Post by gabriel on May 5, 2010 11:21:21 GMT -7
THE HANDLER
NAME: Gabriel White
NICKNAME: Gabe, Gabby, The Raven
CLASSIFICATION: Fallen Angel
GENDER: Female
AGE & BIRTHDAY: 1803, Physical Age: 21, May 14th
APPEARANCE: As a woman who was once an angel, Gabby is in her own way quite beautiful. Her eyes are the color of the earth, a deep mesmerizing hazel. The knowledge of the ages and of the face of God is trapped in her gaze behind the dark bars of pain that permeate her existence. With an average height of 5 feet and 6 inches she stands under the chin of tall men or beasts and at eye level with normal folk of both realms. Her skin is rosy white and her body weight is normal but borders occasionally on thin when she doesn’t eat for a few days or a week. When she is happy she lets her hair grow long and it shimmers like curled starlight, the color of golden wheat in the autumn. But she cuts off those long glorious locks when ever the darker mood takes hold of her. Her hair becomes course and spiky like beaten gold after she attacks it with her sharp scissors. When her hair is short it glitters with a darker more bronzy color even though she has shaved it down. Her golden human hair is all that remains of the glowing light of her heavenly halo, which has been lost to her. Her angelic beauty is like a form of punishment she cannot be rid of it. She hates herself above all things for failing to follow the divine plan God had set for her, but he left her with a beautiful human body to occupy when she was cast down. Gabby remains confused about what the seamless form and shaping of her body means.
Having fallen from grace Gabby was broken and with her many scars and constant easy bruising she looks beaten up most of the time. While her bones do not break she can be injured, badly. She has spent days lying in stillness on the floor of her room, trying to avoid feeling the pain her body creates as it heals at a rapid rate. While she lives in her own skin with defiance, she wears her scars with pride. Especially the two knotted ropes of scar tissue that form a massive V across her shoulder blades. This scar is broken open into fresh new wounds when ever her wings burst forth to take flight. To release her angel’s wings from their human shell is a painful process, much like the transformation of a werewolf or skin walker. The long soft feathers of her impressive wingspan are pitch black, like velvet night. Her wings had once been the blessed white color of purity in her youth, but since her fall they have taken on the tainted radiance of the darkness bleeding from the cracks in the earth where she landed…
ATTIRE: When she is on her own Gabriel wears the scrappy tee-shirts and jeans she can find that fit. She has destroyed many shirts over the years when her wings demanded freedom. Now she favors a stretchy cotton top and the protection of the loose folds of a dusty black leather jacket she had pilfered from a bin outside a stranger’s house on the evening of her fall. It was a man’s jacket, probably thrown out by his grieving wife or scorned lover, and it hangs well past her hips and her arms look frail inside the long sleeves. With the gaping ragged hole in its back she can easily allow her wings to fly and have something to wear apart from her jeans and torn shift. With often short hair, hand cut over a sink, and with bruises on her body that make her look as if she’s been in a fight, Gabriel rarely wears female attire. She never gives herself enough time to dress as a human woman should. Dresses or simply a skirt and blouse are too much of a remembrance for her of the elegance of the celestial robes she once wore in heaven. The feel of silk on her skin or the touch of cashmere is as rough as sandpaper in comparison with the garments she once wore when she was in God’s grace. Now that she is on the earth, working and living as a supernatural human in the shadow of the BPRD, she feels she does not deserve any human vanities or perks. To suffer and be comfortable is enough for her.
PLAY BY: Mia Wasikowska
THE CREATION
NAME: Blackbird
POWER LIST: Healing, Superior Strength & Flight
DETAILED POWER: The one power Gabby has retained from her former life is an ability to heal. It is only her own body which can be healed and not the souls of others as it once was within her power to do. Her own soul remains broken and trapped inside her corporeal body like a handful of shattered glass. Her healing ability is only a heightened form of healing evolution, a week of knitting bones or sinew put into fast forward. It is an extremely painful experience, but one Gabby bares in solitude. Her brittle body is broken too often and her suffering is great. Her ability to heal has also not allowed her to reach the experience of death when she cannot take the pain of her confused and broken life anymore. The pain she experiences coming back from the edge of death, after her many attempts to achieve it in the beginning, is almost worse than the bliss of death itself. It has taught her many harsh lessons and that one day she will die, but it is not yet her time. She had never experienced pain until she was summoned to judgment by the angels and then sent down to earth in her human form. To heal is to be punished to live another day on the earth. Without purpose, her life would mean nothing but to live in torment inside her own perfected body’s living cage. In finding some of her former purpose, Gabby’s healing has been understood and can be put to good use keeping her alive when and after she flings herself rashly into the jaws of danger at every turn.
In flight Gabriel feels more at one with her former self. Her human form can feel the wind on her face and in her hair. The sensation of gravity pulling at you from below is exhilarating. Her wings spread wide and she can soar high into the clouds. Since her powers are more earthbound, she has gained in flight the use of avian sight when her black wings are free. When she flies high above the ground she can see blurry but sharp enough details below her to judge a landing or make an attack, but she has lost the once clear endless vision of space and time she once possessed. She feels handicapped by the constant pull of the earth below her, but by the ever expanding standards of the supernatural on earth today she is an excellent and graceful flier. On earth as well, she has retained some of her divine strength. While she cannot open the gates of heaven with one finger anymore, she can hit with the force of a swinging hammer in the hands of a giant. This inhuman strength occasionally keeps her from interacting with others unable to withstand her strength. A hug, if she was not careful, could crush a human’s ribs before she’d find the will to quickly let them go. Her strength, however, is limited by her own human capacity. Her body cannot push as hard as she is fully able and she could crush her own limbs in an attempt to exceed her body’s limits. In that way her own strength is trapped inside her now human body.
THE POTENTIAL
ALIGNMENT/OCCUPATION: Unaffiliated, but she can be a BPRD Agent for freelance work.
WEAPONS: Gabriel has learned with ease the many uses of a gun, crossbow or bow and arrow. While she finds such weaponry menial and weak, they are all she has left to defend herself from the dangers she faces. The harsh clang of a bullet firing in her ears rings in the same manner as the screams of the angels and demons she once watched fall to earth in battle. The whistle of an arrow through the air, the taught slap of the string against her wrist, is like a peaceful sigh to her ears. The use of an arrow is her preferred form of defense after a good old fashioned kickboxing match. The skill of fighting with a blade, broken glass or sharp object is a customary skill born of necessity. Before she found her place one earth she lived in the alleys and gutters of the world were evil things slithered around your heels in the dead of night. Before she had weapons she used her fingers or anything that came to hand. To fight with a knife is a bloody business, but one Gabriel can get used to in a pinch. The first time she hefted a broad sword it felt like an extension of her arm, it wasn’t a sword of light by any means but it was sharp and smooth to the touch. The blade hummed through the air with ease when she decapitated her advisory. As long as her sword is in hand, she can slice and dice with the best swordsman.
PERSONALITY: Gabriel was blessed with strength at the moment of her creation. Strength of heart, strength of mind and body. That strength was put to the test in the years before her fall. She failed her lord, who she once believed to be the way, the truth and the light of the world. That failure has haunted her like the ghosts of a lost past over the span of years she has lived as a human on the earth. It has drained her strength away. Her body breaks so easily and yet she cannot find peace and the bliss of heaven even in walking so close to death. She has been given a life’s sentence on the earth in punishment for her errors. She is so drunk on pain, she cannot think straight or clearly anymore. Life is so hard. It is so dark. The sunlight on her skin does not feel like the blessings she once gave out freely to one and all. This constant pain has made her angry at the world and yet it does not diminish her capacity to love the things she now despises. It is her love for the divinity she once knew which tortures her every waking moment. While Gabby doesn’t want to feel one more moment of pain on this earth, she cannot help but admire the tenacity of all the races who drift and live in peace and harmony beneath the sky. Often times Gabby wishes she could share in the blissful human freedom of ignorance and providence. But in every living being she sees the light she lost and she is once more tormented by loneliness and pain.
As a former angel, Gabriel has a haunting awareness of her surroundings. Her eyes see deep and far into the souls of others. She is not telepathic, but she can read people through logic and emotional awareness of others. She cannot help but seek to understand people and know how they think. However, she now keeps these instinctual pursuits to herself. She has learned from human life that not all things are to be looked at or spoken of. Secrets must be kept safe in silence. Her innocence is gone, replaced by a dark understanding of the new world she must live and suffer in. Her knowledge of history and the supernatural is untarnished. If ever the BPRD need her assistance in the library with translating ancient texts or learning the ways of new demons or a rabid beast they have discovered that could end the world, Gabby is ready to assist in an intelligent capacity or as a fighter and scout. Books, she has found, are wells of memories from other times and places she once visited freely as an angel but now must seek to understand as an earth bound being without freedom, without innocence and without the power to set things right. The silence inside a library, like the one at the BPRD, is another reminder of the silence in her past, when peace was all she knew.
To fly across the sky on her wings brings her back to a long lost time, before she fully understood the world and what it meant to live in it. She can fully appreciate her own remaining strength as she flaps her raven black wings and drifts along a spiral of hot air above the clouds. When her eyes close she dreams of the ecstasy of nothingness in heaven, which is why she doesn’t understand the reasons why God has sent her to suffer on earth. Why is there suffering at all? This is the great enigma in which she hopes to find understanding and salvation once again. She knows there is a reason for all things and perhaps if she can find acceptance inside herself and for the human and supernatural life around her on earth, her grace will be restored. Everything scares her, but there is still a curious excited light within her which pushes her past the innocence still clinging to her mind and way of thinking. To human eyes she seems aloof and cold, when in fact she is being pleasant or thoughtful. She wants to help others but not find help for herself. When she fights she is filled with a divine wrath, an unstated anger that drives her forward into danger without fear. Fear has no meaning when you do not know death personally. She had once been a guardian of earth from heaven’s throne. Now that she walks on the earth again, with human feet, she still remembers her duty and what the precious delicacy of life means. To preserve the balance on earth she has joined the champions and will use all that she has left to keep fighting the darkness in her life and its secret threats against the only remaining light she can see inside those she cares for…
SKILLS: A deep knowledge of history and the meaning of supernatural/human life is a kind of skill not many covet, but it comes naturally to Gabriel. It does not help her in many situations but it does not hinder either. While she is not a chatty person, she can understand many languages and much of the supernatural world still speaks in ancient languages long forgotten by the human world. Gabriel is not prejudiced against any race, but she can spot a bad apple in a bunch of demons from a mile away. Her senses are the same as any human’s now, but she can use them with far better accuracy than the average person. Her ability to heal is incomparable, but she is injured more times than she is healthy and free of pain. One remaining skill from her heavenly life is her own physical healing, which is enhanced. To heal a bruised rib would take a week or more, but she would be up and able to fight again in a few days to receive yet another blow which could send her reeling into the hospital ward again. These blows she receives come from fighting, for her honor or for her faith or for simply fun, but her fighting skills are inherent. As a former angel she has fought many forms of evil since birth, like a Minerva or Diana of the pagan word. She fights with masculine determination but often times forgets her own feminine and human fragility. With speed and strength she can be at the throats of her enemies like a war hound and like a hound of war it is very hard to call her off from the kill when there is the scent of danger on the air.
STRENGTHS: Courage and a good heart are things Gabriel possesses, but these are strengths not necessary in the real world. Knowledge and strength are required of her occasional profession, but when she is alone they are but pieces of heavy armor she cannot take off. Survival is her new strength. She fights to stay alive and sane in this new world. As a higher being trapped inside a human body, Gabby suffers greatly. Enjoying life is a difficulty when you are so alone, but Gabby will keep trying. Whether it is God’s will for her to understand the meaning of her failures or to simply live a good life in a human form, she will do her best no matter the danger. Fearlessness and freedom are things she uses every day but doesn’t give them a name. Buried under her own self deprecating attitudes is a strong woman with power and the will to use it. She can make friends with those deserving of her favor and behind her cold veneer she can smile like a beautiful sunrise. Having danced with the stars and circled around the moon, to be content on earth is her greatest strength of all.
WEAKNESSES: Her human body is brittle but never sustains too many lasting injuries. A hard slap of her fist against a wall to catch her balance can leave a painful bruise. She can touch the dark black mark with her fingers and feel the pulse of her heartbeat for about a day before it heals, leaving behind an all too human sensitivity to the injuries she’s received over the years. Trust also does not come easily to Gabriel, even though she can partly guess if someone is lying to her or not. To get close to people and be accepted is not something she wants, but she is not a free spirit that wants to be wholly herself and free to do anything. She understands the limitation of law and order. To say she is omniscient is not true, she is just as blind as you or I. She can be deceived and she can be lied to if the person was skilled enough and believed in what he or she was lying about. In many situations Gabby can be naive and shy, close interaction with human kind only brings up her long silences and non verbal communication skills. It is a habit to stay inside her own head, it is safer there and being physically close with anyone in any other place outside of the battlefield is a strange situation for her.
THE STORY
HISTORY: Her creation was pure bliss. The light was so bright it burnt her eyes. Without any knowledge of pain she did not understand the sensation in her eyes or throughout her body at the moment of her birth, fully formed and beautiful before the eyes of God. Pain did not belong in heaven but there was war. To protect the fields of peace, the angels had to take up both shield and sword to defend the goodness still left in the world. Gabriel was one of the many young soldiers made to fight and push back darkness from the realms of heaven. With fresh fire in her heart and lightening in her hand, Gabriel battled demons and wickedness in the heavens. Her sword cut down the black presence of danger and fear. She made peace again with her sword and force of will. The act of battle in heaven was not as it is on earth. Her memories of the heavenly war, which is still being waged, are a vague blurred fog without any scent, sight or sound. While her battles had been clear and sharp in the moment of the attack, when those moments passed they were quickly forgotten. For she had not learned to carry the weight of such memories. The captains of heaven were pleased with Gabriel and after many centuries of endless fighting, Gabriel was given a brief respite from war as a gift for her bravery. After a few centuries of stillness and happiness, Gabriel was given the task to look after a few tender young humans on earth.
She took to her assigned task with a sense of some new strange emotion, joy. The young children grew up happy with her blessings and the family was guarded from many dangers, both spiritual and physical, with Gabby’s guidance. As the children grew and moved away from their parent’s estate, Gabby found it difficult to keep track of them and help them follow the path. One child was human and the other was a supernatural. The young male had an ability to control the forces of the wind and Gabby learned more from watching him live his life than by following the breathes of an average human. Gabby often drifted on the clouds that followed the young man when he walked across empty fields of wheat, seeking peace and freedom from his confusion and fear. The second human male child was suspicious of his brother and the bouts of bad weather that followed him. Soon people were talking of witches in the villages and demon possessions. While many people believed it was the supernatural boy who had lost faith and was tainted by the devil, it was the human brother who had been corrupted. He was being swallowed by greed and hatred for his kinder and far more innocent kin. Gabriel tried to stop what she knew was coming in the young son’s future. He was taken by witch hunters and tortured. She wanted desperately to stop the outcome she had known from the beginning. The thought of his death made pain and fear real for her.
Desperate for his safety and for his life, Gabriel appeared to the boy and gave him the strength of her presence to survive the torture long enough. With her blessed powers she healed the young broken boy and carried him out of the prison. While the human brother roused a rabble to follow his escaped brother’s trail, Gabriel had taken him far away. With the young boy in her care, she hid him away in the mountains of a dark land where his magic would not be noticed or feared until he was able to control it. This failure to let fate run its course set the angels of justice on her trail. The boy was fated to die at the hands of his brother and Gabriel had stopped it. She had made his fate anew. Now he would grow up to help other supernatural boys like himself, while his brother also lived to hunt and kill those he believed to be demons like his brother. Balance was maintained, but Gabriel had failed to follow the path she had been given. Gabriel hid from her creator and wept as the rain fell down upon her and stained her garments. Her God was disappointed in her for not believing he knew what was right. She had taken the destiny of those two young men into her own hands. The other angels called for her banishment and the lord did not reply to their demands for justice. Gabriel tried to stay hidden but the anger of the angels finally found her. She was brought back to heaven and chained, questioned and punished outside of recordable time and space. God said nothing when she asked for him to save her. Gabriel was cast out from heaven as a falling comet of white fire.
She screamed in pain as fire burnt her flesh and singed the feathers of her wings. She blasted into the earth, forming a massive crater of smoke and fire. She lay pale and naked in the crater for what felt like days, her now black wings sprawled out on either side of her. Suddenly a ragged breath filled her human lungs, which burned from bruising and the sudden inhalation of smoke. She crawled out of the crater slowly, dragging her wings behind her. She had to move quickly, she could hear the squeal of sirens getting closer. Summoning up a memory from heaven, which had become a stinging white light in her mind, she was able to close her wings and hide them away. Shivering and feeling cold for the first time, Gabriel ran like a wraith through the alleys of some strange suburban land. It was night and many people where still asleep, even though a massive hole had been punched into the earth a few miles away. She found something to cover herself and stave off the cold. The warm, soft leather jacket she found would become a treasured possession in the future. She hid herself away behind garbage bins and in the damp alleyways of a loud, bright and strange city. It took her a few days to recover her senses. When her mind returned, she realized how low she had fallen, living like a rat in a human world when she had once been amongst the host of heaven.
It was the fantasy realm that allowed her to walk freely enough to gather her strength over the years. She found herself a place to live in the human world and she spent her days walking between the two worlds, causing whispers to stir the air. A fallen angel was a rare enough sight to see and it set every demon on edge and gave every innocent heart hope. Gabriel learned to be accustomed to a lone wolf way of life. She was trapped and in chains inside her own body and mind. She is still trying to understand why she is walking the earth, a disgrace to heaven but a blessing in disguise for the darkness and gray lands below. The BPRD noticed the crater she made in their territory and soon enough they were knocking on her door…To help the champions she had heard about amongst the gossips in the world of fantasy, in some little way, was a kind of soulful form of penance. Learning from them gave her some freedom, enough to want to survive the suffering she endured. She could see they stood for something good, a dim light in a world of darkness on both sides of the veil. The things that go bump in the night are bumped back, all behind the scenes and away from human eyes… It’s not unlike the fashion in which heaven guards them and fights off the evils even they cannot see.
