Johannes Cabal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
somelittleinfamy) wrote2013-02-18 03:27 pm
somelittleinfamy) wrote2013-02-18 03:27 pm
Profile and Permissions
JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM
Name: Johannes Cabal
Aliases: Not here!
Age and/or birthday: 29 (30 August 1860something)
Fandom/Media/OC?: Johannes Cabal series
Programmed Possession: A swordstick: this one is a classy, pristine accessory rendered slightly less classy by the fact that it has a silver death’s-head topping it off, which is a bit gothic even for the times. The blade is a serviceable 1880s duelling sword, somewhere between a sabre and an épée.
Arrival date: 18 February 2013
I am...: a brassy, coldhearted necromancer with bad life choices.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Describe your character physically. There is not much color in Johannes Cabal’s person altogether and the way that he dresses doesn’t much bring it out. He has pale blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and a fair Germanic complexion that burns readily in the sun. As a person of nocturnal habits, he can look especially bloodless and strung-out. In frame he’s tallish, standing at just over 6 feet, and of average-to-lean build: he carries more muscle on his person than he appears to, but not by much. He looks as cold and aloof as he is and possesses an unsettling stare when he chooses to level it, and oftentimes when he doesn’t, too. He is almost always well-groomed: stubble tends to be rare (and wouldn’t show well anyway), his hair tends to be combed, and his fingernails are at even lengths, always cut to blunt lines.
His carriage is formal and self-possessed. He has very good posture, sits up straight, crosses his legs neatly, cuts his food into bite-sized bits, drinks without slurping, and everything else your mother told you to do as a child, unless he’s tired or angry or preoccupied with something else that might fray his Victorian manners.
What does your character wear? In his canon and time period he wears black suits, like many of his contemporaries. He rarely dresses down there and he rarely dresses down in Taxon, either, as going without a waistcoat in public feels weird and too-casual to him. His adaptations to modern fashion tend to be three-piece solids and pinstripes in dark colors. He dresses a bit American Psycho. He’s also given to wearing spectacles, especially when reading.
That covers what they look like. What do they sound like? Crisp, tenor, well-enunciated. Johannes’s English is fluent but he speaks it with a very distinct German accent, a little stronger than his brother’s. He has a clear and sometimes piercing voice with a carrying quality. It is not usually difficult to pick out what he is saying and that he is saying it.
In manner of speech he is articulate and precise, like a person with public speaking training (or, in his case, a foreigner very careful to be understood) and given to a prodigious vocabulary. Some of this is precision, some is the 1890s, and some is his desire to demonstrate his fluency in the language. He’s a less ornate speaker in German.
Running down the list of the five senses.... smell? Johannes smells like soap, cologne, and his own blood.
Touch & Taste. Uh, okay there. His blood is type A negative, slightly anemic.
The fine, fine details: Under his clothes he bears the marks of the occasional run-in with someone else's knife or bullet, and with a vampire, apparently.
PB differences? Johannes dresses more somberly and formally than his PB and his hair is generally tidier. He also wears spectacles, though he may shake this habit at some point in Taxon once he figures out contact lenses.
BENEATH LE SURFACE
A history of me: It would be nice to be able to point to some definitive point in Johannes Cabal’s early life that led to his becoming, well, Johannes Cabal, but the fact is that it was fairly ordinary. He grew up in ambiguous late-1800s steampunk-era Germany, probably Bavaria to stick a pin on the map, as the younger son in an upper-middle-class family; he was shy, hardworking, unremarkable, and full of bottled resentment for his handsome and popular older brother Horst. He was in the process of preparing to study to become a doctor as an older teenager when he met, fell in love with, and miraculously became engaged to a local girl, and briefly it looked like he was all blandly set up for the rest of his unremarkable life--until his fiancee drowned in the river near his town.
Well, that certainly wouldn’t do. Johannes never was able to accept losing things, least of all the tidy future he was absolutely certain he deserved. Distraught over the loss of his fiancee and through her also his only friend and his perfectly planned future, Johannes became fixed on the idea of rescuing her from death, which he came to see as an ugly and unfair limitation on human life; his medical interests changed rapidly to medical science and the occult and the elusive idea of true resurrection from the dead. He turned away from medicine, studied biology and magic, and thereby embarked upon a successful career of dark magic, adventure, moneymaking, and necromantic study (until, at the age of 30 or so, he would have reason to question whether his whole fridged-girlfriend problem was a bit of a stupid and self-delusional undertaking anyway, but that is outside the scope of this application and rather beside the point--suffice to say, it is).
Except that it really didn’t work out that simply. Around the age of 19, in the pursuit of his necromantic study, he got the idea into his head that he needed to investigate vampirism--and, frightened and possessing not many resources beyond his own 19-year-old person, he asked his elder brother Horst for help. They succeeded in locating the tomb of a vampire. They succeeded, in fact, in locating a vampire. Then things fell apart. In his ensuing panic and flight, young Johannes abandoned Horst to death or worse: worse, as it turned out. He sealed up the tomb with his brother still trapped inside of it and spent the next eight or so years of his life with the world’s largest and loudest heart buried under his psychological floorboards.
That was hardly the end of his questionable decision-making, however; this venture being a failure, he then learned enough demonology to sell his soul to the Devil in return for necromantic magic. Of course, this bargain turned out to be less than wise as well: being soulless interfered with him as a magician as well as a human being, as it turned out, and deadened his life altogether. That being so, at the age of 28 he decided he wanted his soul back and promptly entered into... sigh... yet another ill-advised contract, this time with the reward of regaining his soul if he managed to trick 100 people into signing over theirs. The trouble was, as Velma Kelly says, he simply could not do it alone. So, filled with trepidation and with his tail between his legs, he went back to see if the brother he’d betrayed was still alive.
He wasn’t. Not exactly.
Suffice to say, Horst was not happy. But he did help him, after pinning him to the floor and drinking his blood, anyway, which says a great deal about their relationship. In any case, they then founded and ran the world’s most depressing funfair of the year, which was a carnival explicitly designed for the purpose of tricking small-town carnivalgoers out of their souls. P.T. Barnum would’ve been proud.
Unfortunately, things did not improve from here. Things never improve from points like this. Their new family business ran reasonably efficiently, Johannes with his eyes (as always) firmly on the prize and Horst with a few more misgivings, but they disagreed over the finer moral points of depriving people of their souls; specifically, when a desperate Johannes led one woman to commit infanticide and another to sign her soul over to save her father, Horst revealed he’d stolen one contract and miscounted their tally as insurance against Johannes’s cruel behavior. He confessed his regret about helping Johannes in the first place, told Johannes he was more or less a waste of human space (with ample justification), then promptly, and to Johannes’s horror, put an end to his own vampiric existence.
Johannes did manage to retrieve his soul. He did not manage to retrieve his brother. Freshly re-souled and freshly bereaved, a shaken Johannes went about his business and back on his mission to discover the secret to true necromancy (a secret which he is no closer to discovering than he was before, at the moment). In the process of stealing a book not long after from a warlord called Count Marechal, he was caught by Marechal and pressed into resurrecting a recently deceased ruler for propaganda purposes; he upheld his side of the bargain in the strictest senses only. In the ensuing pandemonium Johannes fled and became promptly entangled in a political murder mystery, in the process encountering his recent enemy, Leonie Barrow, the woman he once tricked out of her soul; she made an extremely reluctant ally to him, and vice versa, but eventually the two of them uncovered a plot to plunge Europe into WWI-esque imperial war.
With a marked dislike for war and a more-than-slightly itchy conscience on the matter of Leonie and the murder victims, Johannes managed to do the right thing for the first time in a considerable while and confronted Marechal. He also managed to crash their airship, unfortunately, due to an unwillingness to read manuals and a complete unfamiliarity with airship engineering. This delivers him straight into the hands of Taxon: and here his troubles begin.
Who matters? The thorniest entanglement in Johannes’s life in or out of Taxon is with his brother Horst, his senior by four years. It’s complicated.
Otherwise, we’ll see.
Personality & Psychology: She shot him a dirty look. “You like to pretend you’re some sort of pure scientist without a human feeling in your body, but you’re just a horrid little man, really, aren’t you, Cabal?"
Like all self-made men, Johannes worships his creator. Sort of. He'd certainly like you to think so. In truth, this is only one of many respects in which he's full of shit; no one gets to be as much of an arsehole as Johannes Cabal through their own happy well-adjustedness. He is a cynical, paranoid, unkind young man who has made a great many mistakes, a great many more selfish and self-centered decisions, and survives by being one step ahead of all of them at all times: literally and psychologically. His life is littered with the debris of his own fear and arrogance. So are many other people's, for that matter--those who still have lives in the first place, anyway. Being friends with (or related to) him is generally regarded as a losing proposition. It takes a certain sort of reckless idiot to sell his soul to the Devil; it takes a certain sort of tenacious bastard to win it back. Johannes, fortunately and unfortunately, is both.
To make an omelet, in Johannes's opinion, you have to be willing to break a few eggs. For someone not yet thirty, Johannes has managed to break quite a remarkable number of eggs. He cuts something of a yolky and shell-ridden swathe through the world, as a matter of fact. He justifies himself with pragmatism, a distinct superiority complex, and the scornful belief that it's everyone else who's just too cowardly or sentimental or self-delusional to see what has to be done; however, it's worth pointing out that for the number of broken eggs and lives in his wake, no omelet actually appears to be forthcoming. He leans on the oldest, trustiest excuse of the ruthless and unkind, which is that it's not he who's unkind, it's everyone else who's unrealistic--however, he's wrong. He's unkind. It serves him well in life as well as poorly: arguably he's doing quite well for a friendless, singleminded, lonely person who's blown every second chance anyone else has ever given him, but how much does that count for? As for that latter question, he tries not to think about it. His life philosophy is fairly insular, streamlined, and cruelly efficient. It's very easy to be bad when you've decided that everything and everyone else is too.
Personally, he's dry, businesslike, and more easily provoked to a challenge or an insult than he'd care to admit. He's not the most likeable fellow in the universe, to be certain, but he's also not an idiot: you don't get ahead in life by making needless enemies, and if you're already in the practice of making a lot of needful enemies (in your own opinion), there is no point whatsoever in adding to them. This works out better in theory than in practice for him, unfortunately--in theory he endeavors to be polite and professional but in practice he's an impatient and judgmental person with not much of a natural way with others and very little tolerance for their foibles and mistakes. People who've met him may remember him as a sharp-minded and hard-hearted individual with an variety of skills, a greater variety of opinions, and not a lot of patience for anything that stands between him and The Prize, whatever The Prize happens to be at this particular moment. He is an excessively, amusingly Gordian thinker: he prefers to get to the point at all times, which often causes him to miss other points along the way. He thinks many things could use a good shave with Occam's razor. He thinks many people could use a good shave with Sweeney Todd's razor, to be quite frank. People and matters are always passing through the trim flowchart of his mind with railroaded efficiency, and more often than not they're deemed wanting--and 'wanting' is not a safe place to be in Johannes's esteem.
Of course, no one has literally no redeeming qualities, not even Johannes Cabal: though damned if he isn't a very good facsimile at times. He is too contrary to react well to bullying and strong-armed authority, whether directed at himself or at someone else; he also frankly doesn't take kindly to anything he thinks is unfair. Death is unfair. Tyrants are unfair. Senseless violence is unfair. You may be sensing a skein of hypocrisy here, but it's not the absence of a moral compass that makes Johannes so capable of being a complete prick, it's the ability to ignore it. He's hardly soulless--not anymore, anyway--and he tends to treat others with a fair modicum of honesty and consistency, if nothing else; he is a very reliable partner in any bargain, though it's not his fault if you were rubbish with reading the fine print. He probably wouldn't call himself a "man of his word," because that's silly and a bit too close to the concept of "honor" for his liking, but: frankly, no one as stodgy and Victorian and proud as Johannes enjoys an entirely distant relationship with his own personal honor, and with his own personal sense of self-righteous indignation. This is a sword that cuts in more than one direction, of course; he's also quick to temper and quicker to revenge, contrary as this is to his own cold and calculating self-image, and Hell hath no fury like a Johannes with the notion that he deserves something and hasn't gotten it. But it does mean that when he cares about something, he certainly acts on it, and the handful of people that can count themselves among those he has any esteem for--more than he acknowledges, far fewer than there should be--can more or less count on him, at least when he thinks he owes it to them.
Left unoccupied and alone with his thoughts, he's not unaware that he's an unhappy coward with his back turned on the wreckage of his own mistakes. Usually he's very good at occupying himself. Too bad there isn't much to do in Taxon.
Skills, Powers, Weaknesses, and et cetera: Some people are naturally gifted. Some people do their homework. Johannes has done his homework. He’s spent arguably his entire adult life doing, in one form or another, homework, and his skillset is a testament to that. He is clever, but not as clever as he is resourceful, and his mind has always been studiously fixed on learning as thoroughly as possible so that he can apply that knowledge when he needs it: as a result of this pragmatic mentality and work ethic, he’s a magician with an impressive mastery of necromancy and demonology and a well-read young scientist, with a broad base of occult and scientific knowledge and a working familiarity with the many applications of both. He’s put a fair amount of toil into self-reliance: by practice he’s a capable fencer and a decent shot, if not a virtuoso with either, and has a general smattering of practical skills, with a good sense of direction and fluency in English and French as second and third languages (and passable reading fluency in several dead languages, for occult purposes). He’s accustomed to living and traveling alone and can mend his own socks, cook his own food, and generally takes care of himself unobtrusively; he’s a capable, tidy, hard-working person. He’s a one-man adventuring party most of the time and while he has his weaknesses like every party and every man, he makes do fairly well.
By far his strongest skill is a level-headed approach to problem-solving. Johannes is intelligent, but more importantly, he applies his intelligence well to practical problems; he’s fished himself out of many an instance of hot water with his own level-headedness and opportunistic mind. His stoicism and sangfroid serve him well; he rarely panics in danger and handles himself well under pressure. If nothing else, he’s very accustomed to things going wrong.
OOC, it’s worth noting that as a necromancer, he can wield a certain amount of power over undead characters (with the exception of any with immunity to magic and/or magical compulsion), if he’s desperate and doesn’t mind making a plethora of enemies, anyway.
Sexytiems: Prefers women, not exclusively. Preoccupied.
Best way to meet this character: Placeholder until he gets settled in Taxon!
PERMISSIONS
THE MIND: Johannes’s mind can be read, though he’s got a higher likelihood of noticing or resisting than a character without magic: not by much, however. His mind is tidy, clinical, and a little fractured at the edges, and there are more than a few skeletons in these well-organized closets. Just ask me first!
THE BODY: Johannes can absolutely be harmed and has no particular special resistances to it. Ping me about it! Same goes for his property, with the caveat that his residence is well-warded.
FUNKY STUFF: Sure! Reference his history, go wiki-wandering, or just ask me if you want information. Aura- and magic-sensing is also quite all right, as he’s less than inconspicuous in that regard. He gives off the strong aura or “smell” of death, undeath, black magic, and all manner of the corrupted arcane: it shouldn’t be hard for any character with that sort of detection to tell what he is. His soul also seems a little sewn-up and ill-fitting, like it’s been ripped out and put back again. It has.
PRIVACY: Threadhop and threadjack away! Unlocked posts are fair game; ask me about anything marked locked. Johannes may hide his map location now and then when he figures out how, but that’s a big “when.”
SURPRISE!: In general, feel free to sneak up on Johannes if your character has any particular stealth or other sneaking ability. If they give off any particularly strong or glaring magical effects, though, ask me.
MISCELLANEOUS
Name: Johannes Cabal
Aliases: Not here!
Age and/or birthday: 29 (30 August 1860something)
Fandom/Media/OC?: Johannes Cabal series
Programmed Possession: A swordstick: this one is a classy, pristine accessory rendered slightly less classy by the fact that it has a silver death’s-head topping it off, which is a bit gothic even for the times. The blade is a serviceable 1880s duelling sword, somewhere between a sabre and an épée.
Arrival date: 18 February 2013
I am...: a brassy, coldhearted necromancer with bad life choices.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Describe your character physically. There is not much color in Johannes Cabal’s person altogether and the way that he dresses doesn’t much bring it out. He has pale blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and a fair Germanic complexion that burns readily in the sun. As a person of nocturnal habits, he can look especially bloodless and strung-out. In frame he’s tallish, standing at just over 6 feet, and of average-to-lean build: he carries more muscle on his person than he appears to, but not by much. He looks as cold and aloof as he is and possesses an unsettling stare when he chooses to level it, and oftentimes when he doesn’t, too. He is almost always well-groomed: stubble tends to be rare (and wouldn’t show well anyway), his hair tends to be combed, and his fingernails are at even lengths, always cut to blunt lines.
His carriage is formal and self-possessed. He has very good posture, sits up straight, crosses his legs neatly, cuts his food into bite-sized bits, drinks without slurping, and everything else your mother told you to do as a child, unless he’s tired or angry or preoccupied with something else that might fray his Victorian manners.
What does your character wear? In his canon and time period he wears black suits, like many of his contemporaries. He rarely dresses down there and he rarely dresses down in Taxon, either, as going without a waistcoat in public feels weird and too-casual to him. His adaptations to modern fashion tend to be three-piece solids and pinstripes in dark colors. He dresses a bit American Psycho. He’s also given to wearing spectacles, especially when reading.
That covers what they look like. What do they sound like? Crisp, tenor, well-enunciated. Johannes’s English is fluent but he speaks it with a very distinct German accent, a little stronger than his brother’s. He has a clear and sometimes piercing voice with a carrying quality. It is not usually difficult to pick out what he is saying and that he is saying it.
In manner of speech he is articulate and precise, like a person with public speaking training (or, in his case, a foreigner very careful to be understood) and given to a prodigious vocabulary. Some of this is precision, some is the 1890s, and some is his desire to demonstrate his fluency in the language. He’s a less ornate speaker in German.
Running down the list of the five senses.... smell? Johannes smells like soap, cologne, and his own blood.
Touch & Taste. Uh, okay there. His blood is type A negative, slightly anemic.
The fine, fine details: Under his clothes he bears the marks of the occasional run-in with someone else's knife or bullet, and with a vampire, apparently.
PB differences? Johannes dresses more somberly and formally than his PB and his hair is generally tidier. He also wears spectacles, though he may shake this habit at some point in Taxon once he figures out contact lenses.
BENEATH LE SURFACE
A history of me: It would be nice to be able to point to some definitive point in Johannes Cabal’s early life that led to his becoming, well, Johannes Cabal, but the fact is that it was fairly ordinary. He grew up in ambiguous late-1800s steampunk-era Germany, probably Bavaria to stick a pin on the map, as the younger son in an upper-middle-class family; he was shy, hardworking, unremarkable, and full of bottled resentment for his handsome and popular older brother Horst. He was in the process of preparing to study to become a doctor as an older teenager when he met, fell in love with, and miraculously became engaged to a local girl, and briefly it looked like he was all blandly set up for the rest of his unremarkable life--until his fiancee drowned in the river near his town.
Well, that certainly wouldn’t do. Johannes never was able to accept losing things, least of all the tidy future he was absolutely certain he deserved. Distraught over the loss of his fiancee and through her also his only friend and his perfectly planned future, Johannes became fixed on the idea of rescuing her from death, which he came to see as an ugly and unfair limitation on human life; his medical interests changed rapidly to medical science and the occult and the elusive idea of true resurrection from the dead. He turned away from medicine, studied biology and magic, and thereby embarked upon a successful career of dark magic, adventure, moneymaking, and necromantic study (until, at the age of 30 or so, he would have reason to question whether his whole fridged-girlfriend problem was a bit of a stupid and self-delusional undertaking anyway, but that is outside the scope of this application and rather beside the point--suffice to say, it is).
Except that it really didn’t work out that simply. Around the age of 19, in the pursuit of his necromantic study, he got the idea into his head that he needed to investigate vampirism--and, frightened and possessing not many resources beyond his own 19-year-old person, he asked his elder brother Horst for help. They succeeded in locating the tomb of a vampire. They succeeded, in fact, in locating a vampire. Then things fell apart. In his ensuing panic and flight, young Johannes abandoned Horst to death or worse: worse, as it turned out. He sealed up the tomb with his brother still trapped inside of it and spent the next eight or so years of his life with the world’s largest and loudest heart buried under his psychological floorboards.
That was hardly the end of his questionable decision-making, however; this venture being a failure, he then learned enough demonology to sell his soul to the Devil in return for necromantic magic. Of course, this bargain turned out to be less than wise as well: being soulless interfered with him as a magician as well as a human being, as it turned out, and deadened his life altogether. That being so, at the age of 28 he decided he wanted his soul back and promptly entered into... sigh... yet another ill-advised contract, this time with the reward of regaining his soul if he managed to trick 100 people into signing over theirs. The trouble was, as Velma Kelly says, he simply could not do it alone. So, filled with trepidation and with his tail between his legs, he went back to see if the brother he’d betrayed was still alive.
He wasn’t. Not exactly.
Suffice to say, Horst was not happy. But he did help him, after pinning him to the floor and drinking his blood, anyway, which says a great deal about their relationship. In any case, they then founded and ran the world’s most depressing funfair of the year, which was a carnival explicitly designed for the purpose of tricking small-town carnivalgoers out of their souls. P.T. Barnum would’ve been proud.
Unfortunately, things did not improve from here. Things never improve from points like this. Their new family business ran reasonably efficiently, Johannes with his eyes (as always) firmly on the prize and Horst with a few more misgivings, but they disagreed over the finer moral points of depriving people of their souls; specifically, when a desperate Johannes led one woman to commit infanticide and another to sign her soul over to save her father, Horst revealed he’d stolen one contract and miscounted their tally as insurance against Johannes’s cruel behavior. He confessed his regret about helping Johannes in the first place, told Johannes he was more or less a waste of human space (with ample justification), then promptly, and to Johannes’s horror, put an end to his own vampiric existence.
Johannes did manage to retrieve his soul. He did not manage to retrieve his brother. Freshly re-souled and freshly bereaved, a shaken Johannes went about his business and back on his mission to discover the secret to true necromancy (a secret which he is no closer to discovering than he was before, at the moment). In the process of stealing a book not long after from a warlord called Count Marechal, he was caught by Marechal and pressed into resurrecting a recently deceased ruler for propaganda purposes; he upheld his side of the bargain in the strictest senses only. In the ensuing pandemonium Johannes fled and became promptly entangled in a political murder mystery, in the process encountering his recent enemy, Leonie Barrow, the woman he once tricked out of her soul; she made an extremely reluctant ally to him, and vice versa, but eventually the two of them uncovered a plot to plunge Europe into WWI-esque imperial war.
With a marked dislike for war and a more-than-slightly itchy conscience on the matter of Leonie and the murder victims, Johannes managed to do the right thing for the first time in a considerable while and confronted Marechal. He also managed to crash their airship, unfortunately, due to an unwillingness to read manuals and a complete unfamiliarity with airship engineering. This delivers him straight into the hands of Taxon: and here his troubles begin.
Who matters? The thorniest entanglement in Johannes’s life in or out of Taxon is with his brother Horst, his senior by four years. It’s complicated.
Otherwise, we’ll see.
Personality & Psychology: She shot him a dirty look. “You like to pretend you’re some sort of pure scientist without a human feeling in your body, but you’re just a horrid little man, really, aren’t you, Cabal?"
Like all self-made men, Johannes worships his creator. Sort of. He'd certainly like you to think so. In truth, this is only one of many respects in which he's full of shit; no one gets to be as much of an arsehole as Johannes Cabal through their own happy well-adjustedness. He is a cynical, paranoid, unkind young man who has made a great many mistakes, a great many more selfish and self-centered decisions, and survives by being one step ahead of all of them at all times: literally and psychologically. His life is littered with the debris of his own fear and arrogance. So are many other people's, for that matter--those who still have lives in the first place, anyway. Being friends with (or related to) him is generally regarded as a losing proposition. It takes a certain sort of reckless idiot to sell his soul to the Devil; it takes a certain sort of tenacious bastard to win it back. Johannes, fortunately and unfortunately, is both.
To make an omelet, in Johannes's opinion, you have to be willing to break a few eggs. For someone not yet thirty, Johannes has managed to break quite a remarkable number of eggs. He cuts something of a yolky and shell-ridden swathe through the world, as a matter of fact. He justifies himself with pragmatism, a distinct superiority complex, and the scornful belief that it's everyone else who's just too cowardly or sentimental or self-delusional to see what has to be done; however, it's worth pointing out that for the number of broken eggs and lives in his wake, no omelet actually appears to be forthcoming. He leans on the oldest, trustiest excuse of the ruthless and unkind, which is that it's not he who's unkind, it's everyone else who's unrealistic--however, he's wrong. He's unkind. It serves him well in life as well as poorly: arguably he's doing quite well for a friendless, singleminded, lonely person who's blown every second chance anyone else has ever given him, but how much does that count for? As for that latter question, he tries not to think about it. His life philosophy is fairly insular, streamlined, and cruelly efficient. It's very easy to be bad when you've decided that everything and everyone else is too.
Personally, he's dry, businesslike, and more easily provoked to a challenge or an insult than he'd care to admit. He's not the most likeable fellow in the universe, to be certain, but he's also not an idiot: you don't get ahead in life by making needless enemies, and if you're already in the practice of making a lot of needful enemies (in your own opinion), there is no point whatsoever in adding to them. This works out better in theory than in practice for him, unfortunately--in theory he endeavors to be polite and professional but in practice he's an impatient and judgmental person with not much of a natural way with others and very little tolerance for their foibles and mistakes. People who've met him may remember him as a sharp-minded and hard-hearted individual with an variety of skills, a greater variety of opinions, and not a lot of patience for anything that stands between him and The Prize, whatever The Prize happens to be at this particular moment. He is an excessively, amusingly Gordian thinker: he prefers to get to the point at all times, which often causes him to miss other points along the way. He thinks many things could use a good shave with Occam's razor. He thinks many people could use a good shave with Sweeney Todd's razor, to be quite frank. People and matters are always passing through the trim flowchart of his mind with railroaded efficiency, and more often than not they're deemed wanting--and 'wanting' is not a safe place to be in Johannes's esteem.
Of course, no one has literally no redeeming qualities, not even Johannes Cabal: though damned if he isn't a very good facsimile at times. He is too contrary to react well to bullying and strong-armed authority, whether directed at himself or at someone else; he also frankly doesn't take kindly to anything he thinks is unfair. Death is unfair. Tyrants are unfair. Senseless violence is unfair. You may be sensing a skein of hypocrisy here, but it's not the absence of a moral compass that makes Johannes so capable of being a complete prick, it's the ability to ignore it. He's hardly soulless--not anymore, anyway--and he tends to treat others with a fair modicum of honesty and consistency, if nothing else; he is a very reliable partner in any bargain, though it's not his fault if you were rubbish with reading the fine print. He probably wouldn't call himself a "man of his word," because that's silly and a bit too close to the concept of "honor" for his liking, but: frankly, no one as stodgy and Victorian and proud as Johannes enjoys an entirely distant relationship with his own personal honor, and with his own personal sense of self-righteous indignation. This is a sword that cuts in more than one direction, of course; he's also quick to temper and quicker to revenge, contrary as this is to his own cold and calculating self-image, and Hell hath no fury like a Johannes with the notion that he deserves something and hasn't gotten it. But it does mean that when he cares about something, he certainly acts on it, and the handful of people that can count themselves among those he has any esteem for--more than he acknowledges, far fewer than there should be--can more or less count on him, at least when he thinks he owes it to them.
Left unoccupied and alone with his thoughts, he's not unaware that he's an unhappy coward with his back turned on the wreckage of his own mistakes. Usually he's very good at occupying himself. Too bad there isn't much to do in Taxon.
Skills, Powers, Weaknesses, and et cetera: Some people are naturally gifted. Some people do their homework. Johannes has done his homework. He’s spent arguably his entire adult life doing, in one form or another, homework, and his skillset is a testament to that. He is clever, but not as clever as he is resourceful, and his mind has always been studiously fixed on learning as thoroughly as possible so that he can apply that knowledge when he needs it: as a result of this pragmatic mentality and work ethic, he’s a magician with an impressive mastery of necromancy and demonology and a well-read young scientist, with a broad base of occult and scientific knowledge and a working familiarity with the many applications of both. He’s put a fair amount of toil into self-reliance: by practice he’s a capable fencer and a decent shot, if not a virtuoso with either, and has a general smattering of practical skills, with a good sense of direction and fluency in English and French as second and third languages (and passable reading fluency in several dead languages, for occult purposes). He’s accustomed to living and traveling alone and can mend his own socks, cook his own food, and generally takes care of himself unobtrusively; he’s a capable, tidy, hard-working person. He’s a one-man adventuring party most of the time and while he has his weaknesses like every party and every man, he makes do fairly well.
By far his strongest skill is a level-headed approach to problem-solving. Johannes is intelligent, but more importantly, he applies his intelligence well to practical problems; he’s fished himself out of many an instance of hot water with his own level-headedness and opportunistic mind. His stoicism and sangfroid serve him well; he rarely panics in danger and handles himself well under pressure. If nothing else, he’s very accustomed to things going wrong.
OOC, it’s worth noting that as a necromancer, he can wield a certain amount of power over undead characters (with the exception of any with immunity to magic and/or magical compulsion), if he’s desperate and doesn’t mind making a plethora of enemies, anyway.
Sexytiems: Prefers women, not exclusively. Preoccupied.
Best way to meet this character: Placeholder until he gets settled in Taxon!
PERMISSIONS
THE MIND: Johannes’s mind can be read, though he’s got a higher likelihood of noticing or resisting than a character without magic: not by much, however. His mind is tidy, clinical, and a little fractured at the edges, and there are more than a few skeletons in these well-organized closets. Just ask me first!
THE BODY: Johannes can absolutely be harmed and has no particular special resistances to it. Ping me about it! Same goes for his property, with the caveat that his residence is well-warded.
FUNKY STUFF: Sure! Reference his history, go wiki-wandering, or just ask me if you want information. Aura- and magic-sensing is also quite all right, as he’s less than inconspicuous in that regard. He gives off the strong aura or “smell” of death, undeath, black magic, and all manner of the corrupted arcane: it shouldn’t be hard for any character with that sort of detection to tell what he is. His soul also seems a little sewn-up and ill-fitting, like it’s been ripped out and put back again. It has.
PRIVACY: Threadhop and threadjack away! Unlocked posts are fair game; ask me about anything marked locked. Johannes may hide his map location now and then when he figures out how, but that’s a big “when.”
SURPRISE!: In general, feel free to sneak up on Johannes if your character has any particular stealth or other sneaking ability. If they give off any particularly strong or glaring magical effects, though, ask me.
MISCELLANEOUS