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Welcome to Hair of the Dog {Pre-Anitaverse}

02:31, 26th April 2024 (GMT+0)

Joseph Owens

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

Basics


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

Physique


Physical 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 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: Sky Blue
Character Model: Chace Crawford

Psychology


Demeanor: Joe has learned 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 will serve a purpose, keeping them at a distance so he can pursue leads and things he doesn’t want them to know about.  Though he’s just begun his career, those he might one day call a contact or ally will find him to be a 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 or at least want to come back on the right side of it.  Among the criminals he hunts they might eventually find him to be brutal and almost cruel, content to play avenging angel as much as law enforcing cop.  In fact, he’s prepared to dispense justice outside the courts if needed and fully expects that may be the case given what he knows of the ‘real world’.  Which of these ‘suits’ is the real Joe remains to be seen as those that have seen him unclothed number in the single digits and are unlikely to blab.
Nature: Joe believes in the notion of right and wrong, sin and virtue.  He knows people tread both sides of that line, himself included but believes it’s possible to always find your way back into the light.  It’s that certainty that gives him the confidence to head into the dark to help those there.  He hopes his confidence isn’t misplaced.
Character Merits: He believes in paying debts or at the very least keeping proper accounts.  He’s loyal to those that help him and quick to help those that ask for it.  He has a strong sense of justice, is quick to let small things slide, but unwilling to forget the big without proper atonement.  He knows he lacks experience, especially in regards to the supernatural world and knows he has a lot to learn.  He has vast financial resources and deep pockets.
Character Flaws: Sometimes blind to his own hypocrisy.  He 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 and drinks too much (especially when alone).  He knows the supernatural world exists but most of his knowledge is book learned and he has very little understanding of far the reach of the supernatural world extends.
Sin: Anger (tempered by Charity)
Virtue: Hope (marred by Pride)

Paranormal


Species: Human (Animator and Arcane Practitioner)
Rank: Adept
Animator Abilities:Aura of Power, Partial Immunity to ‘Rolling’, Raising the Dead:, Sensing the Dead
Arcane Abilities:
Primary School: Abjuration (Defensive Manipulation, Magical Support)
Secondary School: Divination
Tertiary School: Conjuration
Weaknesses: His Animator abilities are currently hamstrung due to being suppressed as a youth and the trauma of the war.  Mostly he can sense the presence of the dead and is somewhat immune to future attempts at rolling.  Though he encountered the undead during the war, he wasn’t the one who raised them, nor did he put them to rest through ritual but simply by bashing them to a pulp with shovels and rifle butts.   In addition, his Arcane studies are incomplete, inconsistent and limited in focus to those realms he was already familiar with (i.e. spirits and the dead).

Biography


Background and History: 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 altar 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 the 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 and as of yet untested.

He wasn’t particularly religious, though he prayed daily.  It was a conflicted feeling he had never enjoyed, less so now, after the war.  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 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 supernatural 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 at surviving..

The war was 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.

But comfort was not the same as control.  If asked, he couldn’t say how or why the dead came to him in the dark, whether he raised them unbidden (he didn’t think that possible), they rose on their own accord (as unlikely as it seemed) or they were raised by someone else (perhaps as an means of assault).  He never did discover the answer though he did discover a means of communing with the dead and towards the end of the war he often 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 before putting the corpses back in the ground the only way he knew how, with blunt and violent force.

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 followed him like a shadow the second he stepped back into town. Those old enough to remember his parents gossiped, those who had worked to keep the past in the past considered what to do.  Helena Cortland had 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 his first guide into the world beneath Savannah’s façade.  He gave her his trust and she promised to give 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.

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