Walker
Basics
Name: Walker "Texas Ranger" Willis (He is secretly Chuck Norris.)
Age/Birthdate/Zodiac: 26; February 6, 1982; Aquarius
Occupation: Works in Paris' gym... though “work” is subjective.
Usual Hang Outs: Downtown, coffee shops, book stores, movie theaters, live shows by local bands, and eventually, the Fortress.
Skills: Harmonica, almost dying (especially where peanuts are involved), ignoring nearly everything around him.
Hobbies: Reading (comic books, non-fiction, stuff on the occult, and conspiracy theories), wandering around the city in search of new places to check out, having turbulent romances.
Likes: Smoking, drinking, coffee, smoking while drinking coffee (he is kind of a chain-smoker and caffeine addict), new and exciting people, non-standard-American cuisine, indie music/films/comics.
Dislikes: Peanuts, non-smoking signs, psychiatrists, the Establishment/the Man/the gubmint/etc., organized religion.
Timeline
-February 6 1982: Born to Imani and Frank Willis (Imani is half black and half white and Frank is half white and half hispanic)
-Summer 1999: Maternal grandfather, Zeke (Ezekiel) Jones, dies of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 92.
-Autumn 1999: While digging through his grandfather's things, Walker finds an antique harmonica and takes it as a memento. From that point on, he carries it around with him wherever he goes.
-Spring 2000: While climbing aboard a bus on his way to work, Walker gets a strange feeling from the bus driver, but doesn't really know how to explain it. He shrugs it off as just having a bad day. His bad feeling, though, turns out to be a kind of omen when the bus crashes. Dazed and only half-aware, Walker nonetheless notices something out of place slithering away from the corpse of the bus driver, and thoroughly freaks out.
-Summer 2000: Having seen more and more of these "monsters", Walker's parents become worried and send him to a psychiatrist, who diagnoses him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and hallucinations. The 'hallucinations' eventually become 'coping mechanisms', and he is treated with antidepressants. They do nothing for him, so he stops taking them and, instead, begins to assume that everything he sees is just because he's "crazy". (Note: Walker is not actually crazy, but he begins to believe he is. Therefore, any references to certain things being "things that crazy people do" or what-have-you are entirely in his own mind, and he uses his "craziness" as a crutch and as justification for many of his actions. Thanks to Angie for pointing out the need for me to elaborate on this issue!)
-2002 to 2005: Walker no longer trusts or believes much of what he sees, and mainly gets through life without taking in anything around him.
-2005: Walker's cousin, Paris, opens a gym and, due to a weird sort of magnetism, needs someone else to man the computers. Walker's mom begs for him to hire Walker, so he does.
-2005 to 2007: See "2002 to 2005", only now he has a job.
This Year (2008): Walker has spent this year so far much like the past six: ignoring everything that isn't "normal" and trying not to think about the fact that more and more "abnormal" things have been happening lately.
Big Deals
Appearance
Hair: Dark brown and shaggy, hanging over his eyes a little and curling around his ears and at the back of his neck.
Eyes: Medium brown and oval shaped with dark lashes and low-set, thick eyebrows.
Skin: Caramel-toned and moderately sun-kissed. He comes from a mixed heritage: part black, part Hispanic and part white.
Face: Walker's face is long and lean, like the rest of him. He generally looks bored and unenthused, but is capable of other expressions when motivated. He keeps his facial hair trimmed and looking decent, but he's too lazy to shave it off entirely.
Build: Standing at 6'2, Walker is not an unremarkable man. He has a bit of a hunch (who doesn't?) but he still stands out in a crowd. His limbs and torso are somewhat on the long side, though not abnormally so, and he has decent muscle tone from doing a lot of walking and bike riding.
Attire: Mostly button-up shirts (halfway or completely unbuttoned with a tee-shirt underneath) with casual pants (jeans or khakis). Sometimes he wears long-sleeved shirts under short-sleeved ones. Occasionally he'll get a little dressed up in a jacket and slacks, but that's only really for special occasions. He doesn't care too much about his clothes, as long as they're clean and he looks fairly presentable. He also wears a man-purse because he has things he must carry around, like his epi-pen (he is deathly allergic to peanuts and regular-allergic to many other things) and his Magic Harmonica (see: Relic).
< Walker looking like his usual doofy self.
Personality
Virtues: Generous, friendly, good-natured, funny, tolerant, easy-going.
Neutrals: Laid-back, unassuming, short attention span.
Vices: Fickle, frivolous, irresponsible, reckless, unambitious, willfully ignorant.
Blurb
Walker was a completely normal kid and even a fairly normal teenager. He was just a regular, laid-back kind of guy. But when his grandfather died, a chain of events sent him flying off-course and he hasn't been able to return to stable ground since.
Nowadays, Walker lives his life ignoring most of what goes on around him. Since his half-awakening when he was 18, he has been able to sense the presence of evil and can even sometimes see it, but for reasons best left to the Audition section, he considers these to be hallucinations. Since he disbelieves much of what he, himself, can sense, it has become difficult for him to function properly in the real world.
Not possessing much self-confidence (being a self-diagnosed crazy person and all), Walker doesn't really think much about the future. He lives from paycheck to paycheck and spends his money and his time frivolously. He buys things on a whim, and spends much of his off-time wandering around the city, trying to find somewhere new to frequent. He has no goals in life ('cause he's crazy... crazy people don't go anywhere, you know) and even if he did, he'd have no motivation to reach them. He barely made it through high school and has been doing not much of anything since. The only reason he has a job at all is because his cousin hooked him up with one, at the behest of his frustrated and desperate mother. (He still lives with her. What a bum.)
In ordinary situations, when he's not "seeing things", Walker can be a pretty fun guy. He comes off as a happy-go-lucky, uncomplicated man, though he has a strange sense of humor and can sometimes make people uncomfortable with it. He treats people well, he doesn't play favorites, and he is fairly accepting, believing that people should be allowed to express themselves however they want. Even so, Walker doesn't have many truly close friends. He is attracted to the New and Exciting, and has been known to abandon people who don't keep his interest.
This is most pronounced in his romantic life, where it isn't uncommon for him to agree to date someone just because that person showed interest, and to tire of the person after a few weeks and just stop calling. Yeah, he's one of those. He is as frivolous with people's feelings as he is with his money or his time, and he doesn't really see any problem with it. He doesn't know why people would get so attached to him in the first place, and tends to brush off their feelings as just being angry they got dumped rather than having had any actual affection for him.
He'll date men or women - crazies can't be picky, after all. He's not a particularly romantic guy, but he can be sweet when he's still interested. Unfortunately for his partners, it's difficult to keep his interest. He has a short attention span and he sort of expects his partners to keep him occupied and amused. And if he starts to like someone who hasn't yet shown interest, he won't tell the person. Aside from not being confident, he also doesn't want to deal with the guilt of dumping someone with whom he initiated the chase. It's much easier to blame the other person when they started it.
Friends are far more likely to stay friends if they don't ever develop feelings for Walker (or at least, don't let him know about them). Generally speaking, once someone says they like him, the relationship is pretty much done. He very rarely turns anyone down, and he very rarely stays interested in them once they're not "new" or "novel" anymore. There have been a few exceptions - people who could somehow keep him interested, but in a sad twist of fate, they usually got bored of him instead.
He has also developed a nasty habit of just ignoring things that he doesn't want to acknowledge, which can make talking to him in a serious manner a rather daunting task. It came about from having to ignore the crazy things he was seeing around him, but over the years it has become a handy way for him to brush off unwanted situations. A jilted lover might accuse him of saying something insensitive, to which he would reply that he never said it, or possibly even that he was never her lover to begin with. He's been doing this for so long that he actually forgets many of the bad things that happen to him, so his excuses aren't always actually lies anymore.
All things considered, Walker is a good guy to be friends (or casual drinking buddies) with. He's generally easy to talk to and get along with. In any other sense, though - romantic, professional, etc. - he's a complete dud, with no ambition, no confidence, and no real concern for what happens to him.
The Other Side
Elemental Control: Air: Nitrogen
Type of Hunter: Alchemist
Abilities: Walker is able to manifest a very small amount of Nitrogen directly from his body. His palms are able to produce the most, but really, he could use his elbow or toe if it was really necessary. Luckily for him, he very often doesn’t need to manifest his element at all, since it makes up a good 70% of the atmosphere. Most of the nitrogen he needs comes directly from the air around him.
Being an alchemist, Walker’s ability to manipulate his element is more pronounced than his ability to manifest it. He can separate nitrogen from the air around him and move large quantities of it. He can condense it in his palms and slow its molecular movement - which he does when he first realizes his abilities - so that it forms small pools of liquid nitrogen. His ability starts off clumsy and unrefined, but with practice he is able to concentrate on smaller and more delicate tasks, like forming nitrogen bubbles in a person’s blood stream, for example.
Cryogenesis: The first time Walker does this, it is quite literally by accident. It won’t be till later that he’ll be able to consciously do it, but it might happen again in a dire situation. Walker pools nitrogen molecules, slowing their atomic movement and condensing them into liquid nitrogen in his palms. With practice, he will be able to manipulate nitrogen like this at a distance up to about 50 feet. The liquid nitrogen freezes anything organic and can cause frostbite on living tissue. He can manifest enough liquid nitrogen to completely freeze a mouse, but will only cause surface burns on anything bigger. Luckily, Seedlings on their own don’t get very big.
The Bends: As described above, once Walker manages to manipulate smaller amounts of nitrogen with more precision, he can form nitrogen bubbles in a living thing’s bloodstream. The result is The Bends, and requires a pressure tank to prevent explody messes. Unless Walker is in a mood to undo it. Curing The Bends is the only helpful skill he has when it comes to aiding his allies.
Daemon Tracking: Thanks to Walker’s grandfather’s harmonica (which is a ranger relic), Walker is able to pick up on nearby Daemon activity. His range isn’t very large because he has little innate tracking ability, but he can tell if daemons are nearby (within a mile, mile-and-a-half) and can give a general direction.
Finding Hunters: Walker is completely and totally useless in this arena, even less so than the standard alchemist generally is. While his harmonica allows him greater range and detail of daemon tracking, he’s lucky to get the barest hint of an idea of who might be a Hunter. If he’s standing right next to one, he might know there was a Hunter around him, somewhere, but not be able to pinpoint who it was. Perhaps it has something to do with the harmonica.
Laying Wards and Seals: As an alchemist, Walker can lay anti-wards rather than wards. This comes in handy only when there’s a buttload of Hunters around to take the Angry Daemon Aggro from whatever is lured by his anti-ward, because there’s no way he could deal with it on his own.
As for seals, Walker can’t set them, but he can certainly break them. Actually, for an alchemist, he’s more likely to poison a seal and its inhabitants than outright open it, but as he practices he gets more adept at doing whatever it is he wants to do with it. It might be a while before he knows any of this, though.
Relic: He has a Magic Harmonica from his late grandfather that he carries with him everywhere he goes. He doesn't know that it's a relic, and doesn't realize that it has any particular powers at all, but it actually works to increase his awareness of the daemons around him. It also has an added bonus of attracting said seedlings to him. Yay, fun!
Band: Unofficially, Fortress.
Audition
It had been three days since the funeral. Walker had never been particularly close to Grandpa Zeke, but not by his own choosing. The old man had been suffering from dementia for the last decade of his life, and Walker's parents had done their best to shield him from the insane ramblings of an otherwise fascinating man. He guessed they must have thought he'd catch the crazy if he listened to too much of it. Now that the old guy was six feet under, all that Walker had of him were a handful of memories. Grandpa Zeke had thought he was some kind of super hero, protecting the world from evil - and that Walker could be one, too. He had always wanted to hear the rest of that story, but every time Zeke started to tell it, it was cut short. The interruptions would visibly agitate the old guy, who would then break out his harmonica and play a tune to calm himself down.
Today Walker was with his parents at his grandfather's house, going through the old man's things, separating and packing up what would be kept and what would be discarded. Grandpa Zeke's old harmonica was sitting on the shelf above his favorite rocking chair. It would be a perfect memento, and surely nobody would miss it. Walker grabbed it and stuffed it in his back pocket along with a pack of playing cards and and old Navy telescope.
THE NEXT SPRING
Weird things had been happening since Grandpa died. Odd feelings would stir up in Walker from time to time, like a sense of dread or impending danger. It had him looking over his shoulder wherever he went, and his parents were starting to worry. Today was no exception. As a bus pulled up at its normal spot, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled and stood on end. Against his better judgment, he climbed aboard, and the prickles turned into full-on goosebumps when he made eye contact with the driver. It felt like there was something wrong with the guy, but it wasn't something Walker could put his finger on. Something strange in his eyes, or maybe the way the man was sitting. He still wasn't used to this "spidey-sense", and had no idea what it was trying to tell him, so he shuffled along to a seat toward the middle of the bus and tried to put the eerie feeling out of his mind.
The bus took off with a lurch. It sped up and, for a few blocks, everything was fine. Then the driver passed right by a stop full of people. He actually sped up. Walker held onto the bar on the seat in front of him in a white-knuckled grip; he didn't know why, but he was terrified. When the bus started to swerve, he broke out in a sweat. A few of the other passengers were yelling at the driver, telling him to slow down. Walker could only sit in a state of confused panic. Then he was knocked forward, bashing his head into the bar in front of him. The noise of squealing, crushing metal only registered as an afterthought.
In a daze, he checked around him to see if anyone was hurt. It seemed the passengers were fine, if a bit dazed. His head throbbed, and he wondered dimly if he was some kind of psychic, to have sensed this kind of thing in advance.
"Everyone alright," he asked, his voice shaky from shock. A few people mumbled their acknowledgement and some others nodded. From the front of the bus, someone gasped.
"The bus driver! I think he's..." her voice wavered and trailed off.
Walker sprinted up on unsteady legs, holding onto whatever walls or poles were available for support. The driver was hunched over in his seat, his head resting against the giant steering wheel. Though dreading the physical contact, Walker hesitantly reached out to take the man's pulse. Even with the guy passed out like this, there was still something wrong with him, and Walker felt his skin crawl as he pressed his fingers to the man's neck. He couldn't feel anything. Was the guy really dead?
Just as he was about to tell someone to call an ambulance, Walker saw something that made his skin crawl even more. A line of tarry black, viscous -something- was dripping from the bus driver's nostril. To anyone else it might have looked like blood, but Walker could tell it was something else. The very sight of it made him feel ill, and no nose bleed had ever done that before. It -felt- terrible, like it had an aura of putrescence around it. Walker could only back up in horror, clinging to the bus wall so he wouldn't lose his footing completely. His legs were shaking, as much from fear as from the impact earlier. The stuff continued to drip slowly, along the curves of the steering wheel and pooling on the floor. It didn't splatter like blood would; rather, it formed a congealed blob which writhed and wriggled like something alive.
Near hyperventillation, Walker scrambled backward as fast as he could, trying to put as much distance between himself and the -thing- forming on the floor of the bus as was possible. He couldn't believe it, but everyone else was still gathered around the driver, completely oblivious to what was taking shape at their feet.
"M-m-m-monster," he stammered, but nobody paid him any mind. One was on a cellphone, calling an ambulance, another was checking the driver's pulse again. Amidst the noise and commotion, only Walker saw the black thing slither between everyone's feet and ooze out under the crack in the door.
After that, he promptly fainted.
A MONTH LATER
"I'm telling you, I know what I saw," Walker insisted.
The psychiatrist nodded, trying to be reassuring. "Considering your initial head trauma, it's not implausible that you suffered a hallucination. Now, with your post-traumatic stress symptoms, it's also understandable that you'd see these 'monsters' again whenever a flashback is triggered."
"They're not flashbacks, and I didn't hallucinate anything! Why would one show up at work? There's no cars around! I'm not gonna get in a freaking bus accident at work!"
"I think we should examine what your triggers could be. Sometimes seemingly unrelated events can trigger flashbacks. Maybe there was something at work that reminded you..."
"Ugh, no," Walker sighed, rolling his eyes. This was impossible. He'd been seeing this psychiatrist for the last two weeks, after he'd started seeing or, even worse, -feeling- those things all over the place. "Fine, whatever. They're all hallucinations. What now?" He was done fighting her on it; the only thing that'd do was land him in the psych ward.
"Well, we can go a number of ways. My suggestion is therapy and anti-anxiety medication. We can uncover your triggers and help you learn how to avoid them, and the medication can reduce the emotional impact of flashbacks."
"Whatever." If the medication would help him to stop sensing those... whatever they were, he'd try it. Hallucination or not, they were incredibly creepy. "Fine, let's do that."
A YEAR LATER
After six months of therapy and medication, things had become worse rather than better. Walker would sense a monster at least once a week, though he didn't always see them or know where they were. He could just feel them, their disgusting aura emanating from somewhere in his general vicinity. He'd long ago stopped taking his meds and started to pretend he was "all better" so the psychiatrists and his parents would stay off his case. They knew he could still sense the monsters, and he knew they knew it, but for the sake of a normal, everyday existence, everyone pretended everything was fine.
Walker pretended not to notice the monsters, and his parents pretended not to notice his shoulders hunching, his complexion going pale, and his expression turning dark whenever one was around.
At night sometimes his parents whispered about him. They thought he got what Grandpa Zeke had. He was starting to think so, too. Nobody believed him, medicine did nothing for him; the only option was that he was totally, completely, incurably insane. The best he could do was try to live with it until he went so nuts they had to lock him away. For now, he could just ignore the monsters. They didn't seem to attack him. Sometimes they attacked things near him, but he was never personally harmed. The few times a fellow human was attacked, like with the bus driver, it was often entirely too late before he figured out someone was possessed.
He also figured out that he was not, in fact, psychic. That would have been preferable to whatever he was - schizo, or whatever. He even entertained the thought that he might be the one causing all these "accidents" and blaming them on the monsters as a way of justifying his own deeds. But since most of the time the incidents happened in broad daylight, with plenty of witnesses, and he hadn't been arrested for anything yet, he decided that must not be the case.
Well, at least he could be sure that there were people out there who had it worse than him. Like people who weren't smart enough to shut up about The Crazy, and ended up locked up for life. At least he wasn't one of them, though he thought maybe he should be.