capeandcowl app
PLAYER
NAME: Liz
JOURNAL: rizumcbutt
E-MAIL: silkenaracna@gmail.com
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: David Xanatos / Lazarus
FANDOM: Gargoyles: TV Show
CHRONOLOGY: After assuring his son's safety from the hands of King Oberon and Queen Titania.
BACKGROUND:
Xanatos has always said that he's a self-made man. He started as the son of a fisherman in Bar Harbor, Maine, with little to no money. When he was young he received an envelope containing near-priceless 10th century coins, of which he sold and immediately invested the proceedings. The money he'd earned himself went into the beginnings of his own company, Xanatos Enterprises, and by the time of the series he has a number of branches that provide seemingly unlimited resources. He turns himself into a man that can easily afford a few eccentric hobbies and curiosities.
It's more than just idle curiosity that leads Xanatos to wake the Gargoyles from their millennium of sleep, however. The legend goes that once the castle has risen above the clouds, the gargoyles, trapped as stone, will wake once again. Although unsure as to whether or not it will work, Xanatos makes the investment. He takes the castle apart, piece by piece, to have it shipped from Scotland to his home in New York. There it's reassembled on top of his skyscraper, and it's that night that he watches as Goliath and the others wake for the first time in a thousand years. It's also that night that he reintroduces them to Goliath's former second-in-command, a female gargoyle they'd all thought to be dead with the others of their clan. Demona, as she's come to be named, is a mind that can match Xanatos's in terms of scheming. It was she that had told Xanatos of the legend, and Xanatos, instantly seeing the appeal of having a personal team of monsters at work for him, obliged with her plan of resurrecting them.
He and Demona set up a plan to get the gargoyles on their side, involving hiring a team of men to break in and steal from Xanatos. Xanatos asks the clan to reclaim the stolen property for him, able to be found aboard three flying fortresses above the city. The gargoyles do so, only to learn from a third party -- the detective, Eliza Maza -- that Xanatos had set the entire thing up in order to have them steal for him. Needless to say, the gargoyles are irritated to have been manipulated. It's the start of a bitter rivalry between them, in which the gargoyles do most of the angry distrusting while Xanatos simply seeks to use them to any benefit he can get out of them.
The two groups go their separate ways in the city, the gargoyles moving to inhabit the clock tower above the police station instead of the castle, and Xanatos pleased to have them off of his property. They meet again several times in as many scuffles, but the tone of their encounters remains the same until Xanatos finds himself in need of their assistance. He'd found a magic artifact, the Eye of Odin, and presented it as a gift to his new fiance, Fox. The object was supposed to grant power and insight, and in Fox's case, it did it literally -- she was transformed at night into a beast, and a beast with such voracious metabolism that she was in danger of expending all of her energy and dying. Xanatos needed Goliath and Eliza's help to stop her, and was ashamed afterward to have been found to have a weakness. Goliath was disgusted, telling him that "Only you would regard love as a weakness." The rebuke left Xanatos, for once, speechless, and was something that he would take to heart. After the event he became less ashamed of his affection for his wife -- and later for his son as well -- and even came eventually to use it as a strength.
It was some time after this that Xanatos revealed, in another of his twisted and convoluted plans, that he had, in fact, been a self-made man all along. He found a way to lure Goliath and Demona to his wedding with Fox, convincing them to make amends and rejoin their two pieces of the magic artifact, the Phoenix Gate. The artifact allowed the group of them to travel back through time, and he and Fox had their honeymoon in the 10 century. It was there that he met with fellow Illuminati members (showing himself to be in their society, although as a low-ranking member), and theire he procured those same coins that would make him rich a thousand years later. He sent them, along with instructions on how to put together the plan, to wait for his younger self to receive them in the mail. A self-made man, as he'd claimed.
PERSONALITY:
David Xanatos is a schemer. He knows the facts (or at least he's got a few plans going to learn them), he has the resources (or at least a means to obtain them), and you'd better expect him to have three plans and five backup plans. He's astute and a quick enough thinker to be able to turn nearly any situation to his advantage -- even those in which he's just been defeated. He's quick to look on the bright side of any unfortunate happening, quick to find some way to profit even if it's only to know which way not to do it next time. And profit is surely the name of the game in his case. Not a move is made, not a finger is lifted if it won't someday, somehow, benefit him. And he certainly has the patience to wait for plans to fall into place, for an occasion for distant favors to be returned.
Cunning and self-serving intentions aside, there is occasionally a certain nobility in Xanatos's actions. It begins when, after having successfully cloned the gargoyle Goliath, he seems to feel a certain fatherliness toward the new creation. When the clone is kidnapped, Xanatos not only stops Owen from firing on the kidnappers for fear of hurting the clone, but hands over the entire impressive sum of money asked for a ransom without a second thought. When the entire scheme is shown to be something concocted by the clone in order to gain the money, Xanatos even seems to be proud of him, calling him "a chip off the ol' block." There are limits, however. When the clone appears to have been killed in battle with Goliath, Xanatos merely shrugs and states that he'd known the imitation could never match the original.
When he has a son with his wife Fox, however, his overall goal shifts. It's no longer entirely about him and his own personal gain -- now it's him and his family. His interests widen to include other people for what could be said to be the first time -- something that he views at first as a weakness. Eventually it comes to be a protective love though, and he goes to great lengths to protect his family when Queen Titania and King Oberon of Avalon show interest in raising his child themselves -- in Avalon, of course. Xanatos even goes so far as to swallow his pride and ask Goliath and the others for help. After the battle, when he has, for the first time, failed to pull any backstabbing underlying plan on the gargoyles, an alliance is formed. Xanatos has proven himself to be more human than he presents himself, and it's with decidedly human thankfulness and gratitude that he promises the clan to return the favor one day.
CLASS: Anti-Hero, masquerading for a while as a Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: Lazarus.
ALTER EGO: David Xanatos, a rich CEO.
POWER: Shapeshifting (human only). New forms will be gained by physical contact, something even as slight as a handshake.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE:
I'd like to assume this is another of Oberon's attacks, but having watched you all for a while, it seems that it's a common thing for new arrivals like myself to look for excuses. This is the real deal, isn't it? In any case though, the sudden change is a little... disconcerting.
I'm sure I'll adapt.
David Xanatos here, by the way. I understand there's a few shady characters around here that I might regret introducing myself to, but for now let's call it a clean slate, shall we? Not all of us were born upstanding citizens, after all. And as they say, innocent until proven guilty. That still goes in a place like this, doesn't it?
THIRD PERSON:
A small smile twitched Xantos's lips. Well, no, not Xanatos's lips. They didn't currently belong to Xanatos, after all. The owner of this pair was somewhere a few streets down from him, by now maybe even halfway across the city. Fortunate, then. It wouldn't do for a wife to suddenly notice that her husband had a long lost identical twin.
He swept a hand through carefully styled blond hair that wasn't his, straightened the suit and tie that he definitely hadn't bought (and in that shade of purple, who would?), and started forward in a stride that was longer than the one he'd grown accustomed to. The owner of the borrowed form had just left work, it wouldn't be terribly unusual if he had to stop back in on the pretense of having left something in his office. Xanatos had, of course, planned it carefully. He knew of no other way to plan, after all.
A borrowed smile was tossed to the secretary, an airy joke at his assumed identity's faulty memory, and Xanatos swept toward the elevator. It was a shame that this interesting new power stopped at the duplication of clothing, but it wouldn't be too unusual to have to ask to be let into his own office. Men this high in the chain had a lot to think about, key cards were often laid down, misplaced, forgotten at home. It wouldn't be so unusual.
The first hint of fowl play, Xanatos suspected, would probably come when the man in question discovered his accounts cleaned out, his assets relocated, and the technology his company had been working hard to develop suddenly popping up in a lot more places.
All in all, Xanatos felt that he was off to a good start in the city.