burnination | Witching Hour App

☽☾ Player Information
Name/Handle: Jen
Are you 18 years or above?: Yes
Current character(s) in game: None

☽☾ Character Information
Name: Max Kiesler
Canon: n/a, Original
Age: 29
HMD link: bloop
Story Role: Chaotic Good, mostly, with True Neutral/Chaotic Neutral moments for certain situations. He's weird. But mostly Chaotic Good.
Appearance: Max's PB is Max Riemelt (I named him after his PB, I'm sorry), mostly as he looks in the films Auf Das Leben, and The Depraved. A picture aaaand another picture. He also sports a sundry of tattoos.

History: You may want to rock on down to the world information section before reading this part, as many things about the nature of Max's world are relevant to his history. For a quick summary, without repeating what I'm putting down there, Max comes from a world where magic is a natural force that some possess the ability to manipulate and some do not, and it can be both very handy and very dangerous, not always easily controlled, and not always pleasant to possess. There are various planes of magic, and each person is more aligned to one or another, occasionally, two, though every witch is capable of doing magic from most most planes, some are easier for them than others, and their alignment is their biggest strength.

There's a much, much longer history section that covers all the little details of Max's life over yonder, but for the sake of being concise, I've written this to just touch the major, important parts, that will have relevance to his personality and his fit in the game. But if you'd like to read the full version, it's there.

youth: in which an unfortunate foundation is set.

Maxwell Kiesler was born March 27th, 1996 to a single mother, Katja, in a small farming village outside of Hamburg, Germany. His childhood up until 8 was mostly uneventful. Max played with the village kids, got along well, helped out in the fields, was looked on fondly by the community and had been know for his goofy, wide grin, but around his 8th birthday, Max started to manifest his magical talents. Considering said talents were aligned with the Demonic plane, it wasn't something that the community took too well to. He began speaking in tongues, setting fires on accident, talking to shadows, being taken by some mild possessions, you know, that kind of thing. As the village grew more and more uneasy with him, and began to push Max and his mother more and more to the fringes, Katja was frantically trying to find a means to help him, knowing this as magic manifesting, having a very slight talent for the Natural plane herself. She was approached by the agents of the Reed family, who spoke to her about a school they ran for magically gifted children, most particularly, those of the Demonic plane. With great reluctance, she sent Max with them for training, to learn to control his power, and expected to receive letters and see him on the holidays. Sadly, Katja was lied to, and she never saw her son again.

The Reed family was more of a cult than anything else, boasting middling power with the Demonic plane, and seeking to advance it further through several means, the most detrimental being, advancing a magical phenomenon known as The Crawl (which will be detailed below, in World Information). They sought to collect young children who'd developed impressive levels of Demonic power at very early stages in their life, like Max, and went around Europe, Asia and the Middle East running the same con they'd played Katja with. The children were taken to the Reed compound located in remote Ukraine, and, for the first year, treated relatively well, as if this "school" was exactly as advertised. They were trained in the basics of magic, and taught the simple processes of possession and vesseling that some users of the Demonic plane specialize in, or develop their "Line" in. However, after the first year, this became more of a prison than a school. The children (all boys) were moved into small group dorm rooms, underground, with barred doors and strictly guarded and monitored. Their "classes" became more hands on than theory, and the boys were forced to begin vesseling powerful demonic spirits at far too young an age than is healthy, as just the act of vesseling tends to be very hard on the body and mind of even advanced teenagers. Not all boys made it, and in fact, many either died or became completely, irrevocably possessed, twisted into corrupted monsters controlled by the demonic spirit that had taken them. Those boys were locked into cells and later used as combat and spell practice for the boys still surviving and holding their autonomy. Many of the surviving boys were made to fight and kill the corrupted boys. They performed experiments on the boys, seeking to find ways to siphon their powers from them, or to use them as gateways to the Demonic planes/Outer Ring, and even to tether the children like regular magic users would tether monsters to sap them of power, hold them as minions under their command, and use them as magic batteries (Max never actually experienced that tethering within the compound, and wouldn't even really realize that's what was being attempted until later in life, during studies at BCR). This went on for five years, until Max was 14, and given he'd been one of the eldest surviving boys, he became sort of a big brother figure to the others remaining. Because of this abuse of magic, and Max's young age, he would also develop a bit of magical, demonic corruption that would be attached to his spirit for the rest of his life.

During one session of particularly violent vesseling of a particularly powerful demon, Max's 'Berserker' Line manifested, which allows Max to essentially tip toe all along the line of full possession and corruption, without actually stepping over and losing complete control of himself. A lot like the term suggests, he experiences a massive boost in the power he can use from the demon he's vesseling, and the amount of damage and injury he can take before being incapacitated, often fighting through broken bones and mortal wounds (and then needing a healer really badly). However, given this is a Line that not many are capable of (Max wouldn't have been if not for the corruption he'd acquired through the Reed's treatment), and the fact Max begins to physically shift into the demon he's vesseling when this occurs, it looks a lot like full possession. Thus, he was put into a cell like the others, and another boy was sent to fight him. As Max was a bit out of his mind at the time, and having great difficulty coming out of the trance, he sadly ended up very violently killing the other boy. He came to to see the boy bleeding out in his hands, begging him to stop. Fill with grief and rage (he'd known the boy, he'd been like a little brother), Max used the spirit still inside him to escape his cell, and the same spirit helped him to locate where the gasoline to fuel the compound trucks and jeeps was stored. During the night, he locked the Reeds into their rooms as they slept, spread gasoline throughout, and then lit the compound up with Hellfire, burning the family alive in their beds. He goes to release the other captive boys from their dorms, who all look pretty terrified at Max and what he's done, though they escape the facility into the wilderness all the same. One Reed boy had been out of his room at the time, and gets stuck in the hallways - James Reed, who Max had seen around the complex, but didn't know personally. The Reed children didn't have much hand or even awareness of what was happening to the abducted kids. Reluctantly, Max saves him, and, sort of, is saved by James as well, given he wasn't in physical shape to make it out by himself. They collapse into the snow outside the compound, and when James looks at the inferno that was his home and asks what happened, Max tells him he'd lit the fires. James tackles him, and while they're rolling around in the snow, an agent from the Barrett-Crowley Reformatory, who'd been tracking the Reed family, comes up on them, pulls them apart, and takes them both to BCR - an actual school for the magically inclined, that would take proper care of the boys, and train them in their powers.

barret-crowley reformatory: in which max survives teenage years due to a lot of drugs, sex and partying.

Unfortunately, Max learns that his mother had fallen ill and passed away, with the grief of having lost her son, while he'd been held captive, before he'd escaped. With no family to return to for either boy, James and Max are given a dorm room to share on BCR campus. Though they aren't yet old enough to start their first year of school there, the kids are given private tutoring to catch them up academically, so they'll be ready the following year. Max and James do not talk about what happened at the compound, and aren't entirely sure how to navigate each other regardless. There's a lot of silence, several fights, a lot of bickering and quiet loathing, though mixed with a strong guilt over having been responsible or partly responsible for destroying the others life. It's an odd kind of non-communication they develop, and though they don't particularly like each other, they still help each other avoid being squinted at by the school psychologists that are sent to evaluate them, given the traumatic place they'd come from. Max begins to learn small things about James, and James begins to do the same with Max, and in a bizarre way, with how they're the only two that really understand what the other came from, they become the only family one another has. Over the course of the five years they spend at BCR, though they only really discuss the Reed compound once, and it's a very explosive discussion (when Max learns James had been using the Reed trust fund to pay for both of their tuition), James becomes a brother to Max. When he's feeling unstable, or having too many nightmares, he sneaks across the dorm halls and goes to pass out on James' floor, and there's a comfort in that, even if it's never discussed. They'll continue that sort of friendship into their adult years.

During the first one to three years Max spends at BCR, he often runs off at night, when he starts to get too tense, and too claustrophobic, and will be gone for days at a time, less because he doesn't like BCR (he does), and more because he feels the intense need to remind himself that he can. He isn't a prisoner here. Once they're officially starting classes with the other students, Max meets Marco Lorin, who would become his best friend later, and in his second official school year, he meets Tristan Clark and Dani Davidson, the two other parts of the group that would be a large influence on his life. These three boys, and James, are essentially the only thing that get Max to a point of mental and emotional health that he actually survives into adulthood, and starts to become more of the kid he was before the Reed family. They do what teenage boys do - they get in trouble, they horse around, they break rules, and they do a lot of drugs. The town outside of BCR (which is based in hahahah Alaska), due to the amount of crazies and eccentrics that settle into the magically rich area, has a big rave scene, and the magic boys spent a lot of night sneaking off campus to go get drug-high and magic-high and dance their face of. And have a lot of sex, incidentally. But it gave Max an outlet he'd very much needed. Aaaaand later it became a great method of repression, but, whatever, he's functioning. It should be noted, this social circle (along with Nicola Santos and August Moreau) is incredibly physical with each other, and given Max's weird, incomplete childhood, this becomes the main influence for how "love for a friend" is expressed by him aka he's a ho. During Max's second school year at BCR, he also tethers a demon, Wodan, who happened to be the same one that'd helped him escape the Reed complex. Unbeknownst to him, the demon had actually been following Max since the compound, acting as an agent for Timothy/'Satan' (more on him in World Info), seeking to crack Max open as a gateway, and bring him into Timothy's fold. Gradually, over the course of his time at BCR, Wodan would begin to sink Max closer and closer to full possession. By the time his senior year comes around, Max is painfully aware of just how bad of a position he's in, and hope for his survival has dwindled dismally, though he does a fairly great job of concealing it, even from his professors.

The "final exam" featured at BCR is fairly brutal. On Samhain, when the barriers between the Inner and Outer Rings are at their thinnest, students are sent out into the monster infested forest beyond BCR's protective magical walls, and released to use what they've learned in the last four years to survive. There has never, in the history of BCR's tutelage, been a 100% survival rate for the final exams. Max will survive his exam, though barely, and at a great mental cost. He spends too much time in too deep of his Berserker trance, channeling the same demon that'd been slowly gaining a deeper hold on his soul through the last three years, and Max only makes it back to himself by heavy assistance from James. However, he's deeply shaken, and after healing from the exams, Max finds himself only barely clinging to his autonomy, speeding rapidly towards complete possession and unable to bring himself back. Convinced his death is close and inevitable, and unwilling to let his friends witness it or be harmed by him once his soul is gone, Max takes off to the Ukraine, where he would spend the next week living in the charred remains of the jail cell type room he'd lived in as a boy, slowly allowing the creature in him to eat away at the rest of his mind. However, James, knowing Max better than any of the other friends he'd grown close to at BCR, can make an easy guess at where Max had run off to. Taking the information to Marco, Dani and Tris, Tristan sets the spell to teleport Marco, Dani and James to the old Reed complex, and equip them with a means to exorcise him. When they come upon him, Max is well out of his mind, and nearly completely gone. A fight breaks out, Marco and Dani trying to control Max without killing him, while James sought to exorcise him. It levels the surrounding forest, and leaves the charred ruined even more charred and ruined, but in the end, Max is saved, and spends the next week curled up in bed with one of the four of them, shaken and terrified, but alive and himself, and eternally grateful and humbled by the extent his friends had gone to for him. Graduation, otherwise, goes fairly uneventfully, other than 'congrats, you lived, go be an adult now'. Graduating class of 2016, holla.

adulthood: in which things are okay, and then horrible, and then okay again.

After graduation, with a new lease on life (having spent the last four years convinced he wouldn't live to this point), Max has some issues to resolve, so he heads back to Germany. He looks for his mother, for her grave, confronts a lot of the townspeople who had abandoned her once Max's magic began to manifest, and horrifies them when he vessels something really creepy, and screams at all of them for being fucked up and judgmental and alienating and not comforting his mom when she lost her son, how fucking dare you tbh. She'd died in misery because of them, he'd been convinced. There's some fire. No one dies, because Max just wants to take apart their stupid, toxic community and scorch the Earth. After, he moves on. The boys from the compound that Max thought of as little brothers had never left his mind, often seen in recurring nightmares, so, seeking to find some peace and pay respect to the boys that didn't make it, Max sets out to find the family members of the boys who hadn't made it, and deliver the news of their fate. Some of them he comforts, some of the douchier ones, who had sent their kid off to be Cleansed, he loses his shit on similarly to how he did in his mother's village. It's a dark period for him, and Max ends up captured and imprisoned for arson charges in a small country. He only spends about six months there before breaking himself free (unable to stay sane behind bars again), but he uses the time to force some self-reflection, deciding he's done all he really can to avenge his mother and his friends. Time to shove it out of his mind and move on with life. Again, ~*~repression~*~, it's a helluva drug. But it's Max's favorite.

Then, he shows up drunk on BCR's campus grass, to the headmistress toeing him with a shoe and telling him to get off her lawn. For a while, he lingers around, having soup with his sort of surrogate father, Dr. Adrien Arbuckal, the Master of Necromantics and school physician that'd watched over him during his time at BCR. He does a stint as a BCR recruiter, working with Nic Santos and Marco, his friends from school, but only lasts a couple weeks, as combining him and Marco is never a recipe for professionalism, and he sort of punches a few too many parents wanting their devil children to be Healed. And, incidentally, is accused of some accidental kidnappings, whoops. Look, those kids were better off at BCR anyway. After having failed that, Max moves on to what would be his main career - deciding he's the love child of Harry Potter, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones and Constantine. A profession he lovingly refers to a "magic tomb raidering". He takes to exploring ancient tombs, temples and ruins, either solving magical problems, locating relics, removing or relocating them if they're of some sort of dangerous (usually to BCR), or running off non-magical raiders from messing with things they shouldn't. This would be how he accidentally wakes up an ancient Incan shaman who comes to call herself 'Paya', stumbling his way into breaking the seal on her sanctuary, which annoys the crap out of her, and ends up with Paya punching Max into the spirit plane for a spirit journey. Max is stuck in this plane for about a month (and it ends up more demonic plane than spectral plane, really, due to his alignment), and while it sucks a lot and he whines a lot, Max begins to come to terms with what he is, and the pieces of him that are irrevocable demonic in nature (violence, and the snap to it that he has when he encounters something that's too deeply personal, a complete 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 from him and not from the demon he's channeling, and the certain level of missing/addiction to it he has when he hasn't gone into berserking for a while), due to how he'd been forced into useage of his abilities too early in his life at the compound. He wakes up to Paya slapping him and telling him to get off her floor, he's dirtying her dirt. The journey also allotted him a Void Walking ability, and Paya gave him a spellwork tattoo to boost his frankly pathetic ability for all things Spectral. He has since improved his Spectral plane usage.

Continuing on with his tomb raidering, better equipped for it now, Max eventually makes it to Cairo, and meets a woman named Nada (more so, meets the back of her Jeep, as she hits him with it, taking him for a thief (which he sort of was at the time)), beginning a romance that would blossom into a marriage. One that is ill-fated, partially due to timing, but mostly due to Max's inability to communicate or confront the larger issues of his psyche and general Issues that make him sort of a crazy person. Aka, that moment when Max realizes Maybe Repression Isn't A Great Idea. At some point, he runs back into an old classmate from BCR, Harper Gray, and brings her onto his tomb raidering team. While tomb raidering, over the several years he does this, he picks up on a lot of hints and clues about The Crawl and The Theory (things you'll read more about in World Info), but never quite puts the whole picture together to get that it's the actual fucking apocalypse and something he should be worried about. Roughly four or five months into Max's marriage, Marco, Max's best friend, is sucked into literal Hell by actual Satan (aka Timothy, aka the Outer Ring, Hellside, see World Info), without so much as a note. For 13 months, Marco is missing without a trace, and Max absolutely loses his mind trying to find him. He goes about cleaning house for mobs, cursers, hunters and cultists for that year, trying to find leads on his friend, desperate and terrified that something has happened to him similar to what was done to Max in his youth - something he's unable to communicate to Nada, and the fact he spends so much time away from her searching drives the wedge further between them. Nada asks for a divorce, Max agrees, as he knows this isn't fair to her, and he's unwilling to face these things about himself, so divorce it is. For a while after, Max goes AWOL, and is in a very dark place for a long while. There's also an incident with another friend, Elliot, involving a possession, a lot of magic nonsense, and Max volunteering himself to be tethered in order to save his friend, which is a nightmare and a half. Eventually, Marco pops back up, Satan/Timothy having finished his work on him and punched him back into the Inner Ring/Earth. Max immediately glues himself to Marco's side for a couple weeks to a couple months maybe upon learning Marco's back, spending a good amount of time in the US, where Tris now lives and Marco has been hiding out. While in Hell, Marco had been aggressively tortured by Satan/Timothy as he'd tried to convert Marco over to an agent of his, to advance the spread of the Crawl and get Timothy's people into the Inner Ring through Marco and several other demonic plane users that were sucked down along with Marco. There, Marco learned about the Crawl, the coming apocalypse, all of the nature of it and the impending doom, and was released 13 months later with the expectation that he'd do Satan/Timothy's bidding. Not so much. What he does do is go around sealing the magic of all the other users that were yanked down with him, planned to be used as gateways. It pisses Satan/Timothy off a lot. Oops. Marco also doesn't tell any of the others about what happened down there, other than 'Satan tortured me' and 'the apocalypse is right on schedule'. Hahahahaha :| It should also be noted that, throughout all of this, Tristan's mom's house (where he'd spent several of his BCR holiday's at, Ms. Clark coming to refer to Max as one of herboys), Dani's house and James' house were like save points in the video game that is Max's life. Dani, James and Paya are the only living people who know the full story of what happened in the Reed compound. James because he was there, Paya, because she was watching from the Spectral Plane she'd been trapped in, and Dani being the only one Max has actually told, in very quiet, very private moments, in the middle of the night, whispered across a pillow.

the sucky future: in which max goes to hell.

With Marco back, and still no explanation to how he managed to get free, and no guarantee he won't be pulled back down to Hell, Max's adventuring turns more into trying to find a means to either keep Marco tethered to their reality indefinitely, or travel to Hell himself, so that he can retrieve him if he's taken again. Hell is sort of big, so getting to the deepest layer of it is an issue, and he also doesn't want to do anything that would require either A, making anyone come with him (he knows James has been to Hell with his key, but he doesn't want to risk James) or B, doing some fucking up occult things that would probably require a lot of blood sacrificing, because Hell is messed up or C, dying himself. He also doesn't exactly tell anyone outside of James that he's doing this, because he knows the "that's a fucking bad idea" chorus he'll get for it. Thus, James becomes a bit of his partner in doing this, but mostly for the purpose of putting together a sort of demonic forge. In hopes of assembling something that'll help him, Max wants to be able to siphon demonic spirits into physical items, so it's a strong mix of mechanic and demonic plane magic, thus, James. With James' help, over the course of the next two or three years, Max reconstructs a forge hammer used by an ancient Nordic runic forgemaster responsible for the creation of many of the powerful magical relics Max had spent about a decade uncovering, retrieving or hiding better than they were previously hidden. They constructed a forge out of the enchanted skull of a dragon, so that it can withstand holding Hellfire in it, and Max develops a new technique to siphon demonic spirits into items - things used as magical totems or weapons.

While going about finding/researching all he needs for the forge, he also comes across a group of cultists in the mountains of Scandinavia, where he finds a baby, nearly newborn, covered in occult symbols and ash and goat's blood, sitting in the middle of a summoning circle, about to be made a human sacrifice, because nothing gives a kick to a spell like death of a newborn, you feel? The mother is found somewhere else in the vicinity, already dead, and while Max takes the kid back to Dani, he spends a long time trying to find any other relatives to send the child with. Unfortunately, the mother had none, had been on her own, one of those "victims no one will miss" sort of cases. Very sad. So, since they suspect that baby might have some magic in her, and since Max isn't sure what all was done to her in the sense of bad voodoo going on before he'd walked in and found her, they decide to keep and raise her. After Max fails spectacularly at naming, and really only suggests a lot of pet names ("fluffy" "spot"), Dani picks "Brigid Ada". Given he can't expect Dani to raise this child entirely by himself, and after getting yelled at a lot for being reckless and nearly leaving him by himself with Brigid, Max takes to being around more often, or, at least, taking Dani and Brigid with him when he wanders off to be Lara Croft somewhere. Dani takes a job at BCR, and they set up a house in the town nearby (where Tristan's mother lives, who had become a second mom to Max while he was in school). About six months after, Marco gets into a wreck with a semi-truck and dies. Hahahahaaaaaa and Max loses his absolute shit. Again. There's screaming, there's crying, there's Max refusing to accept it and getting Dr. Arbuckal to repair Marco's body and cast a preservation spell on it, as Max bails on everyone to go commit himself completely to trying to get into Hell and bring him back, as he's convinced himself it was Marco being dragged into Hell again. Desperate, despairing, and more than a little off his rocker, he goes to James, who had constructed two keys, one that takes him to "places I've been" and "places I haven't been", the latter having accidentally taken him to Hell once. Max's options are either A, do some very fucked up magic that will be terrible for everyone, probably require some human sacrifices, and further the Crawl or B, he can get James to take him with his key, as he knows James has been there. He doesn't want to risk James' safety, as he's like Max's brother, but he's desperate. James very reluctantly agrees, and off they go.

It's a bad trip. They discover, when encountering the culmination of demonic evil that Marco had so fondly been calling "Satan" (Timothy!), that Marco isn't there. He died. Simple, straight forward, normal, human death. His spirit had gone on to whatever afterlife he was bound for, and that wasn't Hell. But more than that, Satan is pissed, and the fact that he doesn't have Marco is made obvious by the way he puts an attempt into keeping Max and James in the Outer Ring to try using them as he had Marco and the others. More than that, James and Max witness the Crawl - a cloud of wet blackness that's eating at the barrier between the rings, rapidly thinning it, and everything Max had seen hints and legends and vague stories about in the ruins, tombs and temples over the last several years finally clicks into place. The end times are coming, Satan/Timothy is doing his best to advance it, and all of the Outer Ring is poised and ready to invade and take up residence. Suffice to say, Max and James get the fuck out of there, with his key, as fast as they possibly can. With no other excuse to think he'll get Marco back, the simple truth of it undeniable (that his best friend is just gone), and the looming doom of their world that Marco had been fighting apparent, Max crumbles onto the floor of James' apartment and just sobs and cries and screams for probably another week. But he's at least reached the point where he has to accept it, and can start to move on. He heads back to the house Dani, Brigid and Tris are at in Alaska. He and James finish the forge and complete the hammer, and Max makes his best weapons/items then - when he's filled with rage and grief over Marco's death. It's his therapy, as well as, preparation for the apocalypse that he knows is coming, soon. They'll need all the help they can get. However, not long after, Tristan, who had been closest to Marco, in love with him, actually, has an unfortunate consequence of avoiding grief. A spirit takes his body on a rampage through the US south, having awoken an ability called 'Reaping', that you'll read about in Tristan's abilities page. Max goes after him, with Frankie (another friend from BCR) and Elliot in tow, effectively freeing him from the spirit and binding his Reaping ability permanently. Once Tristan is back to himself, Max brings all their associates together, with James, and they all talk about The Crawl and what it means for the impending apocalypse. The rest of the year is spent preparing, and forging weapons/items.

Until Halloween/Samhain, a year after Marco's death. Marco, fashionably late as he tends to be, crawls out of his grave like a goddamn zombie. Between the thinning of the barrier between the Outer and Inner Rings by the Crawl, and some other magical shenanigans, and thanks to the preservation spell Max made sure was cast on his corpse, Marco, as a ghost, was able to shove himself back into his old body, and shows up in Dani/Max/Tristan's bedroom, covered in grave dirt. There's screaming, there's crying, there's Max punching him in the face, and then there's Max making out with him while sobbing like a baby, grave mud and all. Marco's returned to them, now with the fun perk of being able to explode and reassemble himself. So that's cool.

WITCHING HOUR CANON POINT. 8D

World Information:
BASIC WORLD INFORMATION
—in the land of gods & monsters—

INFORMATION | THE HISTORY OF BCR | BONUS DEETS

Somewhere up north, somewhere cold, is a school for boys possessed of a certain kind of magic. This school doesn't teach how to read the future, or how to walk through walls. This school teaches math, and languages, and how to bring monsters to heel.

Welcome to the Barrett-Crowley Reformatory, and mind the claws.

— all info above written-up by manual.

The world of B&M (Boys & Monsters) is mostly identical to ours, save for the addition of the magic world, generally kept secret from the greater, "normal" populace. The information pages linked above go over the fine details of how the magic schools work, how the technicalities of magic as a whole fits together, where it comes from, and where the monsters that are created by an excess of magic in the planes reside and why, but the thing to take away is that magic builds up every piece of this world's reality, whether people are in tune or aware of it or not. Magic theory and source is heavily drawn from a Judeo-Christian religious field, having things like Heavenly and Demonic planes, with actual interference from angels, demons and legit Satan with the lives of the magic boys. Magic is a force more like nature, not sentient, but simply a core fact of existence, as much as gravity or electricity is. It can be used to create or destroy, to heal or to harm, and can either build a person up, or completely disintegrate them, and morph them into something unrecognizable. Monsters are born from magic as much as benevolent spirits, and both can touch the lives of humans, and can taint them.

Firstly, the year. At this canon point, it's 2025, and the boys graduated from BCR in 2016 (well, Marco and Max did), so it's a bit into the future, but not by much. Not enough that a lot of things changed, aside from fancier phones and probably the legalization of pot in the US. Who knows.

The main thing that ought to be covered here, that isn't posted in the info pages linked above as of yet, is the structure of the universe, and the big threat to the stability of it, along with the various groups located in each section of it. Let's start with some visual aid. We'll cover the factions listed in a moment, but firstly, what the rings mean. The Inner Ring is the present, Earth, where humanity and BCR and all these characters exist. The Outer Rings, Hellside and Heavenside, are where magic exists in great potency and are separated from the Inner Ring by a barrier that is part of the natural make up of this reality. As you can guess, Hellside is where demonic energies exist, Heavenside is where Heavenly energies exist, and all the other planes fall somewhere in between. However, this barrier is not indestructible. Due to the misuse of magic practiced by humans throughout time, since the first discovery of magic in this world ages ago, a natural magical phenomenon has developed and built over the centuries called The Crawl.

To quote Danzy, creator of this OC verse: The Crawl is "a creeping phenomenon of magic bleed from the outer ring ("other") of the known world into the inner ring ("present")", and the problem of it is "the crawl has been eroding the line that separates the outer ring from the inner ring for hundreds of years now, ever since humans discovered magic - due to centuries of irresponsible magic use, the line has been thinning. it's gotten dangerously thin in the recent years, enough that those beyond can now reach in and pull users out. [...] Once the crawl has completely eroded even just one section of the circle, literal hell breaks loose, and heaven, and everything in between. Offense is not a possibility due to the set-up; defense is their only means of surviving the Crawl". Basically, the apocalypse. "Angels demons and others battling out in Wal-mart." There is no way to stop or reverse the Crawl, only delay it, as many councils over the centuries, going as far back as Merlin and St. Tomas de Aquino and further, formed to create Anchors, to try to contain the spread of the Crawl. However, this is against the laws of magic, and it is impossible to actually stop it, hence the training that BCR and other schools offer - making young magic users ready for the fight that's inevitably coming. However, the majority of the magical population is not aware of this. The teachers at all magic schools, like BCR, are informed, as they are what prepares new magic users to face this inevitability, but the students, while they may be aware that Something Is Coming, don't know what that is, or that it has anything to do with the apocalypse. They aren't even really aware of if 'Satan' or 'God' are real entities, as set out by the Church. Max himself doesn't realize all of this until he's about 28.

On the various factions and their motives, some are in favor of the Crawl, some are fighting against it. Starting from the top of our visual aid and moving down - The Holy Order, which is made up of Angels, and is the "vengeful Michael mold". They believe in "natural order" of things re: angels on top with everyone else beneath them, so they believe the Crawl is good, as it is in their favor. They do not utilize humans in the sense of possession to do their work, because they believe they are above it. The Gregory, which is another group of angels and heavenly spirits, and they are fighting in the favor of protecting humans and the state of the universe, working against the Crawl, however, doing so by occupying humans (possession, vesselage), so it's a bit uncomfortable in that sense. Lastly on Heavenside, the Saints, which are former humans who have died and ascended into a state of something like "angels". The exact quote from Danzy being "they're 'angels' who are like guys can u chill let's just be fr-- oh okay HOLY FIRE". But they are also on the side of humanity's survival, and work through humanity with possessions/vesseling. Within the Inner Circle, you have a couple groups of humans, the magical and non-magical, looking to either work together to survive or just do their own thing. The main ones to be concerned about at the Hunters, which are normal, non-magical humans seeking to wipe out magic users, and the Cursers, which are magic users who have turned against other magic users, seeking to eliminate them. They aren't working with any spirits from the Outer Rings, just by themselves, looking to eliminate magic from this reality entirely.

On Hellside, there's two that are the main concern - Mary and Timothy. 'Mary' is basically 'monster mother', a leader of one out of two demonic kingdoms, head of all the nasties invading. Mary's faction doesn't possess, as they are much like the Holy Order, and believe they are above using humanity. They just want to occupy the Inner Ring, because it's nice there, screw the humans tbh. 'Timothy' is a collection of several different entities, swirled into the sort of culmination of evil, that is fondly refered to by Marco/Max/Dani/Tris and what's mostly recognized as "Satan" by the majority of humanity. But we like to call him Timothy. He is the leader of the second demonic kingdoms, and his faction tries to use humans as gateways to get his people into the Inner Circle, through possession and vesselage - people like Max and Marco.

Personality: "Punching yetis in the ass and sleeping in vans while watching Buffy, the Max Kiesler life" - That's the joke text I had sitting in this section, I feel like it still applies well. Anyway.

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. He isn't nearly the healthiest individual in terms of how he manages past trauma and processes traumatic events now, and hasn't had professional diagnosis or treatment for any of it, refusing it any time it's been suggested. Instead, he represses, never speaks about it, tries not to think on it, and buries himself in interaction with the four or five people he keeps incredibly close, and developed a deep love for each, and, consequencetly, a severe and unhealthy level of codependency for them. However, it's been the best thing in his life to make him feel human again, that he's actually willing to engage in. Which is direly important to Max's stability, considering some parts of him are not strictly human anymore.

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 and 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 (Max, unforgivably, slaughtering any group of cultists he finds while going through ruins and adventuring, or people abusing children), 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 from 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. He won't have withdrawals in the sense of declining health, but he'll be a much more tense and on edge and aggressive if he's gone a long period of time without vesseling. Additionally, this corruption of his personality and essence is responsible for the fact he's capable of Berserking at all - the Line requiring a wealth of similarity in the host to allow so much of a demonic spirit to cross over into him without completely taking him over. There's a particular level of savagery that Max is familiar with, that doesn't come from the spirits that pass through him, Max having realized this after several years at BCR, being cleared as Without Passengers, and still finding urges and whispers in the back of his mind.

For a long time, in his BCR years, Max was convinced he wasn't going to live past 18 or 20, due to how his Berserker power seemed to be growing more and more out of control, and the fact he could feel the monster he'd had tethered gradually pulling more and more control out of his hands. The creature, called 'Wodan', had been following Max since he'd left the compound, aware of what he'd been capable of, and it'd stalked just outside the BCR campus for a couple years, waiting for him. When Max tethered it, it was due to the monster allowing it, like being invited in. It's control, in tilting the possession towards it's favor and holding reign over Max's consciousness, was fed by how much Max believed he was already doomed, like so many other boys that didn't survive long enough for the escape Max made from the compound. Also, Max's fear of the monster, and his survivor's guilt, in not having been able to save the other boys, and in being the hand that'd killed several of them. The fact Max largely ignored that this was a problem at all, just continued to pretend that he didn't have these dark things in the back of his mind, continued to go about his business acting like nothing was wrong with him, was also a sizable contributor to his decline. Eventually, when the monster was near completely in control of him, and Max had the lingering ability to make a couple final decisions, he'd removed himself from BCR, disappearing to essentially die off in the wreckage of the charred compound like some kind of wounded animal, it was because he thought that's where he should have died. Having Marco, Tris, Dani and James go after him, and eliminate the monster itself, had put things into perspective for him, as far as things he has to live for and be around for. The month spent in the spirit world with Paya went further to force Max to face what it was that was different in him, and the fact that it isn't something that fighting long enough or hard enough is going to erase from him. Now, it's something that he accepts is part of him, recognizes the dangers of allowing his demonic tendencies and nature to build up and explode, so this, at least, Max isn't so obsessively repressing anymore. As for the rest of it all, well.

Max has made repression practically a way of life since showing up at BCR with James, partly because it was with James, and neither of them ever felt ready to discuss the things they'd been through, or seen, or done, or stood idly by and watched happen. They'd each still had resentment built up in one for the other - Max for James being part of that family, and James for Max murdering his family, though they both realized the fault of it was not so simple as that. Max was escaping torture, and James could hardly control the things the adults of his family were doing. Even into adulthood, they never really discuss the matter of life at the compound for very long, and when it does come up, it tends to be in explosive conversations, ending in physical fights. They've developed a very odd kind of relationship in learning to read one another through other ways. Observing, learning mannerisms and personality hang ups and seeing the frequency of mood shifts and why they happen. They have their own way of understanding and communicating with one another that, truly, goes deeper than Max has an understanding with anyone else in his life. James has become, by incident and tragedy, his family, and is precious and familiar to Max as such. But living with James like this, and growing in this sort of manner, had also permitted Max to repress a lot of the things from the compound and be allowed to easily get away with it. The school had offered psychiatric help for each of the boys when they arrived, but given that they didn't offer really anything in response and, in a way, helped each other to seem In Recovery, they were left alone after a time. As consequence, Max aggressively does not bring up his past with the compound or the torture he was victim to there, and just the thought of acknowledging he was that, a victim, is enough to send him off the deep end in loss of control, a downward spiral of emotion, and potentially dangerous aggression. In school, the only thing he'd actively told his friends about where he'd come from was "I lived in a cult for a while, it sucked", the actual truth of it they hadn't learned until they'd gone chasing Max down in his fourth year (it's easier for him to talk about now, but still doesn't often, and when it does come up, he's very clipped and short in his summary). Instead, he buries himself in the more social side that BCR offered, getting lost through interaction with Marco, Tris and Dani, diving into the rave and party scene, taking drugs, alcohol, overloading himself with stimulation and distraction. Of course, it didn't always work, and the times Max wasn't able to shut his mind down, he'd go find James and curl up in his dorm for a while. As a general rule, James, being the only person alive to really know the full story of what Max experienced, has become, and continues to be, the singular person Max goes to when he can't keep himself moving any longer, followed by Dani.

This tendency was the main thing that dismantled up Max's attempt at marriage, as well. There were, of course, many things that contributed, but a lot of what screwed it up had been Max's issues with being able to communicate the ways he's fucked up, and his unwillingness to want to change those fucked up parts of him to more healthy things. On top of that, when Marco went missing, Max lost his shit because A, he's obsessively protective of his people, and B, it had looked a whole lot like an abduction (technically, it was). Given Max's history, it set every paranoid, damaged, still reeling and unhealed part of him on full throttle with the idea that someone is using Marco's power in horrible ways, or abusing him while Max can't find him (technically, also what happens). That latter part, explaining how deeply it messes with him and why exactly, had been the huge part of what he couldn't really communicate to anyone that doesn't Just Get It, like James. Thus bringing us to the other issue with him and Nada - the fact she wasn't in his life forever, like Dani/Tris/Marco/James, who were not only in his life for a long time, but had bascially been the catalyst for him moving on from, or at least, finding a way to compartmentalize and manage his trauma and escape what life in the compound did to him, making consequences of PTSD (which he definitely suffered from elements of for several years, and still struggles with on varying occasion) easier to swallow and endure. Marco, Tris and Dani had also been brought into the knowledge of what happened at the Reed compound just by the freak out Max had at the end of his final year at BCR - it painted a fairly specific picture. It's the fact he has a support circle for it in a weird, not actually labeled as support circle sort of way? Max is able to get away with his half-assed methods of dealing with it, because his world is made up of people that Get what's going on when he freaks about one thing or another, and have learned how to deal with him over the years, and Nada just unfortunately didn't have the context and history for it. James and Dani couldn't do Max's marriage for him, or follow around translating him to his wife. Not gonna happen, buddy.

When repression fails, Max's cycle is as such: disappear into the world at large, let his vesseling get more and more reckless, use possession like a stress reliever, get lost in the world fighting monsters for a while, live in a van under a bridge in Amsterdam, eventually show back up at James' place and live on his couch for a time, shuffling around in a bathrobe and a beard, eating Cocoa Puffs and sneaking into James' bed at night to curl around him, as he's probably gone without human contact for a couple months at this point. James lets the others know Max is back, eventually Max goes to Dani's after, and after a couple weeks there, goes back to relatively normal. It's a recognizable pattern that those in his life have come to know and accept. Max has a very bad habit of 'if it is complicated/something I cannot figure out/fix/defeat, escape it', so between that and his issues with feeling too caged to places, Max likes to move around a whole lot, being kind of nomadic. He doesn't settle in places well. As mentioned briefly in an earlier paragraph, Max is super aggressively protective of his people. In the compound, he was one of the older boys, and had the habit of taking care of a lot of the younger boys and trying to calm them down from the horrible things that were happening. Unfortunately, as the younger kids were mostly weaker willed and weaker minded, they were the first to be taken completely by possession, and were the ones the other boys would have to fight (and kill), so he's very used to seeing things that are precious to him being annihilated. It's an intense fear that can shoot up suddenly and take him in a choke-hold, so he gets very scary when something he loves, aka James/Dani/Tris/Marco/Nic/Harper, is threatened. See: Max's 13 month violence bender while Marco was spirited away, in which he cleaned global house on a lot of the mafia and cultist underground trying to find his friend.

That covered, let's go over the less internal, more surface qualities notable with him.

Max is weird. From a general standpoint, having met Max in passing or interacted with him a couple times, that'll be something that's fairly immediately notable. Max acts odd, a bit too honest, a bit too blunt, and seems to be about half in his head and half in the real, interacting world. 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. He'd sometimes do things just to prove to himself that he can and that he is allowed and that no one will try to stop him. Max started out doing this when he was young, and more concerned about the idea that he wouldn't be allowed to do certain things (like leave the campus grounds, not speak in English, be out of his room past bedtime, walk out of a classroom if he wanted to, etc), and it just grew to become an integrated part of his personality. Max still has weird habits, like sleeping with the doors and windows open, or sometimes seeming totally distracted from what's happening, or walking off in the middle of conversations, or abruptly shifting conversations. At BCR, he'd also tend to go days at a time speaking in only German, because he hadn't been home in 5 or 6 years, and he'd missed it - didn't want to forget how to German. In language or being. He'll still do that into adulthood, though will tend to shift more to English if he knows someone needs to understand him for something important. Or if it's pissing someone off. He'll get a bit claustrophobic at times, feel too caged into a place, regularly goes running and hangs out outdoors a lot for the wide open spaces. It's common knowledge with his social circle that he likes to hike, and will sometimes disappear for weeks at a time to go get lost in the mountains somewhere. In school, Max had been known to actually get up in the middle of a class and walk out so he can go running outside, when the walls were feeling like they're closing in on him too much.

Between both being born into demonic plane magic, as well as the possessions pushed upon him at far too early an age, Max has been left way too in tune with the demonic plane, and spirits. He isn't very good at shutting off that connection, and while he has, since school, developed better coping mechanisms to try to shut it out, or at least, be more at peace with it, he'll still, on occasion, sit very very still and that will bring enough peace to him to chill. It's especially helpful in the snow - in the mountains, or in a forest, when it's just the creaking sounds of trees and clumps of snow landing on his skin, soaking through his clothes. He finds a deep peace in it. Other times, he just needs everything to be loud as fuck, and requires sensory overload, and that's when the raves and, welp, sex come in handy. In BCR he'd met most of the kids outside of Marco and Tris through, going to raves in town. That need for overwhelming engagement and stimulation brought him back to the more socially outgoing side he'd had as a boy, before being taken to the compound.

At first glance, Max's sense of humor seems very subtle. It's more the type that tends to do something meant jokingly with an absolutely straight face, so it's actually very difficult to discern if he's joking or if he's just really strange. The majority of the time, he is, actually, joking. He also tends to be very honest in anything he says, so, on occasion, people who've gotten used to the idea that Max is more often than not disingenuous when he says things may take something he means seriously as insincere. Like "well, I'm going to go break someone's kneecaps, bye". That is actually something he'd mean seriously, given the circumstances, but the tone in which he says it wouldn't be any different. Max doesn't typically try to correct people if they assume the wrong side of things - serious or not. He's casually claimed he plans on living forever to a few people, as well as "I remember everything". No one's too sure how accurate that is (neither are, his memory is kind of shitty, actually). Given that the demonic class boys, at least the ones that deal in possession/vesselage, have a 24/7 Demon Radio thing going on, that also makes them privy to all the gross, hellacious demonic chatter going on at any given point of the day. More so Marco, who actually spent a good while in Hell himself. But it tends to make their sense of humor a little fucked up. After hearing things whisper about eating people and skinning you and all your friends alive, some stuff just starts being funny. It gets very dark and pretty gross, but also very lame. They make hell puns, and discuss the likelihood of a goat's virginity for the sake of ritual slaughter as sacrifice to Satan. Because they're sad, lame people.

Additionally, dude has a gross lack of social filter. Team Marco/Tris raised him too wild, but it's also part of his 'I will do whatever I please whenever I please" thing. He's generally either very calm and relaxed, or he's snickering up a fit and acting like a five year old. Or, more rarely, he's in a crushing depression, which means he won't be within range of anyone to notice things about him anyway. During the times when he's snickering like a five year old, there's a good chance shenanigans are afoot. Like the time he threw Tristan's cat at him and Marco while they were having sex, or the time he and Marco went streaking through the commons area at BCR. Max tends to be incredibly immature, more in the sense of how childish and giddy he'll get, rather than his understanding of things. Especially when put next to someone else being childish and giddy. 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, Max tends to indulge more in just simple silliness, like rolling around on the floor with friends, or chasing pigeons in a city park, or, most of all, dressing up in silly clothes with Dani and legitimately playing pretend. They went to Monaco and dressed up all fancy and played Bond and Miss Moneypenny. They rented a Bugatti and went gambling and went dancing and pretended to spy on this person with a mustache and Max stole a pen from him, because they're such weirdos. The moral of the story is: never go to the ren faire with Dani and Max, they're giant children.

Despite all the jokes about it and how much Max insists on speaking German for days at a time, he isn't actually very German, in terms of culture. He only lived in Germany until he was 9, and then at the compound, and then at BCR, and since graduating, he's only stayed in Germany for 4 months at longest, coming back to visit frequently, but never staying long. So, culturally, he's really not all that German. He's much closer to American, both due to BCR being based in Alaska, as well as his closest friends all being American (aside from James). Max isn't unaware of it, and it is a point of minor annoyance to him, but he tends to just not comment on it much. Ignore it and it's not there, la la la, that's one of Max's key life philosophies. But at least, in this, there aren't really terrible consequences for letting it go ignored.

The 'tomb raidering', as Max likes to call it, has come to be something surprisingly fulfilling to him, and had given him great direction and purpose when he'd been floundering in his life prior to it (sitting in jail, or lying on the BCR front lawn wondering what to do with himself). 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 gets a kind of peace being in old, abandoned, ruined places, because he feels like he's walking in lives and worlds than have passed. It's both isolating, and overwhelming - a mix that somehow stabilizes him very well, and inspires thought and reflection in him. 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 a nerd (he binged Buffy, Constantine, Hellboy and Supernatural when he was in second year at BCR). In school, despite getting into his fair share of trouble, he was actually very studious, and kept up well with his grades. He does, however, tend to be incredibly reckless when off doing his Lara Croft thing. This led Dani to give him a few more spellwork tattoos - one for damage reduction and one for healing.

Social life became the main tool for repression that Max developed in school, after meeting Marco, Tris and Dani. He'd been a fairly outgoing kid before being abducted, and even within the compound, Max had bonded and got along well with the other children in a way that'd made him a sort of older brother for many of them, once things started to get really bad. After five years of abuse, and after another year or so at BCR being incredibly wary of others getting to know him and getting in his personal space, with Marco's initial, aggressively friendly entrance into Max's life, he came to soak up connection, and especially, affection, once coming to accept it from him. In current years, he craves connection with others, but less so the wide arc of humanity and more the specific group of people he's become severely codependent on - James, Tris, Dani and Marco. He's a glutton for affection and sensation, this, along with Max's tendency to want to mother, or rather, older-brother at everyone he cares for, makes him willing to do pretty much anything to see one of his friends happy and healthy. It isn't hardly a selfless thing - Max just really loves being loved. Consequently, he's also very sensitive to making the 4/5 people he loves a lot in his life angry with him, and will mope around like a gross loser if one of them is mad at him for something. And do absurd things to try to get back in their good graces. As a side note, Max regularly buys sweaters and wears the fuck out of them before visiting, because he is sure to lose at least one every time he stays at Tristan's place, and sometimes Dani's. Possibly Marco's. Basically, everyone owns at least one of Max's sweaters and he's very okay with it.

Powers & Abilities: I'm going to go ahead and put all the information for Max's normal, unlimited powers, but most of it is magic and would be completely nullified upon entering. This is for things he'll start to get back, once the magic is turned back on, in game.

Firstly, Max is a witch, and in the B&M universe, like most canons involving magic, the concept of magic and what all can be done with it is very wide, from floating a rock around, to communing with the dead, to summoning monsters, to warping reality. What I'm listing here are the things Max is specialized in, the spells he uses most often or has created for himself, but he'd still be capable of the more general things, like magicking a microwave door closed (mechanic plane) instead of putting his hand on it, or making shadows dance (unnatural plane), his talent in them depending on which plane it's related to. Some things can be related to multiple planes, like how fire manipulation can be Natural plane, but also falls under Demonic plane for the alignment it has to Hell and it's destructive capacity. However, Max couldn't try to magic-grow a flower, because he completely sucks at Natural plane, and there's not really another way to get around to that through a different plane.

♆ 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 (LINE) | 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 (LINE) | Like possession, except Max is the one in control. He takes on demonic spirits as 'passengers'. They hang out in his 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, if he so pleases. Danzy's quote on it: "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!"

→ BESERKER (LINE) | Max basically tap dances all over the line of complete possession. 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'. He can do absurd amounts of damage, and take absurd amounts of damage physically, without being deterred. Like WoW abilities that give you like 50% more damage when you're below 20% health. As a teenager in school, this was very difficult for him to control, but in the past several years he's A, gained more experience and better control, B, went on this weird as spirit journey with an old ass shaman he pissed off on accident, and C, was given a couple bracelets by James that help him regain control of himself and D, was given a lot of tattoos to help regulate and control this. 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. In BCR this was a serious, serious issue. At present, he's worked a lot on this and mastered it to the point of quick shifts from completely non-vesseling to full throttle beserking, eyes glowing all fiery, horns sticking out of hair, skin on fire, that sort of thing. And then very quickly snapping back to normal. It still leaves burns on his skin that gradually heal (over a faster period of time, due to ability directly below this one), but yeah, it's a good time. And works really well for scaring thieves and scavengers in tombs and temples and shit off without having to actually fight them. Ain't nobody want to be hanging around after they see Max go full demon on them. However, there is occasion that he vessels something too strong for him, while Max is not in tip-top enough mental or emotional state, and holds on to it too long in his Berserker mode, and has difficulty shifting back to himself. He informs everyone who fights or adventures with him that, in the case this happens, then A, run and B, call Dani and Marco to come beat the crap out of him, until he can shift back again. It's still not a perfect ability, but it's much easier to handle than it once was.

→ HEALING/DURABILITY/SPELLWORK TATTOOS | Max vessels p damn hard due to Berserker things, as well as the fact that vesseling is just naturally hard on the physical form. While he is naturally more durable by nature of how his magic has adapted to how it's been used, Max now has a couple different magic tattoos (see 5 and 8 for Healing/Durability, the rest of mostly just boosts) that offer some wards from damage, and some assistance in healing. He's sure as hell not Wolverine or anything, but if some crazy woman backs into him with her Jeep, he'll be okay. Mostly. The spells definitely have their limits, and he's definitely surpassed them many a time, but they at least cover the basics to keep him protected when he's playing meat shield.

→ 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.

→ FIREPROOF | All little demonic hellboys are fireproof, especially the ones who cast hellfire specifically and do a lot of possession/vesselage stuff. Mostly, at least. Well, normal fire isn't going to do much to them.

→ DEMONIESE/DEMON RADIO | Max is fluent in German, English, Latin and Hellspawn. Also hears a fairly regular mental stream of demon chatter going on in his head.

→ VOID WALKING | Due to what happened to him as a child in the Reed compound, Max's mind had sort of always been half forcibly cracked open to the demonic plane, in an incomplete sort of way that just made him constantly vulnerable. Gaining the ability to actually phase into this plane of spiritual existence, walk around in it, and sort of almost be another one of the spirits gave him a means to more cohesively slip in and out of this, thanks to the spirit journey Paya forced him into. This also allows him to see the reality around him from the more magical, spiritual side - able to feel what things pulse with magic, what kind of magic it is, where it goes, where it came from, how old it is, possibly even a signature of who put it there. It lets him reverse-possess as well, jumping into spirits and pulling them apart to look at all the experiences and memories held in however long that spirit has existed for, and the places it has been. It makes tomb raiding and learning the history of a place very easy for him. Where he's actually going is the thin places between the Inner and Outer Rings. While phasing into this space is generally a mental/spiritual more than physical thing, with enough effort and energy, Max can swap himself completely into it, and go poof from the world for a time. However, given his alignment, and the fact it takes him to the Hellside of the Outer Ring more than anything else, it's not a safe place to be with demonic spirits running rampant, and he has to constantly be on his toes to protect himself while there.

→ 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 (or person haaaa) 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, make you feel like molten lava is spreading around right under your skin (because it is), or have a more mentally damaging side of it, gradually cracking a person or beast's mind open to the horrors of the demonic plane :'33333 and driving you batshit. And turning you into a demon/monster magnet. It's a very nasty spell. At the end of it, either you go totally nuts, or your insides melt, or, on some very special occasions, you explode. Though it's also possible to transmit a very mild form of this curse that'll just make someone violently ill for a day. That'll be more what this spell is like at 20%.

→ MAGIC BATTERY | less an ability, more just something Max is good for. Because he has such a high generation of magical energy at any given time (largely due to what was done to him as a kid at the Reed compound, his magical nature is a bit broken), he ends up with a lot of excess that he burns off. It's a large part of why he's so active and why so many of his spells are such high cost, big output things, and end up difficult to control or narrow down (also why he gets so many spellwork tattoos, to help with control and precision). This makes him kind of a powerhouse, and thus, if he's tethered by another magic user (a very, very unfun experience, that is very, very dangerous to detangle from), he can be a very effective magic battery and spell booster. However, it's at great risk to Max, as well as something that's deeply traumatizing to him, because of what the Reed cult had planned to do with him (it's a recurring theme in his nightmares). It's something that would only happen when things are absolutely dire, and when it's done by someone he has a lot of trust in.

→ DEMONIC FORGING | With James' help, Max reconstructed a forge hammer used by and ancient Nordic runic forge master responsible for the creation of many of the powerful magical relics Max had spent about a decade uncovering, retrieving or hiding better than they were previously hidden. They constructed a forge out of the enchanted skull of a dragon, so that it can withstand holding Hellfire in it, and Max develops a new technique to siphon demonic spirits into items - things used as magical totems or weapons. Some of them sort of a little like "I cant be with you all the time to use my demonic destructiony crap to protect you, so pls take this with u, it will fuck things up in my place". He can also put another plane's magic into a weapon, and use the demonic spirit more as a power source, if someone prefers, but that witch would have to be present during the forging of the weapon. Which is sort of a nightmare fuel kind of process to be around. It's gross. The only tool he needs for it is the forge master's hammer, as Max doesn't actually shape the weapons with the metalworking tools - the magic and the spirit going into the weapon or item shapes it, often ending up looking like this or this or this. The only other thing required is an enchanted metal, and a forge that can hold Hellfire without melting. Technically, he could ask a live dragon to just open their mouth and let him forge a weapon inside, but all the dragons from Max's world would have just eaten him on sight. Thus, dead one. Sorry, dragon-friend :(

It should be noted, Max sucks at any kind of scrying or divination, and his summoning skills are eh. Typically, he doesn't summon unless there's a specific demon he wants a specific power to steal from, or to talk to. Given he's such a powerhouse/walking tank, he really doesn't need the rest of the stuff/it would be really OP for me to give him anything else. So, he is precious boom boom explosion baby. He has other boos to do the most meticulous things for him. Also, if you've ever played games like World of Warcraft, that's essentially Max's function in most groups - the tank.

RELATIVE PLANES;
listed by strength in class, from greatest to least (after Demonic class/plane, that is), see graph. it's important to note on this info page, where it says "borrowed" and "host permission", that is something that mostly just applies to teenagers and the young, as their magic is still unstable. max's magic has been stabilized for a long time, and doesn't require another host classed in some of these planes to assist in use - he can use magic from alternate planes at will. however, if there is a witch classes in mechanic nearby that Max borrows energy from directly, the resulting spell(s) will be more powerful/potent

✇ MECHANIC; " The mechanic class possesses magic that can control anything that inherently material and/or man-made and does not possess life, or has possessed life previously." A lot of things learned from James. Heavily used throughout his career while in temples/tombs/ruins, as they are manmade and Max can move and manipulate some of the walls if he tries very very hard. All the boys in his social circle, though, tend to magic-text on their phones, instead of actually typing things. They also magic-hack and snoop on each other's conversations. Sometimes. When they can manage it. Some of them suck at it more than others. By the time Max is 29 and working on the Demonic Forge, he is very near dual classed in the Mechanic plane (it's much easier for adults to do this than teenagers), though not really there. But he has heavily utilized it throughout his adult career and become quite adept.
⊱ UNNATURAL; "The unnatural class possesses magic that can control anything that is unnatural." The Bad Juju class, generally, "bad" magic on the physical. This largely contributes to the void walking and corruption ability. Max deals in shadow manipulation, magic side of disease, and things like entropy - contained orbs of chaos that tend to shred things around them. Like a lil blackhole :'3 Can also be done in wave form. Think Vergil's stupid voodoo purple energy balls in DMC3. I hate those things.

SPIRITUAL PLANES/BORROWED MAGIC;
listed by strength in class, from greatest to least (after Demonic class/plane, that is). as Demonic is a spiritual plane class, so from people classed in other spiritual plane magics, Max can borrow at will, without needing the witch's permission. so from Tris (Spectral), Marco (Demonic), Dani (Heavenly) or Elliot (Necromantic), he can siphon energy from whenever he wishes. From James (Mechanic), he would need approval first.

✴ SPECTRAL; "The spectral class controls magic that affects those that cannot be seen, and are tied to the humane plane." Only before Heavenly/Necromantic (as they're closer on the planes to Demonic) because of all the spirit journeying Paya put him through. But he's still pretty sucky at this too. But mainly used in crossing from physical plane into spiritual/demonic plane (aka, dancing around on the edges of the Outer Rings).
💀 NECROMANTIC; "The necromantic class controls magic that affects those that cannot be seen, and are tied to all that has died or has been corrupted." Sometimes Max can talk to dead people, or sense when ghosts or the dead about around. That's about it.
☩ HEAVENLY; "The heavenly class controls magic that affects those that cannot be seen, and are tied to benevolent spirits." Like... barely capable of anything on this plane. Sometimes feels it when Tris or Dani are getting their mojo going???? But no, angels aren't touching this kid.

DISSONANT PLANES;
things Max cannot do anything with
❧ NATURAL; "The natural class possesses magic that can control anything that natural and alive." Nope, not gonna happen, buddy. Legit, if Max attempts gardening, everything will die. Oops.
❣ HUMANE; "The humane class possesses magic that can control anything that is humane and alive."c Nope, not gonna happen, buddy. Nah.

On a random note, it doesn't really fit anywhere -

→ TELEPORTATION SPELLS | Not something he can just blink and do, it's very time consuming! In the B&M universe, this is a drawn out process, sometimes taking hours or so to get the specifics down right, and the smallest error can be the difference in landing in your friend's house or landing in the middle of the Pacific. You need the coordinates of where you're going, and there's a complex method of drafting glyphs and spells on spell parchment, often heavily reliant on sacred geometry. Max is not great at this, and generally will always ask Dani to draw his spells for him (Dani is the best at this, as he's the best with sacgeo), but he also lays around with his head in Dani's lap while Dani drafts things, so he's decently capable on his own, if he has to be. It would take Max about 20-30 minutes to draft a teleportation spell, starting from scratch. It's possible to make talismans that are reusable to take a person to a specific location whenever it's invoked, and Max has one that will take him directly to Dani's side, when envoked, but they're complicated to make, and he can't do it himself.

Fears, Weaknesses:

FEARS

▸ REED COMPOUND; everything having to do with the compound, being helpless, being held captive, small & dank spaces, bars on doors and windows, people too interested in his powers, human experimentation, torture, violence towards children, still has nightmares about killing his friends. in the dreams, he likes it, and that scares him.
▸ MILDLY CLAUSTROPHOBIC; like what's mentioned above, Max gets freaked out in small, dark places, with no windows, and doesn't like to have doors closed. Most nights, he sleeps with his bedroom door and his windows opened, usually putting up a spell to keep things from entering otherwise. It won't put him into a panic attack, but it'll make him incredibly tense, and start a rising urge to get out of the situation. Any sort of situation where he isn't allowed to leave a place or can't find a means to, tends to make Max very antsy.
▸ POSSESSION; in the sense of completely and fully losing himself in possession or the demonic. Demons themselves Max doesn't really fear, as he tends to see and hear them every day, but it's when they sneak into them and he can't get them out, and the hold gets more and more out of his control that he starts to freak out. So, lack of control of his body or mind, as well.
▸ LOSS OF FREE WILL; so, tethering, being captive, being controlled, all of that. It scares the crap out of him.
▸ HIMSELF; and what he's capable of doing to people he loves. Max is acutely aware of the corruption that exists within him, and constantly feels urges towards violence and cruelty that he sifts through and lets drift to the back of his mind again. He fears those urges building, and fears that he'll become the kind of person to give in to them, and hurt those close to him. Because violence does feel satisfying to him.
▸ DEATH/LOSS OF LOVED ONES; watching his friends die, failing to protect his friends, and now, his daughter. He still has regular nightmares of the boys in the Reed compound dying, and of being the one killing those boys. Sometimes the faces are replaced with Tris, Marco, Dani, Elliot or his daughter.
▸ THE CRAWL; :'DDDDDD Look, it's the apocalypse, it's terrifying. The world as he knows it will be ripped apart and there's nothing he can do to stop it, only prepare. That scares the crap out of him.

WEAKNESSES

▸ 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 Paya sent him on was his constant fear that he couldn't control it. He's much better at it now, but Max is generally always at some kind of risk of a loss of control, more than the average possession/vesselage person would be.
▸ CODEPENDENT; Max is a healthy, function 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 rash 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.
▸ EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE; 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 angry or uncomfortable. He also panics and does extreme things when he's afraid things won't work out, like pressuring James into using his key to take them to Hell, after Marco died.
▸ RECKLESS; given Max functions as the sort of 'tank' for the group, and places diminished value in himself in comparison to protecting those close to him, he tends to have a subpar sense of self-preservation, and will casually put himself into very dangerous situations with little reward.
▸ REPRESSION; Max can't really face personal trauma head on well. He rarely every even mentions anything that happened in his life prior to coming to BCR, and will rarely ever confront what happened to him or what result it's had on his mental or 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. James knows, because he was there, and Dani is the only person Max has actually spoken to about any of it. It's happened in short, quiet moments, late at night, when all the lights are out and he can whisper it to Dani in bed. So, yeah, facing how he'd been a victim is something that severally messes him up, and can cause him to snap into instability.
▸ 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, and 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 very violent as a result. Usually, this is what happens when he runs into cultists or child being mistreated on his adventuring. In times it isn't so obvious of a trigger, Max will just abruptly remove himself from the company he's in and vanish for a while. Typically to the closest area of monster population to get some more violence out. It isn't always something so convenient, but it thankfully isn't severe enough that he's ever hurt a loved one on accident.
▸ LITERALLY JUST THE TANK; aside from things he's gotten the hang of through Mechanic plane, Max is really just the boom cannon of the group. He's not sneaky, he's not good at tradition witchcraft things like scrying or divination or doing cleansing things with sage. He does know some things about crystals and gemstones, but mostly due to Tris' mother giving them to him. If something requires subtly, Max isn't the one to send. He's just around to take hits and knock down walls. Most anything else, he's phoning a friend for.

Samples

Network Sample: Top level from Eudio's TDM with various Network threads (the very last thread, with Harper, was repurposed to be roughly the conversation had before Max invited her to work with him, along with another we did elsewhere) + Another TDM thread with Marco
Prose Sample: A couple prose threads on the Witching Hour TDM. + Prose thread with Tristan.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

things immediately observable!!
GERMAN - accent and features. The accent is very minute, as he's been speaking English since he was about 10 or 11 and it became his primary language at 14, he's now 29. He doesn't make much of an attempt to hide the accent but because he's so fluent in American English and so used to the correct way of saying things, it's very minute, but still present. As for his actual syntax, he's very conversationally the American dudebro, and nothing of German sentence structure ever sticks out when he speaks or writes, though he will be more direct and concise with things.its mostly just the features, the fact his last name is Kiesler, and the tiny bit of accent. If Sherlock is v v familiar with regional accents, his is more the northern German, Hamburg kind.
TATTOOS - max has like five million of them, typically he has his sleeves rolled up and shirt unbuttoned a few spaces, so the forearm tattoos, the collar bone one, the two tiny ones behind his ears, the bambi on on his wrist and white ink ones on his hands would most often be visible. they're mostly very geometric? if he sees elliot richards or tristan clark around, max's tattoos are very similar in nature and theme to theirs.
MUSCULAR BUILD - there's not much in the way of body fat on him, mostly muscle, and more in the sense of working muscle rather than body builder muscle, so he does something that burns a lot of calories and builds muscle (spoilers, his specific plane of magical energy converts into physical strength and muscle mass as a side effect, so lmao he cheats, but he's also basically Lara Croft by profession so he does a lot of combat and idk ancient rock climbing )
JEWELRY - he wears two obsidian necklaces (this and this) that are typically visible, outside of his shirts, and there's a locket that's usually tucked underneath his shirt, but the chain would be visible and the vague outline.
CALLUSES/OUTDOORS DUDE - from rock climbing, weapon holding, short fingernails, dirt underneath nails here and there. he does a lot of outdoorsy working, there will be grass stains on clothes, rips in clothes on knees and things. that sort of stuff. uuuhhhh, phone case is hella? like otter on steroids?
GREAT DANE? - there's dog hair on his clothes, if sherlock can tell from lmao single fibers here and there, it's from a merle colored great dane
EXCESS ENERGY - max likes to move a lot, doesn't like being still, he fidgets and gets bored quickly, and in general has a lot of excess physical energy
WARM?? - max, physically is like fever warm 24/7, or will be once the magic is turned on, but currently, he'll often be acting sort of like he's freezing. he's used to being buzzing with magic that has a side effect of making his body really warm, so with it missing, he feels too cold all the time.
SMELLS LIKE CHRISTMAS - sob im sorry i have no idea what this would tell Sherlock other than that Max owns a lot of candles, but certain smells/tastes are sort of like demon drugs from kids from the Demonic Plane class of magic, and for Max, the smells are: cedar, balsam, juniper, and rainwater. for taste, just peppers. like hella hot ghost peppers. so, for the scents, he owns like 548958034532 candles back home in those fragrances and keeps a lot of cedar, balsam and juniper around him. there's probably some in his pockets, honestly. so he will weirdly smell a lot like christmas. or a lumberjack. plus, peppers? idk.

things he could pick up on after being around max a bit/seeing him interact with ppl
~~MAAAGIC~~ - if he can pick up on that? He uses it regularly and without real subtly, so once the magic turns back on, that'll be a thing
PANSEXUAL/PEOPLE WATCHING? - checks out dudes and girls as they go by, not terribly subtly about it, just casual elevator eyes on occasion. he also tends to just look at people in general, as more of an observancy thing. he people watches.
TINY BIT CLAUSTROPHOBIC - stands close to windows and doors unconsciously, gets just the littlest bit tense when they're closed, will start at any bars across windows for a longer period of time than is necessary, because he really doesn't like them.
SEVERE CHILDHOOD TRAUMA?? - Idk what would be apparent on him that he could deduce that, other than Max tending to be very protective of children, but he also has a two year old daughter at home, so that's another reason for it. if there's anything you see that might suggest it in a tag, feel free to have Sherlock pick up on it
PHYSICALLY PROTECTIVE - if sherlock sees him around tris clark, elliot richards, harper gray or adrien arbuckal, max's postures and mannerisms will come off very defensive and protective, especially of tris clark. also a bit domineering and possessive.
MILD ADDICTION - max regularly smokes and drinks. nothing super hard, but more than just socially. he'd have a bit of cigarette smoke

iiiiiiii cant think of anything else rn and im hella sleepy, ILL ADD MORE IF I THINK OF MORE FFFFF

Edited 2016-01-31 07:27 (UTC)

Witching Hour App

deducible things!! for sherlock!!