The return of World of Darkness the Lost

[greengiant]

Welcome to The Meadous: a small city, somewhere near the ocean, where hardly anyone is what they seem. By day, the city is full of NPCs bustling to and fro like so many little pastel animals, but at night... night is when we enter the true World of Darkness.

And you're a part of it.




So a year and a half ago we had an AU meme involving everyone's characters in We the Lost being player characters from gamelines in the World of Darkness. Given that we've got a bunch of characters who weren't around yet at the time, I figured this would be as good an opportunity as any to resurrect it, only this time using the splats from the New World of Darkness

The options for this AU are as follows:

VAMPIRES:
Whether your Embrace came as an act of violence or seduction, you have been changed by your sire into an immortal creature with a fatal sunlight allergy with strange powers fueled by the blood you so desperately crave as nourishment. Will you be able to carve out a new unlife for yourself among the murky political waters of the Kindred or will you succumb to the ennui of undeath?

WEREWOLVES:
The walls between this world and the world of spirits are thin. When those spirits come into our world and make trouble, that's when werewolves come in. Created when the moon and the primal ur-wolf loved each other very much, these lupine shape-shifters hunt spirits in secret, powered by primal rage.

MAGE:
In the mythic past, the humans of Atlantis built a ladder to reach the heavens and rule the world. It broke, shattering the world into the Fallen World we now live in and the Supernal Realms, which are the true face of reality and which mages visit on the spirit journeys that provide their awakenings, giving them access to the powers of magic.

PROMETHEANS:
Constructed beings created from corpses, the Prometheans travel down the slow and lonely road of their Pilgrimmages to becoming human in truth. It's not easy, however, as the Disquiet they create in the humans they interact with, the wastelands that form around them, and the angry mobs that eventually come after them.

CHANGELINGS:
So the thing about Fairies? They're assholes whose main hobby is kidnapping people and replacing them with shitty replicas called Fetches and only a fraction of the kidnapped ever make it back home. The Changelings, their bodies irrevocably changed by their time in Arcadia, with magic disguising them as normal humans, tend to gravitate toward each other, as the only ones who understand the trauma they've been through.

HUNTERS:
As you might have noticed, there's a lot of monsters hiding out in the shadows of the world of Darkness. What the heck are ordinary humans even supposed to do to protect themselves? That's where Hunters come in. Hunters are ordinary humans who know (or think they know) just what is going on in the World of Darkness and they're going to use that knowledge (and copious amounts of ammo) to protect the rest of humanity.

SIN-EATERS:
Yesterday, you died. Well, maybe not literally, but some time in the past you were dead for a very short period of time and when you made it through and back into the world of the living, you brought a guest along. Good luck; you'll be sharing your second chance at life with your Geist and sometimes you'll have to do them little favors--but since they helped you get back from the dead that's fair, right?

SECOND EDITION AND FANLINES:
But maybe none of that fits you. That's okay. There's a lot of other, less well-tread options. Mummies who rise from the dead for short periods of time and are immensely powerful when they do? Inhuman quasi-mechanical demons who were angels working for the God-Machine until they Fell? The bestial incarnations of primal fears? Or maybe you're a mad scientist or a magical girl! There's a lot of options out here is what we're saying.


Go! Have fun! Talk about your AUs and maybe roleplay a little in the comments. If you're already a World of Darkness creature or used to be, you can talk about what your character would be like in a proper city instead of Zephyr's cozy little village or pick another splat for them to be instead.

(P.S. If you just want to link threads from the last time we did this meme, that's cool too.)

Comments

[greengiant]

WELP, it's my meme so I might as well start things up.

So! About twenty years ago, seventeen-year-old Makoto Kino was in her second year at Juuban High School when she got kidnapped by an entity who she knew only as the Keeper to serve as an enforcer of discipline of the servants in his manse. She then spent what was to her four years in that role as the ambient magic of Arcadia shaped her into an Ogre of the Gargantuan seeming, ending up nearly ten foot tall, very green, and wholly fangy and clawy.

Then the Keeper disappeared for a period, at which point a number of their Changelings made a run for it--including, surprisingly, the one who'd once been Makoto. She emerged on the other side of the hedge in a completely foreign country, about fifteen years and a continent away from when she ought to have come out.

Luckily, this was when she bumped into Amanda Ramirez, who has very little caution in general and certainly not for damsels in distress.

A year later, and the young woman whose ID cards read "MAKO KINO" is a member in good standing of the Spring Court of the local freehold where she's known to her fellow Changelings as 'Lin.' Mako's currently taking culinary arts classes at the local community college and when she's not studying she's working as a sales clerk at a florist shop downtown.

ETA: Oh yeah, I should note that in WoDtL, Mako's 6'6 in both her Mask and Mien appearances unless she invokes her Kith Blessing of Spurious Stature, where she can temporary grow to her height from Arcadia.

just gonna pull out the account I usually use for this AU...

[hazardlight]

Ammond - or, as she's called in AUs where she isn't a troll or a talking rat, Amanda Ramirez - is a Sin-Eater one of the Bound if she's going to call herself anything because while she doesn't have any problem with the whole "helping ghosts" thing she is of the opinion that "Sin-Eater" is an impossibly twee and stupid-sounding label thank you very much.

Anyway. She grew up in The Meadous, working class and with a large extended family of which at least some of the adults were not in the country legally; Amanda herself and most of her cousins were born here but there was always kind of the lurking chance that someone (or multiple someones) from the previous generation could get deported which does not exactly foster a great love of the system in a kid. Also she was kind of a problem child just because she is, inherently, a little shit with a reckless streak, and by the time she turned eighteen she'd managed to make the spectacularly poor life choice of driving her dirt bike while drunk in a thunderstorm, under which circumstances it's probably not surprising that when lightning struck a little too close she freaked out and went off the road and ended up in a bloody heap at the bottom of a cliff.

What's a little more surprising is that she got up and walked it off, now with a death elemental/super ghost, personifying fatal vehicular collisions, grafted onto her soul. Her Geist - which, to those who can see such things, looks like a teenage boy who bleeds gasoline from multiple open wounds and has blank white hyperreflective eyes, and who she calls Roadrash - brought her back from the dead so he could live vicariously through her, and gives her spooky death magic. She's had him hanging around for a couple of years now, and mostly gets along with him, although sometimes it's necessary to bribe him with repeated viewings of Mad Max movies to get him to shut up about how easy it would be to jump the median and drive into oncoming traffic.

Amanda is not really any less reckless now. As one of the Forgotten, who died by sheer rotten luck, she's inclined to see the world as a series of gambles; as a Celebrant, she's determined to live it up as much as she can until her luck runs out for good. Also her manifestations are really cool even if she's a lot better using them with her Industrial Key than she is using them with her Cold Wind Key. (Roadrash thinks she should learn to use the Pyre Flame Key too - apparently his previous hosts could, but the circumstances of her death weren't fiery enough for her to pick it up instinctively - and she's starting to agree from what she's seen of other Bound who can use it. It's not easy to pick up a new Key, though, so she's still working on it.)

She's also really obnoxiously curious about all these other monster people running around, even if most of their supernatural deals aren't nearly as cool as ghost party magic except maybe the changelings. She's kind of biased on that count because she's dating that super cool giantess she pulled out of a shrub a while back. When she's not partying or ghostbusting, she works in her uncle's auto shop, and restores old motorbikes on the side.

Re: just gonna pull out the account I usually use for this AU...

[greengiant]

Amanda's Celebrant influence is why Mako/Lin ended up in the Spring Court and not the Summer Court. She can't actually see Roadrash, but she's attempted to pass messages to him via Amanda.

(Amanda's probably been helping Mako catch up to the 21st century too, since when she left it was still 1995)

[hazardlight]

Lin may not be able to see or hear Roadrash, but he can certainly see and hear her! He's not always really very interested in interacting with people other than Amanda and the other drivers on the road, who he absolutely should not be allowed to interact with - even other bound and geists don't always hold his attention - but sometimes he'll pass messages back through Amanda. Lin's pretty cool, he guesses, for someone who isn't currently driving into a wall at high speed. Which is high praise from Roadrash.

(Of course she has. Although Sin-Eaters tend to gravitate a bit toward older technology anyway, especially ones who make a lot of use of the Industrial Key; Ammond's great on cultural stuff but she may not be the best person to ask for computers or phones.)

[greengiant]

Well, she'll want cultural stuff anyway! Twenty years is a heck of a lot of culture to get caught up on, especially if you're from an entirely different culture/country.

[sillyoldbear]

Created by one Alan Alexander from a teddy bear that had belonged to the (sadly deceased) child who'd once been kind to him and abandoned soon after, Winnie the Pooh is a Construct, a special kind of Promethean who has been crafted from inanimate material rather than human flesh. Being of the Ulgan lineage, his cloth body was pulled apart by spirits and then reassembled, imbued with the curse of unbear life.

To those with eyes that can see, Pooh resembles a leathern teddy bear come apart at the seams. To others, he resembles nothing so much as a grizzly bear cub with ratty yellow fur with a distinctly inorganic feel to it.

Somehow he's avoided animal control until now, but who knows how long that's going to last.

[chalicejoker]

I am reasonably certain that at some point, Hajime's AU Darkroach weird bug hobgoblin has totally picked up this strange bear and tried to give it to Hajime.

Hajime was less than pleased.

[sillyoldbear]

It's okay, Pooh and Darkroach can be friends even if Hajime doesn't like it. For all we know hobgoblins are immune to Disquiet.

[chalicejoker]

So Hajime in this incarnation is an Airtouched Changeling, a wind elemental. Thanks to the way time flows in Faerie, he's not sure how long he's been gone. Only a few years passed in this world, but for him, it feels like he spent thousands of years as part of some Fae's storm system. He's spent so long being a literal force of nature that he has largely forgotten how to be a human; he's having to relearn things like emotion and manners. While he was a bit gruff and stoic before he was taken, that's only intensified during his time in Faerie. Thanks to his best friend there, a lightning elemental, he was able to escape--but his self-sacrificing friend wasn't so lucky. Hajime's not sure if his friend is dead or not, but he knows he'd love to see the guy again if possible--and he keeps toying with the idea of trying to go back to pull off some kind of rescue.

He doesn't have many memories of the human life he was stolen from, save for a few strong ones of being protective of a younger sister. He's not sure, but he thinks he may have been dragged to Faerie in trying to stop them from taking her. (He'd be rather on point with that guess.) He's identified his Fetch as a goofy, irresponsible takoyaki seller who runs a food cart, and he wants nothing more than to kill this creature and take his life back. The only thing stopping him is that the Fetch is so goofy and agreeable that he thinks he'd be identified as the fraud...and he wonders if the people who once cared about him might now prefer the Fetch's company. Besides, the Fetch knows more about being a human than he does at this point. He has no way of knowing that the little sister he left behind has known right from the start that this, for whatever reason, is not really her brother.

Though he swears he's not much of a joiner, he kept finding himself pulled into the Summer Court's business. He ended up joining the court and has risen quickly in its ranks thanks to the Court's ritual focus on competition and Hajime's own prowess where physical competitions are concerned. Being overly combative and too competitive for his own good serve him well here, and it's not much of a mystery to anyone why Hajime kept falling back into Court business no matter how hard he tried to avoid getting involved in anything. Fate has its reasons for pulling him back into the courtly life. He keeps getting told that he cannot fight fate and win, but he doesn't believe that. His lightning elemental friend liked to insist that fate could be fought, and Hajime always did like a good fight.

He likes to go by the alias of Chalice; in some of the circles where the Summer Court needs to show a little muscle, he knows using one's real name isn't safe. He has ID cards and things naming him as one Ryo Mikami, since his Fetch is currently using his real name.

He's gone out and had a few adventures in the Hedge here and there, and his most recent journey ended in his accidentally having some giant hobgoblin insect-thing follow him home like a little lost puppy. He has tried to discourage the hobgoblin, but so far, nothing has worked.

[hazardlight]

Amanda is pretty much always under the appropriate oath to see Fae stuff because otherwise dating someone who is taller than she looks gets awkward real quick, and while she and Hajime don't really run in the same circles most of the time, she has run into Darkroach a few times and thinks he's adorable, because she's weird like that. This probably does not help much with Hajime's attempts to convince the bug to go back to the Hedge.

[greengiant]

That and I'm pretty she told Mako/Lin she was even cuter as a monster girl.

[hazardlight]

Well, obviously.

[chalicejoker]

Darkroach eats up that attention, because yay, new friend! (He is remarkably consistent no matter the AU.)

So now she's got a pale green guy with white hair resisting the urge to offer her a giant bug, because while he doesn't need or want this, letting just anyone run around with a weird rogue hobgoblin is probably not a good idea.

[hazardlight]

Yeah, Amanda absolutely should not have, uh, "custody" of a goblin bug thing. She would not know the first thing about the care and keeping of Darkroaches. As evidenced by the fact that she keeps giving him junk food.

[chalicejoker]

He's not really fond of the feeding his weird hobgoblin junk food, mostly because that will only encourage it to stay around. Kind of like feeding stray cats, only less cuddly and more chirpy.

Also, now it's following him around whining for Twinkies.

[radiantchicken]

In this AU, Torin is a very human Mage. He's a Thyrsus, which means he's physically strong and has a lot of Life and Spirit magic. He has a few ties to the Free Council, but for the most part, he prefers to keep to himself. He's old enough and experienced enough that he can get away with this. He's very coy when the topic of his age comes up, and it's not unusual for those who hang around him to get a sense that he's much, much older than the middle-aged man he appears to be. He's actually pretty well-groomed for a Thyrsus, though the brightly-colored feathers he's got braided into his hair certainly play to expectations.

He lives in an aviary, and a visit to said aviary is all but impossible if Torin doesn't wish you to find it. Inside the aviary is all manner of brightly colored, squawking, colorful bird. Just be careful what you say around some of the parrots--they might not be ordinary birds. Torin has a great affinity for birds, as well as for dinosaurs--the aviary's large enough to house several skeletons as well. It's always wise to respect one's ancestors, after all.

When Torin uses his magic, his Nimbus tends to inspire feelings of bravery in those around him. He has yet to take in an apprentice, though it's rumored that only the strongest and bravest will do. If he were to take an apprentice, he'd probably test the would-be Mage with a simple task...like having them fight a dragon armed only with a tiny magical handgun. That's just how he rolls.

[wingsister]

In this AU, Savil "Sayvil" Ashkevron (she changed the spelling of her name to make it easier to pronounce) is back to being a human again. She's a Mage, of course--an Obrimos, in fact, which are what you might call the paladins of Mages. That is to say that they tend to believe they've been Awakened in service of some higher power and tend to dedicate their lives to Doing Good and Making the World a Better Place.

Unlike her neighbor Torin, she very much seems to be the age she is, which happens to be somewhere in her seventies, perhaps close to eighty. Her hair has been grey since her thirties and she's got a very prominent nose, which according to her is hereditary. She tends to dress plainly, in trousers and tunic tops, and she wears a lot of white, with a smattering of blues and greys.

Also unlike Torin, she's actually been through a few apprentices. Most of them managed to make it out of their apprenticeships fairly intact or if they perished did so in a fairly valiant and useful manner, but the last but one, a young man by the name of Ty, ended up as one of the Mad Ones after his twin brother died at the hands of a rival gangmember. It broke her heart to take Ty down, despite all the awful shit he was doing, and she wouldn't have taken her final apprentice if said apprentice hadn't been her nephew.

(Said nephew, who'd been Awakened during Ty's rampage, had been staying with her after his father threw him out of his house for being gay. He managed to make it out of his apprenticeship surprisingly well for such a traumatic start and is currently a Citizen Agent of good standing in the Free Council.)

All that mess happened twenty years ago, of course, and these days she's perfectly happy to devote what time she would have used to train an apprentice to the study of leylines, as part of the Telluric Legacy. When she was younger she served as a Letter Carrier for the Free Council, but she's long retired from all that.

[spitefulvitae]

Normally, Natalie is a Requiem-style vampire, but if we go for something different....

Natalie Audet was a young woman interested in the occult and magic and all things forbidden and dark and spooky. She fell in with a "cult" of fellow college-age occult types, and what do you know? They actually managed to attract the attention of something horrible and otherworldly. It snatched her and several of the other group members up and hauled them away to a deep, dark corner of Arcadia. They liked to play with darkness, did they? Then they could dwell in it and serve it and become one with it. Her durance transformed her into a Darkling, of the Leechfinger kith.

Natalie isn't completely sure why or how she managed to escape from that darkness, and there's a part of her that wants to go back. The "Father" that she keeps skittishly referring to was her keeper, and the few moments of attention and praise it gave to her are much clearer memories than the deep darkness and the things she had to do to survive in it. She's a member of the Autumn court, albeit one who sticks to the fringes and keeps her distance for she has little trust for anyone. Few trust her in kind, because she seems a few steps away from going Loyalist on everyone and selling them all out, from the way she unsubtly pines for her keeper's attentions.

No fetch was left behind when Father snatched her and the others up. There was no time for it, and no real need. They were reported as missing persons that were tangled up in 'satanic rituals', became part of local urban legends, and were gone long enough that they were declared legally dead. She has no desire to go back to her old human life, because it pales in comparison to this new one that she's found herself in. Natalie is always Natalie, though her last name rotates depending on who or what she feels the most loyalty to, or that she derives the most security from. Her powers focus upon remaining unseen and pulling at the fears of others, although she's been learning how to not just siphon life from others but impart that life into someone else to heal them. Healing's a helpful thing and makes you wanted, in a freehold with as much fighting in it as hers. And if it gives her a way to be useful to that one Summer courtier who seems nearly as bad at properly human-ing as she is, well...

Natalie's mask is her regular appearance, if a little paler and a little more light-shy. Her mien is white as a sheet and sunken-eyed, with unnaturally long fingers and a constantly hungry look. She does filing and accounting work for one of the better-established Autumn courtiers, partially for the sake of earning her keep and partially to get her used to working for a living and properly engaging with others.

[chalicejoker]

So Hajime's activities going into the Hedge fighting things in his spare time on unauthorized field trips doing who-knows-what for the Summer Court mean he's stumbled back out of the Hedge more than a little worse for the wear, possibly even passing out in inconvenient, unsafe places. That healing thing? Super useful. (Also probably a good awkward first meeting...)

[kingroadie]

Gonna try my hand at this meme, be it with limited knowledge of all the extended bits and bobs of this universe. Pardon my pixie dust.

Eddie grew up pretty normally in Seattle, single parent household, a big affection for heavy metal. He had planned on either going to college or becoming a full time roadie. He was 21 at that point and excited about his future.

His plans were derailed completely by his father's death. Sorting through his father's belongings lead Eddie to finding out his parents were... very very different people than he knew. His father had been a hunter, having vowed to slay wayward fae, vampires and werewolves. Only to end up marrying/dating a very notorious pack leader, Succoria the White Wolf. Her track record includes a lot of murder and things people only talk about in whispers. Succoria died in childbirth, leaving Eddie to really know her from very domestic photos around the house. A white haired woman with a toothy grin who loomed over her spouse in photos.

Needlessly to say, Eddie was left considerably stunned by this knowledge. Being more than a little emotionally compromised he ended up taking up his father's mantle and carrying his mother's axe. Eddie naturally took a bit too much after his mother, taking out his denial and anguish on anything that got in his way for a three years. He was a lone wolf who lingered at the edges of other groups and used his skills unwisely. He bumbled around blindly, pissing off a variety of magical creatures in his wake and endangering the rest of the community with his dumb actions. Actual Hunters had to quell the problems he left in his wake and make sure to keep things from getting out of hand.

After a much needed shake down by ACTUAL hunters at 24. Eddie was forced to re-examine his life, the Hunters dealt with him and offered him a position after he had some counseling/was watched very heavily by the community. They were not going to let him run off into the night again and cause havoc via stupidity.

He's currently 40, he's dropped his father's old mantle for something else with less of a history, The Roadie. He works regionally in Seattle with a group of fellow hunters known as Ironheade.

He's friendly with what bit of the magical community is willing to actually approach him. It isn't publicly known who he was, but hunters are always someone you should be wary of.

[marywatson]

Because I'm not great at AUs when I don't know the fandom of the AU I'm incorporating... Have some morphing of her experiences to fit the AU :P

Mary was taken by the Fae in the middle of what was to be her final mission. She was an assassin, but the killing wasn't all it was cracked up to be. She had planned to leave it all behind. Not that her intent to leave mattered, when she faced the judgement of the Fae.

The Fae was supposed to be her partner. Her aid. Oh how blind she was. How slow. When she woke in the place of nightmares, it was obvious what was to happen: she was to pay for her crimes...

The things that happened to her were things she would rather not talk about - ever. Well, unless pressed (I'm planning to use a lot of Mary's Box Experiences for this). And she tries to hold to what little good is left in her, but it is difficult, since the Fae make it so easy for her to give into the Darkling that she has become.

She never expected to escape - or be freed - she isn't sure which. But she has and she looks around her and the world is at once entirely the same and entirely new. She is no longer what she was, but nor is she what she had hoped to become.

But then, she encountered one John Watson and later, his 'dead' friend Sherlock Holmes. And she thought that maybe - just maybe all that had happened to her had been just a nightmare that she had finally woken from...

Until one of the Fae, in the guise of Charles Augustus Magnussen, threatened to reveal all to John and torment Mary again. Mary decided to take matters into her own hands, but Sherlock had interrupted. She couldn't let the Fae know how much she cared for Sherlock, so in vain of doing the best to save everyone, she shot her friend. It all would have been fine, except her hand had the slightest tremble when she aimed....

She didn't have long. The Fae were winning again. She typed up her story. Everything that she had done before being captured and what she had been turned into during her time with the Fae....

And now, Sherlock knows at least about her life as an assassin. And John knows as well. The only way either of them will learn about the other life she's led, is if they read the A.G.R.A. Memory stick....

Mary's mask is her normal appearance - except when she passes into the full light of only the moon. If there is other light around, then the Mask still holds somewhat. When she is in the presence of only moonlight, her new form is revealed and she looks not unlike the Weeping Angels.