[ryan's gulch] you can't be me, i'm a rockstar

[neovampire]

☞ Player Information;
Name: Phoenix
Player Journal: birdburning
Age: 21
Contact: birdburning on Plurk and AIM
Other characters currently played at Ryan's Gulch: Alex Summers | XMFC OU | plasmatic

☞ Character Information;
Character Name: Hannibal King
Canon: Blade Trinity
OU or AU?: OU
Canon point: YAY ALL THE VAMPIRES ARE DEAD

Setting: Blade Trinity takes place in a world much like our own, in some country where Esperanto is spoken to create a sense of vague out of worldliness, which will be highly unlikely to come up because Hannibal barely speaks a word of it.

There are also vampires, who (as vampires do) run a shadowy conspiracy behind humanity to control and feed from the species in secret and comfort. Vampires of Hannibal's world are vulnerable to silver, garlic, strong UV light, fire, and general dismemberment--crosses, holy water, and various superstitions do nothing. Hannibal himself is a cured vampire turned slayer, a member of an organization called the Nightstalkers (really) who exist to help Blade, the numero uno Daywalker vampire slaying badass.

History:

Until he was in his mid-twenties, Hannibal King was pretty much just another mouthy, aggressive, troubled guy. He had a taste for dangerous women and a probable history of doing stupid shit, but he wasn't remarkable, nor clued into the true nature of his world.

That changed when he met Danica Talos. Danica, as it happened, was a vampire--and Danica also had issues up the neck with arrogant, sassy, upstart men. She turned Hannibal and humiliating tattooed him on his lower stomach above his groin to denote exactly what kind of status he had. Vampires usually have their tattoos on their wrists to allow them to access vampire tech, but Hannibal was obviously shut out of that. He wasn't a fledging or a future equal. He was a toy, something for Danica to work out her frustrations (emotional, physical, sexual) on.

This went on for five very horrible years.

It only changed when a young woman named Abigail Whistler, as part of her hunter training, came to a bar Hannibal was in to prove herself by...killing every vampire there. She did that admirably, except for Hannibal, who eventually broke down and begged her to kill him. It was the only way he knew out of what he'd become, and he just didn't want to do it anymore.

Instead, Abby got him the cure. She sponsored him into the Nightstalkers as a hunter in his own right, essentially made him her right hand man, and they merrily slaughtered their way through the night until rumours of the return of the Big Bad Granddaddy of all vampires resurfacing came up. Couple that with the death of Abby's father and the development of the Daystar virus (a virus designed to wipe out all vampires forever), and the stage was set for Blade to enter the picture.

The rest, as they say, is history.

(Theatrical ending. The others are very silly.)

Personality:

Hannibal King. How do you describe Hannibal King?

The most obnoxious motherfucker it will ever be your displeasure to meet, according to most vampires. To his friends, it's...pretty much the same, except said with more fond resignation than loathing. It's utterly true either way: Hannibal is 6'2" and 190 lbs of motor-mouthed, hyperactive, disrespectful nonsense. He is almost literally incapable of watching what he says--a theory that's hard to test, because he doesn't care what he says, or if people happen to be offended by it. He's the class clown on steroids, in essence, attention seeking and provocative to the point of inducing thoughts of murder in saints.

Underneath this irreverent, light-hearted exterior, Hannibal runs on a volatile mixture of rage, self-loathing, and trauma. Five years as a "vampire cabana boy" would give anyone problems--make that vampire Danica Talos, make the cabana boy a man who is constitutionally incapable of shutting up and doing what he's told, add a heavy pinch of torture, and you get Hannibal. Terrible things happened to him, he did terrible things to other people, and an already not all that well-adjusted person came out fundamentally broken.

See, Hannibal is great at killing vampires. He loves it. Nothing makes him happier. And that's all he does. There's no suggestion Hannibal has a life or interests outside of the Nightstalkers. All vampire hunters are isolated, but Hannibal's five years as dead to human society and inducted into the vampire world distanced him even more. Not too long ago people were food, and now he doesn't know what to do with them. Vulgar quips and shop talk do not a functioning social creature make. He's devoted to his fucked up little Nightstalker family, especially Abby and Zoe, but there's no mention of him being in touch with, say, his own family from pre-vampire escapades. His life is the job, because Hannibal is out for revenge.

It's pretty easy to be a single target person. But Hannibal's question to Blade about what he'll do after the vampires are out of the picture is clearly one Hannibal is also asking himself, with a similar lack of answer. Reintegrating back into society is a laughable prospect--what is someone like him supposed to do after years of killing and hunting? He's murdered people. Actual living, uninfected human beings, and he's eaten them. Danica put him through kinds of hell most people don't even dream about. Hannibal has, essentially, all the problems of a rescued POW and veteran without any therapy or introspection. He is not a happy camper.

But all in all, he thrives in crisis situations. Ryan's Gulch is one of those, especially when things will start going to hell--ironically, the worse the city gets the better Hannibal will function.

See, Hannibal's big problem, the reason he never cut it as a vampire, is that he cares too much. Maybe not about people's feelings or their tender sensibilities, but about them? Yeah. His loyalty, when won, is impossible to shake, and he fights best when he has something to protect. The idea of being forced to hurt Zoe is the only thing in the film that shut him up, clearly devastating him even as only a threat. He fights close to Abby not because he isn't perfectly aware she kicks ass, but because she saved him, and he cares about the stubborn little hellion. Hannibal is a good guy. Not a nice guy, by any means, but essentially a good guy.

This will never and should never prevent most people from wanting to punch his stupid face off. Hannibal is fine with that. Under his swagger and bullshit he's actually quite insecure, funnily enough; he looks to a woman at least a decade his junior for emotional guidance and leadership, clearly considering her more capable than he is, and he reacts to Blade petulantly when Blade dismisses them and all their efforts. He clearly thinks little of himself, so he's never surprised when other people do too. He's a good guy, but he doesn't think that of himself. All Hannibal sees is the obnoxious son of a bitch veneer over those five years of hell and monstrosity, where his only real fear, worse than death, resides: Hannibal does not ever want to go back to that. Can't go back to that. He knows he's not strong enough to resist the hunger if it happens, and in a place like Rapture with no cure the threat of vampirism towards himself or, God forbid, someone he cares about--that's one of the only things that will ever make Hannibal be serious. Serious here means that he methodically kills every conceivable threat in hideous ways, so that would be bad for whoever was stupid enough to pull it.

Still, though. For the vast majority of people, for now and always, Hannibal is just that obnoxious fucking guy, and that's exactly how he likes it.

Abilities:

Hannibal is a highly trained vampire slayer, with much hand-to-hand and firearms training. He can somewhat keep up with Abigail Whistler and Blade, although respectively they outdo him in 'not dumbassery' and 'being a hybrid'. Still, in any fight with your average superhuman along the lines of a vampire Hannibal has a much better chance than most people, and he can wipe the floor with the majority of baseline human opponents. He's really good at fighting, but that's...basically all he's good at, is the downside. Hannibal is easily distracted, bleeds as well as any other human, and does not like being stabbed/shot/burned/maimed in any way.

Additionally, he has a few...side effects left over from his time as a vampire. He's a little stronger, a little faster, a little tougher. It's not actually appreciable most of the time, but Hannibal is aware of it, and wavers between seeing it as a useful asset and being incredibly sickened by the idea some of them is still in him. So that's fun.

How did your character arrive in Rapture? Teleported DX he is furious.

Why are you choosing to continue your character's development here from another RP? This question is only applicable if you are porting your character's previous CR and experiences from another game. If this is not the case, please feel free to omit this field.

Network sample:

[Oh look, Rapture. Some of you might already know this asshole. The rest of you are, tragically, about to.]

Hello fellow Sea Monkeys!

Now, I know you're all probably busy mutating yourself, wearing fedoras, and being adorable little citizens of a libertarian wet dream, but I actually have a question! I hope you'll take the time to answer it, since there may or may not be cookies in for you. I bet you all love cookies. Cookies are fucking amazing, of course you do, Jesus. Wait. Am I allowed to say Jesus? I can't keep up.

Right, so that's my first question, then.

Second question, the one I came to ask, is why the fuck are we okay with vampires here, suddenly? Really? They eat people. They also--no, no, I'm going to just keep it simple. They. Eat people. Most of you? Are people. I really just can't grasp this. Are you suicidal? Do you think they're sipping tomato juice? Have you been compromised?

Third question: which of you are the vampires? I'd like some volunteers to meet me in a nice neutral location so I can kill you. Come on, don't be shy, put the fragile human in his place. If you don't, you're chicken. Chiiiicken.

[Yes, Hannibal thinks some of you are actually that dumb.]

Log sample:

With Hannibal, it's usually better not to ask.

That's just a general rule. Asking why or how he does or has done anything is asking for either a frustratingly irreverent answer or something so utterly fucked up you avoid him for days past it, although living with the Nightstalkers--well, he learned to go with the former the vast majority of the time. These days it's only occasionally he'll casually drop in and then she disembowelled the priest. Happy memories like that.

So nobody has asked where or how he acquired something like a bouncy ball, and it's for the best, really. It smacks off the wall repetitively as he sits on the floor and counts catches. He's up in the mid-five hundreds when he finally stops, flexing his sore hand and rolling his stiff shoulders. He's not as young as he used to be, and hunting is hell on the body.

Physically he's maybe twenty-seven. Chronologically he's nearly a decade older. He's not aging right. There is something fundamentally fucked about his biological clock he does not want to think about, because a cure is supposed to mean done. Over. But then there's this, or the way he swears to fucking merciless God he can still smell blood sometimes, and the fucking tattoo he has to see every time he takes a piss.

You can't even kill the vampires here.

Ryan talks some line of bullshit about autonomy and freedom of choice, yeah, whatever, Hannibal isn't listening to that. He'd dust them anyway. But they don't stay down. It's like the worst game of Whack-A-Mole ever conceived by Satan in the fiery pits of assfucking hell using Tabasco as lube--he puts them down and they come back up, and Hannibal will keep killing them anyway because--

He can't stop.

There's no way to tell Abby that. She's hurt, yeah. She misses the boat and everyone as much as he does. More, probably. She's just a kid, underneath everything. Smarter than he is by far, but a kid. And maybe there was some part of him that thought--hey, you know, after this? Abby could do something else. Abby could be somebody else, somebody with a life and a future. When they had Daystar and the team he still thought that. The rest of them would go back to real life and Hannibal would just...fade out like a TV losing signal. He never really planned that far.

But Drake, fucking Drake, killed everyone (on your watch, the faithful little hiss of self-hatred says, on your watch, King, you were supposed to be on watch, if you ever go home you have to sit Zoe down and go 'hey, sweetheart, your mommy is dead because I fucked up, you'll never hear her finish that story and nothing is ever going to make it better but I really needed my sleep') and now Hannibal looks at Abby and doesn't know if that can happen for her anymore. Blade told her to use it, she said. Hannibal wants her to let it fuck her up. Let it make her cry again. Rip it open so it can heal. But none of that can happen as long as the fucking vampires keep coming back.

So he'll keep killing them until they don't.

It's not a stellar plan. But he doesn't have much to go on. He switches to his left hand and starts up again. If there's anything he's good at, it's making the same mistakes over, and over, and over. They say it's the definition of insanity. He's never told anybody he was all that sane.