OOC INFORMATIONName: Wolfy
Contact:Personal journal: wolfintheattic
Plurk: quesadillawizard
Discord: quesadillawizard
Age: 35
Other Characters: Beetlejuice - a minotaur
CHARACTER INFORMATIONCharacter Name: Maurice Zachary Hutch
Age: 26
World Information:Maurice is from your run-of-the-mill modern day Earth with a masquerade (hidden paranormal things that have a bad habit of bumping into main characters.) The range of otherworldly creatures comes in classes of: undead, faeries/spirits, and undiscovered monsters. Werewolves don't really fall into any of those slots since they're just people under a curse. Maurice falls into the undead category obviously, though he too is under a curse. Magic is not a widely known about thing and isn't even an often used thing even among the 'in the know' crowd who have seen behind the curtain. It is incredibly unstable and dangerous--think of it as reality warping HTML. Know how to alter that code and you can change the world. Leave out one single curly friend like this } ? You have teeth growing out of your eyeballs and somebody over in China finds your liver in their living room sofa cushions. It's risky business.
There are also multiple other dimensions overlapping an hidden in the creases of the world but those aren't relevant to Maurice's adventure. He's largely ignorant of all these things. He just knows there are in fact ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and MAYBE Santa Claus. He really hopes Santa isn't real because he's been bad.
The scope of the story takes place in Maurice's hometown, Dogtrot. It plays host to a population of retirees, a tiny family of vampires + one werewolf, and maybe a few lingering ghosts. It's a dumpy little nowhere place that's trying very hard to revive itself and become a 'real' town--not just somewhere you pass through for gas and snacks on your way to a better town with a Walmart. Two hours south is a town called Washatog that has a college campus and a thriving population of new families. He visits this town by accident. Maurice is from November, 2008, just a day after his birthday. The world has no significant timeline differences from our own.
Character Information:LONG VERSION HERECONDENSED VERSION:
Maurice grew up during the 1980s in the fictional town of Two Rock, Texas. He was the youngest of four with two brothers and a sister and spent a lot of time running after them on his parents' farm.
His father was an introverted cotton farmer so Maurice ended up being very close to his mom who was a loud, rambunctious retired trucker. He got his love of mechanics from both of them, but the gift from his dad was music and the gift from his mom was a love of cooking.
Maurice got into 80s glam rock when left alone with the tv. At first, his parents were okay with it and let him join the middle school drama club. Even though he'd veered away from country like his dad liked, he was still making music.
When Maurice was 14, his sister became pregnant and their mother flew into a drunken zealot rage, determined to reset the entire family to the perfect down-home Christian aesthetic. Maurice was removed from drama because his mother deemed it 'unmanly'. She was impossible to get a word in edge-wise with since she was always fighting with his sister and his dad had started hiding in the garage so Maurice was alone.
Since he was a big boy, Maurice found it easy to take out his frustrations from home on smaller kids at school. He targeted those in the arts specifically and anyone who looked like they were having fun in their own niche interests. When he wasn't at school being a bully, he was a nervous wreck at home, stealing from his mom's liquor supply.
This went on for a few years until he got into a fight with the wrong kid and got his ass beat. He was finally caught and his mother was alerted to the issue. His mom erupted on him and the two of them actually got into a fist-fight in the school parking lot. This was when his mom realized exactly what she had caused and vowed to change her ways.
Even though things got better at home, for the entirety of his senior year, Maurice did not speak to a soul. He cut his hair, sat in the back of the class, did his homework, and went home.
Once he got to college and away from the confusing, back-and-forth aura of home, Maurice loosened up again and started finding parts of his younger self. He snuck into theater performances and started taking actual coarses in mechanics. Since he'd been drinking on and off since 14 and he was now entirely un-attended, Maurice developed full-blown alcoholism in college. He wasn't a party drunk, though, he was a black-out-in-his-dorm drunk.
Two years in, he left college to shadow under a man in a town called Dogtrot, which was even further away from Two Rock than his college was. He rented a little trailer and paid half of his keep by helping the landlord with his farm work. He didn't return home unless it was a holiday, to borrow money, or to wash his clothes.
---[Book 1: The Dogtrot Murder]---
One night after a crappy day at work at the gas station, Maurice found 20 bucks on the ground and took it to the bar. There he met a woman who turned out to be a vampire, and after she lured his drunken self out back to help fix her corvette, she beaned him with a wrench from his own tool box and drained him dry.
Maurice struggled to adapt to his new life as a vampire. He had to juggle two entire drinking problems on top of trying to keep what social life he had from falling apart now that he could not go into the sunlight. He lasted about two weeks before running home to his mom with the problem.
She took it better than he thought she would. Now he had one ally.
In all the weeks Maurice had been a vampire, he had survived only by biting livestock instead of people and this started to make him twitchy, lethargic, and hard to deal with. The entire town was on edge thanks to a string of grizzly murders that had started cropping up the night Maurice died. This didn't mix well with his co-worker, Meranda, who was suffering some family issues of her own unbeknownst to him. The two of them argued often and worked less and less which did not make their boss happy.
One night Maurice bumped into a strange man named Horas who seemed to like his company despite his strange behavior. However, later in the week, he met him again and it turned out that he was a vampire whose master was really unhappy to discover that Maurice had actually been living in their town for some time without their detecting him. Horas kidnapped him and brought him to the Dogtrot lair.
There, the local spook population had to decide what to do with Maurice because the string of murders had attracted the attention of a monster-hunter. They were suspicious that Maurice, being recently turned and un-educated in vampireness, was responsible for the murders but they eventually decide to declare him innocent and teach him the right way to vampire so that he doesn't kill anyone by accident while they wait for the monster hunter to go away.
One night while Horas was giving Maurice lessons, they were attacked by the monster hunter. They escaped, but this made their leader, Charlie, put a lair-wide rule into action that none of them were to hunt any more. This ended up being pretty easy to follow since that same week Maurice got kicked out of his trailer for forgetting rent and not pitching in on his landlord's farm due to his weakness to sunlight that he couldn't just tell the man about.
Maurice lived in the lair's bunker and only left to hunt with Horas or go to work. While they were hiding, an old friend of Charlie's shows up to warn them that a more organized monster extermination team unaffiliated with the monster hunter they're already dealing with will be arriving on a specific night. That night, all they need to do is stay together in the lair. Once the sweep is complete, Charlie's friend suggests that the other hunter will leave as well.
A few days before the sweep was to take place, Maurice was out being nosy around his old trailer in his vampire animal shape when Meranda accidentally hit him with her car. She thought he was a normal dog and took him home with her to bandage up his leg. While he was there, Meranda got a phone call telling her that her father who was in the nursing home in town had died. Maurice understood why Meranda had been so prickly for the past while.
The next day at work, Maurice noticed that her name had been scratched out of the schedule at work beyond just when the funeral would be. His boss told him that she was planning on moving to Chicago after the funeral. Maurice resolved to support her during the funeral before she left and to apologize for being such a dick to her while he was dealing with his own stuff.
The kicker was the funeral was the night of the sweep, so Maurice would have to hurry.
Maurice snuck out of the lair to attend the service but missed it. He did manage to find Meranda outside the funeral home and after apologies were exchanged and some talking, Meranda decided to stay in Dogtrot for at least a little while longer since they were really the only friend each other had. Then they were attacked by the flesh drones.
Maurice was forced to reveal that he was a vampire in order to help them escape back to the lair. On the way there, Maurice and Meranda ran into the other members of the lair who'd had all had their own plans to sneak out and deal with the drones so basically everybody got in trouble and everybody got grounded even Charlie who grounded herself.
Once Maurice and Meranda reached the entrance of the lair, Maurice was attacked by the original monster slayer that everybody was worried about because he thought Maurice was kidnapping Meranda. Maurice tried to talk him down and failed, but luckily they were interrupted by someone calling for help. The actual murderer was within ear shot and the monster hunter had a moment of internal conflict before running to their aid.
The two of them finally made it inside the lair only to discover a drone waiting there for them. They defeated it together and licked their wounds until the rest of the lair came home. While Maurice was commended for doing a good job protecting the base, he was booted and resolved to live in his truck.
He and Meranda grew closer as friends and he promised to help her start moving her dad's old stuff.
---[START OF BOOK 2, as of yet unpublished]---
The night before Thanksgiving, Maurice arrived at work to discover that a new mystery had cropped up in Dogtrot. Even though the actual (very human) murderer had been caught, pets were starting to go missing. On top of that, Meranda expressed concern that their gas station may be shutting down due to the new building developments down town.
Maurice went home to spend the last part of Thanksgiving with his family and he and his mother got into an argument about whether or not he should tell the rest of the family that he was a vampire since she was starting to feel the strain of shouldering the secret alone. Maurice's sister also also got on his case because since he couldn't tell anybody the actual reason his arm was injured, she assumed that he was drunk driving. She then told him to stay away from her kids and to, if he could be bothered, kill himself.
Maurice took all of this (understandably) badly and went to do just that by chugging an entire bottle of Everclear and walking into the Texas desert. He ended up in another town called Washatog and after punching out some car windows, he passed out behind a Wendy's with glass in his fist.
Personality:Maurice is just a big kid. Seriously, give him a nerf gun and he will entertain himself for an hour. Hokey B movies, comic books, and old video games all hold his attention in a vice grip. He can even be heard uttering 'Gozer' under his breath as a really lame adopted swear from the Ghostbusters movie. However this isn't because of an 'it's old so it's better' mentality. He's just BROKE and that is all he has--memories and junk from when he was a kid. Maurice daydreams constantly and hums and sings to himself when alone.
The supernatural world leaves him wide-eyed. Being undead for a whopping half-a-year or so has made him question everything. He often jumps to paranormal explanations before even thinking about looking for a normal explanation. EVERY BUMP IS A GHOST. So far, Maurice has been exposed to only a few supernatural things: vampires, scary tentacle starfish aliens that stab you, and supposedly werewolves. He hasn't seen Bert transform yet. He's not entirely convinced the others aren't pulling his leg. See, there's that paranoia. Things have been pretty unstable for Maurice lately and he teeter totters between being painfully gullible and stubbornly paranoid.
Maurice is shy. Though comfortable around people older than he is (he's used to getting pats on the head for being a 'good ole boy') it's rare for him to make small-talk with people his own age. He feels alienated by them because he doesn't have a cellphone or a computer. He can't afford to go see the new movies or buy things like a PS2. He's very much stuck in the 80's with his 'dude' slang, bad haircut, Walkman, and the like. When he does speak, it's a toss up between him mumbling a few stray words to the floor or overflowing with WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION. He hasn't been socialized enough to find that happy medium. When in a group, Maurice hovers near the edges, timidly trying to judge everyone's mood and staying on the look-out for any disturbances like a fat shaky deer.
He tries to be a good boy, and succeeds for the most part. He helps out where he sees help needed and tries to fix or replace anything he breaks. He means well and likes nothing more than everyone getting along. Conflict within a circle of friends tears him to pieces. He'll have a horrible time trying to find a side to be on and end up bailing out of fear of making one end of the argument angry with him for associating with the other. He doesn't like the idea of somebody being angry with him and will usually roll belly-up in attempts to fix whatever he's done even if he isn't sure what that is. He's prone to bouts of, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” and lots of fidgeting and hovering until whoever he's offended is like IT'S OKAY, MAURICE, JESUS, JUST QUIT IT. He has even entertained the idea of mugging a human being and bringing the unconscious body to his undead nest-mates as a token of apology.
It'd probably be adorable if he were a cat or something.
But he isn't.
He's easily persuaded with bullying and pleading alike and aches to please and be accepted. He will go as far as chameleon-ing his body language and speech patterns to better fit in with any group of people he's trying to impress regardless of age or sex. He will go from spinning intricate webs of profanity to greeting others as 'gurl'. Yeah. Any kind of positive attention will cause him to trip all over himself with glee.
He feels guilty when he has to do his vampire business. He takes pains to drink as little as he can afford and to leave as small a wound as possible. He hasn't learned that this is a good way to cause people to get infections by not letting the wound bleed freely. He's only been on a few solo hunts before his pull point. He's gotta be a big kid now without Horas holding his hand. He's actually only mastered a few undead tricks so he depends on blunt trauma to render his victims unconscious instead of hypnotism or any other creative means. He usually does more damage knocking people out than drinking from them.
Decision making is not his best skill. Neither is impulse control. The several years' worth of alcohol addiction, generic 'mom' heart tattoo, and several minor scrapes and bumps that decorate his person are testaments to this. Maurice is one of those guys who can be heard uttering, “Hold my beer and watch this!” before landing himself in the emergency room--especially if he thinks it'll impress someone. Since he's died, this has gotten even worse. You survive enough stabbings and being hit by a car and suddenly you're INVINCIBLE. TENTATIVELY. He's aware there are probably more scary things out there and he should keep an open mind...BUT LOOK AT HIM HE CAN THROW A TRUCK.
Maurice is an incredibly warm person. He hates to see anyone feel lonely or suffer. He's a great shoulder to lean on and is always willing to offer an ear--both out of honest compassion and the want to please others. He's the kind of person who will pick worms off the sidewalk when it rains and then not know what to do with them. While awkward, Maurice almost finds it impossible to keep from giving people compliments when he thinks they deserve them. You! That shirt is awesome on you! You! You punched that guy REALLY GOOD! Unfortunately, he is as good at putting himself down as he is at building himself up. Harsh words from peers and family--especially his sister--have worn a deep groove in his psyche.
And yet, as much of a marshmallow as the vampire can be, he was still a bully at one point and that animal in him is not dead—-just buried. He knows he's bigger and heavier and stronger than a lot of the people he meets. If pushed and prodded and bullied just enough, he can actually pass straight through being a wibbling lump and break a man's jaw and then keep yanking on it to see just how broken it can get. He's his mother's son. This isn't 'I'm going to hurt this thing so I can get away from it/feed off it.' This is 'I'm going to hurt this thing and then sit here and listen to it hurt and make it hurt more until I feel better about myself.' He's the youngest of four. He knows how to wrestle. Part of him really LOVES a good fight! Play-fighting and horsing around is probably one of the best ways to get to know him.
He loves being around kids--being a big kid himself. Helping take care of his sister's daughter for a couple of years and just watching his family in general (lots of cousins and aunts and uncles) made him realize that he really wants to be a father himself. Becoming a vampire stomped that plan out and good (being undead means the party bus has left the station) but he still really yearns for a family--any kind of family. He happily takes on the role of big brother or cool uncle or anything else that makes him feel wanted and depended on. This isn't a wish he talks about too often though. He worries that something like that would come off as weird or creepy or 'not manly' enough thanks to his mother filling his head with all the things he SHOULD be liking at a young age. In fact, Maurice has a LOT of self-discovery to do now that he's out from under his mother's thumb (and an entire WORLD away). His sexuality and interests have been challenged nearly his whole life. It's time to try something new. Maybe. If he can shake the feeling that she'll somehow find out anyway.
5-10 Key Character Traits:-gullible
-humble
-addictive personality
-jolly
-irresponsible
-worrywart
-generous
-musical
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? CONFLICTS
Opt-Outs:
goblin, lich, shade, waldgeist, kelpie, vampire
+ minotaur
Roleplay Sample:THREAD- this thread is from a game that closed and turned INTO a musebox in the month of June. The post is both a TDM for the game and also acts as the game's event for the month. If a new sample is needed, let me know and I'll write a new piece!