This is the basics of my character, with picture, for purposes of discussion!
Name: Isaiah Leblanc
Age: 30
Species: Human. No, seriously, he's human. Cut him and does he not bleed?
Height: 6'2"
Relationship Status: Widower.
Sexuality: Mostly straight.
Personality: Isaiah is a focused, intense person. He has lived the past 12 years with one goal - to find who killed his parents and bring them to justice. It is a totalizing philosophy and mindset but has left him lonely and alone.
History: Isaiah was born into a family of academics, but he was always the odd one out. He liked sports. He liked low-brow stuff like professional wrestling. It's not that he was dumb, but that Brazilian jiu-jitsu and kickboxing interested him more than material physics or anthropology (which is what his parents did - material physics and anthropology).
That changed when he was sixteen and his parents were torn apart by a vampire. He wasn't there - he was at a BJJ tournament upstate - but the cops came and got him, pulled him from the hotel room, and told him that his parents had been killed, apparently, by a wild animal. Maybe a cougar. Sure, they lived in suburbia, and every so often a cougar did kill, y'know, someone's pet, but Isaiah thought that the odds of a cougar breaking into his parents' home and killing them were pretty low. He did not, at the time, believe that things like vampires existed.
He inherited everything, as an only child. His parents were very responsible people, and they had big insurance policies in the case of accidental death. Sure, it was held in trust until he was eighteen (with half of it being reserved until he was thirty-two because they figured that a kid might blow through all of the money if he got all of the money at once, and they were very responsible), but he got everything.
One of the things he got was his mother's computer. It was the computer that was hooked up to their security system, so he tried to watch the video to see if he could see the goddamn cougar or bear or whatever it was. He didn't, because the security system was taken offline minutes before they were killed. He physically checked out the cameras, and they'd been smashed, and there were fist-sized rocks nearby.
Back to the computer, he started going through his mother's files. A BUNCH of stuff had been deleted around the time the cameras had been knocked offline. So, he took the hard drive to a recovery place and asked them to recover the files. He already had a bad, black cat feeling that something was "wrong." But the files were just work files, a bunch of stuff about folk legends of the Louisiana bayou and backcountry. Y'know. Stuff about werewolves. Stuff about vampires. He knew that she worked in that field, and it was the coolest thing about his mom, but she spoke about "vampirism" as arising from pre-modern misunderstandings about the processes of decomposition, and werewolfism as a metaphor for contagious diseases and mental illness.
When the data was recovered, for a while, Isaiah was confused. He picked through the material and... it turned out that his mother had started to believe in the reality of supernatural creatures. She'd spoken with a Voudon bokor who claimed to be 140 years old, and that had spiraled into disturbing revelations about the nature of the world. She hadn't even been going to publish the information, the newest edits of the documents told of her deep and abiding fear that she had put her family at risk. She documented that she believed she was being watched more than once, stuff that sounded paranoid, until a few days later the outside cameras were smashed by rocks and her parents had been torn apart by a "wild animal." And then during or after the killings, all her files about vampirism had been deleted, and the trash emptied.
It took him another year to convince himself that his mother was right. It seemed insane, right? But once you start to look for the signs, you could find them. For instance, the number of violent deaths around the night of the full moon. The number of people who just disappeared. Plus, he kept mulling over the facts of the case, the physical evidence.
When he decided that he had to know, when he accepted the <i>possibility</i> that the world not only had vampires and werewolves and sorcerers in it, but that held positions of power, it changed him in two ways. First, he became driven. The death of his parents hadn't been an accident. It had been <i>supernatural murder</i> and the killers were above the law, which he found both personally and intellectually offensive. The second was he got <i>paranoid</i>. He started using crazy hacker-proof operating systems, and onion routers for even trivial things. He started looking for ways to meet criminals to learn their skills at avoiding detection and recognition (which he found much easier to do than anticipated - he used YouTube to identify con artists near him and just asked to hang out with them).
Then he went to college. He didn't have bad grades, and he was very clever, so he got into a big state school (because, at eighteen, he suddenly had several million dollars to fool around with, so that was easy to afford). He drove himself to be better - not just because he was naturally competitive, but because filling his days with "stuff to do" helped keep him sane. Exhaustion drove away thoughts of vampires and wizards and warlocks lurking everywhere, killing anyone they didn't like. He got a black belt in BJJ, he got a summa cum laude and a degree in physical engineering AND anthropology. He went to firearms classes, he learned action shooting, he trained with a sniper for a summer in Israel, he spent a lot of time on darknet BBSes about supernatural shenanigans. He learned to run CNC milling machines and laser cutters and all the wild stuff they have in big school's engineering labs.
At 24, he tracked down the bokor that his mother had tracked down - an ancient man living deep in the middle of nowhere Louisiana. Yeah, there were evil things in the world. The bokor showed him shit that made his hair curl. He laughed that Isaiah's mom was dead, showed him an imp up from Hell, said that he had the Power, that the bokor could show him the way of his power.
"Bokor" is an evil wizard. Isaiah didn't a bokor. That would be stupid. He decided to go his own way, things he understood, but he remembered what the old wizard said about him having the power. It was a seed in his mind.
When he was twenty-eight years old, he for-sure identified his first vampire in rural Kentucky. He decided to shoot the vampire with a .50 caliber anti-material rifle (the things you can buy in America!) with an incendiary round that he made in his workshop (the things you can buy with a million dollars!). The rifle blew the chest out of the vampire and set it on fire, which was fatal to the vampire.
Since then, he has developed his talents and expanded his knowledge. There are few reg'lar humans who know as much about the supernatural as Isaiah, especially if they aren't wizards, and he has focused on vampires because he is nearly 100% sure that they are the ones who killed his family (since it wasn't near the full moon when they died). He enters the game with a hefty bit of knowledge about the supernatural, and is abundantly armed and equipped to deal with them (in both physical and equipment-based ways), but is otherwise a regular person.
Recently, however, he also purchased what he believes to a dagger owned by King Arthur. Yeah, that King Arthur. Its name is Carnwennan, and it can shroud the user in shadow and can pierce any armor. Arthur used it to slay a giant but cutting off its testicles and disemboweling it.
Faction: None.
Special powers?: He has the power of SPIRIT. Or something. <-- joking, he's "just" a guy.
Special Skills: He's an expert martial artist, and highly skilled in engineering and machining.
Established Relationships: None.
Anything else?: Not off the top of my head, but I'm HIGHLY interested in building stuff with other characters.
Plot ideas?: Finding the people who killed his parents, which he THINKS are vampires, but could also be werewolves. It is also possible he ends up a vampire or wizard, as play takes us!
I'm having a lot of fun with it though
