application for capeandcowl

[excruciate]

[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Ian
AGE: 22 /sigh
JOURNAL: pridefall
IM: priestlyish
E-MAIL: meaculpable AT live DOT come
RETURNING: Nope

[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Vlad III Dracul. Dracula. Alucard.
FANDOM: Hellsing, manga
CHRONOLOGY: Right after battling Rip.
CLASS: Anti-Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: None.
ALTER EGO: None.

BACKGROUND:

Imagine for a moment, if you will, that every fiction spouted by Bram Stoker over the subject of Vlad III were real. Imagine that, rather than simply having others call the man a monster, he is, in fact, the creature of the night that popular myth has led you to believe. He is tall, dark, and mysterious. He craves blood. He seduces young women to become his brides, and he forsook the lands of the living to become something...else. Something neither living or dead, but somehow forever in-between.

Now, imagine that rather than dying at the end of Dracula, Vlad was instead conscripted to fight the very same monsters he himself had inspired...

Alucard is a living weapon created by the Hellsing organization, a family of demon slayers and hunters of the supernatural who have worked to protect Britain from evil since time immemorial. Born Vlad III Dracul, he originally led a life of death and destruction until his untimely end sometime in 1476, whereupon, after losing a battle with the Ottomans just outside of Bucharest, he was quickly tried, imprisoned, and then beheaded for his many horrifying crimes against humanity.

This is where the story of Vlad the Impaler ends, and where the story of Dracula, the first Vampire, begins; after cursing God and Catholicism for abandoning him in his darkest hour, Vlad manages to drink his own blood after being decapitated, forever transforming himself into an immortal, ravenous beast as the cross he wore around his neck shattered into a thousand pieces. Now calling himself Dracula, Vlad fled from the scene of his murder to situate himself in an abandoned castle nestled within the Carpathian Mountains. From here, he would terrorize villages located on the border of Transylvania and Moldavia, stealing into the houses of thousands in the dead of night to drain them of their blood in an effort to both strengthen himself and keep his accursed body alive. He continues to do this for years and years, adding soul upon soul to his collection until Abraham Van Hellsing caught wind of his existence and hunted him down, killing him and ending his reign of horror once and for all.

The story does not end here, however: after being "killed", Abraham bound Dracula to the service of the Hellsing family with numerous arcane seals and runes, converting him from a bloodthirsty monster aimed directly at Humanity's throat to one the greatest weapons ever arrayed against all things inhumane in their world. Dracula -- who now went by the the not-so-clever name of Alucard -- would work for the Hellsing family in this capacity up until the end of the second world war, where, after destroying a "vampire creating" factory built by the Third Reich, he would be deemed "too powerful a drug to be used as more than the occasional medicine" by one of Abraham's descendants: Sir Arthur Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing.

Arthur had the vampire starved and then entombed beneath the Hellsing manor out of fear, leaving him to rot there, forgotten and alone up until the violent restructuring of the Hellsing Organization's power-structure that occurred shortly Arthur's death, 1989. Enter Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing: fourteen year old heir apparent to Hellsing's seat of power, and the girl who inadvertently awakens Alucard. After being shot in the shoulder by her power-mad uncle, Integra flees to the lower rooms of Hellsing manor in an effort to escape her uncle Richard; instead of finding men loyal to her father, however, she stumbles upon Alucard's prison cell and, after being cornered by her uncle, makes a pact with the monster, letting him sup on her spilling blood just enough to turn the tide of the coup d'etat. Her seat then secured, Integra would continue to use Alucard to combat the darkness for years and years, eventually coming to respect and somewhat...admire the monster despite his near-constant attempts at seducing her with dark vampiric power and immortality.

Yeah.

Then came Millennium -- or, rather, then resurfaced Millennium, a Nazi group nearly hellbent on killing Alucard with their own special brand of vampires. Originally, Alucard and the rest of Hellsing had put a stop to the the organization during the end of WWII, but, instead of lying down and taking their defeat gracefully, Millennium decided to instead bide their time in the shadows, building up their forces without the scrutiny of the rest of the the world, their army lying in wait until just the perfect moment presented itself. Here is where we find Alucard drawn out from: after defeating the latest of the newest generation of "vampires" Millennium had created to combat him, Alucard finds himself aboard the Eagle, a VTOL aircraft carrier bound for England.

PERSONALITY: Alucard is a masochistic sadist through and through: he enjoys causing pain, he doesn't care about his own life, and he will do anything -- and I do mean anything -- to test himself against opponents many others would consider unbeatable. He is arrogant, proud, flamboyant, haughty in the extreme, confident, seductive, and; well, while he has good reason to be all of these things and more, at times he is too much the "romantic" vampire, prolonging fights simply to test opponent's abilities to their limit or to put on a better "show" instead of acting like the bloodthirsty beast he should be.

Alucard never tries his hardest unless he's commanded to do so, never takes a fight seriously unless he has some personal stake in it, and continuously flirts with death and disaster at every moment of his life, doing things like allowing an enemy to shoot him over and over again while he asks for more and more punishment, for more seriousness from his opponent. He also hates pretentiousness in any shape or form: abhorring it rather especially in people or things who think they have supposed "power," as every creature he has gone up against has been nothing less than a cheap knock-off, a wild dog deserving nothing but euthanasia.

That said, Alucard has a rather big soft spot for humans -- in fact, one could go so far as to say that he respects and admires the human race simply due to the fact that it was one of their number that brought him down in the first place. Throughout all of the Hellsing manga, he constantly belittles and harangues his opponents for giving up their human sides, going so far as to try and talk his greatest enemy out from becoming a monster just as powerful as Alucard was because of how much of a disappointment it would be to him. He wholeheartedly believes that it is only a human that can bring him down, and thinks that immortality is a gift deserved only by those who merit it, and not those who cop-out and get it for "free".

The only people important in Alucard's life are Integra -- the woman he respects, and some would say "loves" -- her butler, Walter -- his friend and compatriot -- and Seras Victoria, his draculina, who he saved from death by turning her into a vampire.

POWER:
He is primarily a VAMPIRE, so I'll break down his abilities into three catch-all's:

- SUPERNATURAL BODY MANIPULATION (Can ignore gravity and walk on thin air or flat surfaces; can shape shift any part of his body into numerous bats, insects, or canines, turn into mist, or manipulate his own shadow and make it physical; can grow hands, teeth, or eyes from his own body; can become intangible.)

- IS A VAMPIRE (is supernaturally stronger, faster, and more agile than peak level humans; is able to charm those he remains in eye contact with if they're weak willed; can regenerate from a drop of his own blood unless killed in certain ways.)

- [FAMILIARS] (Usable only when the Cromwell Restriction has been lifted and he's in Level Zero mode, a state only available when Integra Hellsing deems it necessary. So, like, only in dire situations. The familiar inside of him are also what give him his ability to regenerate, as every time he is "killed," he merely sacrifices one to keep going. This means that you would have to kill Alucard an extraordinary amount of times to have it stick, since his familiars number in the upper-thousands.)

As a Vampire, Alucard is also vulnerable to many of the traditional vampiric weakness present throughout history.

• Contact with silver, blessed objects, and holy iconography burn him.
• He cannot enter a home without being invited.
• He cannot cross over running water or any kind.
• He suffers from a mild form of arithomania
• Sunlight weakens him, rather than makes him catch on fire.
• Fire, on the other hand, is still fairly detrimental to his health.
• Long periods of not feeding on blood weaken and eventually emaciate/immobilize him.
• Decapitating or staking him through the heart him will "kill" him, forcing him to use up the life of another familiar to keep from actually dying.

[CHARACTER SAMPLES]

COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:

[ Video Mode: Initializing...Done! ]

_{[ Click, bzzzzt, ping. The feed draws to life to show the city at dusk, the image standing still for a moment before whomever is holding it slowly pans the camera right to left, then back again. In the distance, streetlights flicker on one by one as the world darkness, the last vestiges of light casting the world in a mixture of dark oranges and purples before the night settles, thick and opaque, a curtain of black punctured only by stars and faint lamplight. ]}

Fi, fie, foe, fum.

<sub>[ The voice is low and saturnine, barely registering above a whisper. The camera then pans up, red, sliver, white and black all blurring before it until it refocuses on a single eye staring down into the lens. ]

Oh, how I long for the blood of an English Mum.

[ For a moment the eye stares, unblinking, its red iris glowing ember-like in the darkness before the camera pans out, revealing sable hair, pallid white skin, a sharp, curved nose, and then, almost as an afterthought, the topmost point of the skyscraper the figure is standing on. ]</sub>

Hell~o out there, Ci-ti-zens. [ A gentle chuckle ] I've been watching you. [ A beat ] All of you. From within your ceilings and your walls, fettering about in the dead of night to loom over you while you slept, while you dreamt. Some of you tossed, some of you turned; the lot of humanity are all quite...interesting when you sleep. The most pure of blood tend to crawl into a fetal position sometime between one and four am. Or wake up entirely before five. And the noises you make! [ Another low chuckle ] Whether asleep or awake, or somewhere struggling in-between: a veritable symphony of the night!

[ Pause... ]

Why is that, you wonder? And such a thing to call it: the fetal position. [ A low chuckle. ] It implies helplessness. Weakness. Fear. How strange a turn of phrase.

Hm~

...Have any of you seen a dog about? About...well, it isn't as if you'd see him. Baskerville gets so terribly hungry when left off his leash.

LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Without Master, there could be no Servant.

Without Servant, there could be no Order within a Master's house.

Order begot Chaos, and Chaos, in and of itself, defined Order.

What, then, happened to the Master left without a Servant? The Servant without a Master?

The Bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame. I am Zamiel, Uriel, and Azazel made manifest: angel of death with blackened wings, blackened soul, blackened eyes, my teeth poised to tear throats out of spines.

Hear me now. Hear me now, as all of Hellsing dies. Ash to ash. Dust to dust.

Without either of the two, the world had no black or white, no Yin or Yang to judge, tempt, or absolve the actions of others through. You killed the Master, and the Servant went free. You killed Order, and Chaos died along with it, the very concept made into nothing more than a ruined cog in a now defunct machine.

Arthur, can you hear me? I am listening to your death. To your lifeblood ebbing from your veins. Your heartbeat is funeral dirge, a most brilliant hymnal singing testament to the rotted, cancerous life you lived. Drip, drip: the mouth goes first and then the eyes and can you hear me, Arhutr? Can you fucking hear me you mongrel? You parasite?

The world worked in balances upon balances, counterbalances interposed between counterbalances. You spared the rod, and spoiled the child, begetting nothing more than another cycle of the same weak, predictable, and tired bullshit.

Dust to dust. All the world repeated itself, after a fashion.

YOU'VE LEFT ME TO DIE, ARTHUR.

When Arthur dies, Alucard feels it. In a distant, nearly numbing way, the pain of their bond being severed pains Alucard himself, like a flensing knife being shoved between the ribs and upward, blade and hilt rising with the shocked disgust he feels toward the entire situation.

Arthur had gambled, and lost. And now, Alucard paid the heavier toll to the River Styx, left standing at the gates of damnation like so much garbage. Discard. Unwanted. Useless.

You leave Hellsing to die, Arthur.

And Alucard would rage, if he could. He would rage against his death, against this unfairness, against humankind acting as GOD dictated, scurrying about to gain control of a power they neither understood nor could supplant with petty schemes. Hellsing was blood. It was iron and fire and so much more than a name. It was to be Human. To be better than the very same monsters they had hunted since time immemorial.

To be a Hellsing was to be a sword in a world filled with plowshares. To be...more than the blood feud going on above him. And as Alucard hears the gunshots echo throughout the manor, his deadened heart grows all the more still, grows all the more incandescent, body, mind, and whatever passed as a soul in his heart growing angrier and angrier still.

All of them who pretended loyal up until this point were so weak. So disgusting and unfitting to be part of the family that kept things like him in check.

It was no wonder Arthur had put him away when he did. To let Alucard run amok within the ranks of these charlatans would have been to willingly let an antidote run its course in an infected system.

He breathes out a small, dry noise somewhere between an annoyed sigh and a groan.

There will be no survivors, tonight.

All Alucard can do is sit and listen to his world die around him.

..."Uncle, please!"

His eyes snap open.

"No!"

There is a gunshot, and the splatter of something...wet. Of Something sanguine. His cracked lips tremble, blackened tongue moving behind shark-like teeth in anticipation of...Of what, exactly?

Of the sound of footsteps coming nearer?

Of the sound of gunfire hitting stone instead of flesh?

Of pale, luminescent moonlight flooding the cell that had been his entire world for the past ten years?

All of these things...All of these things and the girl that came with them were only portents of disaster. Of a slavery and servitude to one who may not have had the fortitude of will to use a monster without becoming one in turn.

There is another gunshot.

This time, it hits.

He feels warm.

"N-no! U-uncle...I-I. I."

She stands with her back to him, her entire body trembling. Her skin early wet with fear.

Alucard licks his lips.

What other recourse did he have, if not to offer her what every other Hellsing could merely steal?

'Girl.'

She straightens. The shadow her uncle casts fills the room, obscuring what little of her face Alucard can see.

'Listen to me.'

He gives her a choice.

'If you order me to kill them, I will do so..'

It was more than he ever had.