ESSENTIALSName: Owen Cale
Nickname: Cale, monster, demon, other not-so-niceties
Age and Birth Date: 26, March 31.
Occupation: Doors Bartender
APPEARANCEOwen is five and a half feet at most, underweight, and generally happiest swimming in hooded sweatshirts over worn-thin dark jeans. He seems small, unassuming, moving with a quiet sort of grace, easy to overlook when he has the hood of his sweatshirt up. When he pulls it down, however, it's a completely different story.
PERSONALITYThe eternal pessimist, Owen has a miraculous way of finding the worst in any situation. His permanent scowl of apparent annoyance might be his effort to keep the mess of his teeth covered, the narrowing of his eyes might just be a sensitivity to the light, but his bad nature and the grumble behind his voice are definitely
all him.
All of this leaves Owen somewhat sullen and hard to like. He refuses compliments, frequently complains about things small and big alike, and seems to hold no respect for anyone who tries to respect him. He's at his best when he keeps his mouth closed and his head tucked down into the hood of his sweatshirt to just listen to other people talk, an important thing to do in his line of work.
Beneath it, somewhere, there might be a softer core. Maybe. Somewhere. No one's ever found it, and Owen will say with apparent honesty when people ask that he's not lonely, sad, or desperate for something he doesn't have.
On the positive end of things, he does seem to be extremely difficult to drive to anger, approaching situations instead with a cold sort of fatalism and a dry sense of humor. You hate me? Well, nothing new there. You take offense to my face? Yeah, so do I.
If he had any dreams or hopes, they seem to have been driven away, lost in the past. His main goal seems to be staying out of normal human society, his main fear that he'll be found out and hunted down as a monster. At Doors, at least, he fits in. To a degree. Some prejudices are hard to kill, and many are more than willing to believe that he really is a demon.
ABILITIESOwen is small, thin, lean, and woefully out of shape. A long run, a frantic climb or a fight will leave him winded and exhausted and desperately in need of an aspirin. As such, he should be godawful in a fight, should be easy to knock down, but the claws at the tips of his fingers can do their work. They can cut through cloth, through wood and soft metals, sometimes glass. Even though they're wielded inexpertly, his hand-to-hand training spotty at best, they serve as an excellent line of defense and a deterrent against fighting.
He is bright, but not brilliant in any way. His high school education was decent enough to leave him literate and moderately well-read, but that's all he had. Philosophy, advanced mathematics, physics and chemistry -- these are all beyond him, and Owen is perfectly fine with that. He doesn't need to be particularly smart, he has no urge to read or learn for fun. He is what he is and is certain he could never be anything more.
Emotionally, Owen is a stone, or a rock, or an ice cube, or perhaps he's an extremely troubled and lonely young man. It's hard to tell. Even he probably doesn't know the truth of it, and is unwilling to go exploring. As a result, he's not particularly empathetic, telling people the truth instead of what they want to hear, and sometimes seeming to take some sense of enjoyment from their unhappiness, or annoyance, or burst of anger. Even if it means a hit to the face.
There are two things which it seems Owen has successfully mastered. The first is menial labor: he is excellent at setting himself to a simple task and losing himself in it. This, in the past, made him an excellent dishwasher and janitor. The second is bartending; somewhere along the way he went from just drinking large amounts of whatever he could find to actually investigating into specialty drinks to learning how to make them and finally to inventing his own, working behind the bar. He seems happiest, behind the bar, quietly scowling and just nodding at other peoples' problems.
HOBBIESOwen has a not-so-secret love for poker. He's startlingly good at it, too, probably due to the fact that he freaks people out. It's hard to keep a poker face when a gold-eyed monster keeps staring at you, and it's damned hard to read Owen's pointy-toothed grin in the midst of a game of cards.
He's also a fan of dry comedy like the Office, or stupid comedy like any Seth Rogan movie.
HISTORYOwen speaks very little, if ever, about his time before he found Doors. Whatever happened before then, he appeared at the night club around nineteen, drunk as a skunk, and developed an obsession with the oddities that worked their way through the place. He became a regular, viewed as a bit of a creep, following some of the strangest people around.
It only took three weeks for the place to infect Owen. Twenty days and he showed up at the club breathless and aching, fingers wrapped in bandages and barely-usable. He was met by
Charlie who seemed, somehow, already prepared to take him in and give him a place to stay for a while. As a result, Owen tends to view Charlie both as a savior and the cause of all his problems. He'd
known it was going to happen and hadn't stopped it, or saved Owen in any way.
Since then, Owen has very rarely left the safe ground of Doors. He works the bar quietly and seriously, coaxes other people who work there into games of cards, and has a few regulars who come in and give him a hard time. Foremost among them is an ex-priest named George Lavia who comes in, periodically, to lecture Owen and try to explore him, learn more about what he is. He usually drives Owen into angry fits that just about shut down the bar because he has to get out of there.
He has a family, outside of the club, as well. They live in the suburbs. He's let it slip that both his parents are alive, as is a sister who was still very young when he left home. His reluctance to visit them seems largely caught up in shame and embarrassment.
The ChangeTOUCHED APPEARANCEBeneath the hood, he is something of a monster. Once-pale skin has gone paler, with just a hint of a ruddy undertone. Eyes that might once have been blue, or green, or hazel have gone to solid black, glimmering gold in slim rings around his pupils. His mouth is full and pouty and dark, more black than the natural pink of most people, and frequently pursed into an annoyed frown over a row of startlingly sharp teeth. His cheekbones are high, his nose long and straight, pretty but too thin, and ruined by the demonic features.
The hair that sticks out from under his sweatshirt is dark, very curly, very black and wild and uncontrollable, cropped into a messy halo down to his ears, streaked through here and there with slim stripes of silver. He doesn't even try to brush it, and the result is something almost bestial, definitely wild.
The worst part might be his fingertips. Owen keeps his hands in gloves, and with good cause; beneath them, his fingers turn dark and black,sliding into the pointed shape of some very nasty claws. They're strong claws, claws that could do some damage, that could rend flesh. The gloves he wears have to be strong, thick, smothering the knife-sharp edges.
MAGICWhen the magic changed Owen, his appearance evolved drastically, but it left him with very few special abilities -- which is why he views it as more of a curse than a blessing. The claws are his major ability: they don't seem to break, and are always extremely sharp and dangerous. In addition, he hasn't aged much since he changed, and heals at a faster-than-human rate. Not much faster, but enough to get him back on his feet quickly.
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