Post by John Deadhead Muller on Jun 17, 2013 20:19:01 GMT -7
JOHN MULLER
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◊ FULL NAME: Johannes Christoph Muller
◊ CODENAME: Deadhead
◊ GENDER: Male
◊ RACE: Undead
◊ AGE: 72 (49 at death)
◊ APPEARANCE: John bears the appearance of an old hobo. His hair has thinned with age into a light brown mass of unkempt curls. His thin dark lips are mildly pursed from decades of smoking, and creases stretch across his forehead. Shallow worry lines are etched into his face and his skin is a ghostly white, almost translucent, and has actually worn down in places to expose the sinewy tendons and bones beneath.
Standing at an unimposing 5'11" and perpetually slouched, John wears the frame of a skeleton. His eyes are encircled by dark sunken flesh, accented by heavy bags and crowsfeet. His hands, having endured years of abuse in both life and death, are the most weathered with his knuckles worn skinless and lifeless veins bulging just barely contained by thin skin.
◊ ATTIRE: John's common outfits often look as if he raided the "dress clothing" section of a dusty thrift shop. His suits are often old, dirty, or torn, and he has a penchant for wearing fedoras and bowlers.
◊ FACE CLAIM: Tom Waits
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◊ AFFILIATION: BPRD
◊ PROFESSION: Exorcist/Necromancer, Occult Adviser
◊ PERSONALITY: Living a life perpetually stained by the touch of death, John carries with him the solemn air of a man at rock bottom. The curious aspect of John is that he doesn't seem to mind. Having stared into the abyssal depths of existence, died, and come back for more, John takes a very indulgent approach to existence. He drinks, swears, and smokes in excess not seeming to mind what others might think of him at all.
“I'm not fighting for justice. I am not fighting for freedom. I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.”
- Tom Waits
Being dead, it could be said that John has garnered an interesting perspective on life and death. In life he never really feared dying, and valued life as a singular window of opportunity that wouldn't ever present itself again. Undeath has given him something of a second peak through that window and he means to play it just as he intends; using his own meager existence two soften the sadness that weighs to heavily on those existing alongside him or clinging to life needlessly while there's still so much more to the cosmos.
Given all this, if John were a word it would be "durable." He's weathered storms of heartbreak, cacophonies of maddening truth, and bittersweet magicks that both hold him together and pull him apart all at once. With so much life in his years and so much chaos, John is perfectly content to play the neutral party. He most often plays the observer, standing in the sidelines alongside his only constant companion, Agatha. Preferring a peaceful existence to any kind of conflict, he's far more likely to run from a fight than stand his ground. That is to say, unless prompted otherwise. If there's anything he can't stand it's seeing someone else have to suffer, and he would be all too willing to die all over again to save that of a stranger.
Ironically, the old necromancer takes greatest joy in the small things in life. Music, piano, booze, pretty women, books, laughs, cake, puns, and wordplay are all things he enjoys.
◊ ABILITIES:
“It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.”
- Tom Waits
John is many things, an exorcist, corpse, occultist, but foremost a necromancer. By the most basic definition, this means that he is able to commune with others like himself, meaning the dead. That is by no means, however, his only talent.
Practitioner of life-molding magicks, John is able, through spells of varying complexity, to summon, banish, and (to a degree) command spirits. Being dead, his capacity to use his own life to fuel his magic is limited and now relies greatly on contracted ghosts to do his reanimation for him. In addition to this he is able to manipulate life-force as a fluid ectoplasm and, through will, transfer it from one object into another. This is not unlike the teleplasty used by agent Krauss. Unlike the medium, however, he may manipulate any form of life force, not only his own,and is therefore capable of even robbing others of life by this means, though he finds the mere notion abhorrent and would adamantly defy the suggestion.
Through the repeated use of his magicks, training, and returning from "the world beyond" John has become able to not only sense spirits but detect subtle differences in them. Some spirits, he has come to learn, are more receptive to reanimation or communication after death, while others, like his first attempt, are more apt to wail incoherently like banshees. In this way he can detect when people are about to die in close proximity to him, in what direction they are relative to himself, what type a spirit is, and whether or not he should attempt a spell.
Beyond his capacity as a spell-caster, John is also very much dead and possesses both the advantages and disadvantages of the status. He no longer feels pain or bleeds; neither does he heal, meaning that he must find alternate ways of maintaining the rickety remains of his body, be it a few spells or a splint, needle, and thread. In many ways, his body could be compared to agent Krauss' containment suit. Unfortunately this means that, in place of bleeding himself for specific spells, he is required to carry with him a limited supply of donated blood which he must ration between Bureau visits.
◊ SKILLS: John boasts the capacity to down all the beers in the world without even growing tipsy (a fact he's actually a bit sad about), and he may smoke as much as he likes without worrying about his health (a boon in some respects). More useful however is his rudimentary capacity with a handgun and knowledge in first aid. Beyond these basic skills he knows hundreds of spells, how to play the piano and violin, how to speak English, German, Spanish, and Latin, bake a cake, and how to dumpster dive.
◊ WEAKNESSES: John is by no means a strong individual. He's physically weak, frail, and a walking corpse fighting a constant battle against vermin of all kinds. He has yet to come to terms with the idea that he may one day require a new body. On top of this he has a soft spot for anything he sees as being innocent, helpless, or in need.
◊ EQUIPMENT: -Agatha the shrunken head
-An old six-shooter
-A variety of protective charms from several different cultures
-various cleansing incenses
-4 packs of cigarettes
-a box of matches
-A flask
-A pack of white chalk
-Rudimentary First Aid kit with a needle and thread
◊ RESIDENCE: Here and there, just as likely to be found in an abandoned truck as an abandoned motel room. He has a room at the BPRD base, though he only visits every once in a while, and, while furnished, it is in a state of disrepair from lack of use.
◊ FAMILY: Olivia Muller (Sister, Deceased); Daniel Muller (father, deceased); Belinde Muller (Mother, deceased)
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◊ HISTORY:
Johannes Muller was born in Albion, New York in 1958 to Daniel and Belinde Muller. Having fled Austria as children during Hitler's rise to power, Daniel and Belinde worked hard to provide the perfect life for their family. Johannes was raised lovingly and doted upon with bedtime stories, finger painting, and games for the first 4 years of his life. On his first birthday he was given a sister by the name of Olivia, and the two of them quickly became the closest of friends.
Olivia and Johannes remained close for years and it was rare to ever see one without the other nearby, inseparable as they were. But fate is cruel and tragedy befell the family in 1975 when Olivia suddenly collapsed from a terrible coughing fit while on a walk with her brother. The doctors diagnosed her as having a birth defect of the heart which caused a rare complication called Pulmonary Hypertension and damaged both her lungs and her heart. For some times they attempted to maintain some semblance of normalcy as Johannes would take his sister out for walks, pushing her in a wheelchair as she was hooked up to an oxygen mask. Even this attempt at happiness however, proved futile, for only two years later, Olivia suffered from heart failure and died in Johannes' arms.
Brokenhearted over the loss of his best friend and sister, Johannes blamed himself for her death, convinced that he could have protected her better if he'd tried. Unable to live with the perceived guilt of her death, he first tried hanging himself at the age of 20. This he attempted again the next year on the anniversary of her death, and once more, failed. After enduring several months of therapy, Johannes turned to books. Regularly he would visit a local library and drown his sorrow in the pages of a fable, biography, or captivating myth. One fateful day, he found a particular tome while rummaging through the shelves of a clearance sale at a small used book store. The small, yellow-paged book had been out of print for years, but in it he found secrets he could have never even imagined.
The strange little tome marked only with the title Al Azif detailed such intricacies of life and death that Muller could hardly believe them, but desperation drives even the greatest men to madness. For years Muller studied the little text and followed barely legible footnotes scrawled in the cramped handwriting of previous owners. Over time he gathered a few more texts of similarly nefarious content, among which were the Voynich Manuscript, Bardo Thodol, Chronike von Nath, Livre d'Eibon, and Liber-Damnatus. As his collection grew, so too did he grow to know far more than any normal human should. It was in these years that he discovered a quality of himself that both inspired and terrified him. Throughout his lifetime he would get an occasional chill or think that he'd heard someone whispering in his ear or calling out to him from a distance when there was in fact no one to be found. These, he learned, were the faint voices of the long departed and, in his grief, he sought to heighten this sense, striving for even the faintest whisper from his beloved Olivia.
Abandoning school and moving to Chicago, John took up a job as a mortician, which allowed him plenty of material and time for his studies. In those years he acquired a halting understanding of various languages and an even deeper understanding of the links between life and death. Eventually he began striking up conversation with his clients, and they would answer. His first successful reanimation happened on June 29th of 1987 in which he accidentally brought an old man's ghost back into his body, causing him to stand up and begin screaming incoherently until Muller successfully bludgeoned him back to death with a chair. Since that incident he discovered various types of spirits and several different forms of both reanimation and exorcism.
By the year 1993 Muller had become a veritable authority on all things occult. He'd established a handful of contacts that would bring him clients looking to speak with their dead loved ones, and sometimes want consultation on some sort of occult incident. Having seen so many of the dead brought back to the living plane, Johannes had decided to let Olivia remain at peace, and had come to see death as yet one more pathway to take through the course of existence. His profound insight into matters of death also made him an effective exorcist when he gradually started getting more requests from people to dispose of the dead rather than raise them. At other times he would sometimes have to turn to his magical mastery of death to help investigate the whereabouts of missing people, bodies, items, or, on one occasion, a faithless husband.
His work quickly earned him the attention of the Bureau, and it was not long before he was approached with an offer. In 1995 he started working as an agent and supernatural consultant for the BPRD while moonlighting as an independent contractor and, with the bureau's help, stayed out of the limelight. Though most of his work consisted of spirit consultation he would sometimes be sent out as a field exorcist. It was on one of the occasions in 2006 that he lost his life investigating a particularly mischievous efreet. His funeral was a small, solemn service and he was interred in the Mount Albion Cemetery in New York.
“The beginning of it starts at the end”
― Tom Waits
His story, however, continued the day that Hellboy opened the gates for the Ogdru Jahad. With the advent of the apocalypse and the sudden sundering of the veil between the living world and the others, thousands of souls came flooding into the world. For the first time in human history, the dead rose en masse and brought with them an unnatural horror that was steadily ripping the world apart. Johannes Christoph Muller was among the returning masses and, being a powerful sorcerer in life, retained both his mind and soul. His first order of business upon returning to the world of the living was to systematically exorcist the hundreds upon hundreds of reanimated corpses that had accompanied him into the world. With the Bureau in chaos, it was only after the dust had settled that he was able to get in touch with Abraham Sapien and learn of all that had transpired during his "vacation."
He has since resumed his work acting as damage control. Hordes of undead still remain after the rise and fall of the Odgru Jahad, and spirits still occasionally leak through the scarred veil between worlds. Even as a walking corpse, John, codename Deadhead, has taken it upon himself to balance the scale.
