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annihilist) wrote2016-12-06 04:38 pm
The man
Title(s): Elder
Age: 124
Date of Birth: December 27, 1892
Gender: Male
Species: Vampire
Marital Status: Unmarried
Family: Forcibly deceased
Religion: Atheist
Occupation: Hunter
Education Level: Self-taught
PB: Ian Somerhalder
Threadjacking: Y
Fourth-Walling: If discussed
Mindreading: If discussed
Fighting: Y
Injury: Y
Romance: If discussed
Smut: If discussed
Offensive Subjects: (elaborate)
Age: 24
Timezone: GMT(-8)
Contact: PM this journal
At 6'2'' with dark hair, pale skin and bright blue eyes, Devin has a way of standing out. He's muscular without being bulky, and has the chiseled sort of good looks that he seems incapable of playing down. He tends to favor suits and dark colors; rarely can he be seen in anything that isn't blue, green, or black. When the occasion calls for it, he'll wear more practical clothing designed for maximum mobility. Mostly he goes clean-shaven, but Devin travels quite a bit and will sport scruff from time to time. His hair rarely extends far enough to cover his eyes.
Devin has spent most of his life fighting other vampires, and due to a series of unique circumstances (see history) he scars while other vampires do not. They cover a significant portion of his body, but the most severe are the crosshatch marks and the burn across his back. These are also his oldest scars. He also has a series of ultraviolet-sensitive tattoos of over a dozen religious symbols that only appear under a blacklight and are usually hidden by clothing.
He carries himself with confidence and is actually quite graceful, capable of moving through dense crowds without hardly touching anyone. This grace can be disrupted if his focus is shaken enough. As a vampire, his top canines are slightly elongated and sharpened by default and he is capable of extending them at will. When he does so, his eye color also shifts to a clearer, icier blue.
Devin is a loner. His life is spent hunting his own kind; it doesn't earn him any friends among other vampires. He avoids all attachments, as it's far easier to hurt the people he cares about than himself, and he would never want anyone harmed on his behalf. If Devin does demonstrate care for someone, there is very little he wouldn't do to keep them safe. He feels quite strongly that his own life is nearly worthless with all of the blood on his hands. In order to keep people at a distance when he does interact with them on a regular basis, Devin is intentionally antagonistic, hoping to come off as a jerk such that no one will care about him. It's easier that way. He does not trust easily, and will assert that no one should trust him, either.
To say that Devin hates himself is no understatement; he hates being a vampire and all that that encompasses. In particular, he hates having to consume human blood to live. Despite knowing that the eradication of his species is a necessity, murder is still murder, and he's killed thousands. His avoidance of relationships with people is in part a form of self-punishment: he doesn't deserve to enjoy life with all that blood on his hands. He also denies himself those things that he wants, small and large. He only allows what is necessary, most of the time. Though he wishes he could grow hard and uncaring to avoid the sense of guilt and hatred, to sink into darkness and be done with it, the core of his being remains full of light.
If he were coaxed, Devin would express a great love for books. As he is mostly self-taught, books are friends and teachers that can't be used as leverage against him, and help him to understand people and the world around him. Devin has learned how to be comfortable around people and is in fact quite suave most of the time, though his social skills were largely developed out of a necessity. He enjoys solitude well enough, and loneliness a companion he's very familiar with.
Blood Breed — Devin has a variety of racial skills from vampirism. He's capable of moving at several times the speed of a human, to the point of being a blur (especially over short distances). Strong enough to break human bones, Devin has developed a very fine degree of control over his use of force. He has enhanced hearing that he can turn up or down, and excellent night vision. When he elongates his fangs, all of his senses become heightened; however, it's also a state of less emotional control and can prove detrimental if Devin becomes extremely upset or angry.
Vampires are also capable of Claiming and Binding humans. A Claim tells other vampires that human belongs to him, and that there would be grave consequences to harming them. Semi-permanent Claims require a slightly more involved process, but can be broken by choice of the vampire or the human. Binding is a fully permanent process, giving a vampire compulsive power over it's bound humans, essentially turning them into slaves. Bound humans are often turned to vampires. Devin refuses to use this ability.
Youngest Elder — Devin is not only a vampire but an elder, the oldest of his line. The power is associated with his surname, and if he chose he could use magic to break his tie to the surname and thus the power. Essentially, it enhances and expands all of his usual vampiric traits: his is faster and stronger than most other vampires, and this power will only grow as he ages. Elderhood also allows him to Claim humans temporarily by touch alone.
Daywalker — Apparently unique among his species, Devin is capable of walking in sunlight without being burned.
Marksman — Devin is skilled with a variety of firearms, though he wouldn't claim to be a sharpshooter or an expert sniper.
Fists of Fury — Devin is an avid boxer, which is his favorite style, but he's also somewhat proficient with Krav Maga.
Silver Tongue — In addition to his native tongue of English, Devin can also speak Gaelic and is fluent in Latin. He knows a smattering of others, including French, Spanish, and Mandarin.
Word of the Angel — Magic is limited in Devin's world primarily to wards (keeping people out of or inside a place, hiding something from view, etc.) that are built on the angelic language of Enochian. He knows enough of the language to be serviceable at it, but he's not fluent enough to speak it well.
Suppression — Devin has developed the ability to suppress his emotions for days at a time when he's on particularly challenging missions where emotion could cloud his judgement; he's capable of doing so for several weeks, but the repercussions are significant. Even just doing it for a few days is unhealthy for his mental state.
The Aspect — Devin contains one of the seven faces of Abaddon, the Angel of Death. It's entirely dormant, and he's unable to access any of the power it holds (as far as he knows).
Unlike most vampires in his world, Devin was born and not turned. Live-born vampires are extremely rare and very few bloodlines remain that have run unbroken. The youngest son of Elias and Acelina Parker, Devin was born nearly two centuries after his previous sibling and was considered something of a miracle. He was to be their triumph, they said. His siblings (Edmund, Geoffrey, Margaret, Grace, and Rose) were similarly thrilled. At first, anyway. As members of British high society, there were certain things that Devin was expected to uphold, particularly among other vampires. Some of these expectations were humdrum: learning to dance, dressing a certain way, etiquette and so on. The attitude expected of him did not go over well, however.
Vampires are arrogant almost by nature, and because they use humans as food they consider themselves better. They are predators, at the top of the food chain, and humans are there to be used as vampires see fit, either for food or for fun. Even as a child, this did not sit well with Devin. He sympathized with humans, and asked why they had to be harmed in order to feed. Such questions earned him his first serious injury at the hand of his father. At the age of six, he gained his first scar, and it was then that his family realized something was very, very wrong with him. Not only did Devin scar, he was also slower than he ought to be compared to other vampires, and far weaker - almost as weak as a human. Worse still, Devin began to express a dislike with having to consume blood. It became clear that he was some sort of aberration, particularly in the eyes of his father.
Elias couldn't just kill Devin, however. There was an image to maintain, after all. Instead, he took to beating him and then chaining him up and whipping him repeatedly. Half the time he beat Devin was out of hatred, and the other half was to test him - to see how much Devin could stand, how long it took for him to recover and how he would react. Elias was attempting to force his son into being a proper vampire, but in the end only saw Devin as something to be ashamed of. The rest of his family was less physically abusive but regularly reminded Devin that he was something less, that he didn't belong, that there was something wrong with him. That he was broken. At the age of eleven, Devin finally decided he had had enough.
When a vampire is starved long enough, they reach a state of extraordinary savagery. For a short period of time they become extraordinarily strong as well. Devin refused to drink blood almost a month straight, hiding it from his family, and allowed himself to turn into an animal. His father was startled enough that Devin was able to kill him, and then Devin burned his family's mansion to the ground, murdering everyone inside. He didn't escape entirely unscathed, and he still bears a massive burn mark across his back, but it was a small price to pay for freedom. At the age of eleven, he became a vampire elder. Overwhelmed, Devin ran until he couldn't run anymore, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake.
It took him years to get a handle on himself. By the time he was seventeen, he was almost permanently angry but finally in full control of his powers. It was then that he first met the Spirit. Also known by the name God (among many others), the Spirit appeared to keep Devin out of harm's way, and then explained why Devin is the way he is, why he scars and why he's able to walk out in daylight: he contains an aspect of Abaddon, the Angel of Death. The aspect is dormant, kept that way for both Devin and Abaddon's safety. Predictably, Devin was not pleased by this news, and has spent most of the rest of his life denying that it was true. The Spirit by and large has kept it's distance, at Devin's demand, but it continued to keep an eye on him nevertheless.
Driven by hatred of himself and his race, Devin took up hunting his own species, aiming to eradicate them from the earth. He slayed hundreds if not thousands. Both out of a sense of duty and in an effort to sniff out vampires involved in land wars, Devin joined the British military and fought in both World Wars. During this time, he developed what are probably the only friendships he's ever had with some of the men in his unit. After the war, he never saw any of them but continued to write letters with many of them, watching and protecting from a distance those men who had discovered what he was. Nearly a century went by in relative quiet. And then he met Bobby.
Bobby was a human vampire hunter; wickedly smart and relentlessly persistent, she wouldn't let Devin get away when she figured out he was the rumored vampire that hunted other vampires. It was perhaps no surprise that Devin became infatuated with her, and very nearly gave up the lifestyle of a hunter and the tie to his surname that gave him elder power to be with her. He thought he was in love, despite believing that love was well beyond him, that he was too broken for it. Bobby was not human, however. She was, in fact, the daughter of Lucifer, and her real name is Beelzebub. Her attraction to Devin was out of a desire to use the aspect of the angel Abaddon within him for purposes unknown - to get back into Heaven, to end the world; he's still not certain. Devin managed to defeat her, weakened as she was by spending so much time on the plane of the living, but Beelzebub very nearly cut his heart out. Ten years later, Devin is still hunting his own kind and making plans to join up with an organized group of hunters in New York for a very specific purpose: to end his race, once and for all, and then have them kill him.
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