Joseph Owens

“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise, Johnny.”
~Louis Cyphre

Name: Joseph Owens
Alias:  Detective, Joe, JW
Age:  25
Gender: Male
Species: Human (Animator)
Occupation: Detective, Savannah Police Department

Visual Description: Though 6’ and a lean 175 lbs, Joe’s not about to make anyone quake in their shoes when he walked through the door, at least not on size alone.  At first glance, no one would call him particularly imposing, but with a little time, there’s something about him, like the clouds follow him, casting shadows and threatening rain.  He carries some of those shadows in his eyes, which while blue like the sky are sometimes darkened with distant thoughts.  He carries the threat of rain and a storm in his hair which tends to get mussed or even a bit spiked despite his best efforts to keep it down with Brilliantine.  He usually dresses well, sticking with suits, though he usually ditches his coat when he’s working, rolling up his sleeves as they say.
Height:  6'
Weight:  175 lbs
Hair Color/Style: Medium length and light brown, though darker brown when slicked
Eye Color:Blue
Character Model: Chace Crawford

Personality Description:  Joe tends to switch personalities like clothes, putting on different ones for different people.  To his fellow cops, he tends to be a little distant, purposefully feeding the notion that he’s just some rich brat that thinks he’s better than them and bought his badge.  The latter might be true, but the former isn’t.  He doesn’t think he’s better than them, but it serves a purpose, keeping them at a distance so he can pursue leads and things he doesn’t want them to know about.  Among his few fledgling contacts, he can be a generous and loyal friend, someone they can trust and someone that will help them out as long as they don’t stray too far over the line.  Among the criminals he hunts, he can be brutal and almost cruel, playing avenging angel as much as law enforcing cop.  In fact, he’s not above dispensing justice outside the courts if it suits him.  In private, well, the number of people who know what he’s like then number in the single digits and they’re not quick to blab.
Habits: In his short time back, Joe has found a few places he frequents regularly, including Christ Church, a small diner and a club, the latter to mostly prove the speakeasies don’t need to worry about him when he comes knocking on their door.  He doesn’t smoke, but carries them and plays with the lighter as well as cards, coins and other items in an effort to keep his fingers nimble.
Merits:  He believes in paying debts or at the very least keeping proper accounts.  He’s also loyal to those that help him and quick to help those that ask for it.  He also has a strong sense of justice, is quick to let small things slide, but unwilling to forget the big.
Flaws:  Sometimes blind to his own hypocrisy, can become morose when alone, sometimes gets tired of people and spirits asking for help (though he still does help), has a violent streak under the surface
Sin:  Wrath (tempered by kindness)
Virtue:  Temperance (marred by pride)

Background/History:  Only three people ever knew of his abilities.  One of them was dead now, one had always been undead.

It was whispered that his mother had screamed when he was born, not from the pain, but fear and disgust, thinking she’d born a monster.  It wasn’t anything so dramatic as that.  He’d simply been born in the caul, a membrane of skin over his face making him seem devoid of features.  It was by most accounts a thing of good fortune, an omen of future greatness and luck.  It was easily removed and pressed to a piece of paper like tradition held, plastered and framed, a round splotch upon a page.  He had it still, on an alter in the chapel of his family home.  It sat there with other heirlooms and talismans, a picture of the Virgin Mary, a purple priestly stole, a portrait of his parents, candles, a Bible and the leg bone from his first creature he’d raised.

The chapel was large enough to hold a dozen comfortably though no one but he ever went inside.  It was his sanctuary, protected with glyphs and wards, some hanging on the walls, some painted, some carved into the door; all of questionable ability to actually work.

He wasn’t particularly religious, though he prayed daily.  It was a conflicted feeling he had never enjoyed, less so know he didn’t enjoy.  He knew there were things that went bump in the night for good or ill, knew there was more than the mortal eye beheld, so the notion of God, demons, saints and spirits seemed likely.  He just wasn’t sure who to pray to or whether they listened.  As a result, he prayed to them all and to the nebulous dark and unknown.

Maddie, his housekeeper had been the first to notice his gift.  He’d been a boy of six when she’d told him, explaining the caul, what it had meant and how he had The Sight and The Voice to see and talk with the dead.  She was the one that told him how the world worked, the things that lived in it, though she used names like Loa and Adze.  She was also the one that taught him to first harness his abilities, raising cats and dogs when he was still a child and shooing off the spirits that thought a boy could help them right the wrongs done to them.  She was also the first to support burying those abilities when his parents were put in the ground when he was only ten.

His family was quite well to do and had been for more than a century.  Back in the mid-1800’s, his grandfather had been a planter, congressman, lawyer and among other things for a time, the mayor of Savannah.  His father followed a similar path, soldier, lawyer, industrialist, owning one of the largest lumber exporters in the area as well as being a founding partner of the American Pulp and Paper Company.  His mother had been an equal pillar of the community in her own way, a supporter of the arts and charities, who donated her maiden home to the Historical Society to be used as a museum when she married.

That’s why it had been such a shock when both George Junior and his beautiful wife Mary were horribly murdered in front of their young son’s eyes.  It was a murder which had rocked the quiet community, rippling through mortal and supernatural world alike.  It was the closest the latter had come to being revealed in ages and it took effort to quiet the commotion and let the murder fade into grisly history, including convincing a boy that it hadn’t really been a monster that killed his parents, but a man.  It was a story the stuck in his mind for years, put there by a vampire, reinforced by a nanny who thought it for the best.

Perhaps that’s why a short time after his parents were put in the ground he was taken to stay with an uncle across the Atlantic, distance from the scene of death and foggy memory protecting the fiction.  Only, there was only so much a story could cover and the holes it left needed to be filled, not for lost parents, he had Maddie, a kind uncle and a decent aunt for that.  It was a need for justice and a way to assuage his own guilt and gratitude.

The war was a both a release and an education.  Anger hidden within for years had an outlet against the Huns.  It was the American blood, his uncle said, though plenty of British boys shared the same desire to go to war and prove themselves.  Still, it was nothing like he had imagined, far worse and far more miraculous.

If Maddie’s childhood lessons of sacrificing chickens and reading bones were the start of his supernatural education, it was completed in the trenches and battlefields along the Somme..   Death came to him unbidden, reminding him of who he was.  It was terrifying at first, he thought himself going mad, but in time he became comfortable with death again, the war accomplishing what all the zombie cats and dogs in the world couldn’t.  Towards the end, he spent his nights penning letters to people he’d never met and never would, sending the final requests of the dead, British, French, German alike.  And he remembered a haunting image, of half imagined parents, bodies whole and torn, though like the soldiers of the war, they were just one memory in one thousand, first and foremost, but one of many, not one alone.

When he returned from the war he was changed and not just because his clouded mind was starting to clear.  He had a purpose, an idea, one that would take some effort, expense and time.  His family worried.  He became friends with oddfellows, read equally odd books or simply shut himself away for days.  His aunt and uncle feared it the trauma of the war, Maddie feared it a darker path.  Both did their best to put him back on a proper track, so when a short time later he announced plans to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, attending Cambridge and studying law, they were all thrilled, thinking he would go into business or politics, like his family had before him.  They weren’t entirely wrong.

~O~

By the time Prohibition arrived, the Owens had nearly faded into the long history of Savannah.  Their mansion had been long shuttered, the furniture covered in white sheets, turning it into a home of ghosts and memory.  In time, it became a place that children dared one another to approach, a haunted place of shadows that waited silently and decayed.  Then one night, there were lights within, causing some to suspect squatters, others wisps, though when the police investigated, it was just Maddie, the family housekeeper, preparing for her young master’s homecoming.

When he did return a few months later he’d already put the next step of his plan in place, arriving at City Hall to receive a badge and a gun.

~O~

Rumors seemed to follow him as much as shadows.  Those old enough to remember his parents gossiped, those who were cops groused, those who had worked to keep the past in the past considered what to do.

~O~

He’d met the deceased before.  She’d been one of the first to come to his home and ask the question on everyone’s mind.  Where had he been and why had he come back.  He’d shared more of the truth with her than he’d intended, but she was a skilled reporter and a guide into the world beneath Savannah’s façade.  He gave her his trust, she gave him help researching his past, and now she was dead.  A coincidence?  He didn’t know, he just knew she was dead and didn’t deserve it.

Primary Skills: Mental (1), Charisma (2), Supernatural (3),  Physical (4)
Secondary:  Firearms, Investigation/Forensics, Law, Occult Theory, Religions, Beginners Knowledge of Local Politics (Mortal and Supernatural), Rudimentary Sleight of Hand
Tertiary Set: Speaking with the Dead (1), Strong Immunity to Rolling (2), Sensing the Dead (3), Raising the Dead (4), Sense Magic (5), Ritual Magic (6)

Notes:

• His supernatural abilities are currently hamstrung due to being suppressed as a youth.  Mostly he can speak with spirits that approach him and is somewhat immune to future attempts at rolling.  To a lesser degree he can sense the presence of the dead, has raised the dead in the past (but hasn’t tried recently), is starting to sense magic (but doesn’t understand it) and is studying ritual magic (but has mostly learned from books and a few brief encounters with dabblers).
  
• Was rolled as a child by a local vampire.  He doesn’t recall who it was (any volunteers?), but to a degree understands why they did it.  Still has an instinctual distrust of them because of it.
  
• He knew Helena Cortland.  She approached him to do a story about the return of a native son.  He agreed and asked for help in a matter of his own.
  
• Though he hasn’t yet gotten back into the habit of calling ghosts or spirits, they sometimes come to him anyway, usually wanting something, a message to be passed on, a wrong to be righted.  Usually he agrees, sometimes he asks for something in return.
  
• People make up a lot of rumors about him, including one that he killed his own parents as a boy (untrue), another that he bought his badge (true) or ones like the notion that his mansion is haunted (true-ish) and practices voodoo in the back garden (also true-ish).