[App] babylonwood
So how much can you stand to lose before you just can't win;
How much dark before you just lose the light?
Sometimes you just don't get to choose what's underneath your skin,
And good men choose the dark to do what's right.
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: inthemortalcity
AIM/IM: meant to care
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, Meredith Grey
The Character
Character Name: Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden
Character Journal: w_for_wizard
Canon: The Dresden Files
Age: 36. Almost 37.
From When?: Changes. RIGHT BEFORE THAT SPOILER. YOU KNOW THE ONE.
Abilities/Powers: Harry is a wizard, and his power appears to be drawn from life itself - mostly from his own energy, but also from ambient energies created by living things. This shouldn't be affected in the Wood, since the Wood has plenty of living things, but you can seriously limit the power he has on hand by shielding off whatever area he's in so he has a finite amount of magic to draw on. He also has this problem with thresholds: like a vampire, but not so bad. If he's invited into a building that has a threshold - that's someone's home - then he's fine, but if he walks in without being invited, he has to leave a big chunk of his power at the door.
What he can do with his magic is theoretically limited only by his creativity and how long he can use it while still remaining conscious and not blowing himself up, but for the most part, his talents lie in tracking, shields, fire, wind, and blasts of pure force. An unfortunate side effect of his magic is that it has a really unpleasant effect on any nearby technology - particularly when in use, but also when Harry's just... existing in a room with it. So anyone carrying around important tech should probably avoid the wizard.
Sometimes he can boost his magic with something called soulfire - which is basically using parts of his own soul to give himself more power - but it's not a great idea to overuse it. Because, you know, he needs his soul. The parts he use regenerate with time, like any other wound, but still. And speaking of regeneration and healing... Harry heals way better than your average person. It's not necessarily faster, but where most people would stop healing and be scarred or crippled for life, Harry's body just keeps going repairing damage. His hand was once burned and damaged beyond repair, as far as modern medicine knew, and now it's almost completely functional. Because of this, he is expected to have a much longer lifespan than your average human - assuming he actually survives the chaos that is his life, which seems very unlikely.
All true wizards have an ability called The Sight, which is simply the ability to see the world as it really is, on a magical and spiritual level. While occasionally very useful, everything he sees with The Sight is permanently burned into his brain, a perfectly fresh memory no matter how long has passed, so Harry doesn't like to use it much, for obvious reasons. Like not wanting to go mad. Looking into someone's eyes will trigger a soulgaze - sort of a personal, two-way version of The Sight, where both he and the other person will see each other's true natures. That's something he avoids too, when he can help it - luckily, a quick glance isn't enough to trigger it, and he's gotten pretty adept at avoiding much more eye contact than that.
As the Winter Knight, he now has more speed, strength, and stamina, both physically and magically, as well as improved ability with ice magic, which he ordinarily has pretty much no talent for. Though in the Wood, he'll probably be more than a little reluctant to use that last bit, considering what it represents...
In more mundane abilities... Harry is extremely good at listening. Okay, a lot of this is magical, but part of it is just that most people never learn how to really listen, and he's talented enough at it that he can pick up conversations across a crowded room, or hear heartbeats around corners and in nearby rooms, provided it's quiet enough.
He speaks Latin, but... badly. Very... very badly. He can understand it pretty well, but do not ask him to speak it. Just trust me on this. He's pretty good with guns - he prefers revolvers, as automatics will jam or misfire at the worst possible moment thanks to his magic - and has some training with sword and staff, though not enough that he'd trust himself against someone who knew what they were doing. Also, he plays the guitar - he's not extraordinary at it, but he had to find something to do to exercise his injured hand when it still was injured, so he learned to play the guitar.
Power Limitations: I don't thiiink they're necessary? The Wood probably won't want Harry taking chunks out of it, but if he does, it can punish him appropriately. :|
Inventory- His clothes: jeans, a T-shirt, fleece-lined denim jacket, boots. Probably socks and underwear. :|
- Silver pentacle amulet from his mother, with a tiny ruby in the middle. The ruby gives him knowledge of the Ways in the NeverNever, but... the Wood is so not the NeverNever, certain similarities aside. The pentacle itself... is creepy and has bits of his mother in it. Fairies will probably want to poke it.
- Shield-bracelet - a bracelet of miniature medieval shields, just as the name implies, that helps him create magical shields more quickly and efficiently.
- Several rings on each finger of one hand, which store kinetic energy each time they're moved. They release it when triggered, and tend to pack one hell of a punch.
- ...everything else he owns got torn to shreds or set on fire or blown up. :(
Personality: Harry Dresden is not the hero of the story. Well... okay, maybe he is, for some crazy reason, but he's pretty sure he doesn't deserve to be. He's more noir detective than knight in shining armor (...let's just forget about that actual, literal shining armor he recently wore, and the whole Winter Knight thing - ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CONCEPT), at least if you ask him, although... it's not like the whole white knight thing is absent from his personality. It's just overshadowed, especially at first glance, by cynicism and snark and a certain ruthlessness not generally found in those knight in shining armor trenchcoat types. He has done some really terrible things in order to do what he thinks is right, and he doesn't deny those things, and has no doubt he's going to do plenty of things just as bad again one day. He doesn't like it, he always feels guilty for it, and absolutely does everything he can to avoid it, but he can't ignore that that side of him exists.
However, he's also pretty well aware that he has chronic and probably terminal Hero Syndrome. When someone needs his help, he will charge into the situation with as little planning and forethought as he can get away with and still survive. This applies doubly when it comes to women and children - Harry is a sucker for a damsel in distress, and he knows it, and somehow knowing it rarely seems to stop him from giving into his own sense of chivalry. And it is chivalry; Harry's more than a little old-fashioned, and he will go out of his way to treat women like ladies... often whether or not it makes them want to punch him. (This only... sort of applies if said woman is evil - all bets are off, in that case, but Harry will still feel bad if he makes a girl cry, even if she is evil.)
He doesn't feel that women are weaker (having a female best friend who could totally beat him up probably has something to do with this), and if a woman's capable of protecting herself, he's more than happy to let her, but give the slighest indication that his help is needed and he will be there in a heartbeat. And children... Well, Harry never really had a proper childhood of his own. He believes that children deserve to keep theirs as long as possible, and it's probably best not to threaten that unless you're fond of being set on fire. However, you don't exactly have to be an innocent person to get Harry's sympathy - having once been nearly executed for breaking a law he didn't know existed, he's very big on giving people second chances, and he'll also jump to the defense of someone who's made some mistakes, even extremely grave ones, but is basically a good person. After all, if people are only measured by the bad things they've done in their lives, Harry is pretty much screwed.
As quickly as he will come to the aid of someone he feels needs his protection or help, it is so much worse when you threaten his friends or family. Harry's an orphan, he lost his first adopted family in the worst way, and he worked pretty hard to earn his current friends and family, never mind the work he's had to put in to keep all of them alive. He emphatically does not want to lose any of them, and putting them in danger is the fastest way to get Harry to just throw all rationality out the window and come snarling to try and rip your face off, whatever the personal danger to himself. He's literally started wars to save the people he loves, and he wouldn't hesitate to do it again. His temper's not exactly quick, but it is pretty massive, and it burns white-hot - he's capable of keeping it in check, but it does tend to make him quicker to act, and a lot less inclined to think things through entirely.
It's probably incidents like the aforementioned starting of wars that get Harry his reputation as a sort of magical thug, not to mention a loose cannon. For the most part, he does nothing to disabuse people of that opinion. He does have much more raw power than most wizards, and he uses it when necessary. He is very fond of dramatic gestures, especially if they annoy someone who deserves to be poked with a stick - this is the guy who showed up at a vampire party dressed in the cheesiest vampire costume he could find, and rode a polka-powered undead T-Rex through Chicago (not on the same night - that would just be ridiculous). He pretty much can't open his mouth without being sarcastic, most of the time, and when he's talking to something that would happily kill and eat him, that fact will not stop him. Actually, it probably just makes it worse: Harry's default reaction to fear is to try and smash the thing that's scaring him, and if he can't do that, he'll snark in its face to make himself feel better. It's honestly not that he has no sense of self-preservation - he likes being alive a lot, really - it's just that his acute stress response is all fight, hardly any flight, and the snark is part of that sometimes, sort of the way a scared animal will puff up its fur to look bigger.
Despite all outward appearances, though... Harry is a lot more competent and intelligent than you'd guess at first glance. He does not get by as a detective by being an idiot (...okay, that depends on your definition of "idiot") - he is very observant, and while it might sometimes take him a while to work something out, he has a talent for turning problems over in his head, putting disaparate facts together into a bigger picture. He's very quick on his feet, which is part of what makes him such a versatile wizard - improvisation is as important a tool in his repertoire as snark, and he doesn't balk at trying something just because it's crazy. He's capable of keeping pace with (...sometimes) and very occasionally out-maneuvering the master manipulators of the White Court and the fairy courts - definitely not so much the big dumb gumshoe. Harry's biggest strength, though, lies in just not giving up. Ever. He is stubborn as hell, he will keep going no matter how many times you knock him down, and if one tactic doesn't work for him, he'll take some time to regroup and try another. It's really, really difficult to beat a person who's like a masochistic terrier with a habit of going after tigers instead of rats.
However, you don't live your life that way without pissing off a lot of people, and that tends to put a certain amount of distance between Harry and even the people he cares most about. Part of that is how dangerous it is to know him - there are plenty of dangerous things that know perfectly well the fastest way to get at Harry is to hurt the people he loves, and he's not willing to put them in danger like that. Part of that is that he's a wizard, and if he survives long enough, he's going to outlive everyone he knows and loves, which is not a thought conducive to forming any very close relationships. Plus... Harry's just not good at expressing his feelings. Sarcasm isn't just a defense mechanism when he gets scared, it also keeps him from having to admit how he really feels about anything - he will, on occasion, but mostly only when he's pressed. Often when he thinks he might die. He's lonely, and pretty well convinced that he's going to die alone (hint: he is, at least once), but it'd take a lot before he'd admit it.
Harry puts his faith in magic, in the idea of power being controlled, ordered, used for constructive purposes. And the thing with magic is that you can't use it do do something that isn't a part of you, deep down. The effects this has on his self-image are... well. Some of his biggest talents, magically speaking, is blowing shit up, and maybe it's best not to examine what that says about him. He certainly doesn't want to. He doesn't know what it is people see when they look into his eyes, but Marcone seemed to recognize him as a fellow predator, and people have been known to faint or start screaming about how they don't believe in hell after a soulgaze with him, so it's kind of impossible to deny that his soul has some seriously dark corners. On the other hand... most good people who soulgaze him also trust him afterwards, even seeing everything he is and all he's capable of - and he tends to forget that about himself, most of the time.
History: Harry Dresden was born on Halloween, 1973. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, a stage magician, named him after Harry Houdini, Harry Blackstone Sr., and David Copperfield. Harry expected to become his father's assistant when he got older - he never got the chance, because his father died of a brain aneurysm when he was six. Harry became a ward of the state, until he started to show signs of magical abilities and soon after was adopted by Justin DuMorne, a former Warden of the White Council.
DuMorne trained Harry and a girl named Elaine, Harry's first love, in the use of magic until soon after Harry's sixteenth birthday, when DuMorne attempted to enthrall him and set a demon on him, and Harry was forced to kill both DuMorne and the enthralled Elaine in order to save himself. He was put on trial before the White Council for breaking the First Law of Magic, and only avoided being executed because Ebenezar McCoy stepped forward to mentor him and keep an eye on him for the White Council.
After leaving Ebenezar, Harry travelled the country for a few years before he hit Chicago, and started working for a P.I. at Ragged Angel Investigations before he opened his own detective business. Before long, he was approached by a Lieutenant Karrin Murphy, head of the Special Investigations division of the Chicago Police Department, and they worked out an arrangement where the department hired him whenever a case came up that was just a little too weird to work out on their own.
Things started to get complicated for him when a case involving magical murders came up. That particular case got him tangled up with local mob boss Gentleman Johnny Marcone, got Murphy to arrest him on suspicion that he was the murderer, and led him to a ring of sex-fueled magical drug dealers. Later that year, he got to take down a band of werewolf FBI agents, and the year after that, when his girlfriend was turned into a semi-vampire, he started a war with the Red Court. Yeah, complicated doesn't begin to cover it.
Since then, he's found himself indebted to the Queen of the Winter Sidhe and diffused a veritable faerie apocalypse (in typical somewhat explosive Harry Dresden style), come up against fallen angels while rescuing the Shroud of Turin and gotten one of them stuck in his head (she's gone now, we promise), found a half-brother he didn't know he had, necromanced a polka-powered T-Rex to stop a dark god from rising, become a Warden and regional commander of the White Council, gained a shiny new apprentice... oh, and somewhere in there, he got a dog. What? It's important. It would be nice to say that his life is never dull, but really, it's more like he has a week or two of absolute terror and near-death experiences in between long stretches of dull.
Harry's half-vampire ex-girlfriend called him one day to inform him that their daughter - the daughter he'd never known they had - had been kidnapped. In the three days that followed, Harry lost pretty much everything he had, he got himself bound to Mab as the Winter Knight, he nearly died several times over (not that that's anything new), and was forced to kill Susan to save his daughter and end the war with the Red Court for good. And then Harry returned to Chicago, with not much time left before he became the Winter Queen's bitch for the rest of his forseeable future. He and Murphy planned to have one night together before that happened, but before that... Harry ended up in Babylon Wood.
Which is really just as well, because the alternative was death.
First Person Sample: Heeeere...
Prose Sample:A minute ago, Harry was walking down the street in Chicago.
And then he tripped - apparently over his own feet - and now he is still walking down the street in Chicago, but it's an entirely different part of Chicago than he was in a moment ago. Oh yeah, and there's snow everywhere. It does not take a genius or a wizard to work out that something is very wrong here.
Harry whirls, staff in hand, half expecting an attack of some sort. Naturally, nothing happens. A few people stare at him as they walk by, but nothing attacks him. He's still not quite letting down his guard. You would think that the universe would give him just a little downtime before pulling this shit on him...
"I didn't order any fairies..." he mutters under his breath, on the off chance someone happens to be listening. But if whoever - whatever - did this isn't going to show their face, there's not a lot he can do about the situation out on the street.
He pivots on his heel, swinging in the complete opposite direction, and starts toward his apartment. Whatever's fucking with him will have a considerably harder time doing so once he's behind several layers of shields and a nice, solid door.
...that plan's going to change pretty quickly when he reaches his apartment building and realizes it's not there.
Special Notes: I am still canon reviewing. A LOT. I've resigned myself to being a little shaky until I finish that, and please forgive me for it?
How much dark before you just lose the light?
Sometimes you just don't get to choose what's underneath your skin,
And good men choose the dark to do what's right.
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: inthemortalcity
AIM/IM: meant to care
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, Meredith Grey
The Character
Character Name: Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden
Character Journal: w_for_wizard
Canon: The Dresden Files
Age: 36. Almost 37.
From When?: Changes. RIGHT BEFORE THAT SPOILER. YOU KNOW THE ONE.
Abilities/Powers: Harry is a wizard, and his power appears to be drawn from life itself - mostly from his own energy, but also from ambient energies created by living things. This shouldn't be affected in the Wood, since the Wood has plenty of living things, but you can seriously limit the power he has on hand by shielding off whatever area he's in so he has a finite amount of magic to draw on. He also has this problem with thresholds: like a vampire, but not so bad. If he's invited into a building that has a threshold - that's someone's home - then he's fine, but if he walks in without being invited, he has to leave a big chunk of his power at the door.
What he can do with his magic is theoretically limited only by his creativity and how long he can use it while still remaining conscious and not blowing himself up, but for the most part, his talents lie in tracking, shields, fire, wind, and blasts of pure force. An unfortunate side effect of his magic is that it has a really unpleasant effect on any nearby technology - particularly when in use, but also when Harry's just... existing in a room with it. So anyone carrying around important tech should probably avoid the wizard.
Sometimes he can boost his magic with something called soulfire - which is basically using parts of his own soul to give himself more power - but it's not a great idea to overuse it. Because, you know, he needs his soul. The parts he use regenerate with time, like any other wound, but still. And speaking of regeneration and healing... Harry heals way better than your average person. It's not necessarily faster, but where most people would stop healing and be scarred or crippled for life, Harry's body just keeps going repairing damage. His hand was once burned and damaged beyond repair, as far as modern medicine knew, and now it's almost completely functional. Because of this, he is expected to have a much longer lifespan than your average human - assuming he actually survives the chaos that is his life, which seems very unlikely.
All true wizards have an ability called The Sight, which is simply the ability to see the world as it really is, on a magical and spiritual level. While occasionally very useful, everything he sees with The Sight is permanently burned into his brain, a perfectly fresh memory no matter how long has passed, so Harry doesn't like to use it much, for obvious reasons. Like not wanting to go mad. Looking into someone's eyes will trigger a soulgaze - sort of a personal, two-way version of The Sight, where both he and the other person will see each other's true natures. That's something he avoids too, when he can help it - luckily, a quick glance isn't enough to trigger it, and he's gotten pretty adept at avoiding much more eye contact than that.
As the Winter Knight, he now has more speed, strength, and stamina, both physically and magically, as well as improved ability with ice magic, which he ordinarily has pretty much no talent for. Though in the Wood, he'll probably be more than a little reluctant to use that last bit, considering what it represents...
In more mundane abilities... Harry is extremely good at listening. Okay, a lot of this is magical, but part of it is just that most people never learn how to really listen, and he's talented enough at it that he can pick up conversations across a crowded room, or hear heartbeats around corners and in nearby rooms, provided it's quiet enough.
He speaks Latin, but... badly. Very... very badly. He can understand it pretty well, but do not ask him to speak it. Just trust me on this. He's pretty good with guns - he prefers revolvers, as automatics will jam or misfire at the worst possible moment thanks to his magic - and has some training with sword and staff, though not enough that he'd trust himself against someone who knew what they were doing. Also, he plays the guitar - he's not extraordinary at it, but he had to find something to do to exercise his injured hand when it still was injured, so he learned to play the guitar.
Power Limitations: I don't thiiink they're necessary? The Wood probably won't want Harry taking chunks out of it, but if he does, it can punish him appropriately. :|
Inventory- His clothes: jeans, a T-shirt, fleece-lined denim jacket, boots. Probably socks and underwear. :|
- Silver pentacle amulet from his mother, with a tiny ruby in the middle. The ruby gives him knowledge of the Ways in the NeverNever, but... the Wood is so not the NeverNever, certain similarities aside. The pentacle itself... is creepy and has bits of his mother in it. Fairies will probably want to poke it.
- Shield-bracelet - a bracelet of miniature medieval shields, just as the name implies, that helps him create magical shields more quickly and efficiently.
- Several rings on each finger of one hand, which store kinetic energy each time they're moved. They release it when triggered, and tend to pack one hell of a punch.
- ...everything else he owns got torn to shreds or set on fire or blown up. :(
Personality: Harry Dresden is not the hero of the story. Well... okay, maybe he is, for some crazy reason, but he's pretty sure he doesn't deserve to be. He's more noir detective than knight in shining armor (...let's just forget about that actual, literal shining armor he recently wore, and the whole Winter Knight thing - ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CONCEPT), at least if you ask him, although... it's not like the whole white knight thing is absent from his personality. It's just overshadowed, especially at first glance, by cynicism and snark and a certain ruthlessness not generally found in those knight in shining armor trenchcoat types. He has done some really terrible things in order to do what he thinks is right, and he doesn't deny those things, and has no doubt he's going to do plenty of things just as bad again one day. He doesn't like it, he always feels guilty for it, and absolutely does everything he can to avoid it, but he can't ignore that that side of him exists.
However, he's also pretty well aware that he has chronic and probably terminal Hero Syndrome. When someone needs his help, he will charge into the situation with as little planning and forethought as he can get away with and still survive. This applies doubly when it comes to women and children - Harry is a sucker for a damsel in distress, and he knows it, and somehow knowing it rarely seems to stop him from giving into his own sense of chivalry. And it is chivalry; Harry's more than a little old-fashioned, and he will go out of his way to treat women like ladies... often whether or not it makes them want to punch him. (This only... sort of applies if said woman is evil - all bets are off, in that case, but Harry will still feel bad if he makes a girl cry, even if she is evil.)
He doesn't feel that women are weaker (having a female best friend who could totally beat him up probably has something to do with this), and if a woman's capable of protecting herself, he's more than happy to let her, but give the slighest indication that his help is needed and he will be there in a heartbeat. And children... Well, Harry never really had a proper childhood of his own. He believes that children deserve to keep theirs as long as possible, and it's probably best not to threaten that unless you're fond of being set on fire. However, you don't exactly have to be an innocent person to get Harry's sympathy - having once been nearly executed for breaking a law he didn't know existed, he's very big on giving people second chances, and he'll also jump to the defense of someone who's made some mistakes, even extremely grave ones, but is basically a good person. After all, if people are only measured by the bad things they've done in their lives, Harry is pretty much screwed.
As quickly as he will come to the aid of someone he feels needs his protection or help, it is so much worse when you threaten his friends or family. Harry's an orphan, he lost his first adopted family in the worst way, and he worked pretty hard to earn his current friends and family, never mind the work he's had to put in to keep all of them alive. He emphatically does not want to lose any of them, and putting them in danger is the fastest way to get Harry to just throw all rationality out the window and come snarling to try and rip your face off, whatever the personal danger to himself. He's literally started wars to save the people he loves, and he wouldn't hesitate to do it again. His temper's not exactly quick, but it is pretty massive, and it burns white-hot - he's capable of keeping it in check, but it does tend to make him quicker to act, and a lot less inclined to think things through entirely.
It's probably incidents like the aforementioned starting of wars that get Harry his reputation as a sort of magical thug, not to mention a loose cannon. For the most part, he does nothing to disabuse people of that opinion. He does have much more raw power than most wizards, and he uses it when necessary. He is very fond of dramatic gestures, especially if they annoy someone who deserves to be poked with a stick - this is the guy who showed up at a vampire party dressed in the cheesiest vampire costume he could find, and rode a polka-powered undead T-Rex through Chicago (not on the same night - that would just be ridiculous). He pretty much can't open his mouth without being sarcastic, most of the time, and when he's talking to something that would happily kill and eat him, that fact will not stop him. Actually, it probably just makes it worse: Harry's default reaction to fear is to try and smash the thing that's scaring him, and if he can't do that, he'll snark in its face to make himself feel better. It's honestly not that he has no sense of self-preservation - he likes being alive a lot, really - it's just that his acute stress response is all fight, hardly any flight, and the snark is part of that sometimes, sort of the way a scared animal will puff up its fur to look bigger.
Despite all outward appearances, though... Harry is a lot more competent and intelligent than you'd guess at first glance. He does not get by as a detective by being an idiot (...okay, that depends on your definition of "idiot") - he is very observant, and while it might sometimes take him a while to work something out, he has a talent for turning problems over in his head, putting disaparate facts together into a bigger picture. He's very quick on his feet, which is part of what makes him such a versatile wizard - improvisation is as important a tool in his repertoire as snark, and he doesn't balk at trying something just because it's crazy. He's capable of keeping pace with (...sometimes) and very occasionally out-maneuvering the master manipulators of the White Court and the fairy courts - definitely not so much the big dumb gumshoe. Harry's biggest strength, though, lies in just not giving up. Ever. He is stubborn as hell, he will keep going no matter how many times you knock him down, and if one tactic doesn't work for him, he'll take some time to regroup and try another. It's really, really difficult to beat a person who's like a masochistic terrier with a habit of going after tigers instead of rats.
However, you don't live your life that way without pissing off a lot of people, and that tends to put a certain amount of distance between Harry and even the people he cares most about. Part of that is how dangerous it is to know him - there are plenty of dangerous things that know perfectly well the fastest way to get at Harry is to hurt the people he loves, and he's not willing to put them in danger like that. Part of that is that he's a wizard, and if he survives long enough, he's going to outlive everyone he knows and loves, which is not a thought conducive to forming any very close relationships. Plus... Harry's just not good at expressing his feelings. Sarcasm isn't just a defense mechanism when he gets scared, it also keeps him from having to admit how he really feels about anything - he will, on occasion, but mostly only when he's pressed. Often when he thinks he might die. He's lonely, and pretty well convinced that he's going to die alone (hint: he is, at least once), but it'd take a lot before he'd admit it.
Harry puts his faith in magic, in the idea of power being controlled, ordered, used for constructive purposes. And the thing with magic is that you can't use it do do something that isn't a part of you, deep down. The effects this has on his self-image are... well. Some of his biggest talents, magically speaking, is blowing shit up, and maybe it's best not to examine what that says about him. He certainly doesn't want to. He doesn't know what it is people see when they look into his eyes, but Marcone seemed to recognize him as a fellow predator, and people have been known to faint or start screaming about how they don't believe in hell after a soulgaze with him, so it's kind of impossible to deny that his soul has some seriously dark corners. On the other hand... most good people who soulgaze him also trust him afterwards, even seeing everything he is and all he's capable of - and he tends to forget that about himself, most of the time.
History: Harry Dresden was born on Halloween, 1973. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, a stage magician, named him after Harry Houdini, Harry Blackstone Sr., and David Copperfield. Harry expected to become his father's assistant when he got older - he never got the chance, because his father died of a brain aneurysm when he was six. Harry became a ward of the state, until he started to show signs of magical abilities and soon after was adopted by Justin DuMorne, a former Warden of the White Council.
DuMorne trained Harry and a girl named Elaine, Harry's first love, in the use of magic until soon after Harry's sixteenth birthday, when DuMorne attempted to enthrall him and set a demon on him, and Harry was forced to kill both DuMorne and the enthralled Elaine in order to save himself. He was put on trial before the White Council for breaking the First Law of Magic, and only avoided being executed because Ebenezar McCoy stepped forward to mentor him and keep an eye on him for the White Council.
After leaving Ebenezar, Harry travelled the country for a few years before he hit Chicago, and started working for a P.I. at Ragged Angel Investigations before he opened his own detective business. Before long, he was approached by a Lieutenant Karrin Murphy, head of the Special Investigations division of the Chicago Police Department, and they worked out an arrangement where the department hired him whenever a case came up that was just a little too weird to work out on their own.
Things started to get complicated for him when a case involving magical murders came up. That particular case got him tangled up with local mob boss Gentleman Johnny Marcone, got Murphy to arrest him on suspicion that he was the murderer, and led him to a ring of sex-fueled magical drug dealers. Later that year, he got to take down a band of werewolf FBI agents, and the year after that, when his girlfriend was turned into a semi-vampire, he started a war with the Red Court. Yeah, complicated doesn't begin to cover it.
Since then, he's found himself indebted to the Queen of the Winter Sidhe and diffused a veritable faerie apocalypse (in typical somewhat explosive Harry Dresden style), come up against fallen angels while rescuing the Shroud of Turin and gotten one of them stuck in his head (she's gone now, we promise), found a half-brother he didn't know he had, necromanced a polka-powered T-Rex to stop a dark god from rising, become a Warden and regional commander of the White Council, gained a shiny new apprentice... oh, and somewhere in there, he got a dog. What? It's important. It would be nice to say that his life is never dull, but really, it's more like he has a week or two of absolute terror and near-death experiences in between long stretches of dull.
Harry's half-vampire ex-girlfriend called him one day to inform him that their daughter - the daughter he'd never known they had - had been kidnapped. In the three days that followed, Harry lost pretty much everything he had, he got himself bound to Mab as the Winter Knight, he nearly died several times over (not that that's anything new), and was forced to kill Susan to save his daughter and end the war with the Red Court for good. And then Harry returned to Chicago, with not much time left before he became the Winter Queen's bitch for the rest of his forseeable future. He and Murphy planned to have one night together before that happened, but before that... Harry ended up in Babylon Wood.
Which is really just as well, because the alternative was death.
First Person Sample: Heeeere...
Prose Sample:A minute ago, Harry was walking down the street in Chicago.
And then he tripped - apparently over his own feet - and now he is still walking down the street in Chicago, but it's an entirely different part of Chicago than he was in a moment ago. Oh yeah, and there's snow everywhere. It does not take a genius or a wizard to work out that something is very wrong here.
Harry whirls, staff in hand, half expecting an attack of some sort. Naturally, nothing happens. A few people stare at him as they walk by, but nothing attacks him. He's still not quite letting down his guard. You would think that the universe would give him just a little downtime before pulling this shit on him...
"I didn't order any fairies..." he mutters under his breath, on the off chance someone happens to be listening. But if whoever - whatever - did this isn't going to show their face, there's not a lot he can do about the situation out on the street.
He pivots on his heel, swinging in the complete opposite direction, and starts toward his apartment. Whatever's fucking with him will have a considerably harder time doing so once he's behind several layers of shields and a nice, solid door.
...that plan's going to change pretty quickly when he reaches his apartment building and realizes it's not there.
Special Notes: I am still canon reviewing. A LOT. I've resigned myself to being a little shaky until I finish that, and please forgive me for it?