bang bang!

BASICS

ABOUT

PREFS

MONSTER

CODE CREDIT

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.

NOTABLE

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.

FASHION

He has quite an expensive taste and dresses well, if a little garishly. He has a Cartier watch, and also wears quite a lot of jewellery. Necklaces: a crucifix, a set of rosary beads, an Our Lady of Guadalupe pendant, and a plain silver chain. Rings: a plain gold signet ring on his right little finger, a St Michael the Archangel ring on his left index finger, and an ouroboros ring on his right ring finger. He also wears a gold hoop earring in his left ear.

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. Like, the most typical Long Island Italian guy you've ever met. You'd clock him as a guy with strong opinions on pizza from a mile away.

LINKS

Full app · Permissions · HMD?

TL;DR

The ultraviolent, self-absorbed eldest son of a New York mafia boss, made infinitely worse because he has reality-warping powers from a demon who repeatedly tells him he's the most important person of the universe. Committed fratricide out of pique, and used aforementioned reality-warping powers to erase his brother from everyone's memory so he could get away with it. Divorcé. Deadbeat dad. Most annoying person you've ever met.

ILLUSION GENERATION

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 pieces of paper. 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. (He can also make them feel good things, but it's harder because he's not used to that. Let him try it out on you!)

MEMORY MANIPULATION / ERASURE

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. 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. (I'd never ever have him use it without OOC permission and discussion, but if you want to play with this, hit me up.)

SELF DEFENCE

This is a really vague one since he's only just starting to figure it out, but 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.

appearance

His demon form is an 8' tall, thin, skeletal creature with hooved feet, long clawed fingers, large and thin pointed horns, and the tail of a scorpion. It appears to be formed from cracked black marble; the cracks glint faintly gold. It has wings, but cannot use them to fly – they're essentially decorative, made of inky black feathers. The demon has no visible facial features, but its mouth can open wide via an unhinging jaw to reveal thousands of black teeth in rings. Also, it makes Predator-style ticking noises when it's stalking you. (Visual)

behavior

The demon is a creature of impulse and rage, and will use whatever raw and brutal physical methods it can to attack its prey. It doesn't distinguish whatsoever between friend and foe, and will kill anyone that gets in its way. While in demon form, Angelo has no access to any of his powers, and relies entirely on the demon's brute strength.

Player Name: bobby
Pronouns: they/them
Are you over 18? yes
Contact: crowders
Current Characters: n/a
Triggers: footage of car accidents

Character Name: Angelo Salucci
Character Canon: Original
Character Age: 31
Canon Point: After the hotel fire
Link to History: Link
Skills: Angelo is very good at hand-to-hand combat; he has no formal training, but a lot of experience.
Abilities: Angelo is theoretically very, very powerful, bordering on overpowered. He has abilities nebulously grouped under the heading of 'reality warping', but obviously that's super vague; the vagueness accounts for the fact that Angelo really doesn't know the extent of his powers. In order to avoid the possibility of me manipulating this circumstance, I tend to nerf him in game settings and say that he can never develop further abilities beyond what he knows how to do now, which are as follows:

• Illusion generation: 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 pieces of paper. 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.
• Memory manipulation: 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. 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. (I'm happy to nerf this one if it's too OP, but otherwise I'd never ever have him use it without OOC permission and discussion.)
• 'Personal' reality warp: This is a really vague one since he's only just starting to figure it out, but 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.

Curse Mark: Diabel, on his right ring finger

FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES:

• FIRST EVENT: The death of Angelo's grandfather Raul was a uniquely formative moment for him. He was never particularly close with either of his parents, but Raul was extremely indulgent of his grandson, and although this was simply Raul's own response to having been a bad father to his own son, it only ever affected Angelo positively. Raul was the only adult in his early life who didn't ever seem to demand anything from him, and just wanted to treat him like a kid. When he died, so suddenly and violently, it irrevocably broke something in Angelo, and ever since then he's been terrified of abandonment. He clings hard to people who treat him well at the expense of their own freedom, because he believes that if he can control them and force them to stay close to him, he'll never run the risk of leaving them. But he also can't help but test their loyalty constantly, treating them with little regard for their own personhood just to see if their patience with him will run out.


• SECOND EVENT: cw: child abuse, both physical and emotional; abuse apologism. Angelo was not raised in a loving home. His mother was always critical bordering on cruel, picking apart his appearance, his choices, and his personality with complete detachment, while his father opted for more straightforward abuse tactics, constantly demeaning Angelo's intelligence, throwing slurs his way, and occasionally hitting him. Gio's preferred method of punishment was to smack Angelo across the face – he never beat him extensively, but would hit him in front of other people to rub shame in the wound. The most egregious example of this was the incident that left Angelo with the very visible scar on his face, when Gio backhanded him in the ruins of Pompeii, watched by hundreds of tourists. More than the pain, which was definitely excruciating since his father cut his cheek open with one of his rings, Angelo was cowed by the embarrassment of being watched as his father goaded him into crying. One of the tourists intervened, and Angelo, humiliated, lashed out at him rather than accepting his help. This is a distillation of how Angelo tends to see his father's abuse, brought about by years of rationalising it in his own mind: he doesn't want to have it acknowledged as something wrong, because it would force him to acknowledge the damage it's done to him, so he defends it, even to himself.


• THIRD EVENT: At the root of Angelo's self-assured vanity is his relationship with Alastor. At a vital moment in his life, as he turned twenty years old, Alastor became a central part of Angelo's lived experience. Needy for praise and attention, which he craves constantly, Angelo relies on Alastor for unquestioning support and reassurance. Having your ego constantly and uncritically stroked by a being of Alastor's power is extremely addictive, and Angelo has come to rely on him to buoy up the way he sees the world, and to protect himself from the worst of the realisations he might otherwise have about his place in his father's business and good graces. His relationship with Alastor provides him a constant stream of praise and positive attention: Alastor would never tell him he's done something wrong or reacted in a less-than-productive way to a situation; Alastor feeds Angelo's ego and his delusions, treats him indulgently, and refuses to let him think of himself as anything less than perfect. While it's a positive relationship, it's far from a healthy one, and it's given Angelo a lot of rope to hang himself with.


• FOURTH EVENT: Angelo's relationship with his brother, which now exists pretty much exclusively inside his own head, is foundational to the way he approaches the world. When he found out his father was considering passing him over and making Ludo his heir, his entire life crashed down around him: it was proof that he would never be able to do anything to make his father rate him, no matter what powers he was born with, no matter what a literal demon might tell him. Angelo has defined his whole life on the terms of what his father wants, and while finding out that he'd been passed over should have shattered that, he tried to protect himself without even realising he was doing it, by turning that existential crisis on Ludo. Their relationship as brothers was never going to be anything other than fractious, because they have almost nothing in common and live very different lives, but killing him prevented Angelo from ever really coming to terms with the fact that Ludo was being used by their father just as much as he was. Killing Ludo was a moment of finality for Angelo, an impulse he can never take back but has the potential to regret. Although he deliberately hasn't acknowledged any of this, it's always at the back of his mind somewhere, threatening to destabilize him, his worldview and his motivations entirely if he ever acknowledges the truth.

PHILOSOPHY: Generally speaking, Angelo is a relatively amoral person. He does what he wants to get what he needs, and has extreme difficulty empathizing with others, so he doesn't bother. It's difficult for him to care about other people on any level other than defining what it is they can offer him and how they can be useful to him, so that's how he tends to approach the world. Aside from that, Angelo's anger issues determine how he tends to interact with everyone, and easily colour the way he sees other people. He has a very thin temper, and will resort to anger and violence alarmingly quickly. Every negative emotion he experiences funnels into his anger, and he hits his breaking point far faster than most other people do. 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. He's prone to lashing out furiously when things don't go his way and will resort to base violence faster than most people. Trying to emulate the violence he was raised around to please his father has made him see violence as the first and sometimes only option, and certainly never the last resort.

Angelo's entire worldview is brought together by his belief that he deserves to be chosen by his father. It's a worldview that he protects with every fibre of his being, because if it's damaged and holes are poked, then his entire sense of self-worth comes crumbling down.

DESIRES: Angelo will do whatever he wants to get what he believes he deserves. His whole life so far has revolved around one day taking control of the family business, so that's what he wants – really, it's more wrapped up in wanting approval from his father than it is in actually getting to be in charge, but functionally it's the same thing. Outside of and far away from the business, though, Angelo's most potent desire is to be wanted, to be selected, to be the centre of someone's attention, to be someone's first choice. It's like a drug to him, to be wanted by someone that way, even if he doesn't necessarily want them back. He was addicted to being wanted by Valentino, who was kind to and well-liked by everyone: for Angelo to be the centre of his world, when he could have chosen anyone else, was intoxicating. Even without the allure of being his father's heir, Angelo still fundamentally operates out of a desire to be wanted and to be important to someone. While he's not exactly the friendliest guy in the world, there's a singular allure to him primarily because his attention is so rarely handed out to others, and Angelo's very aware of this: he knows exactly how flattering it is to be wanted by him, and he'll use that to manipulate other people if he needs to – but it also opens him up to being manipulated by people who can see this about him.

FEARS: More than anything, Angelo fears being abandoned by those he's come to rely on. He doesn't much like the company of other people, but for those he allows to get close to him, he has to be absolutely in control of this level of intimacy or his paranoia about losing it will run wild. It's partially why, for example, he left Valentino: he hated the idea that Valentino might leave him first. With Alastor, he's constantly testing him, pushing him away to make sure he'll come back, and binding Alastor to him was an extreme example of this, a way of ensuring that Alastor physically couldn't abandon him while knowing that it might well ruin their friendship on any other level – which it did. His desire to avoid abandonment paradoxically makes him difficult to care for: he doesn't want to be clingy, viewing any expression of devotion as weakness that he has to hide from others, so instead he tests others' loyalty to him with cruelty of his own. He needs to be in control of every relationship he's in, and if people push back against that he's likely to cut and run before they can.

SUITABILITY: Angelo's a fun character to bounce off people because he's deliberately unfazed by hostility but also in constant need of attention and indulgence, especially since his main support network, Alastor, isn't here. I'm excited by the challenge of trying to have Angelo form bonds when he's such an unapologetically toxic person, and the conflicts inherent in what he wants (attention, commitment, to be desired and wanted) conflicts with his immediate urge to treat people like shit just to see if they'll come back to him. In a setting where people are encouraged to indulge their worst habits, Angelo might actually thrive, especially surrounded by people who can help him achieve his worst self while ridding himself of his attachment to his father's approval, and throwing him into a complicated situation without the urge to fall back on the family business will force him to think outside the box. He's most likely to engage with the setting's monsters and how they reflect back on people's inherent characteristics.

SAMPLE: TDM toplevel

MONSTER: Angelo's monster is a straightforward demon, reflecting his inextricable links to the creatures through Alastor. His demon form is an 8' tall, thin, skeletal creature with hooved feet, long clawed fingers, large and thin pointed horns, and the tail of a scorpion. It appears to be formed from cracked black marble; the cracks glint faintly gold. It has wings, but cannot use them to fly – they're essentially decorative, made of inky black feathers. The demon has no visible facial features, but its mouth can open wide via an unhinging jaw to reveal thousands of black teeth in rings. The demon is a creature of impulse and rage, and will use whatever raw and brutal physical methods it can to attack its prey. It doesn't distinguish whatsoever between friend and foe, and will kill anyone that gets in its way. While in demon form, Angelo has no access to any of his powers, and relies entirely on the demon's brute strength. Also, just for funsies, it makes Predator-style ticking noises.