Spoiler: SIKSTASLATHALIN as...Spoiler: Booker “The Dragon” DrakeNAME
Booker “The Dragon” Drake
SPIRITUAL AGE
35
AGE AT DEATH
35
CAUSE OF DEATH
Car Bomb
DEPARTMENT
None yet.
RANK
New Recruit
SPECIALTY
Stealth, Combat, & Driving
APPEARANCE
Spoiler: Booker
https://i.imgur.com/afQ8WAu.jpg
6'0 in height and a muscular 185 pounds. Booker is man whose life has a been a constant battle, living wild on the streets of Black Iron City. Surviving on his wits and his fists. His skin is scarred and weathered and his brown hair is short but generally messy, his blue eyes show the permanent haze of a lifetime lost to drugs, blood, and alcohol.
Usually dressed as the above (minus the blood, gun, and radio) even as an adult with his own apartment he still lives very much like the orphaned child he was in the past.
HISTORY
Like many kids born in Black Iron City, Booker grew up in an orphanage. All he knew of his parents were they weren't residents of the B.I.C. and they named him Booker Drake. Years later he tried looking up the surname Drake in hopes of finding them, but when everything came up a dead end he figured they just tacked it on as an afterthought. Either way after a few years of living in what amounted to a refugee shelter for kids he escaped and lived on the streets.
In hindsight...staying in the Orphanage might've been the smarter option or at the very least least dangerous one. On the dirty streets of the B.I.C. you learn quick or you die quicker, he wasn't the only kid that ran away that day, but by the end of the first month he was the only one left. He had earned a small rep for being quick in a fight and able to take some hits, so one of the biggest Crime Families, the Gonmsh came to the dirty young brawler and gave him a home and three meals a day and all he had to do was sell his soul. Which the starving young boy quickly did. Little did he know just how much that roof and food would cost him.
The beginning of the end is what Booker often calls his childhood and adolescence. He was trained, broken, rebuilt, and broken again. Aside from a few instances of lucidity his youth has always been a blur, in fact he often doesn't even remember anything before his first kill at sixteen. Some young drug dealer was sneaking around on Gonmsh territory undercutting their businesses. Booker was given a pistol and a location, the first kill is always the hardest and the young hitman almost messed it up, he hesitated pulling the trigger and almost got a knife through his stomach for it. He pulled the trigger out of fear, but got the job done so he got paid. It got easier after that, they still haunted him for a few years, but once he learned to detach, killing things became second nature.
He continued to train and take on bigger and bigger jobs. Always quick, always ruthless it's how he earned the nickname "The Dragon" he earned his pay then drank or drugged himself into oblivion. A vicious cycle and one that looked to be without end, until one night he was so far into the bottle and pipe that he didn't notice the apartment building he was staying in was on fire. Passed out on his floor he didn't smell the smoke or feel the heat as it began to eat the floor out from under him. He slept through his floor collapsing into the floor under it and only woke up when he landed in someone's kitchen sink and broke the old rusted water spout off in his back and by then it was too late or so he thought. Firefighters found him and dragged him out before they handed him too EMTs who took him to a hospital. It took Doctor's thirty hours to work the rusted pipe and all its pieces out of him. As he still had a large amount of drugs and alcohol in his system they couldn't give the man any sedatives so he was mostly awake through the entire operation.
It was a pain he never knew existed and this is after he'd been shot, poisoned, and set on fire a couple of times. He didn't come to his senses again until six month after the fire, he was forced into detox and forced to face the monster he once was. All their screams and bloody faces tormented him more than a few times he had to be restrained to keep him from killing a Nurse or Orderly. Soon though his madness cleared up and he was released, he recovered for another month and came to the conclusion that he needed out of this life. But leaving has never been an option. You don't leave the Gonmsh unless it's in a body bag, still Booker had to try.
He approached the Boss and laid out his plans, any normal member of the family likely would've been shot on the spot, but a popular pearl of wisdom that had sprung up during Booker's time with the family came into play. "When The Dragon speaks, even the Kings must listen." The Boss didn't want to lose his greatest weapon, but at the same time knew that if he denied Booker his wish he would be the next body in Booker's Tally. So he came up with an impossible task...or at least one he thought was impossible. Booker was to kill the entire Hastings Crime Family whose territory was adjacent to Gonmsh Territory so the family could take it over. At the time the Hastings were among the most powerful and well-armed Syndicates in Black Iron City anyone going against them would be killed before they got to the front gates. Booker took the job without hesitation and within a week the Hastings were being buried in their family cemetery and all their holdings and businesses were under Gonmsh control. The Boss granted Booker's request more out of fear than a desire to keep his end of the bargain.
This began Booker's life as a free man, but while he wouldn't be asked to kill anyone, he would never truly be free of it. He knew this...but just didn't care...he knew that eventually trouble would find him again...but he also knew that trouble would be biting off far more than it could chew if it did come for him.
Meanwhile, word of Booker’s exploits with the Gonmsh reached a group calling themselves the Gatekeepers. They approached him not long after he’d severed his ties with the Gonmsh, offering him immortality in exchange for putting his “unique talents” to good use and becoming so much more than just a former assassin. Booker was no fool; no matter how nice the Gatekeepers seemed to be on the surface, he would not let himself be turned into anyone’s puppet ever again. Sometimes he would agree to help the Gatekeepers with a few odd jobs here and there, but only on a case-by-case basis and not unless the price was right, and any refusal on Booker’s part was non-negotiable. The Gatekeepers agreed to these terms, but as time went on, they began to resort to subtle attempts to coerce Booker into doing things for them, and seemed less and less willing to take no for an answer. Needless to say, Booker was soon fed up with these antics and stormed out, only for his car to explode that night with him inside.
As the smoke cleared from the car bomb, Booker witnessed the Gatekeepers putting out the flames and surrounding his charred corpse with torches in hand, only to be forced to flee as another group suddenly put out the torches and battled the Gatekeepers. The latter group quickly led a confused Booker to safety, and after one thing led to another, Booker found himself face to face with a man named Aidoneus. But unlike the Gonmsh and the Gatekeepers, Aidoneus demanded nothing from Booker, and his offer to help Booker adjust to his new “condition” came with no strings attached. Ordinarily, Booker would’ve been happy to just walk away and start going after at the SOBs who’d killed him, but as the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Spoiler: LADY CELESTE as...Spoiler: AidoneusNAME
Aidoneus
SPIRITUAL AGE
51
AGE AT DEATH
51
CAUSE OF DEATH
Exsanguination as part of a human sacrifice.
DEPARTMENT
Primary Leadership
RANK
Director
SPECIALTY
No one really knows, as nowadays Aidoneus rarely intervenes directly in the field unless absolutely necessary.
APPEARANCE
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/..._-_Profile.jpg
HISTORY
In life, Aidoneus was a lesser noble from Byzantine Greece. An avid scholar, he delved deeply into the philosophical and written works of old almost as soon as he’d learned to read, even as this near-obsession with acquiring as much knowledge as he could occasionally strained his relationships with his friends and family. Eventually, however, this pursuit of knowledge seemed to pay off, attracting the attention of a secret society calling themselves the Gatekeepers, who claimed to have transcended the boundaries of life and death. The Gatekeepers sent a number of coded messages to Aidoneus over the following years, partly to test him, but upon eventually solving each code, Aidoneus realized that they were trying to recruit him. Aidoneus, however, had little more than an academic interest in the Gatekeepers’ claims of achieving immortality, believing that any such immortality outside of the natural order would do more harm than good in the long term, and so he declined their invitations.
The Gatekeepers seemed to take this fairly well, and opted instead to pay Aidoneus to translate various manuscripts for them. This arrangement continued for many years, and by all accounts both parties benefited from the deal. The Gatekeepers got the translations they wanted, and Aidoneus got a steady income from a very generous patron. Despite never actually joining their ranks, Aidoneus was even invited to quite a few social gatherings hosted by higher-class Gatekeeper nobles and gained a degree of prestige by proxy.
It was all too good to be true.
As the years passed, the manuscripts Aidoneus was given became increasingly disturbing in subject and tone, including graphic descriptions of torture and black magic hidden within codes similar to the ones the Gatekeepers had used in the past, the foul practices all too often described in a sickeningly positive light. The social gatherings, once no different than the usual parties of the nobility, led more and more frequently to Aidoneus’ hosts cornering him and trying to pressure him into “proving his devotion”, and soon even a single drop of drink seemed to leave him in a mindless stupor. All of this eventually led Aidoneus to realize that the Gatekeepers were trying to brainwash him and coerce him into the fold.
Finally having enough, Aidoneus quietly slipped out of what would be his last such gathering while his hosts were distracted. On his way out, he heard suspicious noises coming from behind a wall, and discovered a secret chamber filled with bloodstains, occult symbols, and people bound and gagged in small cages. Aidoneus freed as many of the prisoners as he could, but the Gatekeepers caught him and dragged him onto a stone altar, where they slashed his wrists, slit his throat, and left him to bleed out on the altar.
Aidoneus’ murderers recited a spell that would hand over his soul to the “higher being” that they served, but with the last of his strength, Aidoneus managed to sabotage the ritual by kicking the leader backwards into some of the candles surrounding the altar. This simultaneously broke the magical barrier and stopped the leader from finishing the incantation, allowing Aidoneus’ spirit to break free after death. As he died, Aidoneus’ spirit lashed out in a blind rage, destroying much of the chamber and killing several of the Gatekeepers, though some had managed to escape. Only when the ensuing destruction endangered the very prisoners he had originally tried to save did Aidoneus regain his senses, helping the remaining prisoners to escape before leaving the rest of the place to burn to the ground.
In death, Aidoneus found himself unable to cross over, his soul too burdened to find peace, and so he took to keeping watch over the ones he’d left behind and searching for the surviving Gatekeepers, knowing that they would surely cause even more harm if allowed to roam free. As the years passed, Aidoneus’ loved ones in life all eventually died and crossed over, yet still he remained, tracking down the Gatekeepers and thwarting their plans at every possible opportunity.
Years became decades.
Decades became centuries.
During that time, Aidoneus learned to adapt to the changing times and make full use of his ghostly existence, his spirit wandering throughout the world and encountering many others who were like him: lost souls who had died before their time but had not yet crossed over. Aidoneus helped them as best he could, and managed to help most of them eventually find peace. Some spirits, however, were simply too broken or too corrupted to find peace quite so easily, and to make matters worse, many of those particular spirits would go on to cause harm to the living. Aidoneus did what he could to stop them, but he could not handle them all on his own. Fortunately for him, though, Aidoneus found a growing number of allies from among the very spirits he’d sought to help, some of whom willingly stayed behind for a while in an attempt to make up for the time they never got to enjoy in life. Many of these spirits, in turn, sought out other lost souls, helping the lost to find peace and dealing with the broken and the corrupted as necessary, while also bringing even more wandering spirits into the fold. Thus did this loosely-formed coalition grow and solidify itself into what would eventually become the modern Afterlife Agency.
Throughout all those years, Aidoneus has maintained a strong leadership role within the Agency, still staying behind even as countless agents have come and gone. However, though there has been no sign of the Gatekeepers in centuries, Aidoneus still suspects that some remnant of them may have survived, possibly in a different form by now. If and when they do re-emerge, the AA must be prepared.
Spoiler: Makaria “Kari” WilliamsNAME
Makaria “Kari” Williams
SPIRITUAL AGE
20
AGE AT DEATH
Unborn
CAUSE OF DEATH
Miscarriage
(~2 weeks after conception)
DEPARTMENT
None yet.
RANK
Senior Trainee
SPECIALTY
Stealth
APPEARANCE
https://images.cwtv.com/images/c/pho..._0de4_1280.jpg
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bl...onal_Photo.jpg
HISTORY
Like all spirits of children who died far too young, the miscarried baby who would later adopt the name “Makaria” (“Kari” for short) underwent a metaphysical development in which her spirit form would gradually “grow up” with adequate care as she gained strength. Such child-spirits require special care during this process, and must traditionally maintain a healthy attachment to their living relatives under the close supervision of ADA-appointed guardians, until eventually they are deemed mature enough to make “the Choice”. In Kari’s case, however, there were a number of complications; not only had Kari been the product of a drunken one-night stand that neither party ever fully remembered, but her birth mother turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the grief from the miscarriage and was subsequently committed to a mental hospital.
With no living relatives for Kari to attach to who were both willing and well-adjusted, Kari’s attachment to her living relatives had to be carefully managed and monitored, effectively limiting her overall contact with the realm of the living. Aidoneus ultimately assumed the role of Kari’s guardian, becoming a prominent father figure to her, and Kari joined the ADA out of sheer gratitude upon reaching maturity. Thanks largely to Aidoneus’ tutelage, Kari has excelled in her basic training, but has not yet been approved to begin work out in the field.
