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Individual
Character's full name: Derrin Harrison Ford
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Skinwalker
Gender: Male
Age: 57
Date of Birth: 12/12/1955
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: Born and raised in Wilcox Arizona
Nationality: 100% American
Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: Native American
Appearance
Hair color and style: Bald (Short buzz cut Brown hair)
Skin Tone: Pallid flat gray (Healthy tanned rough skin)
Eye Color: Completely white, slightly too big for his face (gray)
Height: 6' 5" (6' 1")
Build: Skeletal thin, with abnormally long arms and legs and a slightly disproportionately large head. (Military build, very fit but no athlete)
Visible mutation: As stated above, with the addition that Derrin has only four fingers on each hand and four toes on each foot, and instead of a nose or mouth he has a flat plane in his natural state. He also has no ears, genitalia, or anus. (stated in parenthesis is the current skin he is wearing)
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: Star-burst scar in his abdomen (several scars from knife fighting, and a long knife scar on his neck)
Other features: N/A
Everyday clothing style: Simple T-shirts, with leather jacket if it's cold, and jeans.
Uniform: N/A
Sleepwear: Nekkid. If he feels secure enough he even discards his skin for the night.
Miscellaneous clothing: Derrin owns several suits he wears at work.
Character
Personality: Because of his isolated childhood and unstable guardians, Derrin often has trouble understanding social cues such as sarcasm or most humor. He is generally a nice guy, and an extreme pacifist, though he occasionally does things that are unacceptable because he doesn't understand. He tries to cheer up those around him, because of the guilt he feels when he feeds. He is outwardly a very happy person, always smiling and making jokes as best he can, slow to anger and quick to forgive. This combined with his learned skills in reading people and (current) good looks are part of what made him a good salesman. However on the inside Derrin has a rather thin skin for insults, and can hold grudges for weeks and months without ever telling anyone.
Hobbies/ Interests: Derrin enjoys woodcarving, and is moderately good at it. He is also fascinated by the internet.
Job or part time job and description: Derrin works as a car salesman.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns: Derrin is terrified that his family are alive and coming for him, and almost as terrified that he is the last of his family.
Special talents: His family taught him how to read and profile people as a part of the necessary skill set to hunt in the modern world, and though he has been away from his family for more than 40 years he keeps his skills sharp through his job as a salesman.
Morality
Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Good. Despite the way he was raised, Derrin tries to be a good person, though his morals are naturally skewed.
Mutations
Mutation description:
Derrin is very similar to the native American myth of the Skinwalker. He has the ability to take the skin of a person and wear it upon himself, taking that persons physical appearance and voice as easily as a normal person wears a coat. However his natural form is repulsive to the eye and very obviously not human. Also, Derrin must feed on the spiritual energy of others for sustenance, as he lacks a mouth or digestive organs. This causes depression and sadness in his victim, and has before led people to suicide. This process only occurs to weak-willed individuals, and a strong willed person most likely wouldn't even notice if Derrin was trying to feed on them. Spiritual energy refreshes during REM sleep, and one meal (that is, 1/3rd the amount Derrin needs per day) would make a person slightly moodier than usual, and more likely to be a little more pessimistic. Two meals would make them depressed and snappish, acting rather out of character for the most time, and a full days amount of energy would leave someone severely depressed with suicidal thoughts. Only once has Derrin fed more than a full days worth from someone, and it drove the person to suicide. To avoid this, he generally "grazes", as in takes very small almost unnoticable amounts of energy from everyone he passes. It is unknown to Derrin the average lifespan of his kind, because in his clan not many lived past the age of thirty five before being killed in one of the many dominance fights that occur. In the legends of the First One, it is said that he lived more than 200 years, but that could just be hyperbole.
Strengths: This allows Derrin to blend in with the rest of humanity with ease. It also makes him nearly perfect at impersonation, if he takes the time to study someones mannerisms. If he feeds on all of the person's spiritual energy before taking their skin, he can fit into their mannerisms much easier, and his strength and speed increase the more spiritual energy he has taken in.
Weaknesses and Limitations: In order to get his skin, Derrin must take it from a living human. Murder is literally the only way for him to change skins. Also, while he looks as muscled as the skin he is wearing, his actual strength is only as much as his real body can handle. Obviously his natural appearance is a bit of a downer. Also feeding on spiritual energy is very addictive, and Derrin must take care not to go on a feeding frenzy. If his skin gets too damaged in will slough off of him, leaving him exposed to the world. Another limitation is that while worn, the skins do not age, so Derrin has to move about once every five or ten years to avoid raising suspicion.
Physical Abilities
General Physical Capabilities: When comfortably fed, Derrin has the same strength as a weak man, and slightly higher speed and flexibility. When full, Derrin approaches average strength and track runner speed and gymnast flexibility.
Fighting Style: Run
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: If Derrin is faster, he gets away. If he's not, he's screwed.
History Of Your Character
Derrin was born to a sect of Native Americans who had lived in secret separate from the majority of the Native American population. His mutation was apparent from birth, and so he was not drowned at birth as all normal children were. For you see, his family had been separate from the rest of the Native Americans ever since his great great ancestor was born with his unusual skin coloration and proportions and was thrown in the river by his own parents. This ancestor, according to family legend, was raised by coyotes and learned of his abilities by accident when he took the skin of a Chief. He ruled the tribe for nearly a hundred years, changing skins as necessary, before he was discovered and ousted. He later took a female from the tribe and started his own clan, one where only those like him were acceptable. It is unknown to the clan whether the legends of skinwalkers was started by this ancestor, or if he just capitalized on them, but for the next thirty generations the tribes of their area lived in fear of the skinwalkers, and made monthly tribute in the form of food, tools, and women. There was a way for a skinwalker to use the skin of a male to procreate, and this was used to build an entire clan of skinwalkers. The regular tributes prevented inbreeding, and allowed for the clan to develop a more stationary culture than that of the Native Americans.
Unfortunately, with the meeting of the europeans and Native Americans, and the struggles that came with it, the skinwalkers ran into trouble. Though they could easily avoid persecution by blending in with the white men, their supply of women was taken from them, and they began to breed within themselves to "keep the line pure", for none of the clan wished to breed with the white man. Generations of this inbreeding saw a decrease of healthy children with the skinwalker powers, until eventually, in the year 1955 Derrin was the only one of nearly two hundred children to be born healthy and with the skinwalker powers. His family had formed their own culture and traditions over the generations of relative isolation, and had come to view normal humans as inferior, as nothing but prey. With the knowledge that their clan was close to extinction and that with the advancement of technology encroaching on their ability to hide, all of his relatives poured their time into moldingDerrin to be the perfect clan leader, to restore them to their former glory. For ten years, Derrin knew only what his relatives told him, that humans were food, nothing more, but it all changed when he met Cindy. Cindy was the daughter of a wealthy rancher whose land overlapped with the skinwalkers traditional hunting grounds. Derrin was going to feed on Cindy, but he didn't know that the skin he was wearing was that of her older brother, who had been killed by the skinwalkers two nights before. She took him to her home, where he was welcomed with open arms and teary eyes.
For three months Derrin experienced what a real family was like and saw that humans were not beneath him. He realized that his family was evil, that his family were the bogeyman in the bedtime stories his new mother would tell him and Cindy. And he was happy to be away from them. But it was not to last. His family, frantic with their heirs disappearance had been searching for him, and when they found him they killed and took the skins of everyone on the ranch, including Cindy and his new mother and father. From that moment forward Derrin knew that he had to escape.
So Derrin bided his time, waiting for the perfect moment to be free of his foul family, and just after his sixteenth birthday, he took it. Ever since the incident with Cindy and that family, Derrin had been watched like a hawk, but on one lazy December Teusday, his watcher fell asleep. Derrin made a break for it, hoping that the watcher would remain asleep long enough to give him a few hours head start. But unfortunately, someone saw him running down the halls and put two and two together. They raised the alarm, but Derrin still managed to escape through the only route available: the front door. He hastily barricaded the door with heavy boxes and took of running. Little did he know, however, that in his haste he had tipped over a lantern and started a fire inside the large wooden building. It wasn't until he saw the flames starting to go out the small windows that he realized what had happened. And then he was faced with a choice: go back and rescue his family, go back to a life of murder and immorality, or to forge onward, and entrust the fate of his family to chance. Derrin kept walking, and never looked back since.
Derrin found his current skin in the summer of 1987. At the time he was in Roswell, using the skin of a young girl who had broken her neck in a car crash. The doctors had informed the family that there was no chance of recovery due to irreparable brain damage, and so it was the perfect opportunity for him to get a new skin without causing too much harm. Unfortunately, wearing the skin of a pretty young girl had it's own set of problems. The man had cornered Derrin in an alley, and it was obvious what the man's intentions were. But Derrin had recently fed, and so was able to slip out of the stronger man's grasp and slash the guys neck with his pocketknife. As the man lay bleeding out in the alley, Derrin saw an opportunity to take a man's skin again, and took it. He found from the man's wallet that his name was Walter Kovacks, and that he was a ex-army vet living in his car. He had no family, no wife or children. In short, he was the perfect fresh start. Derrin has been using his skin and name ever since.
He managed to land a job at a car dealership, selling cars. He stuck with this job for seven years, before he realized he had to move on due to his apparent lack of aging. He drifted for fifteen years, taking various salesman jobs and never staying in one place for more than three years before moving on. He moved to New York City back in 2009, and has been in the city ever since. Though Derrin doesn't have any friends, or even close acquaintances, he has come to love NYC. Despite all of the issues with Mutants and whatnot that had happened over the years, Derrin never thought he was one of them. It just never entered his mind to think that he was a mutant as well, until one day only about two weeks ago.
Derrin was sleeping in his apartment, and therefore had his skin draped over the back of a nearby chair, when a burglar broke in. The burglar woke Derrin up, and when he saw what Derrin looked like he shouted "Mutant! Freak! Get away from me, you monster!" And shot Derrin in the stomach before running. Though Derrin was able to patch up the wound fairly easily as it didn't hit any major organs (not that he really knew anything about how his organs were arranged) the words of the robber stuck with him. Am I a mutant? he thought.
Now Derrin is seeking answers...
Roleplay
Where did you learn about this site?: Google!
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: N/A
Sample RP:
Summer, 1978, Los Angeles, California
Derrin sighed as he trudged down the deserted side street, his hands shoved into his pockets and his hood pulled up to cover his face. He grumbled a little to himself as he shifted, still trying to get comfortable in his new skin. He had taken this skin off of a homeless guy who was dying from a drug overdose, and it was absolutely filthy! That was when he heard it, and froze.
It was a sound he was, unfortunately, intimately familiar with: the soft sliding of metal on leather that meant a knife was drawn. Darting a quick glance behind him, Derrin could see that a shabbily dressed thug was there holding a huge knife in one hand. "Don't need no trouble, mista. Just want your cash." the guy said. A look forward revealed that there was another man blocking the way, and he too had a knife. It was then that Derrin began to panic, and he quickly darted forward, trying to run past the man.
However, the knife flashed out and scored a painful line up his torso, causing Derrin to cry out in pain and stumble, his skin hanging half off of him. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" Derrin quickly abandoned his skin and tossed it at the men, before running quickly out of the alley and ducking into a public restroom stall to catch his breath. "What am I going to do now?" he asked himself.
Then he spied the trench-coat sitting on the door...
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