[sleeper] James Walker
Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2023 8:56 am
[ongoing CW for all of Lucifer’s content: religious trauma & heavy religious themes, mental health issues]
[there may also be allusions to the death of a child, but these will always be vague]
♰
Name: James Walker[there may also be allusions to the death of a child, but these will always be vague]
♰
Nicknames: Lucifer (codename), Luci (tolerable), Jamie (if you wanna get slugged)
Birthday: 12.13.1991 (sagittarius)
Pronouns/Gender: He/Him
Physical Description:
5’11, average weight, and ghastly pale. His hair is naturally dark brown, visible most clearly in his choppy, angular brows, but routinely drenched in aggressive bleach and stripped of as much of its natural color as possible, and hangs limply about his face and down the back of his neck.
Any sense of the boyish charm his face once had is lost in the hollow, haunted, sleepless gloom hanging over it. His ice-blue eyes leer out from under heavily-shadowed lids, and his mouth forms a perpetually dour line. He has several small scars about his face, and a distinct scar across the front of his neck. Both his parents, and his entire family, were white English as far back as their history can be traced.
He wears disheveled business-casual in solid black and white, almost exclusively, though many of his clothes also look a size too big, and are rarely tucked in or straightened up in any meaningful way. He also wears a good deal of expensive silver jewelry, many of which are adorned with Christian symbology, though he is is tight-lipped about his reason for doing so.
Occupation:
Recently released from prison, former career criminal. He was arrested during a particularly violent bar fight, and though his initial sentence was short, his self-destructive attitude tacked on a good deal of extended punishment.
Personality:
Quiet, bitter, and always just a bit too serious, James oscillates between distant stoicism, reckless self-sacrifice, and relentless, aggressive, single-minded determination. Wherever possible, he prefers to let others speak for him, but he is not afraid of speaking his mind when he feels driven to, regardless of the consequences.
In spite of his troubled personality, he seems to carry within him the inescapable impulse to do good. He dislikes drawing attention or accepting praise, and particularly hates being described as ‘good’, yet nothing has been able to extinguish this urge. He is particularly protective of children and animals, and will throw himself in harm’s way without a second thought if he sees them in danger, but he is drawn towards fighting for anyone who seems helpless or incapable of defending themselves.
He believes in the Christian God, the Devil, and Heaven and Hell both, but his view of these entities has been deeply altered by his experiences. He believes that the Bible was designed to deliberately manipulate and mislead in favor of God— making mankind subservient, fearful, and reliant on empty prayer— as the greatest trick of the ‘true’ Devil, and decorates himself with the symbols of God and the name of the Devil as a deliberate mockery against the common faith. Technically, he could be called a theistic Satanist, but does not describe himself as such.
As a result of this belief, he also tends to feel connected to things that are ‘traditionally’ unlucky, and makes a habit of engaging with things other people avoid. Supposedly cursed locations or objects, provoking demons and other spirits, unlucky numerals or dates, and even saying phrases that are typically viewed as cursing the recipient. He feels a strong kinship with black cats, in particular.
Though it is hardly a talent, the primary ability he has bought to all criminal groups he has worked for, is his fearlessness. Anything he is asked to do, anywhere he is asked to go, he is effectively immune to the instinctive dread most people may feel. Of course, the source of his fearless attitude is not healthy, but it does not make it any less useful when it comes to a life of crime.
Backstory:
Born to a strictly devout Southern Baptist family in central Alabama, and surrounded by intensely Christian conservatives on every side, he learned to repress his wants and needs from first the moment he realized he was not attracted to girls; at almost precisely the same moment he became interested in romance and relationships at all.
In his attempts to grow into a good, god-fearing man, he turned his repressed desires into desperately performative attempts to be the single best member of his family’s church. He always took the lead, speaking up first, volunteering first, answering first, and pushing himself to be as impressive and visibly devout as he could be.
Ultimately, this lead him to becoming one of the top camp counselors at a local Christian summer camp, where he was constantly praised by relatives and parents for his leadership and seemingly unshakable devotion to the letter of the Bible. With his own wants and needs as thoroughly buried as possible, he used this praise as private ‘proof’ that he was doing the right thing, allowing it to continue driving him deeper and deeper into absolute self-denial.
Things continued this way until one terrible evening, when a fatal animal attack occurred in the camp under his watch. The shock, the trauma, and the vicious blow to his faith immediately sent him spiraling out of control, into a full mental breakdown that shattered straight through the fracturing facade he had been building for years.
Panicked, disillusioned, and unable to face the community that had put him on such a pedestal before, he fled his hometown and soon fell into a life of petty crime and desperate means of survival, all the while spiraling further into darkness as he was confronted with a side of society he had once been sheltered from.
In his desperation, a brief period saw him submitting himself to neuroscience studies, under a man who called himself Romeo. These tests posited to explore cures for insomnia, which James has suffered from since the night of the camp incident, but soon veered into dangerous experiments with lucid dreaming.
After a brief (and extremely unethical) romantic tryst together, Romeo would go on to introduce James to a team of career criminals, then referred to simply as The Specialists, who he had sought out to continue funding his illegal experiments. Following several highly-orchestrated robberies, the team was dissolved within the year, and James was left out in the cold.
Isolated, feeling used, and angry not only at Romeo, but at God and the entire state of the world that had ferried him to that point, James fell to his very lowest point. It was here that he became involved in a violent bar fight, and was finally arrested.
A year and a half into his ever-growing sentence, he would eventually run into another former member of The Specialists, who had been arrested for his own reckless behavior; a man called Dominic, who often ran under the pseudonym Stitches. The two became close in prison, always watching each other’s back, and through him James found a fire in himself that became like a light in the deepest, darkest pit of his depression.
Eventually, within a few months of one another, the pair were released, and reconnected when they moved into an apartment together, at the far northern edge of Saint Raymond. Currently, the pair fund themselves through low-key scams, house robberies, wallet snatching, and other small-time crimes.
Stats:
- Power: -1
- Finesse: 1
- Mind: 0
- Arcane: 2
