The BATTLE of the CENTURY! [S!7] - Round 1: The New Frontier

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

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Username: Schwaaaaaaaaaaaaaz
Name: "Malrone"
Sex: N/A
Race: Human on the eyes, wraith on the books
Color: -

Biography:

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SpoilerAmnesty wasn't always one city, though what was the man what woke up in a marsh with a thousand pieces of a hundred faces (none of them his) didn't know that. None of the people he'd tricked or conned or borrowed little pieces of to make into new people had known the fact neither, which might've made sense to the man (let's call him Malrone) if he wasn't lain drowning in a river most everyone had forgotten about.

Once upon a time, a time far back enough that work like Malrone's grew redundant in favour of fantastical libel (dead men, as they say, tell no tales), Amnesty wasn't a city. It was two filthy villages which sprawled their way out over history into two grimy towns, separated by a wide, black river that the horses wouldn't drink from and too many generations of mutual dislike. They were simple folk, farmers of the fertile plain the river bisected, with nothing to fear but the satanic harlot sinner lepers on the other bank. So hateful were they of their neighbours, the riverbanks were lined with the inevitable slums of the growing towns, anyone with money enough building far off its shores.

Of course, hatred like that begets only more hatred, and the townspeople-villagers-hamleteers couldn't find much to celebrate save for the fact they didn't live on the other side, where your children starved or died of assorted diseases before they were old enough to earn any of their keep on the farms. This sort of thinking could drive a man (or a woman) to distraction, to the point where you might ask dangerous questions. Like:

"Is it really as bad as they say?"

Until:

One dead of night, the only time a desperate soul could sneak to the river's edge and have no-one (at either bank) throw rocks at you or remember your face, the better to shame you some more. The skies were clear and the moon was bright, else they'd stand there all night shivering with a makeshift raft and hear watery mutterings coming from places they couldn't see. The river still did that, in the day or in the light of the moon (which might've gone some of the other way to explain why good folk steered clear). But you could see in the places you couldn't by darkest night, and that was comfort enough.

So, the desperate soul waded into the water, and even in the dead of winter it never slipped below pleasantly cool. Much to his or her surprise, they found gravel underfoot across the river's inscrutable breadth, and no matter how distant the lights on the other shore the escape seemed far less suicidal.

But then:

A sudden chill chased the current, caught your breath, left no change but for an aching, stinging cold in one little piece of you
And you took your eyes off the distant lights for just a moment, glanced downriver, like it was your heart been ripped out and you expected to see it hot and bright and red against the river's black, still close enough to grab it
And there was nothing
But you knew some part of you was missing
And you had a moment's indecision to abandon it, as tribute to the river, or in its absence know you could never live without it

At that point, a choice. See it as a test - everyone always spoke superstitions of the river, stands to reason strange things might happen - or turn to the swamps and hope you could still catch it.

All in all, it can't have been that uncommon an occurrence. At least one person figured out the wraiths which crawled out of the swamp and came hunting (or scavenging) for your sight or your voice or your swordsmanship or whimsy, they were the ones who hadn't made it. Those people had all crossed the river in their time, though, so kept their damn mouths shut (because, as it turned out, though the other side wasn't as bad as they said, it was basically the same old shit.) Those wraiths, if nothing else, kept the townspeople occupied enough of the time that someone being from the other side became more common than they'd like to think.

At some point, someone built a bridge which, with the commerce and the culture and the eventually-forgotten stupid superstitions about how everyone across the river had sex with goats on the Lord's day, meant the wraiths stopped skulking out of the swamp. They called the city Amnesty, and for convenience and progress built bridges up and down the river, until the channel was more a mere sewer lying forgotten beneath the trendiest houses (for who wouldn't live upon or in view of the Arc Bridge Road, and the swamp was drained for farmland.

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Which, as Malrone would like to remind you (if he weren't drowning) is a whole lot of nothing he gives a flying fuck about.

Malrone was on the Boulevard, which was what they called the Bridges around the time he was still whoever he used to be. The cops were after him, and he didn't know or care too much why. He'd lived his years outside bars, thieving and scamming people out of what they didn't miss all the while, and had no intention of letting those pigs tie the cumulative crimes of seven fabricated men to him.

The Boulevard was a shitty place to which a larcener may flee, but Malrone had been expecting a crowd leaving a show or something to hide amongst. No such luck. A back alley yielded only a dead end, but at that dead end (behind the abandoned scenery) was a gap in the floor.

Malrone flicked a torch on, saw something glittering underneath. Dropped a rock. Heard a splash. Turned, saw a cop run past the sliver of the rest of the world the end of the alley accorded a span over. He'd never heard any stories of a river under Amnesty, but he'd cheated death and unmasking of his thousand lies before.

He pushed aside a plywood rocket, and jumped right in.

And just like all of its greatest stories never told, Amnesty forgot him.

Description:
Malrone stands at average height, average weight, in unremarkable clothing with a vague/common hair colour, a slight accent you can't place, and a posture that doesn't speak of anything in particular. He'll occasionally don a more distinctive set of attributes when a client requires it, but for the most part drifts through life exuding an aura of mundanity. If he's being affable to a group (which'd be a rare occurrence), people's memories tend to fill in the gaps on his appearance based on their own preconceptions. This is great for obfuscation, although sometimes it's a pain when someone's trying to refer a potential client to him.

Since he fell in the river and stumbled his way back into Amnesty, the man's been at something of a loss. He still makes a living with identity theft and the like, but doesn't get any kind of kick out of it like he used to. He's distant, humourless, and exceptionally difficult to make reveal even the smallest aspect of himself. Mostly because he doesn't have any, which from a professional standpoint suits him just fine. Nonetheless, part of him feels hollow even as he goes through the motions. The name Malrone holds no real signficance for him, and when he does muster up enough self-interest to think about things he concedes even his old real name wouldn't mean shit to him either.


Items/Abilities:
Malrone lost his identity to the river, and losing something abstract apparently gives you the power to handle it concretely. Unlike other wraiths, what Malrone lost was never of great personal value, no matter what the river thought. Thus, he doesn't devour victims' identities, rather operating much like he did in life - taking various pieces of information and identification, and stitching them together into convincing identities. Perhaps because the river didn't think to take his occupation, Malrone still mostly saves his identities to sell to assorted interested parties (though he'll save a few for personal monikers, as is his custom).

One quirk of his identity theft gaining the powers of the malevolent spirit variety is his ability to actually steal what he misappropriates - though it's never deliberate, identification and attributes "borrowed" off someone else will, with use by another (including Malrone), "unstick" from the original owner over time. For digital information, this is something of an accidental advantage - databases Malrone has no idea how to infilitrate will rewrite themselves to reflect new owners of stolen identities - but victims losing more concrete attributes over time is more attention than the wraith wants.

Another power of Malrone's is to construct entire people out of nothing but stolen information - though these will often be created at the expense of the victims, Malrone can (with effort) create very sophisticated simulacra. For the most part, though, they're crude spaces that only look good on paper. Such a creature will lack any personality, and only fit vague descriptors when you try to recall what it looks like. Different observers may disagree on the construct's appearance, based on how they interpreted its actions.

Malrone currently has information for about five separate and full identities that would hold up were he detained by a police officer. Unwilling as always to full-out steal identities, he cycles through them, mixing and matching physical attributes and ID as necessary.