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Without further ado, here's a few of my characters to play against—but I have loads more if these boys don't appeal!
SHORT DESCRIPTION Taiga has an addictive personality that he turns to drinking, gambling, and sometimes opium. He's shrewd; a good businessman, you might call him. Arrogant as fuck, you might also call him. Both are equally true. Whether he has a right to be arrogant remains to be seen, though he is by all rights an intellectual. He is not a milquetoast; anyone who buys into the idea of him as a fop has never seen his cunning, never been on the wrong end of his ambition. He's not a bully—it's too sophisticated. He is not in a habit of making enemies, either. He knows the value of friendly thoughts.
Sexual & Romantic Orientations.
Bisexual, but listing far to the side of androsexual. Masculine bodies entice him particularly. He is attracted to women, and others on every end of the gender spectrum, but his attractions are a bit less immediate.
GENERAL HISTORY {SAMPLE HISTORY—HE'S GOT MANY OTHERS}
Marital Status.
Married, but Goddess, don't ask him about it. He bears no ill will towards his wife—as she doesn't towards him, apparently—but he is not attracted to her, and trying to beget children is an embarrassing chore for them both. He doesn't desire children. He never has. He knows, among other things, he would be a terrible father.
Gift.
Warging—Taiga broke his arm at seventeen, falling badly off a horse. The experience was like shocking his soul out of his body and into the temperamental war horse poised to stamp him. They thought he was unconscious for some time, everyone becoming hysterical at the prospect of a coma, before finally he managed to slide back into himself. His favorite animal he ever warged with was a tiger at a private menagerie. After that, Tiger became his name and his affectation. The epithet, once it stuck, is something you have to approach him correctly to earn the right to call him without repercussions. Members of his immediate family and such are prime candidates for this.
Frequented Locations.
He goes where needed, where that bizarre mixture of business and pleasure that categorizes him will take him. He might show up with full entourage at a lesser noble's house. It is equally likely he'll waltz into a noble or imperial court. He likes visiting his lovers, too, and the meetings are rarely clandestine.
Known For.
Gambling too much, drinking too much, vices that have colored his life and his formation into a man. Being a well-known and much-celebrated mathematician. Everyone knows that Taiga likes his lovers, so rarely is he questioned officially when he's seen bandying words with some handsome young man. He lives to defy expectations, either by gaining fame or infamy.
Religious Views.
A good tool of control, to Taiga. He affects a subtle agnosticism while being in every way correct in his outward following of the Faith.
Relationship With House.
Fond of his family, paradoxically, he likes them and fears them, for knowing him too well. Few others do. He has a strange relationship with people who knew him when he was completely powerless.
Goals & Motivations.
Short term: Make it through his bi-monthly attempt to father a child with his wife.
Long term: Continue work on his mathematical treatise. He feels he's on to something big this time.
SHORT DESCRIPTION The only family Crow loved was his little sister.
Crow was born with the true name Beast in Mio, a small coastal village in Japan, during the sengoku period, to a fae mother and one of her Johns. Yoshitsune Masayoshi fathered Crow without realizing. His mother was Emi, a low-level courtesan in a dockside brothel, who spent her livelihood servicing the armies that plowed through and the fishermen, when the soldiers weren't available.
His mother was a harridan. Crow grew up in abject squalor. His home was a rundown hut with paper patching the roof that let every rain through and cracked tatami that grew mold, near the fish mongers, so everything reeked of high tide. It was almost a parody of shelter, particularly in the winters when wood and coal prices soared, and food was scarce. He was offspring to a woman who spent more time imbibing drinks and drugs than tending her son. She neglected him as much as he abused him. As a child, he learned to go hungry. He became familiar with cold so deep it was a miracle he didn't lose limbs to frostbite. He learned pain was a part of life. He learned the wrong lessons, and he learned them far too soon. He was a vicious bully as a child, taking his rage out on other children of the brothel. That all changed when he was eight, in two parts. The first was the birth of his mother's second child. His sister, born in his eighth year, never had to learn what Crow could spare her from. Crow was crafty and industrious, good with his hands. After his mother weaned his sister (too early, far too early) Crow threw himself into her care. He loved that little girl. Part brother, part father, they fought often, but Hana trusted Crow never to hurt her—the only one she so trusted.
Crow soothed every tantrum, rocked her to sleep night after night. Crow fought for her, faced down grown men for her, has killed for her.
It wasn't enough, of course—the efforts of one little boy—but he tried.
But that wasn't the only trial of Crow's eighth year. That was the year he scarred the grandson of the owner of his mother's cathouse. That was a bad mistake. The pimp beat Crow within an inch of his life, and started selling him as a pain whore for years to come. Crow found his status humiliating, but his diet improved. He was able to bring back food for his sister.
Crow's father returned to the brothel he'd frequented a decade ago. He smelt something similar to himself, and walked into Crow's room. Crow was afraid he would be raped. Instead, the stranger asked, "Boy, who is your mother?"
The truth ascertained, Yoshitsune took Crow away to live what Crow calls a "proud, nomadic life." When Crow begged him to, he reluctantly brought his sister along with him.
He idolized his father. They travelled the world aimlessly looking for amusement. Crow's father had no goals in life and led a rather dissolute lifestyle, which was part of why Crow turned out so profligate. He groomed his young son partially out of his own narcissism, and partially because of the vague sense that Crow would one day be useful to him. Crow never knew that: loved his father in a burning, consuming, obsessive way that never eased, cherishing the gifts his father bestowed on him and soaking up all his father's worst ideas like a sponge.
Yoshitsune groomed Crow, believing one day the young fae would be useful to him. It was not to be. Yoshitsune's crimes caught up with him. Ambushed by hunters in China, Crow was able to escape, now a youngster on the cusp of manhood. His father was not so lucky.
He watched in his hiding place, hugging his sister, as they killed his father. Overcome by grief and rage, he grew older.
Many years of wandering brought him to Brazil, then the US, in the height of the Exclusion era for Asian Americans. When World War II started, amid the chilling anger at people of Japanese ancestry, he along with every other Japanese-American from South and North America was corralled into a desert camp, where he sojourned, humiliated and angry. It was a struggle not to die of iron exposure (an anti-iron magical ring helped in that respect), but he was able to work something out with the guards and the other interned American citizens. He checked yes/yes on the loyalty questionnaire, a questionnaire that made him boil with rage when he saw it, and was automatically drafted. Unlike most Japanese-Americans faced with that condescending piece of paper, he didn't join the 442nd. He was part of a special group of supernatural soldiers who fought on behalf of England and its allies in World War II. Though dyslexic, and unable to read in any of the many languages he spoke, he conducted many missions saving as many from the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust as he could. He was once called a moral man in an immoral world, but he thinks that's horseshit. He killed plenty of American and Russian soldiers who thought they had a right to women's bodies.
When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amid the chilling post-war residual hatred of the Japanese in which a large chunk of Americans responded on a survey about the atomic bombs that they were sorry the Japanese had surrendered so quickly, before more bombs could be dropped, he hung up his uniform with a vow never to fight in another war again. He eventually went back to North America. There he drifted as aimlessly as he ever had. He's working as a social worker and learning to read, now, in night classes at a school for dyslexic adults in Nova Scotia. It's not a glamorous lifestyle he lives, but it's his own.
SHORT DESCRIPTION Karim is the baby of the family, and he exudes it. Spoilt, that's the word for it. Used to fine men, fine women, fine suits, and good food, since he's an adept cook who knew all the best upscale places to eat halal in the tri-county area, when he lived there. If that were all there was to him, he'd be as shallow as some take him for: that, however, is not all there was to him, not by a long shot.
The dearest things to him are his big sister, giving back to his community and his God. He found a meaning in Islam that his sister Leyla did not. In the circles of peers he moves through during his drifting, extroverted social life, Leyla was a constant figure, grounding him, pushing him to achieve, and spoiling him mercilessly. He remembers the packed lunches that appeared in his locker as if by magic with a tender fondness, and still has many handwritten notes from Leyla. Those lunches still appear every once in awhile, mysteriously showing up at his workstation. Many of his friends loudly envied their close relationship; many of their friend's parents pointed out Karim and Leyla and said to their own children, exasperated, can't you be more like them?
Karim has known all of Leyla's secrets since they were children. He knew Leyla loved women before she'd come to terms with it enough to tell him. He laughed when she told him and explained succinctly that he didn't know how she could choose—men and women were both so beautiful. She taught him the word bisexual, he's used it since. He's her active partner-in-crime, her confidante. When his parents heard rumors she didn't keep halal in school he told an active and robust lie that he kept up convincingly for years, until the accident.
He was seven years her junior, and so her stories and games were more magical to him than to her, perhaps. He was an impressionable child, always loud and talking, to the point of getting himself in trouble with neighborhood bigots and their children.
Then came the accident, the night of the full moon in the junkyard he went looking for her, and found his sister convulsing, foaming at the mouth. He didn't want to leave her, but terrified, he knew he had to act fast. He tried to find the junkman's phone and dial 911. She turned to werewolf before he could, and confused and wild on her first night as a wolf, bit her little brother. She was allowed to ride in the ambulance with him next morning, since she lied and said she didn't know how to get home. She refused to leave his side until their parents came and carried her away.
After that, she changed.
It wasn't all the guilt over becoming a werewolf, and turning her little brother into one, too. Part of it was her hitting adolescence hard, and not being nearly so inclined to fool around with her baby of a brother. She blamed herself for years for the accident. Even now, as an adult, she still feels that irrational echo of survivor's guilt.
In some ways, it was good for them to get some distance, no matter how he missed her. He went from Leyla's gawky kid brother to school heartthrob pretty fast after eighth grade, when he shot up like a weed summer of freshman year. He liked to talk, he liked to fool around, but more than all of that combined, he liked helping people. He's stood up to every bully he's ever met, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When Leyla was making her own space and place for herself, Karim was doing much the same thing.
He went to culinary school to pursue his passion for cooking. They stayed in touch, of course, and one day, nineteen-year-old Karim, after the pre-dawn Fajr prayer, called his sister, excited by an idea that had been percolating in him for a while.
His grand idea? Becoming a firefighter. The hero bug had bit Karim hard, and after all, he argued stubbornly through all the hours, days, weeks spent wheedling his way through Leyla's refusal, it was a solid career, and some of the Firefighters looked no older than him—some looked measurably younger, in fact.
Finally, she agreed. He was trained, and spent years in the NYC fire department. Wanting a break from big city life, he's just passed Canada's immigration policies and moved out to Ashbourne, Nova Scotia, where he's slated to take up a position at the local fire department.
SHORT DESCRIPTION You've asked often about my past, so I've decided to write a letter detailing what I remember of the territory now called Uzbekistan, and of my family.
Mother wept the day I was born.
Father was a spoke in the Khanates' wheel in our backwater hometown, a pastoral, ethnically Turkic village twenty miles from Samarkand. He was that - he was also a drunk. Not the bumbling kind of boozer you see in movies, nose red from burst capillaries and cheerful, tries to do the right thing, caterwauls songs when the drink's in him.
No, to me, as a boy, my father was a devil when he drank. Mean, worthless, stinking … my father was not a man, not by my estimation.
I don't remember my mother much. I knew she was his slave. The concept of Mother's status was never outlined for me, but I knew the concept of slave very well, and so I knew her status to my father and the village. To me she was a scared, mousey wisp of a woman, who Elder Brother hit as often as Father did.
From a few blurry recollections of when I was very young, I think she doted on me. I grew up with Pop's physique, though, and once I got to an old enough age that it was clear I looked nothing like her, she left reality and never came back.
I fought with father constantly, always wanted him to hit me instead of her. I wanted to protect her.
My first bitter taste of failure came early. Pa beat mother to death with a tent pole. Came home one day, blood everywhere and the neighbors asking questions, dad long gone, using his glamour to run from the law. He'd initiated contact a few times in the following years. He'd tell me all about how he'd never touched a bottle since, which I knew wasn't true because the cup of tea he was drinking in his pathetic little hideout was spiked. You could smell the liquor.
I left that town, Elder Brother in tow, and we both started learning more serious martial arts. I was young, and reckless, but I had a level head. And I was good. Very, very good. I found a fight with a worthy opponent to be the only thing that brought me joy.
Father's long dead. He got so drunk he lowered the defenses and wandered into town, raving, where he was recognized and taken away to prison. They hung him quickly. Elder Brother wanted to see them do it; I stopped him. Didn't want the bastard to have any family around him when he went, just the cold, hate-filled stares of strangers.
From there, things were better. I fell in love with a kitsune. Her name is not important. I do not want to write it.
When we met, imperialism had reached Central Asia long before. Russia was manipulating Samarkand, and starting to reach out into the Turkic tribes I spent the first two hundred years of my life among.
After the Sino-Russian war, I resolved to see Japan, then a rising world power at the height of the Meiji Era.
Japan at the time was incredibly xenophobic. Everywhere I turned, people turned away. I hated the Japanese, until I met her.
She ran a dojo and invited me to a spar. I agreed: we were so evenly matched that I was shocked. She was so small, and finely featured as a doll.
We were married in secret on the eve of World War II, when nationalism and hatred was boiling up in the country of her birth.
The bombs used to fall all day and all night. That was during the war, a terrible thing. Suddenly the claxons started howling, and the firebombs smashed through the wood and paper, setting all alight.
Many of my students had been thrown out of homes whose rations were scarce, told to go find jobs they were too young for. Others had watched their families, their homes, their whole lives consumed in flame, and fled here to be safe from the recruiters.
I believed back then in the value of discipline. I was strong, always able to provide enough food somehow, and though I saw the fires from a distance, my dojo was well-protected against human weapons.
She was a dissident: believed that everyone who was in charge from the emperor on down that had led her country on that doomed crusade should be deposed. And she was so feisty I think sometimes she thought she could do it herself.
That was 1944. But it was not to last.
Our dojo, on the outskirts of Nagasaki, then a bastion for foreigners like me and the Christian capital of Japan, seemed to us impregnable. But we were there on August 9th, 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped. The mountains saved us from the worst of the blast, but not the fires.
She and I and my brother were the only survivors.
I remember the flames when I burned my students' bodies.
One big pyre, one long prayer. My brother was there, hiding smiles that I still saw in his sick face, watching the roasting flesh with interest.
She was there, her concern and compassion like a blade, cutting me, for I selfishly wanted none of it.
She died of the radiation sickness, three months later.
I had no more ties to Japan. I migrated back into China, returning with all the Korean slaves. I returned to Samarkand. I wanted to herd sheep.
The Russians closed the iron curtain, and things became worse and worse. The memories of those times still send shudders down my spine, the fear, the suspicion. The hatred. I stayed in contact with the Seelie Court, who I knew had been watching from my birth. They were a bastion of help and sanity for me. I learned to really be a fae in those times, beyond just the rudimentary glamour I had gained early in life, and the magic that had always been there.
It was relief deep in my heart when Uzbekistan declared independence on August 31st, 1991.
Having been cooped up in my village for so long, I found sheep no longer diverting. I was afraid of going to America. The only things I knew of them were their bombs.
Eventually, though, I resolved to go and meet the people, to see if they were really as evil as they seemed. It took over two years to acquire legal permission to enter the country, but I was incredibly lucky, and did manage it. In December of 1993 I entered an airplane and flew, stopping over in Japan—hours I spent staring wide-eyed out at Tokyo's rebuilt skyline—and finally stopped off in San Francisco.
I never left the city. I settled in Chinatown, and slowly grew my feelings as a legal immigrant. In 1995, I entered the police academy under a push to diversify law enforcement. At first, I was a token minority beat cop with a funny accent. But I got through training, graduating the academy with honors. I started my job.
I made detective a couple years ago. I met you. The rest you know as well as myself.
This is my story. I hope it doesn't disturb you.
Yours with sincerity,
Tisu Bagci
APPEARANCE
HAIR & EYES
His jet black hair is kempt, cut in an almost military-style. His eyes are black.
HEIGHT
6'2"
TATTOO(S) & SCAR(S)
None
OTHER
He's a big guy, like a breathing mountain. His eyebrows are barely there, and his eyes are a rude bright black. His face is care-worn and lined, and he has square teeth and a stocky neck, which leads down into his ample muscles. He often forgets to shave, since a fae's glamoured hair grows more slowly, and then realizes he's left it too long when he has a scruff of a beard.
PERSONALITY & ORIENTATION
SEXUALITY
Bisexual
ROMANTIC ORIENTATION
Biromantic
ABOUT
Unflappable, indefatigable, enigmatic, and with that slight touch of honor and mercy that even he doesn't know quite when he'll reveal. The only way he sees to atone for his past was to never be vulnerable again. Perhaps he just wanted to become the monster he already felt himself to be. Perhaps he was just afraid of loving someone. Perhaps he was just afraid of growing old.
Tisu is a complex case. He's like an anthill. The deeper you dig, the more tunnels appear, and inside each is a creature ready to bite. Layer upon layer of bravado, façades, contradicting desires and intensely-wrought obsessions. But, beneath it all, I suspect you'll find just a normal man with a wounded heart, and a broken dream.
QUIRKS, DISLIKES & LIKES
LIKES Orange juice, reading, classic Japanese films (Akira Kurosawa, anyone?), and listening to Hibari Misora sing.
DISLIKES Hearing arrogant talk, being disappointed, his elder brother.
FEARS Growing old. Infirmity. Also, he was an alcoholic when he was younger. He fears himself when he drinks.
DESIRE To forget his past.
FAMILY
FATHER & MOTHER
He is a rarity, having both a father and a mother who were djinn. His father was a rogue fae, and he bought his mother from a slaver.
SIBLINGS
One older brother born to his father and mother together, who was closer to Tisu's father in temperament. Tisu was far more aligned with his mother.
CHILDREN
None.
PETS
None at the moment, may change rapidly. Soft spot for animals.
SHORT DESCRIPTION Jamaal grew up in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, and had not an idyllic childhood, but certainly a lot of happy memories of baking with his no-nonsense businesswoman mother, flour everywhere, and being carried out to the beach by his father, and particularly of his family's matriarch, the slim and still-beautiful Grandma Amoy, who took his demonological education in hand.
Grandma Amoy warned him she could only teach him Jamaican forms of magic, since she emigrated from her native Jamaica to North Carolina as a young adult to follow her American beau Robbie, Jamaal's grandfather. She encouraged him to seek out other forms of magic and learn them, too.
Jamaal was accepted into many schools, a bright boy with what everyone encouraged him and believed to be a bright future. He decided after some soul-searching to go to Morehouse College. His sister, Aaliyah, was getting a civil union with her long-time partner Jessica Cole.
Jamaal's family was targeted by a powerful demon. His parents collected fine art, and a demon wanted a piece. His mother wouldn't sell. It was the summer after Jamaal's senior year. He'd just been accepted into his first choice. He was out late celebrating.
He came home to a nightmare. Robbers had broken into his home, killed his family. Taken the art and anything else they could sell.
Jamaal went into a cycle of grief and rage. He didn't even tell Morehouse he wasn't coming. He just didn't show up.
He spent years using his pathfinding to track down the robbers. Consumed by the desire to bring them to justice, he finally surprised them. He tied them up. He meant to kill them.
Instead, he sat down and talked to them. He told them what it was like, losing his parents fresh out of high school.
He talked, and then he let them go.
One of the robbers was moved by his story. He turned his partners in, and after serving his time in the Panopticon, he found Jamaal again. They became friends.
There's still one person watching Jamaal: the demon who ordered the hit. To them, Jamaal is a cute plaything.
They've not yet made their move.
SHORT DESCRIPTION Lonán Carniff rechristened himself Lorne as a boy, one of those stupid childhood nicknames that just stuck. He was born in Ireland, County Cork, in a rural village named Boherbue. His mother claimed to be wasting away for love of his father, who left her when Lorne was a baby. Privately, Lorne thought the drinking and lack of stable employment had more to do with her wasting away than love. She showed only passing interest in her son for his resemblance to his father.
Like many children who grow up filling another person's role in their parents' heart, Lorne tried hard to be everything his mother wanted and needed, and failed over and over again. He's still caught in that trap of wanting approval and needing attention, and playacting to get it. He struggles often with this aspect of his childhood, but he bears no ill will towards his mother (unlike as an early teen), and simply struggles to reconcile these extremes.
Lorne decided to pursue adventure and real education before he went back to school. He went to the City and fell in with a bad crowd. Far too quickly, he ended up trafficked into sex work.
SHORT DESCRIPTION What you don't know about Beast could fill a couple of books. They'd be big, and fat, and maybe she'd leave lipstick marks on them, just for you. Her life is written in lipstick marks, in broken things, in the knobby bones on his arm.
Don't be sorry for him. Demons choose their form. He wants to be skinny and he wants to be thin.
Gender is a human construct, and she doesn't abide by its tenets. Usually she'll choose a pronoun for a day, but it might not match the one he uses tomorrow. She often tells people to use the pronouns that appeal—except for it. But some have chosen it, despite her warnings.
She remembers each and every one of those people by name.
In all honesty Beast is a paradox. They were sold to Gula in the Reyes era, but proved too unruly, and were sold afterwards to Mammon, a solo who fancied himself arch-demon of greed. Mammon is dead, though. Another older demon named Altair killed him, and took Beast. But Legion came and Beast was taken to a women's shelter, where he's lived since Altair was taken by the police. He is an angry manipulative survivor, though. Who knows what he'll come to.
What he's done to keep going on this Earth doesn't bear repeating. He's not ashamed of any of it, most of it. If you asked him about it, he'd say he only chose survival.
Beast learned about crow tengu many years ago, and likes to think of himself as one. At times, he grows black wings from his scrawny back, though they never manage to carry his weight.
Beast has never been the companion of a human. He feels disdain for the whole process. To watch some dribbling human baby grow up into a snot-nosed kid? To always be within ten paces of another sentient being? Desire is not the word he feels for that.
TAIGA HISOKA
SHORT DESCRIPTION Taiga has an addictive personality that he turns to drinking, gambling, and sometimes opium. He's shrewd; a good businessman, you might call him. Arrogant as fuck, you might also call him. Both are equally true. Whether he has a right to be arrogant remains to be seen, though he is by all rights an intellectual. He is not a milquetoast; anyone who buys into the idea of him as a fop has never seen his cunning, never been on the wrong end of his ambition. He's not a bully—it's too sophisticated. He is not in a habit of making enemies, either. He knows the value of friendly thoughts.
Sexual & Romantic Orientations.
Bisexual, but listing far to the side of androsexual. Masculine bodies entice him particularly. He is attracted to women, and others on every end of the gender spectrum, but his attractions are a bit less immediate.
GENERAL HISTORY {SAMPLE HISTORY—HE'S GOT MANY OTHERS}
Marital Status.
Married, but Goddess, don't ask him about it. He bears no ill will towards his wife—as she doesn't towards him, apparently—but he is not attracted to her, and trying to beget children is an embarrassing chore for them both. He doesn't desire children. He never has. He knows, among other things, he would be a terrible father.
Gift.
Warging—Taiga broke his arm at seventeen, falling badly off a horse. The experience was like shocking his soul out of his body and into the temperamental war horse poised to stamp him. They thought he was unconscious for some time, everyone becoming hysterical at the prospect of a coma, before finally he managed to slide back into himself. His favorite animal he ever warged with was a tiger at a private menagerie. After that, Tiger became his name and his affectation. The epithet, once it stuck, is something you have to approach him correctly to earn the right to call him without repercussions. Members of his immediate family and such are prime candidates for this.
Frequented Locations.
He goes where needed, where that bizarre mixture of business and pleasure that categorizes him will take him. He might show up with full entourage at a lesser noble's house. It is equally likely he'll waltz into a noble or imperial court. He likes visiting his lovers, too, and the meetings are rarely clandestine.
Known For.
Gambling too much, drinking too much, vices that have colored his life and his formation into a man. Being a well-known and much-celebrated mathematician. Everyone knows that Taiga likes his lovers, so rarely is he questioned officially when he's seen bandying words with some handsome young man. He lives to defy expectations, either by gaining fame or infamy.
Religious Views.
A good tool of control, to Taiga. He affects a subtle agnosticism while being in every way correct in his outward following of the Faith.
Relationship With House.
Fond of his family, paradoxically, he likes them and fears them, for knowing him too well. Few others do. He has a strange relationship with people who knew him when he was completely powerless.
Goals & Motivations.
Short term: Make it through his bi-monthly attempt to father a child with his wife.
Long term: Continue work on his mathematical treatise. He feels he's on to something big this time.
CROW MASAYOSHI
SHORT DESCRIPTION The only family Crow loved was his little sister.
Crow was born with the true name Beast in Mio, a small coastal village in Japan, during the sengoku period, to a fae mother and one of her Johns. Yoshitsune Masayoshi fathered Crow without realizing. His mother was Emi, a low-level courtesan in a dockside brothel, who spent her livelihood servicing the armies that plowed through and the fishermen, when the soldiers weren't available.
His mother was a harridan. Crow grew up in abject squalor. His home was a rundown hut with paper patching the roof that let every rain through and cracked tatami that grew mold, near the fish mongers, so everything reeked of high tide. It was almost a parody of shelter, particularly in the winters when wood and coal prices soared, and food was scarce. He was offspring to a woman who spent more time imbibing drinks and drugs than tending her son. She neglected him as much as he abused him. As a child, he learned to go hungry. He became familiar with cold so deep it was a miracle he didn't lose limbs to frostbite. He learned pain was a part of life. He learned the wrong lessons, and he learned them far too soon. He was a vicious bully as a child, taking his rage out on other children of the brothel. That all changed when he was eight, in two parts. The first was the birth of his mother's second child. His sister, born in his eighth year, never had to learn what Crow could spare her from. Crow was crafty and industrious, good with his hands. After his mother weaned his sister (too early, far too early) Crow threw himself into her care. He loved that little girl. Part brother, part father, they fought often, but Hana trusted Crow never to hurt her—the only one she so trusted.
Crow soothed every tantrum, rocked her to sleep night after night. Crow fought for her, faced down grown men for her, has killed for her.
It wasn't enough, of course—the efforts of one little boy—but he tried.
But that wasn't the only trial of Crow's eighth year. That was the year he scarred the grandson of the owner of his mother's cathouse. That was a bad mistake. The pimp beat Crow within an inch of his life, and started selling him as a pain whore for years to come. Crow found his status humiliating, but his diet improved. He was able to bring back food for his sister.
Crow's father returned to the brothel he'd frequented a decade ago. He smelt something similar to himself, and walked into Crow's room. Crow was afraid he would be raped. Instead, the stranger asked, "Boy, who is your mother?"
The truth ascertained, Yoshitsune took Crow away to live what Crow calls a "proud, nomadic life." When Crow begged him to, he reluctantly brought his sister along with him.
He idolized his father. They travelled the world aimlessly looking for amusement. Crow's father had no goals in life and led a rather dissolute lifestyle, which was part of why Crow turned out so profligate. He groomed his young son partially out of his own narcissism, and partially because of the vague sense that Crow would one day be useful to him. Crow never knew that: loved his father in a burning, consuming, obsessive way that never eased, cherishing the gifts his father bestowed on him and soaking up all his father's worst ideas like a sponge.
Yoshitsune groomed Crow, believing one day the young fae would be useful to him. It was not to be. Yoshitsune's crimes caught up with him. Ambushed by hunters in China, Crow was able to escape, now a youngster on the cusp of manhood. His father was not so lucky.
He watched in his hiding place, hugging his sister, as they killed his father. Overcome by grief and rage, he grew older.
Many years of wandering brought him to Brazil, then the US, in the height of the Exclusion era for Asian Americans. When World War II started, amid the chilling anger at people of Japanese ancestry, he along with every other Japanese-American from South and North America was corralled into a desert camp, where he sojourned, humiliated and angry. It was a struggle not to die of iron exposure (an anti-iron magical ring helped in that respect), but he was able to work something out with the guards and the other interned American citizens. He checked yes/yes on the loyalty questionnaire, a questionnaire that made him boil with rage when he saw it, and was automatically drafted. Unlike most Japanese-Americans faced with that condescending piece of paper, he didn't join the 442nd. He was part of a special group of supernatural soldiers who fought on behalf of England and its allies in World War II. Though dyslexic, and unable to read in any of the many languages he spoke, he conducted many missions saving as many from the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust as he could. He was once called a moral man in an immoral world, but he thinks that's horseshit. He killed plenty of American and Russian soldiers who thought they had a right to women's bodies.
When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amid the chilling post-war residual hatred of the Japanese in which a large chunk of Americans responded on a survey about the atomic bombs that they were sorry the Japanese had surrendered so quickly, before more bombs could be dropped, he hung up his uniform with a vow never to fight in another war again. He eventually went back to North America. There he drifted as aimlessly as he ever had. He's working as a social worker and learning to read, now, in night classes at a school for dyslexic adults in Nova Scotia. It's not a glamorous lifestyle he lives, but it's his own.
KARIM MAHMOUD MAGDI
SHORT DESCRIPTION Karim is the baby of the family, and he exudes it. Spoilt, that's the word for it. Used to fine men, fine women, fine suits, and good food, since he's an adept cook who knew all the best upscale places to eat halal in the tri-county area, when he lived there. If that were all there was to him, he'd be as shallow as some take him for: that, however, is not all there was to him, not by a long shot.
The dearest things to him are his big sister, giving back to his community and his God. He found a meaning in Islam that his sister Leyla did not. In the circles of peers he moves through during his drifting, extroverted social life, Leyla was a constant figure, grounding him, pushing him to achieve, and spoiling him mercilessly. He remembers the packed lunches that appeared in his locker as if by magic with a tender fondness, and still has many handwritten notes from Leyla. Those lunches still appear every once in awhile, mysteriously showing up at his workstation. Many of his friends loudly envied their close relationship; many of their friend's parents pointed out Karim and Leyla and said to their own children, exasperated, can't you be more like them?
Karim has known all of Leyla's secrets since they were children. He knew Leyla loved women before she'd come to terms with it enough to tell him. He laughed when she told him and explained succinctly that he didn't know how she could choose—men and women were both so beautiful. She taught him the word bisexual, he's used it since. He's her active partner-in-crime, her confidante. When his parents heard rumors she didn't keep halal in school he told an active and robust lie that he kept up convincingly for years, until the accident.
He was seven years her junior, and so her stories and games were more magical to him than to her, perhaps. He was an impressionable child, always loud and talking, to the point of getting himself in trouble with neighborhood bigots and their children.
Then came the accident, the night of the full moon in the junkyard he went looking for her, and found his sister convulsing, foaming at the mouth. He didn't want to leave her, but terrified, he knew he had to act fast. He tried to find the junkman's phone and dial 911. She turned to werewolf before he could, and confused and wild on her first night as a wolf, bit her little brother. She was allowed to ride in the ambulance with him next morning, since she lied and said she didn't know how to get home. She refused to leave his side until their parents came and carried her away.
After that, she changed.
It wasn't all the guilt over becoming a werewolf, and turning her little brother into one, too. Part of it was her hitting adolescence hard, and not being nearly so inclined to fool around with her baby of a brother. She blamed herself for years for the accident. Even now, as an adult, she still feels that irrational echo of survivor's guilt.
In some ways, it was good for them to get some distance, no matter how he missed her. He went from Leyla's gawky kid brother to school heartthrob pretty fast after eighth grade, when he shot up like a weed summer of freshman year. He liked to talk, he liked to fool around, but more than all of that combined, he liked helping people. He's stood up to every bully he's ever met, sometimes with disastrous consequences. When Leyla was making her own space and place for herself, Karim was doing much the same thing.
He went to culinary school to pursue his passion for cooking. They stayed in touch, of course, and one day, nineteen-year-old Karim, after the pre-dawn Fajr prayer, called his sister, excited by an idea that had been percolating in him for a while.
His grand idea? Becoming a firefighter. The hero bug had bit Karim hard, and after all, he argued stubbornly through all the hours, days, weeks spent wheedling his way through Leyla's refusal, it was a solid career, and some of the Firefighters looked no older than him—some looked measurably younger, in fact.
Finally, she agreed. He was trained, and spent years in the NYC fire department. Wanting a break from big city life, he's just passed Canada's immigration policies and moved out to Ashbourne, Nova Scotia, where he's slated to take up a position at the local fire department.
TISU BAGCI
SHORT DESCRIPTION You've asked often about my past, so I've decided to write a letter detailing what I remember of the territory now called Uzbekistan, and of my family.
Mother wept the day I was born.
Father was a spoke in the Khanates' wheel in our backwater hometown, a pastoral, ethnically Turkic village twenty miles from Samarkand. He was that - he was also a drunk. Not the bumbling kind of boozer you see in movies, nose red from burst capillaries and cheerful, tries to do the right thing, caterwauls songs when the drink's in him.
No, to me, as a boy, my father was a devil when he drank. Mean, worthless, stinking … my father was not a man, not by my estimation.
I don't remember my mother much. I knew she was his slave. The concept of Mother's status was never outlined for me, but I knew the concept of slave very well, and so I knew her status to my father and the village. To me she was a scared, mousey wisp of a woman, who Elder Brother hit as often as Father did.
From a few blurry recollections of when I was very young, I think she doted on me. I grew up with Pop's physique, though, and once I got to an old enough age that it was clear I looked nothing like her, she left reality and never came back.
I fought with father constantly, always wanted him to hit me instead of her. I wanted to protect her.
My first bitter taste of failure came early. Pa beat mother to death with a tent pole. Came home one day, blood everywhere and the neighbors asking questions, dad long gone, using his glamour to run from the law. He'd initiated contact a few times in the following years. He'd tell me all about how he'd never touched a bottle since, which I knew wasn't true because the cup of tea he was drinking in his pathetic little hideout was spiked. You could smell the liquor.
I left that town, Elder Brother in tow, and we both started learning more serious martial arts. I was young, and reckless, but I had a level head. And I was good. Very, very good. I found a fight with a worthy opponent to be the only thing that brought me joy.
Father's long dead. He got so drunk he lowered the defenses and wandered into town, raving, where he was recognized and taken away to prison. They hung him quickly. Elder Brother wanted to see them do it; I stopped him. Didn't want the bastard to have any family around him when he went, just the cold, hate-filled stares of strangers.
From there, things were better. I fell in love with a kitsune. Her name is not important. I do not want to write it.
When we met, imperialism had reached Central Asia long before. Russia was manipulating Samarkand, and starting to reach out into the Turkic tribes I spent the first two hundred years of my life among.
After the Sino-Russian war, I resolved to see Japan, then a rising world power at the height of the Meiji Era.
Japan at the time was incredibly xenophobic. Everywhere I turned, people turned away. I hated the Japanese, until I met her.
She ran a dojo and invited me to a spar. I agreed: we were so evenly matched that I was shocked. She was so small, and finely featured as a doll.
We were married in secret on the eve of World War II, when nationalism and hatred was boiling up in the country of her birth.
The bombs used to fall all day and all night. That was during the war, a terrible thing. Suddenly the claxons started howling, and the firebombs smashed through the wood and paper, setting all alight.
Many of my students had been thrown out of homes whose rations were scarce, told to go find jobs they were too young for. Others had watched their families, their homes, their whole lives consumed in flame, and fled here to be safe from the recruiters.
I believed back then in the value of discipline. I was strong, always able to provide enough food somehow, and though I saw the fires from a distance, my dojo was well-protected against human weapons.
She was a dissident: believed that everyone who was in charge from the emperor on down that had led her country on that doomed crusade should be deposed. And she was so feisty I think sometimes she thought she could do it herself.
That was 1944. But it was not to last.
Our dojo, on the outskirts of Nagasaki, then a bastion for foreigners like me and the Christian capital of Japan, seemed to us impregnable. But we were there on August 9th, 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped. The mountains saved us from the worst of the blast, but not the fires.
She and I and my brother were the only survivors.
I remember the flames when I burned my students' bodies.
One big pyre, one long prayer. My brother was there, hiding smiles that I still saw in his sick face, watching the roasting flesh with interest.
She was there, her concern and compassion like a blade, cutting me, for I selfishly wanted none of it.
She died of the radiation sickness, three months later.
I had no more ties to Japan. I migrated back into China, returning with all the Korean slaves. I returned to Samarkand. I wanted to herd sheep.
The Russians closed the iron curtain, and things became worse and worse. The memories of those times still send shudders down my spine, the fear, the suspicion. The hatred. I stayed in contact with the Seelie Court, who I knew had been watching from my birth. They were a bastion of help and sanity for me. I learned to really be a fae in those times, beyond just the rudimentary glamour I had gained early in life, and the magic that had always been there.
It was relief deep in my heart when Uzbekistan declared independence on August 31st, 1991.
Having been cooped up in my village for so long, I found sheep no longer diverting. I was afraid of going to America. The only things I knew of them were their bombs.
Eventually, though, I resolved to go and meet the people, to see if they were really as evil as they seemed. It took over two years to acquire legal permission to enter the country, but I was incredibly lucky, and did manage it. In December of 1993 I entered an airplane and flew, stopping over in Japan—hours I spent staring wide-eyed out at Tokyo's rebuilt skyline—and finally stopped off in San Francisco.
I never left the city. I settled in Chinatown, and slowly grew my feelings as a legal immigrant. In 1995, I entered the police academy under a push to diversify law enforcement. At first, I was a token minority beat cop with a funny accent. But I got through training, graduating the academy with honors. I started my job.
I made detective a couple years ago. I met you. The rest you know as well as myself.
This is my story. I hope it doesn't disturb you.
Yours with sincerity,
Tisu Bagci
APPEARANCE
HAIR & EYES
His jet black hair is kempt, cut in an almost military-style. His eyes are black.
HEIGHT
6'2"
TATTOO(S) & SCAR(S)
None
OTHER
He's a big guy, like a breathing mountain. His eyebrows are barely there, and his eyes are a rude bright black. His face is care-worn and lined, and he has square teeth and a stocky neck, which leads down into his ample muscles. He often forgets to shave, since a fae's glamoured hair grows more slowly, and then realizes he's left it too long when he has a scruff of a beard.
PERSONALITY & ORIENTATION
SEXUALITY
Bisexual
ROMANTIC ORIENTATION
Biromantic
ABOUT
Unflappable, indefatigable, enigmatic, and with that slight touch of honor and mercy that even he doesn't know quite when he'll reveal. The only way he sees to atone for his past was to never be vulnerable again. Perhaps he just wanted to become the monster he already felt himself to be. Perhaps he was just afraid of loving someone. Perhaps he was just afraid of growing old.
Tisu is a complex case. He's like an anthill. The deeper you dig, the more tunnels appear, and inside each is a creature ready to bite. Layer upon layer of bravado, façades, contradicting desires and intensely-wrought obsessions. But, beneath it all, I suspect you'll find just a normal man with a wounded heart, and a broken dream.
QUIRKS, DISLIKES & LIKES
LIKES Orange juice, reading, classic Japanese films (Akira Kurosawa, anyone?), and listening to Hibari Misora sing.
DISLIKES Hearing arrogant talk, being disappointed, his elder brother.
FEARS Growing old. Infirmity. Also, he was an alcoholic when he was younger. He fears himself when he drinks.
DESIRE To forget his past.
FAMILY
FATHER & MOTHER
He is a rarity, having both a father and a mother who were djinn. His father was a rogue fae, and he bought his mother from a slaver.
SIBLINGS
One older brother born to his father and mother together, who was closer to Tisu's father in temperament. Tisu was far more aligned with his mother.
CHILDREN
None.
PETS
None at the moment, may change rapidly. Soft spot for animals.
JAMAAL WALKER
SHORT DESCRIPTION Jamaal grew up in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, and had not an idyllic childhood, but certainly a lot of happy memories of baking with his no-nonsense businesswoman mother, flour everywhere, and being carried out to the beach by his father, and particularly of his family's matriarch, the slim and still-beautiful Grandma Amoy, who took his demonological education in hand.
Grandma Amoy warned him she could only teach him Jamaican forms of magic, since she emigrated from her native Jamaica to North Carolina as a young adult to follow her American beau Robbie, Jamaal's grandfather. She encouraged him to seek out other forms of magic and learn them, too.
Jamaal was accepted into many schools, a bright boy with what everyone encouraged him and believed to be a bright future. He decided after some soul-searching to go to Morehouse College. His sister, Aaliyah, was getting a civil union with her long-time partner Jessica Cole.
Jamaal's family was targeted by a powerful demon. His parents collected fine art, and a demon wanted a piece. His mother wouldn't sell. It was the summer after Jamaal's senior year. He'd just been accepted into his first choice. He was out late celebrating.
He came home to a nightmare. Robbers had broken into his home, killed his family. Taken the art and anything else they could sell.
Jamaal went into a cycle of grief and rage. He didn't even tell Morehouse he wasn't coming. He just didn't show up.
He spent years using his pathfinding to track down the robbers. Consumed by the desire to bring them to justice, he finally surprised them. He tied them up. He meant to kill them.
Instead, he sat down and talked to them. He told them what it was like, losing his parents fresh out of high school.
He talked, and then he let them go.
One of the robbers was moved by his story. He turned his partners in, and after serving his time in the Panopticon, he found Jamaal again. They became friends.
There's still one person watching Jamaal: the demon who ordered the hit. To them, Jamaal is a cute plaything.
They've not yet made their move.
LORNE CARNIFF
SHORT DESCRIPTION Lonán Carniff rechristened himself Lorne as a boy, one of those stupid childhood nicknames that just stuck. He was born in Ireland, County Cork, in a rural village named Boherbue. His mother claimed to be wasting away for love of his father, who left her when Lorne was a baby. Privately, Lorne thought the drinking and lack of stable employment had more to do with her wasting away than love. She showed only passing interest in her son for his resemblance to his father.
Like many children who grow up filling another person's role in their parents' heart, Lorne tried hard to be everything his mother wanted and needed, and failed over and over again. He's still caught in that trap of wanting approval and needing attention, and playacting to get it. He struggles often with this aspect of his childhood, but he bears no ill will towards his mother (unlike as an early teen), and simply struggles to reconcile these extremes.
Lorne decided to pursue adventure and real education before he went back to school. He went to the City and fell in with a bad crowd. Far too quickly, he ended up trafficked into sex work.
BEAST
SHORT DESCRIPTION What you don't know about Beast could fill a couple of books. They'd be big, and fat, and maybe she'd leave lipstick marks on them, just for you. Her life is written in lipstick marks, in broken things, in the knobby bones on his arm.
Don't be sorry for him. Demons choose their form. He wants to be skinny and he wants to be thin.
Gender is a human construct, and she doesn't abide by its tenets. Usually she'll choose a pronoun for a day, but it might not match the one he uses tomorrow. She often tells people to use the pronouns that appeal—except for it. But some have chosen it, despite her warnings.
She remembers each and every one of those people by name.
In all honesty Beast is a paradox. They were sold to Gula in the Reyes era, but proved too unruly, and were sold afterwards to Mammon, a solo who fancied himself arch-demon of greed. Mammon is dead, though. Another older demon named Altair killed him, and took Beast. But Legion came and Beast was taken to a women's shelter, where he's lived since Altair was taken by the police. He is an angry manipulative survivor, though. Who knows what he'll come to.
What he's done to keep going on this Earth doesn't bear repeating. He's not ashamed of any of it, most of it. If you asked him about it, he'd say he only chose survival.
Beast learned about crow tengu many years ago, and likes to think of himself as one. At times, he grows black wings from his scrawny back, though they never manage to carry his weight.
Beast has never been the companion of a human. He feels disdain for the whole process. To watch some dribbling human baby grow up into a snot-nosed kid? To always be within ten paces of another sentient being? Desire is not the word he feels for that.
