Toviyah

[Toviyah]

Player: 0173

Contact: (PM me)

Intentions: Hero


Background
Name: Toviyah

Race: Angel

Species: Angel

Age: 5 (died at 36)

Tier: 4


Social
Place of Birth: Columbia, Alexandria (mortal birth), Lost Angels, Alexandria (mortal death)

Allegiances: The Celestial Realm

Aspirations: Bring the lost children home

Nicknames: Toby, Mr Snuffles

Titles: -

Relatives: -

Significant Other: -


Mental
Personality: Toviyah still prefers to be known as Toby, indicative to some peers of a lingering attachment to his mortal life. He certainly does retain much of his old personality: his sentimental affection for the little things, his lighthearted, almost playful sense of optimism, and his tendency to put himself at risk to protect and aid the innocent. He believes destroying evil is only secondary to preserving and inspiring good, and prefers mercy over judgment - up to a point. Even Celestial agents are permitted wrath, and his retains the taste it acquired in life for those who harm children.

Likes: Children, folk music, quiet towns, flowers growing up between the cracks in the sidewalk, peace, quiet, attempting to dance with two left feet, long walks in the countryside, laughing at himself, preserving the spirit of the law, having an active hand in keeping the innocent safe

Dislikes: People who exploit children and innocents, tuna casserole, following rules to the letter

Strengths: As one of the more "mortal-minded" of the angels, Toby can step in more easily among the lower races. Remembering how to be human makes it easier than learning to be human from scratch - learning to go under the radar, blend in with the common races, and get inside their heads, not only to avoid being found out, but also to do good among them - and most importantly, inspire them to noble acts of their own. Toby brings to the table a natural sense of empathy from his old life - an understanding, not just for mortal emotions, but the reasons behind them and the actions that result. Most evil, in his eyes, is merely pain - pain that can be healed, a soul that can and should be redeemed, not destroyed, and he will go great lengths to see that redemption take place. With one notable exception.

Weaknesses: In his former life, Toby was always one for toeing the boundary line, and occasionally crossing it, and this has carried over into his life beyond death. He is very young in angel terms, and while his comprehension of life may have been expanded by his connection to the Celestial Realm, he's still learning to see through this higher sight - and by extension, having to let go of his much more limited mortal understanding. Old sentiments, unfinished business from his past, and his present job scope all evoke old emotions - human emotions - and often weigh him down into making all-too-human decisions, not least of which is his habit of greasing the wheels by subtly messing with mortal free will. His compassion and mercy aren't infinite, either - he reserves little goodwill for beings who deliberately harm children, infernal and mortal alike.


Physical
Major Details: Dark blue eyes, greying black hair, 5 ft 7 in as a human; body length of 2 ft as a white-and-tan beagle; four light blue wings, mainly concealed

Appearance: Toby's four wings, which he rarely shows, are a translucent, ethereal blue. He prefers to take the form he wore as a mortal - that of a lean human with short, neat greying hair, dark blue eyes, laugh wrinkles near the corners of his eyes and a trimmed, short-boxed beard. To keep up his appearance, he walks with a slight limp in his left leg.

Natural Abilities: Toby retains his kickboxing and aiming skills from his life on the police force. With years of combat knowledge firmly under his belt, he can fall back on his reflexes in a fight, and let his body do the thinking for him.

Natural Traits: As a beagle, Toby gains the creature's powerful sense of smell, sharp teeth and claws, and an insatiable urge to play with children and retrieve thrown objects.

Strengths: When push comes to shove, Toby doesn't need to think. Conditioned reflexes can bring his gun to hand, or his fist to his opponent's face, in half the time it would take to consider moving at all. At the same time, also a product of his training, Toby has an instinctive gauge of roughly how much damage he needs to inflict to end the fight as cleanly as possible. From range, Toby is a superb marksman, quick on the draw, accurate with small firearms, and decent with flung projectiles. If it's not nailed down - and even if it is, he can throw it and make it land where it hurts.

Weaknesses: Toby's well-honed reflexes have seen him through years of service, taking down mortal, humanoid opponents. When he's fighting creatures of the night and the Inferno - oozing, slithering, multi-hearted horrors with decidedly non-humanoid bodies and tentacles where tentacles shouldn't be, he fares considerably less well in close quarters when he shuts off his mind and lets his body dance. Most of them just laugh at bullets and rocks. His fighting habits might serve a mortal policeman well - but on this new gameboard, they can be a liability more frequently than a help.


Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Mental (Empathy), Proficiency 4.5. Toby can sense the physical, mental and emotional state of beings around himself, and project emotions into others, drain them away, or insulate beings from feeling certain emotions.
- Tier 2: Spoken (Charm), Proficiency 4. Toby can add magical properties to objects or people by speaking.
- Tier 3: Physical (Healing), Proficiency 4.5. Toby can breathe a healing mist and direct it with his movements.
- Tier 4: Mental (Soul), Proficiency 4. Toby can convert his own life force into energy constructs and project his consciousness in an incorporeal form outside his body. He can also interact with other spirits, sever or restore their connections to life, guide them beyond, bind them to a location - and if need be, destroy them.

Visual Display: Toby's soul is a bright orange, with turquoise flames burning off its edges. His eyes display that same pattern - solid orange, with turquoise flames at the edges - when he uses his Empathy magic. His healing manifests as an orange mist that regenerates all living tissue in contact.

Special Abilities: Enhanced Speed 1, Enhanced Strength 1, Psychometry, Enhanced Toughness 1, Insight
Bonus Special Abilities: Animal Shapeshifting 1, Enhanced Speed 2, Humanoid Shapeshifting 1

Unique Abilities: Toby can project light from his form and control its intensity. His wings, when manifested, allow him to levitate, and he can disguise his magical pressure and energies to resemble those of a tier 2 human.

Strengths: Toby has mastered the ins and outs of his Empathy magic, and can use it to great effect to defuse or snuff out emotional tension before it can explode into a conflict. With similar expertise, he can boost positive emotions such as joy or courage, which works wonders for tipping the scales - half the battle is won in the heart, after all. His Spoken magic, not tied down to a specific language, enables him to be sneaky about casting Charms - as long as he's talking, there's a chance he might be working a spell.

Weaknesses: Toby only recently took up his Soul magic, and is very cautious about using it - punching a creature of pure evil with his own soul is hardly something that could be thought of as safe. His lack of experience, compounded by personal reservations concerning its use, puts great limits on his only combative magical specialization. Charmed projectiles, strikes and demoralization are his preferred way of using magic in a fight, and those are more likely to fall short against psychotic creatures of infernal make. With no elemental weaponry to speak of either, he has no magical wiggle room left when subtlety and supportive spells fail.


Inventory
Mundane:
- A double-action semi-automatic pistol and bullets.
- A sling bag containing several illustrated storybooks.
- A small plush ball containing a bell.

Magical: -


History

Before Toviyah was an angel, he was a mortal man, with all the freedom thereof, born to more privilege than others of his race. His name was Tobias Kent, and the decisions he made through the course of his life would one day lead him to the choice of accepting an offer he could never, would never turn down.

Tobias, known to close acquaintances as Toby, was the second of three siblings born to a family in one of the better suburbs of Columbia. He had a pleasant childhood, as childhoods go; the neighborhood had enough playmates in his age group so he never lacked company, but there was always enough space for him if he needed to be alone. His father worked an 8 to 5 job in the city; his mother stayed home to keep an eye on the three to keep them from razing the neighborhood.

Toby was living the Alexandrian dream, and he knew it. His parents made sure to remind him. His teachers were just as diligent in making sure he knew. He was living the Alexandrian dream, and he needed to treasure it, because he would have to wake up one day, and live in a world much less kinder than his neighborhood, and there would be dark nights and cold days when he would only have good memories to warm him and light the way.

He grew up with his eyes open, or so he thought. He knew, from a distance, that he was lucky, and not everyone else was. That even in his own country, being able to live in a good neighborhood with loving parents, enough food for each day and a roof over his head was a privilege not everyone enjoyed. But he never experienced the disparity in person - not until his first visit to the city when he was fourteen and volunteered for a school-organized charity project. The target of their goodwill: a city orphanage, in dire need of repair...

Seeing is believing, they say.

Children without loving parents. Children without parents. Children who lived hard, and glared at the well-fed, well-clothed strangers coming to mind them during the renovation in progress like outsiders to be driven off hard-won turf. Children barely able to read and write, with something that was hardly a home, some of whom were desperate enough to consider running away and losing themselves in the streets. Children, suffering. Children, suffering...

It was the hardest two weeks in his life, incomparable to the scrapes and occasional fights of his own active childhood. The idea of anyone living without parents and sufficiency and love had never come easy to his thoughts before. But living among it now, watching all the values he knew turned on their heads because that was the only way to survive, feeling the hurt every moment, coming at him from the walls and the angry, tired, hopeless faces... it clawed and tore at something inside him, savaged it until it started to weaken and crumble. And behind it... something else began to flow free.

Toby always had something of a gift for understanding how others felt. Something he just knew, like how the teacher scolding the class about their bad grades wasn't really trying to scare them by being fierce; or how the kid with the inexhaustible sense of humor was upset about something today and teasing him one more time would lead to a broken nose; or how Mom said to come down off that ledge right now or else because she was scared half to death herself...

That spark of something was shaken free inside him. It caught on his heartstrings and ignited, and he never realized it was there.

They returned to the quiet school in the good neighborhood, where a follow-up project was started to raise funds for the orphanage. Each Friday, over the next few weeks, they boarded a bus to the city, tin cans in hand, to solicit donations off the street.

The specter of children in need haunted Toby every step of the way. He accosted every person he saw on the street, laid out the plight of some young strangers they had never and might never see in their lives - poured it out until it ached to feel... and they listened. He spoke fervently, earnestly, and he felt it with all his heart, and his audience listened with rapt attention. And they felt it too, with expressions ranging from the shocked to the tearfully sympathetic... they must have felt, because they all gave, some quite generously indeed. The donations were mostly in coins, but even those added up, and Toby always brought full tins back for his teachers to pour out, count and wonder at...

All felt, and all gave, with one notable exception.

Hit by the same rush of urgency he felt, the owlfolk in the casual wear stopped to listen, as all the other donors had. Shee flinched as Toby continued to speak, feeling that familiar pain rise up to give strength to his words, but then her eyes narrowed, and Toby felt the woman's gaze start to bore into him, and almost through him, shifting from suspicion into indignation -

And then it was Toby's turn to flinch in surprise, then pain, as he felt something slam down around him like invisible walls, and the owlfolk snagged him by one ear and frog-marched him back to his teachers.

Strong telepaths, Toby learned, don't take kindly to having their hearts pulled at with magic.

A good deal of angry noise followed. None of it was particularly loud, and none directed at him, but it was there, and he could still feel it, however suddenly distant the emotions had become. Anger from the owl mage, some at the teachers, some for Toby himself, all to do with the idea that someone would unleash a budding, unaware mage on a city of non-magicals; total incomprehension from his teachers as the floundered to make sense of the fact dumped on their heads in a storm of righteous fury...

Temper bled off, after a length of harsh words met with flailing protest. Toby remained in the custody of his teachers for the entire day, no longer on the volunteer force, and went home shaken, afraid, and even a little angry.

The owlfolk was waiting for him there, talking over matters with his equally bemused and shaken parents.

He didn't return to school that following week. The mage showed up at his doorstep on Monday morning, right as he was preparing to leave with his siblings, and whisked him off to the city. They spent the first day witnessing life as it really was, without the Alexandrian Dream to insulate him - gang fights, robberies, and worse, all before the evening. And Toby learned, painfully, to keep his heart to himself. To shut himself off, because it hurt too much to keep feeling, and to keep from reaching out to the pained and the pain-causers alike, because - and this was the hardest part of the same lesson his new teacher had learned - his interference, in the long run, would only add to the mess. He didn't understand it, not in the least, but with the telepath ever at his side, one hand ready to grip his shoulder and keep him from bolting, the other gripping a walking cane for speedy application to his head if he protested, there wasn't anything else he could do.

The next morning, he tried to sneak out early. The mage was right outside the back door, waiting for him in the yard.

That next harrowing day took him to a hospital. The sterile air and cold corridor lights were thick with the smell of medicine and the dulled throb of pain, and it was all he could do to hug himself tight, hold his magic back, and keep from crawling out of his own skin.

He couldn't sleep that night. He wouldn't leave the house the next day. He shut the windows, pulled the drapes, locked the door, turned - and the owl was sitting on his bed, watching him, with no sign of entry through windows that remained shut and locked.

He broke then, a minute of terrified sobbing precluding a longer period when his vision went red and he began screaming his frustration at the mage - who waited patiently while he ranted, until his throat felt like sandpaper and he could barely breathe for the sound of his heart slamming in his throat.

And then she spoke.

"You were born with a heart in your chest and a brain between your ears, boy. Learn to use both, or you'll be of help to no one."

"An untrained mage, running loose in public and pulling on the hearts of others. You're lucky I found you first - don't look at me like that! This world isn't your idyllic little bubble! Ask yourself, for a moment, if I am the only mage in the world? No? The only one in Alexandria, then? In Columbia?"

"There are powerful figures with far less scruples than I, who have uses for your powers that would turn your stomach and make you wish you had never reached for a single heart, if they'd gotten their hands on you. You barely touched me. What makes you think you could affect them an ounce more? What of those with little self-restraint to speak of, if they sensed you bending their emotions to your petty little cause? You would be a fine red mist drifting on the wind, and no charge would be levied against them for acting in self-defense! Behind bars, in the clutches of criminals, or dead without even a body to bury - where would you be then? Who would you have helped?"

"And even, should we hypothesize that you might dodge their attention, if even by a hair's breadth - let us assume you were successful, every last day of your life. Let us pretend you went through each day, manipulating hearts as you saw fit, and never suffered the repercussions you should have earned. Let us imagine you lived through your life, and it were to come to an end as all lives do. What would happen the moment your spell broke? Those lives you sifted like sand - what would happen, once your magic no longer forced compassion upon them? When they woke up, days or hours later, as many you marked already have, and stopped feeling as you would have them?"

"You already wield power over others, boy. You used it in ignorance, with the best of innocent intentions, and left little damage behind. But think, for a moment, and answer to your own heart, and answer truly. Would you have kept binding hearts to feel, if you had found out what power you hold? Is this what your parents taught you, to trample so freely over the will of others? Is this what you believe in, that you, barely past childhood, can make decisions on the behalf of elders and betters with minds and hearts and cares of their own?"

"And what now, that you know better? Will you set aside your power, or learn to direct it to a better purpose? And how do you believe you can best accomplish either end? Will you learn on your own, and fall and pick yourself up until you are battered and bruised and weary of life and your own limits before you are twenty?"

"Or will you let me help you, and lean on my knowledge until you can stand for yourself and find your own path to walk?"

Toby listened, spellbound, though the only magic active was his own. He felt the owlfolk's own temper, prickly with exasperation at first, until the smolder gave way for the underlying emotion to shine through.

Pure honesty, dead serious, openly concerned - sensing the mental intrusion, but not pushing it aside as she had the first time they met. Letting him in, letting him feel the genuine worry - the flicker of something approaching care for a complete stranger who had made a bad decision out of a desire to help...

Toby felt, and he listened. He reached for the outstretched hand...

He was a month late when he returned to school, to be greeted by curious stares and questions. He had to rush to catch up on his schoolwork, and there was a changed air about him - older, more cautious, more controlled, like a hand gripping a loaded gun, one finger carefully positioned to keep the safety catch in place. But he was by no means less eager to have fun, or to involve himself in the well-being of others. Some remarks were passed, however; in his peers' words, he seemed to 'get' people so easily now; his teachers noted that the tension drained out of arguments when he managed to put a few words in, and he now showed a gift for breaking up fights with minimal injury to all involved. On weekends, he still met up with the mage in his backyard for a gentle method of building up control. The meditation sessions helped in more ways than one - he learned to feel his own magic, to concentrate against the usual stresses of school life, find that almost zen-like state of calm and stay there until he rose above the noise around...

He graduated from high school, and was shunted into a double course in psychology and literature. His tutor in the former subject was a familiar, feathered face that raised an eyebrow upon seeing him, but made no remarks outside of the classroom. Their extra-curricular activities continued, Toby consolidating his grip on his Empathic magic and slowly taking up a new form, also suited to indirect ways of making things better. Basic kick-boxing lessons joined his schedule, preparing him for a field of work where he might need to defend himself, or someone else. He graduated at the age of twenty-four, exchanged forwarding addresses with the mage before they parted ways, and progressed on to join the police force.

A good report, a background of volunteer work with children and a reputation for keeping a level head in the middle of chaos took him far away from his home town, and put him on the fast track to the difficult cases. In the wake of the Were Wars, there were many indeed, enough to rival the numbers of capable members in the department, magicals included, who worked with him to restore some sense of order to the aftermath. Roving street gangs, scavenging for new recruits and broken households to pick on, missing persons by the dozen, broken children, caught up in the mess...

He sat on his magic and forced himself to keep from touching it. He brought the old lessons and the meditative calm to mind, and forced himself to leave the very cuttable corners alone. It was a terrible struggle some days, when they brought in a sullen youth, or two or five, and someone with a level head had to read them their rights or at least attempt to talk some sense into them... but he managed to resist the temptation... mostly...

There were times when just a little spark of magic, barely a nudge to make the one on the receiving end a little more agreeable to listening, enough that they might later consider an idea on their own...

Compared to the more intrusive work of the telepaths in the department - those who had to dip into minds to gather names and establish connections from one person to another, until someone could round them all up - he was barely scraping the surface of magical interference. He hoped.

He never reached to sway their hearts onto another track. But the little things - just slight nudges here, taps there - they added up. He located the core emotions, and shifted them just a little off target, made them more or less than what they were. Charm magic helped find some of them, sharpened his partners' senses to notice little things gone amiss, or helped the psychic interrogators safely go a little further in for clues, and there was no denying that his ability to take the shape of a beagle was crucial in letting him sniff out trails that were supposedly gone dead...

Only ever little things, but they added up ever so well.

The little, mundane things also went a long way. A name might be left off the list, a report filled out in full and missing an important signature... the paperwork was tweaked, the youngest offenders sent home with a stern warning and no lasting stain on their records to show they'd ever been in a police station.

Someone higher up took notice. They didn't take too kindly to that.

Toby was lucky. He had a good track record when it came to bringing in offenders, and they usually didn't come back. His work in the field brought his teammates back mostly unscathed, even from the sizable number of armed fights and street brawls they'd gone into. His superiors officially chalked it up to a matter of simple incompetence with paperwork, and managed to keep the brunt of the fallout from reaching him.

He kept his sergeant rank and the authority that came with it. He didn't get demerited, or placed under investigation on suspicion of being in cahoots with the crime rings. He was only reassigned to the middle of nowhere in hell, more commonly known as the city of Lost Angels.

Hardened criminals plied their trade here, seasoned from years of a dog-eat-dog diet and nowhere ready to listen to reason from a cop whose first impression was the spitting image of a tall glass of water. His battle expertise and strategy were all he could bring with him, or so it seemed at first...

Until Toby met the rest of his team. Many were world-weary and disaffected; the flotsam of the police force washed up in a lawless hellhole following some major screw-up. Bitterness and discontent filled the ranks. Most had barely more interest than the average Lost Angels' mugger in listening to some bleeding-heart with his bright ideas. A handful of magic users was scattered between the departments; fewer and further between were the well-meaning souls who had broken rules one too many times to go ignored. All worked to keep the department alive, often disregarding process and greasing the wheels to obstruct and harass the more slippery criminals who escaped conventional justice, running interference to slow them down, if not stop them.

All he had in common with most of them was the disgrace of being reassigned here, and something approaching a disregard for the letter of the law. All he had to go on, the first few weeks of dirty looks in and out of the station, were his old memories, a flicker of the past to remind him of what he'd lived and toiled for. He whispered into the night, to the darkness and the city and anything and nothing that could hear his words touched with magic, that he'd see a breakthrough...

It was enough.

Two months went by, murky waters barely stirred by his presence, and then suddenly, a miracle. Or so others would have called it; all Toby knew was the flash of white-hot rage when the emaciated child staggered in, heart ringing true with a tale of having been stolen from his home. And then, before he could reign that explosive fury in, everyone within ten feet was up in arms and ready to maim someone as more details poured out - that he was hardly the only one in this latest batch to be spirited away from their homes to some gruesome end, here or elsewhere further south...

Then the psychics, sensing the commotion, reached the scene, and things fell into place.

Subtly laid charms pieced the boy's memories together, tracking the culprits back to a warehouse that had been under close watch for months. They had a battle plan sketched out and in operation before the night was over. Toby insisted, from several hours before, that they'd find enough evidence to put the entire operation away. He gathered a few of the men under him, and they stormed the front, armed with substandard equipment, some with magic of their own, backed by magically charged words and confidence... and the dominos began to fall.

Child traffickers brought to justice, in the city of Lost Angels of all places, was big news. The crime ring behind it, uprooted and put behind bars in the week that followed, courtesy of multiple paper trails that carelessly fell between the cracks for the LAPD to fish out, was bigger news still. Their photos would have been on the front pages of every major newspaper for weeks, but by some strange coincidence, every camera pointed their way had an internal meltdown before the shutter could click.

Spurred on by that major victory, they kept going, daring, in increasing number, to rock the boat with bigger steps and move from interference to open warfare. Some in the ranks protested, cautious of stirring the waters and the inevitable repercussions. A compromise was struck, with the more cautious choosing to stay behind the scenes and work quietly while Sergeant Toby led the others out to battle. One side served as an obvious front and an all-too-menacing diversion; the other pulled strings to keep them informed and shake the lawyers off.

The next month, a drug ring was taken down. Missing persons were located, street brawls broken up, an unlicensed casino discovered to be the front for a Material smuggling group.

After that first time when he let his magic slip, Toby made sure to keep a tight reign on it, remembering how little time it would take for shortchanged results to stop remaining changed. He still listened with both ears and heart, and he employed little charms here and there to keep his partners alert and focused when they most needed an edge to survive. He cut them slack, and spurred on by each victory, they picked up the slack for him.

For his thirtieth birthday, Toby's old department sent him more flotsam as a present to fix. The man was a hulking brute with a fierce scowl, a sharp, belligerent tongue, a history of violence, and a tendency to miss his watch on a monthly basis. He was bringing the department's name down, even if he was taking street crime down a few notches, and lawsuits from angry parents with teenage offspring's cracked bones to tend to were hardly a fitting exchange for keeping youth off the streets at night.

What the official fax and the unofficial warnings from his former colleagues didn't bring up was the abject terror Toby could feel in the man - answers to Oliver, or Surridge, callsign Dervish, injures people who call him Ollie - almost perfectly buried beneath the appearance of a bad temper and words crafted to set others off and keep them from looking further.

The warnings didn't mention his tolerance for stray beagles that padded alongside him when he went out on a patrol. Or the way he looked up at the night sky when he thought no one sentient was in earshot, or the shiver that followed as he watched the moon slide ever closer to fullness...

The first evening of the full moon, he missed his watch. A beagle's keen nose trailed him out of the city, far into the desert, where footprints swelled and doubled in number.

Toby was waiting at his side the following morning, out under the desert sun, when his skin shifted from green to a strained, exhausted pale, horns receded into brows and nose, and he awoke with a groan that cut off in terrified silence. He was waiting at his side with calm words, freshly brewed tea, and a helping hand extended.

The second evening of the full moon, they sat together in the office, Toby's hands on Oliver's shoulders, bracing him with words and will and simple living, breathing presence, to resist the supernatural pull that dragged him from his human form and made him into a monster, inside and out.

The following week, he was a little less prickly; a little slower to stab with a cutting remark; a little more willing to listen for another second or two before blowing it off with a snort. Barely a difference, but it was there...

Oliver had some magical talent of his own - an ability to make darkness flow, solid or immaterial, to the tune of his movements. He had some grasp of it, enough to wield it like a hammer; devastatingly fitting with his superhuman strength and habit of treating everything like a troublesome nail. Toby remembered, from his magical education, that it was this grasp which would be vital to taming the creature that still broke free whenever the moon was full.

There was little enough time for magical training, when there was a growing number of cases to handle, crime to bust and patrol routes to walk. But where they could, whenever they could, they set time aside to head somewhere quiet and smash up the scenery with shadow blades and fists. During the moments between, they found common ground, here and there - it added up, over the five years spent in each other's company. Among other things, both discovered the other had been a Literature major in college.

Ollie, as he begrudgingly allowed Toby to name him, struggled for five years, and finally gained enough magical strength and control to subdue his were form, if not his pessimism, uneven temper, preference for aggressive negotiation and dislike for mornings. But there was a quiet morning when he turned 31, barely days after Toby turned 36 himself. Toby showed up early at his apartment door with a gift-wrapped package, revealed to contain a book on basic runes.

Oliver was silent for the rest of the day. Nothing needed to be said.

Then the raid they staged that night went awry, and nothing more could be said.

It was only a matter of time. Rocking the boat had its cost, garnered negative attention from their very targets - their very power-hungry targets, not about to cure the goose of its golden-egg-laying ailment. The LAPD had a smattering of decent mages. The crime bosses had money to spend to buy stronger, unscrupulous ones - for a hefty price, no doubt, but at a smaller cost than the potential loss of the city, at the rate the police department was slashing their profits. In his time spent focusing on one member of his department, Toby had missed out on the signs that something was going wrong: that some other men had occasionally failed to call in from their patrols, or that one or two seemed suspiciously blank and distracted at times, with little gaps in inconsistent memories. The psychics did, and pooled their talents against the specter of some unknown, powerful mage who was on the other side - but they couldn't catch everything. They realized enough to warn him against the raid. Flush with a long string of victories to the LAPD's name, he didn't listen.

His detection charms saw nothing amiss. They didn't pick up the counter-wards blocking his own magic, or the ambush waiting around the corner. He felt a blow to the back of his head, and everything went dark.

He couldn't move when he woke in darkness. He heard voices; felt the gun barrel against the side of his head; couldn't concentrate to break or shape the wills of those around him; could only sense rage and helplessness and triumph radiating at him from different directions, and one explosion from fear and helplessness into boiling, incandescent rage...

He heard an inhuman howl.

Then everything hurt. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was happening to him; the bones breaking, the flesh tearing, the body flung hard against the wall...

Then there was peace.

He floated in an endless eternity of calm, unknown and unknowing, waiting and wondering, and Someone found him. Someone, or Something - the specifics didn't seem to matter. What did, was that It had been watching his whole life, everything's whole existence - not least the decisions he made, and They had an offer.

A choice was laid out before him.

He made his decision in a heartbeat.

Then he breathed with new lungs, and his feet touched the earth once more. The world looked different; no less dangerous, no less broken, but with an inherent beauty to it, the very one he'd been seeking to protect for all his adult life. There was a connection in his mind to something great and divine and Loving, and It looked upon Its creation and saw that it was good.

He got up, and he began to walk. He had a creation to protect...

Five years later, with more magic at his fingertips and a still-growing understanding of his new place in the grand order, Toviyah can still walk like a human, act like a human, and introduce himself as Toby. He specializes in finding the restless souls of dead children and bringing them to peace.

He also plays fetch and catches frisbees on weekends.