max "FUK U I'M A DRAGON" kiesler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burnination) wrote2020-11-01 05:05 pm
burnination) wrote2020-11-01 05:05 pm
INFO PAGE
maxwellkiesler
don't you ever tame your demons.
{stats.
NICKNAMESMax, Bigbad, Germany, Kibbler, Maximilliano, Maxipad, Wellington, Maximo, Maximus, Maximoose, Maxine, Günther, Maxo.
BIRTHDAYMarch 27th, 1996
HEIGHT6'0".
WEIGHT185lbs.
BUILDAthletic, muscular.
CLASSDemonic.
LINEPossession/Vesselage + Berserker.
RELATIONSHIPDivorced.
OCCUPATIONMagic tomb raider, basically.
RESIDENCENomadic??? He keeps an apartment in Hamburg.
BIRTHDAYMarch 27th, 1996
HEIGHT6'0".
WEIGHT185lbs.
BUILDAthletic, muscular.
CLASSDemonic.
LINEPossession/Vesselage + Berserker.
RELATIONSHIPDivorced.
OCCUPATIONMagic tomb raider, basically.
RESIDENCENomadic??? He keeps an apartment in Hamburg.
HISTORY.
ALWAYS KEEP THEM ON A LEASH.
→ CHILDHOOD + REED COMPOUND (THE CULT YEARS)
▸ Born to a single mother (Katja) in a farming community (Holm) outside of Hamburg, Germany. His early life was fairly simple. They were about as wealthy as you'd expect a farm run by one woman to be, but they managed alright. Largely, she dealt more in livestock and more minorly in produce, with several small fields Max played in as a kid. He was a decently happy child, smiled a lot, played with the other boys in the area, got in trouble for a few small fights but generally was amicable.
▸ At age 8, he started to display signs of magical talent, things that were only very minorly present in his family's blood. His mother was capable of a few, tiny Natural class tricks, but nothing that she ever practiced at large, for fear of how her community and family would react to it (this is partially why she lived away from her family and the village she was born in). What Max started doing was far beyond anything Katja was ever capable of. He'd been seen around town talking to shadows, putting his hands in the blacksmith's fire without flinching, telling his friends about hearing strange voices, floating globes of water, setting things on fire on accident. The towns people began to whisper, which worried his mother something fierce. She went looking for help, people to either take him elsewhere and assist in his magic ability or remove it from him, so that he could live a peaceful life. She'd rather the first, as she loved her boy and didn't want to hurt him.
▸ At age 9, that was when the Reed family found Max. They claimed, to Katja, that they'd be taking Max to a special community for people with magic ability, where he'll be trained to control his abilities. They tell her he'll be able to visit during holidays and write her regularly, and once he can hide his abilities from nonmagic society, he can come home to live with her again. Give these people seem very charming, charismatic and wholesome when she meets them, teary-eyed, Katja sends Max off with them to a better life.
▸ The Reed compound was based in remote Ukraine, a large building, very much like a lmao cultist compound, with dormitories for the children the Reed cult was abducting from around Europe. The first year was very normal seeming - the people were friendly, they took good care of the children, and as promised, Max was able to write to his mother, and recieve mail back. Unfortunately, there was always some completely understandable sounding reason for why he couldn't return home on holiday. Only a few cropped up during his first year, so it wasn't difficult to make excuses. What the Reed family didn't tell Max or his mother was that they weren't any kind of school, and the community itself was all related - a cult, specialized in the demonic class, of fairly middling power, though they boasted much greater to the global magic community at large. Frustrated that they weren't capable of the powers they wished to have, the Reed compound in Ukraine was created, and they began abducting children of great ability in the demonic plane to both study and put through tests and rigorous routines that would allow the Reed family to siphon power from their useage. The Reed Cult is also one of many cults dedicated to advancing 'The Crawl', a magical phenomenon that's eating at the barrier between the Outer and Inner Rings, between 'Hell', Earth, and 'Heaven'. The Reeds believe, if they can manage it with the experiments they're doing with these kids, through their possessions, through tethering them, through stealing power or making them into magic batteries, they can control the things that will come through once the barrier has been destroyed. Bad times.
▸ At age 10, that's when things Got Bad. The community became less a nuturing, educational facility and something more aligned with a military compound. They were made to keep strict hours, put through severe training, given much more merciless rules and punishments, and pushed much harder to develop their abilities than the childrens' age allowed them to. It becomes less a thing of schooling and more one of trials, to see how far the boys (about a dozen or so of them surviving) can do. They push the boys into possession and vesseling far sooner than they were ready for, and any boys that fail to hold control of the demonic spirits that they vessel/possess, turn completely to monsters, but are held in cells to use as practice for the other boys, made to fight and kill them. The boys were moved from the comfy dorms into ones more resembling jail cells - about four boys to a room, bars on the windows, and heavy metal reinforcing the doors that lock the boys in. For 5 years, these boys were tortured by the Reed cult and experimented on and forced to vessel demonic spirits far too young, permenantly altering some of their spiritual make up in the process.
▸ Age 11-14; Max watches the other boys drop off one by one, involves himself in a few escape attempts that he and the others are severely punished for, locked in solitary and starved for days. While Max is one of the more noncompliant boys, he's also one of the more talented boys, and thus not used for experiment fodder or, lol, killed off tbh. Several points during this period, he spots James Reed walking around outside their rooms, or around the compound, while Max and the boys are being made to stand in lines like soldiers, performing exercises. He comes to develop a kind of hatred for the boy, both for him being a Reed, and for the fact these people spare their own children from the tortures they visit on the abducted kids.
▸ Age 14, Max is a Berserker; Max has a larger output of power he can channel from the spirits he takes on, though his control of them is a shakey thing, due to how very, very sceptible he is to demonic possession. Eventually, this triggers his Berserker ability, Max seeming to shift completely into full possession, with an absurd output of demonic power, however, since it appears that a demon is in control rather than Max himself, they take it to mean he's becoming fully possessed, and write him off as such, moving Max into a cell to be held for the other boys to be pitted against. A shortly after, about an hour really, one of the boys is pushed in to fight him, and Max, still in a berserking trance, rips the boy to shreds. It's very sad. After, once he looks at the boy's face, tears streaming his cheeks, and hears him say 'Max, please, stop" as he's dying, Max is knocked out of the trance - given he knows the boy, knows his voice, and remembers more of who he is, enough that he can regain his sense of self. As the demonic spirit that had been controlling him fades away from his consciousness, it whispers to him a couple things: 1, where in the building he can find tanks of gasoline, and 2, what supply closet he can find matches in.
With the last measure of beserker strength he has, as the demon is fading, having told him about the gasoline and matches, Max slams against the cell door until it breaks. And dislocates a shoulder and cracks a couple ribs in the process. He goes to find the gas, and the matches, moving quietly at night, though still heavily injured both from the fight with the other boy and from using himself as a battering ram. He waits until it's late at night, nearly morning, about 5am, and goes about either locking, jamming or barricading all the doors he knows Reed family are in, after having coated the carpets and drapes in gasoline. Then, tosses in a match. Max burns the Reed compound to the ground, will all the family members locked into their rooms. There is screaming, there is dying, there is Max not feeling bad even a little bit. He goes around releasing what's left of the other boys, who looks fucking terrified of him, having heard the boy who was sent to fight him screaming, and seeing what he did to the compound itself. Somewhere, along the way, he runs into James Reed, who'd been out of his room when Max started setting fires. Max considers killing him - the demon still lingering in the back of his mind urges him too - but he still has the blood of the captured boy he killed on his hands, as well as so many other possessed he'd murdered for the Reed family's trials. Instead, he grabs James, speaks a few things to him in German (because he refuses to speak English more than he has to), and begins to lead him out of the compound. Given Max is still severely injured, and limping around at this point, James is needed more to help him move (because the fires are spreading, and it's not going to be safe to be anywhere in here.
▸ Age 14, Rescue by Barrett-Crowley Reformatory Recruiter; They both collapse on the snow outside of the burning compound, Max having fallen into a deep, distant kind of emptiness, half mourning what all had happened, and knowing he couldn't possibly go back to his mother with what he is now, and all that he'd done. James, still unaware that Max set the fires, makes a comment wondering how it'd happened. Max simply tells him, in English, "I killed them." James tackles him (he's still lying there half dead in the snow), and they start to wrestle. A recruiter from the Barrett-Crowley Reformatory, an all boys school for the magically inclined, which teaches boys with magic how to fight monsters, happens on them, having been on the trail of the Reed family cultist abductions, seeking out the compound and trying to figure how to infiltrate it, but saw the fire in the distance. The BCR agent collects the boys and takes them away to BCR - the school that will both help them heal and learn how to properly train their powers.
→ BC REFORMATORY YEARS
▸ Age 14-15 at BCR; Given James and Max are still too young to formally start school, and they're both a bit behind on general academics (especially Max), the boys are given a dorm room to share for their first year being housed at the school (neither have a home to return to, and Max learns that his mother passed away from disease while he was away (likely not helped by the realization that she just gave her son to a group of people that never returned him to her)), without any family to return to. They're given chores to do around the school and put in private classes to catch them up to speed on their academics, so they'll be ready for first year. Max and James put great effort into Not Talking About Anything Having To Do With The Compound. Occasionally, they get along decently. Occasionally, they get into violent as fuck fights and have to be pulled apart by teachers. And yet, Max still develops a habit of looking out for James, and generally stops him from doing dumb things or getting picked on by the older boys (given James is kind of freaking weird tbh). It's an odd sort of Stockholm Syndrome the boys develop for each other. Also, unbeknownst to Max, James uses his family's trust fund to pay for both his and Max's schooling. Max was under the assumption that the school had some sort of scholarship system. A few times, Max wakes James up in the night and insists that they leave the school, consumed in fear that it's just like the Reed compound, as his first year there had been very nice - warm, welcoming, kind, talking about training him to control his powers for a better life. He, however, refuses to leave James behind, and returns after 2-5 days each time. Mostly, Max just needs to remind himself that he can leave, and no one will come after to hunt him down and throw him in a cell for it.
▸ Age 15-16, First Year at BCR; They don't have to share the same room anymore, but remain on the same dorm floor. With the inclusion of other peers, now, Max finds friends, or more so, friends find Max - people like Marco, Tristan and Dani aggressively shoving themselves into his life, and Max, while much more quiet, solitary and severe than he was as a kid, had a social side to him as a boy in his home village that had sort of been repeatedly kicked in the balls over the last several years at the compound. But even at the compound, there was a comraderie he had with the other kids, and he starts to develop that with these boys. Despite being a little weird now. Apparently, they liked him weird. Even so, with a growing social circle, affectionate friends that have started to make Max feel like he may have a chance at being actually normal at some point, he still regularly checks in on James. It isn't lost on him that he did, essentially, murder James' entire family. Even if they were sickos and horrible people who tortured him and a dozen plus other boys. He still took a large family away from James and orphaned him. So, part of him feels responsible for him, now. Max still runs away from the school a couple times, just for a few days, because he likes the reminder that he can, and that he's free to. Towards the end of the year, Max loses his V card to Marco, after Marco puts a sticky note on his dorm door that says "MAXWELL IS A VIRGIN" as a joke, unaware that Max is, actually, a virgin 8| So Max goes and bangs him. And is like "ok, I'm not a virgin anymore, fuck u" /slaps sticky note to Marco's cheek.
▸ Age 16-17, Second Year at BCR; James and Max continue to have a lot of fights but also, in general, spend a lot of time together. They have weird rituals, like how Max will hang out much more with Marco, Tris and Dani, he will always sit with James at dinner, and spends certain parts of his day chilling in James' room (because Max's room smells like cedar and juniper and balsam and rainwater and a little bit cayenne pepper (it's a possession/vesselage kid thing, Marco's room smells like a bakeshop's asshole)). Neither of them really comment on this. It's just Is. Meanwhile, the kids have been separated out into their different classes based on what magic plane they're specialized in - Max in Demonic, and James also sorted into the demonic class, more because he felt he should, given his family's specialization despite the fact his demonic plane powers are fairly weak. James doesn't perform well, and it becomes a sort of great tension between the two of them. At some point in the latter part of the second year, Max figures out that James has been paying his tuition, and a fairly huge fight breaks out between them in the halls that's witnessed by half the school. They don't talk for a while after, but eventually, come back to the same routine. A couple days later, James has a nervous breakdown regarding his attempt to force himself into the demonic plane specialization. Max finds him mid-breakdown in his dorm, having gone back to apologize for freaking out on him about tuition, and takes him to the infirmary to get some rest and recovery. Max spends every single day that James is in the infirmary in the the room with him, taking up the chair near his bed as his new home, pretty much. At some point, he slides into the bed with his friend and snuggles him for a long while. They don't talk about it at all, because they just don't talk. Ever. About anything. But he's a physical comfort to his friend. Somehow, James has become the only real family Max has, and he's terrified of losing him.
Outside of James, Max is finally getting a good handle of his studies, as he'd felt very unsteady and in a period of uncertainty and adjustment in his first year. Marco, who he'd already known from being in his year and his dorm hall (and also banging), is in his demonics classes, and has the same line as him - possession/vesselage - and is aggressively friendly with him. Becoming fond of him, Marco ends up one of Max's closest friends, and his excitable personality brings out more life and energy in Max, getting him out there and social and enjoying himself more often. As he meets Tris and Dani, he also gets big into the rave scene in the town outside of BCR campus, sneaking out regularly with the other boys to dance and drink and smoke and get high as a kite and get laid. His new social circle is very, very, very physically affectionate with each other and also very very very sexually active, and he ends up doing the same. None of this translates over to his relationship with James, however. He tends to be a completely different person with James, largely given James knows things much darker and more personal about him than the others do. While he still broods his fair share, he's generally more carefree around the other BCR boys. At some point, this year, Max tethers a demonic spirit, Wodan, that had actually been following him around since his time in the Reed compound, and was the thing that'd been whispering in his head about the matches and gas tanks. It is bad news bears, and it's been slowly sinking deeper and deeper into Max's mind. It's also an agent of Satan/Timothy (an entity actually made up of several entities, and ruler of one of two demon kingdoms that exist in the Outer Ring/"Hell", interested in eroding the barrier between the Outer and Inner Ring, more on this later), wanting to push the corruption inherent in Max further, as he is one of a group of kids features in a prophecy Adrien Arbuckal's people were aware of. He's not only a demonic plane user, but also functions as a defensive wall between the Outer Ring forces and Marco, Tristan and Dani. The goal is to eliminate him as a threat, and use him as an agent instead.
His winter holiday was spent at Tristan Clark's house, in the town outside of BCR, where his mother, Gwynn Clark, lives, and it was a very touching experience, in which Max learned what it felt like to have a home and a family again. The Clark house becomes the one place he feels he could call home, and Ms. Clark starts to call him one of her boys, becoming a kind of mother to him. Max spends subsequent holidays there, so long as he knows James already has somewhere else to go for the holidays. He's unwilling to make James stay on BCR campus alone.
▸ Age 17-18, Third Year at BCR; In his third year, Max really starts to come into his own with his powers and his schoolwork, becoming aptly studious, and the nerves that he'd come to BCR with have mostly faded into something distant that only come up on rare, uncomfortable occassion. Not because Max has gotten over the things that happened to him in his childhood, but because he's found means to drown it into the back of his mind - friends, drugs, sex, drinking, going out to the town for raves with Tris, Dani, Marco and Nic. He's absorbed the whole scene and sort of started to assume it for himself, largely influenced by the boys he spends so much time with. He's still a vastly different person when hanging out with James, but he's become a bit more warm with him as well, especially after James' breakdown in second year. At one point, after one of the raves in town, Max actually tries to kiss James. Which, makes James panic, and James does what he normally does when he panics - punches him. It is the one time James punches Max that Max doesn't punch him back. Things are very awkward for a couple weeks, and eventually they sink back into their typical routine, aka, not discussing anything involving Feelings or real importance. With Wodan tethered to him, Max's demon radio thing has been more intense, and harder to block out, so he's gotten into the habit of indulging more and more into mind numbing escapism sort of things, like drugs/sex/alcohol/raving. :'3 Because he's a super healthy individual. And, of course, he has been telling no one this. Because Max never actually talks about things that are wrong with him or worrisome or painful.
▸ Age 18-19, Fourth Year at BCR; Senior year at BCR is essentially just monster hunting. Everything is either "pass" or "fail" as far as grades go, and the early part of the year has the seniors' first Hunt. They're sent out into the forest at midnight, and given the 'sink or swim' test to see if they've mastered their skills well enough to fight monsters. A senior class has never had a 100% survival rate from the first Hunt of the year. Thankfully, Max and all his close friends survive it and do fairly well, however, Max gets stuck in his berserker trance, after staying in it for too long, and ends up needing to be forced out of it by some friends. Very near disasterous, very near Max totally losing himself to possession. While he survives and continues about his year as if nothing's wrong, Max is deeply shaken by it, which gives the demon linked to him more and more room to wedge itself into Max's consciousness and start to more solidly pry control away from him, having waited this long for Max to develop his powers well enough to be a formidable host. As the year goes on, Max sinks further and further into possession, though hides it mostly well, until he starts to get really bad, and spends a lot of his days being reclusive, sitting in his room and letting his mind run wild with demony thoughts that he can't shut out. Eventually, when he knows he isn't going to pull out of it, and doesn't want his friends from BCR, the faculty that's cared for him here, and James especially to see him decline, he takes one of the magic keys James had made to create portals to "places I've been", and opens a door to the burned down Reed compound. Leaving the key behind as if he hadn't touched it, Max leaves through the portal, with just the things that are most important to him, and huddles into the compound. For a week, he's there alone, 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, starting to forget things that happened beyond the walls of the compound - anything but the agony the boys underwent there, and eventually, their names as well. Just recalling their faces, their fear, their screams.
Eventually, his friends come looking for him, Tris having scryed for him, and James able to easily guess where Max went after hearing "it's somewhere cold and destroyed". James, Dani and Marco go to retrieve Max, and by the time they get to him, it takes some fighting and some holy fire, and a no-holds-barred, full on demon fight between Max and Marco that pretty much levels the area/turns the surrounding woods into an inferno. Plus, some singing and some Jamesing to get Max into any kind of control. And then aggressively Divine Fireing the demon out of Max. It hurts, a lot. It's very hard to get long term demon out of the carpet and/or soul, you feel? The most Max had told any of his friends about his life before BCR had been "I lived with a cult for a while, it was fucked up". At this point, they likely have gotten the whole picture of what happened at the compound. Whoops. Max goes back to BCR and sleeps for like a week straight. And then is really awkward for another week. And then goes up to each one of them and kisses them deeply and clings for a while because they're great and he hearts them. It's also becoming apparent through this to Timothy/Satan that Max isn't really a force he needs to worry about, as he is ridiculously codependent on Tris, Marco and Dani. He plots that taking out Marco will take out Max as well, two birds, one stone. The idea would have been accurate, too, if it weren't for things fate slipped in unexpectedly, being Paya and Brigid, who will come up later.
Graduation, otherwise, goes fairly uneventfully, other than 'congrats, you lived, go be an adult now'. Also, there's a Nic/James/Max threesome somewhere in there, and then James and Max being really fucking awkward for another couple weeks, and then being back to normal and never talking about it again. Like they do. Constantly.
→ POST-GRADUATION + LATER YEARS
▸ Age 20; After graduation, Max has some issues to resolve, so he heads back to Germany. Looks for his mother, for her grave, confronts a lot of the townspeople, sort of horrifies them when he vessels something really fucking 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. There's some fire. No one dies, because Max just wants to take apart their stupid, toxic community and scorch the Earth. He goes to find his mother's extended family, does about the same thing to them. Goes looking for the families of the other boys who were in the compound with him as well, tells them the truth about what happened, because they deserve to know. 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. He spends time away from James here, because he doesn't like him having to deal with the shit his family did to Max and the other boys, but still checks in now and again. Is very shady about what he's been up to.
▸ Age 21; That's not shit that goes unnoticed. Max does some jail time, in a smaller nation, for arson charges after lighting up the village of one the boys at the compound had lived in, and been shunned by for his abilities before being sent with the Reed family. Less than a year, probably more like 6 months, of actually staying at the jail at most, because being caged into a place makes him incredibly uncomfortable, so it's a little bit self-punishing. Max uses it as time to do some hardcore thinking, about his past and the things that happened, and how he wants to deal with this gross amount of rage he's developed for it. He decides it's finished, tells himself he's satisfied with what revenge he did take, and since there isn't anything else he can really do outside of murdering more people, he's going to just not think about it anymore. Because repression 8D he's so healthy. Eventually busts himself loose (with only minor use of magic). As I said, it was a small nation, and just an arson charge, so after he made it out of the country, it wasn't really worth the funds or man-power to go after him. Max just never goes back to that country. After his jail break, he goes back to BCR, by means of showing up passed out drunk on the school lawn. Probably gets slapped by half his teachers, maybe headmistress, who knows. Trains a lot. Eats soup with Adrien. He goes on a few BCR recruiting runs with Marco and Nic, tracking down magical children that could attend BCR. Unfortunately, they run into a lot of parents that have really terrible attitudes about their newly magical children, some going so far as to call exorcists on their totally non-demonic plane children and the like. So, Max ends up punching a few of them. And Marco ends up just shuffling kids into the cars to take to BCR. Nic does a lot of apologizing. They're maybe a little bit accused of abduction. Suffice to say, Max is no longer allowed to do recruiting.
▸ Age 22; Max decides Lara Croft had a baby with Harry Potter, delivered by Constantine, and he is that baby. Basically, magical tomb raider, but not rich and not getting money from his tomb raidering because all the shit he finds or steals from people who ARE going to make money with it (or do some bad voodoo) just magically show up on BCR's headmistress's desk overnight. And if she gets magic locks he can't crack, show up directly outside her office door. Or in Adrien Arbuckal's underwear drawer. Continues to show up passed out on the lawn on occasion. Claims no responsibility for shrunken heads hidden under Adrien's unmentionables. Some of the prettier knick knacks get sent to Dani. Max attempts to do recruitment for BCR (with Marco and Nic). Fails when he punches like 10 too many douche parents and is accussed a little of kidnapping. Whoops. Back to tomb raidering. After his third or fourth tomb raidering expedition, he accidentally wakes up a hella old (possibly immortal?) shaman woman ("Paya", he calls her "Rafiki", and later "Oma") in an abandoned temple in the Andes, and she gets annoyed and punts his dumb ass into a spirit journey to try to teach him to be less of a reckless, clumsy shit. Also, because Paya notices the imbalance in Max, and his strife in struggling between himself and his innate abilities and the demonic spirits he's so terrified of losing himself to. Because Spectral is a distant class for Max, it actually puts him more into the demonic plane than the general spiritual plane Paya spends a lot of time in. Max spends about a month stuck in there, with Paya following him around and prodding at him to get off his ass and figure out his problems. It works pretty well, and 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 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.
▸ Age 23; Max does a bunch more adventuring and tomb raidering, using the abilities Paya helped him with to great success. It's a pretty good time. He sets off again to go find his bros, hunts them down like creepy stalker dude style. Appears in their homes via Dani's teleportation charters, snoozing naked on their couches or lack of couches. Stays for a couple weeks with each, varying, before disappearing into the ass end of nowhere for a while. Gets a magic teleportation charm from Dani to port him directly to the bae whenever he pleases. Aside from that, he fights monsters. Lots of fucking monsters. Does some of it in an officially sanctioned sort of way and some of it in the I'm Going To Wander Into This Dark Cave And Start Making Noise Because I Have A Death Wish sort of way. Also, travels. Travels a lot (with the assistance of James and his magic key thing - he sort of starts using him as a magic taxi).
During this work, he also begins to uncover the inklings leading to the truth of the largest threat to their reality - 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. Max doesn't uncover all of this information, though he finds a lot of hints and vague references and legends he can't find the solid proof for. The missing piece is the Crawl itself. He knows prophecies and predictions of a big Something, and the groups that'd been working against it, but not what it is, why it's happening or when it's coming. And in a sea of prophecies and crazy religions and other things throughout the ages, he doesn't concern himself much over it. O o p s .
▸ Age 24; Ends up meeting a woman (specialized in the Holy class) in Egypt, named Nada, that he becomes completely enamored with, and spends a lot of time going back there. The story goes as such: a new ruined site was uncovered, Max rushed there to get a look around before any of the non-magic explorers messed it up too much, and Nada did the same. On his way out, with a few artifacts in his back, Nada saw him, and assumed he was a theif (pretty much right). So, she backed her jeep into him. Thankfully, he'd had the added durability to his person allowed by his magic and spellwork tattoos, so nothing was really broken on him. As Nada was wrestling his back from him, and Max was lying in the sand groaning, he asked for her phone number. Because he's a winner. Nada was like 'lol, bruh, no'. As she drove off, Max took a picture of her lisence plate on his phone and set to hunting her down, because he really liked that backpack. A couple weeks later, Max showed up in her office at the school in Cairo (much like BCR) Nada works at, bringing her a coffee, and tells her two things: A, this is for you and B, I want my pack back. You can keep the old shit, you win, good game to you and your jeep fender, I just want the pack. They chat some, she shows him the school, and gradually, they spend more time together. For a while, Max settles in Cairo, though still randomly drops in on friends and goes on a few less trips to old ruined places. Eventually, he gets maaaaaaarried.
At some point this year, Max meets up with Harper Gray again (a student from BCR), for the first time since BCR graduation. They have a long talk about what she's doing now, what her life is, and how BCR has been treating her as a sort of under the table agent, which Max thinks is utter bullshit. He tells her as much, and shares a bit of what his life was, a bitty bit, before inviting her to work with him. He was either dating or engaged to Nada at the time. At another point this year, Max meets Elliot Richards, a necromantic (and pickpocket) from the Johannesburg Collective in South Africa, at the late end of 24, after having been married a while, before Marco disappears. Elliot becomes a regular contact for ruin exploring assistance.
▸ Age 25; Gets divorced about a year later :| He has a lot of baggage, too much to bring into a marrige, and there's too, too, too much she can't understand about who he is and why he does the things he does and how he acts, and Max is too fucked up to be willing to open himself up any more than he has. This is also the time Marco has been sucked into literal Hell by actual Satan (aka Timothy, aka the Outer Ring, Hellside), without so much as a note, about four months into Max's marriage, and he pretty much loses it trying to find him, terrified that Marco had been taken by people interested in his powers, like Max had when he was young. Between that, and the absurd level of protectiveness he has for his small group of close friends, it's very difficult for him to communicate to Nada why he's so rabidly obsessed with this, and all of it sort of turns him into a douche for a while. So, she asks for a divorce, and Max finds it understandable. Divorce it is. After, Max goes Fucking. AWOL. At first, he disappears into the weird places of the world, still searching for Marco and chasing leads, but also, picking a lot of fights with a lot of powerful things, one of them being a dragon, mostly tries to burn off his emotional wreckage by letting the demons he vessels go full throttle with their violence and psycho-ness. After, he spends about a month or so living in the back of a really shitty van in Amsterdam, parked under a bridge, and using public bathroom sinks to bathe like a hobo. Eventually, he turns up on James' couch, sans wedding ring, unwilling to talk about it, but at least not living in a van or sort of a little bit trying to get himself eaten. He goes rapidly from place to place in the year that Marco is missing, chasing leads, breaking kneecaps, being generally horrible because that's the kind of shit he is capable of and he does it so that other people don't have to (because other people won't).
▸ Age 26; Max goes out to meet with Elliot Richards in Johannesburg again, and takes him on a ruin exploration, looking for something to help him find Marco. Max doesn't find anything he's really looking for, but Elliot, little thief that he is, decides he wants to try swiping an artifact. This unfortunately gets Elliot possessed by Nyaminyami, and ancient river god/spirit with a vengeful streak. Elliot collapses the second they step out of the ruin, and Max flips his shit. He goes about doing everything he knows to try to purge the thing, and takes Elliot to see several witch doctors in the area. When they seem to clear him of any possession, Max departs, albeit a bit shaken, but believing Elliot is safe. However, the spirit had only hidden itself inside Elliot, making it look like it'd left him alone. In truth, it was planning on using Elliot's body to get itself to the other side of the dam separating the spirit from it's wife - that's the angry part. Elliot's health starts to rapidly decline, looking near zombielike, and he goes hunting for Max. After skipping from one of his friends to another, he finally locates Max, and Max calls Paya to come help. They take Elliot back to the river the spirit came from, and try to purge it into the side of the dam it's wife is supposedly on. However, Paya's power proves to be insufficient, and Max comes up with the idea that she tether him and use him like a magic battery - something he's been terrified of since he realized the Reed family had been planning to do exactly that to him. But to save Elliot, he's willing. They carry it out, and it is grossly painful, and draining, and Max spends about a week after ill and bed ridden, but it works. Everything's groovey again.
Eventually, Marco pops back up, and sets fires in about half the Vatican in the process, before reinventing himself as "Mark Lorraine", as he's now on the run from The Law. 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 :| Aside from that, see Indiana Jonesing, with the addition of stalking down all his buddies again (who he's probably been checking in with (and keeping tabs on because he's a creeper)) regularly throughout his decade of lame, showing up naked on their couches (or lack of couches) in various levels of Sad Sack Of Shit, ranging from Life Is Actually Kind Of Okay Aside From Me Still Being Trash to I Fought A Dragon And Won And That Makes Me Sad. But he does always bring booze and drugs, so. Never say he never gave u nothin.
EUDIO CANON POINT, YO.
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. 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. Max does a lot of looking over the magic relics and things he'd grabbed out of ruins and temples and tombs over the years and the stories of their creation and starts to uncover something about Nordic runic forgemaster from hella forever ago, that created a bunch of these magical items still powerful centuries later. He'd had a forge hammer he used to do this, but it'd been shattered in pieces and lost. So, much of this time is spent looking for those pieces. Max isn't doing the exact same thing as the forgemaster did, just taking the idea and trying to use it to shove demonic spirits into things. It's a hypothetical thing, so it takes a lot of experimenting and a lot of hunting down of specific magic things from specific places and specific monsters. The rest of the year is taken up with that.
▸ Age 27; More progress is made on the forge. A problem they run into is "what can hold Hellfire without melting", and they figure out - dragon. Hahahaha. And since dragons aren't like to open up and let Max make weapons inside their mouths without, you know, eating him, they decide they need the head, or at least, the skull. It takes a freaking huge raiding party of a lot of fireproof demonic people Max knows, but they do, eventually, get that, enchant it, and turn it into a forge that looks like this. Still working on getting the hammer together.
About a third of the way through the year, Max is up in the Scandinavian mountains, hunting down a coven of cultists doing some screwed up magic (more portals to Hell things, or summoning messed up things from beyond the void etc etc), and finds a baby 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". For Saint Brigid, and also, a pretty awesome Celtic goddess. Given Max can't really expect Dani to raise a kid all by himself, as they're both equally clueless as to how to do this, but also don't want to shove the problem off on someone else, Max is convinced to hang around a bit more, or, at least, take Dani and Brigid with when he scoots off somewhere. Also, to tone down his recklessness. Which is a Task for him, but after getting yelled at by Dani a lot, he starts to but a serious effort towards it. Dani takes a teaching job at BCR and Max and James start to get very close to finishing the demonic forge.
▸ Age 28; aka Max Goes To Hell. But first, Marco dies. In a completely normal, boring, simple way - he gets into an accident with a semi-truck and doesn't live through it. DOA. Max screams for about a week straight, probably, and is immediately unable to accept that Marco is actually gone. He becomes hellbent (hahaha geddit) on bringing Marco back, and convinced it has something to do with his trip down to Hell from a couple years prior. EDIT: ASKS ADRIEN TO A: REPAIR MARCO'S BODY AND B: PUT A SPELL ON IT TO PRESERVE IT FROM DECAY BEFORE THEY BURY HIM, BECAUSE HE'S DECIDED MARCO WILL NEED IT AGAIN ONCE HE BRINGS HIM BACK He vanishes, about an hour after the funeral, as is fucking typical of him, only leaving Dani a note that says "I have to take care of something". Thankfully, Tris stays with Dani and Brigid while Max is gone (for about 2 months). Max goes into a panic, forgetting the forge idea because they are out of time, and starts looking into those old, really fucked up, really occult rituals that are supposed to open portals to Hell and possibly let Hell come onto Earth - the kind of mad, messed up magic that Max and Harper and BCR and Grant and Frankie had spent the previous several years shutting down. Max is ready to do all of those things just to get into Hell to bring Marco back. He's desperate and despairing and a wreck, and the last stop before doing something everyone is going to regret is James' house, to ask him if he'll use his key to take Max to Hell. As much as he doesn't want to risk James, he's reached that point. Very reluctantly, James agrees, and they go.
Only to 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, near BCR, where Dani had taken up a teaching job, and slumps back into the house with "I'm so sorry" and "I tried to get him back, I tried so hard". He spends a lot of time with Brigid, sitting at Marco's grave and telling her stories about him, and a lot of time awake at night thinking about what they saw of the Crawl. 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.
Not long after, Tristan finally cracks. He'd been holding together fairly well, enough to support Dani while Max was gone, but once he comes home and the drama of it is over, and Tris has time to himself, he cracks. Not long before Marco's death, Tris had a magical reawakening, coming into his Spectral powers properly, and did a process with Frankie to expediate the development. He'd been handling it fairly well, but with Marco's death, he'd started working more and more and pushing himself too hard, with the very unfortunate side effect of becoming hardcore possessed by a not so friendly spirit that teaches him an ability called Reaping. Meaning, Tristan can rip the soul/spirit out of any sentient being, and shred it to consume it's power. The spirit spends a couple month masquerading around as Tristan, before fucking off to have it's own party. The spirit takes Tristan's body for a week long joy ride through the American south, massacring a small town or two, having Tris show up on the news, hooded, but with one of the tattoos on the back of his hand visible. Max recognizes it, tries to call him, and gets a lot of really gross speaking in tongues and rudeness sent back to him. So, not Tris. Ghostbusters time. It ends with Max having to fight/hold Tris/the spirit's attention while Frankie sneaks around to tackle him, rip the spirit from Tris and devour it, and Elliot binds Tristan's Reaping power permenantly. Tris is a bit unconscious afterwards, and Max carries him back to the house in Alaska to let him sleep it off and heal up (because Max sort of punched him a lot, oops). After Tris wakes up, himself again, and after he's given some time to process what he'd been through, Max gathers all of them together - Tristan, Dani, Grant, Frankie, Harper, Elliot, James, etc - and they tell them about what they saw in Hell. The Crawl, Satan/Timothy, the barriers between the Outer and Inner rings corroding, and everything Max has found in ruins and temples that tell of this threat being something that's been coming since the beginning of magic use. And they are the unfortunate generation that's going to be saddled with it. Time to prepare. The rest of this year, that's what they do. Try to live with the loss of Marco, and prepare for the storm that's brewing. Max is terrified for what it means for his daughter and his remaining friends.
▸ Age 29; FUCKING MARCO SHOWS UP AS A GD GHOST ON HALLOWEEN A YEAR AFTER HE DIED AND EVERYONE ALREADY HAD THEIR MENTAL BREAKDOWNS, THIS BITCH. No, what he actually does is come back to the body Max had repaired and preserved by Adrien, and crawls himself out of his grave, showing up in Max/Dani/Tris' bedroom covered in dirt like a freak, and everyone screams and cries and maybe punches him.
WITCHING HOUR CANON POINT, YO
▸ Age 30 - 35; PREPARING FOR THE APOCALYPSE 8D and raising his daughter, and learning Reave and making so many demonic weapons/magic items, Max is new forgemaster.
▸ Age 36; :D HELLO WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE
( 15 years of bad times here)
- The kiddos team up, Max and Marco combine hell knowledge and group up for the war, A Team from BCR
- Max uses his demonic forging thing to supply the resistance or w/e, protects refugee camps, has goats
- Brigid manifests spectral magic, taught how to talk to ghosts by tris, taught how to sneak around with shadows by Frankie, kept out of the fighting but gets information from friendly ghosts, informs the people, scouts around etc, v sneaky, v clever, v adorable, looks like Merida
- stuff
- things
- lori
- carter!!!
- harper sacrifices herself to send the bad times, becomes a diety, max and marco touch her statue's boobs a lot
▸ Age 51; The circle is restored, humanity starts to rebuild, Dani and Max are goat kings and Brigid is 23 and a cutie with Merida hair and a lot of boys crushing on her that have all been threatened with castration several times by several people.
▸ Born to a single mother (Katja) in a farming community (Holm) outside of Hamburg, Germany. His early life was fairly simple. They were about as wealthy as you'd expect a farm run by one woman to be, but they managed alright. Largely, she dealt more in livestock and more minorly in produce, with several small fields Max played in as a kid. He was a decently happy child, smiled a lot, played with the other boys in the area, got in trouble for a few small fights but generally was amicable.
▸ At age 8, he started to display signs of magical talent, things that were only very minorly present in his family's blood. His mother was capable of a few, tiny Natural class tricks, but nothing that she ever practiced at large, for fear of how her community and family would react to it (this is partially why she lived away from her family and the village she was born in). What Max started doing was far beyond anything Katja was ever capable of. He'd been seen around town talking to shadows, putting his hands in the blacksmith's fire without flinching, telling his friends about hearing strange voices, floating globes of water, setting things on fire on accident. The towns people began to whisper, which worried his mother something fierce. She went looking for help, people to either take him elsewhere and assist in his magic ability or remove it from him, so that he could live a peaceful life. She'd rather the first, as she loved her boy and didn't want to hurt him.
▸ At age 9, that was when the Reed family found Max. They claimed, to Katja, that they'd be taking Max to a special community for people with magic ability, where he'll be trained to control his abilities. They tell her he'll be able to visit during holidays and write her regularly, and once he can hide his abilities from nonmagic society, he can come home to live with her again. Give these people seem very charming, charismatic and wholesome when she meets them, teary-eyed, Katja sends Max off with them to a better life.
▸ The Reed compound was based in remote Ukraine, a large building, very much like a lmao cultist compound, with dormitories for the children the Reed cult was abducting from around Europe. The first year was very normal seeming - the people were friendly, they took good care of the children, and as promised, Max was able to write to his mother, and recieve mail back. Unfortunately, there was always some completely understandable sounding reason for why he couldn't return home on holiday. Only a few cropped up during his first year, so it wasn't difficult to make excuses. What the Reed family didn't tell Max or his mother was that they weren't any kind of school, and the community itself was all related - a cult, specialized in the demonic class, of fairly middling power, though they boasted much greater to the global magic community at large. Frustrated that they weren't capable of the powers they wished to have, the Reed compound in Ukraine was created, and they began abducting children of great ability in the demonic plane to both study and put through tests and rigorous routines that would allow the Reed family to siphon power from their useage. The Reed Cult is also one of many cults dedicated to advancing 'The Crawl', a magical phenomenon that's eating at the barrier between the Outer and Inner Rings, between 'Hell', Earth, and 'Heaven'. The Reeds believe, if they can manage it with the experiments they're doing with these kids, through their possessions, through tethering them, through stealing power or making them into magic batteries, they can control the things that will come through once the barrier has been destroyed. Bad times.
▸ At age 10, that's when things Got Bad. The community became less a nuturing, educational facility and something more aligned with a military compound. They were made to keep strict hours, put through severe training, given much more merciless rules and punishments, and pushed much harder to develop their abilities than the childrens' age allowed them to. It becomes less a thing of schooling and more one of trials, to see how far the boys (about a dozen or so of them surviving) can do. They push the boys into possession and vesseling far sooner than they were ready for, and any boys that fail to hold control of the demonic spirits that they vessel/possess, turn completely to monsters, but are held in cells to use as practice for the other boys, made to fight and kill them. The boys were moved from the comfy dorms into ones more resembling jail cells - about four boys to a room, bars on the windows, and heavy metal reinforcing the doors that lock the boys in. For 5 years, these boys were tortured by the Reed cult and experimented on and forced to vessel demonic spirits far too young, permenantly altering some of their spiritual make up in the process.
▸ Age 11-14; Max watches the other boys drop off one by one, involves himself in a few escape attempts that he and the others are severely punished for, locked in solitary and starved for days. While Max is one of the more noncompliant boys, he's also one of the more talented boys, and thus not used for experiment fodder or, lol, killed off tbh. Several points during this period, he spots James Reed walking around outside their rooms, or around the compound, while Max and the boys are being made to stand in lines like soldiers, performing exercises. He comes to develop a kind of hatred for the boy, both for him being a Reed, and for the fact these people spare their own children from the tortures they visit on the abducted kids.
▸ Age 14, Max is a Berserker; Max has a larger output of power he can channel from the spirits he takes on, though his control of them is a shakey thing, due to how very, very sceptible he is to demonic possession. Eventually, this triggers his Berserker ability, Max seeming to shift completely into full possession, with an absurd output of demonic power, however, since it appears that a demon is in control rather than Max himself, they take it to mean he's becoming fully possessed, and write him off as such, moving Max into a cell to be held for the other boys to be pitted against. A shortly after, about an hour really, one of the boys is pushed in to fight him, and Max, still in a berserking trance, rips the boy to shreds. It's very sad. After, once he looks at the boy's face, tears streaming his cheeks, and hears him say 'Max, please, stop" as he's dying, Max is knocked out of the trance - given he knows the boy, knows his voice, and remembers more of who he is, enough that he can regain his sense of self. As the demonic spirit that had been controlling him fades away from his consciousness, it whispers to him a couple things: 1, where in the building he can find tanks of gasoline, and 2, what supply closet he can find matches in.
With the last measure of beserker strength he has, as the demon is fading, having told him about the gasoline and matches, Max slams against the cell door until it breaks. And dislocates a shoulder and cracks a couple ribs in the process. He goes to find the gas, and the matches, moving quietly at night, though still heavily injured both from the fight with the other boy and from using himself as a battering ram. He waits until it's late at night, nearly morning, about 5am, and goes about either locking, jamming or barricading all the doors he knows Reed family are in, after having coated the carpets and drapes in gasoline. Then, tosses in a match. Max burns the Reed compound to the ground, will all the family members locked into their rooms. There is screaming, there is dying, there is Max not feeling bad even a little bit. He goes around releasing what's left of the other boys, who looks fucking terrified of him, having heard the boy who was sent to fight him screaming, and seeing what he did to the compound itself. Somewhere, along the way, he runs into James Reed, who'd been out of his room when Max started setting fires. Max considers killing him - the demon still lingering in the back of his mind urges him too - but he still has the blood of the captured boy he killed on his hands, as well as so many other possessed he'd murdered for the Reed family's trials. Instead, he grabs James, speaks a few things to him in German (because he refuses to speak English more than he has to), and begins to lead him out of the compound. Given Max is still severely injured, and limping around at this point, James is needed more to help him move (because the fires are spreading, and it's not going to be safe to be anywhere in here.
▸ Age 14, Rescue by Barrett-Crowley Reformatory Recruiter; They both collapse on the snow outside of the burning compound, Max having fallen into a deep, distant kind of emptiness, half mourning what all had happened, and knowing he couldn't possibly go back to his mother with what he is now, and all that he'd done. James, still unaware that Max set the fires, makes a comment wondering how it'd happened. Max simply tells him, in English, "I killed them." James tackles him (he's still lying there half dead in the snow), and they start to wrestle. A recruiter from the Barrett-Crowley Reformatory, an all boys school for the magically inclined, which teaches boys with magic how to fight monsters, happens on them, having been on the trail of the Reed family cultist abductions, seeking out the compound and trying to figure how to infiltrate it, but saw the fire in the distance. The BCR agent collects the boys and takes them away to BCR - the school that will both help them heal and learn how to properly train their powers.
→ BC REFORMATORY YEARS
▸ Age 14-15 at BCR; Given James and Max are still too young to formally start school, and they're both a bit behind on general academics (especially Max), the boys are given a dorm room to share for their first year being housed at the school (neither have a home to return to, and Max learns that his mother passed away from disease while he was away (likely not helped by the realization that she just gave her son to a group of people that never returned him to her)), without any family to return to. They're given chores to do around the school and put in private classes to catch them up to speed on their academics, so they'll be ready for first year. Max and James put great effort into Not Talking About Anything Having To Do With The Compound. Occasionally, they get along decently. Occasionally, they get into violent as fuck fights and have to be pulled apart by teachers. And yet, Max still develops a habit of looking out for James, and generally stops him from doing dumb things or getting picked on by the older boys (given James is kind of freaking weird tbh). It's an odd sort of Stockholm Syndrome the boys develop for each other. Also, unbeknownst to Max, James uses his family's trust fund to pay for both his and Max's schooling. Max was under the assumption that the school had some sort of scholarship system. A few times, Max wakes James up in the night and insists that they leave the school, consumed in fear that it's just like the Reed compound, as his first year there had been very nice - warm, welcoming, kind, talking about training him to control his powers for a better life. He, however, refuses to leave James behind, and returns after 2-5 days each time. Mostly, Max just needs to remind himself that he can leave, and no one will come after to hunt him down and throw him in a cell for it.
▸ Age 15-16, First Year at BCR; They don't have to share the same room anymore, but remain on the same dorm floor. With the inclusion of other peers, now, Max finds friends, or more so, friends find Max - people like Marco, Tristan and Dani aggressively shoving themselves into his life, and Max, while much more quiet, solitary and severe than he was as a kid, had a social side to him as a boy in his home village that had sort of been repeatedly kicked in the balls over the last several years at the compound. But even at the compound, there was a comraderie he had with the other kids, and he starts to develop that with these boys. Despite being a little weird now. Apparently, they liked him weird. Even so, with a growing social circle, affectionate friends that have started to make Max feel like he may have a chance at being actually normal at some point, he still regularly checks in on James. It isn't lost on him that he did, essentially, murder James' entire family. Even if they were sickos and horrible people who tortured him and a dozen plus other boys. He still took a large family away from James and orphaned him. So, part of him feels responsible for him, now. Max still runs away from the school a couple times, just for a few days, because he likes the reminder that he can, and that he's free to. Towards the end of the year, Max loses his V card to Marco, after Marco puts a sticky note on his dorm door that says "MAXWELL IS A VIRGIN" as a joke, unaware that Max is, actually, a virgin 8| So Max goes and bangs him. And is like "ok, I'm not a virgin anymore, fuck u" /slaps sticky note to Marco's cheek.
▸ Age 16-17, Second Year at BCR; James and Max continue to have a lot of fights but also, in general, spend a lot of time together. They have weird rituals, like how Max will hang out much more with Marco, Tris and Dani, he will always sit with James at dinner, and spends certain parts of his day chilling in James' room (because Max's room smells like cedar and juniper and balsam and rainwater and a little bit cayenne pepper (it's a possession/vesselage kid thing, Marco's room smells like a bakeshop's asshole)). Neither of them really comment on this. It's just Is. Meanwhile, the kids have been separated out into their different classes based on what magic plane they're specialized in - Max in Demonic, and James also sorted into the demonic class, more because he felt he should, given his family's specialization despite the fact his demonic plane powers are fairly weak. James doesn't perform well, and it becomes a sort of great tension between the two of them. At some point in the latter part of the second year, Max figures out that James has been paying his tuition, and a fairly huge fight breaks out between them in the halls that's witnessed by half the school. They don't talk for a while after, but eventually, come back to the same routine. A couple days later, James has a nervous breakdown regarding his attempt to force himself into the demonic plane specialization. Max finds him mid-breakdown in his dorm, having gone back to apologize for freaking out on him about tuition, and takes him to the infirmary to get some rest and recovery. Max spends every single day that James is in the infirmary in the the room with him, taking up the chair near his bed as his new home, pretty much. At some point, he slides into the bed with his friend and snuggles him for a long while. They don't talk about it at all, because they just don't talk. Ever. About anything. But he's a physical comfort to his friend. Somehow, James has become the only real family Max has, and he's terrified of losing him.
Outside of James, Max is finally getting a good handle of his studies, as he'd felt very unsteady and in a period of uncertainty and adjustment in his first year. Marco, who he'd already known from being in his year and his dorm hall (and also banging), is in his demonics classes, and has the same line as him - possession/vesselage - and is aggressively friendly with him. Becoming fond of him, Marco ends up one of Max's closest friends, and his excitable personality brings out more life and energy in Max, getting him out there and social and enjoying himself more often. As he meets Tris and Dani, he also gets big into the rave scene in the town outside of BCR campus, sneaking out regularly with the other boys to dance and drink and smoke and get high as a kite and get laid. His new social circle is very, very, very physically affectionate with each other and also very very very sexually active, and he ends up doing the same. None of this translates over to his relationship with James, however. He tends to be a completely different person with James, largely given James knows things much darker and more personal about him than the others do. While he still broods his fair share, he's generally more carefree around the other BCR boys. At some point, this year, Max tethers a demonic spirit, Wodan, that had actually been following him around since his time in the Reed compound, and was the thing that'd been whispering in his head about the matches and gas tanks. It is bad news bears, and it's been slowly sinking deeper and deeper into Max's mind. It's also an agent of Satan/Timothy (an entity actually made up of several entities, and ruler of one of two demon kingdoms that exist in the Outer Ring/"Hell", interested in eroding the barrier between the Outer and Inner Ring, more on this later), wanting to push the corruption inherent in Max further, as he is one of a group of kids features in a prophecy Adrien Arbuckal's people were aware of. He's not only a demonic plane user, but also functions as a defensive wall between the Outer Ring forces and Marco, Tristan and Dani. The goal is to eliminate him as a threat, and use him as an agent instead.
His winter holiday was spent at Tristan Clark's house, in the town outside of BCR, where his mother, Gwynn Clark, lives, and it was a very touching experience, in which Max learned what it felt like to have a home and a family again. The Clark house becomes the one place he feels he could call home, and Ms. Clark starts to call him one of her boys, becoming a kind of mother to him. Max spends subsequent holidays there, so long as he knows James already has somewhere else to go for the holidays. He's unwilling to make James stay on BCR campus alone.
▸ Age 17-18, Third Year at BCR; In his third year, Max really starts to come into his own with his powers and his schoolwork, becoming aptly studious, and the nerves that he'd come to BCR with have mostly faded into something distant that only come up on rare, uncomfortable occassion. Not because Max has gotten over the things that happened to him in his childhood, but because he's found means to drown it into the back of his mind - friends, drugs, sex, drinking, going out to the town for raves with Tris, Dani, Marco and Nic. He's absorbed the whole scene and sort of started to assume it for himself, largely influenced by the boys he spends so much time with. He's still a vastly different person when hanging out with James, but he's become a bit more warm with him as well, especially after James' breakdown in second year. At one point, after one of the raves in town, Max actually tries to kiss James. Which, makes James panic, and James does what he normally does when he panics - punches him. It is the one time James punches Max that Max doesn't punch him back. Things are very awkward for a couple weeks, and eventually they sink back into their typical routine, aka, not discussing anything involving Feelings or real importance. With Wodan tethered to him, Max's demon radio thing has been more intense, and harder to block out, so he's gotten into the habit of indulging more and more into mind numbing escapism sort of things, like drugs/sex/alcohol/raving. :'3 Because he's a super healthy individual. And, of course, he has been telling no one this. Because Max never actually talks about things that are wrong with him or worrisome or painful.
▸ Age 18-19, Fourth Year at BCR; Senior year at BCR is essentially just monster hunting. Everything is either "pass" or "fail" as far as grades go, and the early part of the year has the seniors' first Hunt. They're sent out into the forest at midnight, and given the 'sink or swim' test to see if they've mastered their skills well enough to fight monsters. A senior class has never had a 100% survival rate from the first Hunt of the year. Thankfully, Max and all his close friends survive it and do fairly well, however, Max gets stuck in his berserker trance, after staying in it for too long, and ends up needing to be forced out of it by some friends. Very near disasterous, very near Max totally losing himself to possession. While he survives and continues about his year as if nothing's wrong, Max is deeply shaken by it, which gives the demon linked to him more and more room to wedge itself into Max's consciousness and start to more solidly pry control away from him, having waited this long for Max to develop his powers well enough to be a formidable host. As the year goes on, Max sinks further and further into possession, though hides it mostly well, until he starts to get really bad, and spends a lot of his days being reclusive, sitting in his room and letting his mind run wild with demony thoughts that he can't shut out. Eventually, when he knows he isn't going to pull out of it, and doesn't want his friends from BCR, the faculty that's cared for him here, and James especially to see him decline, he takes one of the magic keys James had made to create portals to "places I've been", and opens a door to the burned down Reed compound. Leaving the key behind as if he hadn't touched it, Max leaves through the portal, with just the things that are most important to him, and huddles into the compound. For a week, he's there alone, 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, starting to forget things that happened beyond the walls of the compound - anything but the agony the boys underwent there, and eventually, their names as well. Just recalling their faces, their fear, their screams.
Eventually, his friends come looking for him, Tris having scryed for him, and James able to easily guess where Max went after hearing "it's somewhere cold and destroyed". James, Dani and Marco go to retrieve Max, and by the time they get to him, it takes some fighting and some holy fire, and a no-holds-barred, full on demon fight between Max and Marco that pretty much levels the area/turns the surrounding woods into an inferno. Plus, some singing and some Jamesing to get Max into any kind of control. And then aggressively Divine Fireing the demon out of Max. It hurts, a lot. It's very hard to get long term demon out of the carpet and/or soul, you feel? The most Max had told any of his friends about his life before BCR had been "I lived with a cult for a while, it was fucked up". At this point, they likely have gotten the whole picture of what happened at the compound. Whoops. Max goes back to BCR and sleeps for like a week straight. And then is really awkward for another week. And then goes up to each one of them and kisses them deeply and clings for a while because they're great and he hearts them. It's also becoming apparent through this to Timothy/Satan that Max isn't really a force he needs to worry about, as he is ridiculously codependent on Tris, Marco and Dani. He plots that taking out Marco will take out Max as well, two birds, one stone. The idea would have been accurate, too, if it weren't for things fate slipped in unexpectedly, being Paya and Brigid, who will come up later.
Graduation, otherwise, goes fairly uneventfully, other than 'congrats, you lived, go be an adult now'. Also, there's a Nic/James/Max threesome somewhere in there, and then James and Max being really fucking awkward for another couple weeks, and then being back to normal and never talking about it again. Like they do. Constantly.
→ POST-GRADUATION + LATER YEARS
▸ Age 20; After graduation, Max has some issues to resolve, so he heads back to Germany. Looks for his mother, for her grave, confronts a lot of the townspeople, sort of horrifies them when he vessels something really fucking 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. There's some fire. No one dies, because Max just wants to take apart their stupid, toxic community and scorch the Earth. He goes to find his mother's extended family, does about the same thing to them. Goes looking for the families of the other boys who were in the compound with him as well, tells them the truth about what happened, because they deserve to know. 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. He spends time away from James here, because he doesn't like him having to deal with the shit his family did to Max and the other boys, but still checks in now and again. Is very shady about what he's been up to.
▸ Age 21; That's not shit that goes unnoticed. Max does some jail time, in a smaller nation, for arson charges after lighting up the village of one the boys at the compound had lived in, and been shunned by for his abilities before being sent with the Reed family. Less than a year, probably more like 6 months, of actually staying at the jail at most, because being caged into a place makes him incredibly uncomfortable, so it's a little bit self-punishing. Max uses it as time to do some hardcore thinking, about his past and the things that happened, and how he wants to deal with this gross amount of rage he's developed for it. He decides it's finished, tells himself he's satisfied with what revenge he did take, and since there isn't anything else he can really do outside of murdering more people, he's going to just not think about it anymore. Because repression 8D he's so healthy. Eventually busts himself loose (with only minor use of magic). As I said, it was a small nation, and just an arson charge, so after he made it out of the country, it wasn't really worth the funds or man-power to go after him. Max just never goes back to that country. After his jail break, he goes back to BCR, by means of showing up passed out drunk on the school lawn. Probably gets slapped by half his teachers, maybe headmistress, who knows. Trains a lot. Eats soup with Adrien. He goes on a few BCR recruiting runs with Marco and Nic, tracking down magical children that could attend BCR. Unfortunately, they run into a lot of parents that have really terrible attitudes about their newly magical children, some going so far as to call exorcists on their totally non-demonic plane children and the like. So, Max ends up punching a few of them. And Marco ends up just shuffling kids into the cars to take to BCR. Nic does a lot of apologizing. They're maybe a little bit accused of abduction. Suffice to say, Max is no longer allowed to do recruiting.
▸ Age 22; Max decides Lara Croft had a baby with Harry Potter, delivered by Constantine, and he is that baby. Basically, magical tomb raider, but not rich and not getting money from his tomb raidering because all the shit he finds or steals from people who ARE going to make money with it (or do some bad voodoo) just magically show up on BCR's headmistress's desk overnight. And if she gets magic locks he can't crack, show up directly outside her office door. Or in Adrien Arbuckal's underwear drawer. Continues to show up passed out on the lawn on occasion. Claims no responsibility for shrunken heads hidden under Adrien's unmentionables. Some of the prettier knick knacks get sent to Dani. Max attempts to do recruitment for BCR (with Marco and Nic). Fails when he punches like 10 too many douche parents and is accussed a little of kidnapping. Whoops. Back to tomb raidering. After his third or fourth tomb raidering expedition, he accidentally wakes up a hella old (possibly immortal?) shaman woman ("Paya", he calls her "Rafiki", and later "Oma") in an abandoned temple in the Andes, and she gets annoyed and punts his dumb ass into a spirit journey to try to teach him to be less of a reckless, clumsy shit. Also, because Paya notices the imbalance in Max, and his strife in struggling between himself and his innate abilities and the demonic spirits he's so terrified of losing himself to. Because Spectral is a distant class for Max, it actually puts him more into the demonic plane than the general spiritual plane Paya spends a lot of time in. Max spends about a month stuck in there, with Paya following him around and prodding at him to get off his ass and figure out his problems. It works pretty well, and 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 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.
▸ Age 23; Max does a bunch more adventuring and tomb raidering, using the abilities Paya helped him with to great success. It's a pretty good time. He sets off again to go find his bros, hunts them down like creepy stalker dude style. Appears in their homes via Dani's teleportation charters, snoozing naked on their couches or lack of couches. Stays for a couple weeks with each, varying, before disappearing into the ass end of nowhere for a while. Gets a magic teleportation charm from Dani to port him directly to the bae whenever he pleases. Aside from that, he fights monsters. Lots of fucking monsters. Does some of it in an officially sanctioned sort of way and some of it in the I'm Going To Wander Into This Dark Cave And Start Making Noise Because I Have A Death Wish sort of way. Also, travels. Travels a lot (with the assistance of James and his magic key thing - he sort of starts using him as a magic taxi).
During this work, he also begins to uncover the inklings leading to the truth of the largest threat to their reality - 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. Max doesn't uncover all of this information, though he finds a lot of hints and vague references and legends he can't find the solid proof for. The missing piece is the Crawl itself. He knows prophecies and predictions of a big Something, and the groups that'd been working against it, but not what it is, why it's happening or when it's coming. And in a sea of prophecies and crazy religions and other things throughout the ages, he doesn't concern himself much over it. O o p s .
▸ Age 24; Ends up meeting a woman (specialized in the Holy class) in Egypt, named Nada, that he becomes completely enamored with, and spends a lot of time going back there. The story goes as such: a new ruined site was uncovered, Max rushed there to get a look around before any of the non-magic explorers messed it up too much, and Nada did the same. On his way out, with a few artifacts in his back, Nada saw him, and assumed he was a theif (pretty much right). So, she backed her jeep into him. Thankfully, he'd had the added durability to his person allowed by his magic and spellwork tattoos, so nothing was really broken on him. As Nada was wrestling his back from him, and Max was lying in the sand groaning, he asked for her phone number. Because he's a winner. Nada was like 'lol, bruh, no'. As she drove off, Max took a picture of her lisence plate on his phone and set to hunting her down, because he really liked that backpack. A couple weeks later, Max showed up in her office at the school in Cairo (much like BCR) Nada works at, bringing her a coffee, and tells her two things: A, this is for you and B, I want my pack back. You can keep the old shit, you win, good game to you and your jeep fender, I just want the pack. They chat some, she shows him the school, and gradually, they spend more time together. For a while, Max settles in Cairo, though still randomly drops in on friends and goes on a few less trips to old ruined places. Eventually, he gets maaaaaaarried.
At some point this year, Max meets up with Harper Gray again (a student from BCR), for the first time since BCR graduation. They have a long talk about what she's doing now, what her life is, and how BCR has been treating her as a sort of under the table agent, which Max thinks is utter bullshit. He tells her as much, and shares a bit of what his life was, a bitty bit, before inviting her to work with him. He was either dating or engaged to Nada at the time. At another point this year, Max meets Elliot Richards, a necromantic (and pickpocket) from the Johannesburg Collective in South Africa, at the late end of 24, after having been married a while, before Marco disappears. Elliot becomes a regular contact for ruin exploring assistance.
▸ Age 25; Gets divorced about a year later :| He has a lot of baggage, too much to bring into a marrige, and there's too, too, too much she can't understand about who he is and why he does the things he does and how he acts, and Max is too fucked up to be willing to open himself up any more than he has. This is also the time Marco has been sucked into literal Hell by actual Satan (aka Timothy, aka the Outer Ring, Hellside), without so much as a note, about four months into Max's marriage, and he pretty much loses it trying to find him, terrified that Marco had been taken by people interested in his powers, like Max had when he was young. Between that, and the absurd level of protectiveness he has for his small group of close friends, it's very difficult for him to communicate to Nada why he's so rabidly obsessed with this, and all of it sort of turns him into a douche for a while. So, she asks for a divorce, and Max finds it understandable. Divorce it is. After, Max goes Fucking. AWOL. At first, he disappears into the weird places of the world, still searching for Marco and chasing leads, but also, picking a lot of fights with a lot of powerful things, one of them being a dragon, mostly tries to burn off his emotional wreckage by letting the demons he vessels go full throttle with their violence and psycho-ness. After, he spends about a month or so living in the back of a really shitty van in Amsterdam, parked under a bridge, and using public bathroom sinks to bathe like a hobo. Eventually, he turns up on James' couch, sans wedding ring, unwilling to talk about it, but at least not living in a van or sort of a little bit trying to get himself eaten. He goes rapidly from place to place in the year that Marco is missing, chasing leads, breaking kneecaps, being generally horrible because that's the kind of shit he is capable of and he does it so that other people don't have to (because other people won't).
▸ Age 26; Max goes out to meet with Elliot Richards in Johannesburg again, and takes him on a ruin exploration, looking for something to help him find Marco. Max doesn't find anything he's really looking for, but Elliot, little thief that he is, decides he wants to try swiping an artifact. This unfortunately gets Elliot possessed by Nyaminyami, and ancient river god/spirit with a vengeful streak. Elliot collapses the second they step out of the ruin, and Max flips his shit. He goes about doing everything he knows to try to purge the thing, and takes Elliot to see several witch doctors in the area. When they seem to clear him of any possession, Max departs, albeit a bit shaken, but believing Elliot is safe. However, the spirit had only hidden itself inside Elliot, making it look like it'd left him alone. In truth, it was planning on using Elliot's body to get itself to the other side of the dam separating the spirit from it's wife - that's the angry part. Elliot's health starts to rapidly decline, looking near zombielike, and he goes hunting for Max. After skipping from one of his friends to another, he finally locates Max, and Max calls Paya to come help. They take Elliot back to the river the spirit came from, and try to purge it into the side of the dam it's wife is supposedly on. However, Paya's power proves to be insufficient, and Max comes up with the idea that she tether him and use him like a magic battery - something he's been terrified of since he realized the Reed family had been planning to do exactly that to him. But to save Elliot, he's willing. They carry it out, and it is grossly painful, and draining, and Max spends about a week after ill and bed ridden, but it works. Everything's groovey again.
Eventually, Marco pops back up, and sets fires in about half the Vatican in the process, before reinventing himself as "Mark Lorraine", as he's now on the run from The Law. 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 :| Aside from that, see Indiana Jonesing, with the addition of stalking down all his buddies again (who he's probably been checking in with (and keeping tabs on because he's a creeper)) regularly throughout his decade of lame, showing up naked on their couches (or lack of couches) in various levels of Sad Sack Of Shit, ranging from Life Is Actually Kind Of Okay Aside From Me Still Being Trash to I Fought A Dragon And Won And That Makes Me Sad. But he does always bring booze and drugs, so. Never say he never gave u nothin.
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. 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. Max does a lot of looking over the magic relics and things he'd grabbed out of ruins and temples and tombs over the years and the stories of their creation and starts to uncover something about Nordic runic forgemaster from hella forever ago, that created a bunch of these magical items still powerful centuries later. He'd had a forge hammer he used to do this, but it'd been shattered in pieces and lost. So, much of this time is spent looking for those pieces. Max isn't doing the exact same thing as the forgemaster did, just taking the idea and trying to use it to shove demonic spirits into things. It's a hypothetical thing, so it takes a lot of experimenting and a lot of hunting down of specific magic things from specific places and specific monsters. The rest of the year is taken up with that.
▸ Age 27; More progress is made on the forge. A problem they run into is "what can hold Hellfire without melting", and they figure out - dragon. Hahahaha. And since dragons aren't like to open up and let Max make weapons inside their mouths without, you know, eating him, they decide they need the head, or at least, the skull. It takes a freaking huge raiding party of a lot of fireproof demonic people Max knows, but they do, eventually, get that, enchant it, and turn it into a forge that looks like this. Still working on getting the hammer together.
About a third of the way through the year, Max is up in the Scandinavian mountains, hunting down a coven of cultists doing some screwed up magic (more portals to Hell things, or summoning messed up things from beyond the void etc etc), and finds a baby 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". For Saint Brigid, and also, a pretty awesome Celtic goddess. Given Max can't really expect Dani to raise a kid all by himself, as they're both equally clueless as to how to do this, but also don't want to shove the problem off on someone else, Max is convinced to hang around a bit more, or, at least, take Dani and Brigid with when he scoots off somewhere. Also, to tone down his recklessness. Which is a Task for him, but after getting yelled at by Dani a lot, he starts to but a serious effort towards it. Dani takes a teaching job at BCR and Max and James start to get very close to finishing the demonic forge.
▸ Age 28; aka Max Goes To Hell. But first, Marco dies. In a completely normal, boring, simple way - he gets into an accident with a semi-truck and doesn't live through it. DOA. Max screams for about a week straight, probably, and is immediately unable to accept that Marco is actually gone. He becomes hellbent (hahaha geddit) on bringing Marco back, and convinced it has something to do with his trip down to Hell from a couple years prior. EDIT: ASKS ADRIEN TO A: REPAIR MARCO'S BODY AND B: PUT A SPELL ON IT TO PRESERVE IT FROM DECAY BEFORE THEY BURY HIM, BECAUSE HE'S DECIDED MARCO WILL NEED IT AGAIN ONCE HE BRINGS HIM BACK He vanishes, about an hour after the funeral, as is fucking typical of him, only leaving Dani a note that says "I have to take care of something". Thankfully, Tris stays with Dani and Brigid while Max is gone (for about 2 months). Max goes into a panic, forgetting the forge idea because they are out of time, and starts looking into those old, really fucked up, really occult rituals that are supposed to open portals to Hell and possibly let Hell come onto Earth - the kind of mad, messed up magic that Max and Harper and BCR and Grant and Frankie had spent the previous several years shutting down. Max is ready to do all of those things just to get into Hell to bring Marco back. He's desperate and despairing and a wreck, and the last stop before doing something everyone is going to regret is James' house, to ask him if he'll use his key to take Max to Hell. As much as he doesn't want to risk James, he's reached that point. Very reluctantly, James agrees, and they go.
Only to 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, near BCR, where Dani had taken up a teaching job, and slumps back into the house with "I'm so sorry" and "I tried to get him back, I tried so hard". He spends a lot of time with Brigid, sitting at Marco's grave and telling her stories about him, and a lot of time awake at night thinking about what they saw of the Crawl. 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.
Not long after, Tristan finally cracks. He'd been holding together fairly well, enough to support Dani while Max was gone, but once he comes home and the drama of it is over, and Tris has time to himself, he cracks. Not long before Marco's death, Tris had a magical reawakening, coming into his Spectral powers properly, and did a process with Frankie to expediate the development. He'd been handling it fairly well, but with Marco's death, he'd started working more and more and pushing himself too hard, with the very unfortunate side effect of becoming hardcore possessed by a not so friendly spirit that teaches him an ability called Reaping. Meaning, Tristan can rip the soul/spirit out of any sentient being, and shred it to consume it's power. The spirit spends a couple month masquerading around as Tristan, before fucking off to have it's own party. The spirit takes Tristan's body for a week long joy ride through the American south, massacring a small town or two, having Tris show up on the news, hooded, but with one of the tattoos on the back of his hand visible. Max recognizes it, tries to call him, and gets a lot of really gross speaking in tongues and rudeness sent back to him. So, not Tris. Ghostbusters time. It ends with Max having to fight/hold Tris/the spirit's attention while Frankie sneaks around to tackle him, rip the spirit from Tris and devour it, and Elliot binds Tristan's Reaping power permenantly. Tris is a bit unconscious afterwards, and Max carries him back to the house in Alaska to let him sleep it off and heal up (because Max sort of punched him a lot, oops). After Tris wakes up, himself again, and after he's given some time to process what he'd been through, Max gathers all of them together - Tristan, Dani, Grant, Frankie, Harper, Elliot, James, etc - and they tell them about what they saw in Hell. The Crawl, Satan/Timothy, the barriers between the Outer and Inner rings corroding, and everything Max has found in ruins and temples that tell of this threat being something that's been coming since the beginning of magic use. And they are the unfortunate generation that's going to be saddled with it. Time to prepare. The rest of this year, that's what they do. Try to live with the loss of Marco, and prepare for the storm that's brewing. Max is terrified for what it means for his daughter and his remaining friends.
▸ Age 29; FUCKING MARCO SHOWS UP AS A GD GHOST ON HALLOWEEN A YEAR AFTER HE DIED AND EVERYONE ALREADY HAD THEIR MENTAL BREAKDOWNS, THIS BITCH. No, what he actually does is come back to the body Max had repaired and preserved by Adrien, and crawls himself out of his grave, showing up in Max/Dani/Tris' bedroom covered in dirt like a freak, and everyone screams and cries and maybe punches him.
▸ Age 30 - 35; PREPARING FOR THE APOCALYPSE 8D and raising his daughter, and learning Reave and making so many demonic weapons/magic items, Max is new forgemaster.
▸ Age 36; :D HELLO WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE
( 15 years of bad times here)
- The kiddos team up, Max and Marco combine hell knowledge and group up for the war, A Team from BCR
- Max uses his demonic forging thing to supply the resistance or w/e, protects refugee camps, has goats
- Brigid manifests spectral magic, taught how to talk to ghosts by tris, taught how to sneak around with shadows by Frankie, kept out of the fighting but gets information from friendly ghosts, informs the people, scouts around etc, v sneaky, v clever, v adorable, looks like Merida
- stuff
- things
- lori
- carter!!!
- harper sacrifices herself to send the bad times, becomes a diety, max and marco touch her statue's boobs a lot
▸ Age 51; The circle is restored, humanity starts to rebuild, Dani and Max are goat kings and Brigid is 23 and a cutie with Merida hair and a lot of boys crushing on her that have all been threatened with castration several times by several people.
{relations.
→ james reed. known from the reed compound, love/hate relationship? max looks out for him a lot.
→ marco lorin. one of his best friends from bcr, fellow demonic class/vesselage line student. marco is excitable and weird and max hearts his stupid face.
→ dani davidson. one of his bcr bffs, this one he loves a whole bunch, regularly snuggled/sexed/raved with. dani's one of the few that can calm him from berserker trance. the lap he collapses into when everything is terrible.
→ tris clark. bcr bff circle. precious baby boy, let him hold your face and make your bad days go away. they smoke and they shoot the shit and max tells him he's pretty and pets his hair. just be happy, tris. pls.
→ nic santos. townie from the village near bcr, makes the beesssttt drugs. max knows her from rave scene, and hangs with her and tris a bunch. they did that jackson/isaac/erica scene from twoof, i'm jussayin.
→ moose. max's big, lazy great dane and adventure pal. she goes with him on his hiking and tomb raidering trips.
{abilities.
→ POSSESSION/VESSELAGE | Max 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.
→ BESERKER | Max basically tap dances all over the line of 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. V hard to control, though. Starts physically shifting into the demon he's channeling.
→ VOID WALKING | Max phases into the demonic plane, usually on a spiritual level, occasionally physically to hide there. Allows possession jumping from demonic spirit to spirit, and preception of magic presence and origins etc. See more in tl;dr write up.
→ HELLFIRE | What it sounds like. Fire. Like, extra bad fire. Soul burning fire.
→ CORRUPTION | V nasty spell, either rots/melts your insides, or makes you batshit over time. Potentially, explodes you.
→ READ MORE | There is a full write up of powers/abilities here, and his magic tattoos offer him some other neat things.
→ BESERKER | Max basically tap dances all over the line of 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. V hard to control, though. Starts physically shifting into the demon he's channeling.
→ VOID WALKING | Max phases into the demonic plane, usually on a spiritual level, occasionally physically to hide there. Allows possession jumping from demonic spirit to spirit, and preception of magic presence and origins etc. See more in tl;dr write up.
→ HELLFIRE | What it sounds like. Fire. Like, extra bad fire. Soul burning fire.
→ CORRUPTION | V nasty spell, either rots/melts your insides, or makes you batshit over time. Potentially, explodes you.
→ READ MORE | There is a full write up of powers/abilities here, and his magic tattoos offer him some other neat things.
{contact.
TL;DR SUMMARY
» hella german
» abducted at 9 yr/old by a cult and vesseled a butt ton of demons for like 5 years and it was sort of torture and not all the boys lived and it was really terrible p much
» and then max burned that mutha down
» rescued from freezing to death in the snow and taken to really fucking dark hogwarts where people die a lot but mostly learn how to bring monsters to heel
» magic boy, mainly demonic class focus, specialized in possession/vesseling, sometimes goes into berserker trance and it's really hard to tell that he's not actually possessed woops
» basically, he yanks demonic spirits into his body, then uses their powers for w/e the fuck he wants. sometimes it's really hard to keep them from taking over. he's not lost to the void yet, though, yolooooo
» this version is 26, see the babby school boy one here
» and then he grew up and decided he was the baby of lara croft/indiana jones/harry potter/constantine and now he raids tombs and magic places to A, solve magic problems B, punch people who try to steal shit from them C, relocate dangerous bad mojo stuff to safe places aka BCR/Evil Hogwarts.
» this one time he woke up an incan shaman and she punched him into the spirit world for like a month and it sucked, but it turned out ok tbh
» this one other time he got married and then got divorced not even a year later, oops.
» is a manchild, likes adventure and playing bond in monaco with v expensive cars, him and marco are dudebros, it's sad, they unironically own dinosaur toys
» boom boom demon fire and explosions
» throws cats at people having sex and sends grant too many dick pics
TATTOO INVENTORY
click to see larger resolution
BOTH FOREARMS | SPELLWORK INK
( 1. 4th year BCR, as shown, done by Dani before the first hunt.
Purpose: Anchor/Vesselage Protection, when active: the center
piece heating up to a red, embery sort of color, and expanding along
the lines outward until the entire thing is lit up on both arms, and
that's the point when max is at critical possession teetering.
At TYL canon point, they tend to go from from blank and inactive
to completely 100% flared up in a snap, because Max rides hard. )
COLLAR BONES (part hidden when inactive) | SPELLWORK INK
( 3. Age 22, area outline in red always visible, done by
Paya/'Rafiki', as shown, after accidental demon-spirit journey.
Purpose: Amplifier/Tether/Protection. This is for Max's Void
Walking ability. When he starts to use it, the upper part of this tattoo
starts to become visible, on his neck and upper shoulders. It was designed
to amplify Max's perception while in the demonic plane, tether him to his
physical body, so he's less at risk of getting lost in there, as well
as protect him from the ambient demonic spirits who like to get all up
on him while he's hanging out in their space. Incredibly useful if/when
he physically phases into the demonic plane. )
BACK OF LEGS | SPELLWORK INK
( 5. Age 23, done by Dani, as shown, after Max gets hurt like 12 times too
many tomb raidering.
Purpose: Damage Absorbtion; While Max is very durable, and has a boost
from demonic energies, this mark does a lot of the work for him, especially
with more minor, day to day boo-boos. The spell in the ink absorbs trauma done
to Max's body that would normally result in injury, like shock absorption,
appearing in places directly over where his body would have taken injury if the
ward didn't absorb it. The more it absorbs, the farther the ink will grow,
and when it reaches the limit of what it can cover, Max's skin starts to
crack along the lines of the tattoo. Ouchie. )
LEFT HIP/THIGH | SPELLWORK INK
( 7. Age 25, done by Dani, as shown, after Marco has been missing for
1 month.
Purpose: Demonic Shift, each mandala is for each of the default demonic forms he can take
LEFT PECTORAL | NORMAL INK
( 9. Age 26, done by Dani, for Dani, as shown, after Marco
gets back from hell and Tris leaves the Vatican. Normal ink. It doesn't
do anything special, just a normal tattoo. He just loves Dani, ok? )
BACK OF NECK | SPELLWORK INK
( 11. Age 21, as shown, done by Dani.
Purpose: Mechanic plane amplifier. )
RIGHT SIDE, OVER RIBS | SPELLWORK INK
( 13. Age 22, done by Dani. About 6" long. for James Reed.
The placement is directly over where James' hand was on Max's side when he was
supporting him while helping him escape the burning down Reed compound. Max
didn't ask for the little heart to be there, Dani did that without telling him 8|
But it's true, he hearts him, Max is gross sentimental and Dani knows it.
Doubles as Mechanic plane amplifier.)
RIGHT OUTER SIDE OF WRIST | NORMAL INK
( 15. Age 20, done by Dani, outer edge of wrist,
normal ink.
For Marco & Tris. Tris is Bambi, Marco is Thumper. )
BEHIND RIGHT & LEFT EAR | SPELLWORK INK
( 17. Age 25, done by Dani. About 3/4" long.
Necromantic plane amplifier. )
BACK, ACROSS SHOULDERS | SPELLWORK INK
( 2. 4th year BCR, done by Dani just post graduation.
Purpose: Energy absorbtion and containment. The lines start to look
like they're vibrating the more energy he has stored. At critical mass or
w/e, it'll look like the cubes and things are shifting around on his skin,
and the central designs are pulsing, and the lines surrounding them are
rotating/spinning, sort of in orbit. )
TOP OF BOTH HANDS | WHITE SPELLWORK INK
( 4. Age 23, done by Dani, magicy white ink
lines while inactive. Looks like a weird total abscense of pigment in his skin,
not raised. Glows in florescent lighting 8D
Purpose: Hellfire Speed-cast/Amplifier/Precision. When casting Hellfire,
the lines strike up like fire running along a wick,until the whole thing is
glowing ember orange-red. Burns if someone who isn't Max (or, in general,
fire-proof) touches it while active. Boom boom, muthafucka. Also grants
more precise control. Max can light a cigarette with Hellfire, without
blowing his/your face off. Skills, yo. Though, it'll look like he's giving
everyone the finger, due to the focus line being where it is, oops :| )
BOTH PALMS | WHITE SPELLWORK INK
( 6. Age 25, done by Paya, magicy white ink like the Hellfire tattoo.
Purpose: Corruption Focus. Corruption has sort of a wide range of
generally horrible, gross shit that it can do, and Max had a difficult time
trying to narrow down and specify which things he wanted to do when. When
active, the white lines fill in with the color shown above, like water
flooding into ditches carved into a flat surface. Like this. But,
the designs in the center circle shift and rearrange, and it gives Max
a specific pattern to visualize for a specific aspect and intensity to
cast the spell with. )
STERNUM & STOMACH | SPELLWORK INK
( 8. Age 26, done by Dani, as shown, while Max was off breaking
kneecaps and getting arrested a lot and into all kinds of trouble.
Purpose: Healing Ward. Normally, Dani does all the healing Max needs
on his too reckless person. This tattoo, when effectively focused on by Max,
(and possibly remotely focused on by Dani?) will pulse with a white outline,
and start to boost Max's cellular regeneration rate, speeding up his healing. )
RIGHT CALF/ANKLE/FOOT | SPELLWORK INK
( 10. Age 20, done by Dani.
Purpose: Unnatural plane amplifier. )
INSIDE OF LEFT BICEP | SPELLWORK INK
( 12. Age 23, done by Paya.
Purpose: Spectral plane amplifier. )
INSIDE OF LEFT PINKY FINGER | NORMAL INK
( 14. Age 19, done by Nic, for Nic, as shown, just before Max left after
graduation. Normal ink. )
RIGHT SIDE OF ASS/HIP | NORMAL INK
( 16. Age 26 (like two weeks ago), done by some random
tattoo artist in LA, on the right side of Max's ass, closer to the hip, like 2" long.
Normal ink. Tris got Max hella drunk and convinced him to tattoo Luci to his ass
:| Y e p .)
lumberjack meets indiana jones meets hobo, the max kiesler aesthetic
^ the berserker control cuffs james made for max -
there are two
^ magic backpack made by james - it holds as much
as a small closet, but only weighs 20lbs at most
^ max has this shirt in eudio, he wears it
around witch haus with nothing but boxer briefs
^ he wears this p often, actually, esp if
just going out on a hike with the dog or around the city
^ legit owns this beanie, wears it a lot, it looks
like it's been to hell and back
[NSFW] max's wallet photos gallery
POWERS, PART 1 - DEMONIC PLANE
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 firey, 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 | 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) 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.
→ 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 (Angungol, formally). Also hears a fairly regular mental stream of demon chatter going on in his head.
→ VOID WALKING | This one time Max woke up a really old shaman, who slapped him into a spirit journey, which, because he was less spectral and more demonic plane, ended up being a month long dance through the demonic plane, while gross nightmare fuel things hissed in his ear and talked about skinning him alive and wear him like a meat bag 8D It was p great. But it helped his transitioning as far as vesseling and mainly berserking goes a lot. 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. 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. Also, finding booby traps. You know how them ancient magic bros loved their booby traps, we've all seen Indiana Jones, we know how this goes. While phasing into the demonic plane is generally a mental 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. This little trick is also hella dangerous, because every demony thing close to him will immediately know he's physically there, and be all up on him. Since it's a spiritual plane, he relies more on his natural power to keep himself safe, but yeah. That's a bitch, and it's not a fun place to be, but can be very useful. However, his mind is still cracked open to all things demonic, so, on a day to day basis, Max will see gross demonic things just hanging out on the sidewalk, or hear them screeching in his ear, etc.
→ 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 fucking horrors of the demonic plane :'33333 and driving you gd batshit. And turning you into a demon/monster magnet. It's a nasty spell, u don't want this shit. At the end of it, either you go totally nuts, or your insides melt, or, on some very special occasions, you explode 8D So, basically, if you pissed Max off, and he gives you a pseudo-friendly slap in the chest before he leaves, pls go see a priest immediately, or your insides and/or mind is not going to be having a good time. He can, however, mostly control the range of horrible he inflects from just 'i'm going to make you want to die for a day' to 'i'm going to make you legitimately melt from the inside out'. The latter he will generally not use on people. ............Much. :|
→ 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.
AGE 28+:
→ DEMONIC FORGING | With James' help, Max reconstructed a forge hammer used by and 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. 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 forgemaster'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 :(
AGE 34+:
→ REAVE | Max takes hold of a demon, monster or even human, and both physically and spiritually flings them into the chaos of the Hellside Outer Ring, to be shredded down to their particle make up by the elements. He can also use this to pull a friend into the place he goes to for him Void Walking ability, where he more just hides in the edges of the Inner and Outer rings. It's a dangerous place there, so he can't really leave anyone there or they'll either be snatched up by wandering malevolent spirits, or sucked out into the chaotic void of the Outer Ring. In a game, this would operate more as just "feeding my enemies to the void between worlds" or "hiding right at the edges of being here and being not here". Max would not be able to actually go anywhere, just hide for a little bit.
AGE 40+:
IDEFK
AGE 50:
IDEFK, BUTTS and looking hot for 300 years or something
Also, Max fucking 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.
POWERS, PART 2 - ALTERNATE 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, plus, fucking with locks on things, because Max is a bad person like that. Also, heavily borrowed from while in temples, as they are manmade and Max can move and manipulate some of the walls if he tries very very hard. It's sort of hit and miss. He still can't fix Tristan's stupid ass screen door. Of their group, Max tends to be the most experienced one in this plane outside of James, who is specialized in the Mechanic plane. Mainly due to that - it's James, and Max spends a lot of his time around him and in his life and poking at his things. 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 heavily 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.
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.
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 v 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 as 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 talismens that are reuseable to take a person to a specific location whenever it's envoked, and Max has one that will take him directly to Dani's side, when envoked. They're complicated to make, and he probably can't do it himself.