Application--After the Fall Era.

[bringsbadnews]

Out of Character Information

player name: Olivia
player journal: icanhazmuses
playing here: None
where did you find us? Dear_mun
are you 16 years of age or older?: Yes and then some.

In Character Information

character name: Angel has been known by three names. His birth and human name was Liam. As a soulless vampire he was known as Angelus, and his current name is Angel; the vampire with a soul.
Fandom: BtVS/Angel the Series/Angel After the Fall (comics)
Timeline: Season 6 of AtS (Angel After the Fall), issue #5; on his way to fight the Lords of LA. At this point in time, Angel is a human being. Wolfram and Hart turned him into a human when they sent LA to hell.
character's age: 245ish.

powers, skills, pets and equipment:
As a vampire:

Abilities/Powers: Angel was a vampire and has the standard set of powers that come with being one in his world. Due to his age, his powers were more potent than the average vampire. The longer a vampires lived, the more powerful he or she became. Even though he was immortal he could be killed in several different ways including direct sunlight, fire, a wooden stake, and/or decapitation. Additionally, crosses and holy water are a significant weakness of his. Having holy water sprinkled on him is the equivalent of tossing acid on a standard human.

He had several superhuman physical attributes:
-Increased strength: Max capacity would be around a ton and he would have difficulties lifting it up over his head.
-Rapid regeneration: He could recover from injuries such as multiple gunshots within a couple of hours and still function while shot.
-Superhuman stamina: In addition to it being increased through supernatural means, since he no longer has to breathe, he did not have to worry about running out of breath. 
-Superspeed: At times, he moved so fast at times it appeared he has teleported. 
-Heightened senses: His increased sense of smell allows him to track down anything that had a scent if the trail was relatively fresh (a few days).

As a human, he is able to use magic to temporarily mimic some of these abilities and use a glamour spell to make himself look human. Rather than having super natural levels of strength, senses, and speed, the magic places at just above peek human levels. At the moment, he is using magic to hold together all of his injuries. If someone removed the magic spells he has placed on himself, he would have several broken bones, including a broken back and spine.

Skills:
-Psychology: Expert in torture through his time as Angelus.
-Combat: Angel has traveled all over the world, learning different hand-to-combat styles and has been practicing them for several decades.
-Military Combat training: Served in WWI and other wars.
-Martial Weapons: Highly proficient in a variety of modern and ancient weapons, including firearms.
-Magic: is capable of performing low level spells and can use magical devices.


Equipment:

Angel has a variety of magical weapons he gathered from Wolfram and Hart's LA office. He has a couple of 9mms and knives. The most notable weaponry on his person would be:

*Magical Flaming Sword: He has a broad sword that emits steam whenever he has it sheathed. Once he unsheathes it, the blade is consumed in hellfire and has the potential to set anything it touches on fire.

*Great Axe: It is made out of cold steel, allowing it to be more potent against demons and inflict additional damage on them whenever he strikes them.

(Neither weapon's properties were ever explained, other than being magical and collected from Wolfram and Hart's archives. I am guessing their properties are something similar to the ones I described.)

Pet Angel has a large, 100 foot long green dragon that he rides around on. Cordy (the dragon) can fly, breath fire, and is strong enough to take on a T-rex. Cordy's intelligence would be around that of a small child. The two of them share something akin to an empathetic bond.

Everything listed here is canon. The only change I would like for Scorched, while Angel is a human, is to allow him to use his minor magic spells without any reagents.

canon history: http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Angel

personality:

Out of everyone in the series, Angel had arguably one of the most complex personalities because of the curse placed on him. All other vampires retain their main personality traits from their time as a human when they were transformed. Angel, on the other hand, had become the complete antithesis of Angelus. The two were often treated as separate entities because there were things that Angel remembered that Angelus did not and vice versa. There had never been an official explanation on the schism between the two of them, so this was my personal interpretation. Angel had also gone through a number of transformations personality wise, there will also be a fair amount of history mixed in to explain how he got to where he is now (often referred to as prebuffy/Buffy/Post-Buffy.)


Liam: Angel was first known as the human Liam who was born in 1727 in Galway, Ireland. As a human, he was not very ambitious and had a turbulent relationship with his father. The two of them constantly argued and his father would put him down, causing Liam to harbor a great deal of resentment towards his father. Their volatile relationship made it difficult for him to connect with other people. Instead of being a role model in attachment and trust for Liam, his father was a source of shame and self loathing. Liam often tried to drown his sorrows and misery in alcohol. He would hit on women and try to bed them, not caring if the two shared any kind of connect with each other. It did not appear like he had any close friends to turn to and lament his woes to them. When offered the chance of something better by Darla, even in exchange for his mortality, Liam quickly jumped at the chance and allowed himself to be sired. When he was transformed into a vampire, his soul was replaced by a demon.

Angelus: The first atrocious act Liam performed as a vampire was slaughtering his entire family. When he came across his little sister, she was so excited to see her brother who she had believed was dead, that she called him “Angel”. She thought her brother had returned to her as an angel. Liam murdered her and the rest of his family, not before taunting his father and putting the fear of the devil in him. There was no hesitation or pity on his end. He spilled the blood of children and used them to psychologically torture his father. After he was done, he took on the name “Angelus” and no longer had any ties to the human realm. The relationships he formed after that were artificial. Because of the demon inside of him, he was only capable of certain amount of attachment. Despite spending almost a hundred years with Darla, he never learned to love her. He wanted companionship, a constant source of sexual gratification, and it was more fun to terrorize as a group than by his lonesome. So much more destruction and mockery could be achieved. On more than one occasion, the two of them abandoned each other when it benefited them. However, the two would always find a way back to each other.

Angelus was known as one of the most brutal, vicious, and evil demons in all of history. If not the most evil of them all. Darla groomed him to take what he wanted and he ran with it. Most vampires made quick work of their victims, luring them into a place where they will be vulnerable, preying on their blood, and then being done. Angelus much preferred to torture his victims before he killed them. Sometimes, he tortured them physically, other times mentally, and sexually as well. He did not limit his victims to men, he preyed on women and children as well. The most notable of all of his atrocities was Drusilla. He stalked her, used her devout religious beliefs to help drive her insane, and then turned her.

In 1898, Angelus tracked down a young gypsy girl who belonged to the Clan Kalderash, a group of Romanian gypsies who practice magic, and killed her. When the clan found out, they wanted revenge for his cruel deed. They conjured up a curse that reinstated his soul inside of him on the condition that he would never experience true happiness. Anyone with a conscious would never allow his or herself to release the demon again, and thus, the curse was meant to sentence him to an eternity of misery. When the curse was first placed on him, his memories as Angelus were wiped and he became Liam again for a few fleeting moments. He looked up at the leader of the clan bewildered. He said he couldn't remember anything and the man told him that soon he would remember everything.

Liam went from having no memories of murdering or torturing anyone to suddenly being flooded with a hundred years of some of the most brutal and wicked acts that had ever been performed in human history. Not only did he suddenly remember all of them, but he could now experience remorse, empathy, and guilt. It was a severely traumatic experience for him and his mind had to do something before it became overwhelmed with everything he was seeing. The constant onslaught of a decade's worth of violence was taking its toll on his mind and about to push him to the brink of insanity.

When a mind has gone through trauma like his did, sometimes it employed disassociation and repression as a coping mechanism. Mix in a demon and magic and it's a whole new level and type of disassociation and repression. His mind repressed his ruthless nature and locked it up inside of a prison in his mind (later in the series, Angelus fears being “locked away in the prison of Angel's mind” and he disassociated himself from Angelus. Instead of going by Angelus he took on the name Angel and considered himself a completely different being. If he considered himself to be the same being as Angelus then he'd never be able to cope with who he was. Angel still acknowledged that he was the one who had terrorized Europe for over a decade, so the responsibility still rested with him, but now he believed the curse had separated Angelus and himself. Seeing himself as the man and Angelus as the demon kept his sanity in check. 

The disassociation did not come easily. Throughout the series, he struggled mentally and emotionally with separating himself from Angelus. At one point, Drusilla told him that she could hear Angelus whispering to him and he quickly denied it. Whenever Angelus came out to play, Angelus would at times say that the two of them were one in the same. During some of the darkest hours of Angel's after-life, when he was reunited with Darla in Los Angeles, he was filled with self loathing, depression, and isolated himself from his friends. His behavior started to resemble Angelus' rather than his usual behavior. He was overly violent when fighting vampires and demons, didn't care about the well being of his friends. Perhaps in the greatest demonstration of his Angelus like tendencies, instead of saving the lawyers of Wolfram and Hart from two vampires, he locked them all in the same room, knowing the vampires would kill the lawyers. No matter how much Angel wanted to distance himself from Angelus and repress that side of him, it was always going to be a part of him. 


Pre-Buffy: It would be another 98 years before Angel would become a champion of the Powers That Be would emerge. The Powers That Be are an ancient mystical force of good that choose champions to fight for their cause and protect the innocent from the forces of evil. From the time his soul was reinstated to 1996, he wandered the Earth by himself. He drifted from place to place, never staying in the same place for too long nor making much of an effort to connect with the humans he came across. He didn't trust humans; in the 1950s, he had been betrayed by the one human he tried to help and became bitter. In the 1970s, after witnessing a doughnut shop robbery where the cashier was shot dead, Angel fed on his blood. When he was done, he was mortified and sent himself into exile. He lived off of rats on the streets and had no purpose in life.

Buffy: Finally, in 1996 a demon known was Whistler was sent by the Powers That Be. Whistler introduced Angel to the newly appointed Slayer, Buffy Summers. It was then that the modern day Angel was born. Angel fell in love with her the moment he saw her and after watching her narrowly survive her first encounter with a vampire, he wanted to protect her. He finally found a purpose and a connection back to the human world.

Angel's personality evolved considerably from his first encounter with Buffy. In Sunnydale he never felt like he quite fit in. He was always awkward and his shame and guilt were very apparent. Whenever one of the Buffy's friends spoke poorly too him, he never responded in outrage. He'd either brush them off or ignore them all together. He tried to limit his contact with everyone but Buffy because he felt like he didn't deserve to be in the same company as them. After committing all of the atrocities he had done in his past, how could ever hope to among normal people? How could he fault them for thinking so poorly of them when he was every bit deserving of their rebuff? For a long time he would only show up when there was a danger on the horizon. Buffy once remarked that he only showed up to “bring bad news”. Even though he was filled with tremendous amounts of guilt and angst over his past atrocities, his love for Buffy was greater and his feelings for her finally won over. The two of them were like two teens in love and he would spend as much time with her as possible.

Unfortunately, their relationship was not to be. If ever there was a pair of star crossed lovers, it was the two of them. When the two consummated their love, it was the beginning of the end. Angel lost his soul because he experienced a moment of true happiness while being intimate with the woman he loved, and he turned into Angelus. After a series of extremely unfortunate events, including regaining his soul only to have Buff kill him, going to a dimension of hell and back, being haunted by his past victims, and being poisoned, Angel left for Los Angeles to strike out on his own and give Buffy a chance at a real life. The two of them would never realistically be able to be together because of his curse, so he could at least give her her the chance at some semblance of a normal relationship with someone else.

Post-Buffy: His time in Los Angeles was where he came into his own and found his own purpose. While in Sunnydale, his main purpose had been keeping Buffy safe and loving her. She was the love of his after-life and the reason for his existence. When he was haunted by the memories of his past victims and waited for the sun to rise to kill himself in an act of atonement, Buffy convinced him to keep living and gave him hope. He realized that if he truly wanted to make up for his time as Angelus, he needed to do more than protect Buffy; he needed to go out and do good unto the world. From then on, Angel now dedicated his entire life to protecting others. He would do anything to help out someone in need, including rushing into an unknown dimension with the possibility of never returning home to save a dear friend, to going to Lorne's karaoke bar so that Lorne, who can read people's emotions while they sing, and he could get a lead on a case. For the longest time, he didn't want to accept money from clients Angel Investigations helped because it didn't feel right to take money from them. They had suffered enough and he had caused so much suffering himself, how could he ever ask for anything in return. Cordelia, a member of Angel Investigations and one of his closest friends, eventually convinced him that in order to stay in business, they needed to charge a fee.

It was that tireless attitude towards doing good and wanting to protect those in dire need that caught the attention of the Powers That Be. They sent another agent his way, the half-demon Doyle, who received visions from them. Together with Cordelia, they set up Angel Investigations; a supernatural private Investigations agency that was dedicated to helping the hopeless. Angel used to think that in order to do good and really make a difference, he had to do it on a grand scale. He eventually learned that it didn't matter if he saved the world or if he simply helped someone with the smallest of misfortunes. As long as he was doing good work, he was working towards his redemption. Redemption was so important to him because he so desperately wanted it and believed anyone with a soul had the potential to be redeemed. For someone who lived in the gray area in terms of morality, at times he saw the world in black and white terms. Anything with a soul deserved a second chance and, under normal circumstances, he would not take the life of a being with a soul. 

Demons, vampires, and all other supernatural creatures, on the other hand, were fair play. His black and white attitude towards good and evil caused him to make a costly mistake: He killed a demon who was protecting a pregnant woman. Angel recognized that, just like himself, there were beings who were typically evil that wanted to do good. He needed to give them a chance too. That did not mean he was going to open his arms to every demon, (he still approached them with caution and believed the majority were evil), but if one showed they were different, he was willing to help him or her out as well. When a string of murders involving non-violent demons occurred in LA, Angel worked with the leader of Angel Investigations, Wesley, to try and find out who murdered the demons and put an end to it.

Angel cared little about his own well being and was constantly poked fun of for the amount of brooding he did by his friends in Angel Investigations. When he was out and about saving the day, actively doing good, he would put his brooding aside and be very caring towards the people he was helping. He was on task and focused. However, once he was done saving the day he would often seclude himself and reflect on his past. After everything he had done, he saw any kind of punishment that came his way as something he deserved. Darla once told him "You don't learn that kind of darkness. It's innate. It was in you before we ever met." As much as he wanted to discredit her he knew he couldn't. Not entirely. Something about him separated him from the rest of the vampires in history. There had to be something dark inside of him before the demon arrived. Whatever that something inside of him was, it allowed the demon to thrive. More than that, he was the one who invited the demon in. It was the choice he made.

Not to mention, he knew that he was never allowed to truly be happy. For a long time, he even held onto the belief that it was better for him to not get too attached to anyone because it never ended well for them. If he hadn't gotten close to Buffy, a number of people would still be alive. He held onto this belief for a long time until he learned, through Darla's return, how detaching himself from people was even more costly. When he cut himself off from the rest of Angel Investigations, he became violent, moody, depressed, and one of the people he cared about the most, Wesley got shot. If he had been there, he could have helped him.

He came to an epiphany after the whole fiasco with Darla stuck with him. He wanted to do good for good's sake and he needed to form bonds with people to keep the human in him alive. Before, the team at Angel Investigations remarked how he never asked any of them how they were doing. After the experience, he became a lot more involved in their day-to-day lives. He realized that they needed him to be a part of their lives not just when some crisis is going on, but during every day matters as well. He extended the compassion, selflessness, and warmth to his friends as well. The way he spoke to them became more casual, he let his humor and warmth come through. He began to speak more openly about how much they meant to him and would fight for them with every last fiber of being to protect them. Becoming a father added an additional emotional depth to him. As much as he loved Buffy, his bond with his son connected him to someone in a whole new way. More than that, Connor gave him a new, enduring hope. No matter how bad or a desperate a situation got, knowing he had a son to protect gave Angel the extra strength to endure.

Even though he had come a great ways from where he started, he still did not like opening up about himself and sharing his problems. In doing so, he felt like he was burdening them and did not want to. It used to be next to impossible to get him to open up and the only person he'd really share his negative thoughts and feelings with were Buffy. Even then, it was only under dire circumstances. Some improvements were made and he would share at least some of his troubles with his friends if he thought they'd be more worried and restless not knowing than knowing or if a mission depended on it. He still kept his secrets from them when he thought it was for the best. His son, Connor, was taken from him when Connor was still a baby and sent to a hell-dimension. Connor eventually returned but his mind was disjointed because of everything he witnessed in the hell-dimension. After a series of traumatic events, Connor's mind broke all together. Angel made a deal with Wolfram and Hart to run their LA branch, in exchange for erasing Connor's memories and giving him new, normal memories. Angel did not inform his friends of his decision and all of their memories were altered without their consent. More recently, Angel had not told any of his friends, even Connor (whose memories eventually returned) that he was turned into a human.

One would think, given how old Angel was, that he would be mature beyond his years but that was not the case. Often when he was fighting in battle against his foes or in confrontations with them, he would taunt them, insult them and at times, lash out in anger. After Lilah, a lawyer from Wolfram and Hart, had Cordelia's visions intercepted and her visions took on physical manifestations, like getting cuts on her body after seeing a demon attacked, he called Lilah an “evil bitch”. If it was something he took pride in and it appeared the other person was better or he fell short when he was compared to them, he often became juvenile. He would do things like grumble to himself, pout, and he was not above jealously. At times he let his emotions guide his decisions rather than his logic. Recently, Angel tracked down Spike in LA and got into a confrontation with him. Angel assumed Spike was lounging around, not helping anyone and not giving a damn for anyone other than himself. After getting into a very public fight with Spike and Illryia, Connor showed up and asked what was going on. Connor informed Angel that Spike and he had been working together to save citizens in LA. Angel grew jealous of their bond and his jealousy was a driving force behind him challenging the demon Lords of LA.




why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? Angel is being plucked from a time in his life where his beloved city was sent to hell. He sees people murdered on a regular basis and has to fight demonic forces. He has done incredibly dark things himself and originally came to LA to protect people from dangerous supernatural creatures. He'll be right at home in this setting.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample:

[The video feed is shaky for a few seconds before it becomes stationary. What looks like a black leather jacket is visible and the voice that comes through the feed sounds exasperated.]

So much for just "pressing the button and it will turn on". Why doesn't anyone use pen and paper to communicate anymore? Ink from the Order of Artek can go a long way.

[The feed jerks violently and suddenly a squinted eye is peering into it.] Hi? Is this thing on? Please be on.

[Angel rarely used his cellphone or computer these days. Harmony took care of all of that for him. Despite her many faults, she was a damned good secretary and was up to date on technology. After tinkering around it some more, he finally realizes it's on]

Look, I don't know why I'm here and I really don't care. I'm not planning on sticking around for much longer. [Unless they were planning on helping him take on the lords of LA, which he doubts.

Adjusts the video so his face is now visible. His skin is strikingly pale and even though his face looks like that of someone in their mid twenties, his eyes are that of an old soul.]

My friends and I are literally having a hell of a time back home, I need to be there with them. We can either do this the easy way and you can send me back home or we can do this the hard way. Last time I ended up in an alternative dimension, it didn't end so well for those in charge.

[His lips shifted into a defiant smirk.]



Third Person Sample:

One day, some day, Angel would learn to make intelligent choices. When that day would be was anyone's guess, but it was very obvious today was not that day. As he often did, he started off with good intentions. A curious civilian had wandered off by her lonesome and gotten herself into a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble currently translated into a patchwork zombie. Not that he knew what it was called. He had no idea if it was native to Anatole or from some other world. All he knew was the creature was composed of a mishmash of body parts and looked like it was strewn together from several different beings. Somehow it was held together by thread.

The smart thing to do would have been calling for backup. If he was still a vampire then he would have been good to go. These days, Angel was duct taped together by magic and could only summon a fraction of his former abilities. Still, he saw someone in need and his instinct was to dive right in.

And dive in he did. To his credit, he was holding his own and the civilian had escaped. The bad news was he had received some new wounds that he was sure were going to come back to haunt him later on. Angel let out a loud off as he was grappled into a bear hug and for the first time in a long time, his breath was being squeezed out of him.

“Nngh, as ugly as you are, you smell even worse.” Angel's voice was muffled against the creature's gruesome body. Fortunately for him, he managed to hold onto his sword and the creature wasn't exactly stacked in the intelligence department. He didn't have to hit the creature hard or even strike it, he just needed to brush the flames in the right spot. Angel shifted his sword around in his hand as best he could and positioned it so when he let it fall forward, the flame blade landed on one of the creature's threads. The creature let out a loud, grisly roar of pain as its threads caught on fire and his limbs started to fall apart one by one. Angel rolled out of the way before he got covered in zombie goop.

“So much for hanging on by a thread, huh?”

Not one of his prettiest victories, but hey, when you've been reduced to a squishie mortal you've got to take what you'll get and he'll take a victory any day over death by zombie-hugs.

Anything else? ...May I have his dragon? :D