Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2014 19:16:19 GMT -5
Basics
Name: Balthazar Iramos Tremaine
Nicknames: Pick a devil and he's probably been called it, but his one real nickname is Sin.
Age: 16
Birthday: July 12th, 1998
Grade: 10th
Powers:
1) Revelation of Sin: This is Balthazar's main ability, and the one that has earned him both his nickname, and his frightening reputation. To start, it is simply a specialized form of psychic attack that preys upon the sins, the regrets, and the depraved natures of people. This means that anything that can stand against any other form of psychic attack can stand equally against this. The effect is that the individual is faced with their own inner darkness, those terrible things lurking in their mind and heart brought to the surface. Even the most average of person finds that the beginning effects are little more than those haunting memories and drives crawling into their conscious thought, reminding them of the nasty things that slither about in their psyche and bringing them to the forefront. Anyone with a particularly strong will or less poignant regrets or sinful secrets will find that this is much less pronounced. However, as time presses on, and if Sin persists in his focus on the individual, this becomes more and more vicious, eventually resurrecting memories as hallucinatory trances, and flooding their thoughts with those hideous, twisted urges that usually stay nice and buried. There are two ways he can cause the effects to become more intense: either meet the eyes of the person targeted, or use what he already knows (if anything) to direct the prying tendrils of his assault more acutely. Moreover, if he meets and maintains eye contact with the person, he can see exactly what things he is pulling forth and even project himself into the memories/hallucinations/sin-tainted thoughts. Breaking eye contact, either on his part or on the part of the target, ends this bit of the effect, however the influence of the attack itself can endure after the person is out of sight. This really depends on how fortuitous the individual is, how long Balthazar has assailed them, and how intensely he has focused his power on the person. At it's most extreme, this power is capable of causing very real pain and harm as backlash from the psychic trauma, though not nearly as much as an ability with the express purpose of hurting people.
One of the subtler effects of this power is the ability to prod the sins that are seeded within every human to try and influence them to indulge it. He can, for example, prod at someone's lust to make it easier to seduce them, sloth to stop a fight, or greed to distract someone with shiny things.
He is able to use this on multiple people at once, though with increasingly less effect, but at his current level of power, if he directs the effects against approximately five or more people, the best he can hope for is to prod those seeds of sin and hopefully sway them to adhere to those whims.
This ability takes time to build up to it's greatest current level of power. It is not unheard of for it to take months to achieve the true depths of mental and emotional turmoil that this power is capable of, and it is rather common for weeks to pass before damaging or truly maddening effects appear.
2) Hellfire: This is not really fire insofar as it doesn't burn physical materials. He cannot lob balls of flame, he cannot burn down a building, and he cannot affect temperatures. Hellfire is the ability to immolate the spiritual essence of a person. This is a much more vulgar, assailing force of will than Revelation of Sin, and like his main ability, this one feeds on the malignant parts of a person's mind, their evil igniting the flames and feeding them. It does not require the person to hold any deep level of guilt or sin to function; this ability can sear anyone, but the intensity can be diminished by a limited repertoire of sins or a strong will. However, if the flame is too intense, it will burn the flesh of the person, leaving vicious, black burn scars that continue to hurt for long after Balthazar's focus has left them. He can only afflict one person with Hellfire at a time, and the moment he releases his focus on them or they are no longer in line of sight, the fires begin to die down. This power has a synergy with Revelation of Sin in that an individual effected by the former is more susceptible to this and suffers more intense effects of the fire; their sins are dragged to the surface and set like kindling before the flame. This, like his main ability, takes time to generate it's more vicious effects, but has the ability to burn from the very start.
Consider an analogy: against any normal person that he has never seen the sins of, or of whom he knows no secret pains, it is like attempting to ignite any old pile of wood. It may catch, and it may burn, but it is without the precision to immolate only the dry, combustible wood, save for that which is already near the surface. If Balthazar knows of some of their sins and torments, then it is like setting fire only to the dry wood, though it is still lost within the pile and may be quenched by the surrounding mass that does not burn. Revelation of Sin slowly draws the dry wood that burns better than the rest to the surface, and thus if he uses Hellfire after prolonged assault from his main ability, the entirety of the now dry surface may be set alight.
NOTE: This is still a psychic attack, but much more direct and vulgar, and is still subject to any defenses applicable to other psychic abilities.
3) Deathsight: This sight enables him to see the stains of death on the world around him, painted across reality in places where deaths of significant severity occurred by picking up the psychic imprint left by the intense emotions accompanying death. He can tell the age of the stain, thus noting how long ago the death happened, and can feel the resonance of the means that the individual died by: violence, suicide, deprivation, accident, sickness, nature, etc. This does not tell him precisely the means of death, but it does provide the sensation of how it happened. For example, someone shot to death would taint his tongue with the taste of metal and blood, smoke and fear. It isn't enough to be completely sure, but he can draw generally accurate, if not entirely specific, conclusions. This can sometimes go awry when the emotions of the person that died seep too strongly into the stain, leading to incorrect presumptions, or a skewed sense of what happened. He is also able to get a bit of understanding of who died in regards to that particular location and event, but the entity that his mind forms of the psionic vibrations is twisted and distorted reflection bearing no sentience whatsoever. It is little more than a skewed image pieced together to give him an idea of the person that died.
Member Group: Neutral. "Why pick sides? They both have such valid points, I'm sure..."
Canon or not: Not
Appearance:
Balthazar is every bit the devil that people see him as. His hair is a deep obsidian color, usually worn somewhat long and tousled forward. His pale skin is flawless, a delicate, soft porcelain laid across sharp features that shape his somewhat long, serpentine countenance. His eyes are slanted just so, slender, both tempting and foreboding, and they are usually the hue of smoky quartz inlaid in pewter, unless he has recently fed on the sins of someone, at which point the hue alters to reflect what he has recently devoured: sanguine crimson for wrath, a sharp emerald green for envy, a pale and lifeless gray for sloth, burnt orange for greed, a putrescent mahogany brown for gluttony, royal purple for pride, and a scarlet maroon for lust. His body is toned while somehow looking delicate, torso curving into sharp hips and giving him an almost feminine quality to his figure, a beguiling and ophidian form that glides with reptilian grace and poise. His legs are long and fall into perfect proportion, round and curved and yet remaining muscular and defined. He somehow blends the best of masculine and feminine traits into one beautiful, tempting body.
His style is generally fairly simple in its elegance. When he's not wearing the required uniform, which he does very, VERY well, he adorns himself in sleek blacks and dashes of red, gray, purple, or indigo, wearing sleek and streamlined garb. Smooth leather jackets with darkly colored patterns, gray-blue jeans, featureless black shirts that express his defined torso in their snug fit, loose button up shirts with elaborate and ancient looking patterns embroidered upon them, and various boots and shoes of well kept black are all found in his ample wardrobe. He wears two small silver hoop earrings in the cartilage of his right ear, one black stud in the lobe of his left, a ring on the middle finger of his each hand ((which change occasionally)), and a necklace of dark silver depicting a serpent coiling with lithe grace around a garnet and an onyx comprise his jewelry, and rounding it out is a somewhat thin and elegantly decorated silver watch that seems to fall somewhere between expensive as hell and affordable on a middle-class salary.
Personality
Likes:History
Dislikes:Fears:
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Goals:
Overall Personality:
Balthazar is a twisted and loathsome nightmare, but he's an awfully good looking one.
Let me back up here. Balthazar is a young man whose abilities have tranished what could have once been a decent, upstanding human being, warping him into the manipulative devil that he's become. Paired with his origins and the things he went through as a young boy, there was little hope for him to be anything but the awful human being that he is.
He's not all bad though, and indeed, I've made him sound like he's nothing but an evil, uncaring, unfeeling, inhuman malignancy feeding on the darkness within human souls, and while those are definite qualities he possesses, they're not all that he is. There is a part of him that does care about others around him. It's quiet and subtle, and it lurks in the whispers in his head more than it ever sees daylight, but it's there. He listens to it. He considers it just like he considers every other factor in a given situation, and he acts in a way that he sees appropriate to the circumstances, which usually ignores that little bit of decency. There's just no room for it when your life is basically that of a soul devouring devil-thing.
On an average day, there is nothing but confidence (often dancing to and fro across the line of arrogance) hanging about him, as well as an unreal beauty and a surreal sense of power. He knows people. He knows the shadows slithering through their spirits. He has seen the darkest secrets of some of the most hideous kinds of people, and he knows that there are plenty of them out there. He is tainted by what he's seen, what he's fed on, and he has fully embraced this about himself.
But, he's still human. He's still loved, he still hates, he still experiences joy and sorrow, and he still has fears and hopes. They're stuffed into the dark and dragged up only when he finds it necessary, but they're very much there despite perhaps his greatest efforts. He's turned his scars into strength and erased them from the surface, but they're there, deep down where he doesn't have to see them all the time.
Sin is charismatic, so much so that it is sometimes legitimately frightening. He's pleasant, friendly, and tempting, and he smiles plentifully because all the shit around him is beneath him. He's better than the scum surrounding him, both the people and the situations. He's undaunted and unfaltering because he knows himself, he knows that everyone has regrets and guilt for something, and he knows he can evoke that from people to terrifying effect if need be. He doesn't need to fight because who would want to fight him? He doesn't need to convince people of anything because who wouldn't believe him? And who would really like him, care about him, or even love him when they know what he is capable of, and what he is perfectly happy to be?
So he'll be brilliant, cunning, manipulative, vicious, evil, and everything the devil is proclaimed to be. It's the power he has, and he can't pretend he doesn't like it. All they need to know is that he's a sociopathic, twisted, loathesome nightmare. That's all he needs them to know.
Family Members/guardians:
Uriel Tremaine - Mother; deceased
Dorian Tremaine - Father; deceased
Colliro Illoracci - Closest thing to a parent he's had; deceased
Lizabeta Illoracci - Sister... ish; deceased
History:
Balthazar's history is a bit peculiar, if anything. He was born in Boston to a wealthy couple with questionable sources of income at best, living in an upper-middle class environment and wanting for little to nothing. He knew nothing about his family's illicit activities until he was eleven, which is when he overheard a conversation between his father and Calliro Illoracci outlining a careful plan to overrun and obliterate a chop shop run by an enemy family, which was entirely successful. He realized that his family was only so well off because they had been the pawns of the Cosa Nostra since before he was born. While this bothered him to an extent, he was too happy with his comfortable life to develop any genuine personal objections to how they came into such money; as long as he got what he wanted and didn't have to give up what he had, he didn't care. He didn't know that people died and suffered for it, and frankly, even when he found out how steeped in blood every dime they had was, he didn't care. He was happy.
Then his father botched an assassination and got killed when he was eight, simultaneously losing the Illoracci family millions of dollars in the process.
The wrath of the mafia descended upon his mother immediately. They were quickly collapsing into poverty, stalked and hunted by a vengeful Italian family, and hitting dead ends every direction they turned. Balthazar was taken out of school because of the danger posed by Illoracci influence in the area. Uriel couldn't find work, because in addition to the regular obstacles faced when searching, she had no real experience that could be put on a resume, and the family systematically saw to it that she was turned away with extreme prejudice wherever possible. She became desperate and turned, begging and literally on her knees pleading, to the Illoracci's. They took her in and put her to work as a prostitute, desecrating and defiling her, steeping her in foul humiliation. Balthazar was dragged into their service and groomed to be a new soldier for the family, growing up alongside Lizabeta as her sibling while his mother wallowed in her loathsome state. He started small, running drugs and attacking small shops because of their failure to comply with Illoracci demands. Then his powers budded and awakened.
He became the strongest trump that the Illoracci's had. He could bend people by drowning them in their own sins and regrets, pushing them to comply or torturing them if necessary. He killed, and because he saw the vileness within them, he felt no remorse; to him, they deserved it. He immolated the enemies of the family with hellfire, and by seeing and speaking to the dead, he gained information that would have otherwise been impossible to obtain. Slowly, he became the greatest threat offered by the Illoracci's, and even when his powers weren't applicable or ideal, his advanced cunning and intelligence played against those he was directed against to frightening capability, especially considering that he was only fourteen. With him, the family grew powerful, influential, and fearsome to any who would stand against them, but his kinship with Liz faltered as his ego swelled and he bathed in the glory of being "Diavolo del Illoraccia," the Devil of Illoracci. He developed increasingly more sociopathic tendencies, seeing himself as so much greater than those around him, proclaiming himself the Devil sent to earth to feed on the sins of the world.
For years he rarely saw his mother, eventually losing complete contact with her and only occasionally hearing mention of her in passing conversation. The ill they spoke of her, the tainted, disgusting harlot, seeped into Balthazar, corrupting his already deranged sense of those around him and destroying any respect he may have still had for her. Colliro was his father now, and his mother was every matron of the Illoracci family. He didn't need some street-sucking scum. All he needed was the power he had gained, and his perceived lordship over the family; sure, he wasn't viewed as the power center of the family, but in truth, he knew they were nothing without him, and they knew it too. He was in charge. To some extent, he was right, though severely overestimating his influence.
Then he killed them. All of them. It happened when, in an attempt to reign in the cancerous growth of Balthazar's hubris, Colliro played a delicate and careful game against him. He moved the various Illoracci family members, veiled his true intentions behind the most poignant subterfuge, and in the end, he had bent the mechanisms of the family and left Balthazar without money, influence, respect, or even a voice among the others. No one respected him anymore, seeing him as nothing but a feral beast that would be better off chained and left in a cellar until he was needed. Despite all his power, he lost the frail game that Colliro played, finding that there is more to power than twisted psychic ability. When he saw his mother again, the wretched and abhorrent husk that she was, a broken shell of a person decimated by the will of the family and hardly even alive, he snapped. He systematically slaughtered every last one of the Illoracci's that he could get near, even his sister Liz who he had lost almost all sense of care for even before this happened. In the end, when they were all dead and scorched in sin-fed fire and eviscerated by the depths of their own guilt, any lingering ghosts subjected to his rage again and obliterated, he killed her too. She was beneath him. She was an embarassment. She was unfit to keep living. So with the last shred of his love, sparked again to life upon seeing her, poisoned and fouled by his superiority complex, she was killed with the rest. Somewhere within him he also felt, and still feels, that it was an act of mercy, but as time wore on, he found it easier to simply let it go unheeded.
He was dragged into police custody and put through a private trial. With government intervention, fed by the conspiracy that brought the academy into being and the agreement of the Boston DA, considering that it was for the better that the Illoracci's were eradicated, he was sent off to Ashford, his record erased, and his past buried in secret and lost to all but his memory.
Behind the Character
Name: Damian, Nox, Z, take your pick.
Chatango Name: NoxMortuus
RP Experience: Hm.... 11+ years?
How did you find us: Browsed the directory
RP Sample:[/div]
"Isn't this just a trite little place," he quietly muttered, the rhythmic clack of sharp black boots against pavement heralding his arrival.
He wore a simple, though chic, outfit to this little event: smooth black leather jacket tailored to his every curve and inlaid with elaborate deep purple embroidery around the wrists and collar, a thin pale gray t-shirt with an elaborately embellished fleur de lis in black, a pair of deep gray-blue denim jeans that were an ideal balance of baggy and fitted and stiched with silver embellishments, and utterly black and featureless boots. His hair jostled in a passing breeze, wafting before his smoky eyes as they took in the surroundings, both carefully examining and casually appreciating. Students lingered on some of the benches, a couple of small groups cluttering the verdant lawn here and there, and the occasional lone person trudging to some place or another. Eyes averted to him, almost all of them currently littering the grounds, and in them he read every variant of thought. Some glinted with admiration, some warily and cautiously sized him up, some were curious, and some thought he looked a little pompous. But, without a doubt, they all saw him, and they all felt some level of respect or admiration. They had to. It was him, after all, and just the thought inflated the confidence already churning about him.
He didn't see the fist flying at the back of his head.
He stumbled slightly, lurching a foot forward quickly enough to catch himself, his sight darkening ever so briefly as the pain jolted and throbbed through his skull. He righted himself and turned as his vision cleared to see the assailiant: big, beefy, short and spiky hair, too much skin. A stereotype. Sin smiled at him.
'It's going to be one of those days, then...'
He took a tentative step back, eyes instinctively zeroing in on those of his attacker, trying to lock eye contact as the churning psychic assault brewed in his mind and began spilling forth, the purgatorial misama within his eyes swirling to life. He wouldn't try to really hurt this guy; the poor sod was just stupid, after all. But, he wouldn't leave him unscathed if he could help it. The goal was simple: pull this guy's remorse and guilt toward the surface, a mere warning, if anything. Though, if he could catch and hold this guy's sight, it might get a bit more vicious than that. Worth it, though. Might as well learn something and start this new step in his life off with a good hit of old fashioned sin.
"Head of the welcoming comittee, I assume?" Sarcastic, but cleverly genuine. Might very well go over his head. Either way, he was prepared to do what he does best, avoiding the fight entirely if he had his way about it.