Post by Dervish on Sept 7, 2012 20:41:01 GMT -5
Player: 0173
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Neutral
Background
Name: Oliver Surridge
Race: Werelord
Species: Triceratops
Age: 36
Tier: 2
Social
Place of Birth: Columbia, Alexandria
Allegiances: -
Aspirations: Survive
Nicknames: Dervish
Titles: -
Relatives: None in contact
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Guilt can weigh heavily on the soul. Leave it to fester for three years, feed it on a regular diet of loneliness and let it thrive in an environment where the strong eat the weak, and it becomes all but crushing. Fresh out of five years in purgatory, Dervish is paranoid, quietly desperate, and above all, tired - but he'd never admit it while he's still on his feet. A brusque, pessimistic attitude, sharpened by time and guilt, lend more color to an already caustic vocabulary, and generally serve to keep others away. But that's the best way things can be, as he tells himself (more and more frequently, as the isolation creeps in).
Likes: "Hmph."
Dislikes: Most people, most societies, idealists, gangsters, children
Strengths: Dervish got through a rough adolescence and a subsequent long stint in the messier side of the Alexandrian police force, courtesy of a sharp mind that tends to escape the notice of first impressions. Most people stop at "oversized thug", and miss "eye for detail", "obsessive lust for making illegal modifications", and "buried tendency to quote Shakespeare at length". Being almost constantly suspicious of other people has left him with an instinct for sensing when things are out of place. That same habit led him to developing his mechanical skills on the sidelines. The taste for literature is just a hobby.
Weaknesses: Being underestimated often also means being passed up for better opportunities in life. Not many upstanding citizens are very willing to hire an oversized thug, let alone give him a promotion. With his paranoia hanging over his shoulder, he often ends up spending needless time and energy fretting over whether he's about to get the short end of the stick again. His solution of keeping people at arm's length just makes it easier to tell that he's got something to hide, which makes trusting him even harder. Dervish is weighed down even further by his own guilt - he isn't sure he can trust himself anymore, and a guilty conscience makes for a bad pillow.
Physical
Major Details: Black hair, gold eyes, scars on right cheek, left side of throat, forearms and right shoulder, full beard, 6 ft 5 (195cm) in human form, olive-green hide, horns above eyebrows and snout, 7 ft 8 (237cm) in were form
Appearance: With his scars, close-cropped, unkempt hair and beard, brawny build and gut, Dervish doesn't look particularly heroic. His expression is often set somewhere between a frown and a scowl, and his clothes, now limited to a few pairs of faded jeans, well-worn boots and rough cotton shirts, mark him as a blue-collar worker at best.
Were form:
Natural Abilities: Dervish has enough strength to carry a few hundred pounds without difficulty, and the stamina to jog for about five miles. His were form boosts both traits, and improves his speed as well.
Natural Traits: In his were form, Dervish gains a thick reptilian hide, three sharp horns, and the ability to survive on a diet of uncooked vegetation.
Strengths: Size matters. Dervish's height and bulk hold him up well in a close-quarters brawl, but they serve just as well to intimidate the fight out of enemies before they can throw a single punch. He has a considerable amount of strength, proportional to his size, and the right bone density for barging through thin walls or taking hits without lasting damage. His human form's skin, as a bleed-over effect from his Were nature, is unnaturally tough, capable of deflecting broken glass, jagged metal, small blades and hypodermic needles. When he needs to fight, he fights dirty.
Weaknesses: Bigger targets are easier targets at range, and all that physical strength means little against a stronger mage, or a bastard with an improvised flamethrower. Even up close, Dervish isn't that good a fighter, having never progressed beyond basic punches and kicks - not that he ever needed to, when all it usually takes is one hit to take out the other guy, but even he knows that sort of luck doesn't last. Acrobatics and complex manoeuvres are completely beyond him - if it's more than "run fast, hit hard, hurt them more, reach the top shelf", it's out of his grasp.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Shadow (Mental), Proficiency 2. Dervish can generate and manipulate shadows, and harden them into solid matter using his thoughts.
- Tier 2: Runes (Written), Proficiency 2. Dervish can work magical effects by carving or otherwise inscribing runes onto a solid surface.
Visual Display: When Dervish's rune spells are active, the runes glow bright red.
Special Abilities: Insight, Enhanced Toughness 1, Enhanced Strength 1
Bonus Special Abilities: Enhanced Toughness 2, Enhanced Recovery 1, Transformed: Enhanced Speed 1
Unique Abilities: -
Strengths: Dervish worked hard to get off Damian's Isle. To that end, he mastered the basics of rune magic - if anything else, they're a potential starting point for greater things. He can quickly recall a good handful of simple runes, many for defence or fire or other things that might scare off wild animals or injure sentient ones looking for a fight. With his shadow magic tied directly to his thoughts, he can scratch the runes out in a hurry - or "cheat" and think them into solid shapes in the air like stronger Written mages. His shadow magic itself draws form and shape from a fairly stubborn mind, making for hardier constructs or better, darker camouflage.
Weaknesses: Mastering the basics gives a solid foundation, but little else. Dervish's rune spells are simply that - basic - and not too much trouble for a more skilful mage to circumvent. On its own, his usage of shadow magic is straightforward, almost rudimentary: harden shadows, hit things. Or grab things, or slice things, or cover things in pitch blackness and slug them with his fists until they surrender. The more exotic uses of shadow magic - making his personal shadow into a pocket dimension, or travelling through shadows, for example - aren't in his repertoire.
Inventory
Mundane:
Faded blue jeans and rough cotton shirts, a small backpack containing a pouch of workman's tools, a wallet with his personal identification, authentication papers from Damian's Isle to prove he can control his transformations.
Magical:
Basic Runes - Written (Perpetual). An old pocket encyclopedia titled "Basic Runes", with runes for durability, fireproofing and waterproofing cut into the leather spine. Beyond the enchantments these lend, the book is not magical. It contains a list of basic runes and their meanings, with a few examples of simple spells for the budding practitioner to use.
History
While he was growing up, Oliver's only family was his father - a distant, shell-shocked man, estranged from his own family by a marriage they opposed, who then had to deal with the sudden death of a beloved wife, mere hours after she gave birth to their son. With little idea of how to raise an infant son while dealing with his own grief, he left the boy in the hands of childcare center attendants, and devoted the time to a second job to pay for his upkeep.
Oliver was subconsciously aware that something was missing, long before he even had the words for it. He grew up painfully shy, more than a little awkward, and unsure of how to get along with his peers. Among his caretakers, he developed a reputation as the quiet one, the well-behaved one... the lonely one, always trying to hide from the group.
In the absence of other people, he found a hiding place in his books. The daycare hadn't been short on children's books, most of which were left untouched when it wasn't time to learn to read. He was safe from the rowdier children when he was with the books, and he was far from alone, even if he was the only one in the room. None of the adults worried too much about the child who didn't misbehave, so they let him be. That was enough.
Then school came, and the rules changed. He could stay apart from the crowd, as he learned, but he could never really get away from them, as he learned too late. School life came with its fair share of predators, and the stragglers - those who strayed from the herd, or tried to go their own way - were easy targets. His best friends were the teachers, and his grades were at the high end of the spectrum, but that wasn't the best trade-off for an isolation from his peers which was partially self-inflicted. Inside class, he got spitballs from the back row and rumors running wild. Away from the relative protection of the teachers, out in the schoolyard, on the way to the bus home, or during gym class, the bullying was a lot worse.
The Reading and Writing classes fascinated him. They always would. He paid less attention in most of the other subjects, but managed to secure decent grades for them. Then workshop classes began...
Sniping bullies in the schoolyard with a potato cannon earned him a number of bruises when he finally ran out of ammunition and his targets closed in. After the fight was broken up, he went from the sickbay to detention after school. But he'd been given a taste of real power, mixed in with a good helping of vengeance, and he liked it.
Any hitting back had to be done from a distance. He began learning to plan his moves, look for escape routes, hide behind teachers and avoid being backed into corners. Pounding a bully's face in with his bare fists was out of the question, which was maybe the only thing keeping it from being a perfect victory - up close, the pale nerdy kid would always be on the losing end.
He was fourteen when it happened. It was a month after his birthday - exactly a month, and he was at home, doing some yard work while his father watched. The sun went down, and the moon came up...
He blacked out. He woke up with his terrified father shaking him, his clothes reduced to tatters, and a stomach full of grass.
He'd never seen his father so alive before, in the month that followed. So struck by a horrifying revelation, so frantic, so terrified of something... of him, he somehow knew...
When he was presented with some pills, just a week before the next full moon, when he was given a shaky explanation about inheriting a "growth spurt" that needed supplements to balance out, he was more than a little suspicious. They didn't seem to be doing their job at first - all they did was make him sick for a whole week, especially at night, even if he only needed to take them once a month... but the results seemed to speak for themselves, the next time he was accosted by a bully right before class began. He was shoved. He shoved back. The bigger boy ended up in a concussed heap at the far corner of the classroom.
This new flavor of vengeance was more addictive than any he'd tasted before. He was hooked on it, just as the schoolyard gangs were hooked on their own power, and unwilling to let the pale nerdy kid bring their reputation down with a few punches.
Oliver left high school as an angry young man with a bone to pick with the street gangs of the world. He joined the police force on pretenses of wanting to protect the innocent. The interviewers compared his grades and detention records with narrowed eyes, but stamped the necessary paperwork and assigned him to one of the worse streets in town, where the force needed all the help they could get and often turned a blind eye to the methods used to fight crime.
He never needed a gun. His fists were more than enough. Unscrupulous partners were more than happy to stay back while he laid into muggers and petty gangsters. Life was good. He was turning the abuse back on a whole new generation of people he'd always hated. He was getting paid to ram his knuckles into their faces. He was happy...
Except that he wasn't. He was still bristly, and even his own "team" had a number of assholes to contend with. He was at a dead end in life, and each passing day of glaring murderously into the abyss only saw him getting angrier at the world.
Then his supplements ran out...
The supplements that he'd dutifully taken once every month, in exchange for a few sleepless nights of mild fevers and nausea, stopped coming. He shrugged it off, thinking he was well out of that so-called growth spurt at the age of twenty. A gang's hideout was located at an old warehouse, and he went in on his own on a bet. He stormed into an ambush after sunset, and went down with bullets in both kneecaps. The gang closed in, looking for some payback of their own. He was long used to pain, but hated being made the victim again, being helpless again...
Years of buried fear came up to the surface, joining the anger and hate already running high. Something snapped. Something else snapped.
He staggered out hours later, his clothing in ruins, still examining his skin for the dark green reptilian scales, while his shadow writhed like a living thing, snuffing out street lamps and clawing up the asphalt as he went along. He left no survivors.
He disappeared the next night - locked himself in his apartment, missed his shift, and suffered as the moon came up and warped him into a terrified monster.
The incident at the old warehouse had left the department with a mountain of paperwork to sift through. When he missed a day of work, with no reason given, that just added to the trouble. He was taken off duty for a proper psychiatric evaluation - not the rushed job that had brought him into the force to begin with. Two months later, he was being reassigned.
He fared even worse at the next department, and the next, as monthly absenteeism and a continued routine of savagery came to bear against street crime. He found he could move his shadow in sync with his thoughts now - small help that was, as magic seemed to add just another dimension to the chaos he wreaked on the streets. Another year of downhill sliding brought him to Lost Angels: the ultimate Shit Creek Without A Paddle for the force, though its reputation had been starting to turn around in recent years.
There, he met Toby. Annoyingly patient, infuriatingly optimistic, eternally sanctimonious, cheerfully meddling Toby, who was respected by many in their unit, who looked at his bad attitude and acidic vocabulary and decided to look deeper, who could turn into a harmless-looking feral beagle and exploited his weakness for harmless-looking life forms to discover his big secret within a month of his arrival.
One of the best things - the best people - to ever happen to him.
Toby kept his secret. The older man, a mage himself, told Oliver - now known more and more by his callsign, Dervish - about the link between his magic and the control he could wield over his forced transformation. He became his tutor, while they were off-duty. More than that, he became a friend - a migraine-causing moron of a friend who never knew when to shut the fuck up and stop being so goddamned optimistic - but a friend, nonetheless. One who liked literature too; who got him to open up as a proper human being for one of the first times in his life. One who made him want to believe that maybe the world wasn't made of shit bound straight for hell; that maybe people weren't a collective disaster of cruelty and stupidity digging themselves into a pit.
On the night of his thirty-first birthday, he fought the pull of the moon, and the lure of the beast inside him. He fought it, and he won.
And then everything went to hell again.
A raid went wrong. Horribly wrong. Toby was taken hostage. There was a gun pointed at his head, there were stronger mages who easily batted the police mages' powers aside, and everything was falling apart just when it was finally looking up, and Dervish felt the terror and helplessness and rage come back...
He snapped, in front of everyone. A large number of bones snapped after that.
Toby didn't make it.
Dervish was lucky. A few psychics hit his mind hard enough to knock him out, so his teammates didn't have to put him down like the crazed animal he briefly transformed into.
He was a lot luckier than that. The paperwork was rushed, to see him off before the law could sink its teeth into him - if only for Toby's sake, not his own. He was just stripped of his rank and badge with a dishonorable discharge, and put on the first boat out to Damian's Isle with his few possessions, including a book on runes that had been a gift from Toby and his next step to learning to use his magic.
Dervish was alone again, with only himself to blame, and a multitude of regrets hovering behind his shoulder, whispering into his ears with every waking moment.
He didn't trust himself around people. Not after the sudden and brutal proof that he couldn't. He spent most of the next five years that followed out in the wilds of the outback, away from the small towns and the civilization they represented. He roughed it, constantly on the move to avoid the roving packs of weres who had given up and gone native, often wondering why he didn't join them.
Each time he asked himself that question, the answer would inevitably come back to him. He was surviving, and constantly fighting to hold on to his humanity, because someone believed. Someone had believed he could be better, that he could master his wilder nature and prove himself both decent and human.
Someone had cared, in a way that was more tangible than anything else he'd felt before as a lonely ghost slipping through the system. Someone had paid for it with their life - and that made it all the more important, that he keep going, he keep living and trying for their sake. That he endure the frustrations of sluggishly growing magical skill, the uneasy nights and the regret-filled dreams they brought, the pain - because for the first time in his life, as far as he could tell, Someone had singled him out and Believed. He couldn't, wouldn't trust himself, but he could hold on to the memory of someone who had. It was all he had, but it was enough.
It took him five years. Five years, out of the small towns more than he was in them, only returning for occasional supplies, or to scrape some money together by doing the odd repair jobs that he came across. Five years, facing off against packs of weres and other wild animals, running more often than he stood his ground to fight, with enough regret and self-loathing to repress his own animalistic side before it could get out of control. It took him five years, but when he returned to the main city and applied for the magical tests which would certify him sane enough to leave the island, he passed.
He wasn't sure where to go. The fading memory of his first and closest friend could only get him so far before the fire started to burn out. He didn't want to stay at Damian's Isle. Alexandria was the most familiar place, seemingly the easiest for starting all over again.
He boarded the ship. It left the harbour, bringing him back to familiar shores...
Contact: (PM me)
Intentions: Neutral
Background
Name: Oliver Surridge
Race: Werelord
Species: Triceratops
Age: 36
Tier: 2
Social
Place of Birth: Columbia, Alexandria
Allegiances: -
Aspirations: Survive
Nicknames: Dervish
Titles: -
Relatives: None in contact
Significant Other: -
Mental
Personality: Guilt can weigh heavily on the soul. Leave it to fester for three years, feed it on a regular diet of loneliness and let it thrive in an environment where the strong eat the weak, and it becomes all but crushing. Fresh out of five years in purgatory, Dervish is paranoid, quietly desperate, and above all, tired - but he'd never admit it while he's still on his feet. A brusque, pessimistic attitude, sharpened by time and guilt, lend more color to an already caustic vocabulary, and generally serve to keep others away. But that's the best way things can be, as he tells himself (more and more frequently, as the isolation creeps in).
Likes: "Hmph."
Dislikes: Most people, most societies, idealists, gangsters, children
Strengths: Dervish got through a rough adolescence and a subsequent long stint in the messier side of the Alexandrian police force, courtesy of a sharp mind that tends to escape the notice of first impressions. Most people stop at "oversized thug", and miss "eye for detail", "obsessive lust for making illegal modifications", and "buried tendency to quote Shakespeare at length". Being almost constantly suspicious of other people has left him with an instinct for sensing when things are out of place. That same habit led him to developing his mechanical skills on the sidelines. The taste for literature is just a hobby.
Weaknesses: Being underestimated often also means being passed up for better opportunities in life. Not many upstanding citizens are very willing to hire an oversized thug, let alone give him a promotion. With his paranoia hanging over his shoulder, he often ends up spending needless time and energy fretting over whether he's about to get the short end of the stick again. His solution of keeping people at arm's length just makes it easier to tell that he's got something to hide, which makes trusting him even harder. Dervish is weighed down even further by his own guilt - he isn't sure he can trust himself anymore, and a guilty conscience makes for a bad pillow.
Physical
Major Details: Black hair, gold eyes, scars on right cheek, left side of throat, forearms and right shoulder, full beard, 6 ft 5 (195cm) in human form, olive-green hide, horns above eyebrows and snout, 7 ft 8 (237cm) in were form
Appearance: With his scars, close-cropped, unkempt hair and beard, brawny build and gut, Dervish doesn't look particularly heroic. His expression is often set somewhere between a frown and a scowl, and his clothes, now limited to a few pairs of faded jeans, well-worn boots and rough cotton shirts, mark him as a blue-collar worker at best.
Were form:
Natural Abilities: Dervish has enough strength to carry a few hundred pounds without difficulty, and the stamina to jog for about five miles. His were form boosts both traits, and improves his speed as well.
Natural Traits: In his were form, Dervish gains a thick reptilian hide, three sharp horns, and the ability to survive on a diet of uncooked vegetation.
Strengths: Size matters. Dervish's height and bulk hold him up well in a close-quarters brawl, but they serve just as well to intimidate the fight out of enemies before they can throw a single punch. He has a considerable amount of strength, proportional to his size, and the right bone density for barging through thin walls or taking hits without lasting damage. His human form's skin, as a bleed-over effect from his Were nature, is unnaturally tough, capable of deflecting broken glass, jagged metal, small blades and hypodermic needles. When he needs to fight, he fights dirty.
Weaknesses: Bigger targets are easier targets at range, and all that physical strength means little against a stronger mage, or a bastard with an improvised flamethrower. Even up close, Dervish isn't that good a fighter, having never progressed beyond basic punches and kicks - not that he ever needed to, when all it usually takes is one hit to take out the other guy, but even he knows that sort of luck doesn't last. Acrobatics and complex manoeuvres are completely beyond him - if it's more than "run fast, hit hard, hurt them more, reach the top shelf", it's out of his grasp.
Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Shadow (Mental), Proficiency 2. Dervish can generate and manipulate shadows, and harden them into solid matter using his thoughts.
- Tier 2: Runes (Written), Proficiency 2. Dervish can work magical effects by carving or otherwise inscribing runes onto a solid surface.
Visual Display: When Dervish's rune spells are active, the runes glow bright red.
Special Abilities: Insight, Enhanced Toughness 1, Enhanced Strength 1
Bonus Special Abilities: Enhanced Toughness 2, Enhanced Recovery 1, Transformed: Enhanced Speed 1
Unique Abilities: -
Strengths: Dervish worked hard to get off Damian's Isle. To that end, he mastered the basics of rune magic - if anything else, they're a potential starting point for greater things. He can quickly recall a good handful of simple runes, many for defence or fire or other things that might scare off wild animals or injure sentient ones looking for a fight. With his shadow magic tied directly to his thoughts, he can scratch the runes out in a hurry - or "cheat" and think them into solid shapes in the air like stronger Written mages. His shadow magic itself draws form and shape from a fairly stubborn mind, making for hardier constructs or better, darker camouflage.
Weaknesses: Mastering the basics gives a solid foundation, but little else. Dervish's rune spells are simply that - basic - and not too much trouble for a more skilful mage to circumvent. On its own, his usage of shadow magic is straightforward, almost rudimentary: harden shadows, hit things. Or grab things, or slice things, or cover things in pitch blackness and slug them with his fists until they surrender. The more exotic uses of shadow magic - making his personal shadow into a pocket dimension, or travelling through shadows, for example - aren't in his repertoire.
Inventory
Mundane:
Faded blue jeans and rough cotton shirts, a small backpack containing a pouch of workman's tools, a wallet with his personal identification, authentication papers from Damian's Isle to prove he can control his transformations.
Magical:
Basic Runes - Written (Perpetual). An old pocket encyclopedia titled "Basic Runes", with runes for durability, fireproofing and waterproofing cut into the leather spine. Beyond the enchantments these lend, the book is not magical. It contains a list of basic runes and their meanings, with a few examples of simple spells for the budding practitioner to use.
History
While he was growing up, Oliver's only family was his father - a distant, shell-shocked man, estranged from his own family by a marriage they opposed, who then had to deal with the sudden death of a beloved wife, mere hours after she gave birth to their son. With little idea of how to raise an infant son while dealing with his own grief, he left the boy in the hands of childcare center attendants, and devoted the time to a second job to pay for his upkeep.
Oliver was subconsciously aware that something was missing, long before he even had the words for it. He grew up painfully shy, more than a little awkward, and unsure of how to get along with his peers. Among his caretakers, he developed a reputation as the quiet one, the well-behaved one... the lonely one, always trying to hide from the group.
In the absence of other people, he found a hiding place in his books. The daycare hadn't been short on children's books, most of which were left untouched when it wasn't time to learn to read. He was safe from the rowdier children when he was with the books, and he was far from alone, even if he was the only one in the room. None of the adults worried too much about the child who didn't misbehave, so they let him be. That was enough.
Then school came, and the rules changed. He could stay apart from the crowd, as he learned, but he could never really get away from them, as he learned too late. School life came with its fair share of predators, and the stragglers - those who strayed from the herd, or tried to go their own way - were easy targets. His best friends were the teachers, and his grades were at the high end of the spectrum, but that wasn't the best trade-off for an isolation from his peers which was partially self-inflicted. Inside class, he got spitballs from the back row and rumors running wild. Away from the relative protection of the teachers, out in the schoolyard, on the way to the bus home, or during gym class, the bullying was a lot worse.
The Reading and Writing classes fascinated him. They always would. He paid less attention in most of the other subjects, but managed to secure decent grades for them. Then workshop classes began...
Sniping bullies in the schoolyard with a potato cannon earned him a number of bruises when he finally ran out of ammunition and his targets closed in. After the fight was broken up, he went from the sickbay to detention after school. But he'd been given a taste of real power, mixed in with a good helping of vengeance, and he liked it.
Any hitting back had to be done from a distance. He began learning to plan his moves, look for escape routes, hide behind teachers and avoid being backed into corners. Pounding a bully's face in with his bare fists was out of the question, which was maybe the only thing keeping it from being a perfect victory - up close, the pale nerdy kid would always be on the losing end.
He was fourteen when it happened. It was a month after his birthday - exactly a month, and he was at home, doing some yard work while his father watched. The sun went down, and the moon came up...
He blacked out. He woke up with his terrified father shaking him, his clothes reduced to tatters, and a stomach full of grass.
He'd never seen his father so alive before, in the month that followed. So struck by a horrifying revelation, so frantic, so terrified of something... of him, he somehow knew...
When he was presented with some pills, just a week before the next full moon, when he was given a shaky explanation about inheriting a "growth spurt" that needed supplements to balance out, he was more than a little suspicious. They didn't seem to be doing their job at first - all they did was make him sick for a whole week, especially at night, even if he only needed to take them once a month... but the results seemed to speak for themselves, the next time he was accosted by a bully right before class began. He was shoved. He shoved back. The bigger boy ended up in a concussed heap at the far corner of the classroom.
This new flavor of vengeance was more addictive than any he'd tasted before. He was hooked on it, just as the schoolyard gangs were hooked on their own power, and unwilling to let the pale nerdy kid bring their reputation down with a few punches.
Oliver left high school as an angry young man with a bone to pick with the street gangs of the world. He joined the police force on pretenses of wanting to protect the innocent. The interviewers compared his grades and detention records with narrowed eyes, but stamped the necessary paperwork and assigned him to one of the worse streets in town, where the force needed all the help they could get and often turned a blind eye to the methods used to fight crime.
He never needed a gun. His fists were more than enough. Unscrupulous partners were more than happy to stay back while he laid into muggers and petty gangsters. Life was good. He was turning the abuse back on a whole new generation of people he'd always hated. He was getting paid to ram his knuckles into their faces. He was happy...
Except that he wasn't. He was still bristly, and even his own "team" had a number of assholes to contend with. He was at a dead end in life, and each passing day of glaring murderously into the abyss only saw him getting angrier at the world.
Then his supplements ran out...
The supplements that he'd dutifully taken once every month, in exchange for a few sleepless nights of mild fevers and nausea, stopped coming. He shrugged it off, thinking he was well out of that so-called growth spurt at the age of twenty. A gang's hideout was located at an old warehouse, and he went in on his own on a bet. He stormed into an ambush after sunset, and went down with bullets in both kneecaps. The gang closed in, looking for some payback of their own. He was long used to pain, but hated being made the victim again, being helpless again...
Years of buried fear came up to the surface, joining the anger and hate already running high. Something snapped. Something else snapped.
He staggered out hours later, his clothing in ruins, still examining his skin for the dark green reptilian scales, while his shadow writhed like a living thing, snuffing out street lamps and clawing up the asphalt as he went along. He left no survivors.
He disappeared the next night - locked himself in his apartment, missed his shift, and suffered as the moon came up and warped him into a terrified monster.
The incident at the old warehouse had left the department with a mountain of paperwork to sift through. When he missed a day of work, with no reason given, that just added to the trouble. He was taken off duty for a proper psychiatric evaluation - not the rushed job that had brought him into the force to begin with. Two months later, he was being reassigned.
He fared even worse at the next department, and the next, as monthly absenteeism and a continued routine of savagery came to bear against street crime. He found he could move his shadow in sync with his thoughts now - small help that was, as magic seemed to add just another dimension to the chaos he wreaked on the streets. Another year of downhill sliding brought him to Lost Angels: the ultimate Shit Creek Without A Paddle for the force, though its reputation had been starting to turn around in recent years.
There, he met Toby. Annoyingly patient, infuriatingly optimistic, eternally sanctimonious, cheerfully meddling Toby, who was respected by many in their unit, who looked at his bad attitude and acidic vocabulary and decided to look deeper, who could turn into a harmless-looking feral beagle and exploited his weakness for harmless-looking life forms to discover his big secret within a month of his arrival.
One of the best things - the best people - to ever happen to him.
Toby kept his secret. The older man, a mage himself, told Oliver - now known more and more by his callsign, Dervish - about the link between his magic and the control he could wield over his forced transformation. He became his tutor, while they were off-duty. More than that, he became a friend - a migraine-causing moron of a friend who never knew when to shut the fuck up and stop being so goddamned optimistic - but a friend, nonetheless. One who liked literature too; who got him to open up as a proper human being for one of the first times in his life. One who made him want to believe that maybe the world wasn't made of shit bound straight for hell; that maybe people weren't a collective disaster of cruelty and stupidity digging themselves into a pit.
On the night of his thirty-first birthday, he fought the pull of the moon, and the lure of the beast inside him. He fought it, and he won.
And then everything went to hell again.
A raid went wrong. Horribly wrong. Toby was taken hostage. There was a gun pointed at his head, there were stronger mages who easily batted the police mages' powers aside, and everything was falling apart just when it was finally looking up, and Dervish felt the terror and helplessness and rage come back...
He snapped, in front of everyone. A large number of bones snapped after that.
Toby didn't make it.
Dervish was lucky. A few psychics hit his mind hard enough to knock him out, so his teammates didn't have to put him down like the crazed animal he briefly transformed into.
He was a lot luckier than that. The paperwork was rushed, to see him off before the law could sink its teeth into him - if only for Toby's sake, not his own. He was just stripped of his rank and badge with a dishonorable discharge, and put on the first boat out to Damian's Isle with his few possessions, including a book on runes that had been a gift from Toby and his next step to learning to use his magic.
Dervish was alone again, with only himself to blame, and a multitude of regrets hovering behind his shoulder, whispering into his ears with every waking moment.
He didn't trust himself around people. Not after the sudden and brutal proof that he couldn't. He spent most of the next five years that followed out in the wilds of the outback, away from the small towns and the civilization they represented. He roughed it, constantly on the move to avoid the roving packs of weres who had given up and gone native, often wondering why he didn't join them.
Each time he asked himself that question, the answer would inevitably come back to him. He was surviving, and constantly fighting to hold on to his humanity, because someone believed. Someone had believed he could be better, that he could master his wilder nature and prove himself both decent and human.
Someone had cared, in a way that was more tangible than anything else he'd felt before as a lonely ghost slipping through the system. Someone had paid for it with their life - and that made it all the more important, that he keep going, he keep living and trying for their sake. That he endure the frustrations of sluggishly growing magical skill, the uneasy nights and the regret-filled dreams they brought, the pain - because for the first time in his life, as far as he could tell, Someone had singled him out and Believed. He couldn't, wouldn't trust himself, but he could hold on to the memory of someone who had. It was all he had, but it was enough.
It took him five years. Five years, out of the small towns more than he was in them, only returning for occasional supplies, or to scrape some money together by doing the odd repair jobs that he came across. Five years, facing off against packs of weres and other wild animals, running more often than he stood his ground to fight, with enough regret and self-loathing to repress his own animalistic side before it could get out of control. It took him five years, but when he returned to the main city and applied for the magical tests which would certify him sane enough to leave the island, he passed.
He wasn't sure where to go. The fading memory of his first and closest friend could only get him so far before the fire started to burn out. He didn't want to stay at Damian's Isle. Alexandria was the most familiar place, seemingly the easiest for starting all over again.
He boarded the ship. It left the harbour, bringing him back to familiar shores...