Irénée, Ten of Hearts

[Dark]

ID: SD149
Name: Irénée (Rin) Baudin
Suit: Hearts
Rank: Ten
Gender: Male
Animal: Bat (Fruit)
Region: Selkie Lakes
Dealer: Dark

Notes: His tail is longer than most bats, somewhat prehensile too.

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Bipedal:

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Basic Magical Ability:
He can ignore moderate amounts of pain for up to twenty minutes.

Scream Ability:
Once a week, he is capable of throwing back his head and emitting a column of sound so high pitched that only some Canines and Bats can hear it uttered. This blast forces its way forward in a tight line of force that is enough to knock Cards ranked 10 and lower right off their feet and enough to cause Jacks to over balance. All will experience a horrible deaf sensation afterward for up to a full minute. Kings and Queens will dislike the horrible sound, but won't really be affected.

Amazing Ability:
Once a day, he is now able to grasp any object and see the face of whoever touched it last. Not only does this allow his sight deprived mind to see color and faces, but it lets him see exactly what they are doing as long as he remains in contact with the object for up to a full two hours. This vision can also be used to speak quietly into the mind of said person once while he is watching them. His "voice" will have no tonal quality, and unless he tells them who he is, they will have no way of knowing (short of magical ability built toward knowing this). He can only speak to them once, but once he's gotten them, so long as he doesn't break stride, he could talk the whole two hours, should he need to.

Moderate Magical Ability:
When activated, he gains an immediate proficiency with any weapon that he picks up. This can be activated and deactivated at will.

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Other Forms:]

Animal:

[Dark]

Personal Blurb: Rin has a penchant for the daily crossword, and is overall a very mellow, uncomplicated sort of guy who doesn't have a problem with knifing people that fuck with him. He works as a private detective.

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Family:

LTR: None.

Mother: Deceased

Father: Deceased

Siblings: Aurélie; deceased

Children:
[Rin/Jin]
Coralie, Six of Hearts
Kazimeras, Five of Spades
Zhenya, Four of Clubs
Milena, Eight of Hearts

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Items:
n/a

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Pets:
n/a

[Dark]

[:Recruitment:]

Mother died giving birth to her Aurélie.

Father had always been a fairly driven man—almost unnaturally so for a man from the lakes—and had been deeply engrossed in his business ventures even before mother had passed. It only got worse after her death. He was gone longer, home less—until they hardly ever saw him at all except for the occasional glimpse of his back as he left again. He hired a nanny to look after them; he was a ghost.

Aurélie never seemed to notice the loss, maybe because she’d never known before; her concept of a father was abstract. She didn’t have any model for comparison, and she never was much for introspection. The doctors had warned she’d been trapped in the birth canal too long and it might have detrimental effects on her development; it became more obvious as she got older. It took her longer to walk, longer to talk, and she had such a simplistic outlook on life. She was tragically slow, but—

She had the most beautiful smile.

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Aurélie died from an overdose of Checkmate.

She had never been a bright girl, had always been so easily led (one of the things that had made her so dear to him, that she followed him everywhere, hung on his every word with wide-eyed amazement and worship), and when he had left for Capital City to seek—what, really? Some kind of fortune, perhaps, his place in the world—she had been cast into limbo.

Or so he’d heard at the funeral, with his father’s accusing gaze on him. She’d been lost without him, fallen in with a bad crowd, and now she was dead. The and it’s all your fault twisted and swirled beneath the words like a treacherous undercurrent. He didn’t deny it, because he knew it to be true. If he hadn’t been so selfish as to leave, Aurélie wouldn’t have gotten lost.

He didn’t stay in his homeland, not with Aurélie’s memory hanging around in the air like the thick Lakeland mists. His only option was to return to the City and try to scratch out some kind of life for himself.

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Isolde died senselessly, in a squabble over money.

Friends did not come easy—he told himself he didn’t need them, and he didn’t want them, but Isolde was insistent. He was rooming with her, to save on money in the City—it was so terribly expensive, and he could not be so liberal in his spending. She was charming, and bright, and worked some kind of night shift that meant that their real interactions with each other took place only in the morning and in the evening, and she filled his empty hours with cheerful conversation and distraction. She was an exceptionally good listener.

“You do it a lot,” she told him slyly, “in my line of work.”

He had yet to ask her what that line of work was.

He didn’t find out until the police came to his door, to interview him. Isolde had been found dead in a small motel room, stabbed to death, because apparently her john wanted to get away with paying her a lot less than what he owed her. He had managed to fight back the urge to vomit—and to punch something—long enough to tell them everything he knew, which wasn’t much.

He had prowled the streets restlessly after that, angry at everything—but mostly at himself—for another death that he had not been able to prevent. He snarled at everything that moved, and he was almost jailed twice for beating the living hell out of two separate men. One of them had hit his wife. The other one he had overheard plotting to rape a young woman who worked at a nearby coffee shop.

It was madness, and it was intolerable, and he felt just a tiny bit better with every nose he broke. Beating was difficult to accomplish as a bat, however. He would need to find people to do that for him, eventually.

An interesting thought, that. A little vigilante gang, dedicated to punishing the kind of scum who preyed on people like Aurélie and Isolde.

His chance at some kind of redemption came unexpectedly. He was trolling a back alley, spoiling for a fight, when out of the shadows he saw a woman, who looked at him with kind eyes.

“I knew Isolde,” she said. “She wasn’t part of my gang. I couldn’t protect her. But I think you can protect us.”

He stared at her blankly. Who was this woman? What exactly was she offering?

“I look after prostitutes,” she continued. “I understand you’re hard up for money.”

“I’m not a whore,” he said, bristling.

She laughed. “No, of course not. But you can watch over them. I can pay you a fair enough wage, and you can satisfy whatever drive to redeem yourself you harbor. Not all of them need to end up like Isolde.”

He considers her for a moment. No more need for history to repeat itself, Aurélie and Isolde, Aurélie and Isolde, over and over and over again. He could do something useful with his life. He could exact his own quiet vengeance.

“I’m in,” he said resolutely.