when i went dancing with the devil,

Name: Max Kiesler
Door: Door Pass - Sub

Canon: Original
Canon Point: Post Marco's return from Hellcation

Age: 26
Appearance: PB: Max Riemelt

History: Setting + History
Personality:

▸ PERSEVERING/RELENTLESS; What largely defines Max is the concept that 'we do what we must to survive, and spend the rest of our time trying to live with that'. He's emotionally and psychologically damaged from years he'd spent with the compound, both by the things done to him and the things he'd had to do to survive it, and has made the majority of his years since an ongoing exercise in attempting to live his life with the knowledge of both, or perhaps, in spite of it. His coping mechanisms are hardly healthy, but Max does make a point to drag himself, tooth and nail, through everything in his life.

▸ CAREFREE; He's a grown ass man, but most of the time, Max acts a lot like a kid, sometimes more purposefully than not. His typical moods are either A, calm and relaxed or B, snickering up a fit and attempting shenanigans. His childhood, before being taken from his mother's farm, was composed of the memories he remembers most fondly and is more sorrowful over the loss of, considering many of them have faded over the years, both in terms of Max aging, as well as how much he's mentally blocked in his mind from the time he arrived at BCR and before. As a reaction to that, he indulges in the more childish sides of his personality.

▸ SELF-RESPECTING RE:FREEDOMS; When Max was a kid, just escaped from the Reed compound and brought to BCR, the idea of 'I will do whatever the fuck I please, whenever I please, in whatever language I please' became something he needed to constantly assure himself of, partly for the sake of reminding himself that he does have his freedom now, and no one's going to come into his room at night and drag him away to fight another possessed child to the death. If he feels uncertain of that truth, Max goes out of his way to find something that proves it, like run away from the school to see if anyone chases him down, or speak in German only, to see if anyone kicks him around until he uses English.

▸ INQUISITIVE; In school, despite getting into his fair share of trouble, he was actually decently studious, and had it not been for how much he liked to skip whenever he was feeling the need to get out of the building (he gets pretty claustrophobic at times), his grades would've been pretty good. What keeps him doing his tomb raiding is his vested interest in it and curiosity. Max has a genuine, passionate interest in the ancient things he goes poking around in - the history, the old magical cultures, the residual spiritual mojo lingering around in those places. He'll sometimes accidentally go into long discussions about origins of pyramids and ancient cultures and methods of construction and magic used in wards for them, etc etc, it's all very engaging for him, and he's always been a bit of an obsessive nerd.

▸ PASSIONATE; Max's world is fairly simple, he has a few things he loves, and he treasures them above nothing else. He finds he doesn't understand a lot of issues going on with him or others, or a lot of the finer aspects of society and culture, so he likes to focus on these few people, few concepts, few pillars of morality, and just pour all of his caring into those. Better to care a lot about a few things, than just be sort of bleh about a lot.

▸ LACK OF CONTROL; both in terms of his powers and his personality. Max has been through a lot of self-regulation to control his powers, and had items and spellwork tattoos placed on him to assist that. By nature of what his powers are and where Max came from, control is a difficult thing, one of the deepest fears in him that both led to his possession during his time at BCR and his need for the spirit journey thing. It goes hand in hand with emotional instability as well - though Max does a giddy kind of detached very well, he's very emotional juvenile, and his actions are heavily dictated by what he's feeling at the time, sometimes being extremely irrational when upset or uncomfortable.

▸ WRATH; When Max gets pissed, property damage happens. It typically takes a while to really get Max to that point of angry, but there are some things that will take him from 0 to Forest Fires so fast, and those are really the dangerous ones. Things like abusing children, wrongful imprisonment, controlling groups of people, brainwashing or experimentation, all the things that tie back to things that happened at the Reed compound. His lack of self-control feeds into it, and Max stops seeing the lines he shouldn't be crossing.

▸ CODEPENDENT; Max is a healthy, functional adult only as long as his support group is stable. The moment Marco disappeared, or the moment Marco died, Max started to crumble, and jump to extremes, becoming reckless and irrational. He does not function well on his own, and anything negative happening to someone in his circle will have a large effect on him as well.

▸ REPRESSION; Max can't really face personal trauma head on well. He rarely ever mentions anything that happened in his life prior to coming to BCR, and will rarely confront what happened to him or what result it's had on his mental/emotional state. As a result, very few people actually know many specifics about what occurred in the Reed compound, outside of general torture, if they know that at all.

▸ FLASHBACKS/MILD PTSD; though Max has never had professional diagnosis, and refuses to, a lot of his symptoms - waking nightmares, flashbacks, occasionally panic attacks, are similar to PTSD. Sometimes an odd word, or a scent or a scene can remind him of something that'd happened in the Reed compound and send him spiraling. He'll sometimes have stark mood swings, and occasionally become violent as a result. In times it isn't so intense of a reaction, Max will just abruptly remove himself from the company he's in and vanish for a while.

▸ SPIRITUAL DAMAGE; Due to the circumstances in which Max came into his magic, and how he'd spent the age period that would normally be consumed by mental/emotional development for an adolescent, many personality and spiritual traits for Max were heavily warped, pieces of him having become irrevocable demonic in nature. It wasn't something Max really discovered as unusual for a child of the Demonic class until years into adulthood, but it had been the primary source for things like: the immense urge towards violence, the snap to it that he has when he encounters something that's too deeply personal, a strong lack of empathy that takes him when he vessels or shifts into Berserking, the urge to just keep going with the destruction once it's started that comes mainly from him internally, and not singularly from the demon he's channeling, and the certain level of addiction to channeling demonic spirits he has when he hasn't gone into a Berserker trance for a while.

Powers and Abilities:

Magic!!! In this verse, magic is much like your typical wizards or witches in any other supernatural canon, magic is a very generalized thing, and your talent in using the power, your knowledge of spells, and your ability and affinity for certain things than what specifically can and can't be done with it. So magic here is dependent on specialization. While Max's primary affinity is for the Demonic class of magic, he's still capable of using magic that falls into other categories, he just isn't nearly as skilled with it. The spells I'll list here are the main ones he uses.

♆ DEMONIC CLASS;
max's class focus within the magical planes, his "line" being his specialized abilities. "The demonic class controls magic that affects those that cannot be seen, and are tied to destructive spirits."→ POSSESSION | To quote Danzy (creator of the whole B&M OC world), "when the demon/spirit/angel/etc is the one in control of the physical body. host awareness can vary, from full possessions to partial possessions, but generally speaking the host is not the one running the show."
→ VESSELAGE | Backwards possession. Take demonic spirits as 'passengers'. They hang out in the body, he uses their powers as he likes. So long as he's still the one in control, he isn't truly 'possessed'. Vesseling also allows him to forcibly yank a spirit/monster out of someone else and into himself. "It's when the host has control of its hitchhikers; the demon, in this case, is contained inside the physical body, and its powers are temporarily wielded by the vessel. This can be dangerous though, because it risks overpowering the physical body and damaging it from the inside." Neither of these first two will be accessible in Duplicity, given the dimensional plane from canon is required.
→ DEMONIC SHIFT | Demonic students are taught to use the nature of their magic alone to partially shape shift into three or four known types of generic demons, gaining a boost in strength/constitution/power. Given it's coming from within the witch rather than harnessing an living outside entity, it's extremely downgraded, but still grants superhuman ability through their magic. Control is much, much easier to maintain doing this rather than vesseling, as there is no sentience actively fighting the witch for it, only a battle of self-control to return to one's own skin, rather than be sucked into an addiction to the power.
→ BESERKER | Doing The Most in vesseling (or using Demonic Shift, though it's much less powerful). He has a wide range of how fully he can absorb a spirit before losing control of the connection, and that allows him to 'beserk'. This allows the power output to increase dramatically, and can withstand much more physical damage without being deterred/ignores pain unless he's physically disabled. Like Tank abilities in MMOs: the more damage he takes, the more power he's able to put out. The general rule is this - the longer he's in his berserker trance, the harder it is to pull out of it, and the more he starts to physically shift into the thing that he's channeling.
→ HEALING/DURABILITY | Something that's developed over a lot of years of violent possession/vessling. He's not Wolverine, but you'll have to do more than back a car into him.
→ HELLFIRE | What it sounds like. Fire. Like, extra bad fire. Soul burning fire. Like lightsaber level ouchies or some shit. Also comes in Raining From The Sky Like The Literal End Of Days flavor. It's pretty gr8. This also makes him fireproof. At least, regular fire won't hurt him much.
→ DEMONIESE/DEMON RADIO | Max is fluent in German, English, Latin and Hellspawn (Angungol, formally). Also hears a fairly regular mental stream of demon chatter going on in his head. Not accessible in Duplicity. He still knows the languages, just won't get the radio.
→ VOID WALKING | the ability to phase into the plane of spiritual existence. Not accessible in Duplicity.
→ CORRUPTION | A gradual sickness that manifests over the span of either a few seconds or minutes or hours or days (generally not longer than that), that is put into a monster/person like a seed of compact demonic energy/chaotic ouchy nonsense, that blossoms and grows like an infection. It can either grow into physical sickness, killing off and shutting down organs, filling up your veins with nasty black tar type substances, or have a more mentally damaging side of it, gradually cracking a person/creature's mind open demonic plane horror crap. Comes from spell tattooed on his palms.
→ MAGIC BATTERY | less an ability, mostly Max just has a lot of energy that can be pretty easily sapped if you know how to.

→ RELATIVE CLASSES | Magic in the realm of planes that Max isn't specialized in, but are close to his area of expertise. The strongest he is with these others is Mechanic (manipulation of anything man-made), though he can really just move walls around or pulls stairs out of floors or reshape items, nothing earth-shattering. The next is Unnatural, basically having to do with the Bad Juju side of magic, like shadow manipulation, magical disease, corrupting a soul, entropy. He uses this for some spells, but doesn't do anything fancy with it. Spectral (spiritual things/divination), Necromantic (manipulation of the dead), and Heavenly (benevolent spirits and forces) he has a passing familiarity with, but won't tend to do much with.

→ DISSONANT CLASSES | Natural (nature and earthy things) and Humane (all things human) are completely dissonant for Max. He can't do anything with them.

Inventory:
● Moose, the adventure dane
● A big, stupid battle ax
● Max's favorite backpack, constructed and enchanted by James Reed for him. It's sort of like a Mary Poppins bag, but it doesn't open into some sort of voodoo nanny pocket dimension. The holding capacity is about the size of a small closet or a large traveling trunk, but the weight of the pack stays around 10-20 lbs. Also enchanted to survive all the ridiculous crap Max drags his bag through, or drops it in. It looks like it's been through hell, because it probably has at some point. There is not currently anything inside the bag.

Samples:
Duplicity TDM - communication mostly + an extra thread that is also v old.
Log thread from another TDM for introspection.