Kai Gracen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
halfbloodhatchling) wrote2019-04-24 07:15 pm
halfbloodhatchling) wrote2019-04-24 07:15 pm
Aefenglom App
Player Information
Name: Snowfox
Age: 29
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
snowishness or PM
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Ciméara "Kai" Gracen
Canon: Kai Gracen Series
Canon Point: End of Mad Lizard Mambo
Age: Over a hundred (exact age unknown by him) looks mid to late twenties
History:
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.
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.
The elfin parents of the children turn out to be Ryder's sister and Kai's brother (Tanic's son, treated as a potential heir by him). The children were sidhe, but Kai's brother Valen attempts to kidnap them to bring them to the Dusk Court. Kai rescues them and sees them protected in Ryder's court.
Personality:
Kai has been called feral by both his friends and his foes. It can be an accurate description, because Kai is driven by his instincts and he has a very strong fight or flight response. There are other ways he's feral too, he tends to be slow to trust and ready to run from intimacy at the first sign that things are getting difficult.
He does feel a very intense loyalty and care for a man that almost no one else has any time for. This is because Dempsey rescued him, and even if other people have opinions on how he raised Kai, Kai views Dempsey's presence in his life as the best thing that ever happened to him. Maybe someone else would have been better, but Dempsey was the one who was there and he cared about Kai in his own way and that's more than anyone had given Kai before then, even if Dempsey’s more than a bit of an asshole, who treats Kai more like an indebted squire than an adoptive son.
Kai 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. Kai accepts the fact that he's no longer welcome in Dempsey's home, and meets outside instead.
There are many other things that Kai doesn't accept that easily. One of them is an abuse of power of any sort, but especially from the elfin. Kai doesn't so much speak truth to power as he does stride up to power and spit in its face. That has some negative consequences, but Kai has experience with negative consequences even when he hasn't done anything to act up. It's not just bravery then, that motivates him, as much as it is the feeling that the situation can't get any worse. Kai has good reason to feel that way, but it means he tends to escalate situations that might be able to be solved more diplomatically.
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, going as far as to set her up with someone else he thinks would be better 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. Helping people is very important to Kai, and he doesn't hesitate to put himself in danger to achieve that goal. 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.
Abilities & Skills: Skills: Kai's well trained with weaponry, able to use knives and guns to deadly purposes when necessary. He's a decent shot, and decently strong for his size.
The following abilities are all biological rather than magical, but I'm entirely up for whatever limiting of them makes sense within the context of the world.
The elfin heal faster than humans, and Kai heals faster than an average elfin. This is a weakness in canon more often than it's an advantage: he frequently heals around bits of clothing that later have to be cut out and when he suffers a broken arm during a fight it heals quickly enough that he has to have it rebroken after the fight because the way it started to set wasn't right.
He's heavily affected by iron in the way of all elfin in his world are, although he's capable of handling it a little better due to past exposure building up some protection. He reacts very badly to magic, partly because of the psychological affects of having had it used against him for his father's torture and partly because he still has iron shavings under his skin that are too small to dig out but make having magic cast on him very physically painful.
Inventory/Companions: Two knives (one shorter, one more for carving) two Glock pistols, and an ammo belt. Companion is his cat Newt. Newt is a small cat, around 6 pounds, with one leg shorter than the others, a notch missing from his left ear and fur the color of "vomit and concrete".
Choice: Dragon
Reason: Kai already has a very close connection with dragons. In order to combine sidhe and unsidhe into one person, his father Tanic used the live egg of a dragon. There is an elfin belief that the elfin and dragons are related, and for Tanic's magic to have worked there has to be an element of truth in that. The elfin in general worship dragons, although Kai himself is too human for that belief. He has killed dragons in the course of his job and protecting his life, but even with that Kai has a deep respect for the untamed nature of the dragons, getting a tattoo for every dragon he's killed. At one point his father's people steal a dragon egg to try to repeat part of the experiment that made him and Kai gets caught up in the conflict. He gets the dragon egg free and is holding it when the mother dragon arrives. Instead of killing Kai, she preens against him and bites his neck, leaving a dragon scale under his jaw where she'd bitten. He also has scars from the way his father put iron under his skin in the shape of wings, from the shoulder-blades across to the spine, iron scarring with varying ridges that mimic the diamond pattern of reptilian skin. The wings on his back were specifically made to look like Black Pearl dragons, to match the sigil of his father's house.
He's definitely not magical with regards to being a witch, and choosing something that's rare and beautiful while still definitely monstrous fits in very well with his canon role. At the same time the way the monsters work here gives him room to develop and move past the fear of being just a monster and someone's pet. Due to his history and existing connection with dragons, it's the one he's least likely to fight with everything he has, and given his history once Kai decides to fight something he usually fights with everything he has and does not give up. He has his pride and his fierce independence, which makes for a decent fit with dragons. Dragon will still be difficult for him, but he's used to being feared for what he is and because of his mix of sidhe and unsidhe he's used to being unique in his world.
Choice: Turnskin (Clouded Leopard)
Reason: The elfin in Kai's canon are referred to as 'cat-bastards', a slur that Kai himself uses all the time, because of their pointed ears and fangs. Past that, though, Kai things of himself as a monster all the time.
His biological father was the Master of the Wild Hunt, which uses Black Dogs (ainmhi dubh, creations of blood magic) to do his will. Recently, Kai found out that some of his siblings are using humans as the base for their ainmhi dubh, and the parallels of being a cat-based monster is very appealing. Kai is much more of a cat person than a dog person, both because of the trauma from his interactions with the ainmhi dub and because he just plain likes cats.
Kai will definitely struggle with the idea of having a pack because he has visions of being a lone wolf sort. His adoptive father is, but even in canon with all his issues, Kai ends up accepting people around him relatively easily, from becoming very close with his neighbor to being better friends with most of Dempsey's allies than Dempsey ever was to having as a close personal friend the sex worker that Dempsey paid to get him laid for the first time ever. He is part feral, and being able to turn fully into a monster may end up granting him a sort of freedom.
Sample:
here, here & here
Name: Snowfox
Age: 29
Contact:
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Ciméara "Kai" Gracen
Canon: Kai Gracen Series
Canon Point: End of Mad Lizard Mambo
Age: Over a hundred (exact age unknown by him) looks mid to late twenties
History:
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.
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.
The elfin parents of the children turn out to be Ryder's sister and Kai's brother (Tanic's son, treated as a potential heir by him). The children were sidhe, but Kai's brother Valen attempts to kidnap them to bring them to the Dusk Court. Kai rescues them and sees them protected in Ryder's court.
Personality:
Kai has been called feral by both his friends and his foes. It can be an accurate description, because Kai is driven by his instincts and he has a very strong fight or flight response. There are other ways he's feral too, he tends to be slow to trust and ready to run from intimacy at the first sign that things are getting difficult.
He does feel a very intense loyalty and care for a man that almost no one else has any time for. This is because Dempsey rescued him, and even if other people have opinions on how he raised Kai, Kai views Dempsey's presence in his life as the best thing that ever happened to him. Maybe someone else would have been better, but Dempsey was the one who was there and he cared about Kai in his own way and that's more than anyone had given Kai before then, even if Dempsey’s more than a bit of an asshole, who treats Kai more like an indebted squire than an adoptive son.
Kai 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. Kai accepts the fact that he's no longer welcome in Dempsey's home, and meets outside instead.
There are many other things that Kai doesn't accept that easily. One of them is an abuse of power of any sort, but especially from the elfin. Kai doesn't so much speak truth to power as he does stride up to power and spit in its face. That has some negative consequences, but Kai has experience with negative consequences even when he hasn't done anything to act up. It's not just bravery then, that motivates him, as much as it is the feeling that the situation can't get any worse. Kai has good reason to feel that way, but it means he tends to escalate situations that might be able to be solved more diplomatically.
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, going as far as to set her up with someone else he thinks would be better 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. Helping people is very important to Kai, and he doesn't hesitate to put himself in danger to achieve that goal. 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.
Abilities & Skills: Skills: Kai's well trained with weaponry, able to use knives and guns to deadly purposes when necessary. He's a decent shot, and decently strong for his size.
The following abilities are all biological rather than magical, but I'm entirely up for whatever limiting of them makes sense within the context of the world.
The elfin heal faster than humans, and Kai heals faster than an average elfin. This is a weakness in canon more often than it's an advantage: he frequently heals around bits of clothing that later have to be cut out and when he suffers a broken arm during a fight it heals quickly enough that he has to have it rebroken after the fight because the way it started to set wasn't right.
He's heavily affected by iron in the way of all elfin in his world are, although he's capable of handling it a little better due to past exposure building up some protection. He reacts very badly to magic, partly because of the psychological affects of having had it used against him for his father's torture and partly because he still has iron shavings under his skin that are too small to dig out but make having magic cast on him very physically painful.
Inventory/Companions: Two knives (one shorter, one more for carving) two Glock pistols, and an ammo belt. Companion is his cat Newt. Newt is a small cat, around 6 pounds, with one leg shorter than the others, a notch missing from his left ear and fur the color of "vomit and concrete".
Reason: Kai already has a very close connection with dragons. In order to combine sidhe and unsidhe into one person, his father Tanic used the live egg of a dragon. There is an elfin belief that the elfin and dragons are related, and for Tanic's magic to have worked there has to be an element of truth in that. The elfin in general worship dragons, although Kai himself is too human for that belief. He has killed dragons in the course of his job and protecting his life, but even with that Kai has a deep respect for the untamed nature of the dragons, getting a tattoo for every dragon he's killed. At one point his father's people steal a dragon egg to try to repeat part of the experiment that made him and Kai gets caught up in the conflict. He gets the dragon egg free and is holding it when the mother dragon arrives. Instead of killing Kai, she preens against him and bites his neck, leaving a dragon scale under his jaw where she'd bitten. He also has scars from the way his father put iron under his skin in the shape of wings, from the shoulder-blades across to the spine, iron scarring with varying ridges that mimic the diamond pattern of reptilian skin. The wings on his back were specifically made to look like Black Pearl dragons, to match the sigil of his father's house.
He's definitely not magical with regards to being a witch, and choosing something that's rare and beautiful while still definitely monstrous fits in very well with his canon role. At the same time the way the monsters work here gives him room to develop and move past the fear of being just a monster and someone's pet. Due to his history and existing connection with dragons, it's the one he's least likely to fight with everything he has, and given his history once Kai decides to fight something he usually fights with everything he has and does not give up. He has his pride and his fierce independence, which makes for a decent fit with dragons. Dragon will still be difficult for him, but he's used to being feared for what he is and because of his mix of sidhe and unsidhe he's used to being unique in his world.
Choice: Turnskin (Clouded Leopard)
Reason: The elfin in Kai's canon are referred to as 'cat-bastards', a slur that Kai himself uses all the time, because of their pointed ears and fangs. Past that, though, Kai things of himself as a monster all the time.
His biological father was the Master of the Wild Hunt, which uses Black Dogs (ainmhi dubh, creations of blood magic) to do his will. Recently, Kai found out that some of his siblings are using humans as the base for their ainmhi dubh, and the parallels of being a cat-based monster is very appealing. Kai is much more of a cat person than a dog person, both because of the trauma from his interactions with the ainmhi dub and because he just plain likes cats.
Kai will definitely struggle with the idea of having a pack because he has visions of being a lone wolf sort. His adoptive father is, but even in canon with all his issues, Kai ends up accepting people around him relatively easily, from becoming very close with his neighbor to being better friends with most of Dempsey's allies than Dempsey ever was to having as a close personal friend the sex worker that Dempsey paid to get him laid for the first time ever. He is part feral, and being able to turn fully into a monster may end up granting him a sort of freedom.
Sample:
here, here & here