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mekanikaltrifle · 10 months ago

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hi! (monster) and (wound) for juniper and/or dani?

Oh these are good choices and you're so right. Lemme just get my tunes on for these two powerful women (of varying friendliness quotients). Of course, when given two OCs I am gonna write for two OCs so watch out for a big ol' long post below lads :D

monster: Is your OC monstrous in any way? Is there something that makes them monstrous? Are they aware of their own monstrosity? Do they accept it or reject it?

Dani doesn't want to accept it. Objectively, she is monstrous; vampires are rarely considered human, after all, and she's already done horrific things even before she cut her fangs. Tearing a living, screaming human being into bloody viscera in a frenzy was something she wishes she could forget-- and she often lies and says she doesn't remember her 'first' frenzy at all let alone with enough clarity to recall butchering that man, but it's just that. A lie.

Dr Reyes doesn't kill people. The monster does. Dr Reyes is a good person. The monster isn't. But both are her. She's under no illusions that the thing riding her body when she's angry is her, part of her, and irredeemably so. She just wishes she could be dumb enough to play pretend like so many of the fucking Sabbat, acting like freedom will cure them of their guilt.

No Path will cure this, and no Road means anything. Freedom isn't throwing yourself away to play at being a monster just because it makes you nto want to tear your own fangs out of your head and run into a sunrise.

So, she works. She hasn't told her family what's happened yet and probably never will. They'll see her one last time and then she's keeping her distance forever. Her mortal friends died for some stupid Sabbat war, and she cured the vampires' plague when she could have just let them all die. But it'd have killed humanity too. She's going to work for however long she's got now to find the root of how vampires work, where their curses come from... and then she's going to try to alleviate the monster, one step at a time. Dani's going to kill this Beast with kindness, because it's hard, and it's the only way for her.

Juniper isn't a monster, as far as she knows. She thought she was for a while, lied to and misled by the Catholicism still in her head as a child during her very early days as a hunter. The Society of Leopold, and its Inquisitors, weren't sure what she was either.

Mortal, sure, with a heartbeat and breath and all the mortal concerns like needing to eat and sleep and other animal needs.

But mortals can't usually See, not with a burlap sack over their head and struggling to breathe properly through the layers of tape-- and yet, she can. She can see anywhere, in clear crystal clarity and she's sure as hell she's not one of those 'witches' the Inquisitors kept trying hunt. Monsters freeze in her gaze, and voices from beyond tell her what to do, and she's sure she's not a monster at all. She can speak a curse and deprive them of power, and stay awake for days on end, pushing the bounds of 'mortal' needs so clearly...

But how's a body supposed to reconcile with the fact that she's been through things that should kill a soul and come back swinging. Lived this long without stopping? Fought this hard, even when the world that was supposed to end didn't and there's still things out there killing people every night?

But there's no monsters out there, she thinks. Only people.

wound: How does your OC handle being wounded? Are their wounds mostly physical? Mental? Emotional? What's the worst wound your OC has ever experienced?

Dr Reyes, up until her Embrace, had not suffered huge injuries. Working on a digsite is often dangerous, even with all the best practice and safety procedures. She could lose track recounting all the times she'd hit a limb off rocks or slipped in mud and sand, caught her fingers on pieces of metal or tools she was using, and on one memorable occasion her best friend rolled over her foot with a pickup truck back home in Guadalajara when she was visiting her parents. And she's in good spirits about it all, telling you the story with her still-sunwarmed cheeks creased in laughter and her calloused hands gesturing all over the shop.

Since her Embrace though? She can count two worst ones so far, one physical and one mental.

The first, the physical, came during the scramble to end the blood plague. She and the other two were fighting vampires-- really strange, augmented vampires-- and one of them had arms that looked like scorpion-tails. Being unprepared to face something like this as a literal day-old fledgling Tremere, she fumbled the shot with her shotgun (something she's no good at using; she's not a firearms person), and subsequently took a blow full force to the centre of her chest.

This being a sharp barb propelled by inhuman strength, the whole thing went clean through her ribcage, and then pulled back out the way it came. Now, Dani is a survivor despite it all. But that was... startling, because if it had happened a mere two days before, she'd have died outright. It's have hurt, but she'd have simply died. But as a vampire she had to endure it, and not being able to speak let alone draw breath to cope with the pain of having a lung almost cleaved in two was not okay. She's grateful that the thing didn't pierce her heart, because that probably would have killed her, but she was not in the best fucking mood that day.

The mental? Now, that's a story.

Her Embrace was a brutal thing, a voyeuristic Tremere lab setup in which her friends couldn't do anything to help her other than watch through layers of sterile glass as her domitor-turned-sire drained her on order of their boss.

But right before it, the thing that brought her down, was a simple magical circle. Later she'd look it up in Tremere magical tomes and find it was a variant of the 'Ward Against Ghouls' sigil, built around her as she stood talking to her then-domitor Atlas. As Atlas struggled to tell her what they were about to do to her, she backed up, begging them not to. To reconsider. And then, she broke the outer line of the sigil on the floor and agony shot through her, strong enough that she can't even describe it.

In mechanical terms the sigil shattered through four of her seven health points in one second, dealing lethal damage, and if she'd not fallen to her knees in front of Atlas, it probably would have killed her from pain alone.

She still struggles to even comprehend what it was that happened. She's looked up the rituals and whatever else she can find, and now being part of the Tremere but not part of the Pyramid, it's not easy. But she just can't touch the memory of that second of agony without feeling like she's going to pass out.

Wounds are part and parcel of the job. Juniper takes them in stride as best she can, unless they damage her legs and then she does what she can sitting down.

She's been put to death's door a few times. Took minor scrapes. Come out of fights better or worse, sometimes with more her own blood than someone else's on her and vice versa. Usually they don't bother her more than the time it takes to patch the thing up and recover just long enough to get moving again. Does this mean she's scarred? Oh very much so.

The worst one, however? June has been through enough wounds by this point-- 17 years at the hunt and counting (as of roughly 2020-ish)-- that it'd be hard to truly quantify.

That said, the one wound she truly believes was going to kill her and still gives her pause to this day came during a team hunt back in 2007. She was called Junie then, or sometimes Bluebird, because she had all the grace and air of a newly fledged chick and bright blue dyed hair. A crew picked her up out of a truckstop in the middle of nowhere and she was grateful for the company. Ten-strong hunter squad, and confident for what they had going on. With nothing else to do, she offered to help and given most of them were Imbued like her, it was nice to be in likeminded company for a change.

What should have been a normal patrol became a bloodbath, one regular night. She's still not sure what happened, but the thing this crew were tracking wasn't a vampire, or a ghost or anything she was used to. It was... nastier. It could take minds and jump bodies and it managed to kill five hunters in two and a half minutes. The chaos had its benefits though; where the hunter next to her had her skull blown open at the eye socket, spraying everything with all that suddenly-wasted promise, Junie simply took a crossbow bolt to the ribs and collapsed.

The remainder of the crew, now only three people, came to the scene too late to save anyone but her, and she was not in good health. Junie of the time was not a huge bulk of a butch-- she was skinny, and still recovering from a bout of severe undernutriton during a stint homeless in Los Angeles. Put simply, her health was already poor. When the crew realised that the crossbow the monster had used was one of theirs, and therefore poisoned, they knew this was not a matter of 'if' it killed her, but 'when'.

She doesn't recall any of this point in her life with any clarity whatsoever, but knows she was deeply afraid, and very sure this was it. A pathetic death from being caught unprepared, for a young failure of a hunter. She wasn't ready for it. Something about the fear, which stuck even after they'd got a Redeemer with healing abilities to put enough life back into her she survived the worst... well, she suddenly had a very powerful motivator to get so big and untouchable that nothing would make her that afraid again.

So Juniper coped with it the only way she knew how: by getting meaner.

#asks #hunter ask #vampire ask #wod #world of darkness #vtm #vampire the masquerade #hunter the reckoning #htr #juniper #dani reyes #tremere #imbued #judge #thank you!#this was pretty wordy hee hoo

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