POLYMYTHOS: info.

[omertae]

Basics.

art by flurgburgler @ tumblr

Name Michelangelo "Angelo" Salucci
Age 31
Canon Original character
ScryWatch color Orange
PB Luca Marinelli
Content warnings Violence, murder, drug trafficking, torture, organised crime, parental abuse, abuse apologism

Player Bobby
Pronouns they/them
Contact Plurk

First impressions.

Visual Angelo's just a little above average height at 5'11". He's very reedy, with a narrow waist and wider shoulders, and muscles a little on the wiry side. He keeps his hair long-ish and usually swept back off his face like so, and is mostly clean-shaven except for a moustache, although sometimes he goes a few days without shaving.

Notable features He has a dark mole on the right side of his face, and a raised scar on his right cheekbone. For those who can tell this kind of thing about scars, it's quite obvious that it healed badly.

Aural Very strong Long Island accent. He's not afraid to shout, and he gesticulates a lot while he's talking, doing various things with his hands and fingers for emphasis.

Powers.

In game, Angelo can only use any of his powers for brief, short bursts before overtaxing himself and giving himself a blinding, instant migraine that will take him out of the zone immediately, as well as likely a nosebleed and intense dizziness. As he's most familiar with the first power detailed, he can last longer when performing that one, but not indefinitely. The first two powers will be opt-in, and a result of plotting OOC. As for the third power, that one will likely come up a lot more often in threads, but please rest assured that I don't intend to make Angelo invulnerable during fights! That is simply no fun.

Click the power descriptions for more info!

Illusion generation Creating realistic illusory experiences for another person

Angelo can make other people experience short, intense bursts of extremely complex illusion, for example, he can make someone believe they're covered in bugs or being slashed by a thousand tiny razorblades. These illusions cause a lot of mental distress and often physical pain in their targets, and though people mostly come out of it physically unscathed, there have been occasions where a mind has believed in the illusion so strongly that the body was physically injured in some way. This is Angelo's main strength when it comes to his powers, and for a long time it was the only thing he thought he was capable of doing with them. They don't necessarily have to be torture-related, but it's all he's done for so long that it's like exercising a muscle he didn't know he had to do anything with an illusion besides this.

Memory manipulation Altering, erasing and rewriting someone else's memories

Angelo can press into someone's memories, looking for something specific, and erase it. He's not very practiced at it, and he usually tends to go storming into someone's mind with very little care. He's pretty much exclusively used this to erase his brother from the memories of the people who knew him, although he also uses it to erase his own face from the memories of any men he has one night stands with. A memory that has been manipulated by Angelo is often very fuzzy and unclear and gives a general 'sense' of what he wants you to remember, rather than a crystal clear image of it. If he's removing a specific person or object from a memory, concentrating hard on the memory in your head, you might be able to notice a distinct blur where that person or object once was.

Self-defence Warping his own reality to protect himself from injury or discomfort

Angelo can use his powers to warp his own reality in order to defend himself from something. For example, he could light a candle and 'warp' the flame out of his reality, and hold his hand above the flame without burning himself. To anyone else watching, it would look as if he was impervious to the flame, but it's really just that the flame doesn't exist for him. He's also used this power to stop himself from choking to death on smoke from a fire, by warping the smoke out of his reality. It takes an awful lot of mental effort to keep this kind of thing up and he would never be able to make himself fully impervious to anything; it relies on mental fortitude and quick reactions, and any distraction would bring him out of it instantly.

Note For people who can sense non-humans in any way, Angelo would definitely show as such. He's not outright demonic in nature, but he is clearly connected to a demon in a way that would be tangible for characters who can tell that kind of thing. I'm happy for people to notice that he's not entirely human in the course of interacting with him!

Application.

Click here to read.

History.

In Angelo’s world, angels and demons are real and their influence on humans has been storied over the years. Some angels and demons will inadvertently ‘rub off’ their powers onto humans, either after a particularly strong interaction with one directly, or when a person or family has had a particularly longstanding relationship with an entity of some sort. Demons may try to persuade humans to make deals with them in exchange for the human’s soul, and there are ancient arcane rituals that brave humans can try, to bind a demon to them instead. In this case the demon is marked with a brand of some sort, and is magically compelled to do as the human commands. This is incredibly rare: a lot of humans don’t survive the process because mistakes are easy to make and absolutely lethal.

Angelo is the eldest (and currently only) son of Giovanni “Gio” Salucci, the don of the Salucci crime family, which has a reputation for violence and a history of inter-familial bloodshed. Their main criminal interests are racketeering, gambling, and distribution of illegal drugs and firearms, and their legit front is in restaurants and hotels. The Saluccis have been protected for over two hundred years by a demon named Alastor, who made a deal with one of Angelo’s ancestors to protect the bloodline.

Angelo is five years older than his brother Ludovico, of whom he's been intensely jealous since pretty much the day he was born. After Ludo was born, Angelo began to act out more, bullying his peers and developing an angry streak and a penchant for throwing tantrums that never really left him.

Thanks to Alastor, Angelo was imbued with reality-warping powers that first manifested just after he’d turned 9. The first thing he ever did with his powers was use them to slam another kid’s head into his desk, breaking his nose. Angelo's beloved grandfather Raul was assassinated around this time, and though it was Angelo's father who killed him, Angelo has believed for his whole life that it was rivals of the family.

Shortly after Raul’s death, Angelo told his father about his powers, who immediately began to have Angelo use them to psychologically torture enemies of the family. Angelo would never admit this because he’s never spent enough time considering it to even know, but this deeply traumatised him, and pushed him towards a life of violence as the only means of gaining his father’s praise and attention.

When Angelo was 14 he, his parents and his brother took a trip to Italy to see the village of Zungoli, where their family emigrated from. While there they took a detour to see Pompeii. Resentful of Ludo and sick of his whining, Angelo used his powers to terrify Ludo; his father, furious with him, slapped him across the face and cut his cheek with his ring in the process, leaving a scar that he refused to have treated properly.

Alastor formally introduced himself to Angelo on Angelo’s 20th birthday, and they immediately fell into an intense relationship that has lasted, on-and-off, ever since. Alastor has been the only source of uncritical praise in Angelo’s life, constantly reminding him how important and special he is at every turn; Alastor constantly makes excuses for, ignores, and even enables the worst parts of Angelo’s personality. Since the first time they met, Angelo would go through ‘phases’ with Alastor, where he’d be intently obsessed with him, and then recalcitrant and distant, but despite this Alastor remains Angelo’s most valued confidante and advisor, and really his only friend.

Angelo got married aged 22 to Victoria Perrone, a surgeon, who he’d only known for three months, against everyone's advice. They had a daughter together that Angelo doesn't believe he's the father of. About a month after they got married, they both agreed they were incompatible and decided to start seeing other people, but not to get divorced. This conviction lasted four years until Victoria filed for divorce.

Over the years, Angelo settled into his role as underboss of the family, with a reputation as his father’s attack dog, and a violent, sadistic thug who delights in hurting others and is not to be crossed. After Angelo beat the crap out of someone the Saluccis had taken in for questioning, almost killing him, Gio went to his consigliere with concerns about Angelo’s ability to lead the family considering his wafer-thin temper and inability to plan ahead, and eventually decided that he wanted to skip Angelo in the line of succession and name Ludo his successor.

After Gio told Ludo about this, Ludo immediately went to Angelo for advice. Angelo, furious at being passed over, snapped and killed Ludo, strangling him to death. Using a newer development of his powers, Angelo has been able to successfully avoid the repercussions from killing his brother by erasing Ludo from the memories of everyone who ever knew him. As far as anyone else is concerned, Ludo never existed at all.

Questionnaire.

What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed? Angelo's first priority in almost all matters is himself. Practically speaking, this makes him intensely selfish and myopic, determined to follow his own path and get what he feels he deserves. 'What he deserves' is, essentially, control of the family, handed to him by a father who respects and is proud of him. Though raised Catholic, and ostensibly with proof of God via Alastor, Angelo isn't all that spiritual, regarding religion as little more than a moral compass he doesn't really need. Other than himself, Angelo is stubbornly and almost blindly loyal to his father, allowing Gio to treat him the way he would never let anyone else treat him – Gio is an emotional and physical abuser, but Angelo has become so used to it that he can't see his father for what he is, and still desperately craves his respect and pride. Outwardly, Angelo expresses his loyalty by letting his brash, arrogant personality dwindle under Gio's gaze; he's much less aggressive with his father than with anyone else, and it takes very little from Gio to make Angelo capitulate and do what he says, because he always craves his approval. With others, loyalty comes very slowly, and needs to be in response to demonstrable loyalty from another person first – that being said, loyalty from someone else does not necessarily mean loyalty from Angelo in return.

What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take: best, worst, most likely? Realistically speaking, there's very little chance that Angelo will ever become a good person with a strong moral compass. He's been raised in an environment of intense violence, where everything he wants and needs is funnelled into that environment, and his moral code is highly skewed by both a life of crime and Alastor's demonic influence. However, this doesn't mean Angelo is incapable of feeling regret for the terrible things he's done, or that he can't learn to care about certain other people and feel empathy for their struggles. It's possible for Angelo to learn, grow and change in small increments, if he's given room to change slowly, by someone dedicated enough to stick around, and also someone who isn't afraid to knock him down a few pegs whenever he gets too big for his boots. A worst case scenario would see Angelo remain exactly as cold-blooded and cruel as he is. The most likely path depends on outside influences: if Angelo is left alone to fight against a world he truly believes is out to get him, then he'll stay just as he is; with patience from others, he's capable of at least expanding his loyalties, and seeing the truth of his father. That truth would also open him up to realising he targeted and killed his brother when the real cause of his problems was not Ludo at all, but his father.

How do they behave within a group? What roles do they take? Does this differ if they know and trust the group, versus finding themselves in a group of strangers? Why? The only person Angelo is remotely subservient to is his father, so in any other scenario he would prefer to be a leader, making decisions instead of following orders. He's not an especially good leader, considering how selfish and aggressive he is, but it's the position he prefers to take, because trusting someone else to make those decisions would make him intensely uncomfortable. He prefers to boss people around and make them do what he says, and would be extremely recalcitrant to follow orders if someone else were in charge.

What do they need and want out of relationships, and how do they go about getting it? Angelo both wants and needs constant, unwavering attention. It's the most important thing to him, that he's always the centre of attention, and he finds it extremely difficult to operate if he isn't. He doesn't really have friends, so most of his relationships outside familial ones are sexual in nature, and he prefers to be highly in control in those situations, refusing to let others tell him what to do. He's quick to throw tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants, or when he perceives that he's not getting what he wants, even if that isn't necessarily true. Attention is everything to him, obsession one step better. He absolutely has to be the most important person in any conversation, and will make it happen by any means possible. He's been quite lucky in the past that his relationships have mostly been with people who are happy to lavish him in attention and praise, especially Alastor.

How do they understand the world – what kind of worldview and thought processes do they have? Why? Angelo firmly believes that the whole world is set against him, but that he's driven by fate or some similar force to get what he 'deserves'. Everything is motivated by a desire to attain power and control at any cost, and everyone else is either an ally or an impediment to that. Allies, though, are easily disposable: he often doesn't think of people as people, but rather as tools to get what he wants. A lethal combination of Alastor’s zealous insistence on his unique specialness and Gio’s disparaging relationship with him has left Angelo in a fragile state where he is deeply convinced of his own importance, but unable to see that conviction mirrored in the person he wants to see it the most. He has an absolutely colossal outward-facing ego which masks and protects his true ego, which is about the size of a peanut and in need of constant buffing.

How much do they rely on their minds and intellect, versus other approaches like relying on instinct, intuition, faith and spirituality, or emotions? Instinct and emotion is what drives Angelo, moreso than intellect. He has a very thin, easily breakable temper, and will resort to anger and violence alarmingly quickly. Every negative emotion he experiences (jealousy, stress, fear, sadness, etc.) funnels into his anger, and he hits his breaking point far faster than most other people do. But he has more experience than people assume with controlling his anger, by using it: he can get himself through something that would buckle other people on anger alone, and come out the other side stronger for it. Anger is a tool for him and something that sees him through the worst parts of his life, even if it makes him act impulsively, often cruelly, and always with his own best interests in mind above anyone else’s. Anger is the first thing he draws upon in all situations, and it's how he makes decisions.

What is something others might find intolerable about them? Honestly, most things about Angelo are intolerable. He’s prone to lashing out furiously and will resort to base violence faster than most people; he has a habit of smashing plates and glasses and tearing up rooms when he’s angry, and has little impulse control when it comes to destruction of property or people. Being raised in such close proximity to violence and trying to emulate that to please his father has made him see violence as the first option and sometimes the only one, and certainly never the last resort. At his absolute worst, Angelo is an arrogant, impulsive, cruel, sociopathic bully. All that being said: Angelo is under no illusions about these parts of himself. He’s hurt people and derived not even just joy but outright pleasure from the experience. He enjoys hurting people, physically or mentally – it makes him feel strong, and a lot of the time whenever he’s been slighted for some reason, he will purposefully find someone to hurt or mentally terrorise with his power, in order to make himself feel better.