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max "FUK U I'M A DRAGON" kiesler ([personal profile] burnination) wrote2018-11-20 06:27 pm

Duplicity History Write up

GOT A SKULL & CROSSBONES
ON HIS CHEST

( Maxwell Kiesler from BOYS & MONSTERS )


you are a fever (you ain't born typical).
youth: in which an unfortunate foundation is set.

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

The Reed family was more of a cult than anything else, boasting middling power with the Demonic plane, and seeking to advance it further through several means, the most detrimental being, advancing a magical phenomenon known as The Crawl (which will be detailed below, in World Information). They sought to collect young children who'd developed impressive levels of Demonic power at very early stages in their life, like Max, and went around Europe, Asia and the Middle East running the same con they'd played Katja with. For the first year, the children were taken to the Reed compound located in remote Ukraine, and treated relatively well, as if this "school" was exactly as advertised. They were trained in the basics of magic, and taught the simple processes of possession and vesseling that some users of the Demonic plane specialize in, or develop their "Line" in. However, after the first year, this became more of a prison than a school. The children (all boys) were moved into small group dorm rooms, underground, with barred doors and strictly guarded and monitored.

Their "classes" became more hands on than theory, and the boys were forced to begin vesseling powerful demonic spirits at far too young an age than is healthy, as just the act of vesseling tends to be very hard on the body and mind of even advanced teenagers. Not all boys made it, and in fact, many either died or became completely, irrevocably possessed, twisted into corrupted monsters controlled by the demonic spirit that had taken them. Those boys were locked into cells and later used as combat and spell practice for the boys still surviving and holding their autonomy. Many of the surviving boys were made to fight and kill the corrupted boys. They performed experiments on the boys, seeking to find ways to siphon their powers from them, or to use them as gateways to the Demonic planes/Outer Ring, and even to tether the children like regular magic users would tether monsters to sap them of power, hold them as minions under their command, and use them as magic batteries (Max never actually experienced that tethering within the compound, and wouldn't even really realize that's what was being attempted until later in life, during studies at BCR). This went on for five years, until Max was 14, and given he'd been one of the eldest surviving boys, he became sort of a big brother figure to the others remaining. Because of this abuse of magic, and Max's young age, he would also develop a bit of magical, demonic corruption that would be attached to his spirit for the rest of his life.

During one a session of particularly violent vesseling of a particularly powerful demon, Max's 'Berserker' Line manifested, which allows Max to essentially tip toe all along the line of full possession and corruption, without actually stepping over and losing complete control of himself. A lot like the term suggests, he experiences a massive boost in the power he can use from the demon he's vesseling, and the amount of damage and injury he can take before being incapacitated, often fighting through broken bones and mortal wounds (and then needing a healer really badly). However, given this is a Line that not many are capable of (Max wouldn't have been if not for the corruption he'd acquired through the Reed's treatment), and the fact Max begins to physically shift into the demon he's vesseling when this occurs, it looks a lot like full possession.

Thus, he was put into a cell like the others, and another boy was sent to fight him. As Max was a bit out of his mind at the time, and having great difficulty coming out of the trance, he sadly ended up very violently killing the other boy. He came to to see the boy bleeding out in his hands, begging him to stop. Fill with grief and rage (he'd known the boy, he'd been like a little brother), Max uses the spirit still inside him to escape his cell, and the same spirit helps him to locate where the gasoline to fuel the compound trucks and jeeps are. During the night, he locks the Reeds into their rooms as they slept, spread gasoline throughout, and then lit the compound up with Hellfire, burning the family alive in their beds. He goes to release the other captive boys from their dorms, who all look pretty terrified at Max and what he's done, though they escape the facility into the wilderness all the same. One Reed boy had been out of his room at the time, and gets stuck in the hallways - James Reed, who Max had seen around the complex, but didn't know personally. The Reed children didn't have much hand or even awareness of what was happening to the abducted kids. Reluctantly, Max saves him, and, sort of, is saved by James as well, given he wasn't in physical shape to make it out by himself. They collapse into the snow outside the compound, and when James looks at the inferno that was his home and asks what happens, Max tells him he'd lit the fires. James tackles him, and while they're rolling around in the snow, an agent from the Barrett-Crowley Reformatory, who'd been tracking the Reed family, comes up on them, pulls them apart, and takes them both to BCR - an actual school for the magically inclined, that would take proper care of the boys, and train them in their powers.

cigarettes and tiny liquor bottles (the city's ours until the fall).
barret-crowley reformatory: in which max survives teenage years due to a lot of drugs, sex and partying.

Unfortunately, Max learns that his mother had fallen ill and passed away, with the grief of having lost her son, while he'd been held captive, before he'd escaped. With no family to return to for either boy, James and Max are given a dorm room to share on BCR campus.

Though they aren't yet old enough to start their first year of school there, the kids are given private tutoring to catch them up academically, so they'll be ready the following year. Max and James do not talk about what happened at the compound, and aren't entirely sure how to navigate each other regardless. There's a lot of silence, several fights, a lot of bickering and quiet loathing, though mixed with a strong guilt over having been responsible or partly responsible for destroying the others life. It's an odd kind of non-communication they develop, and though they don't particularly like each other, they still help each other avoid being squinted at by the school psychologists that are sent to evaluate them, given the traumatic place they'd come from. Max begins to learn small things about James, and James begins to do the same with Max, and in a bizarre way, with how they're the only two that really understand what the other came from, they become the only family one another has. Over the course of the five years they spend at BCR, though they only really discuss the Reed compound once, and it's a very explosive discussion (when Max learns James had been using the Reed trust fund to pay for both of their tuition), James becomes a brother to Max. When he's feeling unstable, or having too many nightmares, he sneaks across the dorm halls and goes to pass out on James' floor, and there's a comfort in that, even if it's never discussed. They'll continue that sort of friendship into their adult years.

During the first one to three years Max spends at BCR, he often runs off at night, when he starts to get too tense, and too claustrophobic, and will be gone for days at a time, less because he doesn't like BCR (he does), and more because he feels the intense need to remind himself that he can. He isn't a prisoner here. Once they're officially starting classes with the other students, Max meets Marco Lorin, who would become his best friend later, and in his second official school year, he meets Tristan Clark and Dani Davidson, the two other parts of the group that would be a large influence on his life. These three boys, and James, are essentially the only thing that get Max to a point of mental and emotional health that he actually survives into adulthood, and starts to become more of the kid he was before the Reed family. They do what teenage boys do - the get in trouble, they horse around, the break rules, and they do a lot of drugs.

The town outside of BCR (which is based in hahahah Alaska), due to the amount of crazies and eccentrics that settle into the magically rich area, has a big rave scene, and the magic boys spent a lot of night sneaking off campus to go get drug-high and magic-high and dance their face of. And have a lot of sex, incidentally. But it gave Max an outlet he'd very much needed. Aaaaand later it became a great method of repression, but, whatever, he's functioning. It should be noted, this social circle (along with Nicola Santos and August Moreau) is incredibly physical with each other, and given Max's weird, incomplete childhood, this becomes the main influence for how "love for a friend" is expressed by him aka he's a ho. During Max's second school year at BCR, he also tethers a demon, Wodan, who happened to be the same one that'd helped him escape the Reed complex. Unbeknownst to him, the demon had actually been following Max since the compound, acting as an agent for Timothy/'Satan' (more on him in World Info), seeking to crack Max open as a gateway, and bring him into Timothy's fold. Gradually, over the course of his time at BCR, Wodan would begin to sink Max closer and closer to full possession. By the time his senior year comes around, Max is painfully aware of just how bad of a position he's in, and hope for his survival his dwindled dismally, though he does a fairly great job of concealing it, even from his professors.

The "final exam" featured at BCR is fairly brutal. On Samhain, when the barrier between the Inner and Outer Rings are at their thinnest, students are sent out into the monster infested forest beyond BCR's protective magical walls, and released to use what they've learned in the last four years to survive. There has never, in the history of BCR's tutelage, been a 100% survival rate for the final exams. Max will survive his exam, though barely, and at a great mental cost. He spends too much time in too deep of his Berserker trance, channeling the same demon that'd been slowly gaining a deeper hold on his soul through the last three years, and Max only makes it back to himself by heavy assistance from James.

However, he's deeply shaken, and after healing from the exams, Max finds himself only barely clinging to his autonomy, speeding rapidly towards complete possession and unable to bring himself back. Convinced his death is close and inevitable, and unwilling to let his friends witness it or be harmed by him once his soul is gone, Max takes off to the Ukraine, where he would spend the next week living in the charred remains of the jail cell type room he'd lived in as a boy, slowly allowing the creature in him to eat away at the rest of his mind. However, James, knowing Max better than any of the other friends he'd grown close to at BCR, can make an easy guess at where Max had run off to. Taking the information to Marco, Dani and Tris, Tristan sets the spell to teleport Marco, Dani and James to the old Reed complex, and equip them with a means to exorcise him. When they come upon him, Max is well out of his mind, and nearly completely gone. A fight breaks out, Marco and Dani trying to control Max without killing him, while James sought to exorcise him. It levels the surrounding forest, and leaves the charred ruined even more charred and ruined, but in the end, Max is saved, and spends the next week curled up in bed with one of the four of them, shaken and terrified, but alive and himself, and eternally grateful and humbled by the extent his friends had gone to for him. Graduation, otherwise, goes fairly uneventfully, other than 'congrats, you lived, go be an adult now'.

i see the bad moon arising (i hear the voice of rage and ruin).
adulthood: in which things are okay, and then horrible, and then okay again.

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

Then, he shows up drunk on BCR's lawn, to the headmistress toeing him with a shoe and telling him to get off her lawn. For a while, he lingers around, having soup with his sort of surrogate father, Dr. Adrien Arbuckal, the Master of Necromantics and school physician that'd watched over him during his time at BCR. He does a stint as a BCR recruiter, working with Nic Santos and Marco, his friends from school, but only lasts a couple weeks, as combining him and Marco is never a recipe for professionalism, and he sort of punches a few too many parents wanting their devil children to be Healed. And, incidentally, is accused of some accidental kidnappings, whoops. Look, those kids were better off at BCR anyway. After having failed that, Max moves on to what would be his main career - deciding he's the love child of Harry Potter, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones and Constantine. A profession he lovingly refers to a "magic tomb raidering". He takes to exploring ancient tombs, temples and ruins, either solving magical problems, locating relics, removing or relocating them if they're of some sort of dangerous (usually to BCR), or running off non-magical raiders from messing with things they shouldn't.

This would be how he accidentally wakes up an ancient Incan shaman who comes to call herself 'Paya', stumbling his way into breaking the seal on her sanctuary, which annoys the crap out of her, and ends up with Paya punching Max into the spirit plane for a spirit journey. Max is stuck in this plane for about a month (and it ends up more demonic plane than spectral plane, really, due to his alignment), and while it sucks a lot and he whines a lot, Max begins to come to terms with what he is, and the pieces of him that are irrevocable demonic in nature (violence, and the snap to it that he has when he encounters something that's too deeply personal, a complete lack of empathy that takes him when he vessels or shifts into berserking, the urge to just keep going with the destruction once it's started that comes from him and not from the demon he's channeling, and the certain level of missing/addiction it he has when he hasn't gone into berserking for a while), due to how he'd been forced into useage of his abilities too early in his life at the compound. He wakes up to Paya slapping him and telling him to get off her floor, he's dirtying her dirt. The journey also allotted him a Void Walking ability, and Paya gave him a spellwork tattoo to boost his frankly pathetic ability for all things Spectral. He has since improved his Spectral plane usage.

Continuing on with his tomb raidering, better equipped for it now, Max eventually makes it to Cairo, and meets a woman named Nada (more so, meets the back of her Jeep, as she hits him with it, taking him for a thief (which he sort of was at the time)), beginning a romance that would blossom into a marriage. One that is ill-fated, partially due to timing, but mostly due to Max's inability to communicate or confront the larger issues of his psyche and general Issues that make him sort of a crazy person. Aka, that moment when Max realizes May Repression Isn't A Great Idea. At some point, he runs back into an old classmate from BCR, Harper Gray, and brings her onto his tomb raidering team. While tomb raidering, over the several years he does this, he picks up on a lot of hints and clues about The Crawl and The Theory (things you'll read more about in World Info), but never quite puts the whole picture together to get that it's the actual fucking apocalypse and something he should be worried about. Roughly four or five months into Max's marriage, Marco, Max's best friend, is sucked into literal Hell by actual Satan (aka Timothy, aka the Outer Ring, Hellside, see World Info), without so much as a note. For 13 months, Marco is missing without a trace, and Max absolutely loses his mind trying to find him. He goes about cleaning house for mobs, cursers, hunters and cultists for that year, trying to find leads on his friend, desperate and terrified that something has happened to him similar to what was done to Max in his youth - something he's unable to communicate to Nada, and the fact he spends so much time away from her searching drives the wedge further between them. Nada asks for a divorce, Max agrees, as he knows this isn't fair to her, and he's unwilling to face these things about himself, so divorce it is. For a while after, Max goes AWOL, and is in a very dark place for a long while. There's also an incident with another friend, Elliot, involving a possession, a lot of magic nonsense, and Max volunteering himself to be tethered in order to save his friend, which is a nightmare and a half.

Eventually, Marco pops back up, Satan/Timothy having finished his work on him and punched him back into the Inner Ring/Earth. Max immediately glues himself to Marco's side for a couple weeks to a couple months maybe upon learning Marco's back, spending a good amount of time in the US, where Tris now lives and Marco has been hiding out. While in Hell, Marco had been aggressively tortured by Satan/Timothy as he'd tried to convert Marco over to an agent of his, to advance the spread of the Crawl and get Timothy's people into the Inner Ring through Marco and several other demonic plane users that were sucked down along with Marco. There, Marco learned about the Crawl, the coming apocalypse, all of the nature of it and the impending doom, and was released 13 months later with the expectation that he'd do Satan/Timothy's bidding. Not so much. What he does do is go around sealing the magic of all the other users that were yanked down with him, planned to be used as gateways. It pisses Satan/Timothy off a lot. Oops. Marco also doesn't tell any of the others about what happened down there, other than 'Satan tortured me' and 'the apocalypse is right on schedule'. Hahahahaha :|

DUPLICITY CANON POINT.