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Application for Save the Earth
Apr. 17th, 2013 12:06 amOOC Information:
Name: Krystal
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact: PM this journal, shoot me a private plurk, or hit me up on AIM at crystalclearcase.
<cut text="you mourn the death of your bloody valentine">IC Information:
Name: Kay Curtis | Matthew Cadeyrn
Canon: Original
Age: Preincarnated: 18 | Reincarnated: 20
Preincarnation Appearance: Burly, broad-shouldered, and tall, Kay is a young man who has just nicely grown into his body and it is great. His hair is close-cropped and brown. He's quite handsome, with a strong jaw and ~intense~ green eyes. As a wolf, he's built like the Beast with huge gorilla arms and leaner back legs. Think if you fed an Underworld werewolf Gamma radiation and it Hulked out. It's ugly as sin, and has brown fur and green eyes as well -- except the irises are a flat, eerie acid-green like a dog's eyes.
Any differences: Matthew is just as tall, but it's a lanky awkwardness. He doesn't have Kai's muscle, or his confidence; Matthew carries himself with a slouch, as though apologizing for his own height.
Preincarnated History: Kayden Talbot was born to Abraham and Sophia Talbot in 1995. He had a fairly standard childhood. His parents were often both busy with work, and for that reason, Kay couldn't play sports on a team, but his mother especially was loving and caring. Mandy, his younger sister, although they had their spats, looked up to him for the most part. His father could be a little distant and a little overbearing, but the family unit was healthy on the whole -- until, at age six, there was an enormous fight between Kay's parents, ending in his father leaving the family, making Kay promise to take care of Mandy before he went. Kay's mother was never quite the same after that, always worried and nervous. One day, Kay came home from school to find his mother locked in her room. She wouldn't open the door, but Kay heard a gunshot, and saw the body as it was taken away. He was eleven.
Kay and his sister were placed in foster care after that. Since no other family members could be reached, both children were put up for adoption. It was during this unstable time in Kay's life that he discovered his ability to transform into a wolf. He had snuck out of his foster family's house (something he did often, as he resented his situation and was growing surly and hard to manage) and gotten into trouble with a couple of petty thieves. The anger he felt was what made him transform: the change is triggered by falling back on fighting instincts, giving oneself over to anger and the will to fight. Kay mangled the attempted muggers that night, and crawled back home naked and shell-shocked. He was frightened, yes, but the change had been the most exhilarating experience of his life. The fantasy-scifi young adult books he'd read as a kid had done a little bit to prepare him for this situation: he knew enough to realize that 1) he had to keep it a secret and 2) he had to learn to control it. Kay wanted to control it. He never really saw it as a curse, since it provided an exciting escape, an adrenaline high. It didn't help his rebellious streak, or his growing hate of being told what to do.
His attitude bit him in the ass when Mandy was adopted and he wasn't. The family, a young couple from Chicago, thought that Kay would be an unwholesome influence on their new daughter, so they cut off communication between the siblings. This left Kay bereft of his one grounding, stabilizing influence, and he got into more and more fights in (and out of) school. Disciplining him did nothing but breed more resentment of the adults around him, and things finally came to a head when, at age thirteen, he permanently crippled a high schooler. Due to the assault and the property damage involved in that fight, Kay was sent to a juvenile detention center for three months. It was a harrowing experience, but he came out of it a quieter boy, a boy who knew when to keep his head down and bite his tongue, and a boy with very fine control over his werewolf condition. He also came out of it a boy with no family. His foster family had finally given up and washed their hands of him -- the last incident had been too much for them to handle. Kay was placed in the care of Carol and Robert Curtis, a zealously Christian couple looking to help supplement their meager income by taking in a foster child, just in time to start high school in a new school district. This was his social saving grace.
The first two years at Raybury High School were surprisingly ordinary for Kay. He dated (if you could call it dating) a poser-punk girl a year older than him named Michaela. It was with her that Kay did most of his experimentation, deciding he didn't like the loss of control that came with drugs and alcohol. She wanted more emotional intimacy than Kay was willing to give, though, and broke up with him because she couldn't change him into what she wanted him to be. After that, Kay found a best friend at the tail end of his freshman year in a skinny geeky kid named Steven. Steven was exactly the right combination of nonthreatening, sarcastically funny, smart enough to call Kay on bullshit, and unwilling to pry to be Kay's friend. With Steven came his best-friend-since-first-grade Morgan, an outspoken girl with what eventually came to be an obsessive crush on Kay. He knew about it, but kept her at arm's length, both because he was burned from his last relationship and, well, he just wasn't that into her. With them, Kay's act cleaned up a bit. He tried harder to stay out of fights (especially ones at school that he could be disciplined for) and took to running as an alternative way to get his adrenaline kicks. It wasn't quite the same, but not driving away his friends was worth it.
But then the Halloween of his junior year rolled around. Before I explain what happened, let me tell you about some classroom politics. Morgan is head-over-heels for Kay, who barely cares because he's busy checking out both a sweet girl named Ansley and a stoner with something weird about him named Anders, but he's got to be nice to Morgan because she's friends with Steven. Patrick is the star of the soccer team and is a huge dick -- the kind of dick who always pretends to be an expert on whatever he's talking about and whose Facebook profile picture is himself with photoshopped abs in front of his car. That kind of dick. Anyway, Patrick wants Morgan, who doesn't even notice, but Kay does. He also notices that Patrick is flirting with Ansley in order to make Morgan jealous. It's not working on Morgan, but it <i>is</i> on Ansley. Kay wants to punch Patrick for a lot of reasons. Patrick wants to punch Kay because Kay's his main competition for Morgan. With me so far? There was more classroom drama going on, but none of the rest is particularly relevant to Kay.
Anyway, during Kay's junior year, Raybury High was running a haunted house for middle-schoolers in their gym. Everyone he knew was helping out, but that didn't really matter to Kay. What mattered was that the situation with Patrick had finally come to a head at lunch. Between Patrick's jealousy over Morgan and Kay's smart mouth, a fight broke out in the middle of the cafeteria: Kay vs. Patrick and three other soccer players. Kay won when he broke the ribs of one particularly douchey boy named Chad, but winning was a dubious distinction, because he was brought in front of Assistant Principal Lin. Assistant Principal Lin is not quite old enough to be a cougar, but nevertheless has a very different idea of what constitutes an appropriate asst. principal-student relationship than most people. She offered Kay a deal: if Kay gave her a sexual favor, she wouldn't call his foster parents or probation officer and have him sent back to juvie. Reluctantly, Kay agreed.
It was that incident that led Kay to go to the haunted house. He'd been left feeling used, disgusted and powerless, so the obvious answer was to go punch Patrick in the face. That would make him feel better. But he didn't want to start the fight, because that would just get him in trouble again. He had to get Patrick to start it, and to do that, he had to get Morgan to kiss him in front of Patrick. He tried to talk Morgan into it, but she was unwilling -- sure, she wanted to kiss Kay, but it was weird that he wanted to do it in front of Patrick. She made a deal: she'd do it if he went on a real date with her. He agreed, but didn't anticipate that Patrick would hit Morgan, too. That made Kay really mad -- mad enough to shout Patrick down in front of half the school instead of hitting him. He called Patrick out on being a violently jealous douchebag, then apologetically walked Morgan home like a good dog. He hadn't meant to get her hurt.
So, he had a date, but there was a problem: the date Morgan set was the night of the full moon (of course it was). He'd promised her that he'd go, and couldn't back out, so he want to a man named Dr. Brown. Kay met Doc Brown a few weeks after he was released from juvie, after a nasty incident where he'd lost control of himself while a werewolf and had killed a couple ofpeople. Doc Brown found him -- a terrified blood-covered thirteen-year-old -- and reassured him that 1) Kay wouldn't go back to jail for this, 2) he knew about Kay's werewolf condition already, 3) he knew Kay's parents, and 4) he would look out for Kay if Kay worked for him. For the past three years, he had been Kay's werewolf consultant, go-to doctor for when he needed to be cleaned up after a fight, and boss (the part-time job turned out to be delivering unmarked packages (usually drugs), recovering product from compromised dealers (usually drugs), and running any other errands Doc Brown needed), and he had a serum that would suppress Kay's transformations. Kay begged a dose off of Doc Brown, who agreed on the condition that he could perform a full surgical biopsy on Kay to study him. Kay agreed. Date secure.
It was a chaste date, but a nice one. They went out to one of the docks on the river that ran through town, where a carnival had been set up. It was a shame, really, that the date was interrupted by Patrick, a length of rebar, and half the soccer team. Kay, badly injured, fell off the edge of the dock into the river with Patrick. The injuries and the moonlight were enough to trigger an involuntary werewolf transformation, one that left Kay more wolf than human. He dragged Patrick through the water and onto an island, where he proceeded to murder not only Patrick, but every camper and hiker unlucky enough to be there. He woke up in the morning naked, covered in blood, and back in his right mind, so he stole a hiker's clothes and went to see Doc Brown, who told him not to worry about the murders and to worry about fetching back some drugs from a teenage dealer who'd just been arrested instead. Kay went over to the kid's house, broke in, and tried to get all the hidden drugs out for two days. The unofficial raid ended with Kay nearly being arrested by two policemen. He only escaped because he transformed and killed them. This was the first time he'd killed someone while in complete control of himself, and it shook him. He thought for the first time that maybe Mandy's foster family was completely right, that he would be nothing but a plague in his sister's life, and that she deserved a better family than him.
But those murders were the least of his problems. A vampire named Tynan had come into town, and Kay found out that on the night of the date, Tynan had hypnotized and tried to feed on Morgan. On top of that, Tynan had threatened a witch in Kay's class named Evelyn, whose mother was an ex-member of a monster-hunting organization called the Templars. Evelyn asked her mother to call in reinforcements to get Tynan out of town. And on top of all this, he had to explain where he'd disappeared to for two days to Morgan, and study for a history test! Tynan had turned a group of three teenage girls in Kay's class, who went on a blood frenzy during the coffeeshop study session Kay's growing group of friends were having (Steven had befriended Evelyn, who was friends with Ansley, so Morgan made five of them total). Kay found out Evelyn was a witch during that fight, and between them they killed one and injured the other two. One of her spells caused Kay to transform, so they found out each other's secret supernatural powers then.
When the Templars arrived, they also recognized signs of werewolf activity, but believed Ansley to be the werewolf. Kay found out and the whole gang -- him, Evelyn, and Tynan -- went to Ansley's house to stop the Templars. They found her crying in the kitchen and her parents dead on the stairs. There was a huge fight that was interrupted by Anders, the stoner from their class, who turned out to be a fae. Anders asked one of his fae friends (for a loose definition of friend -- his name is Gallowglass, he grants wishes, and will be important later) if there were any way to bring Ansley's parents back to life. Gallowglass said yes, but they'd have to talk to Doc Brown about it -- make him think that he was reanimating Ansley's parents, and boost his work along with a little fairy magic. After some convincing, Doc Brown said that he knew people with the technology to bring Ansley's parents back to life, but also that they were the people he'd been hiding Kay from for years. If he did this, there would be no going back for Kay. Kay didn't care. He also had a fight with Morgan, leading to a proper break-up.
That winter break, Kay, Anders, Tynan, and Doc Brown piled into a truck and road-tripped up to a place called Elysium Retreat. Their party was separated when police attacked the hotel they were staying at: Anders made a deal with Gallowglass, who had snuck along invisible to everyone but Anders, to get the rest of the party out in exchange for him going to fairyland to learn about the other fae powers-that-be. While Anders was away, Gallowglass revealed himself to the rest of the party, explaining that if any of them let him prick their skin with the venomous spurs on his elbows, they would be granted their deepest desire.
Upon arrival at the Retreat, it was revealed that Kay's father was in charge of the place. Kay passed up an opportunity to meet his father for the first time in eleven years in favor of going straight to the machines that would bring Ansley's parents back to life. It was discovered that the Retreat made a business out of "growing" artificial humans and transferring consciousnesses from the old/flawed/broken bodies of clients into the new, better ones. Tynan and Anders each befriended one of the artificial humans: Tynan's icy awful vampire heart was touched by a girl named Venus, and Anders (who had gone all fairy-power-crazy) was helping an emotionless girl named Zola escape. Kay was all business, though, placing samples of Ansley's parents' blood into the machine so that a new body could be created. However, it didn't seem to work -- the bodies were created and animated, but looked like they were drowning, and Kay had no idea how to manipulate the machines. Then, Gallowglass told him that the fairy magic boost required to truly resurrect Ansley's parents was a wish-granting thorn-prick that would only work if bringing Ansley's parents back was what Kay wanted most. Kay agreed, and...well, turned out to be more pure-hearted than anyone would have thought. He piled Ansley's alive-but-unconscious parents into the back of the car they'd brought and tried to call Doc Brown to tell him it was time to go, but Doc Brown told Kay to leave without him. Kay used his latent psychic abilities deliberately for the first time in order to discover whether Doc Brown was in need of a rescue or not, and had a vision of Doc Brown agreeing to come back to the Retreat to work, and talking with Abraham Talbot about a new project: creating artificial humans with vampire powers.
But that wasn't any of Kay's business right then. He brought Ansley's parents to their home and told them that they'd been kidnapped and drugged for the past two weeks. It felt good to be the hero. Kay liked it. The fact that his foster family had adopted Zola (who had used fairy magic to secure her escape and integration into regular society) was only a small black spot on his bright horizon. He talked to Morgan at school the next day and agreed to give their relationship another go, Ansley was on the road to emotional recovery, everyone was friends again, and of course, everything went to shit after school. As it happened, Morgan and Steven had been stupid teenagers in love with people they felt they couldn't have, and had slept together over winter break. When Steven told Kay, it triggered the most powerful surge of jealousy Kay had ever felt -- powerful enough to awaken an "inner wolf" personality that had lain dormant in Kay's psyche up until that point. The wolf took over and attacked Steven in his house.
Kay snapped out of it just in time to realize he had cracked two of Steven's ribs. He found out that Steven had known about the werewolf thing since the fight in the coffeeshop, and after making up and getting some serious brofeels out in the open, they followed clues left by Doc Brown to a small CD with a video on it. On the video, Doc Brown told Kay that Abraham Talbot had rescued Sophia from poverty by paying her to give samples of her DNA to the Retreat. Unfortunately, she carried an unusual and rare blood disorder, and when Abraham found out, it sparked a violent fight. He experimented on Kay, and developed a set of enzymes that would activate the blood condition. (Also, Sophia and Doc Brown had had a relationship in the past. Awkward.)
Kay broke up with Morgan in the worst way possible. He asked her out to dinner, confronted her about the Steven thing, and told her that he was mad jealous and needed to sort his own shit out first. She was extremely suspicious, so Kay did the mature thing and explained that he attacked Steven in a fit of lycanthropic insanity, showing her his werewolf form. Morgan, who is fairly smart, put together that Kay was the monster responsible for the murders in town, and...well...agreed that cutting things off was best.
This was the end of Kay's wild days and the beginning of his real attempts at control. Steven, a huge fan of comic books and superheroes and shit like that, was eager to help. (Steven's comfort with the fact that Kay is a monster is a tad unhealthy. Blame the violent video games.) They trained -- Kay taught Steven how to fight, and Steven helped Kay develop control. Kay got an after-school job, even -- a barista at a coffeeshop, where he would have to deal with high-stress situations on a regular basis. It's dangerous, and a stupid risk, but it's working. That's his pull point.
Preincarnated World: Kay's world is normal 2010s-Earth, but with supernatural monsters behind the scenes. There are Fae in the woods, waiting to extract promises and milk you for all you're worth. There are werewolves in the night. There are vampires where you least expect them. There are secret organizations of humans fighting back -- or making a profit. None of it has gone public. I can give more detail on the factions if you'd like, but since Kay is the only werewolf he knows (and possibly the only living one in the world) it doesn't affect him that much.
Reincarnated History What happened to your character that got them to this point in their normal, human life?
First Echo: He heard some crazy homeless person talking about werewolves, and suddenly, he found himself with a short temper.
Preincarnation Personality: Kay is a teenage werewolf. That means there are a lot of instincts, hormones, and feelings swirling around in his head, most of which are uncontrollable. When Kay is at his best, he's in control of himself, fiercely loyal to the people he considers friends, and willing to work tirelessly to achieve his goals. He's very empathetic towards people he identifies with -- namely, those who have experienced losses similar to his -- and people who remind him of his lost sister. Because he broke his promise to his father to take care of her, Kay takes any and all promises he makes very seriously, and will do just about anything to keep them until the person has released him from his promise or he's physically unable to do it. He's a good leader, if given the opportunity to do so, and will curb his more destructive impulses for the sake of his friends.
He's not dumb, either. Kay does dumb teenage things, and does badly in school, but it's not because he's stupid. He can be very clever, and he has an excellent memory. Trouble is, he just doesn't care about school, and gives the bare minimum of effort to scrape by. Kay remembers a surprising amount of random details from the sci-fi books he read as a child, or from conversations with Doc Brown and Steven, so while it's a crapshoot, there's a chance that Kay's familiar with any given scientific concept. Really, it depends on whether it was mentioned in Animorphs or Dune. He also remembers everyone he fights, and every promise he makes. If you could make him care more about it, he could do quite well in school.
Unfortunately, Kay is his own worst enemy, and many things get in the way of him being good. His temper, for one thing: he's got a smart mouth and an attitude, and can't always keep quiet. He also enjoys fighting other people a lot more than he should. There are several reasons for this: one, it reassures him on a primal level that he isn't helplessly at the mercy of the more powerful figures in his life; two, he doesn't have to think while he fights and can escape into the adrenaline and pain for a while; and three: he has a masochistic streak. But these aren't the only reasons Kay gets into fights. Remember that temper? If he's insulted or otherwise done an injury, his first instinct will be to lash out physically. He has to make the conscious decision not to punch someone who's bothering him. Kay's proud, and hates hates hates looking stupid. He's surprisingly indiscriminate for someone with little-sister issues: he has no problem with hitting girls as long as they pose a real threat to him.
Kay needs to be surrounded by people on an instinctive, emotional level. He can't do the lone-wolf thing -- it makes him miserable. He knows. He tried. Basically what Kay would like would be to have friends without having to open up to them and make himself emotionally vulnerable. He plays the ~mysterious~ ~aloof~
Speaking of wanting to bang his friends, Kay is an extremely jealous individual. Of basically his entire friend group. He is aware that feeling sexually possessive over people he's not even in a relationship with is screwed-up and unhealthy, but when anyone else sleeps with someone in his pack, Kay feels at least some degree of jealousy. Whether it's just a twinge or intense enough to wake up his inner wolf, it is a fact of life. Also, as long as we're on the subject, Kay really likes fierce bitches. He's attracted to a lot of different things, but he really likes outspoken, brave people.
Now let's talk about his insecurities. Kay's murders don't sit right with him, not at all. He knows he's a horrible person, and while he would like to go find his sister in Chicago after he graduates high school, he's got this problem with crippling self-doubt. He worries he won't be able to find Mandy, and even if he does, Kay is pretty sure that she's better off without someone like him in her life. She deserves better, and her adopted family has to be better than him. For the moment, in his heart, he's given up on looking for her. Anything that reminds him of family is a huge mess for Kay, really -- at his canon point, three father-figures have either given up on him or just left him, so he has major trust issues regarding adult men. As if that weren't enough, Kay's also wary of anyone romantically attracted to him because of Michaela; he's afraid that everyone else interested in him is only interested in changing him. He wants people to like him for himself, without trying to "fix him up" because the way he is right now isn't good enough.
He does want to be good, though. Being the hero who brought Ansley's parents back to life felt really great, and Kay's resolved to clean up his act. His old habits will be hard to break, especially since being a werewolf also feels good. The transformation comes with a sense of power and adrenaline that's extremely heady. Kay doesn't like to drink or do drugs because he doesn't like being out of control, but changing into a werewolf and running around rooftops or even fighting gives him an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline and getting to a place where he can go into his body without having to think, whether it's fighting or running or something else, are his vices. His control is so, so far from perfect.
Any differences: Matthew is what Kay would be if Kay's childhood wasn't troubled. He's bright but coasting along, making mediocre grades to the frustration of everyone who can see his potential. He's never been in a fight in his life, nor is he athletic at all. Honestly, Matthew's kind of a coward. He shares Kay's deep need for friends, though, and is pretty fun to hang out with. Unfortunately, you never know what he's really thinking, because he'll usually say what he thinks you want him to say, and keep his own opinions to himself.
Abilities: --Lycanthropy:
Being a werewolf is the big one. His wolf form is brown, about eight feet tall on its hind legs and looks like an Underworld werewolf was caught in some gamma radiation. Its eyes are a flat acid-green and its arms are bigger and stronger than its legs, so the final effect is like the Incredible Hulk's fursona if it were built like Disney's Beast. Kay can transform voluntarily, but direct exposure to full moonlight triggers an involuntary shift, as well as being injured badly enough (as I mentioned before). Only the injury-induced shift makes him lose control of himself; he retains his mind even in full moonlight.
Healing: An injury-induced shift will heal Kay of all the injuries he currently has, up to and including limb regeneration. Sometimes, if Kay is at the point of death, he can fight on without a loss of control through sheer grit and belief in what he's doing. In order for this to happen, though, he needs to care about at least one person besides himself. His ties to other people are what allow him to survive near-death experiences. He cannot use this ability voluntarily.
Bites: If Kay bites anyone while in wolf form, it will not cause anyone in-game to change into a werewolf. The bite may become infected and require medical attention, but in his world, a person needs to have a pre-existing blood condition (essentially, have the dormant potential already) to become a werewolf after being bitten. No one in Einmal would have this.
Moonlight: Being in direct moonlight (no matter what phase) makes Kay physically tougher. He can shake off small cuts, bruises, and even minor burns.
Senses: Kay's senses of smell and hearing are superhuman in wolf form, but not nearly as good as a real dog's. As a human, those senses are unusually sharp, but he would have to transform to, say, track someone.
Kujo: Kay has an inner wolf. Of course he has an inner wolf. This inner wolf is mostly dormant in his psyche, but if Kay uses his psychic powers too much, he risks waking the wolf up. The wolf is everything animalistic about Kay -- all of the instincts with no humanity to temper it. It sees everyone around Kay as either a threat to its dominance, a potential mate, or food. If awakened, it will take control temporarily, and will do terrible, terrible things. A quick and easy way to tell how animalistic Kay is feeling at the moment is his eyes. If the wolf is rearing its ugly head inside of him, one or both of his eyes will turn the same acid green as they are in his wolf form.
Spirit bonds:
He's a harlequin romance hero. You knew this was coming. If someone sleeps with Kay, whether he cares about them or not, a bond will be formed. He'll feel protective and sexually jealous of them whether he wants to or not, and that person will be at a natural advantage with regards to calming Kay down and stopping him from hurting people. He'll also get a vague, spidey-sense kind of twinge whenever the other person is in clear and present danger. This bond is broken as soon as either he or the person he's bonded with sleeps with someone else.
--Psychic abilities:
When Kay is injured badly but not to the point of death (or injures himself for the purpose of using this ability), he gets confusing and sometimes terrifying psychic visions about the biggest question currently on his mind. (In his world, this is an ability shared by all supernatural creatures. Any use of this ability to discover things relevant to another player character will be cleared with the player first.) Kay doesn't use it often; it's risky, it doesn't always work, and at worst it could trigger the same kind of involuntary transformation and control loss that severe injury does.
--Non-supernatural abilities:
Kay's in top physical condition. He's strong, fast, good at breaking things, and can totally do that werewolf parkour shit all the cool kids are doing. He's not an expert fighter -- someone with real training and skill could take him out -- but he's an experienced and talented one. Also, he's really difficult to contain. He has a special talent for breaking out of physical restraints.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person:
Roleplay Sample - Network:
Any Questions? Nope!
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