Name:  Liam Farrell
Apparent Age:  35
Actual Age: 96
Years as a Warlock:  80
Apparent Profession:  Lawyer for Grupo Carso, a holding company based in Mexico City
Actual Profession: Agent of an as of yet unnamed power

Appearance:  At 6’ and 190lbs, Liam is tall and fit.  He has light brown eyes and usually wears his hair dark loose and wavy or more slicked back.  He usually dresses in suits, but isn’t above dressing down to jeans and t-shirts or more casual clothes if they help him blend in better.  No matter what he wears, he tends to lean towards expensive, designer brands or at least comfortable ones.  Either way, he usually seems as comfortable in his clothes as he is in his body.

He rarely frowns, though just as rarely smiles more than a hint, usually in a flash before his face turns back to a mask that’s hard to read.  His eyes are usually bright and unafraid to be seen looking and when something has his interest or attention, for good or bad, his gaze can be intense

Area of Expertise:  Sensory Manipulation

Primary Applications: Liam is skilled in controlling the senses of others.  This control varies based on factors such as proximity, contact and the subject’s level of awareness and extenuating input.  For example, a suggestion or sound of a fly buzzing would make it easier for him to make someone ‘feel’ the fly landing on their arm, a touch on the arm would make it easier for him to make someone feel their skin tingle or burn.

Types of Manipulation include:

• Somatosensory – Touch, temperature, proprioception  (body awareness) and nociception (pain).  With somatosensory manipulation, Liam is able to make someone feel something that isn’t there, pleasant or unpleasant.  He can make them feel warm or cold, in general or in specific places, pleasant or unpleasant.  Affecting proprioception, he can make someone feel disconnected from their body, most often causing problems with balance and coordination, but sometimes numbing limbs, forcing items to be dropped or those limbs to not function.
  
• Audition – Liam can make people hear sounds.  In most cases this is limited to simple sounds, buzzing, indistinct whispers, things going bump in the night.  In some cases he can make people hear simple commands or voices in their head.
  
• Vision – Visual illusions are difficult, but visual distortions less so.  While he cannot make himself ‘invisible’, he’s capable of obscuring himself enough to avoid casual notice.  He can make people see movement or shapes, most easily out of the corner of their eye.  More easily he can blur vision making focus difficult, as though someone suddenly needs glasses.
  
• Gustation and Olfaction – More difficult than most other senses because of their personal nature, Liam can influence taste and smell, more often than not enhancing or dulling them to make something taste sweeter or more bitter, or to make a smell less offensive, more appealing or the like.
  
• Time – With time manipulation, Liam is able to make things seem to go faster or slower.  The change in speed varies greatly depending on outside factors and as with other abilities, varies based on context.  While drawing a knife slowly across skin, he can make the moment last for an eternity, while walking through a crowd he can at best slow them down enough not to bump into anyone.

In the end, it is a combination of sensory manipulation where the true power lies.  While throwing off a person’s proprioception may make them unbalanced, dulling their proprioception, blurring their vision, causing an auditory distraction and numbing a thigh is far more likely to knock them from their feet.  Of course, combining such things is far more complicated and difficult and requires concentration, closeness, contact and frankly, more easily accomplished with a kick to the shin and a shove.

Secondary Skills:    Liam is capable of stealing the life force of others in order to slow his aging.  This coupled with other life prolonging techniques has kept him young for longer than most other warlocks given the extensive expenditure of personal power he’s used throughout his life.  He is also trained in standard magical techniques including magical communication, presence masking and protective wards.

Additional skills include a variety of combat techniques, forensics, business and psychology.

He is also a trained and licensed lawyer, a role he’s played to varying degrees over his long career.

Personality:  Liam can be charming and personable though with a dangerous tension always held in check.  Not easily angered, he takes slights and insults easily, often outwardly finding them amusing while inwardly planning how to extract payment for the slights later. Stubborn and firm in his resolve, Liam’s can be a fierce friend when needed and a terrible enemy when angered, but always with an eye towards his employer.  When working he can be singled minded and unstoppable, nearly to a fault and often with a total disregard for his own safety and survival.

That said, while confident in himself nearly to the point of arrogance, he’s well aware of the likelihood of his own demise.  As such, he enjoys the finer things in life when possible and indulges his personal interests and entertainment frequently.  This ranges from fine food and drink, pleasant and pleasurable company and the more intimate hobbies of manipulation, games and pain.

However, he is exceptionally well controlled in his behavior.  While he drinks excessively, it very rarely interferes with his work.  While he enjoys the company of women, he never puts them ahead of the job and while he enjoys his hobbies, he’s always careful to never leave a mess that could be traced back to him or his employer.

Background:  They were all orphans, some from Europe, some from the United States, some from Central and South America, twenty-two of them at the start, ages six to eight when it began.

Fourteen of them made it to their teens, four were left when they were done.

He only saw two of them die, one at the hands of an instructor, one at his own.  The rest were escorted away or simply disappeared, taken in the middle of the night.  At first they’d wondered where thinking maybe they were adopted, sent to a factory, off to a farm, but eventually they stopped wondering and stopped caring, the lessons and trials and training enough to keep them occupied from morning late into the night.

Four of them were left when it was over, Liam, Helena, Juan Carlos and William.

William died in 1944, Juan Carlos in 1945.  Only he and Helena were left from their generation and she hadn’t left the compound in decades, serving as his employer’s voice for those in the field.

Others had come before him and others had followed, but he’d been raised to believe he was the best, one of many trainings which had stuck even when age began to slow him, when it became harder and more difficult to keep up with the younger agents and operatives.  He knew it was only experience and dedication that kept him in the field, that let him retain his employer’s trust, though he suspected that was beginning to slip, that the cracks in his reputation were beginning to show like the scars of old wounds.

Experience, dedication and training.  Most of the newer breed were recruits, brought onboard after they’d already developed bad habits, without the focus of those that had been all but born to the job.  Good help was hard to find, he thought bitterly, but he supposed that was the point of sending him, to find good help, make poor help better and most of all, make sure things went according to plan.