Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
channingchanningchanning) wrote2007-12-26 10:57 pm
channingchanningchanning) wrote2007-12-26 10:57 pm
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saveourearth
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Kira
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
narwa
Current characters in the game: N/A
CW rape, abuse, suicide for canon history
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings
Canon: Parasol Protectorate and related books
Age: Chronologically 117, looks like he is in his late twenties. (Born in 1779, metamorphosed between 1807-1809.)
Species: Werewolf
Appearance: Channing is tall, muscular and reasonably broad, with long blond hair worn in a military-style ponytail and intense icy blue eyes. He pays attention to his appearance, which is (if he can help it at all) immaculate and carefully styled from hair to boots. Fashion, however, he does not care about and prefers military attire simply because he doesn't have to think about what to wear that way. He often has a sneer on his face. Cloaked in an arrogant, aristocratic aura, he holds himself with the ease of someone who is entirely comfortable in his body, knows that he looks good, and enjoys using his height to his advantage in social interactions.
His wolf form is large, with (almost? canon is inconsistent) pure white fur and the same icy blue eyes.
History: CW Rape, suicide, abuse
[While this is a problem for all sections of this app, it is especially troublesome for Channing's history: The Parasolverse is brimming with unreliable narrators, and we never get a neutral outsider's perspective. Channing's backstory (and personality, and skills) are presented through the eyes, thoughts and comments of various people that are all not necessarily trustworthy. I will thus start this section off with a quick overview of the most important sources and then try to piece together what might really have happened. The main narrators of Channing's backstory are:
- Channing himself, who doesn't like himself and has a tendency to downplay his own abilities, trashtalk his own personality and generally present himself in the worst light possible. And has Issues in general.
- Lyall, who has more or less the same opinion on Channing as everyone else (that he's an annoying pompous asshole) but also cares about him, which makes the general distaste mingle with pity and exasperated older sibling affection.
- Akeldama, who is the one person that we hear talk about Channing's past that actually speaks positively about him, but who also isn't a particularly truthful person.]
Channing was born into the very upper crust of society. His parents died when he was three in a yeast fermentation accident. We don't know what happened after that, but due to his blue blood and the manner of speech and skill-set that he shows, he likely grew up well looked after and soon at boarding schools.
After finishing school, he went to Paris to study with Pajou, a famous sculptor at the time. He was tall and very handsome and showed a lot of potential in sculpting, and thus was offered patronage by a number of immortals in England [1], but he refused, determined to become great and famous, for which he needed to keep his creativity which metamorphosis takes from a person.
At barely twenty, he met a woman named Odette and fell passionately in love. They had a child, Isolde. Odette already struggled with depression when they met and fell into a deep postpartum depression after their daughter was born (though both of that was obviously not a diagnosis in that age; Channing describes her as having had a darkness in her and always having been sickly and sad, and barely interacting with Isolde 'as a mother ought to'). She slowly got a little bit better over the next three years, but Channing did most of the parenting, taking their daughter to the studio with him when he worked and developing a very close bond with her.
And then, likely in late 1803, he got kidnapped by a vampire queen [2]. He'd gotten offers from the local hives before, but now that the Napoleonic Wars were causing chaos in the city and the barely tolerated vampires weren't being watched at all, one of them, not wanting to accept the refusal, picked him off the street and imprisoned him in the hive house. Channings memory of this is hazy; he knows that it lasted a month or two, that he was frequently being fed on, and that the queen tried to rape him.
But the worst part came after. Odette's mental health had deteriorated during his absence, and when he returned home after his imprisonment she committed suicide in front of his eyes, taking Isolde with her as she jumped into the Seine from their apartment window. He dove after them, but wasn't able to save either.
Channing, traumatized and distraught, returned to London and joined a military unit, the Coldsteam Guards as a raw recruit, not minding the threat of death. He fought in three wars and eventually ended up in Spain under the Fifth Coalition (so this would be between 1807 and 1809), where he was lethally wounded by a bullet. Having caught the eye of the pack attachmentâs alpha Lord Vulkasin [3], he was offered the other kind of metamorphosis - into a werewolf - and this time, he accepted, thinking that being immortal would blunt his pain and realizing that instead of just dying, he would actually be able to take revenge on the vampire queen as a werewolf.
So after the wars ended, he returned to Paris. He couldn't attack her directly as a lone wolf, so instead he plotted, pushed every pride far away, and let her imprison him again. It was even worse, this time, as she kept and treated him like a dog, but he endured. And eventually, his chance came. The queen kept him in a cage in her inner chamber, and one full moon the cage wasn't properly locked. Channing broke out of the cage and after some struggle ripped the queen's head off.
This sent the queen's dependent vampires into the mad rampage of bloodlust that the sudden loss of a queen causes, and hundreds of people died in Paris that night, causing France to make vampires illegal within its borders. Channing hadn't known that that would happen and was horrified, but even so, he couldn't bring himself to regret his deed.
After that, he truly became a loner for a while, a werewolf without any pack. Loners aren't very stable, and Channing was especially unstable and removed from his humanity at that point. He stayed as far away from humans as possible, somewhere in the French forests, and spent most of his waking time as a wolf. If he'd been left to his own devices, that would have been the end of him.
But Lyall, the Beta of Lord Vulkasin's pack, decided to seek him out and bring the wayward packmate home. Lyall has kept a close eye on Channing ever since, making sure that they never spend more than a few years apart and staying close especially after Channing returns from war. Every werewolf needs the pack for stability, and in Channing's case the result of faltering stability is violence, so it is an act of keeping everyone else safe from Channing as much as it is an act of helping the man himself.
Things settled in. Channing quickly worked is way up into the position of Gamma, the third-ranked packmember. This position sent him back to war often, as all Commonwealth werewolves have mandatory military service in the form of their pack attaching itself to military units when needed, not quite part of the hierarchy and not quite outside of it, either. The Woolsey pack, due to its size, tended to split up for this purpose, one half going abroad and one half staying around London to head the Bureau of Unnatural Investigations, the department of the British government that deals with supernaturals (vampires, werewolves, ghosts), and preternaturals (who can nullify anything supernatural and thus turn vampires and werewolves into humans and exorcise ghosts). As the Alpha and Beta stayed to work for BUR, it fell to Channing to lead the pack attachment.
This frequent absence, along with a lack of power and clue of what to do, prevented him from doing much when Lord Vulkasin met the eventual fate of all alphas, the Alpha Curse [4], in the years surrounding 1850. Lyall dealt with most of it, directing Vulkasin's sadistic tendencies that increasingly got out of hand towards himself and finally orchestrating Vulkasin's death at the teeth of a new alpha. Channing, wanting but unable to protect Lyall, helped in his way by keeping Lyall's back free and making sure that the rest of the pack as well as the public never learned how bad things truly were.
In the case of the pack, that wasn't just a question of reputation and social repercussions. When an alpha goes mad, it affects the pack and can indeed drive all of them mad: The alpha is closely connected to all pack members through a bond named "tether", and this bond provides a significant amount of the stability that immortals lose upon metamorphosis. If that bond goes bad, crumbling or getting poisoned, it replaces the stability with the form of the alpha's curse.
So while Channing doesn't think that he did anything, it's likely that Lyall wouldn't have been successful in shielding the pack from Vulkasin's deterioration if not for Channing's back-up.
Under the new alpha, Lord Maccon, things returned to normal for two decades, until the alpha got married. Channing, having been abroad with the pack attachment, only encountered the new wife Alexia, a preternatural, after the fact, and they immediately got off on the wrong foot (which, this being Channing, is unsurprising). In other words, he rather derisively hit on her and she hit him with her umbrella in turn.
Not too long after, she got pregnant - a biological impossibility in the eyes of everyone but the vampires, who knew what was going on and thus tried to assassinate her - and her and Maccon separated in a vicious fight, leading to her moving back in with her mother and then travelling to Italy to research how this could have happened, and Maccon got drunk.
Seriously drunk. Under the care of Lyall he finally started to be slightly less drunk and promptly sent Channing after Alexia to make sure she was okay. Channing spent the next few weeks mostly in wolf form, racing around Europe and shadowing the woman to take out would-be assassins, and eventually helped her and her companions escape from the place where she was kept as a glorified prisoner. After that, him and some of the companions travelled back through Europe together.
Not long after, Alexia accidentally gifted the pack's house to a vampire hive which meant that the werewolves needed to find a new place. They moved to London (first central London, and later Greenwich) and thus became the first urban pack in Britain.
Around the same time she also, being a generally inquisitive person and also equipped with an investigative political position, soon (in the context of another investigation) started to dig into the pack history surrounding the time of Lord Vulkasin's madness and death. Channing tried to stop her, but wasn't successful. He could, however, soften the reveal a bit by happening to come across Alexia confronting Lyall about it at the right time.
The problem, in the long run, was that neither Alexia nor Lyall had made sure to check if someone was listening before Channing arrived. And Alexia's vengeful sister had overheard them, and told Maccon about what happened to destroy their marriage. It certainly destroyed some things in the pack: Because Lyall had, to get Maccon to challenge and kill Vulkasin, needed to separate the alpha from his old pack. He had needed Maccon because there was no other alpha in Britain strong enough to win that challenge, and he'd achieved the separation by tempting parts of Maccon's (Scottish) first pack into planning an assassination of Queen Victoria behind their alpha's back, which Maccon discovered and, betrayed, made him abandon that pack.
So when Maccon learned of the deed, he eventually forgave Alexia for not telling him, but it was clear that he wouldn't trust Lyall again.
Due to this Lyall left the pack for the next twenty years, from 1876 to 1895, leaving a young werewolf named Biffy as his replacement. When Maccon developed alpha curse (leading to the pack becoming useless drunks), the transition to the next alpha went without bloodshed or challenge - it had long been agreed on that Maccon would be shipped off to Egypt, where werewolves stop being werewolves and thus alpha curse can't affect a person any more. Which meant that Channing immediately challenged Biffy once he claimed alphahood. He lost, of course, and there were no hard feelings after. Challenging and being contrary, being all fight and war where the beta is peace and the alpha unity, is just a part of being a Gamma.
To help the pack consolidate and form strong tethers with the new alpha, everyone was put on leave from abroad service for twenty years by Victoria. Channing didn't like this at first, but Biffy managed to get him the job of Head of BUR, the position that Maccon had filled before, and between his prior experiences in the Home Office and War Office, a love of finances, and the ability to do something, Channing is as happy with the position as he gets.
And then, two months later, Lyall finally returned, completing the pack once more and managing to make the new alpha stop doubting himself. Biffy and Lyall also became a couple, which Channing approves of as much as he approves of anything - he had, after all, tried to matchmake a bit when they first got together, and their angsty slow-burn oh-but-he's-not-interested-in-me-like-that not!courtship had been getting on everyone's nerves in the end. At the same time, the pack gained two resident children, which continues to put Channing on edge, as they remind him of Isolde.
And then, in 1896, he encountered Faith, who had come to London to net herself a werewolf husband. Their courtship went forth and back between Channing very quickly falling for her and his fear of confronting his various issues keeping him from wanting to commit - from trusting himself to commit. Various pack interventions, especially from Biffy and Lyall, were involved as well as he became very irritable in the process, which was a problem for everyone else, and also because werewolves are meddling busybodies and Biffy and Lyall are worse than most.
Eventually, Faith and Channing got married in a small, simple ceremony and Faith moved into the pack house.
[1] Being turned into a vampire or werewolf often doesn't work and just leaves the person dead, but their chances of survival are significantly higher when the person is creative, which is why creativity is prized in candidates for "metamorphosis", the turning of a mortal into an immortal. (Almost) all creativity is however lost upon metamorphosis.
[2] Vampires are structured in Hives (a female queen; under her some male vampires that she turned; under them drones, pretty, creative humans who hope to be turned into vampires by the queen of the hive they serve; and lots of staff).
[3] Werewolves in Britain have mandatory military service, which werewolves that belong to a pack serve as parts of pack attachments. These attachments retain their normal pack structure and are only loosely a part of the general chain of command, though single members might attain military ranks.
[4] An inescapable, irreversible mental illness which typically manifests as a character trait of the person intensifying until it becomes harmful to everyone around - a preference for sadistic consensual bedroom activities turning into abusive sadism permeating everything the person does in Vulkasin's case, a tendency to withdraw from problems turning into complete, all-encompassing apathy in Maccons case.
REINCARNATION
Name: Chad (Kennel name: Eng CH Bumblecorn He Is A Jolly Decent Fellow)
Age: 10
Appearance: A white Pomeranian.
History:
Chad was born in Moss Manor and has more pedigree than the queen. Originally, his owner wanted to name him Bumblecorn Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings, but there just were too many Channings in there (the Kennel Club has a maximum amount of characters per name), so he ended up being Bumblecorn He's A Jolly Decent Fellow. He turned out to be an excellently bred dog, with perfect appearance, health and temperament. Once he was old enough, he won a couple of titles and worked as a stud for a while. And then...
Well, then he was very quietly gifted to a friend of the kennel's owner. The only explanation that his new owner got was that he had been starting to "behave inappropriately around the bitches he was mating with". His new owner decided that the obvious response should be to get the dog neutered as soon as possible. And then... not very much happened. Chad got used to his new place, and after a spot of trouble or two accepted his new owner. Who had absolutely no interest in contests or anything to do with pedigree dogs, so Chad was never again entered into anything.
Time passed, and Chad's owner's household grew. Being a dog, he didn't quite get why, but more and more people moved in. Some of them stayed, while others kept coming and going.
And then, when he was nine, he got his first echo: Sentience.
Things were never the same after. He couldn't really figure out what it was, but he felt distinctly more self-aware, his thoughts were clearer, and most of all he had started to think abstract and philosophical thoughts. He learned to actually understand English and some Italian and figure out human contraptions on a much more abstract level than he had before. He even learned to work the TV remote and thus learned about all kinds of things outside of Mossgate.
He also got to understand the situation of his humans in much more detail. His household consisted of a core of three people: A couple of Scottish and Italian descent, who were clearly the highest ranked and generally very loud humans, and his owner, a generally rather quiet human who made sure that things ran smoothly from the background. They and everyone else who lived in the upstairs rooms worked at the Italian restaurant on the ground floor. An oddly large amount of cousins helped out - some for an extended amount of time, some for just a few weeks or months at a time (the restaurant is a mafia front, but Chad doesn't know that yet).
But he still can't properly communicate with any of his humans, as much as he wants to now - ever since that fateful day in the bear enclosure, other dogs have just become dull, and what communication he can manage with humans is just really unsatisfying.
There seems to be no way to fix it, though. He can't talk, after all, and nobody seems to expect him to think or understand this much. They just laud him for being a bright dog or scold him for being in places that he shouldn't be in when he tries to tell them that he understands much more than they think. It's really frustrating.
First Echo:
When Chad was nine, he got into a fight. Now, he had gotten into fights before, but he was well-trained and of good temperament, so he had never actually tried to injure another creature. And he had never encountered another animal that actually wanted to seriously injure him, either. But that day, his owner was visiting the menagerie at Moss Manor, and Chad decided to have a poke around... and being the size he is, made it into the bear enclosure.
And for the first time in his life, he was confronted with something that actually wanted to kill him.
He tried to fight it, his dog self unable to come up with a more complicated solution in the face of a wall rising behind him. And then something most peculiar happened. There was a resounding, loud thudding in his ears, and he felt hollow for a moment, and when the dizziness passed, he suddenly realized that there was a very simple answer to his problem here. He just needed to aim for the bear's legs, not to attack but to reach the lever that stuck out in the area and would open the cleaning chute that was too narrow for the bear but would let him squeeze through and get out of the enclosure. He managed to do that, and thus survived the encounter.
Chad gained sentience from his first actual life and death fight as a reoccurence echo: In his canon, sentience while fighting ("fighting with soul") is a rare trait among werewolves. The ability to achieve it is tied to age and dominance, but either way a werewolf isn't "born" with it and needs to acquire it at some point during their lives. Channing can't use it as well as other werewolves with the ability as his general issues make it hard for him to keep a level head when angry/fighting in either form, but Chad won't be impacted by that (yet).
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation Personality:
Channing is a number of things.
Most of all, he's an arrogant asshole - by choice, and he carefully maintains this trait. It's his way of dealing with his PTSD and an attempt to protect both himself and his surroundings. If he doesn't let anyone close, they can't hurt him, and his hurt won't turn outwards and hurt others. So he hurts them with derision instead, which, he figures, is the less harmful option.
He's perfected those walls for many decades, ever since Lyall found him and brought him back to England. They are what keeps him functioning in polite, civilian society, but they also cage him. Going off to fight the crown's wars is thus both a curse and a blessing - a curse because it crumbles his walls and makes him much more volatile for weeks after returning, a blessing because it gives him an outlet for the pain, lets him turn it into royally sanctioned aggression.
To protect his walls, he keeps others at arm's length, even those that he cares about. With some, like the soldiers of his regiment, that is easy; as their officer, there is always the chasm of rank between them. This distance that is enforced by social standing allows him to fairly openly show that he cares about them and to lead them with some charisma, which in turn inspires a loyalty in his soldiers that goes a good deal beyond just that of a soldier and their superior, even making them do potentially dangerous semi-legal things for him. With others this is much harder. His pack and their entourage, on the other hand, who aren't separated from him by social boundaries he needs to pointedly push away to not let them get too close, so when he cares, he tries to hide it or at least follow it up with an insult, a threat or some other unwelcome comment.
His main tool is arrogance. Ever since he started building his walls, he's honed it into a weapon, using derision as its primary expression. He'll sneer at everyone, push away men with insults and by looking down at them and flee from women by leering and making perfectly improper verbal advances or leaning over them in a predatory manner.
Speaking of women, let me digress: I mentioned the unreliable narrators above. Channing's relationship with women between Odette/the French vampire queen and Faith is a huge case of "who can be believed about what", as the various accounts of it that are presented throughout the books can't be reconciled, and the behaviour of his that is actually shown tells yet another story. What we know is that he doesn't necessarily see women as "women", they can also just fill a certain social or pragmatic position and happen to be female, and his behaviour will be completely different dependng on which of the two situations we're talking about, as in the second he makes little distinction between men and women. If he sees them primarily as "women", three things stand out: He enjoys a good banter or fight and will continue pushing if the woman pushes as well, he has a fundamental respect for a woman's denial of his advances (he may continue to push, but he won't do so seriously), and he protects his walls even more sharply when a woman is concerned - a man, he might let inside sometimes, a woman he never will let inside. One very convenient claim to that end is that he "doesn't understand women", which means that he pushes away any possibility of truly connecting with one. The accounts of his interactions with women in combination with what we actually see points, in my interpretation, to the explanation that he 1. sometimes visits whores, leaning in the kinky direction with his desires for their services and 2. he every once in a while makes advances at women not working in the sex-industry, likely to prove to himself that he is unable to have a regular relationship with a woman. None of these relationships last long and due to this being Victorian England the end of them is always socially unpleasant for the woman in question.
All right, so back to his general arrogance. It is distributed equally, though he won't mistreat staff - due to the status that he has enjoyed all his life, they are of no more interest than furniture to him, easily fading into the background of his life. Everyone else, though, no matter their station, will be treated with derision or at least without any warmth. Channing might not fear discipline or even death when it comes to his behaviour - he throws himself into arrogance the same way as he throws himself into battle - but he is politically aware enough to not piss off people like the Queen.
The asshole is a front that he presents not only to the world and but also to himself - and oh, does he have issues with his self-worth. There probably is no person who has a lesser opinion of Channing than Channing himself, and considering that he is London's problem werewolf, that means something. He carefully keeps an ever-growing list of his own flaws, and adds to it without hesitation. As much as he signals to others that he doesn't like them, he tells himself that nobody would ever like him or care about him if not for outside forces like pack or social station.
And he needs his pack. Canon has a narrative rivalry on which of the London pack's wolves needs the pack the most, and Channing's strong point towards that position is that he needs it both to keep him in check, to keep him lashing out at others, and to keep him anchored in society. Pack is like family, belonging to it is less of a choice and more of a force of nature, and thus he can keep up his walls without totally alienating its other members. And then there is the pack bond, the metaphysical connection the alpha establishes, which grounds him and stabilizes him without him having to lower any walls for it. Without his pack, he is adrift, as evidenced by his time killing vampires and living like an animal in France.
But he is more than an asshole with issues.
He is also reliable. If his superiors give him a job, he will do it, and do it well and with care. If he gives a promise, he will keep it. If he is entrusted with a secret, he will be very cautious to not let anyone else learn of it. He can keep to the background to not compromise a mission or task, offer support that the person whom it is offered to might not ever learn about, and take secrets to the grave. He won't give up because it's hard, and will even get over himself and compromise his asshole image if he feels that it is really necessary.
And, closely tied into this, he is intensely loyal. To his pack, to select people, and sometimes to ideas. If the situation allows for it, he will protect those he cares about, or at least do his best by them. Betrayal is not a thing Channing does, and he can form very intense feelings of caring for someone very quickly, even though he doesn't most of the time. A feeling of kinship can cause such a bond, but also a long acquaintance.
He has a special relationship with children. While these days he avoids them wherever he can, he is very tender and caring when unable to escape, and back when his daughter was still alive he seems to have been a very involved and good father. Vampires, on the other hand, he hates beyond reason, and would happily kill every single one of them.
And he is perceptive, particularly when it comes to relationships and other social circumstances. He was the only one to notice just how abusive the situation with Lyall and Vulkasin had gotten, he recognized Lyall's need of a partner and the nature of his and Biffy's feelings for each other more precisely and earlier than others, and he quickly concluded from nonverbal clues Imogene gave him that she was a Lesbian. It should also be noted that he tends to act on his perceptions, even if it would be easier for him to ignore them.
Any differences?:
It might be easier to describe how they are similar than how they are different, between the species difference and the difference in experience, but that ignores that they do, in the end, come from very similar starting points.
They both lost their parents at early ages - Channing to an accident, Chad to simple kennel logistics. They both grew up well cared for, well trained/educated, and well groomed. They both knew that they were highly regarded - Chad as an exemplary dog of his specific breed and Channing as a boy and young man who was very good looking, highly creative and likely successful at academics, judging by his later ease at handling numbers, administration and other life tasks.
Where they split off, experience wise, is where it gets traumatic for Channing. Chad never had those experiences. Yes, he suddenly got demoted from stud and Championship dog to family pet, but that didn't really hurt him much - at the time, he just knew that he was placed with a new owner, who cared for him and made sure that he could continue to live a comfortable dog life. He likely still hasn't fully understood what an insult was offered to him at that time. So all in all, Chad's life has remained comfortable and pleasant.
Thus he never needed to build the walls of arrogance that Channing built. He never developed anger management issues because he never learned to regard violence and aggression as something positive - he never went to war, he never had to fight challenges. He never developed a significant issue with women. And so on and so forth. That leaves Chad a much more pleasant person than Channing - still arrogant, but simply arrogant because he knows that he has pedigree and feels like he's great, not arrogant as a defensive measure.
Closely related is that Chad, unlike Channing, behaves in public. He is a good boy and a pleasant dog to be around (unless he opens his mouth - that is still the same as Channing. Just that in his case the reason is that he barks way too much and at too many things, though less than some other Pomeranians). He might know exactly who is below and who above him in the rank system of his surroundings (his owner is above, his owner's bosses are above his owner, and Russell (spaghettimonster) is somewhere way below him so he doesn't have to listen to him when he doesn't want to, and behave more or less accordingly, but he doesn't misbehave to piss people off. He doesn't intentionally insult people he cares about to keep them at a distance.
He actually likes having people around. And here the species difference comes in. Because he simply doesn't have the kind of human hang-ups that Channing has. He has less need for privacy, less sense for what actions should not be done in public (...or close to none, he's used to people watching him poop), different expectations from food and most importantly a very different way of interacting with people. He's not used to others being able to understand him, the bane of his existence since he gained sentience a year ago. The network will be exciting, and he'll likely spend the first few weeks of it being live almost constantly logged in and talking to people just because he CAN. That will wear off, but even afterwards, to a large part due to all the above reasons, he'll still be a lot more social than Channing would ever be.
Abilities:
- Channing can (as long as the sun is under the horizon) turn into a wolf. Wolf form enhances all his supernatural traits and obeys the laws of conversion of mass - the volume of his body doesn't change, and since he's a tall, muscular human he becomes a large wolf. If he turns voluntarily, he retains most of his sentience in wolf form.
- Superior senses: All natural senses are at least as good as those of a regular wolf, with a supernatural scenting ability on top that lets him smell things about supernatural creatures that aren't part of their actual natural scent.
- He is immortal. This means that his body will always return to the state in which he was metamorphosed - he doesn't age and he heals perfectly without scars or other remainders, but he also can't put on or lose weight, etc.
- Superior strength and speed: Not the greatest supernaturally possible amount of both, but still definitely superhuman.
- Superior healing: He heals very quickly. Most injuries will be gone in a few hours or a day, though complex injuries, physical harm inflicted over a longer period, or expansive damage (eye injuries, the results of torture, and so on), can take up to a week to heal.
- Weaknesses: Nothing comes at no price, and in Channing's case he becomes a raging beast at full moon, is clumsier than he used to be as a human (though he got a certain predatory grace in return), and is weak to the sun. Due to his age and dominance, he can walk around in the sunlight for a very short time and easily stay awake without much of an issue, but he's definitely not going to do either without need.
- Turning to the mundane, Channing takes a strong interest in financial things and mathematics, and has acted as the pack's bursar for many years. His experience goes past financial administration and expands into general administration and bureaucratic leadership and organisation, though, as he has worked in various positions in institutions like the War Office, the Home Office, and the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, always successfully.
- Channing is a military man. He started during the Napoleonic Wars and has been with the military pretty much ever since. Likely very quickly after joining the Woolsey pack he became the leader of the Woolsey pack attachment (werewolves have mandatory military service, structured as a pack serving a certain amount of time a year as semi-autonomous entity that is attached to a regiment. Usually, the whole pack serves, but in Woolsey's case the pack is so big that only half of them go abroad while the other runs the Bureau of Unnatural Registry). He seems to be a very capable leader, inspiring great loyalty in the mortal soldiers of his regiment, and would have all the knowledge about equipment, strategy, tactics and anything else an officer with a field command would know. He also is skilled in hand-to-hand combat.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- Third Person: Here! (if needed: And another one.)
- Network: Here!
ANYTHING ELSE? N/A
Name: Kira
Are you over 15? Yes.
Contact:
Current characters in the game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
PREINCARNATION
Name: Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings
Canon: Parasol Protectorate and related books
Age: Chronologically 117, looks like he is in his late twenties. (Born in 1779, metamorphosed between 1807-1809.)
Species: Werewolf
Appearance: Channing is tall, muscular and reasonably broad, with long blond hair worn in a military-style ponytail and intense icy blue eyes. He pays attention to his appearance, which is (if he can help it at all) immaculate and carefully styled from hair to boots. Fashion, however, he does not care about and prefers military attire simply because he doesn't have to think about what to wear that way. He often has a sneer on his face. Cloaked in an arrogant, aristocratic aura, he holds himself with the ease of someone who is entirely comfortable in his body, knows that he looks good, and enjoys using his height to his advantage in social interactions.
His wolf form is large, with (almost? canon is inconsistent) pure white fur and the same icy blue eyes.
History: CW Rape, suicide, abuse
[While this is a problem for all sections of this app, it is especially troublesome for Channing's history: The Parasolverse is brimming with unreliable narrators, and we never get a neutral outsider's perspective. Channing's backstory (and personality, and skills) are presented through the eyes, thoughts and comments of various people that are all not necessarily trustworthy. I will thus start this section off with a quick overview of the most important sources and then try to piece together what might really have happened. The main narrators of Channing's backstory are:
- Channing himself, who doesn't like himself and has a tendency to downplay his own abilities, trashtalk his own personality and generally present himself in the worst light possible. And has Issues in general.
- Lyall, who has more or less the same opinion on Channing as everyone else (that he's an annoying pompous asshole) but also cares about him, which makes the general distaste mingle with pity and exasperated older sibling affection.
- Akeldama, who is the one person that we hear talk about Channing's past that actually speaks positively about him, but who also isn't a particularly truthful person.]
Channing was born into the very upper crust of society. His parents died when he was three in a yeast fermentation accident. We don't know what happened after that, but due to his blue blood and the manner of speech and skill-set that he shows, he likely grew up well looked after and soon at boarding schools.
After finishing school, he went to Paris to study with Pajou, a famous sculptor at the time. He was tall and very handsome and showed a lot of potential in sculpting, and thus was offered patronage by a number of immortals in England [1], but he refused, determined to become great and famous, for which he needed to keep his creativity which metamorphosis takes from a person.
At barely twenty, he met a woman named Odette and fell passionately in love. They had a child, Isolde. Odette already struggled with depression when they met and fell into a deep postpartum depression after their daughter was born (though both of that was obviously not a diagnosis in that age; Channing describes her as having had a darkness in her and always having been sickly and sad, and barely interacting with Isolde 'as a mother ought to'). She slowly got a little bit better over the next three years, but Channing did most of the parenting, taking their daughter to the studio with him when he worked and developing a very close bond with her.
And then, likely in late 1803, he got kidnapped by a vampire queen [2]. He'd gotten offers from the local hives before, but now that the Napoleonic Wars were causing chaos in the city and the barely tolerated vampires weren't being watched at all, one of them, not wanting to accept the refusal, picked him off the street and imprisoned him in the hive house. Channings memory of this is hazy; he knows that it lasted a month or two, that he was frequently being fed on, and that the queen tried to rape him.
But the worst part came after. Odette's mental health had deteriorated during his absence, and when he returned home after his imprisonment she committed suicide in front of his eyes, taking Isolde with her as she jumped into the Seine from their apartment window. He dove after them, but wasn't able to save either.
Channing, traumatized and distraught, returned to London and joined a military unit, the Coldsteam Guards as a raw recruit, not minding the threat of death. He fought in three wars and eventually ended up in Spain under the Fifth Coalition (so this would be between 1807 and 1809), where he was lethally wounded by a bullet. Having caught the eye of the pack attachmentâs alpha Lord Vulkasin [3], he was offered the other kind of metamorphosis - into a werewolf - and this time, he accepted, thinking that being immortal would blunt his pain and realizing that instead of just dying, he would actually be able to take revenge on the vampire queen as a werewolf.
So after the wars ended, he returned to Paris. He couldn't attack her directly as a lone wolf, so instead he plotted, pushed every pride far away, and let her imprison him again. It was even worse, this time, as she kept and treated him like a dog, but he endured. And eventually, his chance came. The queen kept him in a cage in her inner chamber, and one full moon the cage wasn't properly locked. Channing broke out of the cage and after some struggle ripped the queen's head off.
This sent the queen's dependent vampires into the mad rampage of bloodlust that the sudden loss of a queen causes, and hundreds of people died in Paris that night, causing France to make vampires illegal within its borders. Channing hadn't known that that would happen and was horrified, but even so, he couldn't bring himself to regret his deed.
After that, he truly became a loner for a while, a werewolf without any pack. Loners aren't very stable, and Channing was especially unstable and removed from his humanity at that point. He stayed as far away from humans as possible, somewhere in the French forests, and spent most of his waking time as a wolf. If he'd been left to his own devices, that would have been the end of him.
But Lyall, the Beta of Lord Vulkasin's pack, decided to seek him out and bring the wayward packmate home. Lyall has kept a close eye on Channing ever since, making sure that they never spend more than a few years apart and staying close especially after Channing returns from war. Every werewolf needs the pack for stability, and in Channing's case the result of faltering stability is violence, so it is an act of keeping everyone else safe from Channing as much as it is an act of helping the man himself.
Things settled in. Channing quickly worked is way up into the position of Gamma, the third-ranked packmember. This position sent him back to war often, as all Commonwealth werewolves have mandatory military service in the form of their pack attaching itself to military units when needed, not quite part of the hierarchy and not quite outside of it, either. The Woolsey pack, due to its size, tended to split up for this purpose, one half going abroad and one half staying around London to head the Bureau of Unnatural Investigations, the department of the British government that deals with supernaturals (vampires, werewolves, ghosts), and preternaturals (who can nullify anything supernatural and thus turn vampires and werewolves into humans and exorcise ghosts). As the Alpha and Beta stayed to work for BUR, it fell to Channing to lead the pack attachment.
This frequent absence, along with a lack of power and clue of what to do, prevented him from doing much when Lord Vulkasin met the eventual fate of all alphas, the Alpha Curse [4], in the years surrounding 1850. Lyall dealt with most of it, directing Vulkasin's sadistic tendencies that increasingly got out of hand towards himself and finally orchestrating Vulkasin's death at the teeth of a new alpha. Channing, wanting but unable to protect Lyall, helped in his way by keeping Lyall's back free and making sure that the rest of the pack as well as the public never learned how bad things truly were.
In the case of the pack, that wasn't just a question of reputation and social repercussions. When an alpha goes mad, it affects the pack and can indeed drive all of them mad: The alpha is closely connected to all pack members through a bond named "tether", and this bond provides a significant amount of the stability that immortals lose upon metamorphosis. If that bond goes bad, crumbling or getting poisoned, it replaces the stability with the form of the alpha's curse.
So while Channing doesn't think that he did anything, it's likely that Lyall wouldn't have been successful in shielding the pack from Vulkasin's deterioration if not for Channing's back-up.
Under the new alpha, Lord Maccon, things returned to normal for two decades, until the alpha got married. Channing, having been abroad with the pack attachment, only encountered the new wife Alexia, a preternatural, after the fact, and they immediately got off on the wrong foot (which, this being Channing, is unsurprising). In other words, he rather derisively hit on her and she hit him with her umbrella in turn.
Not too long after, she got pregnant - a biological impossibility in the eyes of everyone but the vampires, who knew what was going on and thus tried to assassinate her - and her and Maccon separated in a vicious fight, leading to her moving back in with her mother and then travelling to Italy to research how this could have happened, and Maccon got drunk.
Seriously drunk. Under the care of Lyall he finally started to be slightly less drunk and promptly sent Channing after Alexia to make sure she was okay. Channing spent the next few weeks mostly in wolf form, racing around Europe and shadowing the woman to take out would-be assassins, and eventually helped her and her companions escape from the place where she was kept as a glorified prisoner. After that, him and some of the companions travelled back through Europe together.
Not long after, Alexia accidentally gifted the pack's house to a vampire hive which meant that the werewolves needed to find a new place. They moved to London (first central London, and later Greenwich) and thus became the first urban pack in Britain.
Around the same time she also, being a generally inquisitive person and also equipped with an investigative political position, soon (in the context of another investigation) started to dig into the pack history surrounding the time of Lord Vulkasin's madness and death. Channing tried to stop her, but wasn't successful. He could, however, soften the reveal a bit by happening to come across Alexia confronting Lyall about it at the right time.
The problem, in the long run, was that neither Alexia nor Lyall had made sure to check if someone was listening before Channing arrived. And Alexia's vengeful sister had overheard them, and told Maccon about what happened to destroy their marriage. It certainly destroyed some things in the pack: Because Lyall had, to get Maccon to challenge and kill Vulkasin, needed to separate the alpha from his old pack. He had needed Maccon because there was no other alpha in Britain strong enough to win that challenge, and he'd achieved the separation by tempting parts of Maccon's (Scottish) first pack into planning an assassination of Queen Victoria behind their alpha's back, which Maccon discovered and, betrayed, made him abandon that pack.
So when Maccon learned of the deed, he eventually forgave Alexia for not telling him, but it was clear that he wouldn't trust Lyall again.
Due to this Lyall left the pack for the next twenty years, from 1876 to 1895, leaving a young werewolf named Biffy as his replacement. When Maccon developed alpha curse (leading to the pack becoming useless drunks), the transition to the next alpha went without bloodshed or challenge - it had long been agreed on that Maccon would be shipped off to Egypt, where werewolves stop being werewolves and thus alpha curse can't affect a person any more. Which meant that Channing immediately challenged Biffy once he claimed alphahood. He lost, of course, and there were no hard feelings after. Challenging and being contrary, being all fight and war where the beta is peace and the alpha unity, is just a part of being a Gamma.
To help the pack consolidate and form strong tethers with the new alpha, everyone was put on leave from abroad service for twenty years by Victoria. Channing didn't like this at first, but Biffy managed to get him the job of Head of BUR, the position that Maccon had filled before, and between his prior experiences in the Home Office and War Office, a love of finances, and the ability to do something, Channing is as happy with the position as he gets.
And then, two months later, Lyall finally returned, completing the pack once more and managing to make the new alpha stop doubting himself. Biffy and Lyall also became a couple, which Channing approves of as much as he approves of anything - he had, after all, tried to matchmake a bit when they first got together, and their angsty slow-burn oh-but-he's-not-interested-in-me-like-that not!courtship had been getting on everyone's nerves in the end. At the same time, the pack gained two resident children, which continues to put Channing on edge, as they remind him of Isolde.
And then, in 1896, he encountered Faith, who had come to London to net herself a werewolf husband. Their courtship went forth and back between Channing very quickly falling for her and his fear of confronting his various issues keeping him from wanting to commit - from trusting himself to commit. Various pack interventions, especially from Biffy and Lyall, were involved as well as he became very irritable in the process, which was a problem for everyone else, and also because werewolves are meddling busybodies and Biffy and Lyall are worse than most.
Eventually, Faith and Channing got married in a small, simple ceremony and Faith moved into the pack house.
[1] Being turned into a vampire or werewolf often doesn't work and just leaves the person dead, but their chances of survival are significantly higher when the person is creative, which is why creativity is prized in candidates for "metamorphosis", the turning of a mortal into an immortal. (Almost) all creativity is however lost upon metamorphosis.
[2] Vampires are structured in Hives (a female queen; under her some male vampires that she turned; under them drones, pretty, creative humans who hope to be turned into vampires by the queen of the hive they serve; and lots of staff).
[3] Werewolves in Britain have mandatory military service, which werewolves that belong to a pack serve as parts of pack attachments. These attachments retain their normal pack structure and are only loosely a part of the general chain of command, though single members might attain military ranks.
[4] An inescapable, irreversible mental illness which typically manifests as a character trait of the person intensifying until it becomes harmful to everyone around - a preference for sadistic consensual bedroom activities turning into abusive sadism permeating everything the person does in Vulkasin's case, a tendency to withdraw from problems turning into complete, all-encompassing apathy in Maccons case.
REINCARNATION
Name: Chad (Kennel name: Eng CH Bumblecorn He Is A Jolly Decent Fellow)
Age: 10
Appearance: A white Pomeranian.
History:
Chad was born in Moss Manor and has more pedigree than the queen. Originally, his owner wanted to name him Bumblecorn Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings, but there just were too many Channings in there (the Kennel Club has a maximum amount of characters per name), so he ended up being Bumblecorn He's A Jolly Decent Fellow. He turned out to be an excellently bred dog, with perfect appearance, health and temperament. Once he was old enough, he won a couple of titles and worked as a stud for a while. And then...
Well, then he was very quietly gifted to a friend of the kennel's owner. The only explanation that his new owner got was that he had been starting to "behave inappropriately around the bitches he was mating with". His new owner decided that the obvious response should be to get the dog neutered as soon as possible. And then... not very much happened. Chad got used to his new place, and after a spot of trouble or two accepted his new owner. Who had absolutely no interest in contests or anything to do with pedigree dogs, so Chad was never again entered into anything.
Time passed, and Chad's owner's household grew. Being a dog, he didn't quite get why, but more and more people moved in. Some of them stayed, while others kept coming and going.
And then, when he was nine, he got his first echo: Sentience.
Things were never the same after. He couldn't really figure out what it was, but he felt distinctly more self-aware, his thoughts were clearer, and most of all he had started to think abstract and philosophical thoughts. He learned to actually understand English and some Italian and figure out human contraptions on a much more abstract level than he had before. He even learned to work the TV remote and thus learned about all kinds of things outside of Mossgate.
He also got to understand the situation of his humans in much more detail. His household consisted of a core of three people: A couple of Scottish and Italian descent, who were clearly the highest ranked and generally very loud humans, and his owner, a generally rather quiet human who made sure that things ran smoothly from the background. They and everyone else who lived in the upstairs rooms worked at the Italian restaurant on the ground floor. An oddly large amount of cousins helped out - some for an extended amount of time, some for just a few weeks or months at a time (the restaurant is a mafia front, but Chad doesn't know that yet).
But he still can't properly communicate with any of his humans, as much as he wants to now - ever since that fateful day in the bear enclosure, other dogs have just become dull, and what communication he can manage with humans is just really unsatisfying.
There seems to be no way to fix it, though. He can't talk, after all, and nobody seems to expect him to think or understand this much. They just laud him for being a bright dog or scold him for being in places that he shouldn't be in when he tries to tell them that he understands much more than they think. It's really frustrating.
First Echo:
When Chad was nine, he got into a fight. Now, he had gotten into fights before, but he was well-trained and of good temperament, so he had never actually tried to injure another creature. And he had never encountered another animal that actually wanted to seriously injure him, either. But that day, his owner was visiting the menagerie at Moss Manor, and Chad decided to have a poke around... and being the size he is, made it into the bear enclosure.
And for the first time in his life, he was confronted with something that actually wanted to kill him.
He tried to fight it, his dog self unable to come up with a more complicated solution in the face of a wall rising behind him. And then something most peculiar happened. There was a resounding, loud thudding in his ears, and he felt hollow for a moment, and when the dizziness passed, he suddenly realized that there was a very simple answer to his problem here. He just needed to aim for the bear's legs, not to attack but to reach the lever that stuck out in the area and would open the cleaning chute that was too narrow for the bear but would let him squeeze through and get out of the enclosure. He managed to do that, and thus survived the encounter.
Chad gained sentience from his first actual life and death fight as a reoccurence echo: In his canon, sentience while fighting ("fighting with soul") is a rare trait among werewolves. The ability to achieve it is tied to age and dominance, but either way a werewolf isn't "born" with it and needs to acquire it at some point during their lives. Channing can't use it as well as other werewolves with the ability as his general issues make it hard for him to keep a level head when angry/fighting in either form, but Chad won't be impacted by that (yet).
PERSONALITY
Pre-Incarnation Personality:
Channing is a number of things.
Most of all, he's an arrogant asshole - by choice, and he carefully maintains this trait. It's his way of dealing with his PTSD and an attempt to protect both himself and his surroundings. If he doesn't let anyone close, they can't hurt him, and his hurt won't turn outwards and hurt others. So he hurts them with derision instead, which, he figures, is the less harmful option.
He's perfected those walls for many decades, ever since Lyall found him and brought him back to England. They are what keeps him functioning in polite, civilian society, but they also cage him. Going off to fight the crown's wars is thus both a curse and a blessing - a curse because it crumbles his walls and makes him much more volatile for weeks after returning, a blessing because it gives him an outlet for the pain, lets him turn it into royally sanctioned aggression.
To protect his walls, he keeps others at arm's length, even those that he cares about. With some, like the soldiers of his regiment, that is easy; as their officer, there is always the chasm of rank between them. This distance that is enforced by social standing allows him to fairly openly show that he cares about them and to lead them with some charisma, which in turn inspires a loyalty in his soldiers that goes a good deal beyond just that of a soldier and their superior, even making them do potentially dangerous semi-legal things for him. With others this is much harder. His pack and their entourage, on the other hand, who aren't separated from him by social boundaries he needs to pointedly push away to not let them get too close, so when he cares, he tries to hide it or at least follow it up with an insult, a threat or some other unwelcome comment.
His main tool is arrogance. Ever since he started building his walls, he's honed it into a weapon, using derision as its primary expression. He'll sneer at everyone, push away men with insults and by looking down at them and flee from women by leering and making perfectly improper verbal advances or leaning over them in a predatory manner.
Speaking of women, let me digress: I mentioned the unreliable narrators above. Channing's relationship with women between Odette/the French vampire queen and Faith is a huge case of "who can be believed about what", as the various accounts of it that are presented throughout the books can't be reconciled, and the behaviour of his that is actually shown tells yet another story. What we know is that he doesn't necessarily see women as "women", they can also just fill a certain social or pragmatic position and happen to be female, and his behaviour will be completely different dependng on which of the two situations we're talking about, as in the second he makes little distinction between men and women. If he sees them primarily as "women", three things stand out: He enjoys a good banter or fight and will continue pushing if the woman pushes as well, he has a fundamental respect for a woman's denial of his advances (he may continue to push, but he won't do so seriously), and he protects his walls even more sharply when a woman is concerned - a man, he might let inside sometimes, a woman he never will let inside. One very convenient claim to that end is that he "doesn't understand women", which means that he pushes away any possibility of truly connecting with one. The accounts of his interactions with women in combination with what we actually see points, in my interpretation, to the explanation that he 1. sometimes visits whores, leaning in the kinky direction with his desires for their services and 2. he every once in a while makes advances at women not working in the sex-industry, likely to prove to himself that he is unable to have a regular relationship with a woman. None of these relationships last long and due to this being Victorian England the end of them is always socially unpleasant for the woman in question.
All right, so back to his general arrogance. It is distributed equally, though he won't mistreat staff - due to the status that he has enjoyed all his life, they are of no more interest than furniture to him, easily fading into the background of his life. Everyone else, though, no matter their station, will be treated with derision or at least without any warmth. Channing might not fear discipline or even death when it comes to his behaviour - he throws himself into arrogance the same way as he throws himself into battle - but he is politically aware enough to not piss off people like the Queen.
The asshole is a front that he presents not only to the world and but also to himself - and oh, does he have issues with his self-worth. There probably is no person who has a lesser opinion of Channing than Channing himself, and considering that he is London's problem werewolf, that means something. He carefully keeps an ever-growing list of his own flaws, and adds to it without hesitation. As much as he signals to others that he doesn't like them, he tells himself that nobody would ever like him or care about him if not for outside forces like pack or social station.
And he needs his pack. Canon has a narrative rivalry on which of the London pack's wolves needs the pack the most, and Channing's strong point towards that position is that he needs it both to keep him in check, to keep him lashing out at others, and to keep him anchored in society. Pack is like family, belonging to it is less of a choice and more of a force of nature, and thus he can keep up his walls without totally alienating its other members. And then there is the pack bond, the metaphysical connection the alpha establishes, which grounds him and stabilizes him without him having to lower any walls for it. Without his pack, he is adrift, as evidenced by his time killing vampires and living like an animal in France.
But he is more than an asshole with issues.
He is also reliable. If his superiors give him a job, he will do it, and do it well and with care. If he gives a promise, he will keep it. If he is entrusted with a secret, he will be very cautious to not let anyone else learn of it. He can keep to the background to not compromise a mission or task, offer support that the person whom it is offered to might not ever learn about, and take secrets to the grave. He won't give up because it's hard, and will even get over himself and compromise his asshole image if he feels that it is really necessary.
And, closely tied into this, he is intensely loyal. To his pack, to select people, and sometimes to ideas. If the situation allows for it, he will protect those he cares about, or at least do his best by them. Betrayal is not a thing Channing does, and he can form very intense feelings of caring for someone very quickly, even though he doesn't most of the time. A feeling of kinship can cause such a bond, but also a long acquaintance.
He has a special relationship with children. While these days he avoids them wherever he can, he is very tender and caring when unable to escape, and back when his daughter was still alive he seems to have been a very involved and good father. Vampires, on the other hand, he hates beyond reason, and would happily kill every single one of them.
And he is perceptive, particularly when it comes to relationships and other social circumstances. He was the only one to notice just how abusive the situation with Lyall and Vulkasin had gotten, he recognized Lyall's need of a partner and the nature of his and Biffy's feelings for each other more precisely and earlier than others, and he quickly concluded from nonverbal clues Imogene gave him that she was a Lesbian. It should also be noted that he tends to act on his perceptions, even if it would be easier for him to ignore them.
Any differences?:
It might be easier to describe how they are similar than how they are different, between the species difference and the difference in experience, but that ignores that they do, in the end, come from very similar starting points.
They both lost their parents at early ages - Channing to an accident, Chad to simple kennel logistics. They both grew up well cared for, well trained/educated, and well groomed. They both knew that they were highly regarded - Chad as an exemplary dog of his specific breed and Channing as a boy and young man who was very good looking, highly creative and likely successful at academics, judging by his later ease at handling numbers, administration and other life tasks.
Where they split off, experience wise, is where it gets traumatic for Channing. Chad never had those experiences. Yes, he suddenly got demoted from stud and Championship dog to family pet, but that didn't really hurt him much - at the time, he just knew that he was placed with a new owner, who cared for him and made sure that he could continue to live a comfortable dog life. He likely still hasn't fully understood what an insult was offered to him at that time. So all in all, Chad's life has remained comfortable and pleasant.
Thus he never needed to build the walls of arrogance that Channing built. He never developed anger management issues because he never learned to regard violence and aggression as something positive - he never went to war, he never had to fight challenges. He never developed a significant issue with women. And so on and so forth. That leaves Chad a much more pleasant person than Channing - still arrogant, but simply arrogant because he knows that he has pedigree and feels like he's great, not arrogant as a defensive measure.
Closely related is that Chad, unlike Channing, behaves in public. He is a good boy and a pleasant dog to be around (unless he opens his mouth - that is still the same as Channing. Just that in his case the reason is that he barks way too much and at too many things, though less than some other Pomeranians). He might know exactly who is below and who above him in the rank system of his surroundings (his owner is above, his owner's bosses are above his owner, and Russell (
spaghettimonster) is somewhere way below him so he doesn't have to listen to him when he doesn't want to, and behave more or less accordingly, but he doesn't misbehave to piss people off. He doesn't intentionally insult people he cares about to keep them at a distance.He actually likes having people around. And here the species difference comes in. Because he simply doesn't have the kind of human hang-ups that Channing has. He has less need for privacy, less sense for what actions should not be done in public (...or close to none, he's used to people watching him poop), different expectations from food and most importantly a very different way of interacting with people. He's not used to others being able to understand him, the bane of his existence since he gained sentience a year ago. The network will be exciting, and he'll likely spend the first few weeks of it being live almost constantly logged in and talking to people just because he CAN. That will wear off, but even afterwards, to a large part due to all the above reasons, he'll still be a lot more social than Channing would ever be.
Abilities:
- Channing can (as long as the sun is under the horizon) turn into a wolf. Wolf form enhances all his supernatural traits and obeys the laws of conversion of mass - the volume of his body doesn't change, and since he's a tall, muscular human he becomes a large wolf. If he turns voluntarily, he retains most of his sentience in wolf form.
- Superior senses: All natural senses are at least as good as those of a regular wolf, with a supernatural scenting ability on top that lets him smell things about supernatural creatures that aren't part of their actual natural scent.
- He is immortal. This means that his body will always return to the state in which he was metamorphosed - he doesn't age and he heals perfectly without scars or other remainders, but he also can't put on or lose weight, etc.
- Superior strength and speed: Not the greatest supernaturally possible amount of both, but still definitely superhuman.
- Superior healing: He heals very quickly. Most injuries will be gone in a few hours or a day, though complex injuries, physical harm inflicted over a longer period, or expansive damage (eye injuries, the results of torture, and so on), can take up to a week to heal.
- Weaknesses: Nothing comes at no price, and in Channing's case he becomes a raging beast at full moon, is clumsier than he used to be as a human (though he got a certain predatory grace in return), and is weak to the sun. Due to his age and dominance, he can walk around in the sunlight for a very short time and easily stay awake without much of an issue, but he's definitely not going to do either without need.
- Turning to the mundane, Channing takes a strong interest in financial things and mathematics, and has acted as the pack's bursar for many years. His experience goes past financial administration and expands into general administration and bureaucratic leadership and organisation, though, as he has worked in various positions in institutions like the War Office, the Home Office, and the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, always successfully.
- Channing is a military man. He started during the Napoleonic Wars and has been with the military pretty much ever since. Likely very quickly after joining the Woolsey pack he became the leader of the Woolsey pack attachment (werewolves have mandatory military service, structured as a pack serving a certain amount of time a year as semi-autonomous entity that is attached to a regiment. Usually, the whole pack serves, but in Woolsey's case the pack is so big that only half of them go abroad while the other runs the Bureau of Unnatural Registry). He seems to be a very capable leader, inspiring great loyalty in the mortal soldiers of his regiment, and would have all the knowledge about equipment, strategy, tactics and anything else an officer with a field command would know. He also is skilled in hand-to-hand combat.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- Third Person: Here! (if needed: And another one.)
- Network: Here!
ANYTHING ELSE? N/A