Kai Gracen

The most important person in Kai’s life is the human who rescued him/won him in a poker game, Dempsey. Dempsey’s more than a bit of an asshole, who treats Kai more like an indebted squire than an adoptive son, but that suits Kai perfectly fine. He understands Dempsey, and if part of what he understands is that the only reason he kept Kai was because he thought he could make money from training him as a Stalker, it’s a debt that Kai can easily satisfy. Dempsey is, in many ways, Kai’s adoptive father, and while Kai doesn’t explicitly look for approval from Dempsey he also doesn’t consider taking a path other than the one Dempsey wants for him. So Kai’s a Stalker, and no matter how much Dempsey’s former allies will tell Kai he doesn’t have to support the old man, Kai can’t imagine doing otherwise. That Dempsey’s own regard for Kai is tempered is something that Kai accepts, like he accepts the fact that the woman Dempsey is with hates elfin with a passion that leaves her to call for a priest to bless the house if Kai ever steps into it.

The most important thing in Kai’s life is his cat, Newt. Kai adopted Newt when he was a half-starved kitten chewing on a giant salamander that Kai had killed. Other than taking care of Newt and repaying his debt to Dempsey, Kai doesn’t do commitment. He prefers the people he has sex with to not know his name and to definitely not have his cell phone number, since he’s looking for a night of fun and not any sort of relationship. He’s half in love with his neighbor, Dalia, and it’s because he cares so much for her that he’s made certain to never act on his desire for her.

Because Kai thinks of himself as a monster. He knows that his body is a mix of sidhe and unsidhe, and he knows his father was looking for an experimental subject, not a person. He also knows that his mother tried to kill herself to keep from bringing him into existence, and while Kai wants to live he doesn’t think he deserves any more than that in his life. He hates the elfin as much as any human does, calling them cat-bastards and other pejoratives. More than anything else, he wants to leave the elfin world behind for good, despite the fact that the unsidhe court he escaped from wants him back and that Ryder of the sidhe wants him to be welcomed into the elfin fold.

Kai’s certainly more interested in Ryder’s offer than becoming Tanik’s plaything again, particularly as Ryder’s offer comes with the possibility of protection and under the basis of mutual respect. While Kai is attracted to Ryder (and Ryder is definitely attracted to Kai in return), he also finds the sidhe lord rather insufferable because Ryder wants to sweep in and take Kai under his wing, and Kai wants to continue to live his own life. His independence is something that he’s very carefully won and is very proud of. There are pheromones that draw elfin together, and as much as Kai is attracted to what Ryder is, that attraction just causes him to push Ryder away more deliberately, to resent the manipulation even though it’s nothing intentional on Ryder’s part. There might be mutual physical attraction there, but Kai has no desire at all to be owned by someone else, and that’s part of what he thinks a relationship with another elfin would be.

Kai himself is very prickly, used to being on his own and very comfortable with that continuing to be the way that his life functions. He likes being a Stalker (state-licensed bounty hunter) because it’s helping people without having to interact much with them. At his heart, Kai is a nurturer, but he’s also incredibly afraid of himself and what he could become. He’s afraid of being like his father, and he’s afraid that he might become whatever sort of monster his father had planned for him to be. He’s not used to getting a lot of affection or care, and as a result he’s suspicious of it.

• He’s a pretty good shot (nothing unnaturally good),
• Can take the recoil better than most humans, due to being elfin and built a little differently.
• Stronger than an average human, but not stronger than a human who’s trained.
• Sort of allergic to most magic, since the iron dust he has under his skin makes him react very badly to any sort of spells being performed around him.
• To healers he feels really unnatural and possibly cursed.
• He can heal himself much faster than a human, to the extent that one can watch his wounds seal.
  
  

Kai was created when his father mixed sidhe and unsidhe together with a dragon egg and then implanted it into a female sidhe prisoner. While the sidhe and unsidhe are both elfin, children born are either entirely sidhe or unsidhe, when conceived naturally. Kai was the fourth or fifth attempt of his father, Tanic, to make a chimera, and his mother stabbed herself in the stomach while carrying him to kill both the monster growing inside of her and herself. She died, but with the help of Tanic and unsidhe healers, Kai survived. His body was aged by the healers to rapidly achieve adulthood, although his mind had to develop at a usual elfin shedule. That didn’t matter to Tanic, who used Kai as a subject for experimentation and torture.

Sometime after Kai’s birth, the elfin world combined with the human one, slamming together and replacing chunks of one world with the other. At that point, the sidhe and unsidhe stopped fighting each other and got into a war with the humans. A few million humans died and about six hundred elfin, which the elfin considered about a draw, given the dramatically lower birth rate of elfin.

After Kai was around 60, which would be the mental equivalent of a human 14, one of his guards grabbed him and ran, hoping to ransom Kai to the sidhe side of his family and get rich. He didn’t make it there, instead losing Kai in a poker game to a cigar-smoking, grumpy human named Dempsey. Dempsey was a Stalker, a sort of Bounty Hunter licensed by SoCalGov, and he saw profit in turning the mostly-feral Kai into a trained Stalker. Although Dempsey got bit quite a few times on the way, he and his friends raised Kai, and Kai considers being won by Dempsey the best thing that ever happened to him. Dempsey wasn’t a kind foster father, believing in physical discipline and throwing Kai into life-or-death situations while on Stalker runs, but Kai considers his life under Dempsey as far superior to what came before. Originally Kai was Chimera, but Dempsey decided Kai was closer to an actual name, and it stuck.

He spent another forty or so years working for and then with Dempsey, until Dempsey was injured and retired. Since Dempsey drinks most of his money, Kai supports him, giving him a third of what he makes. Kai himself lives in a former warehouse in San Diego, with his cat, Newt as company, and works full time as a Stalker. He’s left the elfin world behind, until the sidhe lord named Ryder conscripts Kai into his service, sending them both through dragon territory to relocate a pregnant human woman. This gets him in the middle of a bloodline feud and with far more contact with the elfin than he’s comfortable with. He does manage to survive, and so do the two elfin children who were magically implanted into the human to carry to birth.

Kai’s history includes torture and scientific experimentation. He doesn’t voluntarily bring it up, but it may still come up in his threads. If you’d like to make sure that certain topics don’t come up, or would prefer I drop the thread if it goes in that direction, please comment on my HMD!