(no subject)
Name: AJ
Livejournal: yyuuuupp
Contact: On file.
Your First Canon Character: Katara - kyasdaughter
Total Characters Played: A thousand. I mean four.
Character: Morgan Walker.
Description of World: Morgan lives in a modern world that is in many ways a reflection of our own: people own and use cellphones, go bar-crawling, and are generally very much caught up in their own lives, with one major exception: supernatural creatures of myth and legend are very much real, if not incredibly common. Vampires, werewolves, and succubi might be dangerous, but the advent of modern technology succeeded in leveling the playing field just a little bit for humanity. People are adaptable, and they adapted the ability to fight back.
While humanity at its core is hardly different in this world when compared to our own, the social and government systems have been completely rehauled. Seeking safety in numbers and sturdy walls, cities maintain and govern themselves, struggling to remain self-sufficient. While some of the ‘safer’ supernaturals live integrated (or hidden) in society, there is still danger from creatures that might be looking for easy prey. Fear keeps the population contained for the most part in the cities.
Without a strong, overarching national government, these settlements do struggle sometimes for power and control over each other. Control over more territory means control over more resources. Some have actually enlisted the help of some of the supernaturals (and in some scenarios, ‘enlisted’ is too tame of a word for it - creatures have been bred for the sole purpose of military service.)
The world is a little fragmented and the people are sometimes a little hungry. People have given up many basic rights of privacy and speech in the name of safety, and a militaristic, socialist society is more common than the idea of democracy and freedom. However, humanity continues to flourish, just as it often does.
(NOTE: This OC is from the same world as this one. I tried to restate the world as much as I could without straight-up plagiarizing from Rae. ☺)
Personality: On the surface, Morgan is a bit of a shallow playboy. While moderately intelligent, he was able to skate by mostly in his early years on the fact that he was both charismatic and fairly attractive. He generally maintains a flippant, easygoing nature and can be an incorrigible flirt if given the right signs from a pretty girl. He much enjoys the company of people, finds something soothing in the patter of inane, meaningless conversation. Uncomfortable issues simply make him uncomfortable; idle chitchat is his forte, and Morgan will go to great lengths to eschew difficult conversation. When in a good mood (and he customarily seems to be), he is playful, snarky.
He is laid-back, a follower. Morgan is never the first one in any line (though he is rarely the last, either), and while he has his own ideals, he rarely pursues them. It takes too much time, wastes too much effort. He would much rather sit back, listen, and wait for someone else to puzzle out the answers to life’s problems for him.
‘A bit lazy’ isn’t to say that he is completely without hobby or interest, however. He is a dancer (something that will be explained and expanded upon in his background), and while it is something he remains a little embarrassed about, it is something that is genuinely important to him. As a rule, Morgan worked little at school and works even less in relationships. While it may have been begrudgingly, dance classes were the only thing that could drag him out of bed before nine in the morning on most given days. Circumstances can change the man, however; in his own world, he does hold a steady job at a greenhouse, but he hates every boring minute of it.
While he has a long fuse and a generally mild demeanor, he can be downright caustic when actually riled up, partially stemming from the fact that he is a werewolf. Not born this way, this is an aspect of himself in particular that he rejects. He has little interest in the fights that sometimes break out between the “factions” of supernaturals that exist and even less in joining up with a pack (probably a good thing, since the wolf that bit him had gone rogue - he has no pack to be grandfathered into.) Not only does he hate what he is, he also scorns others like him. When he does “blow up,” he isn’t prone to physical violence: it hurts, so he’s more likely to shoot off frustrated threats and crack his knuckles suggestively instead of actually resorting to blows.
As a note, Morgan hates government and has a very tenuous relationship with both it and the military. He does not like having rules imposed upon him, and while he is not the type to go picket, protest, or occupy Wall Street, he is rankled by strict law and privacy invasion.
A combination of his natural restlessness and subtle, selective self-loathing means that he has never been good at keeping relationships, either romantic or platonic. Not that he couldn’t if he tried, but he simply doesn’t care enough to put forth the effort, especially when he has a very fatalistic “it’d never work out in the long run” viewpoint. As stated earlier - he does like people, he usually just doesn’t establish many relationships that are more than merely superficial. He never really settled into the pack mentality that is second-nature for others of his kind, considering he was turned and not born this way.
The one exception to most of these rules applies to his mother. A good woman, she sacrificed a lot of her own life to give Morgan a better one, and he was a clever kid: he saw that. She is quite literally the only family that he has, and he is devoted to her, especially as her health is beginning to fail and in a bad way. He is willing to do whatever it takes to take care of her, to make sure that she’s comfortable and loved and happy.
In short, Morgan is an alright guy. His moral compass is generally pointed pretty firmly toward ‘good,’ even if his dismissive attitude and overall impassiveness might sometimes suggest otherwise. Cavalier and a little self-absorbed, he is not blind to social injustice or the wrongs of the world, and sure, they rub him the wrong way - he is simply both unwilling to do anything about them and surprisingly good at shirking most responsibility.
Background: An only child, Morgan was a mostly-happy little accident brought into the world by a young couple who had initially decided against children. Not that he was loved less than any other kid his age; his parents adored him, raised him well, and spoiled him just a little bit.
While the world he lives in is a little clustered, a little dystopian, the arts still survive (even if they do not exactly thrive) and Morgan’s mother, in an effort to make sure that her son grew up well-cultured, stuck him in lessons and classes at an early age. Though most of it didn’t stick (he can’t paint or draw his way out of a wet paper bag) coupled with natural grace and a genuine interest, Morgan flourished in dance.
He was eleven when he and his dad were attacked on their way home during a full moon. A werewolf had gone off the deep end, going rogue and targeting children. Three were bitten that night; he was one of two to survive the bite. The biting spree ended with Morgan - his father, while not a large man, wrestled the wolf off of his son, killing it with a silver knife, but not before sustaining fatal wounds himself.
His mother pushed him through school, supporting them both on the wages she made working in one of nine large, city-owned greenhouses. Though werewolves usually retain control of themselves during their transformations, they had a large, sturdy cage set up in the basement of their apartment complex where Morgan would sleep on nights with a full moon. He refused to acknowledge it as part of himself and instead regarded it as an illness. At first, the change stunted him a little socially; he was afraid of making connections with people, scared of scaring people, scared of himself. Stubborn, he decided that he didn’t care, and that helped him eventually replace his shyness with a cooler, loftier outward air.
Morgan was nineteen when his mom was diagnosed with a degenerative disease. He began to work in the greenhouses with her to support them both; when he was twenty-three, they sent her home on permanent medical leave due to her rapidly failing mental health and increasingly frequent fits of mania. He worked there, supporting them both for a year and teaching classes at a little, run-down dance studio on the side for fun. It was shortly after he turned twenty-four that his city was taken over by one of its neighbors and a strict military rule imposed upon it.
The new government approached him, and let him know in no uncertain terms that they knew what he was, that he had better watch his step: Big Brother was keeping an eye on him. Morgan stopped dancing and began to instead work and keep his mother company during the day and feed on the seedy underbelly of the city in bars and illicit little clubs at night. He’ll be coming into Adstring shortly before turning twenty-five.
Abilities/Additional Notes: Morgan is a werewolf and follows most of the traditional werewolf lore. On the nights before, after, and during the full moon, he shifts into a large, gray wolf until sunrise. He still has most of his mental capacities: he won’t be going on any killing sprees and probably won’t be chasing any tennis balls, either. He is stronger and faster than a vanilla wolf, but is otherwise remarkably similar. He does not turn into a man-wolf or anything that seems inherently monstrous.
Since he was not born a wolf, his human form is mostly unremarkable. Morgan is stronger than he looks, though not incredibly so. He does have a higher-than-average sense of smell, and during the two or three days leading up to the full moon, his temper runs a little hotter, but he never had the training needed to tap into most of that potential.
He doesn’t often get sick, he heals quickly (but again, he doesn’t possess magic regenerative powers; he is young and healthy, and being a werewolf boosts that just a bit), and silver is poisonous to him. He’s a dancer, but has no fighting experience, and if handed a gun, would probably shoot himself in the face before he figured out how to hold it correctly.
Sample Journal Post: [The flash of smile that he gives the PCD is white, toothy, and Morgan flashes his eyebrows at the camera, as if trying to make sure that he actually has its attention.] Well, now that I’m settled in - not that I’d really call this settled in, mind - I’d like to apologize for that nasty little display a few days ago.
[He reaches up, rubbing the side of his ear in an oddly boyish gesture.]
Adstringathing, Animus, people from different worlds -
[Morgan’s voice is light, but there’s something shuttered, careful about his expression.]
Sounds like a lot of fun, but if we’re all trapped here together, tell me a little about you. How goes it, fellow inmates? Who the hell are you people, anyway? And maybe, most importantly of all - what do people do here?
Sample RP: His head hurt.
God, his head hurt. It was almost impossible to focus on anything else. There was a dull throb behind his eyes, beating out a slow, heavy rhythm, and with a little groan, Morgan rolled over onto his back, struggling to suss out the situation. It took him maybe six seconds, and went something like this:
Was he hungover?
No - no, he hadn’t drank the night before. He’d been feeling under the weather, came home, ate dinner, kissed his mom and collapsed across his bed, still in the clothes he’d worked in. Maybe he was sick? His head certainly hurt enough, and his mouth was dry, felt like it was full of cotton. His back hurt, too.
His back hurt because he was lying on a rock.
Why the fuck was he lying on a rock?
And then the six seconds ended, and Morgan sat up with a jolt, simultaneously yelping and smacking his palm to his temple as it throbbed in rebellion against the sudden movement. Okay, that wasn’t a rock that he was lying on: it was broken concrete.
He was on a street. He was on a street in a city that he did not recognize and -
“What the hell is going on here?” he cried as he scrambled to his feet, momentarily oblivious to the weight of the PCD in his pocket. Panic was setting in, now: the headache and the confusion coupled with the sight of the wasteland was nearly enough to send him reeling into shock, and hastily he groped for his phone, pulling out the PCD instead. Stunned, he considered the screen, then swallowed his surprise and moved on.
“Hey!” he barked into the device, then hit another button and tried again. Lights were flashing on it - that was a good sign, right? “Hey, whatever jackass thought this would be a clever joke--“