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synodiporia
Dec. 18th, 2015 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
failgoyleP L A Y E R;
NAME: Airdra
AGE: 31
PLAYER JOURNAL:hyper_air_dragon
TIMEZONE: CST
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Airdra
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Hajime Aikawa (PG), Zed
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Julian "Jules" Thibault
CANON: Changeling: The Lost OC
POINT IN CANON: Roughly one year after his return from Faerie.
AGE: Physically, he's 30. Mentally, he's 21, thanks to some timey-wimey stuff involving the Hedge.
APPEARANCE: To most people Jules looks just like a normal human. This is thanks to his Mask, a sort of magical protection that prevents most people from seeing what he really is. Most will only see him as a scrawny, gangly human with terrible posture.
However, his true form is that of a Lurkglider--a fancy way to say he's pretty much a gargoyle. He's a dark purple from head to toe, though his hair remains black. He's got pointed ears and a thick forked tail, as well as a pair of small black wings on his back. There are two stubby horns protruding from his forehead at the hairline, and he has more of a snout than an actual nose, which sets off his fangs nicely. His feet tend towards the pawlike, while his hands are clawed.
CANON HISTORY: Jules is an OC created using World of Darkness's Changeling: the Lost as a source. The game centers around Changelings, who are humans who were kidnapped by the True Fae and taken to Faerie to serve as whatever the Fae needed them to be. These Changelings have then escaped from the Fae and made it back to the human world, where they must now deal with what has happened to them and being something other than human. When the Fae took them, the Changelings lost a little bit of themselves, but gained something otherworldly--their own fae powers--in return.
Jules's childhood was unremarkable, if not a little easy. His parents were both lawyers, and on the material side of things, he and his two siblings never wanted for anything. On the emotional side of things, Jules was the middle child--he found it difficult to attract his parents' notice over his sister the award-winning tennis player or his brother the violinist. He was always kind of a quiet kid, and he liked computers, which didn't usually provide a lot of parental boasting fodder. After all, a bit of computer code wasn't as easy to show off as a shiny tennis trophy or a recording of a violin recital. Jules didn't mind too much; he preferred to keep to himself and a small circle of friends, and this lack of parental interest in his interests meant a lack of parental supervision. This left Jules free to exercise his talents in all the ways he saw fit--and none of them were good. He took control of peoples' webcams, stole the answers to tests and other sensitive data, left inappropriate messages on electronic road signs, erased all of his absences in the school's computers, and so on and so forth. He had problems with bullies, true, but somehow, long lists of infractions appeared on their records regardless of administrative input. By the time he was in college on a cushy scholarship, he was in control of a small botnet that he could direct towards various enterprises of his choosing. He maintained a lucrative side business trading in stolen Social Security numbers, stolen credit card numbers, offering "assistance" in internet-based classes to his classmates, and selling very good fake IDs to teenagers who only wanted to party.
But all good things must come to an end, and Jules was eventually caught. His status as the son of lawyers didn't help him out the way he might have hoped--his parents were absolutely furious with his behavior--and Jules ended up facing a good deal of jail time for identity theft with a few secondary charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors. He'd never handled punishment and actual consequences particularly well, and the thought of prison terrified him. Indeed, it was an unpleasant experience, and it didn't do anything for his nerves. And yet something was about to happen that would wear down his nerves even more.
All of the identity theft and cheating Jules had done managed to attract the attention of the True Fae. He was never sure why, or how. Maybe the Fae had a business interest in the mortal world that Jules had ruined. Maybe he'd stolen the identity of a Fae's loyalist in the mortal world or monkeyed around with the wrong person's webcam. It didn't matter. The Fae came for him while he was in jail, snatching him out of his bunk in the middle of the night and replacing him with a Fetch, a simulacrum made in Jules's likeness so that a prisoner suddenly going missing didn't cause a fuss. The Fetch only needed to hold together for a week, at which point it died in a freak food poisoning incident at the prison. There was a big fuss kicked up regarding the proper way to store industrial-strength cleaning solvents in the state's prisons, and Jules was written off as an unfortunate casualty of improper labeling and safety practices. In reality, he'd been taken somewhere else and was now in the care of a True Fae serving as his Keeper.
Jules's Keeper maintained a vast expanse of a seemingly infinite maze. Within the walls of the maze was some kind of mad carnival, the sort Jules would never fully understand. There were rides and midway games and all manner of foods, but all of them were twisted somehow. Rides didn't follow any sort of logical sense of physics or progression of time--you might get off before the ride ever started only to find yourself upside-down in the middle of a log flume--and the games generally involved some manner of bodily harm. Jules's job was, for the most part, to watch. To keep an eye on all the comings and goings of the carnival, and to make sure none of his Keeper's "guests" ever found their way out of the maze. Yet keeping watch was easier said than done--some of the other beings down in that carnival were positively terrifying, there were other things outside the maze with him, and sometimes, despite his best efforts, he'd find himself swept into the carnival itself, sucked into participating in a midway game or serving as a living prop in some ride. That was never a good thing--the Keeper was adamant that Jules remain part of the scenery, and scenery doesn't participate--despite the fact that it was the Keeper who liked to keep his watchmen on their toes, causing them to get sucked into the carnival.
Jules grew good at parts of his job. He could remain motionless for hours at a time, remaining nothing more than a part of the scenery so long as nothing disturbed him. But when things tried to come at him, swooping down on him from above or suddenly erupting from the maze below, he couldn't handle the terror and would lose his composure. This became a source of amusement for the Keeper, who saw to it that the tail Jules had sprouted in his time there would fall off if Jules became alarmed enough. Scenery, after all, didn't react, and Jules would do well to learn that--lest he start losing other, more important body parts. His orders were often contradictory, wanting him to stay still and be a part of the scenery while at the same time wanting him to act to perform various tasks, like carrying off various targets or preventing anyone from leaving. All this, while things in the maze tried to eat him while the maze itself tried to trap him.
For quite some time, the carnival and the watch were all he knew. He had no memory of his old name or old life, and as far as he was concerned, he was nothing but one of a number of gargoyles bound to that maze for eternity. This all changed when the maze shifted, as it was wont to do, and with it, the wind changed. It brought with it the aroma of normal, fried carnival food--similar enough to the smell of the fish frys his father used to have when he was a child that he remembered that he'd been something else once. His escape was slow and tedious--he made his way out slowly and cautiously, trying to avoid notice--but escape eventually came. As was the case with all Changelings, he didn't remember the entirety of his captivity and was left only with flashes and impressions of bits and pieces of it here and there.
Escaping from the Hedge spit him out in downtown Houston, where he was soon picked up by the local Changeling freehold. No time had passed between the time he was taken and the time he made it out again, though his body had aged years in the process. Between that and the fact that everyone he'd ever cared about thought he was dead after accidentally ingesting cleaning solvents while in prison, putting together a new life was difficult. He fell in with the Winter Court, the Court of Sorrow, in large part because the Court's ideals of keeping one's head down to avoid notice by the True Fae resonated with him. He started working with the freehold's efforts to create new identities for returned Changelings--identity papers were hard to come by if, like Jules, you were thought to be dead or, if like other Changelings, the Fetch had survived and taken over your life. Jules's computer skills and past forays into the wide world of identity theft assisted him greatly with both creating and maintaining these false identities for other Changelings. Because many in the freehold could see that Jules would stay holed up alone with his computer all the time if they allowed it, he was also given a part-time job as a night watchman at a small private museum that was owned by another Darkling, an Antiquarian who was with the Spring Court. It was something to get Jules out of his apartment and earn his keep in a more honest manner. He still wasn't much better at the guard job despite the fact that it was no longer filled with the terrors of Faerie. He was good at the watching--even better at playing on his cell phone in the bathroom--and not so good at the acting should any trouble arise.
And though Jules had zero interest in Changeling politics and the way the Courts jostled for power, he somehow managed to get swept up as a pawn in that political jostling. He'd been stationed at the job with the Spring Court Antiquarian by the Winter Court in the hopes of using this connection to keep an eye on the doings of the Spring Court. The Winter Court also took to sending him on errands in Faerie, in large part because through some quirk of fate, Jules registered as kin to many of the hobgoblins that prowled the Hedge. It made him ideal to go to Goblin Markets and bargain with the hobgoblins there or to carry out other small errands where hobs might become a problem. It wasn't the sort of thing the easily-spooked Jules would have accomplished on his own, and the Court leadership could see that. They'd send him out with people, and after a few missions here and there with different Changelings, he fell into a motley of other Changelings within his Court. They became the first friends he'd had in quite a while.
There were three other members in his motley: Crystal, Haru, and Francis. Crystal was a Snowskin, the Elemental brains of the outfit. She had a way of hiding her emotions under a cool facade and instilling a chill of terror in others on top of being an ice elemental. Jules didn't really mind all this so long as it wasn't directed at him. He was also fairly certain Crystal wasn't her real name because it was just too perfect with the way she looked like a living ice crystal, but he knew that some Changelings never remembered their real names. He never commented on it. She dealt with Jules in the same cool manner she dealt with everyone else in the motley, and they all came to realize she had designs on the Winter Court throne. At least she seemed like she'd be a better ruler than what they were working with now.
Haru was the Cyclopean muscle, an Ogre Jules wouldn't have wanted to cross. She possessed an overactive sense of humor for a bright red oni, but she was very reliable. She tended to view Jules as her "little friend" (which was appropriate considering that Haru was twice his size) and took it upon herself to fuss over the Lurkglider, seeing to it that he ate and remembered to get off of his computer every once in a while. She also found his freakouts rather endearing in a sort of "watch over the adorable baby animal" kind of way, and she'd try to make sure nothing else menaced her jumpy little buddy. The two of them had a tendency to get into trouble if left to their own devices, despite Jules's best efforts. At least between Jules's talents of stealth and her talents of cracking skulls, they were able to get out of most of said trouble.
Francis was a Wizened Chirurgeon. Like Jules, he knew the value of hanging around in the background. Unlike Jules, he had an actual work ethic and knew how to get things done. Jules suspected that Francis might actually be older than him, but the Wizened's general demeanor was such that he tended to treat Jules like an irresponsible young punk. (Which really wasn't too far off the mark, all things considered.) Francis was a doctor, albeit one with...questionable...methods. He patched Jules up a few times here and there, and Jules does not like to dwell on the experience. It didn't help that Francis looked very much like one of the big-headed, big-eyed grey aliens that are so prevalent in popular culture, and that Jules had seen one too many science fiction movies in his time.
Together with his motley, Jules started to navigate the new world in which he'd found himself, for better or for worse. He wasn't always enthusiastic about all this, but at least he now had people to fall back on. Maybe. If he trusted them. If they trusted him.
CANON PERSONALITY: Jules tends to be a little high-strung, and he is pretty good about inadvertently letting people know this. They usually catch on to this the second he starts yelling about something or dramatically bemoaning his fate about some other thing. He's a coward who scares easily, which is exacerbated by the fact that he still has his tail--and the tail still functions as the Keeper intended, not unlike a lizard's tail. If Jules becomes frightened enough (which isn't hard to do), the tail will drop off. This is always a matter of extreme irritation, and dropping his tail can sometimes cause him to forget about his fear through the exasperation that results. It takes him a couple of weeks to grow that thing back, after all. Very inconvenient.
He's also not at all quick to become involved in anything. Part of this is thanks to the nature of his durance encouraging observation over action, but part of it is also a tragic pre-existing condition known as laziness. He'd rather skirt around along the edges of whatever's going on and avoid direct participation unless pressed into service. He will watch and file information away for later, but he won't volunteer any of it on his own unless he's pressed. He's very big into picking the course of action that means the least risk and work for him. And yet if he's not thinking too hard on the relative amount of work, he'll spend a great deal of time and energy on things that are designed to save him effort in the future.
He's a complainer. He's good at finding flaws in everything and loudly sharing them with the class. There is always something wrong, nothing is ever perfect. In his mind, seeking out the flaws in something is a means of self-defense. If you identify the flaw, you can plan for its failure. If he's poking holes in a plan, it's because he's trying to guard against its inevitable failure. He plans for the worst, and he doesn't dare hope for the best. His life has not been something that engenders hoping for the best. "What if" is a question that is to be thrown at anything and everything in order to test it. He's convinced his life has been a string of nothing but the Worst Possible Outcomes, and so clearly those are what he needs to worry about.
Blowing things way out of proportion and overreacting accordingly is a favorite pasttime of his, though it's not usually intentional. He lacks a certain amount of emotional regulation that lets him just deal with the unexpected or things not going his way. He can be a bit of a drama queen, and his motley (mostly Haru) has taken to making a list of things that make him have a dramatic freak out in much the same way some parents on the Internet make notes of all the absurd reasons their toddler is crying. More than anything, Jules can't handle combat. He is not a combatant by any means, and he will beg forgiveness or mercy or start crying hide or flee or do what he needs to do in order not to get involved. The man doesn't have much in the way of pride when it comes to saving his own skin. Subtlety is not something he's good at here. As much as he hates losing his tail, he will gladly drop it and run if it thinks it would be a sufficient distraction to spare him a really terrible fight. His gargoylish fae mien might be imposing to some, and he's aware of this on some level. But in practice, he's not good at applying that intimidation potential. He can work up a very good resting gargoyle bitchface if he has to, but any effect that has usually dissolves when he opens his mouth to speak or if he's confronted directly. It doesn't help that the human form of his Mask is scrawny and relatively unimposing, as Jules was before he was taken.
Yet underneath the cringing, snivelling surface, he's got a surprising amount of determination. You don't escape from Faerie if you're a total weakling, and there is some sort of strength hidden deep in there. Jules can be patient when he needs to. Very patient. He'll use misdirection if he has to, channeling his complaining urges towards something less important in order to obfuscate his true concerns or intentions. It's a win-win scenario as far as he's concerned--he still gets to vent somehow, and he gets to keep his true intentions to himself. And hey, complaining is just a way to pass the time while you're waiting, right? But if things get serious enough, he knows when he should freeze and wait there in the dark, biding his time. He knows how he usually behaves and he knows what people expect of him, and it's when he gets a grip on himself and uses what he is to his advantage that he's at his most dangerous. He sees no problem in kicking up some kind of dramatic scene for use as a distraction or to cause people to underestimate him. (Dignity? Who cares?) Everything has its own series of costs and benefits. If he manages to calm down enough to think, he's capable of weighing those costs and benefits with surprising coldness. He's not inclined towards sentimentality, and his priority is simply to ensure his own continued survival. He's not particularly loyal to anyone or anything other than himself. He likes his motley and all, but if it comes down to his making some selfless sacrifice on their behalf, he's afraid that they'd be completely and utterly screwed. Clearly, the solution to that ethical dilemma on his part is just to avoid those sorts of dangerous situations at all costs so he doesn't have to choose.
Being something other than human is still kind of a new thing for him. He seems comfortable enough with who he is now, but lingering frustrations with his lot in life tend to show up in other ways from time to time. The most obvious example of this is his tail. Having a tail is clunky and inconvenient if you want to do anything like, say, wear pants, and yet it's somehow even more inconvenient if he drops the tail like a scared lizard and can thus fit into normal pants again. The facial changes don't bother him quite so much, oddly enough. He's grown comfortable with having things like horns and a snout. And while such things might make him look ferocious, he doesn't think of himself as such. This reflects itself in his bearing--he's got terrible posture, and he has a tendency to flinch easily. Darklings tend to embrace the darkness, but Jules has only met that tendency halfway. He likes the cover the darkness provides, the way he can hide himself in it. Darkness makes it easier for him to sit there and like in wait or watch for things. But darkness also contains the things that go bump in the night, which Jules very much wants nothing to do with. This, despite the fact that many would classify him as one of many such nightmarish things. He's too afraid something bigger and nastier than he is will come along and do horrible things to him. He doesn't fear death quite as much as he used to, if only because he's been through much worse.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: So Investigating is going to send this poor gargoyle into a panic, because this has got to be a trick of the True Fae, but Infiltrating's going to hit him just as hard after the fact. (All of this is the True Fae messing with them, even if they're calling themselves Trumps now. Got to be the case.) He'll probably most often end up Infiltrating as some sort of informant or other character type who would prefer to stay out of the direct line of fire, because that's the type of role he tends towards. With that said, it's sometimes fun to turn an Infiltration on its ear, too. He's probably getting stuck as some sort of ridiculous "what is fear?" daredevil at one point for the awfulness that would result. There's nothing quite like having him have some kind of retroactive heart attack at the memory of skydiving or leading an army into glorious battle.
Infiltrating would, in a perfect world, ultimately help Jules to become a better person. He's normally on the cowardly side and kind of lazy, so what happens if he Infiltrates as someone who likes to take action or someone who doesn't know fear?And even if his personality remains more constant through Infiltrations, how does he react when his laziness or cowardice causes something bad to happen? What if that bad thing happens to someone he really cares for if his Infiltrated self isn't quite so good at keeping people at arms' length? It's the sort of thing that would make him examine his own actions and motivations if only because the Infiltrations gave him a bit of distance.
He'd also be bothered if Infiltrating returned him to being fully human, if only for a little while. That's just taunting him with what he's lost. If he Infiltrates as something that isn't human, he's not really going to be bothered by that at all--a lack of humanity is easy to roll with at this point in his life. But with that in mind, he'd also be in a position to help other characters who might have a little bit of trouble or confusion in dealing with form changes.
ABILITIES: Jules has a variety of abilities related to his status as a Changeling. Perhaps the most important of these is his fae mien and its accompanying Mask. His time in Faerie saw him serving as a gargoyle, and many of those traits stuck with him upon his return. The Mask, a sort of protective bit of magic, prevents ordinary humans from seeing Jules as he really is--they only see him as a human. The Mask is thorough enough that it will mask the presence of additional limbs like his wings and tail, even if his tail falls off in a fit of panic. It's possible for his Mask to falter to a certain extent--some might be able to see his true nature either temporarily or permanently if the conditions are right (children, drunkards at the full moon, seventh son of a seventh son, people with two different colored eyes, people who have slept in a cemetery on a grave, anything otherwise appropriately fairy-tale-esque, etc). He can also perform a pledge called the Oath of Rose and Thorn, which would allow a mortal to see any Changeling as they really are--but be unable to say anything about it to another. One of the conditions would also be that whoever he performs the ritual for must do him a favor. Other supernaturals might also be able to pierce the Mask through other means.
Changelings have separate Seemings and Kiths depending on what sort of role they served in Faerie. Jules's Seeming is that of a Darkling, a creature of darkness. Being a Darkling also gives him a bonus as far as being stealthy is concerned, and if he's trying to hide, he'll be difficult to find. There's also a drawback to being a Darkling, and that's that his magic won't be as strong if he uses it during the day, especially if he's in the presence of the sun. His Kith is a Lurkglider, giving him the Kith blessing of the Gargyole's Grace. He can fall up to 100 yards and not take any damage from said fall. He also has wings, though he is a terrible flyer and is much better at gliding.
As a Changeling, he relies upon Glamour to use most of his active powers. Glamour is a substance that's harvested from human emotion. Just being in the presence of humans experiencing strong emotions is enough for Jules to sort of skim off the excess. It's unlikely that this would be noticed, especially since Jules isn't the sort to try to repeatedly harvest heavily from the same people--that's the sort of thing that would get him noticed. He feels like a leech when he's got to harvest Glamour, but a guy's got to do what a guy's got to do in order to survive. Glamour is used to activate spells and the like in the tabletop setting, and I'm not really sure how that translates to DWRP.
He's got the following Contracts:
- Jack's Breath: Can lower the temperature in a room.
- Creeping Dread: Can incite fear in a target.
- Fickle Fate: Temporarily worsens the target's luck.
- Favored Fate: Temporarily improves the target's luck.
He also has the following Merits:
- Iron Stamina: He's got stamina to spare, allowing him to keep going long after others might have fallen to exhaustion.
- Perfect Stillness: Capable of staying absolutely still for long periods of time, even in positions others might find uncomfortable.
- Iron Stomach: He can eat just about anything; he's far less likely to get sick off of spoiled food than a normal person.
- Trained Observer: What it says on the tin--he's been trained in the art of observation and will make note of the most relevant details of a scene when he's actively trying to observe it.
- Mantle (Winter): Proof of his standing with the Winter Court; it's a little cooler standing near him than it would be standing anywhere else in the room.
- Hob Kin: For whatever reason, hobgoblins register him as one of their own. Gives him bonuses when trying to bargain or otherwise deal with hobgoblins.
Outside of his supernatural abilities, he's quite good with computers, albeit with a criminal bent to that. He's capable of both forging new identities and stealing existing ones.
INVENTORY: A messenger bag containing his wallet, keys, laptop, phone, chargers for the laptop and phone, earbuds, a couple of pieces of goblin fruit, and a stack of fake IDs he was on his way to deliver.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I'm going to apologize here and now for any tl;dr that happened up in the main body of the app.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: There's a Test Drive link here.
PROSE SAMPLE: #27 - Digital World
The thing about being thrown into a completely dark room when you were a Darkling was that it just wasn't that big a deal. Sure, the fact that he was once again in prison was cause for Jules to be alarmed, but the darkness and the white noise? Meh. Been there, done that, got the wings and tail to prove it. He'd survived Faerie. He thought he could survive this. Was prepared to throw the biggest snitfit in the afterlife if he could not survive this.
"Hey! Hey!" The white noise didn't have much of a chance to do anything with the ruckus Jules was raising. He found a wall, and pounding on said wall seemed like an excellent way to pass the time. "You gotta let me out of here! I'm innocent! Totally innocent!" Even if he was currently being mistaken for some kind of variable program. How frustrating. "Look, if I could just talk to someone, I'm sure you'd find everything in order! I'm pretty harmless!"
His tail lashed behind him in agitation. "Totally, completely harmless!" His voice started to rise in an insistent whine. Was anyone else even nearby to hear this? Was he at the mercy of a bunch of machines? He could sit and wait--he was pretty sure he could endure for quite some time, wait there motionless in the dark until someone else came along, but when would someone else come along?
He moved to situate himself in a corner he thought would allow him to keep an eye on the door. He flared his wings out in the most intimidating pose he could manage and settled down in a crouch to wait. Body language counted for a lot, right? He'd be all tough and ready for trouble despite his verbal insistence he was harmless. Super-tough. If whatever came through that door had any sort of ability to see through his Mask, it would be greeted by a grumpy-looking, hopefully super-intimidating Lurkglider. A gargoyle among gargoyles. And if not, it would...see a gangly human...human-looking program thing (what even was going on with this)...sitting there with his shoulders squared looking like he might be ready to shank a bitch. That would...maybe work. Hopefully work.
Might have worked if Jules was capable of keeping his mouth shut. The constant stream of whining kind of ruined the effect a little. "You could at least tell me what I did! Because locking a guy in here without due process, it's not right!" Not that the True Fae ever cared about that, and he was starting to become worried that this was just one of those Fae things that mortals weren't meant to understand. Punishment for punishment's sake. He just had to hope there was something more going on here than that. Something he could reason with...or at least annoy into letting him go. "I demand a lawyer! Some kind of attorney program! Or one of those TV lawyers! You know, the kinds that call themselves Hammers or Strongarms or whatever! You gotta let me out of here! I could forget about all this if you let me out of here! And it's not like I wanna cause you guys any trouble, just let me go and I'll be out of your hair!" If they had hair. Jules was strongly starting to suspect that this was all the work of killer robots. Fae killer robots. Sounded about right.
NAME: Airdra
AGE: 31
PLAYER JOURNAL:
hyper_air_dragonTIMEZONE: CST
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Hajime Aikawa (PG), Zed
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Julian "Jules" Thibault
CANON: Changeling: The Lost OC
POINT IN CANON: Roughly one year after his return from Faerie.
AGE: Physically, he's 30. Mentally, he's 21, thanks to some timey-wimey stuff involving the Hedge.
APPEARANCE: To most people Jules looks just like a normal human. This is thanks to his Mask, a sort of magical protection that prevents most people from seeing what he really is. Most will only see him as a scrawny, gangly human with terrible posture.
However, his true form is that of a Lurkglider--a fancy way to say he's pretty much a gargoyle. He's a dark purple from head to toe, though his hair remains black. He's got pointed ears and a thick forked tail, as well as a pair of small black wings on his back. There are two stubby horns protruding from his forehead at the hairline, and he has more of a snout than an actual nose, which sets off his fangs nicely. His feet tend towards the pawlike, while his hands are clawed.
CANON HISTORY: Jules is an OC created using World of Darkness's Changeling: the Lost as a source. The game centers around Changelings, who are humans who were kidnapped by the True Fae and taken to Faerie to serve as whatever the Fae needed them to be. These Changelings have then escaped from the Fae and made it back to the human world, where they must now deal with what has happened to them and being something other than human. When the Fae took them, the Changelings lost a little bit of themselves, but gained something otherworldly--their own fae powers--in return.
Jules's childhood was unremarkable, if not a little easy. His parents were both lawyers, and on the material side of things, he and his two siblings never wanted for anything. On the emotional side of things, Jules was the middle child--he found it difficult to attract his parents' notice over his sister the award-winning tennis player or his brother the violinist. He was always kind of a quiet kid, and he liked computers, which didn't usually provide a lot of parental boasting fodder. After all, a bit of computer code wasn't as easy to show off as a shiny tennis trophy or a recording of a violin recital. Jules didn't mind too much; he preferred to keep to himself and a small circle of friends, and this lack of parental interest in his interests meant a lack of parental supervision. This left Jules free to exercise his talents in all the ways he saw fit--and none of them were good. He took control of peoples' webcams, stole the answers to tests and other sensitive data, left inappropriate messages on electronic road signs, erased all of his absences in the school's computers, and so on and so forth. He had problems with bullies, true, but somehow, long lists of infractions appeared on their records regardless of administrative input. By the time he was in college on a cushy scholarship, he was in control of a small botnet that he could direct towards various enterprises of his choosing. He maintained a lucrative side business trading in stolen Social Security numbers, stolen credit card numbers, offering "assistance" in internet-based classes to his classmates, and selling very good fake IDs to teenagers who only wanted to party.
But all good things must come to an end, and Jules was eventually caught. His status as the son of lawyers didn't help him out the way he might have hoped--his parents were absolutely furious with his behavior--and Jules ended up facing a good deal of jail time for identity theft with a few secondary charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors. He'd never handled punishment and actual consequences particularly well, and the thought of prison terrified him. Indeed, it was an unpleasant experience, and it didn't do anything for his nerves. And yet something was about to happen that would wear down his nerves even more.
All of the identity theft and cheating Jules had done managed to attract the attention of the True Fae. He was never sure why, or how. Maybe the Fae had a business interest in the mortal world that Jules had ruined. Maybe he'd stolen the identity of a Fae's loyalist in the mortal world or monkeyed around with the wrong person's webcam. It didn't matter. The Fae came for him while he was in jail, snatching him out of his bunk in the middle of the night and replacing him with a Fetch, a simulacrum made in Jules's likeness so that a prisoner suddenly going missing didn't cause a fuss. The Fetch only needed to hold together for a week, at which point it died in a freak food poisoning incident at the prison. There was a big fuss kicked up regarding the proper way to store industrial-strength cleaning solvents in the state's prisons, and Jules was written off as an unfortunate casualty of improper labeling and safety practices. In reality, he'd been taken somewhere else and was now in the care of a True Fae serving as his Keeper.
Jules's Keeper maintained a vast expanse of a seemingly infinite maze. Within the walls of the maze was some kind of mad carnival, the sort Jules would never fully understand. There were rides and midway games and all manner of foods, but all of them were twisted somehow. Rides didn't follow any sort of logical sense of physics or progression of time--you might get off before the ride ever started only to find yourself upside-down in the middle of a log flume--and the games generally involved some manner of bodily harm. Jules's job was, for the most part, to watch. To keep an eye on all the comings and goings of the carnival, and to make sure none of his Keeper's "guests" ever found their way out of the maze. Yet keeping watch was easier said than done--some of the other beings down in that carnival were positively terrifying, there were other things outside the maze with him, and sometimes, despite his best efforts, he'd find himself swept into the carnival itself, sucked into participating in a midway game or serving as a living prop in some ride. That was never a good thing--the Keeper was adamant that Jules remain part of the scenery, and scenery doesn't participate--despite the fact that it was the Keeper who liked to keep his watchmen on their toes, causing them to get sucked into the carnival.
Jules grew good at parts of his job. He could remain motionless for hours at a time, remaining nothing more than a part of the scenery so long as nothing disturbed him. But when things tried to come at him, swooping down on him from above or suddenly erupting from the maze below, he couldn't handle the terror and would lose his composure. This became a source of amusement for the Keeper, who saw to it that the tail Jules had sprouted in his time there would fall off if Jules became alarmed enough. Scenery, after all, didn't react, and Jules would do well to learn that--lest he start losing other, more important body parts. His orders were often contradictory, wanting him to stay still and be a part of the scenery while at the same time wanting him to act to perform various tasks, like carrying off various targets or preventing anyone from leaving. All this, while things in the maze tried to eat him while the maze itself tried to trap him.
For quite some time, the carnival and the watch were all he knew. He had no memory of his old name or old life, and as far as he was concerned, he was nothing but one of a number of gargoyles bound to that maze for eternity. This all changed when the maze shifted, as it was wont to do, and with it, the wind changed. It brought with it the aroma of normal, fried carnival food--similar enough to the smell of the fish frys his father used to have when he was a child that he remembered that he'd been something else once. His escape was slow and tedious--he made his way out slowly and cautiously, trying to avoid notice--but escape eventually came. As was the case with all Changelings, he didn't remember the entirety of his captivity and was left only with flashes and impressions of bits and pieces of it here and there.
Escaping from the Hedge spit him out in downtown Houston, where he was soon picked up by the local Changeling freehold. No time had passed between the time he was taken and the time he made it out again, though his body had aged years in the process. Between that and the fact that everyone he'd ever cared about thought he was dead after accidentally ingesting cleaning solvents while in prison, putting together a new life was difficult. He fell in with the Winter Court, the Court of Sorrow, in large part because the Court's ideals of keeping one's head down to avoid notice by the True Fae resonated with him. He started working with the freehold's efforts to create new identities for returned Changelings--identity papers were hard to come by if, like Jules, you were thought to be dead or, if like other Changelings, the Fetch had survived and taken over your life. Jules's computer skills and past forays into the wide world of identity theft assisted him greatly with both creating and maintaining these false identities for other Changelings. Because many in the freehold could see that Jules would stay holed up alone with his computer all the time if they allowed it, he was also given a part-time job as a night watchman at a small private museum that was owned by another Darkling, an Antiquarian who was with the Spring Court. It was something to get Jules out of his apartment and earn his keep in a more honest manner. He still wasn't much better at the guard job despite the fact that it was no longer filled with the terrors of Faerie. He was good at the watching--even better at playing on his cell phone in the bathroom--and not so good at the acting should any trouble arise.
And though Jules had zero interest in Changeling politics and the way the Courts jostled for power, he somehow managed to get swept up as a pawn in that political jostling. He'd been stationed at the job with the Spring Court Antiquarian by the Winter Court in the hopes of using this connection to keep an eye on the doings of the Spring Court. The Winter Court also took to sending him on errands in Faerie, in large part because through some quirk of fate, Jules registered as kin to many of the hobgoblins that prowled the Hedge. It made him ideal to go to Goblin Markets and bargain with the hobgoblins there or to carry out other small errands where hobs might become a problem. It wasn't the sort of thing the easily-spooked Jules would have accomplished on his own, and the Court leadership could see that. They'd send him out with people, and after a few missions here and there with different Changelings, he fell into a motley of other Changelings within his Court. They became the first friends he'd had in quite a while.
There were three other members in his motley: Crystal, Haru, and Francis. Crystal was a Snowskin, the Elemental brains of the outfit. She had a way of hiding her emotions under a cool facade and instilling a chill of terror in others on top of being an ice elemental. Jules didn't really mind all this so long as it wasn't directed at him. He was also fairly certain Crystal wasn't her real name because it was just too perfect with the way she looked like a living ice crystal, but he knew that some Changelings never remembered their real names. He never commented on it. She dealt with Jules in the same cool manner she dealt with everyone else in the motley, and they all came to realize she had designs on the Winter Court throne. At least she seemed like she'd be a better ruler than what they were working with now.
Haru was the Cyclopean muscle, an Ogre Jules wouldn't have wanted to cross. She possessed an overactive sense of humor for a bright red oni, but she was very reliable. She tended to view Jules as her "little friend" (which was appropriate considering that Haru was twice his size) and took it upon herself to fuss over the Lurkglider, seeing to it that he ate and remembered to get off of his computer every once in a while. She also found his freakouts rather endearing in a sort of "watch over the adorable baby animal" kind of way, and she'd try to make sure nothing else menaced her jumpy little buddy. The two of them had a tendency to get into trouble if left to their own devices, despite Jules's best efforts. At least between Jules's talents of stealth and her talents of cracking skulls, they were able to get out of most of said trouble.
Francis was a Wizened Chirurgeon. Like Jules, he knew the value of hanging around in the background. Unlike Jules, he had an actual work ethic and knew how to get things done. Jules suspected that Francis might actually be older than him, but the Wizened's general demeanor was such that he tended to treat Jules like an irresponsible young punk. (Which really wasn't too far off the mark, all things considered.) Francis was a doctor, albeit one with...questionable...methods. He patched Jules up a few times here and there, and Jules does not like to dwell on the experience. It didn't help that Francis looked very much like one of the big-headed, big-eyed grey aliens that are so prevalent in popular culture, and that Jules had seen one too many science fiction movies in his time.
Together with his motley, Jules started to navigate the new world in which he'd found himself, for better or for worse. He wasn't always enthusiastic about all this, but at least he now had people to fall back on. Maybe. If he trusted them. If they trusted him.
CANON PERSONALITY: Jules tends to be a little high-strung, and he is pretty good about inadvertently letting people know this. They usually catch on to this the second he starts yelling about something or dramatically bemoaning his fate about some other thing. He's a coward who scares easily, which is exacerbated by the fact that he still has his tail--and the tail still functions as the Keeper intended, not unlike a lizard's tail. If Jules becomes frightened enough (which isn't hard to do), the tail will drop off. This is always a matter of extreme irritation, and dropping his tail can sometimes cause him to forget about his fear through the exasperation that results. It takes him a couple of weeks to grow that thing back, after all. Very inconvenient.
He's also not at all quick to become involved in anything. Part of this is thanks to the nature of his durance encouraging observation over action, but part of it is also a tragic pre-existing condition known as laziness. He'd rather skirt around along the edges of whatever's going on and avoid direct participation unless pressed into service. He will watch and file information away for later, but he won't volunteer any of it on his own unless he's pressed. He's very big into picking the course of action that means the least risk and work for him. And yet if he's not thinking too hard on the relative amount of work, he'll spend a great deal of time and energy on things that are designed to save him effort in the future.
He's a complainer. He's good at finding flaws in everything and loudly sharing them with the class. There is always something wrong, nothing is ever perfect. In his mind, seeking out the flaws in something is a means of self-defense. If you identify the flaw, you can plan for its failure. If he's poking holes in a plan, it's because he's trying to guard against its inevitable failure. He plans for the worst, and he doesn't dare hope for the best. His life has not been something that engenders hoping for the best. "What if" is a question that is to be thrown at anything and everything in order to test it. He's convinced his life has been a string of nothing but the Worst Possible Outcomes, and so clearly those are what he needs to worry about.
Blowing things way out of proportion and overreacting accordingly is a favorite pasttime of his, though it's not usually intentional. He lacks a certain amount of emotional regulation that lets him just deal with the unexpected or things not going his way. He can be a bit of a drama queen, and his motley (mostly Haru) has taken to making a list of things that make him have a dramatic freak out in much the same way some parents on the Internet make notes of all the absurd reasons their toddler is crying. More than anything, Jules can't handle combat. He is not a combatant by any means, and he will beg forgiveness or mercy or start crying hide or flee or do what he needs to do in order not to get involved. The man doesn't have much in the way of pride when it comes to saving his own skin. Subtlety is not something he's good at here. As much as he hates losing his tail, he will gladly drop it and run if it thinks it would be a sufficient distraction to spare him a really terrible fight. His gargoylish fae mien might be imposing to some, and he's aware of this on some level. But in practice, he's not good at applying that intimidation potential. He can work up a very good resting gargoyle bitchface if he has to, but any effect that has usually dissolves when he opens his mouth to speak or if he's confronted directly. It doesn't help that the human form of his Mask is scrawny and relatively unimposing, as Jules was before he was taken.
Yet underneath the cringing, snivelling surface, he's got a surprising amount of determination. You don't escape from Faerie if you're a total weakling, and there is some sort of strength hidden deep in there. Jules can be patient when he needs to. Very patient. He'll use misdirection if he has to, channeling his complaining urges towards something less important in order to obfuscate his true concerns or intentions. It's a win-win scenario as far as he's concerned--he still gets to vent somehow, and he gets to keep his true intentions to himself. And hey, complaining is just a way to pass the time while you're waiting, right? But if things get serious enough, he knows when he should freeze and wait there in the dark, biding his time. He knows how he usually behaves and he knows what people expect of him, and it's when he gets a grip on himself and uses what he is to his advantage that he's at his most dangerous. He sees no problem in kicking up some kind of dramatic scene for use as a distraction or to cause people to underestimate him. (Dignity? Who cares?) Everything has its own series of costs and benefits. If he manages to calm down enough to think, he's capable of weighing those costs and benefits with surprising coldness. He's not inclined towards sentimentality, and his priority is simply to ensure his own continued survival. He's not particularly loyal to anyone or anything other than himself. He likes his motley and all, but if it comes down to his making some selfless sacrifice on their behalf, he's afraid that they'd be completely and utterly screwed. Clearly, the solution to that ethical dilemma on his part is just to avoid those sorts of dangerous situations at all costs so he doesn't have to choose.
Being something other than human is still kind of a new thing for him. He seems comfortable enough with who he is now, but lingering frustrations with his lot in life tend to show up in other ways from time to time. The most obvious example of this is his tail. Having a tail is clunky and inconvenient if you want to do anything like, say, wear pants, and yet it's somehow even more inconvenient if he drops the tail like a scared lizard and can thus fit into normal pants again. The facial changes don't bother him quite so much, oddly enough. He's grown comfortable with having things like horns and a snout. And while such things might make him look ferocious, he doesn't think of himself as such. This reflects itself in his bearing--he's got terrible posture, and he has a tendency to flinch easily. Darklings tend to embrace the darkness, but Jules has only met that tendency halfway. He likes the cover the darkness provides, the way he can hide himself in it. Darkness makes it easier for him to sit there and like in wait or watch for things. But darkness also contains the things that go bump in the night, which Jules very much wants nothing to do with. This, despite the fact that many would classify him as one of many such nightmarish things. He's too afraid something bigger and nastier than he is will come along and do horrible things to him. He doesn't fear death quite as much as he used to, if only because he's been through much worse.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: So Investigating is going to send this poor gargoyle into a panic, because this has got to be a trick of the True Fae, but Infiltrating's going to hit him just as hard after the fact. (All of this is the True Fae messing with them, even if they're calling themselves Trumps now. Got to be the case.) He'll probably most often end up Infiltrating as some sort of informant or other character type who would prefer to stay out of the direct line of fire, because that's the type of role he tends towards. With that said, it's sometimes fun to turn an Infiltration on its ear, too. He's probably getting stuck as some sort of ridiculous "what is fear?" daredevil at one point for the awfulness that would result. There's nothing quite like having him have some kind of retroactive heart attack at the memory of skydiving or leading an army into glorious battle.
Infiltrating would, in a perfect world, ultimately help Jules to become a better person. He's normally on the cowardly side and kind of lazy, so what happens if he Infiltrates as someone who likes to take action or someone who doesn't know fear?And even if his personality remains more constant through Infiltrations, how does he react when his laziness or cowardice causes something bad to happen? What if that bad thing happens to someone he really cares for if his Infiltrated self isn't quite so good at keeping people at arms' length? It's the sort of thing that would make him examine his own actions and motivations if only because the Infiltrations gave him a bit of distance.
He'd also be bothered if Infiltrating returned him to being fully human, if only for a little while. That's just taunting him with what he's lost. If he Infiltrates as something that isn't human, he's not really going to be bothered by that at all--a lack of humanity is easy to roll with at this point in his life. But with that in mind, he'd also be in a position to help other characters who might have a little bit of trouble or confusion in dealing with form changes.
ABILITIES: Jules has a variety of abilities related to his status as a Changeling. Perhaps the most important of these is his fae mien and its accompanying Mask. His time in Faerie saw him serving as a gargoyle, and many of those traits stuck with him upon his return. The Mask, a sort of protective bit of magic, prevents ordinary humans from seeing Jules as he really is--they only see him as a human. The Mask is thorough enough that it will mask the presence of additional limbs like his wings and tail, even if his tail falls off in a fit of panic. It's possible for his Mask to falter to a certain extent--some might be able to see his true nature either temporarily or permanently if the conditions are right (children, drunkards at the full moon, seventh son of a seventh son, people with two different colored eyes, people who have slept in a cemetery on a grave, anything otherwise appropriately fairy-tale-esque, etc). He can also perform a pledge called the Oath of Rose and Thorn, which would allow a mortal to see any Changeling as they really are--but be unable to say anything about it to another. One of the conditions would also be that whoever he performs the ritual for must do him a favor. Other supernaturals might also be able to pierce the Mask through other means.
Changelings have separate Seemings and Kiths depending on what sort of role they served in Faerie. Jules's Seeming is that of a Darkling, a creature of darkness. Being a Darkling also gives him a bonus as far as being stealthy is concerned, and if he's trying to hide, he'll be difficult to find. There's also a drawback to being a Darkling, and that's that his magic won't be as strong if he uses it during the day, especially if he's in the presence of the sun. His Kith is a Lurkglider, giving him the Kith blessing of the Gargyole's Grace. He can fall up to 100 yards and not take any damage from said fall. He also has wings, though he is a terrible flyer and is much better at gliding.
As a Changeling, he relies upon Glamour to use most of his active powers. Glamour is a substance that's harvested from human emotion. Just being in the presence of humans experiencing strong emotions is enough for Jules to sort of skim off the excess. It's unlikely that this would be noticed, especially since Jules isn't the sort to try to repeatedly harvest heavily from the same people--that's the sort of thing that would get him noticed. He feels like a leech when he's got to harvest Glamour, but a guy's got to do what a guy's got to do in order to survive. Glamour is used to activate spells and the like in the tabletop setting, and I'm not really sure how that translates to DWRP.
He's got the following Contracts:
- Jack's Breath: Can lower the temperature in a room.
- Creeping Dread: Can incite fear in a target.
- Fickle Fate: Temporarily worsens the target's luck.
- Favored Fate: Temporarily improves the target's luck.
He also has the following Merits:
- Iron Stamina: He's got stamina to spare, allowing him to keep going long after others might have fallen to exhaustion.
- Perfect Stillness: Capable of staying absolutely still for long periods of time, even in positions others might find uncomfortable.
- Iron Stomach: He can eat just about anything; he's far less likely to get sick off of spoiled food than a normal person.
- Trained Observer: What it says on the tin--he's been trained in the art of observation and will make note of the most relevant details of a scene when he's actively trying to observe it.
- Mantle (Winter): Proof of his standing with the Winter Court; it's a little cooler standing near him than it would be standing anywhere else in the room.
- Hob Kin: For whatever reason, hobgoblins register him as one of their own. Gives him bonuses when trying to bargain or otherwise deal with hobgoblins.
Outside of his supernatural abilities, he's quite good with computers, albeit with a criminal bent to that. He's capable of both forging new identities and stealing existing ones.
INVENTORY: A messenger bag containing his wallet, keys, laptop, phone, chargers for the laptop and phone, earbuds, a couple of pieces of goblin fruit, and a stack of fake IDs he was on his way to deliver.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I'm going to apologize here and now for any tl;dr that happened up in the main body of the app.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: There's a Test Drive link here.
PROSE SAMPLE: #27 - Digital World
The thing about being thrown into a completely dark room when you were a Darkling was that it just wasn't that big a deal. Sure, the fact that he was once again in prison was cause for Jules to be alarmed, but the darkness and the white noise? Meh. Been there, done that, got the wings and tail to prove it. He'd survived Faerie. He thought he could survive this. Was prepared to throw the biggest snitfit in the afterlife if he could not survive this.
"Hey! Hey!" The white noise didn't have much of a chance to do anything with the ruckus Jules was raising. He found a wall, and pounding on said wall seemed like an excellent way to pass the time. "You gotta let me out of here! I'm innocent! Totally innocent!" Even if he was currently being mistaken for some kind of variable program. How frustrating. "Look, if I could just talk to someone, I'm sure you'd find everything in order! I'm pretty harmless!"
His tail lashed behind him in agitation. "Totally, completely harmless!" His voice started to rise in an insistent whine. Was anyone else even nearby to hear this? Was he at the mercy of a bunch of machines? He could sit and wait--he was pretty sure he could endure for quite some time, wait there motionless in the dark until someone else came along, but when would someone else come along?
He moved to situate himself in a corner he thought would allow him to keep an eye on the door. He flared his wings out in the most intimidating pose he could manage and settled down in a crouch to wait. Body language counted for a lot, right? He'd be all tough and ready for trouble despite his verbal insistence he was harmless. Super-tough. If whatever came through that door had any sort of ability to see through his Mask, it would be greeted by a grumpy-looking, hopefully super-intimidating Lurkglider. A gargoyle among gargoyles. And if not, it would...see a gangly human...human-looking program thing (what even was going on with this)...sitting there with his shoulders squared looking like he might be ready to shank a bitch. That would...maybe work. Hopefully work.
Might have worked if Jules was capable of keeping his mouth shut. The constant stream of whining kind of ruined the effect a little. "You could at least tell me what I did! Because locking a guy in here without due process, it's not right!" Not that the True Fae ever cared about that, and he was starting to become worried that this was just one of those Fae things that mortals weren't meant to understand. Punishment for punishment's sake. He just had to hope there was something more going on here than that. Something he could reason with...or at least annoy into letting him go. "I demand a lawyer! Some kind of attorney program! Or one of those TV lawyers! You know, the kinds that call themselves Hammers or Strongarms or whatever! You gotta let me out of here! I could forget about all this if you let me out of here! And it's not like I wanna cause you guys any trouble, just let me go and I'll be out of your hair!" If they had hair. Jules was strongly starting to suspect that this was all the work of killer robots. Fae killer robots. Sounded about right.
