Back to the Wraith PageCharacter Sheet: Fugue
Appearance
Prelude
Journal Entries:
Name: Fugue
Player: Ben Haas
Status: Removed (Flaked)
Fictionalization by Jennifer L Lochabay-Swanson
Chronicle: Santa Cruz/Wraith
Nature: Judge
Demeanor: Martyr
Shadow: ?
Life: ?
Death: Murdered
Regret: Vengeance
ATTRIBUTES:
Physical: Strength-2, Dexterity-3, Stamina-2
Social: Charisma-2, Manipulation-2, Appearance-2
Mental: Perception-4, Intelligence-3, Wits-3
ABILITIES
Talents: Alertness-3, Athletics-3, Awareness-2, Brawl-2, Dodge-3, Empathy-1, Streetwise-1
Skills: Drive-1, Etiquette-1, Leadership-2, Meditation-2
Knowledge: Enigmas-2, Investigation-1, Linguistics-1, Occult-2, Science-1
ADVANTAGES:
Backgrounds: Artifact-2, Eidolan-4, Haunting-2
Passions: Anger (destroy killers)-3, Hope (help the wretched)-3, Sorrow (discover life)-4
Arcanos: Argos-1. Embody-1, Pandemonium-3
FETTERS: Burial Ground-3, Death Room-4, Homeless Shelter-1, Unknown Killer-2
Corpus-10
Willpower-5
Pathos-5
Appearance:
(to be added later)
Prelude:
Fugue had no memory of his life. After being in the Shadowlands for about two years, he finally pieced together where he was killed and buried. He met his demise in a small concrete room in the basement of a country cottage. All that is left their now is a chair, a bowl, and a red stain on the floor. After he was killed he was taken several miles into the forest behind the cottage and buried. He still doesn't know who did it, or why he/she did it. Since his life began in the Shadowlands, he has forged a loose connection with a group of heretics, though he wouldn't consider himself part of the cult. He spends most of his time wandering his haunt (the house where he died) contemplating his death and how he can avenge it. He is not a happy ghost. Though he has let people wander his haunt for the purpose of gaining information of his death, he forces them away as soon as he tires of them. He is stuck, not knowing what direction he should head towards next.
Wednesday, July 19th, 1995 1:34 a.m.
In the world of the quick and the dead, under the cloak of a gentleness called Night, the Quick rested peacefully. The dead did not.
Not this night or any night, not now, not ever. Here was darkness eternal, and the rising of the sun in that other forgotten world did not dispell it, but merely faded it to a sort of colorless dusk. Below it the lamps were lit at all times, creating a sickly greenish haze with a thin screeing sound and a foul fishy taste. Everyone Fugue knew hated the lamps.
But none would have attempted to get rid of them, not even Fugue, for what could they be replaced with? Sometimes if you stood under the lamps, and gazed beyond them into the Outer Darkness, the blackness itself would bend and swirl and the - the...
(the things)
...would leap away, before you could quite pin them with your gaze.
But worse than all of this were the whispers.
It was the whispering, Fugue thought, which had driven him mad, for he had been sane once - he was quite certain he had been sane. But could anything retain its sanity here in this hellish place, here where the monotonous, endless murmering stretched your nerves to the breaking point? Here where every set of ears strained continually for just one recognizable word - no, a syllable, just one single clear syllable in the cacophony of disembodied voices?
He had heard one once, the word at which his sanity had flown, dispersed into the darkness, never to be found again. He had been standing at the lamp, the edge of reality under his toes with the Darkness and the Malestrom beyond and some... some - thing - said (Jump.)
It wasn't a word but a concept, an absolutely clear mental image of himself spinning off into space, and he saw that the - the things - were waiting for him, jibbering and howling in his skull with strange appendages that couldn't be called mouths, and when he woke up he was lying at the foot of the lamp and circling sharklike around and around in his head was the word
(jump.)
He tried to stop the memory but it was too late. From somewhere within him the voices, which had subsided to a mere murmer, grew to a roar.
(Jump, jump, why don't you jump and end it end it now, skip to your doom my darling, look at us now, are we really that different once we peel away the skin? Let's peel it away and look, shall we? It won't hurt for long, just forever-)
(Stop it-)
(And forever-)
(Stop it-)
(And forever-)
(STOP!!!)
With all his heart and all his soul and all his might, Fugue closed his eyes and clenched his fists and concentrated on what he remembered of life, of the golden honeyed time before he had found himself as a departed soul in this horrible place. What he remembered, as clearly as he remembered going mad, was the color BLUE. Once the sky had been BLUE, a clear brilliant BLUE that soothed your heart when you looked at it. On the day he couldn't remember what BLUE had looked like, the shadow would have won, whether or not he flung himself into the malestrom.
But today it came to him, the image of the clear periwinkle sky marked here and there by clouds as fluffy and delicious as cotton candy, and at the sight of it the shadow crept whimpering into the farthest corners of his mind.
He took a moment to catch his breath - he had no breath after so many years but the habit still clung - and opened his eyes to a world without color, whose only light was a sickly greenish glow that smelled like fish.
Sickened, Fugue turned away from the lamps and looked at the docks. Once upon a time he had been appalled at the scenes here; now they seemed as much a part of a scenery as he himself did. The ship might have been handsome if it had been made in another place or another time, but here it was a sort of skeletal monstrousity with broken decks and tattered sails. Screams issued from it at regular intervals, either from the kidnapped passengers as they were chained below-decks, or from the wierd skull mounted on the prow. Fugue wondered, in his more miserable moments, whether it was the gigantic skull itself that screamed, or whether it housed some etherial torture-chamber... but he tried not to think of it too often. It took him a moment to recognize the voice as his own.
"A fugue is a psychological state-"
This last group seemed especially pitiful, ragged and thin, some of them so low as to be literally transparent. These were the heretics, the weak, the unlucky, the somehow-sane. They shuffled hoplessly in their black stygian chains. They would be sold as slaves in some port or other, or tossed headfirst into the malestrom to try and slake its insatiable thirst.
"-characterized by amnesia-"
There were so many more than there were last time. Tribute was bad enough, but more than twice what had been collected previously? Why so many? How long would it be before Stygia demanded every soul in purgatory? Would its greed never be satisfied?
"-and actual physical flight from the immediate environment-"
It had seemed such an appropriate name when he had first taken it. If only there were somewhere else to go to, if only he could fly, far away from here...
There was a disturbance on the dock. It was hard to see from where he stood. Someone shrieked and ran, one of the prisoners he thought, but the flight was cut short by a vicious cut from one of the armed guards. Hamstrung, the screams from the tortured soul blended with the outer malestrom in a sort of awful harmony.
"A terrible sight, isn't it?"
Fugue hadn't noticed the other wraith near him, a woman who in life had probably been pretty. "Not that they don't deserve it of
course," she hastened to add. "Many of them are heretics or are weaklings that should face oblivion. The Hierarchy is wise to sacrifice the weak so that we better quality souls can continue our search for Transcendence. Don't you agree?"
(Jump, jump, why don't you jump? Tell her what you think and go to stygia in chains just like these just like all the others and you won't come back. Look into her eyes and jump...)
Fugue summoned the color BLUE in his mind momentarily to still his inner demons, and tried to keep his reply carefully neutral.
"There are more than last time. Stygia has demanded additional souls on every voyage for the last five voyages. "
It was a safe enough reply, he felt. It was common knowledge that the "passenger lists" on the slave ships had more than doubled and no one could accuse him of doing anything more stating a simple fact. The other wraith didn't have a chance to reply. The screams on the dock rose to a pitch that carried even over the malestrom on which the slave-ship floated. Fugue realized that the prior fight with the luckless hamstrung soul had cut the chains, freeing the last captive in line, who had promptly taken off and was nearly upon them, the guards and barghests from the ship hot on her heels.
She raced up the steps three at a time. He caught a look at her face and realized that her own cowl must have just been removed, for her face was sharp and bright as if she had been truly alive, and its expression even held the suggestion of tears.
"Please help me!" she begged him. "I don't know what's going on! I just want to wake up from this nightmare! But I can't! I can't!"
Fugue looked at her eyes and suddenly he was tired of it all, tired of trying to fit in, tired of hiding and wondering when he was going to be one of the ones on the docks in chains. "To hell with it," he said, and greeted the malestrom with open arms, taking his sword from its sheath so that it could drink deeply of someone else's essence before it drank of his own. He held out his hand to the fresh new soul. While he did it he opened his heart to let out the word that he had held captive in it all this time, and said
"Jump."
Back to the Wraith Page
Back to the World of Darkness
Back to Main Page