Victor Randel Abbott

   
Nature: Architect- | -Demeanor: Confident
Hamartia: Despair and Womanizing- | -Concept: Professional Mermaid Trainer
Inheritance: Aziza pu Sais- | -Dynasty: Udja-sen

Attributes

PhysicalSocialMental
Strength2Charisma3Perception3
Dexterity2Manipulation (Persuasive)4Intelligence2
Stamina3Appearance3Wits3

Abilities

TalentsSkillsKnowledges
Alertness2Animal Ken0Academics0
Athletics3Crafts (Costuming)4Computers1
Awareness3Drive1Cosmology1
Brawl0Etiquette0Finance0
Empathy2Firearms1Investigation0
Expression0Melee0Law0
Intimidation0Performance0Medicine1
Leadership1Stealth0Occult1
Streetwise0Survival1Research0
Subterfuge2Technology0Science0
Other TalentsOther SkillsOther Knowledges
Carousing0Divination1Enigmas0
Intuition2Hypnosis0History0
Seduction2Meditation2Poisons0
 0Riding0Thanatology0
 0Traps0Lore: Reborn1

Advantages

Backgrounds
Ba4
Fame: Mermaid Trainer2
Ka1
Resources1
Heaku
Alchemy0
Amulets0
Celestial2
Effigy1
Necromancy0
Nomeclature0
Misc
Balance2
Willpower8
Sekhem2
Merits
Fascinating Gaze2
Soothing Voice3
Language: Ancient Egyptian1
Flaws
Nightmares1
Intolerance: Alcoholics1
Probationary Member: Spiders of the Sand3
Enemy2

Health Levels
Bruised-0 
Hurt-1 
Injured-1 
Wounded-2 
Mauled-2 
Crippled-5 
Incapacitated- 
Broken/Scorched- 
Crushed/Burned- 
Dismembered/Cremated- 
Pulverised/Cremated- 
Dust/Ash- 

HEKAU

ALCHEMY ( )

(1)

AMULETS (0)

(1)

CELESTIAL (2)

(1) Gripping the Water(R)
(1) Becalm(S), Hanging the Stars(R)
(1) Weather Sight(S)
(1) Weather Whispers(S)
(1)

(2) Book of Thoth(S)

EFFIGY (1)

(1) Command Simple Implement(S)
(1)

NECROMANCY (0)

(1)

NOMENCLATURE (0)

(1)

 Known True Names:

DESCRIPTION:

          Five foot five, with stout limbs and the wide shoulders of a swimmer, Victor doesn't have raw good looks but his smile was a real heart melter. Short black hair tops a wide face with eyes set just a bit too far apart, eyes that are dark brown and sad as a selkie's. Hook nosed and freckle splashed over an almost burnt brown tan, his face was lively and inviting in spite of not being model perfect. If he opens his mouth, a deep and mellifluous voice pours forth honey into the ears of all within hearing.

Fame: Mermaid Trainer (2) Victor's mermaids made him particularly known in Miami, but his videography and photos had a web presence that insure he's known by some for his art.

As long as Victor carries the stone, everyone who has Awareness/Primal Urge can Roll with diff 7, and on 2 successes see he has an aura to him that is slightly dark.


EQUIPMENT:

 Digital camera, handheld video camera with underwater case, assorted sketchbooks, sewing tools (needles, leather awl, etc)

Victor now has a temporary ID, starting 25.07.2018, with his picture on it, until further notice he has no access to his old bank accounts, and needs to find how to get by with no money.

Special: a gem of unbelievable beauty, about the size of two grapes. It does not shine, rather it draws the eye to it like a moth to the flame, it looks black and purple and red and its surface is both flat and seems to be shifting, like a stirring darkness. It is so much heavier than it should be, in this size. It is hard to take your eyes off of it.


BIO:

Raised in a small fishing community on to gulf side of the Florida peninsula, Victor Randall Abbott was the son of a charter boat captain and a fisherman's wife. They both drank heavily, though mama at least just screamed when she was pissed, da could be a real nightmare with his fists. Victor learned fast that fighting back just made the beatings worse, so he learned ways to get around it, learned how to escape both in his mind and into the sea that lay a short run past the end of their trailer park home.

   School wasn't much of an outlet, though it introduced Victor to these wonderful places called libraries...which he soon discovered held books of stories, amongst other unimportant things, and some of those stories were about the sea. Mermaids consumed the boys young mind, even as his day to day life plodded through the usual bits of hell the child of a pair of alcoholics goes through. 
 Home wasn't a good place for a creative soul, being stuck helping out on da's boat was worse in a lot of ways...but he got to be out on the water and da wouldn't hit him in front of customers. Still, Victor showed surprising aptitude for various art forms in school and in spite of otherwise being a very middling to bad student, there was a place he got encouragement and support consistently during his enforced twelve years of public schooling.
   That Victor's primary skills were those that supported thespians, film and photography, costuming, prop creation and the like, wouldn't have gone over well with da. Da was dead of liver failure before Victor started highschool though, it even made mama try the twelve steps for a while...but then she'd binge and scream, lie and steal and for worse things all over again. 
  Mama's boyfriends were scum, but by the time Victor was in his freshman year he was almost never home. He worked three jobs, went to school, and participated in the school theater...never as an actor of course but it kept his hand in and let him create. People would have laughed if they had known what he planned to do with his life, not because he couldn't sell the idea...Victor could seemingly sell anything to anyone for pocket money...but because the idea of training women to be 'professional mermaids' was just ridiculous to backwater minds. 
  That is exactly what he did though, the day after graduating, Victor left home and never looked back. With years worth of savings and his old beater truck, he made for Miami. It would take years more, years of shit jobs and good ones...the latter spent in various dive shops...years of sketching, prototyping, and talking up his ideas about underwater modeling, but he did it. Fin Magic opened and soon Victor was teaching women how to free dive, how to swim in full on mermaid outfits, how to pose underwater and taking photos and videos of the lot.
   The dream was coming true, his budget allowed for donations to charities he trusted to do right by his beloved sea, and he had several major clients who he was helping make advertisements for with his girls. The women he worked with regularly, as opposed to the multitude (comparatively speaking) of recreational free divers and women that just wanted a mermaid photo shoot, trusted Victor...he set them at ease and they trusted him.
  Of course the dream was just that, the charities turned out to be corrupt, his money was wasted and he got better at researching such organizations...and he got more skeptical to the point of cynicism. Those big clients, turned out to be polluters, abusive to their employees, or in one case wanted his girls to do live performances...with lots of unethical strings attached. Victor had been able to get his girls out before the drunken businessmen managed to get too many of their costumes torn off...he got a beating and threats of legal action for that one.
  Slowly the dream died and Victor died slowly with it. He began to abuse the trust of his girls, manipulating them into sleeping with him...his drug of choice was women, he couldn't stand alcohol or anything harder...and he soon learned he was good at twisting people. The business began to falter, he had close calls with customers he tried, or did convince to sleep with him, one angry fiancé nearly killed him one night...knives hurt, but the blade missed his liver. Victor came to loath himself, but he still loved the sea, still loved being in it...and seeing mermaids, even if he no longer could see them as anything more than fakes.
  The day he died, Victor R. Abbot had taken three of his favorite (the last that would deal with him really) mermaids out for a shoot in waters he wasn't familiar with. It was a shit day, currents kept dragging the girls around, the boat drifted, visibility went in and out with the cloud cover and tempers were frayed nearly to the breaking point. They kept having trouble with these big masses of sarghasum too, torn up from storms earlier in the week. One of those masses had an old fishing net in it, that tangled Lori's tail and trapped her underneath the waves.
   Victor got her out, in a frantic mad scrabble with little air and a dive knife, saw her breach the surface even as his vision faded...the damn net had tangled him as he worked to free her. 

It wouldn't be until several months had passed that Victor would find out what happened next, he didn't remember the deal he'd been offered, only recalled the living nightmare of the haji every night when he slept, and got little more than shit from the disappointed faces waiting for him when he woke up in some lonely sand hole in Egypt. He'd been made into one of the Udja-sen, a Judged One, which meant days of pain and nights of barely sleeping horror. He drowned every night, drowned amongst the faces of women he couldn't quite remember...though he'd later find out they were his core group of mermaids...sometimes the women were human, usually not. Cities of rot floated on the waves or were half buried in the sand, but everywhere there was water in his dreams. For some those nightmares would drive them running from the real ocean, they just made the skin crawling sensation of being too far from the salt all the more unbearable when he was awake.

   He found out why 'his mermaids' haunted him with a phone call, it was unpleasant enough he thought the phone would melt. Mary was the girl he called and she let him have it, furious that he'd left them all thinking he was dead, she vented about how he'd saved them from those corporate crooks only to start manipulating them into his bed himself. It hurt finding out he'd abused the trust of those women, but it hurt at a distance and an apology via long distance phone call wasn't going to regain lost trust. With an incomplete picture of who he'd become in those last days, Victor focused on what he could do now and getting out of the sand trap as soon as possible was high on his list.
    Learning about this 'brave new world' he was now a part of was enough to make Victor wish he drank...almost...but nothing so weak sauce was going to help with the icy pain that flowed through him each dawn. At least the pain woke him from his nightmares, even if it felt like someone had dropped him into the deepest abyss of the sea...liquid ice burning him up and the pressure of worlds crushing his chest. Day after day, pain, learn a little, and try to find a way out.

HISTORY:

THE FIRST LIFE:

          Priestess of Neith in the delta city of Sais, Aziza pu Sais was familiar with the warrior arts simply because of Who she served. She was also a healer at the great teaching temple of Sais, an intellectual as well as a deeply devout woman.She watched the mystery plays of Osiris as a child and would perform in them as an adult woman, she never married, but had become one of the teachers at the temple by the time her hair had begun to gray. 

          She was too old when the city fell to wild men who came ravening down the holy Nile from the sea, too old to fight as well as she once could. Yet Aziza ab Neith, priestess, healer, teacher and warrior died as the last, with all her arrows spent upon the steps of the temple and defiance on her face. It was as her Lady would have wanted it.

THE SECOND LIFE:

          First Life

Raised in a small fishing community on to gulf side of the Florida peninsula, Victor Randall Abbott was the son of a charter boat captain and a fisherman's wife. They both drank heavily, though mama at least just screamed when she was pissed, da could be a real nightmare with his fists. Victor learned fast that fighting back just made the beatings worse, so he learned ways to get around it, learned how to escape both in his mind and into the sea that lay a short run past the end of their trailer park home.

   School wasn't much of an outlet, though it introduced Victor to these wonderful places called libraries...which he soon discovered held books of stories, amongst other unimportant things, and some of those stories were about the sea. Mermaids consumed the boys young mind, even as his day to day life plodded through the usual bits of hell the child of a pair of alcoholics goes through. 

 Home wasn't a good place for a creative soul, being stuck helping out on da's boat was worse in a lot of ways...but he got to be out on the water and da wouldn't hit him in front of customers. Still, Victor showed surprising aptitude for various art forms in school and in spite of otherwise being a very middling to bad student, there was a place he got encouragement and support consistently during his enforced twelve years of public schooling.

   That Victor's primary skills were those that supported thespians, film and photography, costuming, prop creation and the like, wouldn't have gone over well with da. Da was dead of liver failure before Victor started highschool though, it even made mama try the twelve steps for a while...but then she'd binge and scream, lie and steal and for worse things all over again. 

  Mama's boyfriends were scum, but by the time Victor was in his freshman year he was almost never home. He worked three jobs, went to school, and participated in the school theater...never as an actor of course but it kept his hand in and let him create. People would have laughed if they had known what he planned to do with his life, not because he couldn't sell the idea...Victor could seemingly sell anything to anyone for pocket money...but because the idea of training women to be 'professional mermaids' was just ridiculous to backwater minds. 

  That is exactly what he did though, the day after graduating, Victor left home and never looked back. With years worth of savings and his old beater truck, he made for Miami. It would take years more, years of shit jobs and good ones...the latter spent in various dive shops...years of sketching, prototyping, and talking up his ideas about underwater modeling, but he did it. Fin Magic opened and soon Victor was teaching women how to free dive, how to swim in full on mermaid outfits, how to pose underwater and taking photos and videos of the lot.

   The dream was coming true, his budget allowed for donations to charities he trusted to do right by his beloved sea, and he had several major clients who he was helping make advertisements for with his girls. The women he worked with regularly, as opposed to the multitude (comparatively speaking) of recreational free divers and women that just wanted a mermaid photo shoot, trusted Victor...he set them at ease and they trusted him.

  Of course the dream was just that, the charities turned out to be corrupt, his money was wasted and he got better at researching such organizations...and he got more skeptical to the point of cynicism. Those big clients, turned out to be polluters, abusive to their employees, or in one case wanted his girls to do live performances...with lots of unethical strings attached. Victor had been able to get his girls out before the drunken businessmen managed to get too many of their costumes torn off...he got a beating and threats of legal action for that one.

  Slowly the dream died and Victor died slowly with it. He began to abuse the trust of his girls, manipulating them into sleeping with him...his drug of choice was women, he couldn't stand alcohol or anything harder...and he soon learned he was good at twisting people. The business began to falter, he had close calls with customers he tried, or did convince to sleep with him, one angry fiancé nearly killed him one night...knives hurt, but the blade missed his liver. Victor came to loath himself, but he still loved the sea, still loved being in it...and seeing mermaids, even if he no longer could see them as anything more than fakes.

  The day he died, Victor R. Abbot had taken three of his favorite (the last that would deal with him really) mermaids out for a shoot in waters he wasn't familiar with. It was a shit day, currents kept dragging the girls around, the boat drifted, visibility went in and out with the cloud cover and tempers were frayed nearly to the breaking point. They kept having trouble with these big masses of sarghasum too, torn up from storms earlier in the week. One of those masses had an old fishing net in it, that tangled Lori's tail and trapped her underneath the waves.

   Victor got her out, in a frantic mad scrabble with little air and a dive knife, saw her breach the surface even as his vision faded...the damn net had tangled him as he worked to free her. 

THE HAJJ

         Though hardly remembered as more than fragments of his nightmares, they apparently managed to board a plane with some of Victor's remaining funds after walking out of the sea a few days after his drowning. By some miracle they made it through airport security in spite of the predations of various denzins of the deep and the marks they had left. The Children of Osiris were waiting and whisked them away to a small shrine to perform the Rite.

THE THIRD LIFE:

          Aziza pu Sais was destroyed, she had picked a poor vessel in Victor...his soul had remained strong for years only to crumble in the face of naivety being ripped away. After that wound the rest had been Victor's doing and the injury caused by turning his skills against those that trusted him tore his soul all the more. Still Aziza had pled their case even as Victor had resigned himself to judgment in this place of strange god like beings and sand, a place he'd never dreamed of being. 

          The judges had decided, to send Victor back...with Aziza torn and stretched and stuffed into his wound. Aziza's face would take it's place amongst those faces that haunt his dreams, when he awoke to the act of breathing and life once more.

  The Children were, displeased, when he came back with only the faintest of nightmarish memories and knowing the name of she who had been utterly lost. 

  Victor got shuttled around from safe house to safe house, trained here and there by cultists that couldn't quite hide their disappointment and ocassionally given a beating (mentally or otherwise) by another of 'his kind', none of whom seemed particularly happy about his existence...especially the scarred and scary bastards. 

  While it was the Children of Osiris that brought him back and mostly kept him while Victor was still in 'the sand pit', they wouldn't be who he gravitated too. Eventually he found his way to the Spiders of the Sand, an outcast naturally attracted to 'the crazies' who were interested in expanding the Web of Faith outside of such dry and sandy climes. While Victor was decidedly 'the new kid' he was also eager to get himself out from underneath the oppressive heat of those lands and the glare of 'his' people. 

  A port city came up, a mission to prove himself to the Spiders, and an offer to head back to the sort of sands he loved...those by the sea. Victor took the chance, going back to Florida couldn't possibly be worse than staying in Egypt right?