Character History
Jul. 26th, 2020 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
failgoyleJules'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. Emotionally, parental attention was a different story. Jules couldn't compete with his siblings' accomplishments in music and sports, not when his talents lay with computers. And with his parents not really caring to pay much attention to him in favor of his siblings, he was often left to his own devices, which lent him to carrying out increasingly more illegal stunts just to see if he could. 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. By the time he was in college on a cushy scholarship, he was in control of a decently-sized 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 the way it made them look--and Jules ended up facing a good deal of jail time for a long list of digital crimes. He'd never handled punishment and actual consequences particularly well, and the thought of prison terrified him. He had no idea that something worse would be lying in wait for him.
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, just one of many gargoyle servants in a carnival-themed maze.
For quite some time, the mad maze was 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 a necessary bit of difficulty. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. He'd get into minor trouble with his oni BFF Haru from time to time, and he was doing pretty well for himself working on fake identities and cybersecurity for the freehold, but Court politics were beyond him. Problem was, "the computer guy" was a valuable asset despite his own obliviousness to most everything, and in politics, assets become quite important. And Crystal, the Elemental who had made herself the defacto leader of Jules's little motley, was prepared to use that asset to her advantage after a few years of the status quo.
Jules found himself tricked into both accidentally betraying Frosty Jack, the bear-themed Beast who was the then-current King of Winter and into electronically leaking a bunch of sensitive Winter Court documents. Because Darklings are easily mistrusted and because Jules's reputation wasn't the greatest, almost everyone assumed the amiable idiot act must have, in fact, been an act and that he was actually a cunning mastermind out to get Winter's crown for himself. In all the chaos, he was forced to flee into the Hedge while Crystal was able to snag Winter's crown in the chaos and Frosty Jack's downfall.
Jules should never be allowed to be unattended in the Hedge, but that's where he ended up--unattended in the Hedge. He knew of a few Hollows where he could lay low, and he was lucky enough that for whatever stupid reason, hobgoblins tended to view him as one of their own. (Unfortunately for him, several of them tried to "help" him on one occasion, using hob logic, and he grew a foot in the process. He refuses to speak about this process.) He also found himself the target of a would-be Winter assassin who attempted to poison him, and either thanks to his own ability to eat pretty much anything and not die or the assassin's incompetence (possibly a bit of both), the only ill effects he suffered were the development of a few stony patches across his shoulders.
This went on for a couple of very tense weeks by his reckoning, but Haru, his oni friend, was having none of this. She'd picked up on what Crystal had done and was royally pissed off that her stupid friend got dragged into the crossfire. She went into the Hedge, retrieved Jules, and, after a bit of discussion (during which Jules expressed a fear of going back), they hatched a plan. (At least, Haru hatched a plan; Jules mostly just loudly bemoaned his fate and the past couple of weeks he'd had in the Hedge and everything was awful, screaming, crying, etc. etc.)
All Jules would have to do was use one of his contracts, a Darkling one Haru didn't have access to. Jules agreed, and thanks to the fact that he was a sneaky Lurkglider who had, against all odds, gotten pretty decent at sneaking around, was able to get in close enough to Crystal to use the Balm of Unwakeable Slumber, a contract that renders the target all but impossible to wake. He then proceeded to get the hell out of there to establish some plausible deniability somewhere else, because though Haru hadn't told him the full extent of the plan, he had a pretty good idea of where it was going.
Haru was very upset with Crystal for throwing her idiot friend under the bus, after all, and she was nothing if not loyal. Crystal had proven herself to be anything but loyal, as well as far too dangerous to continue to do what she wished. Haru took the most Ogre way out, and she killed Crystal. And, despite the fact that she and Jules figured that the crown would go to the most suitable person in the Court, she ended up the new Winter Queen in the process.
Jules was less than pleased, Haru was less than pleased, such is life if you get too close to Court politics. Notably, while Jules is still a member of the Winter Court and ended up pretty well politically placed in this whirlwind of disaster, his Mantle hasn't really matured. It's still there, though it's very faint. It's reflected in the Contracts he's picked up; he's avoided Winter contracts in favor of others. His relationship with the rest of the Winter Court and with the rest of the freehold remains tense. There are those who are absolutely convinced the disaster-plagued idiot act is just an act, and that Jules is actually the sort of devious mastermind who would pull the strings to install an easily-manipulated ogre in the role of Winter Queen, who likes him well enough to make him her right-hand man.
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 the way it made them look--and Jules ended up facing a good deal of jail time for a long list of digital crimes. He'd never handled punishment and actual consequences particularly well, and the thought of prison terrified him. He had no idea that something worse would be lying in wait for him.
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, just one of many gargoyle servants in a carnival-themed maze.
For quite some time, the mad maze was 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 a necessary bit of difficulty. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. He'd get into minor trouble with his oni BFF Haru from time to time, and he was doing pretty well for himself working on fake identities and cybersecurity for the freehold, but Court politics were beyond him. Problem was, "the computer guy" was a valuable asset despite his own obliviousness to most everything, and in politics, assets become quite important. And Crystal, the Elemental who had made herself the defacto leader of Jules's little motley, was prepared to use that asset to her advantage after a few years of the status quo.
Jules found himself tricked into both accidentally betraying Frosty Jack, the bear-themed Beast who was the then-current King of Winter and into electronically leaking a bunch of sensitive Winter Court documents. Because Darklings are easily mistrusted and because Jules's reputation wasn't the greatest, almost everyone assumed the amiable idiot act must have, in fact, been an act and that he was actually a cunning mastermind out to get Winter's crown for himself. In all the chaos, he was forced to flee into the Hedge while Crystal was able to snag Winter's crown in the chaos and Frosty Jack's downfall.
Jules should never be allowed to be unattended in the Hedge, but that's where he ended up--unattended in the Hedge. He knew of a few Hollows where he could lay low, and he was lucky enough that for whatever stupid reason, hobgoblins tended to view him as one of their own. (Unfortunately for him, several of them tried to "help" him on one occasion, using hob logic, and he grew a foot in the process. He refuses to speak about this process.) He also found himself the target of a would-be Winter assassin who attempted to poison him, and either thanks to his own ability to eat pretty much anything and not die or the assassin's incompetence (possibly a bit of both), the only ill effects he suffered were the development of a few stony patches across his shoulders.
This went on for a couple of very tense weeks by his reckoning, but Haru, his oni friend, was having none of this. She'd picked up on what Crystal had done and was royally pissed off that her stupid friend got dragged into the crossfire. She went into the Hedge, retrieved Jules, and, after a bit of discussion (during which Jules expressed a fear of going back), they hatched a plan. (At least, Haru hatched a plan; Jules mostly just loudly bemoaned his fate and the past couple of weeks he'd had in the Hedge and everything was awful, screaming, crying, etc. etc.)
All Jules would have to do was use one of his contracts, a Darkling one Haru didn't have access to. Jules agreed, and thanks to the fact that he was a sneaky Lurkglider who had, against all odds, gotten pretty decent at sneaking around, was able to get in close enough to Crystal to use the Balm of Unwakeable Slumber, a contract that renders the target all but impossible to wake. He then proceeded to get the hell out of there to establish some plausible deniability somewhere else, because though Haru hadn't told him the full extent of the plan, he had a pretty good idea of where it was going.
Haru was very upset with Crystal for throwing her idiot friend under the bus, after all, and she was nothing if not loyal. Crystal had proven herself to be anything but loyal, as well as far too dangerous to continue to do what she wished. Haru took the most Ogre way out, and she killed Crystal. And, despite the fact that she and Jules figured that the crown would go to the most suitable person in the Court, she ended up the new Winter Queen in the process.
Jules was less than pleased, Haru was less than pleased, such is life if you get too close to Court politics. Notably, while Jules is still a member of the Winter Court and ended up pretty well politically placed in this whirlwind of disaster, his Mantle hasn't really matured. It's still there, though it's very faint. It's reflected in the Contracts he's picked up; he's avoided Winter contracts in favor of others. His relationship with the rest of the Winter Court and with the rest of the freehold remains tense. There are those who are absolutely convinced the disaster-plagued idiot act is just an act, and that Jules is actually the sort of devious mastermind who would pull the strings to install an easily-manipulated ogre in the role of Winter Queen, who likes him well enough to make him her right-hand man.
