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By the time he left college to shadow under a mechanic in a town called Dogtrot, Maurice had accepted that he'd become a sort of an alien. His own age group didn't 'get' him and he didn't 'get' them. They spoke different languages. All he knew how to do was please superiors. He decided that going somewhere where no one knew him and edging in with the older crowd was what was best for him. People liked a 'good ole boy' and that was what he decided to become. He rented a trailer behind a man's house and offered to do manual labor for half the rent and then sold everything inside said trailer for beer. He lived this way for three years.
When his mother learned about his drinking, she begged him to get help but he denied it--he didn't want to interact with more any more than he had to. This crushed her and she understood why he behaved this way, but she never stopped trying. While his sister let their mother visit with her kids, Maurice was still the one who came around the most--even if it was to usually borrow money or wash his clothes.
[TIME FOR THE BOOK TO ACTUALLY START]
And here was Maurice, minding his own business, working at a gas station and TRYING to keep out of trouble. It was the middle of July. Hot. Terrible customers. He had himself a bad day. A really bad awful no good day. So he did what any alcoholic recluse does on a really bad awful no good day. He skulked off to his favorite way-out-of-the-way bar for a drink or twelve. As fate would have it, he stepped on a crumpled twenty dollar bill. And as fate would also have it, he encountered a cool funny lady far too pretty to be a dingy old bar with dead animals on the walls. She lured him outside, claiming car trouble, and knocked him out with a wrench. She and the rest of her undead posse drank him dry, buried his body in the woods, and skipped.
Maurice's life then proceeded to get a whole hell of a lot harder. After figuring out and acknowledging the fact that he was a bloodthirsty CREATURE OF THE NIGHT (and also that bloodthirsty creatures of the night did in fact exist), he had to keep it a secret. There were shenanigans and lots of hiding form the sun under several layers of clothes in the Texas heat. This lasted for about two weeks before he drove to Two Rock and spilled everything to his mom. She took it better than expected. They now had something to keep them connected again. With one person on his side, Maurice continued trying to do things as normally as he could in Dogtrot and didn't do a terrible job, all things considered. He managed to weasel a night shift out of his boss and worked that way for a while, picking off chickens and attacking nearby cattle to feed himself.
Unfortunately, improper nutrition started to get to him. Without human blood, Maurice's senses were dialed up to eleven and his twitchyness made him hard to deal with. His new co-worker, Meranda, was having a lot of un-spoken family issues of her own. When Maurice added his own aggression to their already hot-and-cold friendship, working at Fred's became a delicate ballet of dancing on eggshells for both of them. Naturally, neither knew why the other had their undies in a twist. Communication is for nerds.
Juggling two drinking problems was pretty hard on Maurice and after destroying a man's arm in a bar fight that he more or less started, he fled into the night, eventually losing himself in an unfamiliar part of town. He eventually ducked into a coffee shop. There, he shared a highly caffeinated drink with a bored clerk named Horas. Unbeknownst to Maurice, Horas was also undead and part of a little cluster of vampires that had been living in the city undetected for a good fifty years. He'd seen Maurice around before but only realized that night that he actually lived in town.
This upset Horas and the rest of the vampires in town because up until that moment they were completely unaware of him. Not only that, but around the same time Maurice was turned, a few other dead people had turned up in town. And they were actually dead. Murdered in grizzly ways and left to be found by police. It wasn't vampire-like work but the murders were weird enough to get the attention of a local self-appointed monster slayer who had started to make getting a bite to eat pretty damn hard.
Maurice the rookiepire wandering around town making sloppy livestock kills, people are turning up dead, the slayer is on the lookout for a monster to blame The Dogtrot Murder (the group of vampires. don't laugh it was a long time ago) doesn't want ANY monster to be found out.
What to do?
Well obviously either kill Maurice or get him an education so the slayer guy doesn't catch him and start looking for more. Vampires are sort of a cockroach situation. There's never just one.. Charlie, the leader of the Dogtrot Murder, liked that first idea, but Terri, an undead soccer mom, wasn't going to have any of it and Horas didn't think the the kid was half bad so they took him under their wing and started to teach him how to be a right and proper dead person. If this book were an 80's movie there would be an 80's vampire training/bonding montage right about here, but since it isn't, there isn't one. After a couple months of trial and error, Maurice adjusted. In order to stay hidden, Horas taught him how to turn into a bat, but after nearly getting eaten by a cat during his first flying lesson, Horas decided to teach him how to turn into a dog instead. Maurice became very good at the dog shape and was able to travel and hide.
He was also taught how to mug people in back alleys and feed from them without turning them. It's hard to turn somebody on accident but it does happen, especially if the vampires involved are inexperienced and unable to control themselves.
One night, while Horas was teaching Maurice how to feed properly, they were ambushed by the slayer and Maurice was stabbed multiple times. This threw The Dogtrot Murder into paranoia overdrive. Charlie instructed the members to only hunt in pairs until whatever was committing the weird crimes was caught. Not long after that, Maurice got kicked out of the trailer he'd been renting because dying and running around with a bunch of other dead people tends to make you forget about...y'know...human responsibilities. Like rent. And answering the phone. That bummed him out pretty badly, but Charlie agreed to let him to stay in the little bunker the lot of them met up at until he got back on his feet. She wasn't crazy about the idea but at least it'd be easier to keep an eye on him.
Jody, a human friend of Charlie's, pops up on the first of November to warn her that that M.O.O.N., this group of overpowered nerds with sticks up their asses but startlingly good magic skills, was pretty freaked out over the whole Jack-the-Ripoff murder count and are sending some drones by in the coming weeks to have a look-see. If they aren't detected, the drones will return and MOON will forget about Dogtrot. It's a speck of a town and nobody cares about it anyway. The plan was to keep off the streets as much as possible until then. After that they would relax and have themselves a good time.
Early Black Friday morning (aka Vampire Christmas) would be easy and safe hunting because it's easy to pick off people when they're fighting each other for five dollar crock pots. They could go dry until then.
A week and a half before Thanksgiving, Meranda accidentally hits Maurice with her car while he was in dog form. Mistaking him for a normal dog, she took him home and wrapped his leg with the intent to take him to the vet in the morning. During the night Meranda gets phone call and gets the news that her father has finally passed away. After watching her break down, Maurice understood why she'd been acting so crazy for months on end. He feels like a shit. Which he had been. You suck, Maurice. When Meranda leaves to go to the nursing home, Maurice shifts back into his human shape and escapes back to the nest. His arm is still broken. Terri gives him a makeshift cast. It's terrible.
Things were awkward at the gas station for the next couple of days and he noticed that Meranda's name was missing from the schedule. His boss tells him that she put in her two weeks and was planning to return to Chicago. Maurice decided to attend Meranda's father's cremation ceremony to support her and let her know that he was sorry for being a shit. He didn't want her to think she hadn't had any friends in Dogtrot. After actually making friends, Maurice couldn't stand the idea of someone else not having any.
Fate would have it that the day of the funeral was also the day the MOON drones were set to visit. Maurice knew that he risked getting caught and torn open (and probably the town being put under permanent watch) but he was a young person with a bleeding heart so he did the dumb protagonist thing and dropped the idiot ball. Maurice crept out of the nest with his guitar on his back just in case something happened to it while he was gone. Everybody had gotten paranoid at that point.
He missed the ceremony itself but caught Meranda outside the funeral home. After an apology from both sides, they made up. Meranda decided to hang around a little longer since there wasn't much waiting for her in Chicago anyway. Maurice offered to help Meranda box up old things to sell or give away. He and Meranda decided to go get something to eat but then THE PLOT showed back up in the form of a guy in a Braves hoodie with no face and horrible tentacle arms.
There are kind of a lot of them.
Maurice and Meranda fight back with broken wine bottles and debris from the alleyways before being rescued by Terri who had also snuck out of the nest. She told them that the MOON drones weren't really living creatures and were defective on top of that. They had to be killed and their cores had to be removed to insure MOON didn't come after them. Jody would make up some bullshit story on their behalf. She tried to usher them back to safety but the three of them are were caught by Charlie and Horas who had also slipped out to patrol the town. THERE IS A LOT OF COUGHING AND AWKWARD FOOT SHUFFLING. Charlie yelled at Maurice and ordered him to go the fuck back to the nest with Meranda. Maurice's broken arm made him almost useless for fighting. Meranda had taken the brunt of the damage and was flagging hard. They took an overly complicated back way to the nest and were almost home free.
Near the nest, they witnessed (or overheard, rather) someone being murdered. While they feraked out about it, the slayer popped up and mistook Meranda for the source of the yell and attacked Maurice. Instead of running, Maurice stood up to him and dared him to try and kill him, face to face. After all the crap he'd been through over the past few months he wasn't going to let some guy in a coat put him down. Luckily a severed hand landed between them from the building above. After some sassing, Maurice convinced him to investigate the source of the scream instead of heckling him and Meranda. They made it to the nest only to find the doors open.
A MOON drone had gotten inside and was waiting for them. Maurice and Meranda used up the last of their energy and killed it tag-team style because battle friends are the best kinds of friends. Maurice delivered the killing blow with the splintered neck of his guitar. Once that was over, things calmed down in Dogtrot. The scream in the alley had, in fact, been the cause of nothing more than a human murderer that the slayer apprehended. He was praised on the news much to the Dogtrot Murder's disgust but the less he bothered them the better.
Charlie pulled Maurice aside and regretfully told him that he could not live at the nest. He had helped them in defending it but had also disobeyed her (and not for the first time). Meranda flipped her shit at Charlie but Maurice understood and did not put up a fuss. Maurice grew to level: Semi-Responsible For His Actions.
Once they were patched up, Maurice drove Meranda home and apologized profusely for dragging her into the whole mess. She assured him that she would deal. They were friends. They could do stuff later. Like get absolutely shitfaced, watch Dune and not get strangled by starfish monsers. Maurice bid her farewell and drove off in his truck that was, for the moment, his new house.
BOOK 2 opens the day before thanksgiving (his birthday) and not a whole lot has had a chance to happen.
Maurice arrives at work to find Meranda taping up a suspicious amount of lost pet fliers. They comment on the unusual lack of business the gas station has been getting and worry that it may be closing down like many other shops on their side of town. The next afternoon Maurice went to his parents' house for a super late Thanksgiving dinner.
His mother being the only one in the family to know about his vampire problem, his siblings weren't too keen on his slightly-more-battered-than-usual look. His sister pulled him aside before he left to go home and forbid him from having anything to do with her kids, who he was pretty much crazy about. Maurice was a good uncle.
It was no secret that Maurice had a drinking problem but his worsening condition gave him the look and mannerisms of somebody who was on something a great deal harder. She had disliked him for years and that was the last straw in her opinion. Hurt, he left the house and boiled all the way home. He then went out to find himself a bottle of Everclear. He drank the whole thing by himself and wandered out into the desert as a half-assed suicide attempt that just ended up with him passing out behind a Wendy's after punching out a car window.
Personality:
Maurice is just a big kid. Seriously, give him a nerf gun and he will entertain himself for an hour. Hokey B movies, comic books, and old video games all hold his attention in a vice grip. He can even be heard uttering 'Gozer' under his breath as a really lame adopted swear from the Ghostbusters movie. However this isn't because of an 'it's old so it's better' mentality. He's just BROKE and that is all he has--memories and junk from whe he was a kid. Maurice daydreams constantly and hums and sings to himself when alone.
The supernatural world leaves him wide-eyed. Being undead for a whopping half-a-year or so has made him question everything. He often jumps to paranormal explanations before even thinking about looking for a normal explanation. EVERY BUMP IS A GHOST. So far, Maurice has been exposed to only a few supernatural things: vampires, scary tentacle starfish aliens that stab you, and supposedly werewolves. He hasn't seen Bert transform yet. He's not entirely convinced the others aren't pulling his leg. See, there's that paranoia. Things have been pretty unstable for Maurice lately and he teeter totters between being painfully gullible and stubbornly paranoid.
Maurice is shy. Though comfortable around people older than he is (he's used to getting pats on the head for being a 'good ole boy') it's rare for him to make smalltalk with people his own age. He feels alienated by them because he doesn't have a cellphone or a computer. He can't afford to go see the new movies or buy things like a PS2. He's very much stuck in the 80's with his 'dude' slang, bad haircut, and the like. When he does speak, it's a toss up between him mumbling a few stray words to the floor or overflowing with WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION. He hasn't been socialized enough to find that happy medium. When in a group, Maurice hovers near the edges, timidly trying to judge everyone's mood and staying on the look-out for any disturbances like a fat shaky deer.
He tries to be a good boy, and succeeds for the most part. He helps out where he sees help needed and tries to fix or replace anything he breaks. He means well and likes nothing more than everyone getting along. Conflict within a circle of friends tears him to pieces. He'll have a horrible time trying to find a side to be on and end up bailing out of fear of making one end of the argument angry with him for associating with the other. He doesn't like the idea of somebody being angry with him and will usually roll belly-up in attempts to fix whatever he's done even if he isn't sure what that is. He's prone to bouts of, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” and lots of fidgeting and hovering until whoever he's offended is like IT'S OKAY, MAURICE, JESUS, JUST QUIT IT. He has even entertained the idea of mugging a human being and bringing the unconscious body to his undead nest-mates as a token of apology.
It'd probably be adorable if he were a cat or something.
But he isn't.
He's easily persuaded with bullying and pleading alike and aches to please and be accepted. He will go as far as chameleon-ing his body language and speech patterns to better fit in with any group of people he's trying to impress regardless of age or sex. He will go from spinning intricate webs of profanity to greeting others as 'gurl'. Yeah. Any kind of positive attention will cause him to trip all over himself with glee.
He feels guilty when he has to do his vampire business. He takes pains to drink as little as he can afford and to leave as small a wound as possible. He hasn't learned that this is a good way to cause people to get infections by not letting the wound bleed freely. He's only been on a few solo hunts before his pull point. He's gotta be a big kid now without Horas holding his hand. He's actually only mastered a few undead tricks so he depends on blunt trauma to render his victims unconscious instead of hypnotism or any other creative means. He usually does more damage knocking people out than drinking from them.
Decision making is not his best skill. Neither is impulse control. The several years' worth of alcohol addiction, generic 'mom' heart tattoo, and several minor scrapes and bumps that decorate his person are testaments to this. Maurice is one of those guys who can be heard uttering, “Hold my beer and watch this!” before landing himself in the emergency room--especially if he thinks it'll impress someone. Since he's died, this has gotten even worse. You survive enough stabbings and being hit by a car and suddenly you're INVINCIBLE. TENATIVLY. He's aware there are probably more scary things out there and he should keep an open mind...BUT LOOK AT HIM HE CAN THROW A TRUCK.
Maurice is an incredibly warm person. He hates to see anyone feel lonely or suffer. He's a great shoulder to lean on and is always willing to offer an ear--both out of honest compassion and the want to please others. He's the kind of person who will pick worms off the sidewalk when it rains and then not know what to do with them. While awkward, Maurice almost finds it impossible to keep from giving people compliments when he thinks they deserve them. You! That shirt is awesome on you! You! You punched that guy REALLY GOOD! Unfortunately, he is as good at putting himself down as he is at building himself up. Harsh words from peers and family--especially his sister--have worn a deep groove in his psyche.
And yet, as much of a marshmallow as the vampire can be, he was still a bully at one point and that animal in him is not dead—-just buried. He knows he's bigger and heavier and stronger than a lot of the people he meets. If pushed and prodded and bullied just enough, he can actually pass straight through being a wibbling lump and break a man's jaw and then keep yanking on it to see just how broken it can get. He's his mother's son. This isn't 'I'm going to hurt this thing so I can get away from it/feed off it.' This is 'I'm going to hurt this thing and then sit here and listen to it hurt and make it hurt more until I feel better about myself.' He's the youngest of four. He knows how to wrastle. Part of him really LOVES a good fight! Play-fighting and horsing around is probably one of the best ways to get to know him.
He loves being around kids--being a big kid himself. Helping take care of his sister's daughter for a couple of years and just watching his family in general (lots of cousins and aunts and uncles) made him realize that he really wants to be a father himself. Becoming a vampire stomped that plan out and good (being undead means the party bus has left the station) but he still really yearns for a family--any kind of family. He happily takes on the role of big brother or cool uncle or anything else that makes him feel wanted and depended on. This isn't a wish he talks about too often though. He worries that something like that would come off as weird or creepy or 'not manly' enough thanks to his mother filling his head with all the things he SHOULD be liking at a young age.
In fact, Maurice has a LOT of self-discovery to do now that he's both out from under his mother's thumb and not constantly struggling to make ends meet (both with the undead and the living). His sexuality has been challenged nearly his whole life by society and his poor brain screamed bloody murder at the very idea of exploring ANYTHING ELSE any time it occurred to him. The gender spectrum is completely unheard of. He is a sheltered southern boy with little to no tools to help him explore his identity. He doesn't internet. The boy doesn't even know being bisexual is a thing. Help him.
Pokémon Information Affiliation: Trainer Starter: Rhyhorn Password: Atomic Fireball
[The feed shakes as the cameraman shuffles on his knees away from his napsack and toward what looks to be some kind of burrow. The speaker is out of breath but none the less excited.]
Okay--okay so I was setting up camp or whatever and I heard a noise--crap. Crap is this thing--
[He turns the 'gear around to give the network a view of his unshaven face. His cheeks are sunburned and there are leaves in his hair. Behind him, a Rhyhorn can be seen happily drinking from the lake on Route 31. Maurice squints uncertainly into the camera and he wipes the lens off with his thumb. The little light is on. That seems to have satisfied him because the camera is quickly flipped back around. It draws nearer to the hole and inside it's possible to see a pair of huge perfectly round eyes.]
Okay, yeah, so! I heard a noise and felt somethin' real weird in the air like a...static. I don't know! Anyway I got t'lookin' around and found this hole and ya'll there is a purple-ass cat in this hole! It's so purple! It's like...a grape koolaid cat! What the hell!
[Maurice laughs incredulously and tries to bring the camera even closer. This purple cat thing is A DELIGHT. The Espurr's eyes are suddenly aglow and the entire screen fills with a Light Screen. Maurice lets out a yodel of dismay and the feed cuts.]
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Pokemon! Congratulations, you have a fun and exciting adventure awaiting you.
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indigo_league) wrote2016-05-03 09:48 pm
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When his mother learned about his drinking, she begged him to get help but he denied it--he didn't want to interact with more any more than he had to. This crushed her and she understood why he behaved this way, but she never stopped trying. While his sister let their mother visit with her kids, Maurice was still the one who came around the most--even if it was to usually borrow money or wash his clothes.
[TIME FOR THE BOOK TO ACTUALLY START]
And here was Maurice, minding his own business, working at a gas station and TRYING to keep out of trouble. It was the middle of July. Hot. Terrible customers. He had himself a bad day. A really bad awful no good day. So he did what any alcoholic recluse does on a really bad awful no good day. He skulked off to his favorite way-out-of-the-way bar for a drink or twelve. As fate would have it, he stepped on a crumpled twenty dollar bill. And as fate would also have it, he encountered a cool funny lady far too pretty to be a dingy old bar with dead animals on the walls. She lured him outside, claiming car trouble, and knocked him out with a wrench. She and the rest of her undead posse drank him dry, buried his body in the woods, and skipped.
Maurice's life then proceeded to get a whole hell of a lot harder. After figuring out and acknowledging the fact that he was a bloodthirsty CREATURE OF THE NIGHT (and also that bloodthirsty creatures of the night did in fact exist), he had to keep it a secret. There were shenanigans and lots of hiding form the sun under several layers of clothes in the Texas heat. This lasted for about two weeks before he drove to Two Rock and spilled everything to his mom. She took it better than expected. They now had something to keep them connected again. With one person on his side, Maurice continued trying to do things as normally as he could in Dogtrot and didn't do a terrible job, all things considered. He managed to weasel a night shift out of his boss and worked that way for a while, picking off chickens and attacking nearby cattle to feed himself.
Unfortunately, improper nutrition started to get to him. Without human blood, Maurice's senses were dialed up to eleven and his twitchyness made him hard to deal with. His new co-worker, Meranda, was having a lot of un-spoken family issues of her own. When Maurice added his own aggression to their already hot-and-cold friendship, working at Fred's became a delicate ballet of dancing on eggshells for both of them. Naturally, neither knew why the other had their undies in a twist. Communication is for nerds.
Juggling two drinking problems was pretty hard on Maurice and after destroying a man's arm in a bar fight that he more or less started, he fled into the night, eventually losing himself in an unfamiliar part of town. He eventually ducked into a coffee shop. There, he shared a highly caffeinated drink with a bored clerk named Horas. Unbeknownst to Maurice, Horas was also undead and part of a little cluster of vampires that had been living in the city undetected for a good fifty years. He'd seen Maurice around before but only realized that night that he actually lived in town.
This upset Horas and the rest of the vampires in town because up until that moment they were completely unaware of him. Not only that, but around the same time Maurice was turned, a few other dead people had turned up in town. And they were actually dead. Murdered in grizzly ways and left to be found by police. It wasn't vampire-like work but the murders were weird enough to get the attention of a local self-appointed monster slayer who had started to make getting a bite to eat pretty damn hard.
Maurice the rookiepire wandering around town making sloppy livestock kills, people are turning up dead, the slayer is on the lookout for a monster to blame The Dogtrot Murder (the group of vampires. don't laugh it was a long time ago) doesn't want ANY monster to be found out.
What to do?
Well obviously either kill Maurice or get him an education so the slayer guy doesn't catch him and start looking for more. Vampires are sort of a cockroach situation. There's never just one.. Charlie, the leader of the Dogtrot Murder, liked that first idea, but Terri, an undead soccer mom, wasn't going to have any of it and Horas didn't think the the kid was half bad so they took him under their wing and started to teach him how to be a right and proper dead person. If this book were an 80's movie there would be an 80's vampire training/bonding montage right about here, but since it isn't, there isn't one. After a couple months of trial and error, Maurice adjusted. In order to stay hidden, Horas taught him how to turn into a bat, but after nearly getting eaten by a cat during his first flying lesson, Horas decided to teach him how to turn into a dog instead. Maurice became very good at the dog shape and was able to travel and hide.
He was also taught how to mug people in back alleys and feed from them without turning them. It's hard to turn somebody on accident but it does happen, especially if the vampires involved are inexperienced and unable to control themselves.
One night, while Horas was teaching Maurice how to feed properly, they were ambushed by the slayer and Maurice was stabbed multiple times. This threw The Dogtrot Murder into paranoia overdrive. Charlie instructed the members to only hunt in pairs until whatever was committing the weird crimes was caught. Not long after that, Maurice got kicked out of the trailer he'd been renting because dying and running around with a bunch of other dead people tends to make you forget about...y'know...human responsibilities. Like rent. And answering the phone. That bummed him out pretty badly, but Charlie agreed to let him to stay in the little bunker the lot of them met up at until he got back on his feet. She wasn't crazy about the idea but at least it'd be easier to keep an eye on him.
Jody, a human friend of Charlie's, pops up on the first of November to warn her that that M.O.O.N., this group of overpowered nerds with sticks up their asses but startlingly good magic skills, was pretty freaked out over the whole Jack-the-Ripoff murder count and are sending some drones by in the coming weeks to have a look-see. If they aren't detected, the drones will return and MOON will forget about Dogtrot. It's a speck of a town and nobody cares about it anyway. The plan was to keep off the streets as much as possible until then. After that they would relax and have themselves a good time.
Early Black Friday morning (aka Vampire Christmas) would be easy and safe hunting because it's easy to pick off people when they're fighting each other for five dollar crock pots. They could go dry until then.
A week and a half before Thanksgiving, Meranda accidentally hits Maurice with her car while he was in dog form. Mistaking him for a normal dog, she took him home and wrapped his leg with the intent to take him to the vet in the morning. During the night Meranda gets phone call and gets the news that her father has finally passed away. After watching her break down, Maurice understood why she'd been acting so crazy for months on end. He feels like a shit. Which he had been. You suck, Maurice. When Meranda leaves to go to the nursing home, Maurice shifts back into his human shape and escapes back to the nest. His arm is still broken. Terri gives him a makeshift cast. It's terrible.
Things were awkward at the gas station for the next couple of days and he noticed that Meranda's name was missing from the schedule. His boss tells him that she put in her two weeks and was planning to return to Chicago. Maurice decided to attend Meranda's father's cremation ceremony to support her and let her know that he was sorry for being a shit. He didn't want her to think she hadn't had any friends in Dogtrot. After actually making friends, Maurice couldn't stand the idea of someone else not having any.
Fate would have it that the day of the funeral was also the day the MOON drones were set to visit. Maurice knew that he risked getting caught and torn open (and probably the town being put under permanent watch) but he was a young person with a bleeding heart so he did the dumb protagonist thing and dropped the idiot ball. Maurice crept out of the nest with his guitar on his back just in case something happened to it while he was gone. Everybody had gotten paranoid at that point.
He missed the ceremony itself but caught Meranda outside the funeral home. After an apology from both sides, they made up. Meranda decided to hang around a little longer since there wasn't much waiting for her in Chicago anyway. Maurice offered to help Meranda box up old things to sell or give away. He and Meranda decided to go get something to eat but then THE PLOT showed back up in the form of a guy in a Braves hoodie with no face and horrible tentacle arms.
There are kind of a lot of them.
Maurice and Meranda fight back with broken wine bottles and debris from the alleyways before being rescued by Terri who had also snuck out of the nest. She told them that the MOON drones weren't really living creatures and were defective on top of that. They had to be killed and their cores had to be removed to insure MOON didn't come after them. Jody would make up some bullshit story on their behalf. She tried to usher them back to safety but the three of them are were caught by Charlie and Horas who had also slipped out to patrol the town. THERE IS A LOT OF COUGHING AND AWKWARD FOOT SHUFFLING. Charlie yelled at Maurice and ordered him to go the fuck back to the nest with Meranda. Maurice's broken arm made him almost useless for fighting. Meranda had taken the brunt of the damage and was flagging hard. They took an overly complicated back way to the nest and were almost home free.
Near the nest, they witnessed (or overheard, rather) someone being murdered. While they feraked out about it, the slayer popped up and mistook Meranda for the source of the yell and attacked Maurice. Instead of running, Maurice stood up to him and dared him to try and kill him, face to face. After all the crap he'd been through over the past few months he wasn't going to let some guy in a coat put him down. Luckily a severed hand landed between them from the building above. After some sassing, Maurice convinced him to investigate the source of the scream instead of heckling him and Meranda. They made it to the nest only to find the doors open.
A MOON drone had gotten inside and was waiting for them. Maurice and Meranda used up the last of their energy and killed it tag-team style because battle friends are the best kinds of friends. Maurice delivered the killing blow with the splintered neck of his guitar. Once that was over, things calmed down in Dogtrot. The scream in the alley had, in fact, been the cause of nothing more than a human murderer that the slayer apprehended. He was praised on the news much to the Dogtrot Murder's disgust but the less he bothered them the better.
Charlie pulled Maurice aside and regretfully told him that he could not live at the nest. He had helped them in defending it but had also disobeyed her (and not for the first time). Meranda flipped her shit at Charlie but Maurice understood and did not put up a fuss. Maurice grew to level: Semi-Responsible For His Actions.
Once they were patched up, Maurice drove Meranda home and apologized profusely for dragging her into the whole mess. She assured him that she would deal. They were friends. They could do stuff later. Like get absolutely shitfaced, watch Dune and not get strangled by starfish monsers. Maurice bid her farewell and drove off in his truck that was, for the moment, his new house.
-END BOOK 1
4/4
Maurice arrives at work to find Meranda taping up a suspicious amount of lost pet fliers. They comment on the unusual lack of business the gas station has been getting and worry that it may be closing down like many other shops on their side of town. The next afternoon Maurice went to his parents' house for a super late Thanksgiving dinner.
His mother being the only one in the family to know about his vampire problem, his siblings weren't too keen on his slightly-more-battered-than-usual look. His sister pulled him aside before he left to go home and forbid him from having anything to do with her kids, who he was pretty much crazy about. Maurice was a good uncle.
It was no secret that Maurice had a drinking problem but his worsening condition gave him the look and mannerisms of somebody who was on something a great deal harder. She had disliked him for years and that was the last straw in her opinion. Hurt, he left the house and boiled all the way home. He then went out to find himself a bottle of Everclear. He drank the whole thing by himself and wandered out into the desert as a half-assed suicide attempt that just ended up with him passing out behind a Wendy's after punching out a car window.
Personality:
Maurice is just a big kid. Seriously, give him a nerf gun and he will entertain himself for an hour. Hokey B movies, comic books, and old video games all hold his attention in a vice grip. He can even be heard uttering 'Gozer' under his breath as a really lame adopted swear from the Ghostbusters movie. However this isn't because of an 'it's old so it's better' mentality. He's just BROKE and that is all he has--memories and junk from whe he was a kid. Maurice daydreams constantly and hums and sings to himself when alone.
The supernatural world leaves him wide-eyed. Being undead for a whopping half-a-year or so has made him question everything. He often jumps to paranormal explanations before even thinking about looking for a normal explanation. EVERY BUMP IS A GHOST. So far, Maurice has been exposed to only a few supernatural things: vampires, scary tentacle starfish aliens that stab you, and supposedly werewolves. He hasn't seen Bert transform yet. He's not entirely convinced the others aren't pulling his leg. See, there's that paranoia. Things have been pretty unstable for Maurice lately and he teeter totters between being painfully gullible and stubbornly paranoid.
Maurice is shy. Though comfortable around people older than he is (he's used to getting pats on the head for being a 'good ole boy') it's rare for him to make smalltalk with people his own age. He feels alienated by them because he doesn't have a cellphone or a computer. He can't afford to go see the new movies or buy things like a PS2. He's very much stuck in the 80's with his 'dude' slang, bad haircut, and the like. When he does speak, it's a toss up between him mumbling a few stray words to the floor or overflowing with WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION. He hasn't been socialized enough to find that happy medium. When in a group, Maurice hovers near the edges, timidly trying to judge everyone's mood and staying on the look-out for any disturbances like a fat shaky deer.
He tries to be a good boy, and succeeds for the most part. He helps out where he sees help needed and tries to fix or replace anything he breaks. He means well and likes nothing more than everyone getting along. Conflict within a circle of friends tears him to pieces. He'll have a horrible time trying to find a side to be on and end up bailing out of fear of making one end of the argument angry with him for associating with the other. He doesn't like the idea of somebody being angry with him and will usually roll belly-up in attempts to fix whatever he's done even if he isn't sure what that is. He's prone to bouts of, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” and lots of fidgeting and hovering until whoever he's offended is like IT'S OKAY, MAURICE, JESUS, JUST QUIT IT. He has even entertained the idea of mugging a human being and bringing the unconscious body to his undead nest-mates as a token of apology.
It'd probably be adorable if he were a cat or something.
But he isn't.
He's easily persuaded with bullying and pleading alike and aches to please and be accepted. He will go as far as chameleon-ing his body language and speech patterns to better fit in with any group of people he's trying to impress regardless of age or sex. He will go from spinning intricate webs of profanity to greeting others as 'gurl'. Yeah. Any kind of positive attention will cause him to trip all over himself with glee.
He feels guilty when he has to do his vampire business. He takes pains to drink as little as he can afford and to leave as small a wound as possible. He hasn't learned that this is a good way to cause people to get infections by not letting the wound bleed freely. He's only been on a few solo hunts before his pull point. He's gotta be a big kid now without Horas holding his hand. He's actually only mastered a few undead tricks so he depends on blunt trauma to render his victims unconscious instead of hypnotism or any other creative means. He usually does more damage knocking people out than drinking from them.
Decision making is not his best skill. Neither is impulse control. The several years' worth of alcohol addiction, generic 'mom' heart tattoo, and several minor scrapes and bumps that decorate his person are testaments to this. Maurice is one of those guys who can be heard uttering, “Hold my beer and watch this!” before landing himself in the emergency room--especially if he thinks it'll impress someone. Since he's died, this has gotten even worse. You survive enough stabbings and being hit by a car and suddenly you're INVINCIBLE. TENATIVLY. He's aware there are probably more scary things out there and he should keep an open mind...BUT LOOK AT HIM HE CAN THROW A TRUCK.
Maurice is an incredibly warm person. He hates to see anyone feel lonely or suffer. He's a great shoulder to lean on and is always willing to offer an ear--both out of honest compassion and the want to please others. He's the kind of person who will pick worms off the sidewalk when it rains and then not know what to do with them. While awkward, Maurice almost finds it impossible to keep from giving people compliments when he thinks they deserve them. You! That shirt is awesome on you! You! You punched that guy REALLY GOOD! Unfortunately, he is as good at putting himself down as he is at building himself up. Harsh words from peers and family--especially his sister--have worn a deep groove in his psyche.
And yet, as much of a marshmallow as the vampire can be, he was still a bully at one point and that animal in him is not dead—-just buried. He knows he's bigger and heavier and stronger than a lot of the people he meets. If pushed and prodded and bullied just enough, he can actually pass straight through being a wibbling lump and break a man's jaw and then keep yanking on it to see just how broken it can get. He's his mother's son. This isn't 'I'm going to hurt this thing so I can get away from it/feed off it.' This is 'I'm going to hurt this thing and then sit here and listen to it hurt and make it hurt more until I feel better about myself.' He's the youngest of four. He knows how to wrastle. Part of him really LOVES a good fight! Play-fighting and horsing around is probably one of the best ways to get to know him.
He loves being around kids--being a big kid himself. Helping take care of his sister's daughter for a couple of years and just watching his family in general (lots of cousins and aunts and uncles) made him realize that he really wants to be a father himself. Becoming a vampire stomped that plan out and good (being undead means the party bus has left the station) but he still really yearns for a family--any kind of family. He happily takes on the role of big brother or cool uncle or anything else that makes him feel wanted and depended on. This isn't a wish he talks about too often though. He worries that something like that would come off as weird or creepy or 'not manly' enough thanks to his mother filling his head with all the things he SHOULD be liking at a young age.
In fact, Maurice has a LOT of self-discovery to do now that he's both out from under his mother's thumb and not constantly struggling to make ends meet (both with the undead and the living). His sexuality has been challenged nearly his whole life by society and his poor brain screamed bloody murder at the very idea of exploring ANYTHING ELSE any time it occurred to him. The gender spectrum is completely unheard of. He is a sheltered southern boy with little to no tools to help him explore his identity. He doesn't internet. The boy doesn't even know being bisexual is a thing. Help him.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Rhyhorn
Password: Atomic Fireball
Samples
RP Sample:
TEST DRIVE MEME TOPLEVEL
Victory Road Sample:
Check this out check this out check this out!
[The feed shakes as the cameraman shuffles on his knees away from his napsack and toward what looks to be some kind of burrow. The speaker is out of breath but none the less excited.]
Okay--okay so I was setting up camp or whatever and I heard a noise--crap. Crap is this thing--
[He turns the 'gear around to give the network a view of his unshaven face. His cheeks are sunburned and there are leaves in his hair. Behind him, a Rhyhorn can be seen happily drinking from the lake on Route 31. Maurice squints uncertainly into the camera and he wipes the lens off with his thumb. The little light is on. That seems to have satisfied him because the camera is quickly flipped back around. It draws nearer to the hole and inside it's possible to see a pair of huge perfectly round eyes.]
Okay, yeah, so! I heard a noise and felt somethin' real weird in the air like a...static. I don't know! Anyway I got t'lookin' around and found this hole and ya'll there is a purple-ass cat in this hole! It's so purple! It's like...a grape koolaid cat! What the hell!
[Maurice laughs incredulously and tries to bring the camera even closer. This purple cat thing is A DELIGHT. The Espurr's eyes are suddenly aglow and the entire screen fills with a Light Screen. Maurice lets out a yodel of dismay and the feed cuts.]
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