Mages

Lysander

• Gallery

  Art by Piccolaria on DA

  

• Basic Info

  • Full name: Jacob Conrad
  • Alias/Shadow name: Lysander
  • Ethnicity: White British
  • Nationality: British (English)
  • Age: Early 30s
  • Hair: Sandy blonde, shaggy, short.
  • Eyes: Brown
  • Height: 5'11"
  • Build: Average
  • Sexuality: Heterosexual

• Physical description

  Lysander is a scruffy man with sandy hair that refuses to lay flat and an apparently permanent 5 o clock shadow. No matter how often he shaves, it never quite seems to be enough to stave off the stubble around his jaw.
  
  He's of around average height and average build with an angular jaw and a straight roman nose.
  His ears are ever so slightly pointed at the tips.
  
  He dresses in a fairly conservative manner, boot cut jeans and plain shirts with a tweed jacket that has leather elbow patches.
  However, under his long sleeves he has large tattoos on each arm, running from wrist to elbow. Both depict a black silhouetted forest scene with birds and deer and other abstract animal forms.
  
  He wears a tooth on a pendant around his neck, he claims it's from a wolf and is a good luck charm.

• Personality

  Lysander would love to pretend he's an easy going laid back kinda guy but truth be told, he really isn't. He tries to act aloof and chilled but he's really not such a good actor and most people can see that he's an emotional wreck.
  
  Lysander has spent most of his life living in the shadow of his older brother, and piled high with expectations from his parents to be "just like Simon". For a long time Lysander believed he had no other choice, he dutifully bowed to his parent's demands, tried to make them proud of him but in the end, he really just never was quite good enough.
  When he finally snapped, he made it a point to do all he could to forge a life for himself that wasn't going to be in anyone's shadow.
  
  Unfortunately years of emotional abuse from those closest to him means he can't help but judge himself alongside others and he suffers from quite intense envy and jealousy for how effortless so much is to everyone but him.
  He's not good at articulating this feeling of inadequacy, so he keeps it bottled up and passive aggressively takes it out on those around him instead.
  
  Lysander can be a real jerk, but underneath his defense mechanisms he is someone who does desperately want to be GOOD. He wants to help people, to be able to say he's most definitely not his father's son, to be free to just be himself.
  
  Lysander holds grudges, badly. He isn't one to forgive easily but he's quite quick to trust. He wishes he wasn't, as he's had that trust abused and shattered a few too many times.
  
  He's a hard worker who puts his all into what he's set his heart to, he takes his role as a protector of the city seriously but he's not the sort of person who desires power or control. He's quite happy to follow, to be told what to do and do it. Always the underling, never the manager, some might see this as a lack of ambition of Lysander's part. He however, sees it simply as knowing his limits and understanding that he really really really doesn't want the stress of being in charge.
  
  He's very accepting of people, he isn't one to judge. Harm nobody in your actions and he doesn't really care what you do with your life. He's seen some truly horrific things and once you've worked with the supernatural as long as he has, you sort of just stop caring about mundane crap like sexuality and race.

• Abilities

  Languages:
  
  - English
  - High speech (Atlantian) - The language of mages, to anyone else it just looks like scribbles
  - Latin
  
  Skills and talents:
  
  - Occult - Particularly folklore.
  
  - Academics - Law - Lysander attended Law school for 2 years before he had a breakdown and dropped out. His father and older brother are well known lawyers in the city of York, Lysander grew up surrounded by legal jargon and similar such things.
  
  - Librarian - Lysander is a trained (yes, they get trained) Librarian.
  
  - Computer use - Lysander is great at googling things. Research and information gathering are his areas of expertise.
  
  - Investigation - See computer use and librarian.
  
  - Politics - Much as Lysander would rather not get involved in politics, it's everywhere and yeah, he does pay attention.
  
  
  Other special abilities:
  
  - Encyclopedic knowledge - Lysander is a font of both useful and not so useful information on a wide variety of subjects.
  
  - Resources - Lysander may not much talk to his parents, but he does come from money and has a fair bit put away in a trust fund. He's also employed by people who pay him rather handsomely for his services. He's not your standard librarian.
  
  - Contacts - Legal - Lysander knows people in his father's field, most of them are well acquainted with the Conrad family. Of course, some of these people aren't quite so... eager to help a Conrad. Lysander's father and brother have a reputation and it's not always positive.
  
  - Contacts - Werewolves - Lysander has family in the local pack, they're great allies to have.
  
  - Contacts- Vampires - Lysander currently works for vampires in their archives.
  
  -Magic - Thyrsus/Mysterium - Lysander is a Shaman - Life - Lysander can heal wounds, cure illness and purge toxins. he can manipulate his own metabolic rate, slow his breathing, slow his heart and even put himself into a form of stasis if necessary. He can communicate (to an extent) and manipulate simple life such as insects and plants and even grant himself aspects of the animal world to aid him temporarily (Such as natural armor, giving himself claws or even granting him limited resistance to certain toxins or environments) , Spirit - Lysander can see and communicate with spirits and shadows. He has the ability to protect himself from spiritual attack, shield his very soul and even summon friendly minor spirits to aid him. Time - Lysander can sense, dimly, future events and more acutely sense the past and history of any object he holds. He can speed or slow time around himself or an ally, a useful skill in a fight.
  
  
  Disadvantages:
  
  - Envy
  
  - Well known family - Hiding your real identity when your father and brother are public figures is pretty tricky. Being the black sheep of the family of course helps, but in his mundane life it's quite tiring to be constantly asked "Conrad, as in David Conrad? that bastard lawyer who got that rich embezzler off?" and similar.
  
  - Known to the police - He was sadly involved and a suspect in a murder case and a kidnapping. While nothing ever came of either of these accusations, it does mean the police know of him and also know he's quite often nearby whenever something terrible happens in the city.
  
  - Demented mentor - Lysander's now deceased mentor was a raving lunatic, a fact Lysander didnt become aware of until the man tried to rip a hole in reality and invite demons into the waking world. Lysander and his companions managed to stop this, but Lysander now has yet another shadow to get out from under. People tend to be a bit suspicious of you when they find out you learned everything you know from someone who came so close to destroying the world.

• History

  Jacob Conrad was born the second son to a wealthy and influential family in the city of York.
  His father was a high price lawyer, his mother a socialite quite obsessed with appearance and power.
  
  As a child Jacob was dimly aware that he had grandparents and indeed a maternal aunt, but they never saw any of them, something he never really questioned until his teens.
  From what little he'd ever been told about his family, his father was from a long line of important men, while his mother had barely known her own father and had been raised along with her sister by their mother, alone.
  Her father, she claimed, simply walked out one day when the girls were young.
  
  When he was in his early teens his maternal grandmother finally died and they attended the funeral, here Jacob and his brother met their aunt and her sons.
  She was, like her mother before her, a single mother. Her husband had died when the boys were young. Jacob immediately liked this quirky strange hippy woman, she was such a contrast to his straight laced, highly critical mother.
  But his parents didn't want him associating with that side of the family, so again they went back to pretending a whole branch of the family tree didn't even exist.
  
  this never sat well with Jacob.
  
  When he went off to university he naturally went into law, just like his brother before him. It was, after all, what was expected of him. He was a decent enough student but at university something changed. He started to fall behind, he stopped attending lectures and he began to spend more and more time at his Aunt's house seeking advice. he was miserable and confused. He hated his course, he hated the direction is life was taking and he didn't feel he had anyone else to turn to.
  Struggling with the stress of it all, part way through his second year Jacob suffered what his parents would call a "full psychotic break".
  He was found wandering barefoot and half naked in the woods several miles from the university, delirious and rambling incoherent gibberish.
  
  Jacob himself can't even remember that night, how he got to the woods but he does know that that is the point everything changed.
  When he woke up in the hospital he felt like he'd just woken from a terrible nightmare and that now for the first time he was truly awake.
  
  His parents of course didn't listen to his claims that he was fine and he was put under observation before being returned to his family home so that his mother could take care of him.
  He didn't want this, he resented their coddling of him and soon enough there was a fight.
  
  He demanded to know why his parents had spent their lives sheltering him from everything, controlling every aspect of his life, he wanted to know what the hell they were so scared of.
  His mother admitted she feared he'd turn out just like her sister, or worse, like their father. She wouldn't explain anything more other than to tell him that she wasn't going to let him turn into a monster and that he would, WOULD have a normal life and be NORMAL.
  
  Jacob resented her, he resented this idea of normalcy. He packed his things and left, telling his parents not to contact him again.
  
  He went to stay with his aunt, half because he trusted her and half because he knew it'd piss his mother off. Not turn out like her? His aunt was, in his opinion, a remarkable woman and he couldn't' understand how or why his own mother was so ashamed of her sister.
  His aunt Cecilia was a better mother to him he thought than his own mother, and she encouraged him to seek his own path in life.
  With her support he re-enrolled in his studies, this time he trained to become a librarian.
  
  Around this time he also met the man who would become his mentor and began his studies into the arcane as well. His "psychotic break" it turned out hadn't been a break at all, but an awakening. Shaman often had walking hallucinations they then struggled to remember. When he really thought about it, all Jacob could remember was speaking a name that wasn't his own yet was, and being very very at peace. That name was Lysander, a name he could never explain why he chose. It simply felt "right."
  
  After graduation Lysander went to work at the university in their extensive library, a job he mostly enjoyed.
  
  a few years later his world fell apart when the coworker he was working up the courage to ask out was killed in a hit and run accident.
  After this strange things started happening around the university. Lysander started to have horrible nightmares and those monsters seemed to seep through into the waking world as well. It started with a strange man who smelled of burning, then a student with a bloodied ID who coughed a lot turned up asking strange questions.
  
  Then people started to turn up dead on campus and Lysander became a prime suspect when one of the security guards was found dead in the library after having an altercation with the librarian.
  
  During this investigation Lysander met Zedikya, another mage and a detective constable for the police.
  
  Soon enough more mages came together, including a tattoo artist who went by the name of Strega.
  She had contacts in the local biker gang who frequented her shop, a biker gang who just so happened to be werewolves.
  A werewolf biker gang Lysander soon found out included his youngest cousin Clarence.
  
  Through his cousin Lysander learned more about his family tree. Clarence's father was a werewolf as well, he'd died defending the city as part of this very pack. But so too, was their shared grandfather a werewolf. Whether Lysander's mother was aware of this or not he couldn't say, but Lysander certainly had his suspicions.
  His mother had become so stifling after his episode because she feared he was becoming what his grandfather was, what was, to her eyes, a monster. It explained why she was so desperate for her sons to be "normal", so determined to avoid contact with her sister who had embraced the occult. She likely resented magic for taking her father from her, while Cecilia saw their father as a hero.
  
  Soon enough the real culprit of the murders was found and an occult link discovered.
  There were rats in the walls but worse, there were rats in people too. Rat spirits, or rat demons who had possessed and consumed their victims hearts and were using them like fleshy puppets to do their dirty work as they and their master tried to further erode the veil between worlds so more of their kind could flood into the human world and reek chaos and death.
  
  What ensued was a series of traumatic encounters including watching a young woman birth a sea of rats and being responsible for tearing the as yet uninfected soul from a man who's body was infested with demon taint and changing faster than they could stop it.
  
  In the end they were led to a dank cellar where the one who they'd been trying to stop all this time was revealed to be none other than Lysander's own mentor who tried to get his student to join him in his mad scheme.
  Lysander refused, Zedikya shot the insane man and the world was, for now, saved.
  
  Lysander had by this point lost his job at the university, but he was offered a new opportunity with some local allies they'd made during their adventures. He currently works for a group of vampires in their archives, keeping safe and making available to those who need it all the true occult knowledge of the city.
  He also remains in contact with the other mages of the city, who since the death of the previous leaders of the magic council at the hands of Lysander's mentor are now led by Zedikya, the most senior mage left in York.
  
  The small fledgling council of York look to the powerful Order of the White Rose who govern most of Yorkshire, led by the enigmatic Miss Sophia, for guidance and support. The Order, who are based in Leeds, seldom demand the York Cabal's interference in events and trusts them to keep their city safe, but there are times Zedikya is called upon to send a representative to aid in a crucial matter. For the most part though, York is left to their own devices.
  For now, York is safe...

• Playstyles Chart

  Always	Sometimes	Maybe	Never
  Always Modern/Urban fantasy Mage: The Awakening Supernatural investigation	Sometimes Relationships Horror Modern slice of life		Never Non Con Extreme Kinks MxM Pregnancy/Childbirth