Post by Chains on Aug 19, 2009 4:38:35 GMT -5
Name: Alexander Iovaniss
Alias/Alternate names: It has been almost a decade since Iovaniss was called by his full name. He has recently adopted the nickname Senge and gives it out as his own to any who meet him. Less commonly used, and reserved almost exclusively as insults, are several other aliases. Among them: Hound, Cur, and Hell-Mongrel, none of which would lead to a favorable, let alone, amiable relationship.
Age: Late twenties, somewhere around 27 or 28.
Memories: Retained, and quite well. He boasts what some would consider near total-recall, but where it once served him quite well in his previous life, it has become more of a hinderance in Animus.
Religion: Senge tends to avoid any thoughts about religion, higher presences, or pre-destination. He does, however, believe firmly in luck and coincidence- more specifically that the former can be a bitch and the second doesn't exist.
Personal Quote/Philosophy: Everyone has a price.
History in detail: While slavery was officially 'frowned upon' within Senge's birth City, it was not exactly an uncommon practice. And although the trade was more muted and discrete in the City than in either of its neighboring kingdoms, it still existed: most commonly within the ranks of nobility. Not only did the elite keep servants who were little more than indentured workers, but in an ironic twist, noble families who found themselves falling into debt would often "gift" a later born son or daughter into their debtors possession. Over time, such a gifting had become the City's most common form of slavery, with the sacrificial child now belonging exclusively to another individual or family of individuals for as long as they are desired.
During a time of financial upheaval so disasterous as to ruin even the ruling Barons, the House of Iovaniss was swept under. In a desperate attempt to buy time, the youngest Iovaniss was sent into the possession of the most ravenous creditor. It was just a prolongation of the inevitable, and even the "gift" of a nobleman's son did little to slake the thirst of the debtors. It was at the table of his new masters that a ten year old Alexander heard of his family's sudden plummet into poverty and his father's execution at the Debtor's Square. And so died his foolish, boyish hopes about a glorious rescue- a reversal to the way things had been Before.
He was never mistreated in the Creditor's care, but he was made to work and work hard. Already well educated and literate, Alexander was given the task of laboriously re-copying bills and letters, and on occasion: to deliver the transcripts to their intended recipients. Those were always harrowing experiences, he quickly learned. The letters were often lists of sums not paid and their recipients were far from pleased to see them. He also quickly learned that, apparently, everyone followed the principal of shooting the messenger. The first couple of times, he was taken completely off guard by the violent reactions but as he grew, he learned how first to evade the blows and then later, how to counter them. And, also as he grew older, he thought several times about running away. But Alexander was nothing if not a practical child and he recognized with his family in hiding and possibly dead, he had nowhere to go and no money whatsoever to his name. So he remained, and he did a lion's share of the household's work, and most of all: he learned how to read people.
Soon, he could tell who would take the letters with a show of bad grace and nothing more and who would lash out at him. When he turned seventeen, his Master began to reward him with small, containable amounts of money. Alexander used a small portion of his earnings towards several nights of drinking and tavern frequenting. It was there that he learned further how to anticipate people's reactions and experimented with just how much he could push a certain individual before they snapped. It cost him a broken nose, one missing tooth, and multiple black eyes, but he got off lightly. What he lacked in brawling experience, he made up for in sheer speed and agility and he soon learned through a mixture of trial and error, the dirtier of fighting moves.
Eventually, the people who owed his Master money found the letters of their debt delivered not by a hapless boy, but by a quietly capable young man. Who, as it turned out, was just as proficient at breaking insteps and smashing noses as he was at delivering such neatly transcribed letters.
But before Alexander was entirely comfortable with this new role, things shifted once more and the routine that had been building to a comfortable permenance, fell into ruin. A plague swept into the city, carried by winds from the far east. It ran rampart through his Master's household, carrying away everyone but Alexander and two singularily lucky maids who emerged from the house-turned-tomb, covered in weeping sores and barely alive. The rest of the city had fared no better, and it was though a slog of sickness and pus, foulness, and decay, that Alexander went searching for someone-anyone- who could help him.
Later, he would hear tales of how the plague was Spirit-sent, a manifestation of the divine whim of Lesser Beings upon the Earth. Later, he would realize that the priests he had ignored weeks earlier, had foretold the event and warned the devout to seek shelter underground. In the bowels of the city. To remain there and hide their faces against the pestilence, lower their eyes against the things that Walked through it and Burned. But all that would come later, and in the now, he knew none of it and so it he walked blindly through the sands of disease.
The Beings found him there, barely alive, in the heart of the storm. For all his power of memory, Alexander recalled only shadows with nothing to cast them- a king on a throne with his eyes torn out, a corpse choking on a crust of bread, and dozens more of them, gathering around in a little knot of darkness. He must have asked them for mercy, but he didn't remember that either. Fever dreams. Shadow dreams.
And the swirl of ravenous sand.
It was sometime later when he awoke. He surged to his feet, shook himself free of the worst of the grit, and turned his head into the wind. The twitch of his ears. The lash of a powerful tail. Rain. Rain was coming. He shook again, a powerful motion that set his spines to rippling, then shot away- over the dunes, across the treacherous darkness, running towards the rain, the storm, oh Gods, the storm-
He awoke again, his mouth metallic with the taste of blood and sand and the feeling in his body as if he had been beaten within an inch of his life. The Spirits were gone. The Plague Storm was gone. And all around him, the city slept like one dead.
Rest of History-summarized: Eventually, the city recovered from the deadly outburst of plague. And although its population had taken a hard hit, those that remained were recovered in full. Shouldering their grief, they worked first and foremost to rebuild and restablish order. The mourning came later. It was a while before Alexander was able to find work, but with his Master's entire family taken by the sickness, he had no choice but to fend for himself. He worked for a while as a cleric, organizing tallies of available food stores, and drawing up lists upon lists of the dead. But with the rebirth of the City came an inevitable rebirth of crime, as desperate times bred a desperate criminal and Alexander found himself more suited to working the streets than recording the endless deceased. He took whatever job he could- nothing was too mean or too petty for him, and eventually, when conditions improved and money flowed once more into the city, he had garnered quite a reputation for himself. Soon he could afford to become more selective with which jobs he took, and gravitated by nature to quick kills, bounty runs, assassination missions. Profficient and unflinching, was the word on the street. Proficient and unflinching.
And so by day he killed people and enjoyed the occasional walk in the riverside parks, and entertained the casual fling. And by night he dreamt of an endless desert and the pursuit of a storm through its fiery dunes.
Things continued in the vein for quite some time, but there comes a point in every man's life, when he can no longer court perfection. When carelessness visits him with all its many inconveniences. Such a day dawned on Alexander sometime in mid Jul, where a lapse in focus and a momentary distraction, cost him his life. An assassin had been set on the assassin and he found himself jumped in a squallid little alley, and strangled into blackness. He came to when he hit the water, bound and weighted down with bricks. He died in that canal, knowing the panic of drowning: the sensation of water violating his lungs and the horror of when all he could inhale was darkness. And sludge.
Several days later a freak storm lashed the city with torrential rains and wind. A ragged beast was cast up from the depths of the canal onto its sloping sides, and lay there unmoving. The monsoon slathered it. Water ran down its black sides, streamed from its open mouth. An hour later, it drew its first shuddering breath. And then another, and another, as if it had just remembered how to breathe. It retched up a veritable tide of water. It twitched as if prodded. Another hour later and it lurched sickly to its feet, and staggered up the sides of the canal. Twice it slipped back to the hungry water below, and once it collapsed completely but each time it braced itself and tottered forward.
After an exhausting struggle, it gained the street and lurched under the eaves of the nearest house. It collapsed again, but this time it did not rise, and instead lay in a pitiful heap with only the slow rise and fall of its massive sides to denote that it still lived. Behind it, it had trailed a brick tied to its left paw with a rope half-rotted away.
Alexander woke with eyes too swollen to make out where he was. His chest felt heavy, as if a weight was pressing down on it. Someone (a child?) was prodding him with something jagged. Wood. It felt like wood. A stick? It was shouting, but he couldn't make out the words. Had he once been able to speak? He wasn't sure. He heard footsteps and then there was nothing at all for quite a long time.
Later, he pieced most of it together. He had been found by a canal-dwelling family, and it was under their care that he made a partial recovery. He still had difficulty breathing, and his left hand didn't quite work right: the fingers bent stiffly, awkwardly, as if they had been deprived of blood for too long. His rescuers naturally wanted to know how he had gotten to their doorstep, what had happened, had he been attacked, but as Alexander couldn't explain it even to himself, he had nothing to tell them but lies. The half-truth satsified them more than the actual truth would have, and he left them thinking they had saved the life of an innocent who had been beaten by thugs and left to drown. For his part, he wondered. And, when he had sufficiently recovered his strength, he began to experiment.
The easiest, most controllable manner of suicide he decided, was strangulation. He could rig a noose from the ceiling of his room so that if he was to kneel and lean forwards, he would choke, but if he tipped backwards he could enjoy slack on the line. Theoretically, as long as he did not lose his balance and topple forwards, he should be able to jerk backwards before he blacked out. It was risky, but he would not endure drowning a second time, and there was really no going back from a slit wrist.
And so, one evening, he put his theory to the test. He rigged the noose, and slipped it over his head and after a brief toast to his health, he knelt down and strained forwards. Almost at once, he felt the tightening of the rope around his neck. It was going to leave quite a bruise, he realized, he should have worn a silk scarf. His breath caught in his throat. His lungs started to protest. He could hear his heartbeat, ringing in his ears. A little more. A little more. He really should have worn a scarf. The beginning flare of panic. His lungs went from protesting to screaming. A little more. Blackness clawed at his vision. Come on. Come on. A little more. He felt the blood rise behind his eyes and thunder in his veins. It wasn't going to work. Pull back. Pull back. Pullbackpullbackpull-
A little more.
Darkness exploded across his vision. His chest felt crushed, constricted. And then, just when he knew it was either pull back or die, he felt something shift inside him. His view shifted, he twisted a neck that was distinctly not human, and lashed a tail that sent his bedside table flying, and snapped the noose with a single shake of his massive head.
Alexander sprawled backwards amid the splinters of his hapless furniture, bleeding from the nose, and laughing like a madman.
Over the next several years, he practiced summoning whatever it was that the Spirits had given him. At first, it took near death experiences to conjour up the transformation, but soon it only took grievous injury (improvement in his mind) and then, after years and years of effort it took only the conviction of death to call it up. The sensation of drowning was almost always sufficient. Eventually, Alexander could wrap himself in a second skin as easily as he could wear his own.
He called his second self Senge (Acis for 'Life') and pushed its limits for self-preservation to the edge time after time. He learned that he was not immortal in its form, just much, much harder to kill. It made him more reckless than was wise, as in courting Death, it was Death that always seemed to lose. Imagine his surprise then, when he woke from a should-have-been fatal encounter with a rival, only to find himself in Animus.
Personality: Alexander's past hasn't been the most conducive to cultivating a sense of trust and stability. Having long since learned that the only thing of permanence in one's life is oneself, he prefers to keep to his own company but will never rudely dismiss another's. A former employer was heard to remark, in passing, to a friend: "Just because he does not lash out at the world," he warned, "It doesn't mean that he isn't angry. He has just crumbled in upon himself from the strength of all that rage, much like how burning paper curls up at the edges before turning into ash. He is good at what he does because of that anger. Every time he pulls a blade across a throat, you can feel it."
This isn't to say that Alexander is some cold-hearted, mean-spirited, ruthless-killing machine: although he is a quiet man, he isn't monosyllabic or non-communicative.
Physical Description: Gifted with the classically handsome features of his house, Alexander is roughly average height for his birth city. Wiry and slender, he nonetheless retains the muscles necessary for his trade but will never aspire to be a brawler. He keeps his black hair cropped to a little above shoulder-length, and wears the rough beginnings of a beard. No tattoos, no piercings, but quite a few choice scars- most of which aren't readily visible.
Eye color: Very light hazel
Senge:
Weapons of Choice: Well versed in the art of knife throwing, knife fighting, and knife juggling- knives will always be his preferred weapon. In a pinch, he can and will use the bodkins he keeps about his person and he is fond of the garrote, but he has almost no knowledge about handling swords, pikes, axes, or any of the bulkier weapons. Can operate and use a crossbow. Also knows how to make the best use of his hands: breaking necks and maintaining a smother hold and all that other good stuff.
Pick two items you will awaken with in your possession in the City of Animus? You may only pick two, so please think it through: The Sinful Sisters.
Alias/Alternate names: It has been almost a decade since Iovaniss was called by his full name. He has recently adopted the nickname Senge and gives it out as his own to any who meet him. Less commonly used, and reserved almost exclusively as insults, are several other aliases. Among them: Hound, Cur, and Hell-Mongrel, none of which would lead to a favorable, let alone, amiable relationship.
Age: Late twenties, somewhere around 27 or 28.
Memories: Retained, and quite well. He boasts what some would consider near total-recall, but where it once served him quite well in his previous life, it has become more of a hinderance in Animus.
Religion: Senge tends to avoid any thoughts about religion, higher presences, or pre-destination. He does, however, believe firmly in luck and coincidence- more specifically that the former can be a bitch and the second doesn't exist.
Personal Quote/Philosophy: Everyone has a price.
History in detail: While slavery was officially 'frowned upon' within Senge's birth City, it was not exactly an uncommon practice. And although the trade was more muted and discrete in the City than in either of its neighboring kingdoms, it still existed: most commonly within the ranks of nobility. Not only did the elite keep servants who were little more than indentured workers, but in an ironic twist, noble families who found themselves falling into debt would often "gift" a later born son or daughter into their debtors possession. Over time, such a gifting had become the City's most common form of slavery, with the sacrificial child now belonging exclusively to another individual or family of individuals for as long as they are desired.
During a time of financial upheaval so disasterous as to ruin even the ruling Barons, the House of Iovaniss was swept under. In a desperate attempt to buy time, the youngest Iovaniss was sent into the possession of the most ravenous creditor. It was just a prolongation of the inevitable, and even the "gift" of a nobleman's son did little to slake the thirst of the debtors. It was at the table of his new masters that a ten year old Alexander heard of his family's sudden plummet into poverty and his father's execution at the Debtor's Square. And so died his foolish, boyish hopes about a glorious rescue- a reversal to the way things had been Before.
He was never mistreated in the Creditor's care, but he was made to work and work hard. Already well educated and literate, Alexander was given the task of laboriously re-copying bills and letters, and on occasion: to deliver the transcripts to their intended recipients. Those were always harrowing experiences, he quickly learned. The letters were often lists of sums not paid and their recipients were far from pleased to see them. He also quickly learned that, apparently, everyone followed the principal of shooting the messenger. The first couple of times, he was taken completely off guard by the violent reactions but as he grew, he learned how first to evade the blows and then later, how to counter them. And, also as he grew older, he thought several times about running away. But Alexander was nothing if not a practical child and he recognized with his family in hiding and possibly dead, he had nowhere to go and no money whatsoever to his name. So he remained, and he did a lion's share of the household's work, and most of all: he learned how to read people.
Soon, he could tell who would take the letters with a show of bad grace and nothing more and who would lash out at him. When he turned seventeen, his Master began to reward him with small, containable amounts of money. Alexander used a small portion of his earnings towards several nights of drinking and tavern frequenting. It was there that he learned further how to anticipate people's reactions and experimented with just how much he could push a certain individual before they snapped. It cost him a broken nose, one missing tooth, and multiple black eyes, but he got off lightly. What he lacked in brawling experience, he made up for in sheer speed and agility and he soon learned through a mixture of trial and error, the dirtier of fighting moves.
Eventually, the people who owed his Master money found the letters of their debt delivered not by a hapless boy, but by a quietly capable young man. Who, as it turned out, was just as proficient at breaking insteps and smashing noses as he was at delivering such neatly transcribed letters.
But before Alexander was entirely comfortable with this new role, things shifted once more and the routine that had been building to a comfortable permenance, fell into ruin. A plague swept into the city, carried by winds from the far east. It ran rampart through his Master's household, carrying away everyone but Alexander and two singularily lucky maids who emerged from the house-turned-tomb, covered in weeping sores and barely alive. The rest of the city had fared no better, and it was though a slog of sickness and pus, foulness, and decay, that Alexander went searching for someone-anyone- who could help him.
Later, he would hear tales of how the plague was Spirit-sent, a manifestation of the divine whim of Lesser Beings upon the Earth. Later, he would realize that the priests he had ignored weeks earlier, had foretold the event and warned the devout to seek shelter underground. In the bowels of the city. To remain there and hide their faces against the pestilence, lower their eyes against the things that Walked through it and Burned. But all that would come later, and in the now, he knew none of it and so it he walked blindly through the sands of disease.
The Beings found him there, barely alive, in the heart of the storm. For all his power of memory, Alexander recalled only shadows with nothing to cast them- a king on a throne with his eyes torn out, a corpse choking on a crust of bread, and dozens more of them, gathering around in a little knot of darkness. He must have asked them for mercy, but he didn't remember that either. Fever dreams. Shadow dreams.
And the swirl of ravenous sand.
It was sometime later when he awoke. He surged to his feet, shook himself free of the worst of the grit, and turned his head into the wind. The twitch of his ears. The lash of a powerful tail. Rain. Rain was coming. He shook again, a powerful motion that set his spines to rippling, then shot away- over the dunes, across the treacherous darkness, running towards the rain, the storm, oh Gods, the storm-
He awoke again, his mouth metallic with the taste of blood and sand and the feeling in his body as if he had been beaten within an inch of his life. The Spirits were gone. The Plague Storm was gone. And all around him, the city slept like one dead.
Rest of History-summarized: Eventually, the city recovered from the deadly outburst of plague. And although its population had taken a hard hit, those that remained were recovered in full. Shouldering their grief, they worked first and foremost to rebuild and restablish order. The mourning came later. It was a while before Alexander was able to find work, but with his Master's entire family taken by the sickness, he had no choice but to fend for himself. He worked for a while as a cleric, organizing tallies of available food stores, and drawing up lists upon lists of the dead. But with the rebirth of the City came an inevitable rebirth of crime, as desperate times bred a desperate criminal and Alexander found himself more suited to working the streets than recording the endless deceased. He took whatever job he could- nothing was too mean or too petty for him, and eventually, when conditions improved and money flowed once more into the city, he had garnered quite a reputation for himself. Soon he could afford to become more selective with which jobs he took, and gravitated by nature to quick kills, bounty runs, assassination missions. Profficient and unflinching, was the word on the street. Proficient and unflinching.
And so by day he killed people and enjoyed the occasional walk in the riverside parks, and entertained the casual fling. And by night he dreamt of an endless desert and the pursuit of a storm through its fiery dunes.
Things continued in the vein for quite some time, but there comes a point in every man's life, when he can no longer court perfection. When carelessness visits him with all its many inconveniences. Such a day dawned on Alexander sometime in mid Jul, where a lapse in focus and a momentary distraction, cost him his life. An assassin had been set on the assassin and he found himself jumped in a squallid little alley, and strangled into blackness. He came to when he hit the water, bound and weighted down with bricks. He died in that canal, knowing the panic of drowning: the sensation of water violating his lungs and the horror of when all he could inhale was darkness. And sludge.
Several days later a freak storm lashed the city with torrential rains and wind. A ragged beast was cast up from the depths of the canal onto its sloping sides, and lay there unmoving. The monsoon slathered it. Water ran down its black sides, streamed from its open mouth. An hour later, it drew its first shuddering breath. And then another, and another, as if it had just remembered how to breathe. It retched up a veritable tide of water. It twitched as if prodded. Another hour later and it lurched sickly to its feet, and staggered up the sides of the canal. Twice it slipped back to the hungry water below, and once it collapsed completely but each time it braced itself and tottered forward.
After an exhausting struggle, it gained the street and lurched under the eaves of the nearest house. It collapsed again, but this time it did not rise, and instead lay in a pitiful heap with only the slow rise and fall of its massive sides to denote that it still lived. Behind it, it had trailed a brick tied to its left paw with a rope half-rotted away.
Alexander woke with eyes too swollen to make out where he was. His chest felt heavy, as if a weight was pressing down on it. Someone (a child?) was prodding him with something jagged. Wood. It felt like wood. A stick? It was shouting, but he couldn't make out the words. Had he once been able to speak? He wasn't sure. He heard footsteps and then there was nothing at all for quite a long time.
Later, he pieced most of it together. He had been found by a canal-dwelling family, and it was under their care that he made a partial recovery. He still had difficulty breathing, and his left hand didn't quite work right: the fingers bent stiffly, awkwardly, as if they had been deprived of blood for too long. His rescuers naturally wanted to know how he had gotten to their doorstep, what had happened, had he been attacked, but as Alexander couldn't explain it even to himself, he had nothing to tell them but lies. The half-truth satsified them more than the actual truth would have, and he left them thinking they had saved the life of an innocent who had been beaten by thugs and left to drown. For his part, he wondered. And, when he had sufficiently recovered his strength, he began to experiment.
The easiest, most controllable manner of suicide he decided, was strangulation. He could rig a noose from the ceiling of his room so that if he was to kneel and lean forwards, he would choke, but if he tipped backwards he could enjoy slack on the line. Theoretically, as long as he did not lose his balance and topple forwards, he should be able to jerk backwards before he blacked out. It was risky, but he would not endure drowning a second time, and there was really no going back from a slit wrist.
And so, one evening, he put his theory to the test. He rigged the noose, and slipped it over his head and after a brief toast to his health, he knelt down and strained forwards. Almost at once, he felt the tightening of the rope around his neck. It was going to leave quite a bruise, he realized, he should have worn a silk scarf. His breath caught in his throat. His lungs started to protest. He could hear his heartbeat, ringing in his ears. A little more. A little more. He really should have worn a scarf. The beginning flare of panic. His lungs went from protesting to screaming. A little more. Blackness clawed at his vision. Come on. Come on. A little more. He felt the blood rise behind his eyes and thunder in his veins. It wasn't going to work. Pull back. Pull back. Pullbackpullbackpull-
A little more.
Darkness exploded across his vision. His chest felt crushed, constricted. And then, just when he knew it was either pull back or die, he felt something shift inside him. His view shifted, he twisted a neck that was distinctly not human, and lashed a tail that sent his bedside table flying, and snapped the noose with a single shake of his massive head.
Alexander sprawled backwards amid the splinters of his hapless furniture, bleeding from the nose, and laughing like a madman.
Over the next several years, he practiced summoning whatever it was that the Spirits had given him. At first, it took near death experiences to conjour up the transformation, but soon it only took grievous injury (improvement in his mind) and then, after years and years of effort it took only the conviction of death to call it up. The sensation of drowning was almost always sufficient. Eventually, Alexander could wrap himself in a second skin as easily as he could wear his own.
He called his second self Senge (Acis for 'Life') and pushed its limits for self-preservation to the edge time after time. He learned that he was not immortal in its form, just much, much harder to kill. It made him more reckless than was wise, as in courting Death, it was Death that always seemed to lose. Imagine his surprise then, when he woke from a should-have-been fatal encounter with a rival, only to find himself in Animus.
Personality: Alexander's past hasn't been the most conducive to cultivating a sense of trust and stability. Having long since learned that the only thing of permanence in one's life is oneself, he prefers to keep to his own company but will never rudely dismiss another's. A former employer was heard to remark, in passing, to a friend: "Just because he does not lash out at the world," he warned, "It doesn't mean that he isn't angry. He has just crumbled in upon himself from the strength of all that rage, much like how burning paper curls up at the edges before turning into ash. He is good at what he does because of that anger. Every time he pulls a blade across a throat, you can feel it."
This isn't to say that Alexander is some cold-hearted, mean-spirited, ruthless-killing machine: although he is a quiet man, he isn't monosyllabic or non-communicative.
Physical Description: Gifted with the classically handsome features of his house, Alexander is roughly average height for his birth city. Wiry and slender, he nonetheless retains the muscles necessary for his trade but will never aspire to be a brawler. He keeps his black hair cropped to a little above shoulder-length, and wears the rough beginnings of a beard. No tattoos, no piercings, but quite a few choice scars- most of which aren't readily visible.
Eye color: Very light hazel
Senge:
Weapons of Choice: Well versed in the art of knife throwing, knife fighting, and knife juggling- knives will always be his preferred weapon. In a pinch, he can and will use the bodkins he keeps about his person and he is fond of the garrote, but he has almost no knowledge about handling swords, pikes, axes, or any of the bulkier weapons. Can operate and use a crossbow. Also knows how to make the best use of his hands: breaking necks and maintaining a smother hold and all that other good stuff.
Pick two items you will awaken with in your possession in the City of Animus? You may only pick two, so please think it through: The Sinful Sisters.