#beast as a metaphor for pwpd yayyyy woooohoooo

[huntunderironskies]

infodump away, my good friend — 1) guilt for silas, 2) midnight for charlotte, and/or 3) hunt for leo

:^) Oh boy!

Silas

As you know extremely well, Silas is the embodiment of Catholic guilt. I am not exaggerating in the slightest that he's convinced he's damned. The fact that he died and is currently Schrodinger's Zombie is not helping. He does think that God has given him one final chance but the only way he's salvaging his life is by making some sort of incredibly grand sacrifice that nobody else could possibly do. He's not sure what it is, but he's sure that God is going to guide him to it.

Being that he's damned, it logically follows (at least in his own head) that he can't become more damned on the path to being not damned, and that's why this keeps involving him committing nonviolent crimes (he doesn't want to actually kill anyone because if he does, they might die without getting a chance to repent for anything they did wrong, which is bad.) That aside, he is exceptionally perfectionistic when it comes to his behavior, down to never swearing, but this is more trying to prove to God that he really genuinely means he wants to be saved and is willing to do whatever it takes.

The extreme tl;dr of how this all started is he got dragged into running some errands for a local crime syndicate when he was young and desperately trying to keep his family out of poverty. He was gullible enough he didn't completely understand what he was getting into until it was too late and they didn't take him trying to do the right thing and back out well.

They didn't expect him to come back, of course. :V

Charlotte

I'm not going to dance around the issue, Charlotte has borderline personality disorder. So the questions around what her anxieties et al are is...a lot, and she does in fact tend to sleep pretty poorly because she's in a near-constant state of agitation despite not looking like it. This can be more "positive" in the sense of her hitting a grandiose phase where she's busy with working and plotting, or negative in the sense she's collapsed into a self-loathing lump.

Charlotte is exceptionally concerned with coming across as sensible, no-nonsense, and generally someone who both is taken seriously but also is the kind of person you aren't afraid to approach with your problems. There's some element of brutal practicality to this, because she knows that knowing everyone else's dirty secrets is worth its weight in gold and also she does kind of deal in acting as a ringleader for a third-party whistleblower who can silently release information about social parties (whether they be corporations, politicians, or anything else) who would otherwise be too dangerous to speak openly against for a single person.

She really, really, really, really is invested in this idea of herself as a clever above-it-all social manipulator. On some level, she expects everyone to be completely transactional in their relationships with her

Unfortunately, she is very aware that she has actual emotions and that they're pretty difficult to control. She hates the general fact that there is a seething core of anger, fear, and frustration that's constantly boiling beneath the surface because it's so contrary to what she wants to think of herself as being like and because she knows people won't like it if they see it. Like a lot of people with "quiet" borderline, she tries to bury her emotions until she has an implosive episode. She's still incredibly petty and vengeful when she feels slighted and fantasizing about revenge is something she's very prone to do.

(Side note, she's a lot easier to manipulate than she wants to believe she is and she's very easily won over by flattery, it's not a coincidence that her two most consistent partners are very effusive in their affection, which is good because she needs near-constant reassurance but struggles with actually asking for it, so someone who's going to show it without her actively prompting it helps. A lot.)

...oh, and she can't have nightmares. Like, literally. It's impossible. So that doesn't really keep her from sleeping but everything else does.

Leo

So. Leo's dad is a piece of work. Here's his theme song. Anyway, they aren't outright trying to kill each other but they're both strongly considering it.

Leo's dad (hence, Elijah) works for a subsidiary of Cheiron Corp called Maranatha and is currently Maranatha's CEO, a position he inherited from his father/Leo's grandfather. Maranatha takes a more biblical approach to Cheiron's usage of monster parts-- specifically, they believe that humans were meant to inherit the Earth and are allowed to have full dominion over what's in it. Monsters are trying to take that birthright from them...and if humans are allowed to take all resources of the world that God gave to them, it's only right that they take power from monsters in order to ensure the world remains in their hands.

(EXTREME oversimplification here but we'll be here all day if I give the full theological details, it's essentially a Christian dominionist worldview.)

Leo grew up extremely sheltered (technically relevant: they're DFAB, I always assumed this was implicitly obvious but it seemed like it flew over the heads of a lot of people in the game they were in? I guess you need an understanding of typical gender role dynamics within American evangelical subcultures) and their future was always kind of decided for them. They never knew what kind of wetwork their dad was involved in until it was too late.

Maranatha had developed a new, highly experimental procedure and they needed a host for what they believed was a new and heretoforth unseen relic, a part of God's body itself. If you ask Elijah Giles, he'd prayed long and hard on the matter, and giving up his eldest child was no easy feat. Men are usually the one on the front lines, anyone else getting the chance to take up the sword of judgement is rare indeed. Still, he was sure he'd made the right choice. Leo was devout, pure, the perfect servant of God. They'd earned it in a sense, even if they were an unconventional choice.

Still, it's a little suspicious he didn't choose his trueborn son over his daughters when they'd tried so hard for so long to have a proper heir, isn't it? Especially given how dangerous it'd have been.

The procedure failed in a way that absolutely nobody expected when the Dark Mother pulled the metaphysical equivalent of "I licked it, it's mine now" which is why Leo is both a Stigmatic and a Beast. They did not have a good time and it's going to be everyone else's problem, especially Maranatha. Leo's been hunting them down with single-minded dedication and their secondary focus is on the God-Machine itself, which they have internalized an extremely odd theology around (I think I've mentioned the Church of the Night Angel on this blog before, so...they are an extremely devout member of it to the point that more senior members have been desperately trying to keep a metaphorical leash on them so they don't do something stupid in the pursuit of the Church's goals.)

Leo is...less paranoid than you'd expect because they have absolute faith in the Dark Mother to lead them down the right path. They are absolutely desperate to trust people, in fact, and while they can be a bit wary of others at first they try their best to be friendly, the problem is that their "friendly" is deeply offputting for reasons that are very complicated to explain but long story short they are incredibly socially awkward and only part of that is from being so isolated they only had extended contact with their family and a few other people within the Maranatha inner circle until they were ten.