Cadenach
Skald of Ambiguous Renown
[SIZE=15.3333px]Genre:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] Rock[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Name: [/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px]Jon Roth Xylander[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Age: [/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px]31[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Gender:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] Male[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Species: Human mostly. Paternal grandfather was a demonic forest spirit.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Appearance:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] A man of middling height, light brown hair, eerily penetrating and incandescent light-blue eyes, and a sort of nondescript handsomeness marred only by a scar running along underneath the right side of his jaw. Any charm he might have quickly dissipates upon closer inspection however, as his bearing typically displays the jaded cynicism of someone who has witnessed the absolute worst humanity, and all else, has to offer.[/SIZE]
View attachment 167311
[SIZE=15.3333px]Personality:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] On the surface, Jon seems a suspicious, brooding, and misanthropic sort. To those who have worked with him long enough, he appears a more melancholic and professional character. Rumors around the station and the more clever (and subsequently longer-lived) members of the supernatural community allude that he was once a much more idealistic and earnest young man. Whatever the case may have been, these days he is a seemingly tired, grim, and unarguably effective investigator of particular cunning, possessed of a misleading and seemingly indifferent countenance.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Backstory:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] Born to lower middle-class Dutch-German parents in the outskirts of Detroit, Jon spent his childhood growing up between his parent's double-wide and the log cabin lodge of his maternal grandparents. His father was a DPD officer who had to retire from the force at the age of 37 after a run-in with a group of junkies left him with permanent damage to his hip and lower back. Picking up work as a general handyman, Jon's father provided for his son and wife, who supplemented the family income with her job as a secretary for the manager of a stationary manufacturing company, as best he could. There were times however, when Jon would be sent to live with his grandparents as part of an arrangement they made with his mother and father. They were the ones who taught him of his family history. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]His mother's side you see, was a family of some import in ages past. Their ancestors were hedge-wizards and occult advisors to several European monarchs, once upon a time. They also told him the story of his father's family despite his parent's wishes. As it turned out, his great-great grandfather had been a German miner who through a series of odd circumstances, had encountered a group of Twerg (Old High German word for Dwarves) who revealed the location of a large and easily exploitable vein of silver. Being an entrepreneurial man, Jon's great-great grandfather established a rather prosperous mine and soon grew his business to include three other mines in southwest Germany. He also fostered the unique relationship with the local Twerg and employed them as an expert workforce and construction consultants. He eventually founded the most successful mining and drilling company in Germany and became known in the supernatural world as a man of power and influence. All of that success eventually lead to great disappointment however when his grand-daughter and only heir became infatuated with a young man named Woed Tuffel. Woed Tuffel, as it turned out, was actually an ancient demon and trickster spirit responsible for the destruction of many notable individuals and powerful houses throughout history. By despoiling the last living heir of the family, he managed to cast a curse on Jon's great-great grandfather. The cursed caused all of his business ventures to fail and his reputation to fall into ruin, which lead to his eventual death from a stress-induced aneurysm in a dilapidated hostel. Jon's father managed to finally put the curse to rest by killing his father, but as a result had to leave Germany. He fled to America and met a beautiful young Dutch girl whose family had come to America a few generations prior and married her not long after.[/SIZE]
Jon's father, driven by the guilt of his patricide and what he felt to be his failure to support his family, turned to drink. It wasn't long before he became violent and drove his wife to flee to her parents along with their young son. Jon watched his father devolve into a self-pitying, petty, delusional degenerate as he grew older. After his father's death, apparently due to alcohol poisoning, when Jon was 16, he resolved to become a better man than his father. He devoted himself to his studies and obtained a Bachelors Degree in Criminal Psychology. He joined the DPD and made Detective in a mere three years. It was about this time that Jon began noticing...strange things. For a while he wasn't quite sure that what he was seeing was real or simply some sort of mad hallucination and was worried that his desire to prove himself better than his father would be dashed before he really got a chance to make a name for himself due to some sort of mental disorder. About 6 months later, while walking to work for an evening shift, Jon saw what appeared to be a woman standing in the middle of the street in the path of an oncoming truck. As he tried to grab her and pull her to the side, she turned her head and he saw that where her eyes should have been, where two masses of flailing tentacles and her mouth was a lipless circle of needle thin teeth. Recoiling and frozen in fear, Jon stood helpless as she quickly flew into the air and around the corner. While the creature may have been unnaturally swift, Jon was not, and he was struck by the 2 1/2 ton truck as the driver desperately tried to apply his brakes too late for it to make a difference.
Waking in a hospital bed two days later, Jon realized that all the stories he had heard as a child were true. There WERE dark and strange things out there in the world. The bizarre things he had thought were hallucinations, must have been fleeting glimpses of things no normal person should ever be aware of. When Jon got out of the hospital, he visited his grandparents. His grandfather put him in contact with a man named Simon Caulwater. Simon proved to be no man at all, but a Weirgeist (creature that feeds on the spirits of the recently deceased) and a fellow law enforcement officer. Simon was the Agent-in-Charge of the local FBI field office as well as the regional head of the Bureau of Supernatural Defense, an organization of supernatural peoples within American and Canadian law enforcement agencies dedicated to the apprehension, prosecution, and occasional eradication of criminals that prove beyond the capabilities of mundane law enforcement officials to effectively deal with due to their...unusual nature.
Jon has spent the past several years working for the Bureau from within the DPD. He's been around longer than most of the BSD agents in the Department and few know him from those early years anymore. Working for the Bureau is dangerous work after all.
Currently, Jon has become obsessed with tracking down a cult known for worshiping a number of very dangerous entities, that he has linked to a number of ritualistic killings of both humans and several supernatural creatures. Despite a lack of support within the BSD, now led by a rather frugal and dismissive Twerg who holds a major grudge against Jon after the death of Jon's old friend Simon Caulwater two years ago, Jon has managed to connect them to no less than 17 killings throughout the midwestern United States and southern Canada. Convinced that this elusive organization is behind a much larger and dangerous conspiracy, Jon refuses to relent to internal organizational pressures or to the growing dread instilled by a name that repeatedly crops up over the course of his investigations...Woed Tuffel.
[SIZE=15.3333px]Other: Jon wrestles with a lot of internal demons aside from the more literal ones he faces over the course of his work. He is regarded as one of the most capable agents fighting what seems like a losing battle against dark forces and general criminality, but struggles to find further meaning in his life. His original desire to prove himself a worthy man, raise a family, and leave a legacy worth being proud of has been subsumed by his job, without him even realizing it. Now it feels as though his chance to find and make something good in the world was lost and he wonders if he'll just end up throwing his life away in pursuit of an unattainable goal. All of the people he felt close to in life have died. His family, his friends from the old days, his old partner...the only woman he ever loved left his life years ago after a huge falling out and he's slowly coming to the realization that his life will probably never have the one thing he wanted.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Inspiration: The idea for the character sort of coalesced progressively as I listened to each song. The first song, Insterstate Love Song by the Stone Temple Pilots made me think of sort of hopeless nostalgia coupled with rueful acceptance and feigned indifference. I think that's what formed the concepts for the character's current state and personality. It also helped me come up with the idea that his desire to find the right woman, settle down, and raise a family better than his father was spent on the wrong woman and left him jaded. With all the other stuff happening in his life, he just buried it and moved forward, only now realizing as he looks back that he should have dealt with it then and figured out what direction to take his life in. I was gonna write more about that aspect of the story, but getting too deep into that would have conflicted with what I was already doing with him so I decided just to mention it a little and leave it as part of a more implied emotional past only alluded to, since practically nobody left in his life would remember it and his prickly demeanor keeps everybody else from getting close.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]When I got to Sound of Silence, I first listened to the Simon & Garfunkel version, then the Disturbed version. I felt like the Disturbed version fit into conceptual niche made by the previous song a lot better. It kind of made me think of a tired man, coming home to a darkened apartment right as the sunset starts to fade, grabbing a bottle of cheaper scotch from the fridge that he bought a week ago because he was in a hurry and tired, pouring a double, and walking over to his small living room, looking around, and realizing he had no desire to really do anything. Like nothing would satisfy him, so he just sits uncomfortably in his chair letting his eyes rove around the room without focusing on the blank tv or the burnt out lamp in the corner, just giving a sigh and sort of being forced by his own unsatisfaction to listen to...nothing. Finish most of his scotch, and fall asleep. That sort of completed the character for me. A tired detective who had originally had dreams of fighting evil and making the world a better place, only to be dragged down by the realities of life.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]The third song kind of hit an instinctively unnerving note with me. I grew up being a very religious Christian, but eventually drifted away from the church and developed an agnostic perspective. I always loved gospel style music, but there were certain tonal qualities that struck me as creepy. Then, when I realized the song was talking about worshiping the devil, it kind of solidified the uncomfortability. However, I felt the need to challenge that feeling and try to see the emotions and meanings behind the song in the way they were intended, not just the way I perceived them. I decided to incorporate both perspectives into the story by making the main character part demon, a source of his strength and his family's shame and misfortune. Then, by putting him between two worlds, being a part of a supernatural community while at the same time combating certain elements of it, all at the expense of his more mundane life, I wanted to kind of merge the revulsion of perceived evil with the veneration and acceptance of what would be considered "abnormal" by normal humans. It also kind of gave me the idea of the demonic cult. Tying it in with the previously established demonic character kind of captured that dread of the familiar unknown, while implying that an accepted minor evil might actually be deeper and of more consequence than previously assumed.
Also listened to all the songs playing at once with varying volumes, and after the second time, I figured out the cues for changing volumes and pausing that made them all sound like an actual song. That was pretty cool and they worked surprisingly well together. I also used a lot of Dutch and Old High German references for the names. I was kind of inspired by He Is to lean towards old Kabbalism and early Christian interpretations of demons, which lead to German Jewish connection. After that, it was just finding names that fit the character background, subtly referenced the character's ancestry, and sounded cool. I actually put a lot of time into the etymology, basing it on the migration patterns of Dutch Jews in America and second-wave German emigration in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Also, my room mate was playing Madden as the Lions and since Detroit is kind of the perfect example of a city trying to fight overwhelming crime, economic depression, and general hopelessness, it just fit as a setting for this character. It all just sort of...came together with the inspiration I got from the songs and a few details from my own experiences. Plus, I couldn't make a character without designing a complex backstory and hinting at a future one
[/SIZE]
View full character
[SIZE=15.3333px]Name: [/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px]Jon Roth Xylander[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Age: [/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px]31[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Gender:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] Male[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Species: Human mostly. Paternal grandfather was a demonic forest spirit.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Appearance:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] A man of middling height, light brown hair, eerily penetrating and incandescent light-blue eyes, and a sort of nondescript handsomeness marred only by a scar running along underneath the right side of his jaw. Any charm he might have quickly dissipates upon closer inspection however, as his bearing typically displays the jaded cynicism of someone who has witnessed the absolute worst humanity, and all else, has to offer.[/SIZE]
View attachment 167311
[SIZE=15.3333px]Personality:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] On the surface, Jon seems a suspicious, brooding, and misanthropic sort. To those who have worked with him long enough, he appears a more melancholic and professional character. Rumors around the station and the more clever (and subsequently longer-lived) members of the supernatural community allude that he was once a much more idealistic and earnest young man. Whatever the case may have been, these days he is a seemingly tired, grim, and unarguably effective investigator of particular cunning, possessed of a misleading and seemingly indifferent countenance.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Backstory:[/SIZE][SIZE=15.3333px] Born to lower middle-class Dutch-German parents in the outskirts of Detroit, Jon spent his childhood growing up between his parent's double-wide and the log cabin lodge of his maternal grandparents. His father was a DPD officer who had to retire from the force at the age of 37 after a run-in with a group of junkies left him with permanent damage to his hip and lower back. Picking up work as a general handyman, Jon's father provided for his son and wife, who supplemented the family income with her job as a secretary for the manager of a stationary manufacturing company, as best he could. There were times however, when Jon would be sent to live with his grandparents as part of an arrangement they made with his mother and father. They were the ones who taught him of his family history. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]His mother's side you see, was a family of some import in ages past. Their ancestors were hedge-wizards and occult advisors to several European monarchs, once upon a time. They also told him the story of his father's family despite his parent's wishes. As it turned out, his great-great grandfather had been a German miner who through a series of odd circumstances, had encountered a group of Twerg (Old High German word for Dwarves) who revealed the location of a large and easily exploitable vein of silver. Being an entrepreneurial man, Jon's great-great grandfather established a rather prosperous mine and soon grew his business to include three other mines in southwest Germany. He also fostered the unique relationship with the local Twerg and employed them as an expert workforce and construction consultants. He eventually founded the most successful mining and drilling company in Germany and became known in the supernatural world as a man of power and influence. All of that success eventually lead to great disappointment however when his grand-daughter and only heir became infatuated with a young man named Woed Tuffel. Woed Tuffel, as it turned out, was actually an ancient demon and trickster spirit responsible for the destruction of many notable individuals and powerful houses throughout history. By despoiling the last living heir of the family, he managed to cast a curse on Jon's great-great grandfather. The cursed caused all of his business ventures to fail and his reputation to fall into ruin, which lead to his eventual death from a stress-induced aneurysm in a dilapidated hostel. Jon's father managed to finally put the curse to rest by killing his father, but as a result had to leave Germany. He fled to America and met a beautiful young Dutch girl whose family had come to America a few generations prior and married her not long after.[/SIZE]
Jon's father, driven by the guilt of his patricide and what he felt to be his failure to support his family, turned to drink. It wasn't long before he became violent and drove his wife to flee to her parents along with their young son. Jon watched his father devolve into a self-pitying, petty, delusional degenerate as he grew older. After his father's death, apparently due to alcohol poisoning, when Jon was 16, he resolved to become a better man than his father. He devoted himself to his studies and obtained a Bachelors Degree in Criminal Psychology. He joined the DPD and made Detective in a mere three years. It was about this time that Jon began noticing...strange things. For a while he wasn't quite sure that what he was seeing was real or simply some sort of mad hallucination and was worried that his desire to prove himself better than his father would be dashed before he really got a chance to make a name for himself due to some sort of mental disorder. About 6 months later, while walking to work for an evening shift, Jon saw what appeared to be a woman standing in the middle of the street in the path of an oncoming truck. As he tried to grab her and pull her to the side, she turned her head and he saw that where her eyes should have been, where two masses of flailing tentacles and her mouth was a lipless circle of needle thin teeth. Recoiling and frozen in fear, Jon stood helpless as she quickly flew into the air and around the corner. While the creature may have been unnaturally swift, Jon was not, and he was struck by the 2 1/2 ton truck as the driver desperately tried to apply his brakes too late for it to make a difference.
Waking in a hospital bed two days later, Jon realized that all the stories he had heard as a child were true. There WERE dark and strange things out there in the world. The bizarre things he had thought were hallucinations, must have been fleeting glimpses of things no normal person should ever be aware of. When Jon got out of the hospital, he visited his grandparents. His grandfather put him in contact with a man named Simon Caulwater. Simon proved to be no man at all, but a Weirgeist (creature that feeds on the spirits of the recently deceased) and a fellow law enforcement officer. Simon was the Agent-in-Charge of the local FBI field office as well as the regional head of the Bureau of Supernatural Defense, an organization of supernatural peoples within American and Canadian law enforcement agencies dedicated to the apprehension, prosecution, and occasional eradication of criminals that prove beyond the capabilities of mundane law enforcement officials to effectively deal with due to their...unusual nature.
Jon has spent the past several years working for the Bureau from within the DPD. He's been around longer than most of the BSD agents in the Department and few know him from those early years anymore. Working for the Bureau is dangerous work after all.
Currently, Jon has become obsessed with tracking down a cult known for worshiping a number of very dangerous entities, that he has linked to a number of ritualistic killings of both humans and several supernatural creatures. Despite a lack of support within the BSD, now led by a rather frugal and dismissive Twerg who holds a major grudge against Jon after the death of Jon's old friend Simon Caulwater two years ago, Jon has managed to connect them to no less than 17 killings throughout the midwestern United States and southern Canada. Convinced that this elusive organization is behind a much larger and dangerous conspiracy, Jon refuses to relent to internal organizational pressures or to the growing dread instilled by a name that repeatedly crops up over the course of his investigations...Woed Tuffel.
[SIZE=15.3333px]Other: Jon wrestles with a lot of internal demons aside from the more literal ones he faces over the course of his work. He is regarded as one of the most capable agents fighting what seems like a losing battle against dark forces and general criminality, but struggles to find further meaning in his life. His original desire to prove himself a worthy man, raise a family, and leave a legacy worth being proud of has been subsumed by his job, without him even realizing it. Now it feels as though his chance to find and make something good in the world was lost and he wonders if he'll just end up throwing his life away in pursuit of an unattainable goal. All of the people he felt close to in life have died. His family, his friends from the old days, his old partner...the only woman he ever loved left his life years ago after a huge falling out and he's slowly coming to the realization that his life will probably never have the one thing he wanted.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]Inspiration: The idea for the character sort of coalesced progressively as I listened to each song. The first song, Insterstate Love Song by the Stone Temple Pilots made me think of sort of hopeless nostalgia coupled with rueful acceptance and feigned indifference. I think that's what formed the concepts for the character's current state and personality. It also helped me come up with the idea that his desire to find the right woman, settle down, and raise a family better than his father was spent on the wrong woman and left him jaded. With all the other stuff happening in his life, he just buried it and moved forward, only now realizing as he looks back that he should have dealt with it then and figured out what direction to take his life in. I was gonna write more about that aspect of the story, but getting too deep into that would have conflicted with what I was already doing with him so I decided just to mention it a little and leave it as part of a more implied emotional past only alluded to, since practically nobody left in his life would remember it and his prickly demeanor keeps everybody else from getting close.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]When I got to Sound of Silence, I first listened to the Simon & Garfunkel version, then the Disturbed version. I felt like the Disturbed version fit into conceptual niche made by the previous song a lot better. It kind of made me think of a tired man, coming home to a darkened apartment right as the sunset starts to fade, grabbing a bottle of cheaper scotch from the fridge that he bought a week ago because he was in a hurry and tired, pouring a double, and walking over to his small living room, looking around, and realizing he had no desire to really do anything. Like nothing would satisfy him, so he just sits uncomfortably in his chair letting his eyes rove around the room without focusing on the blank tv or the burnt out lamp in the corner, just giving a sigh and sort of being forced by his own unsatisfaction to listen to...nothing. Finish most of his scotch, and fall asleep. That sort of completed the character for me. A tired detective who had originally had dreams of fighting evil and making the world a better place, only to be dragged down by the realities of life.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=15.3333px]The third song kind of hit an instinctively unnerving note with me. I grew up being a very religious Christian, but eventually drifted away from the church and developed an agnostic perspective. I always loved gospel style music, but there were certain tonal qualities that struck me as creepy. Then, when I realized the song was talking about worshiping the devil, it kind of solidified the uncomfortability. However, I felt the need to challenge that feeling and try to see the emotions and meanings behind the song in the way they were intended, not just the way I perceived them. I decided to incorporate both perspectives into the story by making the main character part demon, a source of his strength and his family's shame and misfortune. Then, by putting him between two worlds, being a part of a supernatural community while at the same time combating certain elements of it, all at the expense of his more mundane life, I wanted to kind of merge the revulsion of perceived evil with the veneration and acceptance of what would be considered "abnormal" by normal humans. It also kind of gave me the idea of the demonic cult. Tying it in with the previously established demonic character kind of captured that dread of the familiar unknown, while implying that an accepted minor evil might actually be deeper and of more consequence than previously assumed.
Also listened to all the songs playing at once with varying volumes, and after the second time, I figured out the cues for changing volumes and pausing that made them all sound like an actual song. That was pretty cool and they worked surprisingly well together. I also used a lot of Dutch and Old High German references for the names. I was kind of inspired by He Is to lean towards old Kabbalism and early Christian interpretations of demons, which lead to German Jewish connection. After that, it was just finding names that fit the character background, subtly referenced the character's ancestry, and sounded cool. I actually put a lot of time into the etymology, basing it on the migration patterns of Dutch Jews in America and second-wave German emigration in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Also, my room mate was playing Madden as the Lions and since Detroit is kind of the perfect example of a city trying to fight overwhelming crime, economic depression, and general hopelessness, it just fit as a setting for this character. It all just sort of...came together with the inspiration I got from the songs and a few details from my own experiences. Plus, I couldn't make a character without designing a complex backstory and hinting at a future one
[/SIZE]View full character