max "FUK U I'M A DRAGON" kiesler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burnination) wrote2016-09-25 06:29 pm
burnination) wrote2016-09-25 06:29 pm
CHARACTER HISTORY WRITE UP;
There's a much, much longer history section that covers all the little details of Max's life over yonder, only read that if you have butt tons of time on your hands.
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. The next five years are spent preparing for the apocalypse - raising his daughter, becoming the new magic Forgemaster, learning Reave, and dreading the future, you know how it goes. By the time the apocalypse kicks in, Max is 36, Dani is 35, and Brigid is 8.
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. The next five years are spent preparing for the apocalypse - raising his daughter, becoming the new magic Forgemaster, learning Reave, and dreading the future, you know how it goes. By the time the apocalypse kicks in, Max is 36, Dani is 35, and Brigid is 8.