Arteaux
[vigilem]
Arteaux. That’s his name. If he ever had a different one, he doesn’t know. He’s nothing. No one. Not really. He’s a Vigilem but that is all. Nothing more. Never anything more. He can’t become anyone or anything else as he isn’t allowed to. Suppressed and trained only for one specific purpose, he has no free will anymore. He’s probably the only Vigilem out there that is not immune to unicorn poison. That’s how the Order found him in the first place: dying on the stairs of the nunnery. When he was cured and awoke, he had absolutely no memory. He couldn’t even talk or move at first either. Those things came back to him over time, but nothing else. The Order decided to use this to their advantage. They gave him a name and taught him all there was to be taught of the Order and the tasks befallen of the Hunters. They shaped and molded his mind to their ways. They taught him how to protect the Hunters. They taught him to serve and defend. He became a Vigilem of old, a subservient creature pandering to the Hunter’s every whim and order. And he does it willingly. He knows nothing else but the simple order to obey. He came to them with no inhibitions, no memories, no ties to anyone or anything. Now he is tied and bound to the Order and their hunters. He is inferior in their eyes but loves it. He loves it for it is all he knows. He doesn’t understand when men tell him of men’s superiority. In his eyes, women have always been superior over men. It makes sense to him naturally. They are the ones who protect them from the unicorns after all. He can seek out the unicorns but he cannot fight them, not effectively at least. He has inherent battle skill, but it is next to nothing compared to the Hunters. Since Hunters are female and he is male, he is therefore the weaker of the species. Simple? To him perhaps. Men try and instill in him whatever manly pride most men possess, but he finds it baffling and ridiculous. Arteaux is often drawn to matters of simple logic. It might be a mere childish trait, his revulsion for complication and an affinity for black and white. But it’s simply the way he is. He seeks understanding, a limited amount of understanding to be sure. He wants to know things, but seems to hate the answers. He wants to know about himself, but is reluctant to make any discoveries. He doesn’t know what he will find if he tries to learn about himself, and he fears for the result. So he learns of other things instead. Anything, everything, something: so long as it isn’t about himself. He would rather stay the subservient creature, the nobody, the nothing, the useless Vigilem, than discover what he might have been. If Arteaux was an animal, he would undeniably be a cat. Ask anyone and they would readily agree. Every movement of his is feline. Every step, every turn, every move is made with unmatched grace. His mind and body are in perfect synch, his reflexes at an incredible, heightened peak. His reaction time is instantaneous. He can turn from sleepy and docile to alert and fierce within a matter of milliseconds. He can catch and throw back arrows. Once, a bullet even. He seems to be naught but a haunting, flitting shadow that glides over the ground and flickers against the walls. One minute there, one minute not. So quiet, his tread lighter than feathers. He can creep up on anyone, anything. Only certain Hunters are ever able to hear his approach. He is so still and silent, one can enter, move about, and leave a room that he occupies without ever knowing he was there. It gives him an almost ethereal quality, seeming to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye, always being where one least expects him and always vanishing when one looks his way. He’s flighty, feisty, and very independent. Yes, he lives and breathes every word that commands him, but on his own, he is extremely introverted and despairingly antisocial. He sticks to the shadows and the corners, only coming out when summoned. He does his work, serves his purpose, then disappears. Like a cat. The cat will come out to hunt the mice, eat its meal, and offer a moment of company with its owner before it runs off to new places. Arteaux might run off, but he’s always within the church. He never goes outside unless accompanied by a hunter on missions. Such are the rules. He has explored nearly every nook and cranny of the church, and he keeps exploring. There’s always something new to find in a building such as the nunnery palace. He also has this look about him. In his wide eyes and his usually expressionless gaze. This look that he knows something, that he’s far wiser and above everyone else than he appears to be. It’s a look that demands everyone bow down before him instead of the other way around that it truly is. It is unsettling, the way he seems to command everything with a glance. How his knowing, fathomless eyes pierce right through the soul and extract the essence of it. He is grace and lithe and liquid silver, a pirouetting ghost that haunts, a cat that creeps and crouches, waiting to pounce. There is that as well. He has all this potential, all these forgotten memories, but the feelings are still there. Sometimes he feels things and doesn’t know why. Sometimes he is angry and murderous, but he doesn’t understand. This is why some fear him, why some are loathe to keep him here, and why many are so keen to control him. He is a crouched cat. Every little emotion, every feeling, bottled up, suppressed, coiled about like a coiled spring. Coiled, crouched, waiting to strike. Claws slowly sliding out from velvety paws, serpentine oculars closed to slashed lines of silvery-gray, fangs bared, hackles raised, tail lashing, ears flattened against the skull. He is dangerous, unpredictable. A crouched cat, a ticking bomb, a sleeping dragon: just waiting, watching, for the moment when he will attack. It’s hard to think of him this way. He’s such a gentle, docile creature, but appearances can be deceiving. Arteaux is always thought of gentle. Gentle, meek, quiet, compassionate. He can be a little rough around the edges. He’s very hard to commune with as he’s a very closed, withdrawn person. Despite it, he is very pleasant and a bit more optimistic than many would expect. He has all the innocence of a young child, despite the amount of blood shed by his hands. Everything is new and beautiful and intriguing to him. His curiosity can sometimes make him a bit reckless or even clueless at times, but he isn’t stupid about it. He seems utterly naïve of certain things and quite unable to understand conversation or the ‘current lingo’ or ‘cultural references’. He’s more old fashioned, delving into ancient history and literature rather then looking to the modern things. He finds the past simple in its ways and understands that far more than the complicated drama and flair of the flamboyant present his is a part of. It often frustrated him, this modern world. He’s not frustrated easily and very slow to anger. Even in battle he doesn’t display much rage of any sort. A furrowing of the brow, a concentration, a seriousness of composure, but not anger. He isn’t very temperamental and can put up with nearly everyone and everything no matter how hard they may try to press his buttons and get on his bad side. He doesn’t lash out or lose control, and he would never dream of touching a girl. Never mind the chivalry of not hitting one, he wouldn’t even touch them unless it was his duty. He treats women as if they were divine goddesses, both delicate yet strong, fragile yet unbreakable. He never appears sad and has never been known to cry. He has been known to smile though. His trademark smile is small but very heartfelt, a little fragile thing that transforms his stony face entirely. Some may call it a loving smile, but it is hard to tell what he does or doesn’t love. He doesn’t seem to quite understand the concept. Because of this, there isn’t much worry that he will ever –how to put it- take the purity of any of the Hunters here. There was originally much discussion about whether it was wise to keep him within the building that the Hunters lived and slept in, but after much proof that he simply had no idea about the ways of men and women, all their worries were laid to rest. There might still be a chance that a girl might be able to bed him, but as the majority of girls aren’t so keen, even that suspicion wasn’t given much thought. He seems numb to affection anyway. So he is allowed to live there, with and among the people he serves. It makes him more accessible. They don’t have to wait for him to arrive to get things done, as he is always there. They also have more control over him in that respect. They have forbidden him from leaving the nunnery, making him the only permanent male resident there. Arteaux is rather harsh looking, a counter to his sweet disposition and downtrodden inferiority. He has pale skin, as though he didn’t spend much time outdoors. A little frosty of pallor, but not pale enough to be sickly or offsetting. He has a healthy enough glow to his color. His hair is pure white, the color of untainted, freshly fallen snow. It is soft to the touch, smooth and rather downy. It was once a honey brown, but turned white after he was poisoned. He has pointed ears, almost elvish in style. The nature of these ears is unknown, but they seem to attribute to his uncanny hearing. His eyebrows are slanted, giving him a fierce, angry look that offsets his wide, wondering eyes. The eyes themselves are a bright, silvery gray. And rather than black pupils, he doesn’t seem to have any really. They are more of a dull gray than black, occasionally blending in with the color of his irises. His nose is aquiline; sloping gently and a little sharp. He has rather sharp facial features all around. His slightly raised cheekbones and the line of his jaw give him a bit of a feline appearance. Sharp enough to be fierce but not pointed enough to look thin. More slender. Arteaux has his fair share of scars, but the most eye catching are the ones on his neck and chin. They are maddeningly unnatural, a specific design purposely placed there. Starting at the lower lip, the scar becomes two lines that meet at the base of the chin, extending further down, slightly widening, disappearing under the collar of his shirt or whatever he is wearing. It extends all the way down his chest and stomach, following the indented curvature of his muscles till it ends at his bellybutton. Three scar lines, shortening in length as they descend, cut in measured succession across his neck, in such a way that an exact half of each is on either side of the center line. Paler scars come down from the back of his neck and the start of his jaw to run down alongside the center line. These unnatural scars have raised some questions as is conceivable, but Arteaux cannot answer them, nor would he really care to if he even knew. Their origin is unknown, the meaning of them even further indiscernible. Arteaux is quite intelligent, consuming vast amounts of knowledge from reading. He likes to read. He also likes to fight, though he prefers mortal, human opponents to things like unicorns. At least with humans he has a chance of winning. Arteaux isn’t one for art or music, anything that is remotely involved with self-expression as he has next to none. He’s logical, precise, and simplistic. Things like emotion, things gained over years and years of development and self exploration have been utterly lost to him. He might be relearning, but he is still stuck in a single mindset. It is this mindset that truly holds him back from being whatever man he could possibly be. He doesn’t want to change it. He doesn’t want to find it. He doesn’t know what he will find when he does. Then he might not be Arteaux anymore. Then he might be someone else entirely with memories and feelings and goals and things. He doesn’t want that. Just thinking about it is too much to handle for his simple, steadfast mind. He’s happy being Arteaux. And it seems that’s who he will remain forever.
Luca Trune
Luca Trune lied. He's no vigilem. The reason he lied was to get in on the Berlin Special Forces Tactical Unit and guard his best friend Evon. It is unknown where Luca is from or his backstory. According to official records, he didn't exist up until he was seventeen. He joined when he was eighteen and crawled up the ranks as one of the top notch assassins in the business. He and Evon came to Rome after a berserk unicorn hunter betrayed the unit and wiped them out along with half of Berlin. Now nineteen, he and Evon hunt unicorns throughout Italy and protect as many citizens as they can despite the severely low effectiveness of their attacks.
Evon Fawkes
[vigilem]
Evon was a part of the Berlin Special Forces Tactical Unit that protected the civilians against unicorns. Unfortunatley, they were betrayed by a psychotic member of the Order and their entire unit, as well as half of Berlin, was slaughtered. Evon and his friend Luca managed to escape with barely their lives. They still hunt unicorns and protect people even though they aren't that effective if not at all.
Callisto Agostini
An Italian citizen by birth, his grandparents were originally from South Korea before fleeing to Italy during the Korean War. He was orphaned at age ten when his father was pushed in front of a bus by a man pickpocketing him and his mother committed suicide soon after. Callisto was raised by his uncle Donatello in the southern part of Rome where he lived most of his life. He joined the Carabinieri when he was nineteen. In 2003, he was caught in the blast of a suicide bombing on their base camp in Nasiriyah. He ended up in a coma for a total of two years, and when he came out of it, he didn't remember the incident. He lost most of the feeling in his left leg and side, a drastic decrease in vision despite corrective eye surgery, and occasionally limps at times. Because an amount of shrapnel ended up close to his heart and couldn't be surgically removed, as well as his other limiting injuries, he was honorably discharged from the military. Dead set on getting some kind of life back, he did an extraneous amount of physical therapy and fitness training before he went to the European Bureau of Investigations and became one of their agents. Callisto has pale skin, flawless in his face after several surgeries, but still retains his asian genetics. He claims his nose is a little flatter than before and his cheekbones are too round, but no one really seems to notice. His hair is spiky and straight, and he likes to keep it a little long in the back. He wears glasses all the time, as he's legally blind without them. They were once a dark, deep brown, but now they appear more metallic gray. Another surgery side effect, but it is better than no sight at all. As he's missing the pointer finger of his right hand, he has retrained himself to be left handed, at least when it comes to fighting. He habitually uses his right hand for things at times. He is about twenty-nine years old now, still living in Rome in a crummy apartment that he never finds the time to fix up. If he has a lot of money, which eh probably does, he doesn't make it known. He's very frugal, and the only thing he tends to splurge on is video games, his knife collection, and cigarettes. He drinks but not enough to be alcoholic. Despite his smoking problem, he always does it outside so he doesn't smell much like smoke. He's into health and fitness, a lot, and actually enjoys yoga of all things. He goes to physical therapy about once a month for his leg as well as monthly doctor visits to keep a check on the condition of his heart. His life span has shortened in theory because of his condition, but he doesn't seem all that worried about it. Perhaps he's faking. Like your stereotypical Asian, he's good with electronics and martial arts. He also enjoys origami but doesn't do that very often. He doesn't care for Asian food that much, except perhaps a few rice dishes. He much prefers Italian food as he grew up on that a lot more.
Innocenzo Bianchi
coming soon
Taikatalvi Tockspringe
Silence. To his own ears, the world was silence. Faded. To his own eyes, the world was faded. Dreary. The world doesn’t look the same to his eyes. He takes a step. The sound echoes in his ears, and before his eyes, a burst of color. Red. Red like blood. A bird chirps, and a streak of blue strikes through the air. A car’s horn blares and his vision is filled with yellow. A man shouts to another, and there are small lights of soft, red orange filling the sky. At first it charmed him, entertained him. But it never ended. It overwhelmed him. Hurt him. Taikatalvi suffers in silence, both the literal and the metaphorical sort. He is battered and betrayed by his own body and bears it quietly, by himself. He was born with sound-to-image synesthesia, a mental condition that turns what he hears into images, colors, pictures that he sees. He hears with his eyes, and the nosier it gets, the more he sees. Once he loved music. It fed him. It moved him. He lived and breathed it. When he was alone and trapped in his own silence, he would play music with unbridled joy. He had a talent for it. Every song he ever heard need only be heard once before he could play and sing it perfectly. Every instrument he ever touched came alive under his talented hands. He had such a strong bond with the music he played. In the solitude and silence that was his life, his dreary world soon became shifting, dancing, living colors and images that filled his mind and took him to unbelievable heights of ecstasy. But that was then and this is now. He had been carefully nurtured and protected, kept from the outside world and all its broken promises. In his home where he was kept sheltered from loud noise, where people spoke in whispers, and the loudest thing that ever occurred was perhaps a pin dropping; there the colors came softly, gently, and not very often. He didn’t like being confined. He had seen the world through the windows of his home and h wanted to go there. Become a part of it. He didn’t like being confined. He was so curious. He was warned, oh he was warned, but he did not listen. He stole away in the dead of night when no one was paying him any mind. Now he was out there, alone and unprotected in the world. It was too much, far too much. The sights, the sounds, the colors! He was completely assaulted by them. All at once. It tormented him. Violent. Intense. Insane. After that day, things changed. Events occurred and situations arose that sent Taikatalvi’s carefully structured world spiraling out of control. He was taken from his home and sent elsewhere, to live with people who didn’t understand him. He was forced to live a normal life, but he wasn’t normal. Not normal at all. He couldn’t explain to others what he saw or how he perceived the world. He was thrown into society and had to learn of things like currency and transportation and social skills. He had been taught simple, gentle things by loving, beautiful people, and he was ill prepared for the cruelty, the violence, and the noise of the outside world. The stress and shock of it nearly killed him. He could not function and could not adapt. He was too weak for the world; weak in body, spirit, and mind. Every movement, every breath, every heartbeat was a struggle, a war against his will. The pressure nearly broke him. Nearly. He was weak but his will was strong. He clawed and crawled his way back to sanity and stability. It took him years, but he finally made it. He finally managed to change. The delicate glass butterfly had become an uncut diamond. Pretty, but hard and unrelenting. The state of solitude in his psyche altered into anti-social personality disorder. He cannot understand others and seeks to keep others from understanding him. They don’t understand him as it is and he will only make it harder for them to. He will lash out when angered, and become all levels of nasty and ill tempered, yet barely feels any remorse if none at all. He can be a tormentor, but gains no pleasure from it. He gains pleasure from nothing these days. He shuts himself up inside. He won’t explain himself or let himself feel anything. He controls his feelings and silences his consciousness. He tries and for the most part, he succeeds. But there are days when all his hypocrisy overwhelms him. He longs for the days when everything was simple and silent. He longs for the times when he was innocent. These times are few and far between, and he is such a vulnerable spirit when they do occur. Instantly his walls are leveled and he seeks anything or anyone to give him comfort and peace of mind. What a pathetic creature he is. No, he is more than pathetic. He’s a mite of a despicable child as well. Everything loving and beautiful about him on the inside has been twisted into some nasty, wretched being, and it surely is what is on the inside that counts. He hates and accuses, looking down on every living creature with undisguised disgust. It matters not who or what they might be. Just their mere existence is enough cause in his eyes for his hatred. He cares not for others, and it goes beyond his mere personality disorder. He is exclusively selfish, a greedy, needy child and a miser at heart. He wouldn’t give anyone the time of day if it inconveniences him and always puts his own, personal needs above the needs of others. He doesn’t believe in the collective, only survival of the one. If others begin to get in his way or cause him to be distracted from his focus, he will brutally tear them down until nothing remains. If someone is his enemy, with or without cause for them to be matters not, he will not rest until he has irreversibly destroyed them to some degree, whether in an emotional, physical, mental, or social sense. This form of selfishness overcomes any form of care or kindness he may show during those odd moments when he seems to be genuinely helpful or caring. He is never genuine about anything, definitely not anything good, though he can have all the appearances of it. Despite his aloof air and the way he remains estranged from all contact, he also has violently shifting patterns in this behavior of his. It’s not nearly as clear cut or as easy to label him as that. Not to make him appear overtly complicated, but he does have some flaws in the carefully structured personality he has transformed to, and these flaws are more apparent in his general behaviors. It was mentioned earlier that he enters into a pathetic state of weakness on occasion in which he longs for those simpler days when all was love and innocence bonded together. In these moments, he also demonstrates this odd form of imprinting on people he meets. The moment is fleeting but eternal. When he clings to one person, he is impossible to pry off. He randomly picks someone to bond to, to love and follow and look up to, and these people he will follow to the end of his days. These people he tends to be rather strange to. He acts much younger than his age and becomes utterly obsessed wit the object of his affection, to the point of terrifying these people. His imprinting behavior turns more people off to him than his normally hateful demeanor. Hatred is something many people can deal with. They can take that hateful person and set them in a box and say, “This person is hateful. I can choose to try and love them, hate them back, or simply ignore them.” Hateful people can be packaged perfectly, but not obsessed people. The obsessed defy the norm and are full of unexpected surprises. They follow, they live, they breathe the air of their obsession and they can never be gotten rid of. Like the hydra, they just keep reappearing every time they are struck down. Then, like an opposite reflection in a mirror, he can have violently murderous intentions to some. These also can come from his rather fragile states when his mind isn’t totally right. He turns people into the pure embodiment of all his hatred, his suffering, and everything that may have wronged him in the past. He sets these people aside as targets that he must destroy. He has never actually killed anyone yet, but he has come very close to it multiple times. On that darker note, Taikatalvi also seems to be attracted to blood. Not just the color or smell, but the taste. He never shies from the sight of blood, rather it lures him in. He will touch it, taste it, drink it if the opportunity presents itself. His love of blood seems to stem from a bizarre fear that he doesn’t have enough in his body. It is not a totally irrational or unexplained fear. One would think the boy’s list of problems would have ended by now, but no. Taikatalvi came down with lung cancer when he was ten years old. The illness has progressed to later stages, and he is often racked with terrible bouts of coughing up blood, occasionally followed by vomiting blood as well. Taikatalvi is absolutely terrified of the disease, and so stemmed from it the sudden urge to drink blood, believing he is replacing the blood he loses. Of course, drinking blood does not agree with him at all, and he finds this strange urge of his disgusting. Yet another factor in his self-loathing. Yet he does not try to stop himself, already having accepted it as an irreversible part of him. And if the abnormalities of this child couldn’t possibly end there, Taikatalvi suffers also of narcolepsy. It is possibly the lesser of all evils. Though it is a chronic disorder, he doesn’t experience all the downsides it has to offer. He will drop to the ground and fall asleep instantaneously, or perhaps awake fully alert at the most impromptu times. He often undergoes automatic behavior: a period where he continues to function (talking, putting things away, etc.) during sleep episodes, but awakens with no memory of performing such activities. He occasionally experiences hallucinations, especially if he hasn’t slept for a long time, but these are expected to fade as he gets older. From everything described of him, from his strange past, his sufferings even as a child, to his unexpected behaviors, one could almost have pity for him. But they are warned not to be fooled. He is a child beyond help, beyond hope. It would take years, maybe decades, to right all the wrong that has poisoned his mind. But he doesn’t have years or decades. He’s running out of time. He can feel it. Death calls to him, and though he fears it and fights to live, a part of him has come to await it. Taikatalvi looks rather fine despite his conditions and his abnormal side. He once had soft, silky blonde hair, the pale yellow color of the sky before dawn, but the stresses turned his hair stark white, with none of its former color remaining. It lies flowing yet downy on his head, always in a pleasantly ruffled, tousled style that seems to suit his youthful age without making him appear to wild. His eyes are electric, powerful. Neon oculars of an opalescent blue-green color, more green than blue really. His eyes speak more than he ever will, always swirling with torrential floods of unexpressed thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears. Eyes are windows to the soul after all, and his remains caged and despairingly violent against his barred windows. He is everything cold and winter, from those eyes and hair to his soft, pale skin. It is not a sickly pale that whitens his entire body, rather a frosty, delicate pale that compliments rather than disgusts. His once flawless skin is now laced with violent, twisted scars, though most have faded over time or blend in with his skin, the rest continue to mar his body. Some are self inflicted, an experiment. The rest are larger, more pronounced, the results of terrible accidents. Yet Taikatalvi does not seem to care about any accidents or the scars, in fact he seems mostly unaware of them for the most part. One may ask where he attained a scar and he will simply not remember. Not for the sheer quantity he possesses but merely because he honestly does not know. He happens to have been born with CIPA: a defect that prevents the user from feeling or registering any pain. Therefore he can be injured by the smallest or largest of things and won’t even notice until someone points it out, or perhaps later if he notices blood or if something seems out of place. Truly then, he won’t know where he received most of his scars. He is ice in his face and form, a rigid, cold demeanor that epitomizes ferocity in every angle and contour, yet his every move is hypocrisy. He has all the balance and grace of a prima donna, a dancer, a ballerina. Something soft, strong, and gentle. He hovers and glides across rooms as though his feet never touch the ground. He is light on his feet and silent as the grave. He can creep and crawl and none shall know he was ever there. A mere shadow that flits o’er the walls. It’s almost mesmerizing. He torments himself almost as often as he torments others, by drowning out the world and its noise in his music. He hates music now. He hates it because music is emotion and the language of the soul. He swears he has no soul. He swears he isn’t human anymore, but the music does not care for what Taikatalvi believes and it will pour from that soul and show him that he indeed bears humanity inside, and suffers for it terribly.