Name: Acerbus, Averna
Species: Human (Possessed), Human (Ghost)
Position: N/A, Enforcer for J&Q
EXP: 3
Skills:
Acerbus
- Defense: 2
- Perception: 1
- Urban Exploration: 1
- Sense Motive: 1
- Stealth: 5
Averna
- Agility 4
- Defense 4
- Melee 5
- Perception 3
- Persuasion 3
- Sense Motive 2
- Urban Exploration 2
Inventory of Possessions:
- 1 canteen full of a soupy mixture that contains all the various nutrients required to sustain Acerbus's body at a level acceptable for Averna's uses, in a quantity sufficient for three days. It smells terrible and tastes worse, but Acerbus doesn't care and Averna has more important things to worry about.
- Three nice, decorated wooden boxes with lids, containing shriveled, mummified fingers. No two fingers are from the same person.
Inventory of Equipment:
- 1 Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife
Notable Character Traits:
Shadow Step: Averna can teleport herself and Acerbus at will, with the only restriction being that Acerbus's feet must land within the space his shadow occupied immediately prior to Averna initiating the teleport.
Burning Touch: Averna, being a ghost, can extend a part of herself out beyond Acerbus's body to harm people Acerbus has skin-to-skin contact with.
Sensation By Proxy: Acerbus and Averna have a telepathic bond that allows Averna to "listen in" on Acerbus's senses, albeit with a 0.02-second delay. (See "By the Light of Her Eye".)
Seeing Souls: When Averna is looking at the world directly (i.e., not via Sensation By Proxy), she sees things in a peculiar way. Everything living lights up, bright and colourful; everything dead or inanimate is dull and overcast with grey; her fellow undead souls, by contrast, appear to be voids of utter blackness.
Notable Character Flaws:
Apathy Killed the Cat: Acerbus suffers from crippling, depression-induced apathy. The only reason he hasn't died from self-neglect is because Averna takes better care of his body than he does.
By the Light of Her Eye: By superimposing her sensory organs over Acerbus's own, Averna can get around the delay inherent in using "Sensation By Proxy". However, she only has one eye, which shines out from one or the other of Acerbus's pupils with a very conspicuous red glow, blinding him in that eye for the duration.
Honourable Shmonourable: Averna is pathologically incapable of fighting fair. In a fight, if she can, she will teleport behind you and slip a knife between your ribs. If she can't, she tends to go for the face or the groin.
Miscellaneous:
Cases of possession are rare in themselves. Most humans, Acerbus included, are capable of at least partially resisting a ghost's will. What sets Acerbus apart, though – and what has let Averna control his body as thoroughly as if she were using a soulless corpse – is the fact that he simply doesn't care enough, about anything, to resist. He doesn't see his current existence as any more or any less desirable than any other possible one. Averna, meanwhile, has a vested interest in keeping Acerbus alive and reasonably healthy: he's the ideal long-term host.
Acerbus can, and occasionally does, speak. His voice is, naturally, the same voice that Averna uses, but for those in the know, it's easy to tell who is who: Acerbus's speech has a distinct monotone to it, while Averna's is inflected normally.
Stuff added in RP:
Averna:
- Can leave Acerbus's body at will. When disembodied, she is only visible to others as a small, red ball of light — her single eye — but when she looks in a mirror in ghost form, she sees the rest of her "form" as an amorphous darkness.
- Is 100% non-corporeal in ghost form.
- Lost her left eye in a car crash as a small child. It left her with an impressive scar there. It was the first in what would become a large collection.
- Only started getting into fights after the crash. It would start with one of the other kids would say something about her scar being ugly… and end with them on the ground, bleeding from being repeatedly punched in the face, and telling her "YES OKAY I'M SORRY I TAKE IT BACK THE SCAR IS VERY PRETTY SO PLEASE STOP AAAAHHHHHHH"
- The whole "pinning them down, beating the crap out of them, and making them tell her that her scar is 'very pretty'" thing eventually got to her head, and led to the whole "loving and cherishing every one of her scars" thing as she got older.
- Only started getting into fights after the crash. It would start with one of the other kids would say something about her scar being ugly… and end with them on the ground, bleeding from being repeatedly punched in the face, and telling her "YES OKAY I'M SORRY I TAKE IT BACK THE SCAR IS VERY PRETTY SO PLEASE STOP AAAAHHHHHHH"
- Considers herself female, but does not consider herself a "woman" anymore, on the reasoning "How can I be a woman when I don't even have a face?", and she insists that she's "only an imprint" of the person she was in life
- Has been around for at least a few hundred years, and has forgotten much of what she looked like in life; the only parts she remembers clearly are the scars she had — and she had many — and the fact she had red hair.
- Said scars are remembered in photographic, loving detail; they were her favourite part of herself when she was alive.
- She recently recalled that she never liked her toes, which had grown kinda crooked.
- Was always getting into fights when she was alive, and full well expected that she would die in one, but her life came to a thoroughly dissatisfying end when some faulty wiring caused an electrical fire in her house in the middle of the night.
- Doesn't get her energy from nowhere; she absorbs it from her surroundings. The easiest way is to drain heat energy from living people, which might, at worst, if she REALLY tried, give a person some bad chills for a while.
- She can also "sleep" to conserve energy.
- Uses Herbal Essences Lilac Apple Fusion shampoo and body wash.
- "If Acerbus cared about whether or not he smells girly, he would wash his own goddamn hair."
Acerbus:
- Is 19 years old
- When he was 14, his mother gave up, packed up, and moved away without him. Averna quickly "moved in" once she thought the apartment was vacated, and was quite surprised to find Acerbus just sitting up against one of the walls, staring off into space and waiting to die. One thing led to another, and she ended up sorta adopting him, not out of the goodness of her heart or anything, but because she'd just struck metaphorical gold, host-wise.
- Suffers from a congenital disorder where the "reward circuit" in his brain is simply does not naturally work on its own; the concept of "enjoy" is completely alien to him.
- Is very good at obeying orders, but bad at taking initiative.
- He doesn't really have a good sense of "self". When "nothing" became no longer an acceptable answer (Janus can be thanked/blamed for that one), he had to figure out what he was, and why he existed, and the conclusion he eventually came to was that, even with the introduction of Janus into Averna's unlife, his purpose hadn't changed: To be a useful tool.
