Post by maniacalmeep02 on Jan 15, 2014 4:31:33 GMT -5
CYPHER CROSS |
General Age: 238 years Date of Birth: June 29th Gender: male Species: Cursed human/Necromancer Dimension: idk I’ll think of a title eventually Appearance link, link Although it is clear that Cypher at least used to be a human, his Necromantic curse has altered his appearance, making him somewhat resemble a corpse himself. He is tall, and thin to the point that much of his skeleton is visible, especially his hip bones, and his skin is pale, ashy white like bone, except for two black circles around his eyes. More recently, his hands also changed colour, turning dark red as though bloodstained, despite the fact that he had long since gotten into the habit of wearing gloves any time he touches a corpse when this happened. In addition, he has grown small, sharp claws, his irises are blood red, and his left eye has three small pupils in a triangular pattern. His hair, which used to be pure black has developed white and bright red streaks, his tongue ends in a triangular point as well, and his teeth are razor-sharp, especially two prominent fangs, though they aren’t visible unless his mouth is open. One of his most immediately obvious mutations though, are the small-ish, light gray horns on the right side of his head. One sits on top and curls back a little then up, and a smaller one starts at his right temple and curves up. He also has four black spikes, two at the base of his jaw on the right side, and two tiny ones just under his mouth. The mutation that is by far both the most noticeable and the most corpse-like is the changes made to his spine. It now extrudes from his back above his shoulder blades and up the back of his neck, as well as from the bottom of his ribcage to his tailbone. An extra rib cage-like structure has grown over his existing one on the outside as well, and white bones have grown around him, fitting between his first four ribs, and two more have grown from the base of his spine and around the front of his hip bones, as well as from the base of his neck over his shoulders. Four tiny, delicate looking ones have grown around his neck in the same way, too. He also seems to be starting to develop skeletal wings or something, as two more structures have appeared behind his shoulders, with two more rib-like bones growing around the outside of his shoulders, and two more are growing up-wards and are visible from the front. Two smaller, thin ones also grow out from the bottom of these structures, and similar spikes to these are at the base of his extra rib cage. These things look uncomfortable, and although his spine ripping itself partially out of his back was the worst pain he had ever experienced, they don’t cause him discomfort anymore, and are just flexible enough to not hinder his movement, though he can’t bend or move them by choice. He is unable to change his shirt, as his extra ribs keep it pinned to his body, and he is unable to remove these without injuring himself. However, since his body is, for all intents and purposes, frozen in time, the only reason he needs to bathe is getting dirty from an outside source –usually blood from corpses- and he doesn’t need to eat unless he wants to, he doesn’t really need to take it off. It is a shirt from one of the uniforms of his family’s former house staff, and is white with a high collar and fastens all the way down, and sleeves that end just past his elbows and have a small slit up one side with a smaller fasten at the top. However, because he can only surface-clean it, and is unable to remove it for proper washing, the front has accumulated bloodstains over the years, and has turned from white to a sort of mottled pink, though it otherwise mysteriously remains in almost-new condition. Incidentally, because his body is frozen as it is, his hair also never grows, and remains permanently short and choppy, as well as very messy. Other than that, most of the time he wears his ‘work’ clothes; his usual shirt and dark gray pants, as well as whatever the most modern equipment he can get his hands on is. At the moment, this consists of a long, black leather apron, knee-high black rubber boots, and elbow-length black rubber gloves, as well as goggles and a hygienic surgical mask, which is either on his face or hanging around his neck. These things are generally clean, as he is able to remove them for proper washing, unlike his shirt, and in the case of the pants, gloves, and mask, he has several of them. He is also generally careful in his work, and tries not to make too much of a mess. On the rare occasions that he leaves the house, since he knows being seen would scare people at best and get him captured or arrested at worst –especially since, for the most part, he only goes outside at night to either hunt animals in the woods or steal body parts from the local cemetery- he often wears a long, black cloak he made himself, and his gloves, or else, as of more recently, a black hoodie on warm nights. Personality Cypher, despite his somewhat demonic appearance and disturbing abilities and ‘job’, is actually very kind and gentle. He used to be shy to the point of being downright afraid of other people, and has retained a bit of the fear and paranoia, though because he has been almost completely without socialization for over two hundred years, he is very lonely, and would likely be very open and friendly to someone who was willing to keep him company. However, he is also rather unstable, and has many bizarre habits and paranoid delusions. For instance, although he would love company, his occasional outings have lead him to learn of the advances in law enforcement and weaponry, and because he tends to only leave his house at night and either go to the graveyard or the woods, or wander around alleyways and sketchy parts of town, he has seen a lot of crime, which has convinced him that most of humanity is inherently evil. Not helping this is his ‘profession’. When he was cursed, he became a necromancer, with the ability to communicate with spirits and help them pass from one world to the other. He started making deals with the more vengeful spirits, usually murder victims, or those who lost their lives too young. He follows their requests and instructions to build them an earthly vessel –stitching together a corpse, sometimes mutating it by adding or taking away parts, including those of animals- then uses necromantic rituals to get them from the spirit world into the new body so that they can avenge their own deaths, usually by killing or terrorizing those responsible. This has only helped to convince him that people are evil, and has made him even more paranoid. As a result, he keeps some of the dangerous failed experiments in his house as protection, although they generally attack him on sight as well, so he tends to carry around a weapon, usually his shovel, or the old, blood-stained axe that was used to murder his mother and house staff. Likes
Dislikes
Strengths
Weaknesses
Family Mother: Diane Cross (deceased) Father: Roy Cross (deceased) or Creator: “Death”, kinda Siblings: none History Cypher was born a normal human and only child to a wealthy couple near the start of the 1800s. Growing up, he was both sickly, and almost unnaturally close to his mother. He also displayed anti-social tendencies, likely inherited from his father, who was known to be insane, though medicine had not advanced to the point of being able to diagnose him properly. Both Cypher and his father were always quiet and withdrawn from society, to the point that Cypher needed to be schooled by his parents, as he wouldn’t even look the tutors they hired for him in the eye. Also, because of his refusal to leave the house, combined with his already sickly, weak disposition, doctors were often brought in on house calls, to the point that a doctor’s office was installed in the basement among the staff bedchambers. His life remained relatively uneventful, and he stayed quiet and soft-spoken until he was about twenty years old, when his father, in the midst of a psychotic episode, murdered his wife with an axe; first knocking her down with a blow with the blunt edge of the blade, then decapitating her, then proceeding to chop up her body and bury her in the back yard. Cypher, who had still been living in his parents’ home, too cowardly to move out on his own, witnessed this, and although he tried to hide, fled when he father found him and attempted to kill him. He also found that some of the house staff had escaped, though most had met the same fate as his mother, although their bodies hadn’t all been buried, and simply left in pieces to rot in the gory mess. Cypher was eventually cornered, but before his father could hit him, a bright light seemed to explode from the ground, enveloping Cypher and protecting him from harm as the spirit of his mother appeared, killed his father, and disappeared again, along with the light. As it hit him that he was now completely alone with his parents dead and the house staff -most of the people he had ever known- either also dead or missing, Cypher began to panic. As he did, his sanity started slipping quickly. Knowing that given the staff that had escaped authorities were probably on their way, and suddenly overcome with the urge to see his mother again, he dug up the sack containing the pieces of her body and brought them down to the doctor’s office in the basement, and, using extra supplies he found, began to stitch her back together. As he did this, despite the end result simply being her inanimate corpse, he found the act soothing. When he came back upstairs, he found that the police had come and gone, but the corpses of the house staff were still there, waiting to be cleaned up. Moving quickly, he managed to steal a good number of body parts and bring them back downstairs into the doctor’s office. Having made a mess of his clothes, he changed into one of the extra uniforms left in the basement, as well as leather work gloves and a cook’s apron, and began stitching them back together. As he finished the first full corpse, another bright flash of light occurred, and standing in the corner of the room was now a tall figure completely concealed with a dark, hooded robe carrying a scythe. Though terrified, he found himself unable to move as the figure began communicating with him. It explained that because of his mother’s spirit saving him, he had been given a second chance at life, and the years that his mother would have lived out had she not been killed, had been added to his own lifespan, because he had been a large part of the cause of her being able to avenge her own death. It also said that this had cursed him, and made him into a ‘Necromancer’, making him now able to communicate with the spirit world, and would be able to put spirits back into the bodies he fixed. If he did this for people who died too young, their remaining potential years would also be added to his own, and he would stop aging for that amount of time, however, if the ritual failed, he would become more and more disfigured and demonic with each additional failure, regardless of his lifespan. When the figure disappeared, a huge, tome bound in tanned human skin was left behind, and Cypher immediately began to pour over it, learning about the rituals he needed to perform what he now considered his ‘duties’. His eyes had also changed from blue to red after the figure left, and his left pupil had split into three dots in a triangular pattern. Meanwhile, when the police returned and found some of the bodies missing, they began boarding up the manor. Knowing that Cypher’s body had never been found, they assumed that the disappearances meant that he had still been inside, and had taken them. However, it was known that he had inherited some of his father’s mental disorders, and it was inferred that this meant he had also snapped and had gone feral, and was eating the bodies or something equally horrific, and would simply be a danger to anyone who went to look for him, so he was to be kept inside and left to die. Cypher didn’t notice, being two stories underground and far too preoccupied with performing his first ritual anyway. He completed it successfully, and the corpse got up, and started towards the door of the doctor’s office. Curious, Cypher followed it, unlocking doors and moving obstacles as it went, though when he found the exits boarded up, the raised spirit broke the boards on the door for him and continued outside into the night. Cypher was too scared to follow it beyond that, though, and simply locked the door behind it. Whatever it did, it must have been avenged, as another bright light enveloped Cypher for a few seconds a few hours later. Having always been sickly and afraid of death, this excited him, and he quickly set about continuing his ‘work’. He used another ritual to set up a nearby bathroom as a place to preserve his stock of body parts. As time went on, he found that although he still got tired, and needed to sleep, and could eat, he never got hungry. He never needed to care for himself in any way. It was like his body had become frozen in time. This allowed his obsession with his work to grow tenfold, and he began to experiment. He started combining different body parts, adding and taking away limbs and bones, extending the spines and rib cages, changing the arrangement of organs, even swapping around teeth, eyes, and even entire extra heads and the like. This is where the failures began. The figure, whom Cypher had now come to refer to as Death, hadn’t been lying when it said that failure would disfigure him. He became thin to the point of being emaciated and he became paler and paler until his skin was pure white, making him somewhat resemble a skeleton. Only enhancing this, wide, black, tattoo-like circles appeared around his eyes, furthering his face’s similarity to a skull. His teeth, tongue and hair changed, and he grew claws and his horns, spikes, and strange ‘exoskeleton’, and his hands turned red. However, through some successful, particularly strong clients, he was granted a few supernatural abilities, including is night vision and invisibility powers, as well as his reinforced bones and capability to summon spirits, or borrow their power. As the years have gone by, he has replaced his old apparatus with new, more modern surgical equipment and tools he’s managed to steal on occasional outings. He has also taken to looting the near-by graveyard for ‘supplies’, concealing his mutations with a large, loose-fitting black robe he stitched together from old linens, or, more recently, a black hoodie. Along with the physical mutations, his sanity began to slip, and along with this, his loneliness grew into outright desperation for companionship. To remedy this, he attempted to keep some of the failed experiments –those who had gained sentience, but had not been properly imbued with a sprit or consciousness- as pets, though they mostly tried to attack him. He began keeping them in the unused rooms of the house as ‘guards’. Although he would love companionship, and would never dream of hurting a living person himself, any who have wandered into the manor over the years and come across him or one of the experiments have been scared and attempted to flee. Since he knows that as time has gone on, law enforcement has gotten better and better, and what he’s doing would probably be hard to explain at best, but probably highly illegal, he has become paranoid. Although he is harmless, even friendly to other humans, as he lost his sanity, he turned to animals for companionship, and, using either his tools, his shovel, the hatchet used in the murders, which he managed to recover, or his father’s old revolver pistol, which was eventually possessed and modified to never run out of bullets via a successful contract, to kill, then mutate and revive animals from the forest near the manor, though their resurrections are rarely permanent. He has also made deals with some of the spirits he has resurrected, allowing him to summon them or quickly revive nearby bodies when he needs to, and with this combined with his weapons, he was able to massacre an entire wolf pack, so has many canine parts, though in the past his pets have included rabbits, birds -including hawks and eagles, and even the occasional fox, bobcat or deer part. Meanwhile, the town surrounding his manor, which has always had a high crime rate, has been plagued by frequent ‘zombie’ sightings, though any who are killed by them always turn out to have committed a crime, usually murder. Cypher has also been seen occasionally in the grave yard, although because of his black robe and pale, skull-like face, people assume he’s some kind of ghost or grim reaper. These two things, along with the ‘abandoned’ manor, have given the town a reputation as haunted. People think there might be a connection between these three things, but given the tendency that people who enter the manor to investigate have to disappear, and the trend of the only apparent victims being criminals, the case has long since been abandoned, and passed off as urban legend. Cypher peaceably continues his work in his basement, oblivious to his effect on the outside world. He also kept his mother’s body, though before he figured out that he could ‘borrow’ parts from the graveyard, he had to resort to using pieces of her. He has kept her skull, though, and he keeps it on a shelf above the sleeping area he’s made for himself in one of the staff dorms by pushing several beds together. |