Player Name: bii E-mail: all (dot) your (dot) beliefs (at) gmail Preferred Contact:obiisama Timezone: PST Current Characters in Victory Road: Greg Universe
Character Name: Steven “Sharpteeth” Durante Series: Original Character (Changeling: The Lost) Timeline: Roughly two months after his escape and return from Arcadia Original Character Background: As a note, both this and the following section will be partially reused from a previous app I did for Steven over a year ago, although changed and expanded in some places as my concept of Steven as a character has changed and expanded.
So first off: the World of Darkness is a world that is much like our own, except everything sucks just a little bit more and also there are supernatural creatures running around everywhere. As far as this background is concerned, though, the main kind of supernatural creature you need to be concerned with are Changelings. Changelings are what happens when a magical, eldritch creature of incomprehensible power called a True Fae kidnaps a human for whatever reason and leaves behind a construct of whatever junk it had on hand, called a Fetch, to live their kidnapped human’s life for them. This human is then pulled through the magical Hedge and taken off to Arcadia, which is basically fairyland, where they are then changed by their environment and circumstances to something not-completely-human anymore: a Changeling.
Changelings are divided into six basic types depending on what Arcadia shaped them into: animalistic Beasts; beautiful Fairests; Elemental forces of nature; Wizened drudges; monstrous Ogres; and creepy Darklings. Sometimes Changelings manage to force their way back through the Hedge to their world, but not always. Plenty of Changelings who get taken are taken for good--and it’s often extremely hard for the ones who do make it back to get their old lives back. After returning to their world, Changelings often join one of the seasonal courts, each of which is governed by a different emotion, which function as support groups: Spring, the Court of Desire; Summer, the Court of Wrath; Autumn, the Court of Fear; and Winter, the Court of Sorrow.
(As a homebrewed OC built using tabletop rules, Steven’s own specific World of Darkness features my personal favorite iterations of the main World of Darkness gamelines. Which basically means that it’s mostly New WoD with the Old WoD vampire clans, because those are the most fun.)
The shorter version is this: Steven Durante was born in the year 1980 in San Diego, the first child of a pair of second-generation Mexican-American professionals. For a few years, his uncle lived with them while he attended college, until said uncle died in the AIDs crisis. When Steven was not quite ten, his little sister Charley was born. Despite the age difference, they were quite close. His family moved northward to a college town not far from Silicon Valley just before he started high school. At age seventeen, he came out as gay to his family, His parents initially freaked out, but quickly reconciled themselves to it and supported him afterward. After college, he moved back to San Diego and found work as a newscaster and later a news anchor. He remained publicly closeted for professional reasons, which ended up contributing to the break-up of his only long-term relationship.
In 2012, Steven misused his press pass while attending a wrestling match, hoping to be able to sneak backstage and meet his adolescent hero, El Diablo Verde. He never got a chance to, as a True Fae who called himself El Pecador was also skulking around illicitly and decided to kidnap Steven to Arcadia and make him both the overseer of his own wrestling stable of similarly kidnapped Changelings and also the fixer of his matches. Over the next five years, Steven would find his body altered to better suit El Pecador’s whims and needs, eventually ending up a Darkling of the Leechfinger kith: long-fingered ghouls that can sap someone’s life force with their touch. (Among other things, he ended up with extra finger joints and lots of really sharp teeth.) Eventually, however, about a dozen of El Pecador’s wrestlers decided to stage a break-out and return to the human world--and they took Steven.
Once back in his own world, Steven found out that in those five years, only three had passed in the world outside Arcadia. He also found out that the Fetch he’d been replaced with had made an absolute hash of his life, having gained both fame and fortune by becoming a local conservative pundit with a sizable following. As Steven was staunchly liberal, this infuriated him to no end and learning that the Fetch didn’t actually believe any of it, but had sold out for fame and fortune, didn’t actually help. Even worse, not quite a year ago, Charley had gone missing. But as the Winter Court, which Steven had joined shortly after reaching San Diego again, advocated that its Changelings leave the Fetch in their old life and try to make a new instead, Steven was left with not much he could do about that. Two months after his escape, he’s still chafing at the Winter Court’s restrictions, worrying about what happened to his sister, and resorting to day labor to keep himself fed. One good thing, however, has happened to him: he’s been invited to be a DJ on the local Winter Court’s private podcast: Radio Free Fae.
Personality: Steven Durante is a man who’s very conscious of appearances, of being Respectable. This is likely not surprising, given that he worked in television, but he really has both consciously and subconsciously bought into the idea that as long as he’s Respectable, he’ll be safer than he might be otherwise as a gay man of color. Thus he chooses to appear and act in a deliberately straight-laced manner. This involves a fair amount of self-censoring at times. (In general, except in private, with people he finds trustworthy, Steven tries not to say things that he could not get away with on broadcast television, although he’ll certainly think them.)
As well as trying to appear as Respectable as possible, Steven does his best to make sure people don’t see him as a threat--he’s not a small man and that can make certain people nervous. The last thing he wants is for someone to assume he’s a thug.
He’s very proud--it’s his besetting vice. He’s also more than a little self-righteous. And more than anything, Steven is conscious of his own dignity. It’s one of the reasons that the day labor he’s had to do since emerging from the Hedge has been so painful to him. He’s third generation American, with a college education--it infuriates him that the people he’s been doing work for probably assume he’s an illegal who’s only recently slipped over the border.
(More than anything else, Steven does not want to be a stereotype.)
He tends to compartmentalize things in his life, most especially his sexuality. Although his family knows he’s gay, he’s never really brought any of his boyfriends home. Even Steven’s younger sister, Charley, has only met one of them over the years (Liam, his only long-term boyfriend) and that when she was making an extended visit to Steven in San Diego.
Speaking of his younger sister, Steven’s relationship with her is a good example of his strong protective streak. He worried a lot about her and her unguarded heart, the opposite of his own. He worries even more now that he’s escaped from Arcadia and has to face the idea that she’s gone. Maybe for good.
That’s scary. Charley, and his relationship with her, had been a constant in Steven’s life ever since she stopped being just ‘the baby’ and started being her own person. Even after he graduated high school and moved away for college, they still skyped regularly and hung out when he came home to visit--and after he went to San Diego, Charley ended up visiting him for a few weeks every summer. Steven honestly believes that if he’d been there and not the fetch, Charley wouldn’t have gone missing.
From what he can tell from his old social media accounts--the fetch never did change any passwords--Charley didn’t have the same relationship with his replacement. Even if she didn’t know that the fetch wasn’t him, she could tell that ‘he’ was acting weird and began pulling away from him. While it breaks Steven’s heart that she had to, it’s also an incredible fucking relief that Charley, at least, could recognize there was something incredibly fucking wrong with the fetch, even if she didn’t know what.
Because yeah, Steven really, really wants to kill his fetch. The main thing stopping him from doing so is the rules of the Winter Court and his own tendency to follow the rules, spoken or unspoken, of any group that he’s a part of. He does understand why the Winter Court would want its members to cut themselves off from their own lives--it’s protection both for themselves and their loved ones--but it’s hard not to try to take his life back. It was a good life. It was his life. And now it’s not.
Part of him wants to blame his family for not realizing the fetch wasn’t him--but a lot of him blames himself. If he’d shared more of his life with them, would they have realized it wasn’t him? Sure, his parents and Charley were halfway up the state, but most of his mother’s family was still in San Diego. What does it say about him that even his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the same city didn’t realize it wasn’t him? That they’d really believed he’d sold out everything he believed in to chase success? He keeps thinking of all the accusations that his ex-boyfriend Liam threw at him during their break-up and it’s a disquieting thought that if he really had been the person Liam had accused him of being, the fetch’s actions would have been entirely in character.
What else? Steven has a strong sense of justice. He considered it a privilege of his former career to bring injustices to light and expose them to the world--well, San Diego. He’s an odd mix of a cynic and an idealist. He has those high ideals, but at the same time he recognizes that most of his high ideals aren’t likely to be put into practice and he’s better off being practical and engaging with the world as it is now, not as how he’d like it to be.
As noted before, Steven tends to follow the rules of the society he’s in, even if they make him miserable--both the written and unwritten rules. This can and does often come in conflict with his sense of justice, because he lives in the goddamn World of Darkness and it’s just like our own, only worse.
He’s not a romantic. Well, that is to say, he’s not a romantic when it comes to relationships, anyway. He’s all too capable of romanticizing ideas.
He’s an atheist or at most, a strong agnostic, but is very much quiet about it. (He is, however, culturally Catholic.)
He’s a giant nerd. He’s usually able to downplay it in normal company, but occasionally he can get pendantic when it comes to something he really cares about, like superhero movies or shonen anime or wrestling. He’s also excessively fond of the spooky and the macabre, which he also tends to downplay alongside normal people.
Deep down inside, despite the calm and sometimes cold front that he puts out, he’s angry. Angry that he was taken, angry that he’s lost so much and everything he told himself he was going home for is gone. Right now the sorrow he feels for his losses overwhelms that anger, but there’s more than one reason that the Winter Court is an imperfect fit for him as he currently is--but who knows if any of the other three Courts would be any better?
He uses sarcasm as a coping mechanism.
Pokémon Information Affiliation: Rocket Grunt, the poor asshole Starter: Misdreavus (plus Woobat for his bonus Rocket starter) Password: Atomic Fireball
Samples RP Sample:With a Fjord in the In The Dark test drive, with the caveat that although Steven is taken from the same point in time as he would be for route, more or less, the conceit of In The Dark is that all the characters are dead, so it’s technically same canonpoint + surprise death.
It's not the first time in his life that Steven's woken up in an entirely unfamiliar place, with no idea how he's gotten there. This is not, in fact, his first kidnapping rodeo.
Last time was darker. Which doesn't mean El Pecador hadn't managed to get him back somehow. It just meant that if he had, he'd decided to dump Steven somewhere else, somewhere with a proper light source. In which case, the proper reaction was to--
Shit. He doesn’t-- he doesn’t know. How the hell’s he supposed to get out of here on his own? The only way he’d gotten out before was because he’d been in large group and even then, they’d lost part of the group in the process.
No. Breathe. He’s not going to get anything done if he panics.
He sits up and begins to automatically reach for his glasses on the table-- no, desk next to the bed… and then immediately stops himself because he can see just fine, his glasses are still on his face, and that does not make him feel any more positive about who must have kidnapped him, because wouldn’t a normal human know you don’t let people wear their glasses to bed?
Huh. Somebody left a note? And some… balls?
What on Earth is Team Rocket?
Skimming through the rest of the letter isn’t all that helpful either, really. There’s a uniform. He’s a ‘grunt.’ There are ‘admins.’ His ‘team-mates’ are in the balls. They’re called ‘Pokemon’ (and that really sounds like something Charley would have been into when she was eight or nine.)
Steven’s hands aren’t right.
It had taken him longer than he wanted to admit to notice, but once he does, he can’t-- it’s all he can notice. They’re shorter than they were before he passed out. They’ve got less joints than they had. They’re--
They’re normal.
He drops the letter. The letter doesn’t matter. His hands are normal again, like a regular human’s--maybe a little longer than they were originally, but that’s all. Like his Mask, he thinks numbly. This must be what they look like in his Mask.
Oh hell. Does that mean--
A short hunt for a reflective surface later and Steven can confirm it. He’s got his old face, his old body back. He’s--as far as he can tell--a normal human once more.
“What the hell--?”
[Note: Apologies for the edit, I realized I left the contact blank unfilled.]
Steven 'Sharpteeth' Durante (OC) | World of Darkness (Changeling: The Lost) | Not Reserved
Name: bii
E-mail: all (dot) your (dot) beliefs (at) gmail
Preferred Contact:
Timezone: PST
Current Characters in Victory Road: Greg Universe
Character
Name: Steven “Sharpteeth” Durante
Series: Original Character (Changeling: The Lost)
Timeline: Roughly two months after his escape and return from Arcadia
Original Character Background: As a note, both this and the following section will be partially reused from a previous app I did for Steven over a year ago, although changed and expanded in some places as my concept of Steven as a character has changed and expanded.
So first off: the World of Darkness is a world that is much like our own, except everything sucks just a little bit more and also there are supernatural creatures running around everywhere. As far as this background is concerned, though, the main kind of supernatural creature you need to be concerned with are Changelings. Changelings are what happens when a magical, eldritch creature of incomprehensible power called a True Fae kidnaps a human for whatever reason and leaves behind a construct of whatever junk it had on hand, called a Fetch, to live their kidnapped human’s life for them. This human is then pulled through the magical Hedge and taken off to Arcadia, which is basically fairyland, where they are then changed by their environment and circumstances to something not-completely-human anymore: a Changeling.
Changelings are divided into six basic types depending on what Arcadia shaped them into: animalistic Beasts; beautiful Fairests; Elemental forces of nature; Wizened drudges; monstrous Ogres; and creepy Darklings. Sometimes Changelings manage to force their way back through the Hedge to their world, but not always. Plenty of Changelings who get taken are taken for good--and it’s often extremely hard for the ones who do make it back to get their old lives back. After returning to their world, Changelings often join one of the seasonal courts, each of which is governed by a different emotion, which function as support groups: Spring, the Court of Desire; Summer, the Court of Wrath; Autumn, the Court of Fear; and Winter, the Court of Sorrow.
(As a homebrewed OC built using tabletop rules, Steven’s own specific World of Darkness features my personal favorite iterations of the main World of Darkness gamelines. Which basically means that it’s mostly New WoD with the Old WoD vampire clans, because those are the most fun.)
A full character history for Steven can be found here. Since it’s long and I don’t want to make the app take up too many comments, I’ll summarize the key points in the next couple paragraphs.
The shorter version is this: Steven Durante was born in the year 1980 in San Diego, the first child of a pair of second-generation Mexican-American professionals. For a few years, his uncle lived with them while he attended college, until said uncle died in the AIDs crisis. When Steven was not quite ten, his little sister Charley was born. Despite the age difference, they were quite close. His family moved northward to a college town not far from Silicon Valley just before he started high school. At age seventeen, he came out as gay to his family, His parents initially freaked out, but quickly reconciled themselves to it and supported him afterward. After college, he moved back to San Diego and found work as a newscaster and later a news anchor. He remained publicly closeted for professional reasons, which ended up contributing to the break-up of his only long-term relationship.
In 2012, Steven misused his press pass while attending a wrestling match, hoping to be able to sneak backstage and meet his adolescent hero, El Diablo Verde. He never got a chance to, as a True Fae who called himself El Pecador was also skulking around illicitly and decided to kidnap Steven to Arcadia and make him both the overseer of his own wrestling stable of similarly kidnapped Changelings and also the fixer of his matches. Over the next five years, Steven would find his body altered to better suit El Pecador’s whims and needs, eventually ending up a Darkling of the Leechfinger kith: long-fingered ghouls that can sap someone’s life force with their touch. (Among other things, he ended up with extra finger joints and lots of really sharp teeth.) Eventually, however, about a dozen of El Pecador’s wrestlers decided to stage a break-out and return to the human world--and they took Steven.
Once back in his own world, Steven found out that in those five years, only three had passed in the world outside Arcadia. He also found out that the Fetch he’d been replaced with had made an absolute hash of his life, having gained both fame and fortune by becoming a local conservative pundit with a sizable following. As Steven was staunchly liberal, this infuriated him to no end and learning that the Fetch didn’t actually believe any of it, but had sold out for fame and fortune, didn’t actually help. Even worse, not quite a year ago, Charley had gone missing. But as the Winter Court, which Steven had joined shortly after reaching San Diego again, advocated that its Changelings leave the Fetch in their old life and try to make a new instead, Steven was left with not much he could do about that. Two months after his escape, he’s still chafing at the Winter Court’s restrictions, worrying about what happened to his sister, and resorting to day labor to keep himself fed. One good thing, however, has happened to him: he’s been invited to be a DJ on the local Winter Court’s private podcast: Radio Free Fae.
Personality: Steven Durante is a man who’s very conscious of appearances, of being Respectable. This is likely not surprising, given that he worked in television, but he really has both consciously and subconsciously bought into the idea that as long as he’s Respectable, he’ll be safer than he might be otherwise as a gay man of color. Thus he chooses to appear and act in a deliberately straight-laced manner. This involves a fair amount of self-censoring at times. (In general, except in private, with people he finds trustworthy, Steven tries not to say things that he could not get away with on broadcast television, although he’ll certainly think them.)
As well as trying to appear as Respectable as possible, Steven does his best to make sure people don’t see him as a threat--he’s not a small man and that can make certain people nervous. The last thing he wants is for someone to assume he’s a thug.
He’s very proud--it’s his besetting vice. He’s also more than a little self-righteous. And more than anything, Steven is conscious of his own dignity. It’s one of the reasons that the day labor he’s had to do since emerging from the Hedge has been so painful to him. He’s third generation American, with a college education--it infuriates him that the people he’s been doing work for probably assume he’s an illegal who’s only recently slipped over the border.
(More than anything else, Steven does not want to be a stereotype.)
He tends to compartmentalize things in his life, most especially his sexuality. Although his family knows he’s gay, he’s never really brought any of his boyfriends home. Even Steven’s younger sister, Charley, has only met one of them over the years (Liam, his only long-term boyfriend) and that when she was making an extended visit to Steven in San Diego.
Speaking of his younger sister, Steven’s relationship with her is a good example of his strong protective streak. He worried a lot about her and her unguarded heart, the opposite of his own. He worries even more now that he’s escaped from Arcadia and has to face the idea that she’s gone. Maybe for good.
That’s scary. Charley, and his relationship with her, had been a constant in Steven’s life ever since she stopped being just ‘the baby’ and started being her own person. Even after he graduated high school and moved away for college, they still skyped regularly and hung out when he came home to visit--and after he went to San Diego, Charley ended up visiting him for a few weeks every summer. Steven honestly believes that if he’d been there and not the fetch, Charley wouldn’t have gone missing.
From what he can tell from his old social media accounts--the fetch never did change any passwords--Charley didn’t have the same relationship with his replacement. Even if she didn’t know that the fetch wasn’t him, she could tell that ‘he’ was acting weird and began pulling away from him. While it breaks Steven’s heart that she had to, it’s also an incredible fucking relief that Charley, at least, could recognize there was something incredibly fucking wrong with the fetch, even if she didn’t know what.
Because yeah, Steven really, really wants to kill his fetch. The main thing stopping him from doing so is the rules of the Winter Court and his own tendency to follow the rules, spoken or unspoken, of any group that he’s a part of. He does understand why the Winter Court would want its members to cut themselves off from their own lives--it’s protection both for themselves and their loved ones--but it’s hard not to try to take his life back. It was a good life. It was his life. And now it’s not.
Part of him wants to blame his family for not realizing the fetch wasn’t him--but a lot of him blames himself. If he’d shared more of his life with them, would they have realized it wasn’t him? Sure, his parents and Charley were halfway up the state, but most of his mother’s family was still in San Diego. What does it say about him that even his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the same city didn’t realize it wasn’t him? That they’d really believed he’d sold out everything he believed in to chase success? He keeps thinking of all the accusations that his ex-boyfriend Liam threw at him during their break-up and it’s a disquieting thought that if he really had been the person Liam had accused him of being, the fetch’s actions would have been entirely in character.
What else? Steven has a strong sense of justice. He considered it a privilege of his former career to bring injustices to light and expose them to the world--well, San Diego. He’s an odd mix of a cynic and an idealist. He has those high ideals, but at the same time he recognizes that most of his high ideals aren’t likely to be put into practice and he’s better off being practical and engaging with the world as it is now, not as how he’d like it to be.
As noted before, Steven tends to follow the rules of the society he’s in, even if they make him miserable--both the written and unwritten rules. This can and does often come in conflict with his sense of justice, because he lives in the goddamn World of Darkness and it’s just like our own, only worse.
He’s not a romantic. Well, that is to say, he’s not a romantic when it comes to relationships, anyway. He’s all too capable of romanticizing ideas.
He’s an atheist or at most, a strong agnostic, but is very much quiet about it. (He is, however, culturally Catholic.)
He’s a giant nerd. He’s usually able to downplay it in normal company, but occasionally he can get pendantic when it comes to something he really cares about, like superhero movies or shonen anime or wrestling. He’s also excessively fond of the spooky and the macabre, which he also tends to downplay alongside normal people.
Deep down inside, despite the calm and sometimes cold front that he puts out, he’s angry. Angry that he was taken, angry that he’s lost so much and everything he told himself he was going home for is gone. Right now the sorrow he feels for his losses overwhelms that anger, but there’s more than one reason that the Winter Court is an imperfect fit for him as he currently is--but who knows if any of the other three Courts would be any better?
He uses sarcasm as a coping mechanism.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Rocket Grunt, the poor asshole
Starter: Misdreavus (plus Woobat for his bonus Rocket starter)
Password: Atomic Fireball
Samples
RP Sample: With a Fjord in the In The Dark test drive, with the caveat that although Steven is taken from the same point in time as he would be for route, more or less, the conceit of In The Dark is that all the characters are dead, so it’s technically same canonpoint + surprise death.
Also, some threads on the test drive!
Victory Road Sample:
It's not the first time in his life that Steven's woken up in an entirely unfamiliar place, with no idea how he's gotten there. This is not, in fact, his first kidnapping rodeo.
Last time was darker. Which doesn't mean El Pecador hadn't managed to get him back somehow. It just meant that if he had, he'd decided to dump Steven somewhere else, somewhere with a proper light source. In which case, the proper reaction was to--
Shit. He doesn’t-- he doesn’t know. How the hell’s he supposed to get out of here on his own? The only way he’d gotten out before was because he’d been in large group and even then, they’d lost part of the group in the process.
No. Breathe. He’s not going to get anything done if he panics.
He sits up and begins to automatically reach for his glasses on the table-- no, desk next to the bed… and then immediately stops himself because he can see just fine, his glasses are still on his face, and that does not make him feel any more positive about who must have kidnapped him, because wouldn’t a normal human know you don’t let people wear their glasses to bed?
Huh. Somebody left a note? And some… balls?
What on Earth is Team Rocket?
Skimming through the rest of the letter isn’t all that helpful either, really. There’s a uniform. He’s a ‘grunt.’ There are ‘admins.’ His ‘team-mates’ are in the balls. They’re called ‘Pokemon’ (and that really sounds like something Charley would have been into when she was eight or nine.)
Steven’s hands aren’t right.
It had taken him longer than he wanted to admit to notice, but once he does, he can’t-- it’s all he can notice. They’re shorter than they were before he passed out. They’ve got less joints than they had. They’re--
They’re normal.
He drops the letter. The letter doesn’t matter. His hands are normal again, like a regular human’s--maybe a little longer than they were originally, but that’s all. Like his Mask, he thinks numbly. This must be what they look like in his Mask.
Oh hell. Does that mean--
A short hunt for a reflective surface later and Steven can confirm it. He’s got his old face, his old body back. He’s--as far as he can tell--a normal human once more.
“What the hell--?”
[Note: Apologies for the edit, I realized I left the contact blank unfilled.]