Jean would like to state for the record that he is not a vampire. He can see how the teeth and the pallor might confuse people, but those bodily fluids are not of any particular interest to him. Neither is he an emotional vampire, not in the traditional sense. He is an empath, and he absorbs emotional energy in the same way that plants absorb light from the sun. He does not take anything that was not being given off anyway, and certainly does not deprive anyone of their own feelings, no more than a flower steals from the sky. Unlike a flower, which cannot urge the sun to burn brighter, Jean is not above inducing emotional responses in those from whom he has decided to feed.

    These days, he tries to be nice about it.

    He is pretentious and vain and sadistic, and he does not contest these facts. He may well be the first to point them out. For some reason, people tend not to believe him; it makes things worse for them when they figure out that he is as bad as he said he would be. He does not take liberties and does nothing which he has not been asked to do, and really, that almost makes it worse.

    But he really is trying to be better. He has a limp in his right leg these days, and it seems to act up when he indulges his unkinder impulses. It is a bit of a puzzling limp, considering he is generally able to recover from even the most deadly wounds without a single scar. His hair, though – his hair is mortal. And he is very protective of it.

    (Someone who looked closely would find that he has a misaligned femoral fracture. It is extremely likely that the muscles in his thigh are constantly repairing the damage done by the bone slicing through them. Whether or not he deserves this is a matter of some debate.)

    Jean is a lover and not a fighter. His figure is that of a gymnast or a dancer, save for the matter of his cane. His strength and ability to heal are variable, based on how much he has to feed on at the time. His eyes are a decent indicator: at their darkest shade of blue, he is at his weakest. The paler and brighter they grow, the more dangerous he can be. There are not many circumstances that can make his eyes turn white, but he generally tries not to move around too much when it happens. No one likes a shattered pelvis.

    His nails, like his teeth, are sharp points. On his right hand, he files them short, because being considerate is important. The left is reserved for emergencies, masochists, or both.

    Jean has spent the last few hundred years in the same house on the east coast of the United States. The last decade or so has seen him become a recluse, filling his home with books and feeding on the residual energies therein. He has more recently converted his parlor into a bookstore, but he is thus far proving to be an incompetent salesman. Instead of getting rid of books, he is acquiring people.

    It would be rude to call them pets, and Jean does so loathe to be rude.

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Reunion | Light Reading [NSFW] | Secretary [NSFW]

    Dean is just your usual, Black-Iranian couchsurfing hipster. She likes good music and shitty beer, she doesn't give a fuck about nerd shit but she probably still knows more about it than anyone else in the room. She likes putting her life on other people's tabs and skipping town before her debts can get called in.

    As a melanin-enriched female who likes to sleep around, she knows better than to fuck with weird shit. She's seen horror movies. She knows how that goes.

    That does not mean she will not fuck weird shit. She is xenophilic by nature, she loves the new and the strange and the novel. Sometimes this means trying new food. Sometimes this means riding a dragon. Sometimes this means fucking a mummy. Shit happens. She rolls with it.

    As a general rule, she keeps her full name to herself. It is entirely possible that she has technically been a missing person for at least ten years. She also never technically left that cult.

    She makes her lies sound like the truth and her truths sound like lies, and she neither talks nor thinks about the past. Still, some things leave their mark. She has scars, though she's covered them in lewd tattoos. She doesn't care for ravens. Sometimes she watches the sky for scales. Sometimes she remembers blonde hair and brain matter. Her sleep is always dreamless.

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    Grilka is Krotazi. For someone who has not met a Krotazi, it may not be clear what this means. What it means is: ey has six feet of torso, and sixty feet of tail; eir tail is actually comprised of an astonishing number of scaled tendrils, braided together to make them resemble a unit; ey has scales the color of sapphires that turn pink in more delicate areas; ey has teeth like an anglerfish and two long prehensile tongues; eir four arms each have four venomous talons on each hand; eir horns are a spiraling black, curling back against the ridges on the back of eir head; eir eyes are enormous and a vibrant pink with slitted pupils; ey covers eirself in delicate jewelry but not clothes; ey has questionable ideas about things like 'personal space'.

    As ambassador to the Krotazi Empire, there are things that ey can and cannot do in Allied Space. They cannot, for instance, own a business or hire employees. But ey can give gifts to friends, who let em loiter in their businesses as ey pleases. Diplomatic immunity won't do anything for murder, but eir friends do have a dreadful tendency to be near the sites of accidents. Ey has a special dispensation to possess memti – because a sober Krotazi is a fearful thing indeed – but it keeps, somehow, getting stolen.

    It's all very unfortunate, all of these terrible and inexplicable incidents. But Krotazi have peculiar ideas about karma, and if the people who've wronged em always seem to get hurt, it's surely karma that's to blame. To say otherwise would be to insult the spiritual beliefs of Krotaz – and no one wants that.

    If someone needs a favor, Grilka is always happy to help. But they will, of course, owe a favor in return. Thank-you gifts are always welcome, and those who do em favors are likely to receive gifts of their own.

    Grilka would describe emself as 'cuddly' Other people usually prefer 'whoa wait what's happening I need an adult'. If there is one nice thing about Grilka, is that ey will take 'no' for an answer – but it needs to be said quickly, and ey's unlikely to be happy about being refused. Ey will not hesitate to cut off from all possible assistance those who ey feels do not appreciate em.

    Those few of Grilka's 'friends' able to avoid being playthings recommend being extraordinarily useful, or extraordinarily good at stroking eir ego.

    Being Captain Robinson's Daughter comes with a lot of baggage. Kreska does not carry it well. She uses it to get out of things, mostly, to stay out of prison and to keep her record clean, because no one wants to deal with the inevitable media shitstorm.

    Most people don't even know she exists, and that suits her just fine.

    She was born and briefly raised on Kotii, before Teraka Ido decided that she was not equipped to raise a half-human child that she could not recognize as herself. After that it was Cylinder Station 12, where Dirk Robinson had grown up, and where she was one of few non-Terran residents. It was here that she got her accent, her leather jacket, and her generally bad attitude.

    (Cylinder Stations being essentially the gated communities of life in space, there is not a lot of actual crime or strife. Those who try to adopt tough personas, who adopt the deliberately difficult manner of speaking typical of this subculture, are often derogatorily referred to as 'station scum'.)

    Kreska entered the Academy with the hopes of entering the Terran Allied Forces, but soon washed out after a number of disagreements regarding 'the letter of the law' and 'unspoken but obvious' and 'victory conditions' and 'acceptable losses'. She is no longer allowed to pilot any Terran Allied vehicles, but she does still love an opportunity to go faster than legally advised whenever possible.

    She mostly does favors for Grilka these days. She's good at getting around Osiris, she knows all the shortcuts and she can run like hell. She's got the peculiar immunity of the child of a universally beloved intergalactic hero, so she's an ideal courier for sensitive items.

    Sometimes she gets in trouble. She hasn't been kidnapped since she was a teenager, so that's nice. But certain parties tend to take a particular dislike to her attitude, to her uncanny good fortune while gambling, and her terrible way with words. Certain other parties have an unhealthy interest in the only Terran-Jobari hybrid, or just small green women in general. She has all the small frame and lightweight bones of a Jobari, with none of the poison.

    Kreska has spent 23 years being almost as disappointing to others as they are to her, and she doesn't expect that to change any time soon.

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Dead Meat | Rescue Mission | Holiday Cheer | Halvsies [NSFW] | Logistical Problems [NSFW] | Technicality | Making Friends | Familiarity | Morning After | The Trouble With, Part One | The Trouble With, Part Two | Playing Games

    Of all of Grilka's friends, ey is probably most protective of Xotll. The owner of the Farendajo, she has managed to acquire a lot while aspiring to little. She hails from a planet of mineral farmers, and the best she could have hoped for was to marry well and have lots and lots of hardworking babies. Being on the small side, she was not considered a particularly good catch for a Ga'lleq wanting a herd of children, and so it was more likely that she would end up working in a processing plant doing work both tedious and poorly-paid.

    So it would have gone if she had not accompanied an export shipment to Osiris. Being approximately as clever as most Ga'lleq – which is to say, not very – and three times more kind, she was wonderfully pleased to make a new friend. An enormous, sharp-toothed, sharp-clawed friend who told her she was as pretty as prey.

    As compliments go, it doesn't take much to make Xotll happy.

    Four cloven hooves tend not to make a woman graceful, and having only two large fingers and a thumb on each hand don't make her dextrous. The flicking of her tail and her ears mean she wears her hearts on her sleeve, purple stripes mean she can't be unobtrusive and a tendency towards shyness means she can't take advantage of the spotlight. But Xotll is loyal and optimistic and well-meaning and kind, and the patronage of someone who is ten times her size and none of those things means that Osiris has never managed to beat those things out of her.

    Many a well-worn cynic has faltered in the face of her sunny disposition, and Grilka is well aware of this fact.

    Ixaaliot quit being a lawyer because he cared too much about justice. Really, that might be all anyone needs to know about Ixaaliot.

    Being Siladen, he is approximately 99% gangle with a hint of lank. He has slender limbs and hollow bones, and someone could probably break all four of his arms at once without trying very hard. It's possible that someone has. Instead of a sense of smell, he has chemical receptors in his cephalic tentacles, but he keeps those numbed because cities are gross and he doesn't need them flailing around on his head all day. He wears special glasses to block ultraviolet light from his vision, because – as stated – cities are gross.

    His anatomy conspires to embarrass him at every turn. His vocal cords are in too low a register, and so his voice carries no matter how quiet he is trying to be. He has a pouch on the right side of his neck that inflates with air and causes him to croak involuntarily when he thinks someone is cute. His fingertips stick to surfaces when he touches things incorrectly, or when he's nervous. His tongue is over a foot long, and he sleeps in what is basically a koi pond. While he has designated himself male, that was a decision made to fit in better in Terran Allied society, because the three sexes and eight genders of his species can make things a bit confusing.

    Ix is a very private person, in part because he does not consider these things anyone's business.

    His only stroke of good luck is that only Siladen understand the scars in his skin. It's hard enough getting by on Osiris without everyone knowing his forehead proclaims him to be, in so many subtexts, a dumbass and a chronic fuckup.

    He is as much a cynic as having been a lawyer would suggest, and as much a hopeless romantic as having quit indicates. Being one of Grilka's first 'friends' might not speak to an ideal moral compass, but he hopes that the ends will justify the means. It is much easier, he's found, to find justice outside the law.

    People make a lot of assumptions about a guy who's half human, half purple space ork. For the record, it's his father who's Terran. He was raised by his father on Cylinder Station 12, one of the only non-Terrans there. Just him, and an extremely aggressive and very small green girl.

    A whole war was fought over how much their technicolor halves should have hated each other. Maybe it helped that neither of them were very good at being what they were supposed to be.

    The N'sazz object to being characterized as a warrior race. Particularly when they get into only half as many wars as Terrans do, and less of them with their own people. Most wars are fought based on a highly important concept that very roughly translates to the principle of the thing. Emotions are important and valid, and are considered to outweigh logic in most things.

    In that regard, Nolan doesn't fit in great with N'sazz ideas of what he ought to be. Much like his father, he's big into zen. He's a chill dude, goin' with the flow. He's down with whatevs. Whatever makes you happy, man. He'll roll with it. Sometimes he gets a little aggro, but hey, that's just biology. As long as no one does anything dumb, he won't try to rip anyone's throat out with his tusks. Easy-peasy.

    He's also big into explosions. He thinks they're a good example of creative destruction. The universe got made in a great big explosion, after all. Stars are explosions, kind of. Explosions are cool.

    Things have changed since he left the station. He got to blow a lot of things up, that was nice. Got even more chill, somehow. Had to ditch the station scum accent, but hey, errybody makes sacrifices. His new one isn't actually much better. Grew another 14 centimeters, and sometimes he imagines how irritated Kreska would be to know about that. When it came to his horns, he was a bit of a late bloomer. They're not particularly large, as N'sazz horns go, but they swoosh nicely with his pompadour so he ain't too fussed.

    He got his second set of tusks coming out of his cheekbones, and he thought it would be a good idea to get them carved to look all fancy. Turns out they're basically teeth and that was a bad idea that hurt like hell. But then he got them filled in with gold, so really, it all worked out.

    When he decided to become a bounty hunter – and let's face it, he mostly did it because he thought it would be badass – he got a tattoo of a mythological N'sazz creature on his bicep. A creature of legend, one capable of gazing into the second soul where secret truths are hidden, a monster of nightmares. Unfortunately for him, humans think it looks like an adorable six-legged baby deer. Guys. Guys. No. It's – it's fucking cool, okay? It's badass. It's not adorable, goddammit.

    He got a helmet custom-made so it wouldn't mess up his hair, he got a gun that's six times bigger than necessary and makes explosions that look great while doing very little actual damage, and he bought a spaceship that barely runs. But goddamn does it look good doing it. Almost every credit he makes goes into trying to get his ship to run just a little bit longer. Or into his guitar collection. Because what's the point of two thumbs if you don't have plenty of great guitars?

    He hasn't spoken to Kreska in five years because he's not much good at thinking up things to say. Not when he's lightyears away and kind of a little embarrassed about how he left things, and those seem like the kinds of messages that'd get real awkward real fast. It's hard to know what to say to a girl when you bought her a leather jacket and a whole lotta cigarettes, when you broke each other's noses and broke other people's noses and accidentally broke her arm that one time because it turned out to be real easy to break.

    But he looks real cool playing collectible guitars in a collectible spaceship, and maybe one of these days she'll be real impressed to see him looking as cool as he does.

Leah is a courier. She delivers exactly what is needed, exactly when it is needed. Sometimes it's a particular item, sometimes it's information, sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's a door.

It would be a very confusing job, but Leah is good at not thinking about it too hard. Not thinking about things is her specialty.

She hides her tail beneath her skirt and wears fake nails to hide her claws. She pulls her hair tight to hide her curls and she wears makeup to pretend her skin has flaws. There's nothing she can do about the cat ears on top of her head, and even less she can do about being three feet tall. But she is a professional, and she acts like it, and sometimes that's enough.

Leah is angry. Always, and unfailingly angry. She does not like to be touched. She does not like to be watched. She will discuss contracts for work, but she does not like to hold a conversation. Displays of affection repulse her. So does the violin. Her job is her life, and she likes it that way. As much as she likes anything. She can't cheer herself up by thinking back on the good times, because that just makes her angrier.

She likes trashy reality television and celebrity gossip, and knowing that the people she's been sent to work with are probably worse off than she is. She likes knowing that there are no happy endings, and that getting what you wished for usually leaves you worse off than the alternative.

If a small and cat-eared woman with a briefcase appears to offer exactly what you need, it's best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Ｔｈｅ Ｍａｃｈｉｎｅ doesn't offer twice.

    Boudica's life has a pattern, an order. It is neat and it is tidy, if not always pleasant. She finds a home, first. Whatever home will have her. She likes big houses, best, big and empty and old. It's easier there to slip in unnoticed and make herself at home. Small houses will do in a pinch, but they're harder. It's difficult to find anyone who still keeps to the old ways, and they're the only ones who'll do.

    It's hard to say how she knows which homes will work. The doors don't make her palms itch. She knows them when she finds them. She can tell when the owners are sleeping much the same, because the safety wraps around her like a quilt. That's when she gets to work, cleaning all the spots that have been missed, scrubbing the floorboards and dusting the molding. She has no magic to help her get the job done; only elbow-grease and practice. Anything not in its proper place makes her ache down to her bones, and nothing can ever be clean enough to make it go away for good. If it's bad enough, it leaves her feeling bruised and raw. If they keep to the old ways, they'll leave her a gift, something milk and honey, sugar and fat. Sugar is bliss, a welcome respite from what ails her, something to numb the magic that burns in her veins.

    She dresses in neat suits with long skirts and keeps her hair in a bun with not a strand out of place. Her nails are short and neat, her shoes are flat and practical. A leather bag like an old doctor might carry holds all her possessions, mostly cleaning supplies. She accepts only gifts, and never payment, as has always been the way of things. Ears that come to delicate points and eyes of solid black are her only concessions to her nature. She is plain and easy to overlook, and that is not an accident when she can feel every pair of eyes that falls on her, when it keeps her from doing what needs doing most. It is not that she will not clean when she is watched; it is that she can't.

    When payment is offered, or when the home is forfeit, Boudica finds a new refuge. An endless cycle of doors, of floors, of vinegar and soap, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning more. She's used to silence, and she's used to dark; unseen and unheard and unpaid. That's the way she likes it. That's the way it's always been.

    The thing that most people know about the Baron of Corvana is that he does not take off his mask. As such, a description of his mask is the only description that most people can give of him. Black wood inlaid with gold filigree, it covers the whole of his face, a distinctly birdlike silhouette. Not quite so dramatic as a plague doctor, but more feral, more monstrous. Sometimes the gold changes color to suit his mood.

    Outside of the confines of the Masquerade, the rules around masks are a little less rigid. It is possible, outside of those festivals, to note that he is tall and dark, with ears that come to blunt points. His pupils are slits, but it's hard to tell in eyes so dark. It's not much to go on, but it's telling all the same.

    Francesco is a mage, and enormously wealthy. He would not be the one without the other. Magic, after all, is expensive. His pursuits are primarily scholarly, treatise after treatise written in cramped script for limited publication in academic circles. But he is not above the occasional duel, under cover of night on the outskirts of the city. His home is a treasure trove of magical artifacts, and any one of them is worth more than most people will have in a lifetime.

    Despite the fact that he fulfills his societal obligations only when forced, he is always the height of fashion. Crushed velvet and fluttering silk, brocade doublets in dark colors embroidered in gold thread. Sometimes his clothes change color in different lights, subtle effects that could be chalked up to reflection but which are almost certainly enchantments to match his mask.

    His house is uptown, near to the wealthier mercantile families rather than the other members of nobility that live further north. His scholarly pursuits are not well-suited to the interests of old money in nice neighborhoods – and so he settles for a neighborhood that is only slightly less nice.

    (It is still very nice)

    He is very secretive, even for nobility and even for a mage. Servants would be cheaper than magic, but he uses it anyway, nevermind that it is both frivolous and wasteful. His wealth makes him a very eligible bachelor, but he has thus far avoided the many ambitious mothers who would like to throw their daughters at him. Most of them have realized that he is a lost cause. Some of them are persistent. But no one is quite as stubborn as Francesco.

    He's a gargoyle gone feral, built into the security system of a cathedral in Valesport.

    Or else he's a tiefling, son of a wizard and a succubus, part of the King's Guard and very good at his job.

    Either way he's dtf so that's neat.

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Using Our Words