September Jakob Kohl

He uses “Smokestack” more than he uses his real name and it seems to stick since he’s almost never seen without a cigarette in his hands. It often gets shortened to “Smokes” in and of itself. This is derived, in part, from a nickname he had as a child, Ember Coals, a play on his last and first names, however, if you shorten his name to Ember, you’d best hope you’re a very close friend or a lover, or he might very well never want to have anything to do with you again. It’s something of an intimate thing.

Nineteen.

Male

Somewhere south of the worst closet case you’ve ever seen. (Bisexual, homoromantic).

Male 11

Human

Gerard Way, Vox for My Chemical Romance

Smokestack’s appearance is almost always changing. Usually, he has his hair dyed black from its natural dark brown, but whenever anyone gets too comfortable with his hair, he changes it up, dyes it bright red or bleaches it to deathly white. He has a soft curve to his jaw and his smile takes up his whole face when he’s really smiling, which relatively rare, although his fake smile, his friendly smile, is a very close mimic. He’s rarely seen without a marlboro red clasped between his first and middle finger, and without smoke pouring from his mouth. This is likely why his “codename” stuck.

Smokes, for the most part, wears dark, semiformal clothing with red and grey accents, although his clothing style is just about as versatile as his hair. He likes rings and accessories but loses them too often to really have them considered a part of his day to day life. He also has a habit for putting things in his hair, or through his shirt buttons, like little flowers he finds or twigs, or anything that he picks up and fidgets with enough.

+ Messenger Bag +
+ Cell Phone +
+ iPod and headphones +
+ Butterfly Knife +
+ A Number of Fake IDs and Passports(including his own and the ones he’s meaning to deliver to other people) +
+ Two Packs of Marlboro Red 100s +
+ Wallet +
+ Sketchbook + Flask +
+ A Myriad of Other Doubtlessly Illegal and Stolen Goods +

Smokestack, as most humans, is a bundle of walking contradictions. Perhaps the easiest way to examine him at first is from the outside. From the outside he acts like everyone’s best friend but offers little information about himself. He keeps where he’s sleeping, who he’s getting the things he’s getting from, even his real name, secret for the most part. You meet him as Smokestack, not as September, you meet him as the nameless kid who can get you anything you need quick for the right amount of cash. He’s a friendly entrepreneur at first, a businessman. Huge smiles and cigarette smoke. Big gestures. He pretends there isn’t any stress in stealing, in manufacturing fake IDs and passports, in walking with werewolves when he’s a soft-skinned, near-defenseless human.

It takes effort to get past this outer shell, this front of absolute stability. But what you find behind the fire is a desolate wreckage of nerves, substance abuse, and ruined self esteem. You’ll find the dark things he writes and draws in his sketchbook, the ink smudges on his fingers and the way his eyes flash cold when you talk about his family. It’s the part of him that pushes so hard and so vicious against intruders it’s something of a miracle that anyone could observe anything deeper than his fear and his anxiety, his depressions and his self-loathing. There is deeper, though, in small doses. There are times you can get him to smile for real, if you try hard enough, if you’re close enough. Showing him your art, or remarking on his, Smokes feeds off of creativity and deep thoughts. He likes listening to people talk about their thoughts, he likes thinking about what it’s all about, what the meaning of it is. And his best friends are the people who can keep up a conversation about those things.

As with most things about Smokes, his goals are a nebulous bundle of oxymoronic motives. He wants to get closer to people, to feel less alone, but he doesn’t want to open himself up and make himself vulnerable. He wants to continue with his black market trading but he doesn’t want to keep doing illegal things for all the stress it gives him. He wants depression medication but he doesn’t want to be a zombie without the extremely happy moods he gets in exchange for the depression. He wants a real job, but he doesn’t want to find himself falling into step with society.
So to be completely honest, Smokestack doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t have a damn clue.

Smokestack has a long history of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. His parents were only fifteen when he was born, and not nearly ready for a kid. But they tried, because like hell, as his father, Tracy Blake, said, any kid of his lineage was going to end up in foster care. Which evidently, didn’t stop him from taking off two years later and never speaking to Smokestack’s mother, Morgan Kohl, again. Morgan dropped out of school to get a job and take care of her son, where she met Smokestack’s father figure for most of his early life, and her next boyfriend, David Diaz. Not a year later, they’d moved in together (much to Morgan’s parents’ protest), and were raising Smokestack together. Another year and Smokestack’s sister, Emilia Kohl was born.
Over his early childhood, both Morgan and David fell into alcoholism and as a small family they passed in and out of homelessness near-constantly.
When Emilia was five, and Smokes was nine, Emilia was diagnosed with Leukemia and uninsured and poor, the family scraped together funds to pay for her treatment only through fundraisers and pulling quite a few different strings, something they were all rather good at. As a result of this, Smokestack spent quite a bit of the time Emilia was alive in hospitals. She held on for three years, then she was announced NEC, or No Evidence of Cancer, at eight, and the family thought they were finally out of the hardships. Morgan and David fell into alcoholism again, now that they could barely afford it, and things were good until Smokes was fifteen, and Emilia fell into an unexpected remission, one which snuck up quick enough and hit hard enough that there wasn’t any stopping of the spreading or the fate it wrote her.
Morgan and David became distant after Emilia’s death, and Smokestack sought company elsewhere. He found himself dealing drugs for a friend at school, although he’d never used anything besides a prescription pain pill here or there. He became entrenched in forgery and learned his hand at the black market quicker than most who are raised in it. He knew how to get goods and he knew how to move them, and better yet he found he had a talent for the artful design of fake identification. Fake anything. He was good at making mimics, fake designer handbags and fake “imported” goods. He was good at selling what he didn’t have and giving goods he did have in the place of what he said he did. Best thing was, Smokes didn’t ever get caught.
So he took off, estranged from his mother and step father’s alcoholism, when he was nearly eighteen, and he left for greener pastures. By some miracle he ended up in Cereus, became its very own small city drug dealer and became the go-to guy whenever kids want cigarettes or whenever werewolves need a passport or a driver’s license that marks them down as human, whenever anyone needs anything that’s a little less than legal. He knows everyone. He drifts between pack borders like they’re doorways and always seems to have more than enough cash to hold himself down in whatever motel he wants to sleep in that night around town. He shows up to events, despite no one inviting, but seems welcomed all the same, seeing as he’s a friendly face, even if you’re not doing business with him. Still. There are things untold about the boy who walks with wolves and humans alike. It’s interesting to think of someone who might be able to get him to tell them.