Harold, Jack of Clubs/Hearts

[Kari Muffin]

Harold, it seems is not at all an ordinary Card. His marking, for one is exceedingly unusual as he was once a Club but the result of the glass vial breaking over the picture of his beloved has caused them to...merge, for lack of a better term. She now resides in the back of his mind and he has absorbed her Heart marking and suit abilities. A bit of black can still be seen, as though to honor the memory of his bygone Club days, leaking from the new Suit marking.

Harold cannot change into any form other than that of his Human, and cannot even begin to guess what species he actually is. He also has a slight problem with age...he doesn’t grow older...he hasn’t since his and Felaria’s unfortunate demise and his re-emergence into existence when his enchanted painting released its hold on him.
He is able to sense Felaria’s presence in the back of his mind but is only able to communicate with her once a month on the night of the full moon. He is otherwise only able to pine for his beloved and hope she cannot read his thoughts. (She cannot, sadly, but with enough points she could do quite a number of things, she was an amazing firebrand of a Marsh rat.) Harold’s inability to grow any older will be seen by those around him as a frightening thing...or they will want the secret and attempt to torture or cajole it out of him, as he does not know why he has never grown beyond 33, it is unlikely that remaining in one place too long will seem a good idea to the poor man.
Harold is an incredibly twitchy person by nature of his imprisonment in a painting for over a century and the sudden merging with his love, it’s a wonder he hasn’t snapped...
In order to rank up this character, you will need to submit double the points, for example: If you wanted to raise his rank to King and submitted 50 points, you would have to choose if the rank up was for his Club abilities, or his Heart. To raise both would be 100 collectively, they do not both have to be raised at once or at all.
No longer truly a Card, Harold (like Vyn's swords) will not be given a number unless he makes it his life's goal to become truly normal. Harold does have the ability to reproduce...but I would be careful about it if I were you...

Notes: His marking has returned to being just a Club except for the night of the full moon, where it changes to a Heart.



Club Abilities:


Basic Magical Ability: He can go three days without needing to sleep.
Moderate Magical Ability: When activated, he can carry up to 20 lbs of extra weight for 24 hours straight, one day per week. He is left feeling tired and somewhat drained for the 24 hours following that period.
Strong Magical Ability: When activated, he can move or shift small piles of glass that he can reduce to a fine powder beforehand. Moving or shifting the glass in a non-powdered form is not possible for him, but once it is...it becomes quite formidable against an opponents' lungs and eyes.
Powerful Magical Ability: When activated, he can communicate with another Card he is acquainted with by blowing a minute pinch of dust into the air and speaking their name softly. He will then be able to whisper a soft message to the air, and it will be carried to them by the dust...though it could take hours or even days to find them and they cannot reply in the same manner.
Jack's Ability: He is able to sprint to any place, seeming regardless of obstacles, he has been before in thirty minutes or less so long as that place is thirty miles from him or closer.

Heart Abilities:

Basic Magical Ability: He can ignore moderate amounts of pain for up to ten minutes.
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.
Strong Magical Ability: When activated, he can inflict mental pain on another card of Heart or Club suit, once per day. The degree of pain is equivalent to that of a hot branding iron being pressed to the center of their forehead.
Powerful Magical Ability: Harold has never been able to master the ability of controlling the mind of another Heart...it may be because he is not fully a Heart. As it stands, he can make the person rather embarrassingly itchy for about five minutes without detection.
Jack's Ability: He is immune to any and all poisons, the exception being the saliva of any Mustelid type of Card. If he is bitten by, spat upon, licked, or kissed...he will suffer extreme pain and slowly begin to die unless brought to a healer. Sadly, he knows he is immune to poisons...he has yet to figure out what this exception is.

[Kari Muffin]

Notes

Harold: He is an Esterberry, tall and slender with very long fingers, he is a Human and has yet to reveal his animal form to anyone...at home it was rumored that he was stuck in the one form he was born in...that even he might not know what animal he is. He is a Jack of Clubs and worked in the Court for the first twelve years of his adult life (He is 28), before becoming dissatisfied with the tight way the Court was run...and the iron fist of the reigning King and Queen. He set out to "find himself", going out with a "friend" from the Court, a fellow Jack who didn't know he intended to leave for good and wanted his spot. Harold's friend then ditched him in the Golfam tied up in thick ropy strands of invisible rope (the other's Jack power) to die.

He was found by Felaria, who managed to convince her grandfather to free the Esterberry...and then not to eat him. He spent a month with their family...falling in love with the young rat because of how different she was from anything he had ever been around before. Sadly, when they began to show signs of romantic interest in each other, Felaria's grandfather flew off the handle and forcibly removed the Human from his home (By tying a sack over his head and sending him off with a few other Golfams, thinking Harold would be taken back to the edge of the Capital and left there.

Sadly, the other Golfams, more rats, thought he would make a better toy instead. They planned to kill him and then see if the remains could be enchanted, when they were set upon by an incredibly angry Felaria. They lashed out without thinking, as it was too dark to fully see the attack, and accidentally killed both Harold and Filaria together.

Felaria: A Golfam rat with a pretty lighter green mane tied back in a braid. She is short, young (17), roundish, and fetching for a Glofam. Though she was young, she was cynical and well on her way to rising in power, a Jack of Hearts and well versed in a few extra abilities. She lived alone with her Grandfather, a large, fat Golfam rat, not knowing what happened to her parents, and not caring to ask. She was born a Jack and was trying to raise her rank constantly, and had finally decided to join the Courts to really make something of herself, her Grandfather cried and for the first time in her life told her how proud he was of her, and that he loved her.

Practically on fire with delight, she was stopped on her way to the palace by the sight of Harold, bound up in the Golfam. She was caught by the sight of his beauty, rank, and form. Delighted, she freed him, and spoke to him about what had happened. Upon learning of his place in the Courts she brought him back to her place to stay for awhile.

Her grandfather was understanding at first, thinking it wise to help a man of Harold's stature, and for her to learn a bit about Court structure before she went for it herself. But seeing how close they were getting caused him to think that Harold would make a wife out of his granddaughter and not allow her to bloom to full potential. Against his daughters wishes (she and Harold had discussed the Courts, leading to her decision not to go.) he tossed the man out, sending him off with a sketchy crew.

Enraged, Felaria moved after them, telling her grandfather that she would take her man back. Upon finding the group and hearing what it was they planned to do to Harold, she attacked without thinking. Resulting in their deaths.


Their remains were coma across sometime later, about a month, by an odd creature... Though he remained anonymous, it is known that whoever he was, he took their remains to a sorcerer, asking if they could be drawn back into the world in some way. Together, they managed to reunite the two through the portraits. Sadly, those portraits were separated, and the two will do anything to have the pictures near each other again.

---

Felaria is now visible to Harold as a ghost. She is incapable of communicating with anyone else, but she is able to travel up to a mile away from him without consequence, and he can almost feel her touch.


The mix of markings on Harold's chest has remained, however... Very odd. Points toward that could spike something from it. At the moment though, he'll note that he can still use both sets of powers and that the marking burns whenever Felaria gets too far from him.

---

Marking Revelation: Over the course of three days, Harold will begin to remember a small piece of his past.
He had a...friend? Maybe? Long ago, an Esterberry/Morganberry Nightingale. She was a Jack of Clubs and rather mouthy and affectionate. He will remember that they were very close and that they, possibly, went to school together? He remembers being in the school that she certainly went to, and that he had attended some of her practice lectures, but he can't remember attending any of the classes himself.
Her name was Odami Lyssn.
She wore glasses and liked to sing when no one else was around.
She had two brothers, twin Esterberry Lynxes, and her parents were as plain as could be, with the Morganberry being a very small thing from her mother's side.
He can remember all of this about her...and about being with her, being her close friend, watching her preform a play, going out for ice cream...but he can't remember his own parents, family, school experience aside from the time spent with Odami, or what kinds of things he did by himself.
The marking on his chest will, over the course of the three days, separate into two distinct ones, the Heart, over top of the Club.
He will still have access to both sets of abilities, but the Heart set will now only function half the time and every time he tries to sleep nowadays...he keeps hearing faint screaming...

---

After taking a drink one night, he succumbed to a rather horrible bout of illness that led to a five day coma.
He awoke from it stunned and reeling as his mind tried to process what he had just learned.
During the coma, he finally re-lived everything he had previously forgotten, and understood why he had tried to bury it.
Odami Lyssn was a Jack of Clubs, but her mother had been a Heart, a King, who had been very ill for the majority of her life. Odami's mother had been called Riss Lyssn, a Nightingale Heart from a very prestigious a long line of Esterberries and Esterberry mixes, all Hearts and all highly intelligent.
She had attained the rank of King very shortly after her last child had been born, a daughter she had named Odami.
And with that rank, she had found herself able to summon a Shotel sword
oriental-arms.co.il/item.php?id=569
that, out of irony to her grandfather's memory, she named "Harold".
Constant practice with and care for the sword brought about its rise to consciousness within a year and its being able to take on a physical form, a male Esterberry Human, by the time that little Odami was four.
Riss was in and out of small medical centers constantly and sometimes for days at a time, while her husband, Tarry, worked as often as possible to support his three children and sick wife.
Riss, thanking the stars for her weapon, would leave him at home constantly with little Odami, asking him to be her guardian and to watch her as closely as possible, begging him to be her friend and parental figure when she could not.
Harold had agreed out of duty to his summoner, though he somewhat resented being lowered from powerful weapon to "babysitter", and after a time, grew to care for the girl as though she had been his own daughter.
Riss passed away quite suddenly when Odami was seven, and Harold had found, to his utmost shock, that due to his summoner's dying wish, he had been bound to Odami as her weapon as opposed to vanishing with his summoner.
He trained well with the girl and was able to be summoned and unsummoned by her as though she were a normal Heart king and he born to be her weapon.
He went with her everywhere, and after her father died when she turned 15, he became her anchor to reality. Her brothers moved away to the Capitol to sell their knowledge to the school systems and local businesses...and to get away from their odd-ball sister, who required too much draining care.
Odami loved and cared for Harold, and he for her until she turned 25 and met a wonderful man, strong, upstanding, and loving.
She turned her back on Harold and rarely summoned him for a full year, preferring to spend time with her newfound love.
Destroyed by bitterness, Harold became reclusive, refusing to be summoned one night, assuming that she just wanted to talk to him about the man she'd fallen for...that damn Golfam Hound.
He found out seconds later that Odami had been trying to summon him to fight for her as she was attacked on the way home by a deranged Ace that had crawled out of an alleyway and attempted to eat her.
Harold finished it off, but was far too late for Odami.
As she died, he forced himself into her body, taking on some of her features, like her Club abilities, rank, poor eyesight, and lovely voice quality.
Her spirit passed, and his was trapped.
His memories were erased from that evening on.
He found solace and shelter from a kindly older woman for a few years and then decided to pursue the Courts.