biography
i am as vain as i allow
isaiah kennedy
june 13th 1988
intro.
Isaiah is a live wire twisted into some semblance of a man, though kid, boy, any sort of diminutive male tends to lend itself more to him than an outright masculine noun. Years of sunning have given him a tan that isn't going without a fight, but the dreary cloudiness of his new territory are certainly pushing to dissolve his skin tone back to the milky white he was born with. He has a slight build, really, and though he looks like he has a whole lot of muscle it's more a fluke; the muscles grew along with his height in the best of his puberty years, and since then Isaiah hasn't been eating enough to cover them up. He tends towards being long in arm and leg and torso; he has spindly spider's fingers.
Isaiah has a face that wants to be dramatic, profound, and when he gets into melancholy moods it gets its chance to be the artist's model of tragedy that it so desperately strives to be. It's not often, though, that Isaiah goes Shakespeare in plain sight-- or even at all. There's a manic energy about him, but not one easily apparent: he looks and feels calm, but with his smiles come a burst of raw electricity, and his smiles snap onto his face in a similarly alarming way. His smiles can really get a little scary, he abandons himself to them so.
His hair is a carefully cultivated mess, and if it ever looks unnatural Isaiah would just not leave his room. His appearance is one of the things that really gets under Isaiah's skin, and his hair must be perfect according to his mental image or he's liable to spend the day inside, furious at himself and the world and anything else that may be conspiring against his style. Isaiah also happens to be one of those oddly impressive but pathetic people, the sort that live under the poverty line and turn the heating on only when it is absolutely necessary to keep from getting frostbite yet routinely blow hundreds of dollars on designers shirts. While his apartment is well-ordered but dingy, and he goes without cleaning as long as he can stand, that any of his clothes go a day without ironing after being washed is completely unheard of. In fact, it's offensive. To suggest that it happens to Isaiah would deeply offend him.
Clothes that are in any way ripped or stained (and not for style reasons) immediately get banished to Isaiah's pajama drawer- if they're lucky. Considering that Isaiah tends to sleep in as little clothing as possible (except in wintery circumstances), it's far more likely for clothes with a tiny wine stain to be shoved swiftly at a Goodwill. When he remembers. Often they are shoved with a great deal of shame into the bottom of a trash can, where Isaiah can forget about them and then go buy new things.
Tattoos are very appealing to Isaiah, but he's managed to restrain himself from getting huge gouts of ink injected all along his body. He has one tattoo: a stylized but simplified wing on his right shoulder blade, black with a white strip perfectly centered between the black portions.
personality.
Talking to Isaiah is a little like talking to your 10-year old best friend, except while you might be 18 or 20 or 48, he's still 10. He's your best friend, yeah, but he's undeniably 10, you know? Talking a mile a minute, his every move aches with the energy you can only ever manage after downing about thirty Red Bulls, and he walks with the sort of cockiness you'd expect from a yearling who just won the Triple Crown. Yeah, that's me, he seems to say with that huge shit-eating grin, I just kicked all your asses and I'm skinny as fuck. He has the same sort of ADD quality people expect from little kids; easily distracted, easily excited. He seems, overall, pretty and dumb and energetic and totally harmless.
But that's kind of a lopsided picture.
The truth is, while Isaiah may not be the brightest crayon in the box, he isn't as dumb as he acts- not nearly. And it's not that he's sly and deceitful and thinks that it's real cool to be secretly intelligent; his dumbass actions, his dumbass words, they're all sincere Isaiah. And it's not that he has a chronic case of missing brain-to-mouth filter, since that implies it's something not his fault. He does have a filter. Thing is, Isaiah uses it only in case of emergency. Getting a job, talking to his mom (half the time, anyway), when he really wants to smooth-talk someone; these are times when Isaiah is put-together, when he keeps his tongue in check and doesn't start cussing like a sailor, doesn't spout out pop culture references like he's afraid they'll go out of style in the next ten seconds. In other words, when it really counts. Any other time? You're on your own, because not only does Isaiah not bother to keep his fast-paced thoughts in check, the guy has a habit of never shutting the fuck up. Isaiah's been in the process of having his ass thoroughly and bloodily kicked and he still can't keep himself from spouting slander; you think he's gonna stop just because you want him to?
The real problem might be that Isaiah is shot so full of energy, you'd think he was constantly sneaking into the bathroom to snort speed, and all this excess energy can find no other outlet than to burst full force out of his mouth. This isn't true: it finds plenty of other outlets. Before he had a dog, Isaiah paced manically and compulsively; now he just wanders around the city with Boss, stopping to make friends with passersby or just to grin mysteriously and crazily at them. This is a prime reason why he is sickeningly skinny, or maybe the fact that another outlet of his is to read at a dizzying pace. Not willing to waste money on books, Isaiah instead reads endless wikipedia pages, cracked.com lists, and celebrity gossip blogs (news articles are not only too short but too lacking in witty commentary that he can absorb to regurgitate at people later).
Isaiah seems so wired all the time because- okay, yeah, because he is, but also because he's mind-numbingly cheerful. He's the kind of guy that wakes up, yawns, rolls over, and then basks in the glory of being alive for another day. Except without all that pensive shit, because Isaiah isn't nearly so thoughtful. Half of it is that Isaiah is a great actor and he likes being consistent, half of it is that Isaiah is just happy. A large part of it, admittedly, is because his brain synthesizes his own inherent magical ability into what boils down to brain crack. Yeah, he gets sad, even gets depressed, but his energy level just doesn't let him mope for very long; if he's down he goes out, calls people, even just reads blogs at random until he cheers up. being mean helps too. There's nothing saying that happiness equals kindness, and Isaiah exemplifies the silliness of such a sentiment: that bitch is vicious. Isaiah shit talks like nothing bad could ever happen to him (a theory disproved by his past beatings), and he slips it into his everyday speech without pause.
This sentence is along the lines one could commonly hear from Isaiah: "Actually you, uh, only need one teaspoon of sugar, that bitch Rachel Ray is just so fat she thinks she needs to drown everything she puts in her huge mouth in sugar, you know?"
But Isaiah isn't completely insensitive. Once he likes someone, he likes them. He is, like, their biggest fan, and though his shit-talking of them goes through the roof it's mostly all teasing and usually said to their face. And for all his word-vomit, Isaiah is kind of sneaky; he's only uninhibited when mad drunk of around people he really really knows, and all other times he's just ridiculous enough to be himself, just toned down enough to make people like him so he can know everything about them. Because Isaiah loves people. They are the air he breathes, the water he bathes in, the food he eats. He would be lost if he was shut up by himself; if he were the last man on earth, he would do something ridiculous and get himself killed and feel better for it.
He's theatric. He likes things that make him feel important (who doesn't?) but also things that seem a little like movies, or plays, or books, or anything glamorous and fictional. He likes secrets, conspiracy theories, outrageous rumors. He finds little things funny, even bad things, even bad things that happen his friends; if it has an element of humor, Isaiah appreciates it (as long as it isn't happening to him). He likes having people all around him but for them to not necessarily to know him that well, for him to feel mysterious.
He loves to lie.
background.
Marcus Ward was a vicious alcoholic, crack addict, high school dropout, ardent gang member, and all around shitty person. All these conditions make it pretty fucking unlikely that he ever came to anything, and of course he did not. But only one of these conditions was actually true, chiefly because for someone to be all those above things and turn out as expected was grossly against the world's style; she liked to keep things interesting, and if a + b + c + d always equaled the same thing, she just was not doing her job. So the true beginning of the story goes like this: Marcus Ward went to college, had a degree in engineering, only got shitfaced a few times a year and was pretty sober otherwise, and though he was once in the same room with a giant stash of coke, it never personally entered his nostrils or lungs. In a similar vein, he was pretty good friends with someone who ran with MS-13, but he wouldn't touch that shit if it gave him a million--- well. If it gave him a thousand dollars. All these traits seem to add up to a pretty decent guy, but that is where Gaia snorts a little and then cracks up when no one's looking: he really, really wasn't. The one thing true of all these crazy things Isaiah shittalked about him was the fact that he was a terrible human being.
Marcus' girl Hannah, she was the good one. She wasn't exactly the Girl Next Door, timid and nerdy and just begging to be the focus of a vapid film plot; she'd played a few videogames in her life, but they weren't her life, and she was much more likely to go out partying than stay home and read Wuthering Heights. Maybe she had something of a drinking problem in her early years, but by the time she and Marcus hit it off fully she was way past that. She had makeup and dyed hair and was teeny enough to look insecure in strong winds, but she was cheerful and forgiving and had something of a canine quality to her personality. Marcus was okay, but anyone who knew him for more than a month knew that he had a nastiness in him like rattlesnake venom, a potential to snap at something and corrode all around it. Hannah was in her last year of college, cagey and tired of work and ready to do something with a tangible reward; Marcus' bad boy edge wasn't a novel image, she had seen plenty before, but she liked that he acted like a badass without being a druggie or lush.
As she discovered, there were worse things.
A year and a half into their relationship, Hannah was pregnant. She also knew Marcus a little better, and had this illogical but unshakeable suspicion of him; it often found an outlet in questioning his fidelity, which led to some screaming every few months, but with no real result. She wasn't really sure he was making it with other girls at all, but it made her feel better a bit to accuse him of something. She thought maybe he was untrustworthy in some fundamental way and the pregnancy news would bring it out. She was sorely disappointed when he was actually a little excited for the baby. What kind of true badass liked the idea of having kids? Wasn't he supposed to run away in horror? It was good, but it made Hannah even more irrationally suspicious.
They held together through the pregnancy, the birth, even three years of Isaiah's being alive; Hannah still had her flare ups, was uanccountably nervous if she had to leave Isaiah with Marcus for longer than four hours, but it was fine. There was no evidence of anything. Until there was. She went out with her friend Kate, nothing big, a weekend break, and when she came back it was to an Isaiah that clutched at her and whined and eventually worked himself up to crying at her about something daddy did. Her first thought was sexual predator, and when she got the whole story out of both of them (Marcus didn't really obscure it), she was intensely relieved. And then pissed. Isaiah was much more rebellious and resistant when Marcus was the only around, and apparently his refusal to go to bed had touched off a nerve, and his dad had grabbed him by the arm and shaken him like a doll. There was a bruise and maybe some strained tendons, and Marcus seemed at least guilty over it. She chewed him out for the next week and kept an eye on him.
It was around this point that the story went from being about Hannah and her suspicion/love of Marcus to being about Isaiah and his absolute full on covert war against this jackass who was his father. Isaiah wasn't quite the go-getter yet, he was only three, but the seed of hatred had been planted. That Marcus was around much less than his mother, and that his presence sooner or later meant something unpleasant, was a recipe for disaster. And it came, four years later. Four years of quiet and outright defiance, of Marcus and Isaiah's wills clashing and Isaiah's ridiculous baby self infuriating his volatile father came to a rough climax one fall day when Hannah was out, Marcus was in, and Isaiah was smarting over petty grievances with the world at large.
Isaiah can't remember exactly what happened, how he provoked his father on this occasion. Maybe he never provoked him at all, just said something innocent and teetered his dad over the edge. In any case, Isaiah was yelling and screaming and having a fit while his father was doing much the same thing, blows were involved, his vision went white, and after an eternity curled up on the floor seething and writhing in pain, Isaiah had the sense and presence of mind to call his mother. His memory of the event is more a sense of pain and a series of images than a coherent line of thought: the white of the tile kitchen floor, its cold against his cheek, the phone receiver in front of his face, his mother's screech as she finally found her fears confirmed.
Marcus was conspicuously absent from the scene. In fact, from that point on, he was conspicuously absent in general, owing to his complete disappearance. Some people just can't face up to their actions. Breaking your seven year old's arm so badly the bone breaks the skin, well. It takes a lot of guts to own up to that. Personally, Isaiah is pretty glad it happened; his left arm will always be a little weird, and he has a scar to show for it, but it got his dickhead father well out of the way.
It was painful, especially for Hannah, to see how immediately more cheerful Isaiah was with his father nowhere in sight. Even with a hospital stay and a cast, he beamed. The sun shone out of his eyes and mouth, rolled off his tongue, he got to harass the hell out of other kids and have them completely unable to retaliate. You look dumb with freckles, he could say to the neanderthal ginger kid in his class, and neanderthal could only snarl something and want to hit him but be unable. Everyone knew if you hit the kid who got beat by his dad the teachers would make sure you wish you'd killed yourself instead. It was perhaps this single incident that turned Isaiah into the calm, laid-back dick he is: he got to practice while he was untouchable, and he learned the lesson that if he was snotty and stubborn enough and willing to go through a little pain, he could do whatever he wanted.
As a kid, Isaiah was the typical excited one, jumping around and getting berated by teachers even as they sort of gigglesnorted at one of his antics. He was of average intelligence, but disliked anything tedious which included all school after first grade, so he tended to do well in short bursts and then get abysmal marks. Besides the whole my-daddy-broke-my-arm story, he was not remarkable. Even his energy was typical, and there were more clowns in the classes than just Isaiah.
Isaiah only really became weird and a little messed when he started approaching puberty. This fact is true for pretty much everyone, but for Isaiah it went double; not only was he starting to get the typical symptoms, but he was even more high energy, bouncing around, unable to focus on anything for very long, mouthing off so fast he only realized his tongue had moved after he got punched. And he got happy. He was always really cheerful, happy, but as puberty progressed he rarely had lows, didn't seem to get as aggressive and rebellious and teenagery. His mother got a boyfriend and he didn't even seem to care that much. His mother's boyfriend expressed to her that he might be on drugs and this was duly investigated, but Isaiah claimed (and sincerely) that he was not on drugs (that came later). Even when he was fifteen and his mother announced he was going to have a little brother, he was thrilled. Nothing could get him down.
A series of incidents began to make clear just why Isaiah was so pumped. He saw animals that seemed to appear and disappear out of nowhere. He began to feel like certain places were the place to be, even if they were a junkyard. He began to pass people in the street and turn his head, quizzical, because they smelled really good. It wasn't until shortly before his brother's birth that everything was illuminated. Long story short, Isaiah had a vivid fast food filled dream, accidentally summoned a bird spirit to get him food, and had his mind blown.
So he could do magic.
From then on, he was even more of a cocky bitch. Since he was around eight and had become something of a bamf in reputation due to having a grotesquely broken arm, he'd been friends with this kid Jeremy whose older brother ran with an honest-to-god gang. This gang, it was sort of wonderful: Jeremy said his brother Jamie was pretty high up in it, but it was organized. There were fighting bits and intelligence bits, it was like a damn country as a gang inside L.A. Being L.A., Isaiah was no stranger to the fact that gangs existed (at least a third of the kids in his high school were in one and he got to laugh at their feuds), but they all seemed like losers strutting around. Organization? Purpose? What was this wonderful machine? Finding out that he was like, Merlin or something, Isaiah was spurred to go from backseat to driver. He wanted in. He wanted to be in this gang. Besides, he'd hung with Jeremy and Jamie's friends, and they smelled really really good.
This was somehow important to his decision.
When he walked, more strutted, to a guy he knew had some rank and asked to be let in, he was honestly startled to.. be taken in. To see the boss. Well, not THE boss, but A boss, and this boss liked him. This boss was like, you are cool man, and Isaiah was so so confused until later someone took him aside and explained that they could tell he could do magic, they always needed more, he'd been assigned the magic sector.
Other people could do magic. This was pretty rocking, but a little annoying. It was his thing. But Isaiah could deal, because he was in this amazing gang, and he could do magic, and he felt great all the time (because his mind was converting all the stray magic into crack). He became a spy, a rat, and in honor of his first summoning, he called himself The Magpie. Not Isaiah the Rat, the Canary, The Stoolie- Isaiah the Magpie.
Isaiah got on his bosses' nerves-- one in particular, part of a high up circle of bodyguards for The Boss, was a huge gaywad and hated him --there was no denying he was a natural. People loved him. They thought he was a spaz and never suspected he was carefully listening to tell their life stories to a guy who passed it on to a guy who passed it on to a guy who could have them drawn and quartered before they got to having a hangover from their drunken confessions. It was power and he loved it, loved being able to make up ridiculous shit. His grades in school went down and he didn't care, he could get any job with his contacts in the gang, life was great, perfect, everything was great-
Until he was reassigned.
Details were sketchy. It was sort of secret. He was brought to see The Boss to get in on it, actually, for the second time in his life, and that guy was scary as fuck. Gist of it was, The Boss had somehow found out there was another guy who was just as scary and just as good as he, and he needed rats in this guy's gang. Sure, Isaiah said, he was a great magpie. Great, Boss said, Only he's in Chicago. WHAT, Isaiah thought, but in reality he kept on smiling nervously and said Well, guess I'm moving.
Boss said, Yeah. He grinned, Isaiah almost pissed himself, and he went on, Looks like.
What Isaiah told everyone about his move was that he "needed a new scene" when the reason was more along the lines of "I think I will be killed and eaten if I do not go". It was hard keeping Isaiah down, though, and he got legitimately excited about it.
Isaiah's enthusiasm has since decreased; he's been in Chicago for over a year, working dead-end jobs and making friends and contacts, but not much else. Due to in-game circumstances, his value as an operative has been severely lessened. Really, he's only still there to pick up some scraps. And because he likes it.
abilities.
Isaiah is something of a conjuror; he has always been able to summon up small spirits, or weird things of magic construct, but only under the tutelage available in the Flock has he been able to fully exercise his abilities. He's one of those chaotic, new-age magic practicers, not bound by ritual and specific candles or anything, but more going by feel and things given significance only by his investment in them. In light of these factors, to catch Isaiah conjuring can be pretty hilarious; he tends to focus using, yes, junk food. He can conjure inanimate objects pretty easily if he has them in mind, but tends not to; he prefers semi-living things. He can summon up spirits/constructs of average will up to the size of large dogs, though he can go bigger the dumber they are. He has an affinity, predictably, for bird-shaped things, and often reports by conjuring a magically constructed bird messenger, similar to a Patronus, and telling it everything that needs to be passed on. This risks interception by another magic user, but hey, life isn't fun without danger.
Isaiah's main power, though he's almost completely unaware of it, is being a bloodhound for magic. Isaiah is innately attracted to magic users, places where magic was recently used, the casting of magic in action, and even people who were simply around when something magical happened. This ability only registers to Isaiah by his thinking, without assigning any importance, that certain people or places have "a good vibe" or "smell really great". Isaiah's magic sense isn't just an ability that developed on its own, though. Isaiah can sense magic and is attracted to it because he unconsciously feeds on it; when he's around magic users and raw magic, his brain works in conjunction with his own ability to convert the magic into a kind of paranormal drug.
Basically, Isaiah is always happy because he's high on magic all the time.