Post by WIL CROFT on May 21, 2011 18:15:21 GMT -5
WILCROFT
all alone there you stand
won't you let me take your hand
come with me if you wanna save yourself
• • HOPE YOU GOT YOUR THINGS TOGETHER,
hope you are quite prepared to die
FULL NAME: Vadim Zolnerowich (Birth name, a long time ago), William Aaron Croft (Current legal identity)
NICKNAME: Wil
AGE: 327 (looks about 20)
BIRTHDATE: May 11, 1684
SPECIES: Shtriga
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Bisexual
OCCUPATION: Hunter
• • LOOKS LIKE WE'RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER,
one eye is taken for an eye
FACE CLAIM: Ash Stymest
SKIN:Pale, very slightly to the olive side.
HAIR:Dark brown, worn with the sides clipped close and the top long and floppy
EYES:Blue
HEIGHT:6' 1"
WEIGHT:150 lb.
OVERALL APPEARANCE: Being tall, scrawny, and femme wasn't exactly an advantage with the ladies in the last years of Tsarist Russia, but it works out a lot better for Wil these days. He's more girl-pretty than man-pretty and frankly he doesn't mind it any more. After three hundred odd years he doesn't have much modesty left, or many hangups about gender identity, and so he has no problem playing up the androgyny when he's in the mood. He's also got a fondness for a sort of early-fifties Rebel Without a Cause look that he gets away with more due to attitude than looks.
He's covered himself with brightly-colored and semi-random tattoos, whatever catches his fancy at the time. When he gets tired of a tattoo he just cuts it off, lets the skin grow back clean, and voila! Fresh canvas. At the moment some of his most prominent tats are a scroll across one forearm reading 'Death before Dishonor', a monstrous face on one shoulder and a similarly-proportioned rose on the other, and a complex symbol just above his pubic bone that is actually a concept-symbol from old Javanese script meaning 'the beginning of a new stanza'
• • DON'T GO AROUND TONIGHT,
well, it's bound to take your life
LIKES:
- Tish
- Cars, especially fast ones.
- Whiskey (vodka tastes like alcoholic nothing)
- Asian food, the spicier the better
- Guitar blues
- Cigarettes. These days it's Camels, but he misses Players.
- Warm dry weather
- Odd-numbered decades
DISLIKES:
- His feeding cycle
- Snow, Sleet, any cold wet weather
- Being in the ocean
- Sushi
- When Tish talks about becoming a hunter herself.
- Sitcoms. Seriously, they're ridiculous.
- Angels. They always know what he is.
- Demons. They're just dicks.
STRENGTHS:
- Nearly impossible to kill.
- Faster and stronger than a straight human
- Long years have given him a lot of perspective on life
- Extremely well-read and educated
- Skilled hunter
WEAKNESSES:
- Can be killed by being shot by an iron bullet while feeding.
- Tish
- Gets squeamish at odd moments
- A bit of a romantic, it makes him easier to manipulate
- Reacts badly to being cold and wet, it's a psychological issue but so deeply ingrained that it might as well be a physical weakness.
FEARS:
- That he'll hurt Tish someday
- Being found out by other hunters
- Losing his immortality and aging normally
- Somehow getting stuck back in Russia
- Jellyfish. They're just freaky.
POWERS & ABILITIES: Wil is a shtriga, either a witch or a monster depending on who you ask. He is functionally immortal so long as he keeps up his feeding cycle, which requires him to spend a number of months every 23 years feeding on the Spiritus Vitae (lifeforce) of humans. While he feeds, he transforms into a pallid, gnarled humanoid shape with greatly elongated fingers and draws the life directly from the mouths of sleeping humans. This is the only moment at which Wil is vulnerable to physical attack. At all times he is stronger, faster, and has sharper senses than a human, with a strength and speed roughly equal to a black-eyed demon, maybe a bit less.
OVERALL PERSONALITY: Wil presents to most people as cocky, rough around the edges, a typical hunter who spends too much time punching things and not enough time around normal people. It's a front, but it's a very good front and few people ever penetrate past it. In truth Wil is intelligent, educated, and oversensitive; he carries around a hefty load of guilt less because of what he's done in the past and more because he knows he'll do it again in the future. No matter how he chases redemption, no matter how well he raises Tish or many people he saves, when his cycle comes up again in twelve years, he's not going to choose to starve to death. He never does.
In everyday interactions Wil is outgoing, flirty, confident, with a clumsy charm that gets him a lot of mileage with maternal types. He's good with mundanes, better than a lot of hunters are, because he's had literal centuries to learn how to interact with people and especially how to present as harmless. It probably goes without saying that he's wildly protective of Tish, a paranoia that extends both to arming and training her and to occasionally locking her away safely somewhere when he's hunting something particularly vile.
• • THERE'S A BAD MOON ON THE RISE,
don't go around tonight
HISTORY: In the spring of 1684, a Ukrainian tinsmith's son was born with the caul wrapped tightly around his head, a near-disaster that was remedied by the quick thinking of the midwife attending the delivery. The grateful parents named the boy Vadim at the herbwoman's suggestion, and never wondered why the local woman took a continuing interest in the boy as he grew up. Honestly, they were just grateful when the midwife came back to them when Vadim was eight and offered to buy him into a servant's contract. She needed a boy around the house to fetch and carry, she said, and it was a perfectly respectable position for a whitesmith's fourth son.
Life in Mama Yasha's house wasn't bad, Vadim became very fond of her and when she started to feed him a daily dose of a particular blend of herbs, boiled roots, and blood, he was bright enough to know why. Legends of the strigoi weren't as widespread as they'd been a few centuries before, but growing up in a witch's house you learn a few things. He took the dose every day from puberty until he reached a man's growth, and when the first hunger came Vadim knew exactly what he needed.
It was a simple enough arrangement: Yasha gave him the shtriga's nature, and he served her for one cycle. She was already an old woman, twenty-three years carried her through to the end of her life and she was the first one Vadim fed from when the hunger came back. Fair was fair.
After that he wandered. For centuries he wandered. He got married, once, that was a disaster. Fought in a war, that was kind of fun but he got tired of it long before the army was willing to let him go. He sailed, he flew, he got rich and got poor and got rich again.
And he fed. Four times a century he fed, taking in the raw life that makes all other food seem like the decaying flesh and rotting vegetable matter that it is. Pure life, it's like nothing else and even now he craves it.
It's not like he woke up one day and realized that sucking the life force out of children is wrong and he shouldn't do that any more. The change in perspective came slowly, over decades. Eventually he started trying to avoid killing the ones he fed from. It wasn't easy, he slipped several times and even as he got better at it he found that he needed to find more children, feed more frequently to satisfy the need in him. He's well aware that the most moral thing he could do would be to stop feeding altogether, to either starve to death or set things up so that some hunter could pick him off. He's not doing that. Whatever his guilt, whatever his nature, life is still sweet and he wants to keep living it.
So he tries to make it up in other ways. He started a school once, that was gratifying. Over the centuries he's given several fortunes to charities, especially those that focus on poverty and education. He puts quarters in other people's parking meters. He doesn't think that it makes up for what he is, what he does. Rather he sees it as an honest attempt to put some good into the world as well as evil. He may be damned, but that doesn't mean he can't try.
He started hunting sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, concentrating on demons primarily because he just has too much sympathy for the monsters. He's a good hunter, both skill and because being virtually indestructible is a pretty sharp advantage in a fight.
Eleven years ago he stole a baby. To this day he couldn't tell you why her, why of the hundreds or maybe thousands of babies he'd seen held and fed on over the years he decided this was was different. But he stood there over the crying newborn, looked at her fight and thrash with rage from the laundry basket lined with grubby towels that served as her crib, looked around at the filthy shanty in the pueblo jóvenes outside Lima where she was going to grow up and live and die and he just...took her. Picked her up, stepped over the bodies of her dead parents, and walked off with the baby in his arms.
He named her Letitia, calls her Tish. She knows he's not her real father, that he found her when she was a baby. She knows that her parents are dead, killed by a monster that Wil had been hunting. She doesn't know that Wil only found her because he was looking for a meal in the wake of the black-eyes' destruction.
She's grown up on the road, traveling from place to place as Wil hunts. She knows her life isn't normal, but she also thinks it's perfectly fine to carry a pistol with her everywhere she goes, to check into a motel and immediately run salt lines and put up wards. She's grown up on homeschool curricula and diner food and has been training in barehanded fighting since she was four. She's smart and mouthy and vicious and happy, which is really the best any parent could ask.
• • WELL, IT'S BOUND TO TAKE YOUR LIFE,
there's a bad moon on the rise
ALIAS: Briar
OTHER ACCOUNTS: Rin Cooper
EXPERIENCE: Long, long years.
WHERE DID YOU FIND US: Caution 2.0
