maddening and futile, but learned to internalize all her frustration in as non-destructive a way as possible.

she was obsessed with righting wrongs and trying to undo any damage she came across, though eventually she became so disillusioned with the state of the world that she stopped trying to fight the bigger issues and settled for working on an individual basis instead. she did what she could but the rest hung heavy over her head.

she was very kind, very distant, and very alone. at least, until ro came tromping along.

relationships:
satero e ankhar was one of several people whom soothe substituted in as a father figure, but satero is simply rather good with kids, and finds them entertaining. she, on the other hand, thought the whole world of him. but following their long separation and the subsequent reunion, soothe discovered that her childhood naivete had masked out all of satero’s many horrifying flaws, and he was nothing like the man she remembered. these days the very mention of satero’s name makes her bitterly disappointed.

corosa e ankhar also acted the part of father to soothe, though he may have also been viewing her as the replacement for his own, deceased daughter. as a result, he had what almost seemed like bipolar behavior where she was concerned. on the one hand, he could be fiercely, overly protective of her at times — but sometimes he seemed to go out of his way to avoid her, or brush her off, mostly due to overpowering guilt over having failed his own daughter and having transferred his affections over to soothe instead.

mukhari sharak fell somewhere in between the role of father and brother. he, like satero, was naturally good with children, but actually was terribly fond of soothe and very distraught when they could not find any trace of her after the fall of kharta. when she turned up again he was overjoyed to know that she was still alive, but she found his attitude and life choices straight-up appalling and let him know as much. eventually her fury calmed itself and she tried to see it from mukhari’s point-of-view, which was a fairly sad and pathetic point-of-view, and made her feel equal parts disgust and pity for him. mostly pity by the end.

blackened hated soothe right from the start and soothe learned this pretty quickly. he had no real reason to, other than the fact that he hated women and he hated kids and that he was, in general, awful. he possibly made several attempts on her life because she was annoying him though no solid proof was ever put forth. soothe was horrified to learn that he too had achieved immortality, and avoided him like the plague. in fact, blackened probably terrified her far more than satero ever did.

bariyan e kodhi also played the part of father to soothe, probably better than anyone else. like corosa, there was the distinct possibility that he was using her as a stand-in for his own deceased son, but unlike corosa, bariyan never let that get in the way of their relationship. he was also probably the only one of soothe’s friends whom didn’t turn into a enormous letdown later. probably because soothe never saw him again after the fall of kharta.

aethra farfire was a mage who later took soothe under her wing as an apprentice, though she soon came to treat soothe on more equal footing. soothe grew very fond of aethra and held a great deal of admiration for her, and when aethra started to exhibit signs of breakdown and madness soothe fought against it with a militant fervor. when it became obvious that all of her efforts were futile, she and aethra made a pact in one of aethra’s increasingly rare bouts of lucidity. and when the next wave of insanity came on, soothe upheld her end of the pact and put an end to aethra’s life.

ro of the non was either soothe’s best friend or straight-up girlfriend. soothe didn’t talk about it, though ro claimed that the case here was romance. regardless, they were obviously very close and ro was about the only person in the world whom soothe trusted fully. unfortunately, ro had fabricated parts of her past and soothe never knew that ro was far more than she appeared to be.

soothe cycle of shades

Saturday at 3:11 pm October 15th, 2011

sound (rochra jira)

age: 24. possibly not immortal! wow!!
origins: kharta circa ~800 years before the present day
appearance: wears kohl under his eyes, has large silver hoop earrings, crooked nose, lots of missing teeth. has no tongue, some douchers cut it out of his mouth when he was a child. electric blue eyes!!

background:
sound was a khartan street rat. presumably he had family somewhere in the city, but he probably only saw them every other week or so whenever he needed money or food or a place to sleep. otherwise he lived out in the alleys and rooftops all on his own. as a result, sound knew the entire city like the back of his hand.

he liked stirring up chaos and causing trouble and many of the things he did he did for no reason other than boredom. so he broke into stone’s house for that reason, once, and made friends with stone that way. the two of them were pretty much inseparable from there on out. when they both had their tongues cut out (which was mostly sound’s fault, really) they pretty much had no choice but to stick together, as they developed their own sign language to communicate.

personality:
sound remained eternally angry about having his tongue cut out and always felt like it was everyone else’s responsibility to try and accomodate him and his muteness. and so he turned into an utter asshole about it! if people had trouble understanding him, he’d think that they were stupid, and then he’d get really angry about it and blame them entirely. he didn’t like being ignored or left behind or being in the background, and would get up to some fairly bizarre antics just to get people to notice him.

he pretty much used his muteness as an excuse to be as horrible and nasty a person as possible, because he felt that he was entitled to it. he was also highly aggressive, easy to irritate, openly flaunted social norms, and a pathological liar.

obviously, people didn’t like him very much. to be fair, sound didn’t like people very much either.

at the same time, sound had some very solid moral and ethical codes that he stood by fiercely (even if some of them were a little bit strange), and when hell broke loose in kharta he still upheld every last one of his beliefs. unlike most of his companions and acquaintances, sound did not kill anyone, and he did not betray anyone, and he stood by those whom he considered his friends even when it was quite clear that they were quite intent on abandoning him. and this undying loyalty to the wrong people possibly got sound killed.

relationships:
stone was sound’s best (and for a long while, only) friend. they were both mutes and had developed their own sign language to communicate with one another, which alienated the rest of the world and drew them closer together. sound was quite fond of stone and quite often got into arguments and fights on stone’s behalf. unfortunately, sound’s compulsive lying was not something that he could repress even around stone and so their friendship was pretty much a constant dance around misconceptions and half-truths and outright fabrications.

cycle of shades sound