Application for destinystrings

[angryyoungvamp]

Application in comments, for space economization/section up-dividing/other such things.

Out Of Character Information
Here!

In Character Information
In Character Information I - World Information (Name, Age, Birthday, Arcanum, World Snapshot)
In Character Information II - Story Information (Backstory & Canon Standing)
In Character Information III - Personality
In Character Information IV - What Comes With Him (Canon Powers, Weapons/Items, Allies, Baggage)

Persona
Malagi

Writing Sample
Here!

Apologies for two things: One, I know I'm long-winded and not always in the most coherent manner. And two, yes, he and his Persona are named after the same guy. I used the Italian name for the Persona to make it harder to mix them up. But if characters in the actual games can do it (cough Maya cough), so can he :P

Comments

In Character Information II - Story Information (Backstory & Canon Standing)

[angryyoungvamp]

Backstory:
Landen Heath had an unremarkable childhood and majored in Literature in college, mostly notable for his skill in fencing and his interest in fairy tales. He never moved out of Columbus, Ohio, his hometown. He was a couple of years into a dead-end job when he was embraced by a member of Clan Tremere, a group of vampires known for their command of the blood magic called Thaumaturgy, in order to help repel an incursion of Sabbat who were close to attacking the city. His introduction to the hidden society of the Camarilla caught his imagination, both in the fact that he could do magic now and in making him wonder what else might be out there, and he quickly immersed himself in the clan's immense occult archives, particularly fascinated by the mysterious rumors of the fae. Much like many vampires, he renamed himself sometime after the embrace, calling himself Maugris after the fairy-raised sorcerer knight who served Charlemagne in French chivalric romances (incidentally, that's where the name of his motorcycle came from, too - Bayard was a magical horse won by Maugris and given to his cousin Renaud de Montauban).

The newly-christened Maugris's most notable moment in Columbus was a peculiar incident. He was practicing his wind-based magic on the roof of the tallest building in the city when he saw a strange, ethereal woman - a fae, to the extent of his ability to tell - get apparently trapped in the air conditioning systems. A ring slipped from her finger, adorned with an orange butterfly whose wings flapped. He snatched the ring up and ran. Its wings turned blue and it ceased moving as he put it on his finger, but ever since then he seemed to be just a bit luckier… Apart from the fact that he shortly became fairly sure a fae presence of some variety was stalking him and had it out for him.

He was one of the small group of Kindred from the Camarilla sent to Metatropolis after the decision to reestablish vampiric presence in the city was made in the fall of 2011, but he quickly became disgusted with the morals (or lack thereof) of his fellows in the Camarilla. He quickly proved himself reliable, if not always willing to get his hands dirty, and when demon-possessed mortals murdered the Seneschal of the city's Camarilla, Maugris found himself suddenly elevated to the position and given the task of managing the rest of the city (Camarilla cities are ruled by a Prince, and the Seneschal is his right hand). Finding that the other sects of vampires seemed to have a better handle on the problems in the city that affected all of them, he struck up a working relationship with an influential member of the Sabbat, a manipulative Anarch who received psychic visions, and a young, rebellious member of the independent Clan Giovanni (an Italian clan with ties to organized crime the world over and necromantic powers). All of them were tied by a dissatisfaction with how the city's problems were being handled and an inclination toward the occult. Together, with Maugris as their apparent public face due to his high position in one of the sects, the four of them investigated the mystery of the mysteriously absorptive black orbs around the city that seemed to attract demons that possessed a variety of mortals. The first thing they found was that the city planning commissioner was a corrupt Masonic wizard, drawing power from a pact with a demon and the infernal energies of the orbs, as well as the flow of life in the city. Dealing with this man was the first great triumph for Maugris and his coterie - with the Anarchs to cause chaos and disrupt traffic flow, the Giovanni's political connections to lure the commissioner out, the Sabbat's brute strength to attack him directly, and the coterie's talents to investigate the office where the demon lurked, they succeeded in bringing the commissioner down and removing his demonic influence from the city. They proceeded to follow up on this trail for a while - they tracked down four mystical items that gave an Anarch the ability to destroy the black orbs, but resulted in her possession by a demon and the reopening of the portal to hell, then sunk quite a lot of occult study and resources into erecting a durable, permanent seal on the hell pit.

After this, the coterie began to drift apart. Maugris had to focus on his duties as Seneschal, and when rogue members of the Camarilla murdered the Baron (like the Prince, but for Anarchs) and he was brought into conflict with the Anarch he'd worked with before, he was forced to choose between the lives of his subordinates by the Prince - who among the Baron's murderers would be handed over to the Anarchs to die for their crimes. This was a horrible experience for Maugris, who hated killing, and sowed the seeds of a greater split. As much of the city was caught up in the mercenary vampire hunters brought to the city under the pretense of bolstering the police force, Maugris was tracking down mysterious, disappearing bald men with impossible technology and a tendency to attack people and control them, apparently at random, and then faced a cult that worshipped a sun god and drew real power from their devotion. The visionary Anarch, having received a prophecy that portended his death, fled the city. The rebellious Giovanni, in horror of the prospect of her clan enslaving her soul for all eternity, sacrificed herself to destroy the last of the black orbs. And in the spring, after the sun cult's ritual to bring their god to Earth was narrowly thwarted, the Sabbat priest simply left the city to find his own following elsewhere while Maugris ensured the death of a member of the Camarilla whose attempts to manipulate the hunters had brought them down on the heads of the vampires.

The summer, at least, was quiet. What little remained of the cult went into hiding, the bald men lay low, and the hunters drew down and settled into normal police work. The fall was marked by the beginnings of strange portals appearing in the city, weakenings in the fabric of reality, but Maugris had bigger problems - his fae pursuers had finally followed him to Metatropolis. In the presence of the growing number of Halloween decorations, Maugris's ring showed a tendency to fade back to its original orange and flap its wings, and tiny imps with pumpkin heads were seen being born from circles of gourds. His foes were the Pumpkin Court - the king, who commanded the imps and a legion of knights and pursued him for the ring he'd given to a maiden of the court of Air, and the queen, who drew power from mortal blood like a vampire and wanted the ring for herself as proof of her husband's infidelity. The Pumpkin King's servitors pursued Maugris through the city until he and a group of other vampires confronted the two of them in an abandoned Halloween shop, where Maugris blew the king across the room and dueled the queen with his cold iron sword, anathema to fae, with the intent to punish her for her attacks on mortals in the city. But he was brought down by the king's knights, hacking at his arm with long halberds to retrieve the ring. Maugris was driven into torpor from the damage. When he woke, the Pumpkin Court had been driven off, his ring had been destroyed to prevent their return, and he was bound by blood to the Prince, subordinated to his will. The finger he'd worn the ring on never did regrow, but thankfully the luck he had thought the ring brought him hadn't deserted him despite the loss of the ring itself.

The fall and winter were spent in investigating the strange portals - consulting the fae, human magic-users, even werewolves, hereditary enemies of vampires. But the Prince's treatment of vampires under his command and his attitude toward mortal lives grew intolerable, and around New Year's, one of Maugris's close friends in the Camarilla provided him with an ultimatum: by the end of that night, one of them would have declared their intention to replace the Prince as head of the Camarilla. Knowing that his friend was not nearly as capable of defending himself from either assassins in the Prince's employ or the Prince's own powers of manipulation, Maugris overcame the power of the blood bond to declare Praxis. He confronted the Prince about his policies before the Camarilla, and the Prince, used to the manner of old-world nobility and a grandstanding style, suited the occasion with a guillotine. Maugris still abhorred killing, however, and intended to let the Prince leave the city alive, until the Prince threatened to kill an innocent for every member of the Camarilla who stood behind Maugris, intending either to make a hypocrite of him or force him to prove that he would kill when necessary - Maugris never was sure which. Either way, when he stepped up to kill the Prince, he found he'd been tricked - the body the Prince had spoken from was that of a mortal, perhaps always has been. The real Prince had been hidden safe away in Boston this entire time.

As the Prince, Maugris's need to solve the city's problems doubled - but thankfully, his willingness to work with the other Sects, even the Sabbat, helped make it easier to look into the issues. And they only intensified as the mysterious portals became more frequent, parts of the city dropped out of reality and were erased from history entirely, and the bald men returned, striking directly against vampires now, believing them to be the cause of the damage to reality. Despite Maugris's efforts, though, the stress made the differing factions fractious, and as the reality damage reached a critical pitch and they all needed to pull together, two major problems happened - the vampiric cult called the Followers of Set called up their god, believing it would somehow help, and a rogue faction of the Camarilla, led by two of Maugris's most trusted advisers, murdered nearly all of the Sabbat in an attempt to push them out of the city. So it was with the Anarchs, the handful of independents who hadn't fled the city, the few Camarilla who hadn't joined the slaughter, the leader of the Sabbat, and a werewolf mystic, the only one who hadn't gotten the hell out of dodge, that they went to confront the source of the trouble - a demon who had been hidden within an Amish community. They burst in and destroyed the creature, but it was too late - the damage was irreversible, and when they escaped the demon's lair, Metatropolis was no more. Reality had been so badly damaged that they found themselves in Champaign in 1923 - ninety years in the past. But not all of their number had made it.

Maugris never arrived in 1923 with the rest of them. He'd vanished, somewhere in the flux of injured reality.

Canon Standing: (We want to know at what point in the game your character was picked, even if it is an OC ) After defeating the demon and vanishing in the reality storm that left the rest of the vampires stranded in 1923.