Chase Collins (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fifthofthecovenant) wrote2021-04-27 12:18 am
fifthofthecovenant) wrote2021-04-27 12:18 am
Entry tags:
The Last Voyages: Application
User Name/Nick: Gail
User DW:cacopheny
E-mail: cacopheny@gmail.com
Other Characters: Bucky Barnes
Character Name: Chase Collins
Series: The Covenant
Age: 18
From When?: The end of his fight with Caleb
Inmate Justification: Chase tried to manipulate, intimidate, and finally beat another young witch into willing away his Power, and thus his life. During the course of his plan, he lied, spied on people without their knowledge, sent cursed dreams, sent actual curses, threatened to kill, and in fact killed. He doesn't regret any of it except that it didn't work. Part of the problem is the fact that he is literally a teenager thrown into deeper waters than he should ever have been allowed into, thanks to his birthright and situation growing up. Part of the problem is grief and desperation clouding his judgment. And part of the problem is plain ole privilege.
Arrival: Chase absolutely agreed to come to the Barge. He knows why he's here, though not how to do what needs doing, because he is desperate for more time to accomplish his goals. And who knows, a magical Barge and Admiral that can bring people back from the dead might have clues to help him achieve those goals.
Abilities/Powers:
Magic: The Power is an inherited ability to control energy through motion and thought combined. It requires a strong will and a creative mind, as well as keeping your hands free, because hand and body motions direct the magic. It can do a lot of things.
- Movement: Magic allows one to move one's self from place to place (Chase calls this "ghosting" and it's more like going intangible and invisible than actual teleportation) as well as move objects around (like telekinesis). The latter requires hand and body motions to direct the power and can look a lot like dancing or single-combat forms like Tai Bo. Enough focus, and the wielder can even lift themselves and fly, to some extent.
- Energy: Magic can be gathered as energy, semi-visible as a warping of the air or in flashes of light. This energy can be used to blast, to trap, to bind, to fuel a fire, or meld broken glass back together.
- Summoning: Chase can summon imps, or small spider demons, to work as carriers for greater spells and, well, as pets. Stepping on or swatting them doesn't kill the spirit, just the form, sending the spirit itself back to whatever realm he pulled it from. He can also summon "darklings", or the spirits of the dead-- he thinks, anyway. It's possible he’s only summoning slightly higher orders of imps, but they show in the form of whatever dead person he's trying to summon. The canon doesn't make it clear whether these are true spirits or not.
- Curses: Magic can be refined through actual spells instead of just working as a force or energy, and this has many more applications, from causing pain or sickness, to sending nightmares. This kind of magic requires more preparation, and often an imp as a carrier, but has more long-lasting effects.
Acting: Combination gift and self-defense mechanism, Chase is a chameleon in social situations. Whether he's trying to win over a group of boys, charm a young lady unhappy with her jealous boyfriend, convince a teacher he's on his best behavior, or play the part of the most evil diva you ever met, he'll be what he thinks he needs to be for the situation.
Swimming: Chase was the top of his freestyle swimming team at his old school. He didn't even use his magic to cheat, he just enjoys swimming and is good at it.
Inmate Information:
Chase Collins is an active, dramatic, and friendly young man. Chase Collins is a polite and respectful boy who calls his teachers sir. Chase Collins is a monster who kills people for fun and will do whatever it takes to get more power.
Chase Collins is, really, none of these things. He's always playing a part. The emotions Chase displays are not usually the emotions he's actually feeling. Maybe three or four times in the whole movie does Chase actually show what he's feeling. The rest of the time he has the mask up of the friendly kid, the perfect student, or the most evil swaggering bad guy you ever did see.
These are the things we do know about Chase. First, Chase is smart and observant. He's watched people for his whole life, and he's learned a lot about how they tick. His masks all play hard into people’s expectations of him, and he's had to hide his magic in plain sight since he was thirteen, so he's learned how to figure out what people most want to see so he can give that to them and keep them from looking deeper. He's got the brains to use all the resources at his disposal to learn his own history, to make and then pull off a complicated plan to infiltrate a close-knit group of boys in a town he's never been to before, and to deflect suspicion when his own ID was found in the back seat of a dead boy's car. He's had to figure out the ins and outs of his magic entirely on his own, and he's managed to become more advanced with it than the boys who had access to families and spellbooks and all their history.
Second, Chase is driven and determined. In the wake of his parents' death, when he's surely still upset and confused, he tracks down his biological father who at the very least abandoned his mother and only son, and at worst actively tried to kill them both and succeeded in killing his mother. Then Chase gets information out of him about the Power and their history, convinces the old-young man to give his Power to Chase, and then concocts and implements a plan to get more power. He fights for what he wants and doesn't let little things like nosy neighbors, concerned teachers, locker room bullies, or stupidly noble kids get in his way.
Third, Chase is an addict. Not only does he readily admit to this, not only is it consistent with the lore of the world, he also shows all the signs of it. Even when pretending to be the friendly kid, he’s twitchy and has trouble holding still. When using his Power, he gets looser, even giggly. It's central to all of his plans, like he can't really think of other ways to get things done.
This affects his decision-making, but also gives insight into his life before the movie begins. People with plentiful social support systems and a fulfilling life are much less likely to become addicts, so it's not likely Chase is happy or has a lot of close friends. He loves his adoptive parents, but they're wealthy pillars of the community and probably don’t have a lot of time for him. He's shown multiple times that he knows how to take a hit and laugh through it, even enjoy it, and how to win over people with his false personas, so he's clearly sought out both positive and negative attention, just so he can get attention, but as long as he's hiding his magic, he's never really connecting to anyone.
Fourth, Chase does feel things behind the masks, and he feels them powerfully. The times we see his feelings actually on his face, they're deep and clearly affect him. When he's listing off people he'll let live if Caleb gives him his magic, and he lashes out and breaks a lamp when he names Caleb's mother-- because Caleb still has a mother, and Chase has lost his twice. When Caleb tells him more Power won't stop the premature aging, he clearly isn't surprised and instead looks miserable rather than angry, like he's about to cry, not like he's about to be thwarted in his plans. He's eighteen years old, he feels like he doesn't have anyone who actually understands him, his life got turned upside-down in the past four months or so, and he lost the two people most important to him in his life... in an accident caused by him. His emotions fuel his decision-making even more than his addiction. He wants to feel things, whether good or bad, and he is intensely jealous of those people who can feel good things-- who have real connections. It's clear from the look on his face when Caleb calls the other witches "like brothers" that he feels alone and wants that feeling more than anything, himself.
Now he's lost the only real connections he had in his life, and he can't shake the feeling that it's his fault, and he can't escape the certainty that he's the only one who can fix it.
Barge Reactions:
The Barge is going to be a strange mix of threatening and liberating. First, he's not the only one here who’s special, which means not having to hide his magic, which is the first step to making actual friends, even if he doesn't know it. Second, his magic will be taken away, which means what's special about him is also gone, and thus he needs to shut down any avenue to his true self for his own protection lest these people realize he’s so helpless without that magic.
It's most likely Chase will be defaulting to the "friendly kid" mask he displayed for the first half of the movie, in an attempt to make himself seem relatively harmless or at least not desperate, guilty, and probably evil. He'll chatter, he'll laugh easily, he'll talk to anyone and everyone, he'll ask lots of questions, and he'll turn up the wattage on his smile to eleven. He'll be amazed by all the different people and powers, and greedily soak up as much information about it as possible. He'll probably, frankly, be fascinated by the flood effects and port worlds, and being somebody other than himself for a while during breaches might well be a relief. He'll be (possibly surprisingly) open to trying to figure out what the in-game events are trying to teach him, even if in the end he decides it's nothing, really. He might be unhappy, but he’s not closed off, not exactly, and he came here to learn.
But none of that will be helping him get out of here and get his parents back, and he's never going to forget that, either.
Path to Redemption:
The biggest, most important thing here will be getting Chase off his addiction to magic-- not just the physical and metaphysical addiction, but the mental reliance on it as the only thing he leans on and the only thing that makes him special. All of that will definitely be a challenge since he's not in a happy place, he's been using addictive magic more and more over the past five and a half years, and wisdom is not the strong suit of a grieving eighteen-year-old. The Barge is an excellent place to do this, given the Barge's limits on an Inmate's power and wide variety of people with powers and even wider views on those powers.
Beyond that, we'll have to tackle his tendency to try to take things from others rather than earn them himself, his over-the-top attention-seeking personas, his inability to show anyone his real self, and his guilt over his parents’ death-- not just his adoptive parents, but his biological mother as well. At the heart of it is the certainty that he really is evil, just like good old dad, that his Power is only good for hurting people, and there's nothing he can do about it.
History:
Non-italics are canon facts. Italics are extrapolated from those facts, from the setting, from Chase's actor's choices in portraying him emotionally, and from headcanon.
Chase’s mother died when he was two years old, and Chase doesn’t know why or how, but given what he learned later, he suspects that his father, who came from a long line of witches, all the way back to before the Salem trials, wanted to break the line and get rid of inconvenient family ties in one fell swoop. The eldest son of a family with the Power inherits that Power, getting a taste at thirteen and then ascending to full strength at the moment of his eighteenth birthday, at which point it becomes tied to his life force. That Power is addictive, encouraging the bearer to use it more and more, until it becomes painful to not use it, and until it ages the bearer prematurely. The four families of Power in Ipswich, MA, were all taught about this and how to avoid it.
Chase, adopted by a wealthy but childless couple in Pennsylvania when he survived whatever (or whoever) killed his mother, was not. The first taste of his Power showed up at his thirteenth birthday party, held by his adoptive parents, in which he accidentally threw his own birthday cake at one of the other kids by magic. It scared him at first, but before long he was using it for all sorts of pranks, and to avoid other kids (or adults) when they were bothering him. Chase has done a lot of watching of other people, though he never really fit in, particularly after the magic started getting more and more of a grip on him and he focused more and more on experimenting with what it could do. He learned how to fake it, but never to really connect, since no one could know about that most intrinsic part of him.
Then his eighteenth birthday rolled around, and rather than another party, his parents were just planning to take him out to a nice dinner. They were in the car, on the highway, when the actual birthday moment hit and he ascended. Ascension is a flashy, loud, even painful ordeal, looking and feeling a little like being struck repeatedly by lightning-- and this was happening in a car, on the highway, in the back seat. The car, predictably, went out of control and into oncoming traffic. Both of Chase's adoptive parents were killed.
He didn't know what had happened, but he did know his magic was much, much stronger now. He used it-- and good old-fashioned money and influence-- to hunt for records of his real parents, hoping they would know what happened. He tracked down his father, furious at being abandoned and grieving over his adoptive parents' death, and learned about the Power, the families, and the boys in Ipswich who also had this same Power. Then Chase forced his father, by then ancient and infirm despite being only in his late 30s, to will his Power to him, ending his life.
And then Chase went hunting for the sons of Ipswich. His plan was to convince one of them to give away his Power to Chase, in part because of how good it felt to have even more of the Power running through him, which was the reason he gave Caleb, but even more because he wanted to bring his adoptive parents back from the dead. He knows how to summon spirits and give them temporary form, called "darklings" according to his father, so surely it's just a matter of using more magic to make that permanent, right?
So he made a big donation from the family trust to the local private high school so the staff would be inclined to support him, and enrolled as a senior. Right away he started ingratiating himself with the four boys: Caleb, Poge, Tyler, and Reid. He had always been good at pretending, at acting, and it wasn't hard to just put up a good face of a normal, friendly teenage boy, gathering intel on which one's eighteenth birthday and final ascension was the closest, on which of them would be the easiest to manipulate, and which of them he thought could give him the most Power for his job. He settled quickly on Caleb, mostly because Caleb's birthday was rapidly approaching.
The con culminated in the events of the movie: putting a sickness spell on Poge's girlfriend Kate, hurting Poge in a motorcycle crash, and then delivering his ultimatum to Caleb over Caleb's girlfriend's unconscious, cursed body. They fought it out in a barn outside of town the next night, and Caleb refused and refused to give in, even when Sarah was threatened. Caleb's greatly aged father willed his Power to Caleb, and allowed him to overpower and launch away a startled and dismayed Chase.
That's when the Admiral snatched him up, before he fell into the burning barn and died, whether of a broken neck or of the fire.
Sample Journal Entry:
[A neatly printed to-do list, with more hastily scribbled notes in the margins:]
Explore the ship - garden, doctor's, zero (what's zero? sounds spooky)
Something about an inmate-only bar? (get password?)
Get lunch (off-hours so it's quieter?)
Organize and review notes - direct spells, mythology, physics
Figure out why there are more notes than expected (don't remember writing all these? it's my handwriting, though)
Check out the library (big??)
Meet people (ugh)
Work out the warden-inmate thing (check network?)
Find someone to convince to give me magic back before withdrawal sets in (will there be withdrawal if it's sealed?)
[Then the last line reads:]
Figure out why there's cat hair on my bed??
Sample RP:
Chase tosses the to-do list aside, staring around at what is definitely his bedroom, albeit with some stuff in it that he definitely doesn't remember. Not bad stuff: there's some books and, of course, the notes, and a couple pretty rocks on the window sill. All things he definitely would have added if he came across them and thought they were neat.
The cat hair is weirder. He brushes it into a ball, meticulously, and rolls it between his hands, frowning and thinking. The first thing that crosses his mind is that his parents had gotten a cat while he was off at the new school, except-- his heart twists inside him painfully, because obviously that isn't true. They were dead. He killed them. Just because his stupid brain wants to keep thinking about them like they're alive doesn't make it real.
Someday, the pastor told him after the funeral, that would stop. He'd get used to their loss. The pain would fade. (He kept imagining the pastor bursting into flame, a supposedly holy man touching someone who summoned demons. Wondering if he'd be trying to be so comforting if he knew he was talking to a witch. A murderer.)
He doesn't want the pain to fade. He should keep feeling it. It's a reminder. It's motivation. That's why he's here. He's going to fix it.
He tucks the little ball of cat hair under his pillow rather than tossing it in the trash, and gets up, heading for the door. Time to get started on the list. First things first: get his bearings. See what he's dealing with, exactly. Then set about finding out what he can do about his parents from this new place.
And figure out how to get his magic unlocked again. God, this is going to suck.
Chase's previous activity for more.
Special Notes:
1.)With his Power locked by the Admiral, Chase will only experience the psychological withdrawal effects of being unable to use his magic. This will give him time to form some CR without experiencing the really bad physical and metaphysical affects. He'll be twitchy and unhappy, but not in pain or sick. If and when he gets his Power back, he'll start experiencing that if he doesn't use his magic, as well as after Breaches and if and when he gets it taken away again. Updated state of the Power.
2.) I'd like to say this is the same Chase who was here before, only like some others who have gone and come back, he doesn't remember it. Like he will find some things familiar (and his room remembers that he used to have a cat!) but nothing and no one in specific. Considering he basically backslid during his previous time here, rather than making any progress, due to losing most of the people who he connected with, I am looking for a soft reset with some understanding of Barge culture and slight leanings towards any of his remaining CR. Which I think consists only of Sweeney at this point, but still...
User DW:
cacophenyE-mail: cacopheny@gmail.com
Other Characters: Bucky Barnes
Character Name: Chase Collins
Series: The Covenant
Age: 18
From When?: The end of his fight with Caleb
Inmate Justification: Chase tried to manipulate, intimidate, and finally beat another young witch into willing away his Power, and thus his life. During the course of his plan, he lied, spied on people without their knowledge, sent cursed dreams, sent actual curses, threatened to kill, and in fact killed. He doesn't regret any of it except that it didn't work. Part of the problem is the fact that he is literally a teenager thrown into deeper waters than he should ever have been allowed into, thanks to his birthright and situation growing up. Part of the problem is grief and desperation clouding his judgment. And part of the problem is plain ole privilege.
Arrival: Chase absolutely agreed to come to the Barge. He knows why he's here, though not how to do what needs doing, because he is desperate for more time to accomplish his goals. And who knows, a magical Barge and Admiral that can bring people back from the dead might have clues to help him achieve those goals.
Abilities/Powers:
Magic: The Power is an inherited ability to control energy through motion and thought combined. It requires a strong will and a creative mind, as well as keeping your hands free, because hand and body motions direct the magic. It can do a lot of things.
- Movement: Magic allows one to move one's self from place to place (Chase calls this "ghosting" and it's more like going intangible and invisible than actual teleportation) as well as move objects around (like telekinesis). The latter requires hand and body motions to direct the power and can look a lot like dancing or single-combat forms like Tai Bo. Enough focus, and the wielder can even lift themselves and fly, to some extent.
- Energy: Magic can be gathered as energy, semi-visible as a warping of the air or in flashes of light. This energy can be used to blast, to trap, to bind, to fuel a fire, or meld broken glass back together.
- Summoning: Chase can summon imps, or small spider demons, to work as carriers for greater spells and, well, as pets. Stepping on or swatting them doesn't kill the spirit, just the form, sending the spirit itself back to whatever realm he pulled it from. He can also summon "darklings", or the spirits of the dead-- he thinks, anyway. It's possible he’s only summoning slightly higher orders of imps, but they show in the form of whatever dead person he's trying to summon. The canon doesn't make it clear whether these are true spirits or not.
- Curses: Magic can be refined through actual spells instead of just working as a force or energy, and this has many more applications, from causing pain or sickness, to sending nightmares. This kind of magic requires more preparation, and often an imp as a carrier, but has more long-lasting effects.
Acting: Combination gift and self-defense mechanism, Chase is a chameleon in social situations. Whether he's trying to win over a group of boys, charm a young lady unhappy with her jealous boyfriend, convince a teacher he's on his best behavior, or play the part of the most evil diva you ever met, he'll be what he thinks he needs to be for the situation.
Swimming: Chase was the top of his freestyle swimming team at his old school. He didn't even use his magic to cheat, he just enjoys swimming and is good at it.
Inmate Information:
Chase Collins is an active, dramatic, and friendly young man. Chase Collins is a polite and respectful boy who calls his teachers sir. Chase Collins is a monster who kills people for fun and will do whatever it takes to get more power.
Chase Collins is, really, none of these things. He's always playing a part. The emotions Chase displays are not usually the emotions he's actually feeling. Maybe three or four times in the whole movie does Chase actually show what he's feeling. The rest of the time he has the mask up of the friendly kid, the perfect student, or the most evil swaggering bad guy you ever did see.
These are the things we do know about Chase. First, Chase is smart and observant. He's watched people for his whole life, and he's learned a lot about how they tick. His masks all play hard into people’s expectations of him, and he's had to hide his magic in plain sight since he was thirteen, so he's learned how to figure out what people most want to see so he can give that to them and keep them from looking deeper. He's got the brains to use all the resources at his disposal to learn his own history, to make and then pull off a complicated plan to infiltrate a close-knit group of boys in a town he's never been to before, and to deflect suspicion when his own ID was found in the back seat of a dead boy's car. He's had to figure out the ins and outs of his magic entirely on his own, and he's managed to become more advanced with it than the boys who had access to families and spellbooks and all their history.
Second, Chase is driven and determined. In the wake of his parents' death, when he's surely still upset and confused, he tracks down his biological father who at the very least abandoned his mother and only son, and at worst actively tried to kill them both and succeeded in killing his mother. Then Chase gets information out of him about the Power and their history, convinces the old-young man to give his Power to Chase, and then concocts and implements a plan to get more power. He fights for what he wants and doesn't let little things like nosy neighbors, concerned teachers, locker room bullies, or stupidly noble kids get in his way.
Third, Chase is an addict. Not only does he readily admit to this, not only is it consistent with the lore of the world, he also shows all the signs of it. Even when pretending to be the friendly kid, he’s twitchy and has trouble holding still. When using his Power, he gets looser, even giggly. It's central to all of his plans, like he can't really think of other ways to get things done.
This affects his decision-making, but also gives insight into his life before the movie begins. People with plentiful social support systems and a fulfilling life are much less likely to become addicts, so it's not likely Chase is happy or has a lot of close friends. He loves his adoptive parents, but they're wealthy pillars of the community and probably don’t have a lot of time for him. He's shown multiple times that he knows how to take a hit and laugh through it, even enjoy it, and how to win over people with his false personas, so he's clearly sought out both positive and negative attention, just so he can get attention, but as long as he's hiding his magic, he's never really connecting to anyone.
Fourth, Chase does feel things behind the masks, and he feels them powerfully. The times we see his feelings actually on his face, they're deep and clearly affect him. When he's listing off people he'll let live if Caleb gives him his magic, and he lashes out and breaks a lamp when he names Caleb's mother-- because Caleb still has a mother, and Chase has lost his twice. When Caleb tells him more Power won't stop the premature aging, he clearly isn't surprised and instead looks miserable rather than angry, like he's about to cry, not like he's about to be thwarted in his plans. He's eighteen years old, he feels like he doesn't have anyone who actually understands him, his life got turned upside-down in the past four months or so, and he lost the two people most important to him in his life... in an accident caused by him. His emotions fuel his decision-making even more than his addiction. He wants to feel things, whether good or bad, and he is intensely jealous of those people who can feel good things-- who have real connections. It's clear from the look on his face when Caleb calls the other witches "like brothers" that he feels alone and wants that feeling more than anything, himself.
Now he's lost the only real connections he had in his life, and he can't shake the feeling that it's his fault, and he can't escape the certainty that he's the only one who can fix it.
Barge Reactions:
The Barge is going to be a strange mix of threatening and liberating. First, he's not the only one here who’s special, which means not having to hide his magic, which is the first step to making actual friends, even if he doesn't know it. Second, his magic will be taken away, which means what's special about him is also gone, and thus he needs to shut down any avenue to his true self for his own protection lest these people realize he’s so helpless without that magic.
It's most likely Chase will be defaulting to the "friendly kid" mask he displayed for the first half of the movie, in an attempt to make himself seem relatively harmless or at least not desperate, guilty, and probably evil. He'll chatter, he'll laugh easily, he'll talk to anyone and everyone, he'll ask lots of questions, and he'll turn up the wattage on his smile to eleven. He'll be amazed by all the different people and powers, and greedily soak up as much information about it as possible. He'll probably, frankly, be fascinated by the flood effects and port worlds, and being somebody other than himself for a while during breaches might well be a relief. He'll be (possibly surprisingly) open to trying to figure out what the in-game events are trying to teach him, even if in the end he decides it's nothing, really. He might be unhappy, but he’s not closed off, not exactly, and he came here to learn.
But none of that will be helping him get out of here and get his parents back, and he's never going to forget that, either.
Path to Redemption:
The biggest, most important thing here will be getting Chase off his addiction to magic-- not just the physical and metaphysical addiction, but the mental reliance on it as the only thing he leans on and the only thing that makes him special. All of that will definitely be a challenge since he's not in a happy place, he's been using addictive magic more and more over the past five and a half years, and wisdom is not the strong suit of a grieving eighteen-year-old. The Barge is an excellent place to do this, given the Barge's limits on an Inmate's power and wide variety of people with powers and even wider views on those powers.
Beyond that, we'll have to tackle his tendency to try to take things from others rather than earn them himself, his over-the-top attention-seeking personas, his inability to show anyone his real self, and his guilt over his parents’ death-- not just his adoptive parents, but his biological mother as well. At the heart of it is the certainty that he really is evil, just like good old dad, that his Power is only good for hurting people, and there's nothing he can do about it.
History:
Non-italics are canon facts. Italics are extrapolated from those facts, from the setting, from Chase's actor's choices in portraying him emotionally, and from headcanon.
Chase’s mother died when he was two years old, and Chase doesn’t know why or how, but given what he learned later, he suspects that his father, who came from a long line of witches, all the way back to before the Salem trials, wanted to break the line and get rid of inconvenient family ties in one fell swoop. The eldest son of a family with the Power inherits that Power, getting a taste at thirteen and then ascending to full strength at the moment of his eighteenth birthday, at which point it becomes tied to his life force. That Power is addictive, encouraging the bearer to use it more and more, until it becomes painful to not use it, and until it ages the bearer prematurely. The four families of Power in Ipswich, MA, were all taught about this and how to avoid it.
Chase, adopted by a wealthy but childless couple in Pennsylvania when he survived whatever (or whoever) killed his mother, was not. The first taste of his Power showed up at his thirteenth birthday party, held by his adoptive parents, in which he accidentally threw his own birthday cake at one of the other kids by magic. It scared him at first, but before long he was using it for all sorts of pranks, and to avoid other kids (or adults) when they were bothering him. Chase has done a lot of watching of other people, though he never really fit in, particularly after the magic started getting more and more of a grip on him and he focused more and more on experimenting with what it could do. He learned how to fake it, but never to really connect, since no one could know about that most intrinsic part of him.
Then his eighteenth birthday rolled around, and rather than another party, his parents were just planning to take him out to a nice dinner. They were in the car, on the highway, when the actual birthday moment hit and he ascended. Ascension is a flashy, loud, even painful ordeal, looking and feeling a little like being struck repeatedly by lightning-- and this was happening in a car, on the highway, in the back seat. The car, predictably, went out of control and into oncoming traffic. Both of Chase's adoptive parents were killed.
He didn't know what had happened, but he did know his magic was much, much stronger now. He used it-- and good old-fashioned money and influence-- to hunt for records of his real parents, hoping they would know what happened. He tracked down his father, furious at being abandoned and grieving over his adoptive parents' death, and learned about the Power, the families, and the boys in Ipswich who also had this same Power. Then Chase forced his father, by then ancient and infirm despite being only in his late 30s, to will his Power to him, ending his life.
And then Chase went hunting for the sons of Ipswich. His plan was to convince one of them to give away his Power to Chase, in part because of how good it felt to have even more of the Power running through him, which was the reason he gave Caleb, but even more because he wanted to bring his adoptive parents back from the dead. He knows how to summon spirits and give them temporary form, called "darklings" according to his father, so surely it's just a matter of using more magic to make that permanent, right?
So he made a big donation from the family trust to the local private high school so the staff would be inclined to support him, and enrolled as a senior. Right away he started ingratiating himself with the four boys: Caleb, Poge, Tyler, and Reid. He had always been good at pretending, at acting, and it wasn't hard to just put up a good face of a normal, friendly teenage boy, gathering intel on which one's eighteenth birthday and final ascension was the closest, on which of them would be the easiest to manipulate, and which of them he thought could give him the most Power for his job. He settled quickly on Caleb, mostly because Caleb's birthday was rapidly approaching.
The con culminated in the events of the movie: putting a sickness spell on Poge's girlfriend Kate, hurting Poge in a motorcycle crash, and then delivering his ultimatum to Caleb over Caleb's girlfriend's unconscious, cursed body. They fought it out in a barn outside of town the next night, and Caleb refused and refused to give in, even when Sarah was threatened. Caleb's greatly aged father willed his Power to Caleb, and allowed him to overpower and launch away a startled and dismayed Chase.
That's when the Admiral snatched him up, before he fell into the burning barn and died, whether of a broken neck or of the fire.
Sample Journal Entry:
[A neatly printed to-do list, with more hastily scribbled notes in the margins:]
Explore the ship - garden, doctor's, zero (what's zero? sounds spooky)
Something about an inmate-only bar? (get password?)
Get lunch (off-hours so it's quieter?)
Organize and review notes - direct spells, mythology, physics
Figure out why there are more notes than expected (don't remember writing all these? it's my handwriting, though)
Check out the library (big??)
Meet people (ugh)
Work out the warden-inmate thing (check network?)
Find someone to convince to give me magic back before withdrawal sets in (will there be withdrawal if it's sealed?)
[Then the last line reads:]
Figure out why there's cat hair on my bed??
Sample RP:
Chase tosses the to-do list aside, staring around at what is definitely his bedroom, albeit with some stuff in it that he definitely doesn't remember. Not bad stuff: there's some books and, of course, the notes, and a couple pretty rocks on the window sill. All things he definitely would have added if he came across them and thought they were neat.
The cat hair is weirder. He brushes it into a ball, meticulously, and rolls it between his hands, frowning and thinking. The first thing that crosses his mind is that his parents had gotten a cat while he was off at the new school, except-- his heart twists inside him painfully, because obviously that isn't true. They were dead. He killed them. Just because his stupid brain wants to keep thinking about them like they're alive doesn't make it real.
Someday, the pastor told him after the funeral, that would stop. He'd get used to their loss. The pain would fade. (He kept imagining the pastor bursting into flame, a supposedly holy man touching someone who summoned demons. Wondering if he'd be trying to be so comforting if he knew he was talking to a witch. A murderer.)
He doesn't want the pain to fade. He should keep feeling it. It's a reminder. It's motivation. That's why he's here. He's going to fix it.
He tucks the little ball of cat hair under his pillow rather than tossing it in the trash, and gets up, heading for the door. Time to get started on the list. First things first: get his bearings. See what he's dealing with, exactly. Then set about finding out what he can do about his parents from this new place.
And figure out how to get his magic unlocked again. God, this is going to suck.
Chase's previous activity for more.
Special Notes:
1.)
2.) I'd like to say this is the same Chase who was here before, only like some others who have gone and come back, he doesn't remember it. Like he will find some things familiar (and his room remembers that he used to have a cat!) but nothing and no one in specific. Considering he basically backslid during his previous time here, rather than making any progress, due to losing most of the people who he connected with, I am looking for a soft reset with some understanding of Barge culture and slight leanings towards any of his remaining CR. Which I think consists only of Sweeney at this point, but still...