| Denis | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Denis Taylor | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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An upbeat and empathic individual however he has trouble socializing and usually is better at relating with animals than people.
Special Skills
- Tracking
- Animal Husbandry
- Herbology
- Supernatural Lore
- CQC
Special Abilities
- Wolf form - can shift into full wolf form
- Hybrid form - can shift into a form halfway between man and wolf.
- Heightened strength
- Heightened reflexes
- Increased speed
- Heightened senses
Background
Denis grew up in his hometown of Anaheim as a social outcast. He was not very sociable and talking to people made him nervous. As a result he became a pariah in his town and school. Despite this he found happiness in helping hurt animals he would find. His parents had no real opinion since they worked too long and hard to pay attention to him beyond giving him the necessities. He seemed to have a natural ability to bond and care for animals and since they never hurt him no one even noticed.
As he grew he started to read up books about animal care, he had decided to become a veterinarian. One day as he was walking home from highschool he spotted an injured wolf and made his way over to help. The wolf started to try and leave but Denis was persistent. His persistence was rewarded with a nip on the lip from the wolf who seemed to act in an unusual way. In the end he was happy with doing good for another living being. Little did he know that the wolf that bit him was infected with the lycanthropy virus and that in a month’s time he would undergo his first shift. This moment marked the end of his happy days.
He was inexperienced to say the least and his awkward but stubborn nature led to him being rejected by the local packs. He also ended up causing his parents additional stress from the things he would rip and damage while in his wolf form. This stress lead to his father’s mental breakdown and later interment into a mental facility. His mother tried her best to keep going but she couldn’t deal with Dennis anymore. At 17 he was thrown out of his house into homelessness. Dennis kept wandering finding odd jobs to keep himself alive, he would gravitate to farms and ranches so he could attend to animals. While he was exceedingly good at his job he was always forced to keep wandering to avoid harming anyone or any animals he attended to.
Through his travels he started to learn of the various supernatural creatures of the land. Not just that but his heart ached at the creatures that were being hunted to extinction by greedy supernaturals and prejudiced humans. He sets his sights from just surviving to trying to protect and tend to animals. The reality set in very quickly, how was he going to care for all these animals if he could barely get enough money to support himself.
He worked with greater focus now that he gave himself a purpose. After many months of concentrated effort he would manage to get his hybrid form, now 24 years old. He celebrated by working harder. He tried to live as frugally as possible to save as much as he could. Even like this his goal eluded him, he would need to work for a few centuries to raise the money. He looked for some other way of funding his dream. He moved to Santa Barbara to look for a higher paying job or even someone that shared his passion.
Unfortunately he was unable to find anything, he was rejected at every turn. On top of this the local pack started harassing him for being an outcast that never bonded with any other pack. He persisted and started to look for alternate methods to achieve his goals. He was not good at stealing and could not bring himself to kill anyone as an assassin for hire, the only option was bounty hunting. As a lycan it was a natural fit and it allowed him to alleviate his more basal instincts without having to shift to full wolf form.
It was during one of his bounties that he hunted a rogue mage named Kalie Vincent. She had a large bounty on her head due to her knack of avoiding capture. In fact the first time that Denis tracked her and found her she managed to give him the slip in broad daylight. He didn’t relent however since her skills piqued his interest. A pattern emerged, Denis would gain her scent and track Kalie to a location and Kalie gets away using her magical and sleath to get away.
Denis started to notice her patterns of escape and adjust his tactics as she observed, their deadly dance stretched out to a year before Denis was surprised by Kalie. When he tracked her down she didn’t run away but decided to talk to him. So far he was the only one that kept an active trail on her and she decided it would be best to get him on her side. They converse for a time and she decides to get him aid on his dream. She had promised that in exchange for his help in her objectives she would use her contacts to get him the money needed to get his preserve up and running. He was always an independant bounty hunter so he was free to follow the money and his conscience.
Follow he did, as he went along with Kalie to help her in fighting a corrupt magical guild that wanted her dead. He used his skills to help her investigate the guild members and to track down evidence to be used against them. Unlike her Denis wasn’t a stealth expert, Many times he had to run away or have Kalie save him. Their time and work together brought them close, once hunter and prey now they were a team. Finally after six months they had compiled enough evidence to have the local vampires act on it. Kalie had her life back and she was able to grant Denis his wish. The vampires gave him an old abandoned castle in near the Ardennes, the castle was enchanted and many rooms within were spacially larger than what the castle should allow. Along with this a hefty sum of money from Kalie.
With this he set in his work, reading up on the types of creatures and getting to know how to contain them and even take care of them. He used his new wealth sparingly and preferred to seek out the knowledge he needed rather than spend money better used to maintain his preserve. He began his trek around the world to lean as much as he could about all these types of obscure magical creatures. To his surprise Kalie went with him, she had missed him for some time and figured helping him on his personal goal would be a fun adventure. The two went around for a few years collecting creatures and learning about them from experts. They became much closer during the travels even to the point where Kalie and Denis had a romantic relationship.
They returned to Germany to convert the castle into a preserve, Kalie used her magic and Denis his new creature lore. The conversion was the fastest part of their work so far. It was finished in three months and the preserve operational the month after. It was half a year after that they started to run into trouble, trouble they called hunters. These people hunted and killed supernatural creatures for a variety of reasons and yet they were coming together to break into the preserve that Kalie and Denis had spent so long to build. Everyday they had to deal with attacks and attempted break ins. Kalie had to use some of her connections to get safeguards installed into the castle.
Even as their defences became better the hunters tried harder and used stronger magic. They were only two people against hundreds and the only reason they had gone on for so long is that they used money and connections to get help for it. Their luck ran out as a psionic hunter was able to break down the defenses of the castle with a combination of psionic attacks and magical counters. It was devastating though they were not harmed by the hunters it brought Denis to his mental breaking point. In the aftermath Kalie had to take care of a broken Denis. His condition was very delicate and he had sworn off trying again. He didn’t want this to happen a second time and thought that he had done more harm than good.
He could not find something else to dedicate his life to, sinking into the same mediocrity he was stuck in after he was kicked out of his parent’s house. This broke Kalie’s heart, she was fine with finding something else for them to do and the fact that he had willingly abandoned his dream but she believed this was too far. Kalie started to push him to find something to do, something more constructive. Denis wouldn’t budge, he didn’t want to try for fear that his dream would be destroyed by the selfishness of others again. Kalie persisted in her point, she argued that he needed something to drive him or his life will speed past him. As he rejected the other options she gave him she started thinking about restarting the preserve. The property was still there and there were still people willing to help them with their goals.
Kalie started to rebuild the preserve herself, behind Denis’ back. She knew he would be angry if he found out she was doing this. Denis kept to the same routine of working odd jobs in farms and ranches while all this happened. Once she had restored the preserve she revealed it to Denis, as she had predicted he was angry. She argued that he was scared and that if helping animals really was his passion then he couldn’t stop. Denis wasn’t entirely convinced but he was given a pause from her passion. He had translated his passion to her and was now feeling guilty for abandoning his dream. The guilt moving in into action Kalie was happy to hear him go back to pursuing his dream. They started going around finding more creatures to protect but as they did Denis had a panic. If the hunters had gotten to them before then surely it would happen again.
He started looking around for a way to hide the preserve in a way that would make it exponentially harder to get into. This was something out of his expertise so he took an offer he shouldn’t have. A ‘friend’ set up a meeting between Denis and Kalie, and someone that could help them for a fee. The mysterious person turned out to be a demon, what he wanted for the knowledge to safeguard a location was for Denis to be the demon’s thrall. Denis wouldn’t relent and he preferred to leave, Kalie however would try and negotiate with the demon. The demon did not want anything to do with her however, she tried to convince him in many ways. She was a mage after all, maybe she could obtain something for him in exchange for the knowledge. He did not and even kicked her out because she was annoying.
They started up their rescue operations but majorly scaled down to avoid attention. No more would they brazenly save animals, now they did things much more subtly and discreetly. This served only to prolong the time until conflict restarted. Once again they had caught the attention of the hunters and this time they attacked more efficiently. Denis started to panic as they tested their defenses. He didn’t want a repeat of the last time they got through. Taking advantage the demon from before contacted him to present his offer again but Denis rejected it. The demon kept pressing and with the hunters closing in and starting to get through the defenses Denis relented. He still rejected his offer but said that anything else was fine. The demons laughed and seemingly disappeared, Denis thought his last chance had just left and he braced himself for a second failure. He was surprised when the attacks stopped in their tracks.
The demon reappeared and explained that the castle was now hidden in interdimensional space and that he would tell Denis the way to be able to enter and exit the preserve. A way that is extremely hard to figure. Before it did the demon decided to collect on his debt, this debt being Kalie’s soul. As demons do, it had tricked Denis into a faustian deal. This particular deal was that in exchange for a almost perfectly secure preserve Denis had forfeit his love’s soul. Kalie felt betrayed for a moment but she pushed the thought out of her mind and smiled. She went to the demon willingly, they had never had any type of intimate contact since he had the lycanthropy virus and it would affect her adversely as a mage. This was something they both knew and regretted, however seeing this Kalie figured that she would be able to leave a lasting memory for Denis and a source of motivation.
The demon took her soul and even her body right in front of Denis. He was nearly broken but a small voice in his head told him to keep going, to not give up hope. After the demon left Denis was left in the preserve to think to himself. There was no way he would find someone else like her, she was the closest he would ever get to having a family with a person. He cried bitterly for a few hours before he started back up working on his goal. After all Kalie would have wanted him to keep going, no matter what just keep going and hope for the best.