magic_fratboy

Five Ordinary Things

- I love baseball.
- I'm Greek.
- I was born in Brooklyn, New York.
- I graduated from UCLA.
- I had my appendix out when I was a kid.

Five Things That Make Me Special

- I've lived three times total now.
- I can do real magic.
- I have the soul of a Titan god.
- I've been buried alive.
- The most incredible woman on the face of the planet is in love with me.

Tommy Karras
Original Character

Five things in your fridge.

1. boneless chicken breasts
2. leftover gyros from dinner tonight
3. frozen bagels for May (does the freezer count?)
4. celery
5. cannolis (we're still working through the building implosion...and Buried Alive 2)

Four songs on your iPod.

1. Them Bones - Alice In Chains
2. Highway to Hell - AC/DC
3. My Way - Frank Sinatra
4. Lie to Me - Control Freak

Three places you like to visit.

1. Los Angeles
2. Manhattan
3. Venice

Two books you’ve read.

1. Stranger In A Strange Land
2. Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero

One thing you’ll never admit aloud.

[locked]

I'm not afraid to die.

[/locked]

The last dream I had was a nightmare…a prophetic one.

The thing to understand about my power is that I don’t see the future, not outright. The past determines the future, it shapes who we are and what we do. Add free will to the mix, and you have this volatile swirling darkness you’re staring into. Nothing is certain, nothing lasts…but at the same time, everything is possible. Anything can happen. It’s very good, and it’s very bad. It’s an easy place for The Darkness to reach me, and it has on more than one occasion.

The other night I dreamed about something that’s going to happen. Those dreams are dark and start out very quiet. Shapes form in the black, and I have to go damn near cross-eyed to see them. It’s frustrating, and not always rewarding.

I saw a dark tunnel, felt a floor collapse beneath my feet. I heard a woman scream, and I could smell dust and blood. Then there was something that slammed into me so hard it knocked me loose, woke me up.

I’m scheduled to escape a building slated for demolition in mid-July…and I think the dream I had just might’ve been about my death.

I hope to God I’m wrong.

Just over a year ago, I would’ve told you, unequivocally, that I was just so much meat. I’m no pussy, never have been, but I wasn’t no hunter. I had no killer instinct, I wasn’t much of a fighter outside my kickboxing classes…I was just a guy. Nothing more.

I was a man, a simple one, too, and sometimes I mourn his passing.

When I became a predator, that man died. It’s horse shit what they say about power corrupting, it doesn’t taint anything but the mind. Power brings understanding, at least that’s what it brought me. Knowledge, comprehension…I know more than even avatars have a right to. It’s the knowing that killed the man I was, looking into the dark and hearing the voices of the men and women everywhere as they gave in to despair.

Battles, lives, worlds are won and lost on that one tiny choice. The Darkness knows that, it plays on the weakness of choice. My people play on the strength of it…and play we do. That’s how I became a hunter.

I learned to lie, cheat, and steal my way to salvation. I learned to kill for the greater good. I embraced my past lives and my true power to keep going when I thought the one thing I wanted in the world had left me for good.

I deceive with illusions. I lie to the soul just enough to make it wonder, make it question. From there, it seeks out more beauty and fills itself up until there’s no room for shadow. I cheat humans out of choice by forcing them to feel something beyond description, an emotion that hooks them like a drug. I steal victims from my enemy and set them free to live their lives and feed me power. Every dream, every desire, every wish I drink down so that I can give them more to wish for, more to dream, more to want.

I used to be human. I used to be prey.

Now, I’m an avatar. I’m a Titan. I’m a father, and soon to be a husband.

I’m a predator…and if you’re a human, pray when next I hunt, I come for you.

Don't think this needs much explanation, except for the fact that I'm a magician so I can cram a lotta crap into my pockets, so...

The obvious stuff is the dog biscuit and the pacifier. Dog and kid, got one of each...cards and coins are for magic, pencil and notebook is for sketching, and the stake's from Sassy. Still carry it everywhere I go, babe.

The book's all Bee's fault. She keeps insisting I read it, so...for you, babe.

I used to have one tattoo and a couple scars. When I was still asleep, still a human being, that was it…simple as my life used to be. I had handcuffs on my back, some piercings, a pale white patch on my right knee, and a surgical scar on my belly. Simple.

Then my life changed, and with it my body. Nothing’s the same now, and nothing is simple.

The scar on my knee was my first basketball injury, I skinned it when I was ten. The surgical scar was from my appendectomy when I was fourteen. Piercings were the usual teen rebellion and avant garde artist chic: three holes in each ear, one eyebrow, couple cartilage, navel and nose…think my nose has closed up since then, though.

The tattoo came in college, an art piece from one of my classes. I sketched a pair of handcuffs for a still life project, and later I found myself playing with it. I gave them a seven link chain, each one bearing a letter to spell the word “Houdini.”

I didn’t realize at the time that I was branding my future into my own skin.

The art and the scars have accumulated since then. To start I have the red spot on my palm, where I caught the bullet that should’ve killed me the night my powers awoke. My wrists and ankles are permanently red and pitted by cuffs and chains forged by The Darkness, scarred by evil itself. Got those when I was bound and tossed in the basement of a building slated for demolition…I almost didn’t make it out. Those scars got deeper after The Darkness switched my bonds at Buried Alive, leaving deeper gouges in my skin. I have a few scattered marks on my back where I didn’t fully heal from the SUV nail bed stunt, and I have a human bitemark on my shoulder that Zee left when we…uh…ya know. Our last time was pretty rough, but that’s the only lasting mark she’s ever left.

As for tattoos, I have my Fraternity brand: a pair of handcuffs tattooed on my left wrist done in black and white. The color’s solid and bright, it’ll never fade with time. Unlike most of my Brothers and Sisters, though, I have a second pair just above that…not as vibrant, but just as clear, a pair of single action cuffs from the turn of the century that appeared on my wrist after I regained my memories of Harry Houdini. They were his mark, and now they’re mine.

The newest tattoo’s on my left ring finger. Yeah, that’s intentional. It’s a black crown with a Latin inscription at the base reading nunc scio quit sit amor. “Now I know what love is.” It was my way of marrying a woman I thought was gone forever…my pledge of fidelity to the dead because I couldn’t give my heart to another woman. I couldn’t live in Hell when I’d already tasted Heaven.

It’s a lot of ink and a lot of pain for one man, but I’m not your average Joe. Now that I’m awake, now that I’m no longer human…I just learn to deal with it.

"If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't change a thing!"

That's a load of crap. There's always something you'd change about your past, if you could. List five of them.

1) I wouldn't have cheated on Bess. She deserved better than that.

2) I would've engineered the Mirror stunt better...left no clues, make sure it stood the test of time.

3) I would've at least tried to get into magic long before I knew about my heritage.

4) I would've done Buried Alive the first time around.

5) [locked] I would've asked Zee to marry me the second I found out she was pregnant. Maybe she'd have turned me down for trying to be noble or something, but at least I wouldn't be killing myself over it now.[/locked]

Tommy Karras
Original Character

Not exactly a fan, but Bee's into DANCING WITH THE STARS and showed me a clip from a couple seasons ago...one of the couples danced to this song, and it struck a chord.

I don't think I need to say that this goes out to Zee. I love you...and I'm waiting.

( KEEP HOLDING ON by Avril Lavigne )

Continuing in this morbid vein, list the five most likely ways your character will die. Be as serious, gory or humorous as you like. For bonus points, add the LEAST likely way your character will die.

- Hearing the voice of evil
- Seeing the face of evil
- Wounds from a weapon forged by evil
- Fatal wounds (shooting, stabbing, I'm a mortal avatar after all)
- Suicide...not mine, a human suicide. The act of taking one's own life is the death of hope. Physical proximity to a suicide can kill an avatar. I've been around some close calls, and it's made me pretty sick, so...

Least likely way I'm gonna die? Old age or natural causes. The avatar that gets that death is a lucky son of a bitch.

1) Play with my daughter. Seriously, she's a hoot and a half, especially with the animals around and they always are. We had a power outage a couple weeks ago? Barely noticed when the lights came back on, I was so caught up playing peek-a-boo.

2) Draw, sketching specifically. On a rainy day? I seriously draw the rain. I'm on this lifelong quest to achieve creative Nirvana and go one better than Frank Miller.

3) Clean...I mean, might as well, right? Plus I can put my basketball training to good use: I can sink a pair of dirty socks into the hallway laundry hamper from clear across my bedroom.

4) Mess around on my guitar. I don't actually play (except one song I learned by accident), but it helps me think. Some of my best ideas come from sitting around plucking at fucking nothing on my beat up old Strat.

5) Watch TV with my cats. Since I figured out I could sorta communicate with 'em? I discovered they love TV, and not those stupid animal DVD's they sell at PetSmart, either. Hardy loves LOST, and Kel likes anything on CARTOON NETWORK. We all love Adult Swim...go figure.