R O L E
“What am I? I’m the future god of this world, of course.”
A young man of 19 years from New Boston who came to the city of Orecston (once Harrisburg), the capitol of New Penn to kill the king. The job was all too easy, and he successfully became the new king at the age of 15. After four years of the job, the king began to believe himself a god and was slowly inching New Penn towards a dictatorship before his guards attempted to assassinate him. He fled the castle and attempted to blend in when he met the Princess who took him in. He’s the self-elected leader of the group, and his dream is to take back his throne and transform the world into a place worthy of living in.
A G E
19
G E N D E R
Male
A P P E A R A N C E
“And what do your eyes tell you of a man’s character? You seek the right thing in the wrong place.”
Attractiveness is subjective, but Vincent would fit most models of masculine beauty. His face is well-structured, angled squarely without being craggy. His nose is straight and faintly aquiline, his cheekbones high, his mouth full but not overlarge, and his jaw on the sharper end of the spectrum. Everything about his appearance is quite symmetrical as well, so much so that it seems to lack the natural flaws and idiosyncrasies of a fully human face. He looks rather like someone crafted him, with uncanny precision and attention to detail. His coloration is rather exotic and distinctive: his eyes are a light grey-violet, the purple most prominent in normal lighting. His hair is a bright snow-white, the cut a little shaggy and feathered at the ends, incredibly soft to the touch. The left side of his neck bears a peculiar birthmark that is often mistaken for a tattoo, the coloration a faded red against the otherwise slight tan of his complexion. There is a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, a simple sequence of numerals reading ‘1152084.’
He stands at a proud six feet, certainly not as tall as some others, but the aura of power and command that surrounds him on most days is enough that he seems somehow much taller. His physique is not what one would expect of a king, allowed to grow lax and soft atop his throne. Rather, the life he had growing up shaped him into a man made for war, and daily practice and honing has kept him that way. It is not anyone who can challenge a former king to battle at the tender age of fifteen, after all. His musculature is pronounced, but not excessively bulky, and a reasonable estimate of his body weight would be perhaps 185 pounds, scarcely any of that fat. He may remind one of a jungle cat for his sleek, powerful lines and obvious grace.
His most prominent expression is one of studied neutrality, face carefully closed off, mouth set in a firm line. He often appears thoughtful, though at times, he’s known to break out into a catlike smirk or scowl deeply. Overall, however, you’ll probably only see these variations infrequently. His bearing is unmistakably aristocratic- he walks, talks, and acts like a prince, and it’s hard to mistake him for anything else. His feelings may be easily-disguised, but his fundamental nature is there for all to see.
Vincent’s clothing is always clean and well-kept, but he changes styles depending on the situation. He owns everything from an impeccably-tailored three-piece suit to t-shirts, though he seems to gravitate toward collared shirts or sweaters and a long duster coat.
A F F I L I A T I O N
“’Good’ and ‘evil’ are such trite ways of looking at the world. I fight for the downtrodden, the weak, the sick and the hungry who cannot fight for themselves. I fight to create a world where they will be lifted, strong, healthy, and fed. A world where those who seek only for themselves will face justice, and the rest will live in peace. I shall be the god of this world- the Destroyer of the old, the Creator of the new, and the Keeper of their faith in a better life. Oppose me, and I shall be your unmaking.”
S K I L L S
“I do what needs to be done, and I will not be satisfied with less than perfection.”
Vincent has been called prodigy on more than one occasion, and seems to be capable of succeeding at those things he deems important enough to take up. That said, he’s no superhuman being, and he’s only had nineteen years to learn. A childhood on the streets and then an adolescence of rigorous training has made him an adept combatant, with his specialty being in hand-to-hand fighting. He’s also good with staves and spears, but prefers to fight with his body alone. His shot is decent, but not as good as that of someone like Leo. Vincent has good stealth capability, but it’s not something he uses regularly, and he can’t hide as well as Kana could.
The man has a very analytical, tactical mind, and is capable of thinking on his feet very well. This makes him a fair hand at leadership, governance, and diplomacy. As one would perhaps expect of someone like him, he’s excellent at chess, a preferred hobby of his.
W E A K N E S S E S
“You are bold to ask such a question.”
Well, if it wasn’t obvious already, Vincent has a major Messiah Complex, and truly believes that he’s the best chance the world had to improve itself. Democracy broke down with a solar flare, the kings are weak, priests are weak, and ordinary people are weak, allowing themselves to be taken advantage of by teenaged gangs and pathetic racket-runners with nothing but money and power on their minds. He thinks that the world needs something better, something stonger, and that he is that something. Aside from making it somewhat difficult for him to fit in with society as a whole, it causes other problems as well. With the ideal of sacrificing his personal gain to save the rest of mankind comes the tendency to sacrifice his well-being for others at a moment’s notice. If the enemy is keeping a hostage, chances are good that Vincent will offer himself up in exchange. In a fight, he tries to be everywhere at once to defend his allies, and he pays no attention to his own health, often overworking himself to the point of exhaustion or illness.
Despite being incredibly intelligent, Vincent has difficulty understanding people and relating to them. His social skills leave much to be desired, and frankly he can be downright frustrating at times. He holds himself to absurd personal standards of conduct, and often expects his allies to do the same, growing very dissatisfied when they do not.
P E R S O N A L I T Y
“What I become is no longer up to me. The world will decide, and I will conform to what it needs most.”
On a day-to-day level, Vincent comes off as an arrogant iceman who appears to care little if at all for anyone or anything. He rarely allows any kind of emotion to flicker across his face, and this is because he doesn’t quite know how. He is quite skilled at several important things, enough to inspire confidence, but his straightforward way of stating things and lack of self-effacing humility mean that he takes compliments as a matter of course and doesn’t praise anyone else who has done a merely adequate job, which can lead to the appearance of being, well, something of a jerk. Worse is the general distance and aloofness he has for seemingly everything around him; he does not contribute to conversations in the usual way, rarely speaks of his history or personal feeling on any matter, even to his closest allies.
The truth is, he has no concept that anything is wrong with this. To him, the average person is too emotional, too quick to share things best kept private. He’s perhaps a bit more egotistical than he should be, but more than that, the impression of arrogance comes from the fact that he is unfailingly honest in his assessments, and tends to deliver them in a voice devoid of all feeling. It leaves many people feeling flat-footed around him, and the fact that he doesn’t spare feelings hardly helps. Still, he has made the judgment that honesty is for the best, and he generally tells only what he believes to be the truth.
His personality can almost be seen as a paradox- while he proclaims himself a future god, he holds himself generally beneath even the lowest of the ordinary citizens in some sense, namely that he will go to absurd lengths for the sake of even one innocent person. He believes wholeheartedly that the weak cannot protect themselves and must be defended from the vultures that would prey upon them. It is only by dent of his skill, smarts, and good choice in allies that he’s even still alive. That said, he absolutely will not hesitate to kill someone he believes to be against his ends should they interfere with him. The world must be remade, and if he must stain his hands with blood for that to happen, then so be it. His devotion to this idea is absolute, and will always override his concern for his own life.
He is ignorant of the full spectrum of human feeling. He has known rage, and pain, and hunger and determination and satisfaction, but joy, betrayal, friendship, camaraderie, and love are all foreign to him. This colors his interactions with others considerably, and leads to his misunderstanding certain situations. In attempting to learn better the world he has not been exposed to, he has come to understand and appreciate word games and humor, enough that he’s learned to employ sarcasm and acquired a wicked smile to go along with this.
H I S T O R Y
“You ask dangerous questions.”
Vincent has no memories of parents or a loving household; the first thing he can recall seems to be an incident in which he was found squatting in a dirty building, bleeding from a wound in the head. The officer who found him chased him out, and would have caught him had someone not grabbed him from the side and pulled him into the darkened shadows. That person, it tuned out, was a young teenaged girl named Samara, and she took him to where she lived with several other children between his age and hers.
He grew up there, on the streets with fifteen or so other dirty children, all cared for by the young woman. Samara was insistent that none of her ‘little siblings’ get themselves involved with gangs, but even the few that were able to find work brought home next to nothing, and occasionally, one of them would never return. The older boys looked after Vincent, teaching him to throw a punch and block a hit, how to climb up onto the rooftops for an easier method of escape from guards, and how to disappear into the dark of night and shadow. With these skills, he managed to keep himself safe on a daily basis, though more than once he limped home covered in bloody wounds.
When he was about nine years old, he discovered what Samara did for a living. He couldn’t say at that time that he quite understood why she followed that well-dressed man around everywhere, and why there was so much touching involved, but it seemed that she didn’t like him much. Over the next few months, he noticed her belly grow in size, and when he questioned her about it, she just smiled sadly and told him not to worry about it.
The mercenaries came the next day. Samara seemed to have been expecting it, for she forced Vincent to run away before they arrived, and made him promise not to come back until he was sure they were gone. When he did, she was dead. Something broke in the young boy that day, and there is no mistaking that of all the events that occurred in his short lifetime, nothing has ever affected him so profoundly as that day.
He was soon taken in by a group of rebels against a local king, and moved from New Boston to Oresburg. Seeing the potential in the street rat, they trained him much more rigorously in martial arts, put weapons in his hand, and taught him to read, to utilize his mind and strategize. By the time was fifteen, he was exactly what they wanted him to be: the perfect weapon. Skilled, emotionally distant from trauma and highly obedient, they sent him to kill the hardened war veteran that was New Penn’s king.
He was expected to slip some poison into the man’s cup, but instead, he challenged him to single combat. The king, amused, agreed to a duel to the death, expecting to make the little rebel’s death an example to the rest. Perhaps the only one not surprised when the king bled out on his ballroom floor was Vincent, and he assumed the man’s mantle thereafter, surviving several assassination attempts. At this point, the rebel group at large was still more or less pulling his strings, but the young man was competent on his own, and slightly drunk on power, and wound up making his former allies into his enemies. Plotting with the old king’s brother and his associates, they betrayed him, attacking en masse and forcing him to flee for his life.
Never again will he be brought so low. He’s more independent now, with better allies, sharper skills, and a proper goal in mind: destroy the corruption, create a better world, and act as custodian for the dreams of the populace.
O T H E R
N/A, unless I think of something later.
Poets of the Fall – Smoke and Mirrors
I danced a tango with my hubris high on youth
We swept across the dance floor to subjective truth
But there was no harmony there
No reason for coexistence
Nothing to span the distance, now
Do we even know who we are
Living like all life is forfeit
Like we can just go redefine it
Regardless what we broke
Who died and made us stars
With our intellectual gambits
Our millionaire flair and our antics
We're like mirrors seen through smoke
I tried a shanty with the fool to find my pace
Anything from puns to jests to intertwine our ways
But there was no loyalty to hope
And funny the need for mercy
How it makes us bleed all mercy, now
Do we even know who we are...
Now the melody's void of sympathy
cos that shit's in byte size bits on YouTube
so tell me what am I supposed to do
When the malady's no remedy
Till we reach the lowest absolute
And necessity will finally force something through what's walling you
Do we even know who we are...