app; deerington [ april ]

[armatusdeo]

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Jasper Campbell
Played-By/Art Claim: David Lyons
Age: a very tired 36
Species: Human

Content Warnings: cults, religiously-motivated abuse and torture, child abuse, murder, serial killing/vigilante justice.

History: (Note: Jasper's world is 'normal' Earth as we know it, in the present day...with some basic supernatural elements involved. Think most urban fantasy or perhaps the Exorcist movie or tv show. Everything is normal, except demons are real, alongside a smattering of other religious icons, deities, and witchcraft practices.)

Jasper grew up on the isolated All Risen compound in Louisiana. His parents were dedicated believers of the All Risen church - a church that included twenty-seven followers of a man named Joshua Nelson, all isolated in the middle of the bayou back country. They raised Jasper, their only child, according to the church's values. This mostly included: a lot of prayer, studying the All Risen Testament (penned by Joshua Nelson, their prophet), complete silence on the holy days each week, and absolute obedience to Nelson. Jasper grew up understanding terror before affection, and the order
of what he feared from least to greatest went: God, Nelson, and then his parents.

During a particularly bad fight at home, Jasper managed to get ahold of his father's gun, and the rest, as they say, is a villain cliche as old as time. He was twelve when he shot both of his parents to death. When neither of his parents came after him for punishment, the fear from before started to abate. To Jasper's mind, he'd finally become powerful enough to keep himself safe.

Growing up after that, Jasper was briefly a kid on the run. He lived outside, slowly losing weight and faith in his ability to survive after all, until he was eventually reclaimed into foster care and his identity was tracked down by the state. By fourteen, Jasper was inducted into the cycling hell that was foster care for kids without any known living relatives.

(The only upside was that no one ever thought to take a teenager's fingerprints when investigating the homicides of his parents.)

When he was an older teen, still hopping around between questionable living situations, Jasper was briefly staying in a household with another teen. Jake was a kid with anger issues, ones that looked like how Jasper often felt inside but never really acted upon. Jasper had always been quietly angry, let it eat him from the inside; ignoring the fights that occasionally broke out among the other teens he'd room with. But Jake was...different. He called to a part of Jasper that he hadn't felt since he'd grabbed his dad's hunting rifle off the wall.

Jasper didn't realize that this was because Jake was, unfortunately, harboring a demon of his own - with far worse consequences than the demon that Jasper had been housing all these years.

Eventually, Jake went after another kid in their shitty three-bedroom apartment they shared with the group home owners, and Jasper followed to intervene. What Jasper tried to do was split the kids up and pounce on Jake's chest. What he did was separate them, tackle Jake to the ground, and then he watched Jake's face change. His veins stood out blue and dead in his face, the whites of his eyes grew bloody. And then something that wasn't Jake anymore reached out towards Jasper.

And then something that wasn't Jake anymore rushed into Jasper. The demon, magnetized towards Jasper instead, switched hosts eagerly - an accidental exorcism of Jake.

By the time the married couple running the group home had pulled them apart, Jake looked dazed and was blaming his "bloody nose" on Jasper, and Jasper felt an angry strength he'd started thinking he'd lost after killing his parents. While Mrs. Hooper dragged Jake off to his room, Mr. Hooper started taking off his belt. Jasper beat him to the punch, literally. He broke the leg off a wooden kitchen chair while beating Mr. Hooper with it - anywhere he could reach. The police were called, Jasper was moved to a new group home again but not charged with assault, and Jasper went to bed a week later realizing he'd done it again. This was how he avoided people that wanted to hurt him: hurt them worse.

Jasper, as an older teen and adult, has since developed the bad habit of soothing himself by killing dangerous people. He's generally planned and quick with it - he doesn't savor the killing, but is relieved by the death. The worries when he was younger, of asking God if he'd gone too far with his parents or with anyone else afterwards, have largely abated. Jasper feels confident in the logic of what he does, because he'd learned long ago to accept that he wasn't a good person. Now, still damned, he can at least act on God's behalf by doing evil things. Jasper sees himself as a weapon of God and has a lot of thoughts about the necessity of Satan - who he realizes he seems to resemble more. Jasper sees himself as someone cast out and unworthy of salvation or affection, but serving a greater purpose.

Now as a mid-thirties adult, Jasper makes a living as an exorcist, in that he performs unsanctioned exorcisms on people who are genuinely possessed...by absorbing the demon out of the other victim. Instead of using holy water and sacramental words to banish demons that can't stand that kind of godly power, Jasper instead acts as a magnet for the little bits of iron that represent demons in this metaphor. He is quite literally a lightning rod for demons. Yippee.

The way this works, supernaturally-speaking, will be highlighted more in his 'powers' section! As far as how it impacts Jasper's history, Jasper first discovered he could do this by accident, as detailed earlier with fellow foster-kid Jake.

Jasper also likes moonlighting as a serial killer of the child abusers he comes across. He meets an unfortunate amount of them, visiting the kinds of people who would request an exorcism from someone who isn't an ordained priest. Munchausen-by-proxy, religious torture, more cults he's uncovered - Jasper has seen it all and probably killed someone for it.

Nowadays, Jasper lives in Louisiana still, renting a one-bedroom apartment in a split house in a cheaper area of a big city. He's not really concerned about dangerous neighbors, and after living through so many days of enforced silence growing up on the cult's compound...he actually likes the noise of a rowdier neighborhood. His neighbors know him as an eccentric, quiet guy who sometimes sits on the shared porch and drinks with them. He's never been the cause of any noise complaints, so...must be fine, right? His day job as a car mechanic means he makes enough money to pay bills and gives him a few conversation starters, and that's all most people know about him.


Personality: At first glance, Jasper is a friendly guy with a southern drawl that puts most people either at ease or gives them a certain impression of him. And they're not too far off; this is a guy who was either absent for or actively ignoring the majority of his formal education. He doesn't have a high school diploma, although he got a GED later to make it easier to get quick-and-easy jobs when he needed money, and he's pretty open about this fact. Stereotypes make Jasper sound maybe a bit slow, maybe even harmless, but there is an intensity and an intelligence to him that he's actually not that good at masking, if you stick around.

Jasper tends to smile often - sometimes too widely and with too many teeth, if we're honest - and he doles out jokes in a flat tone that might make it sound like he's threatening you. In a good mood, he often comes across as warm and sincere. Just...he also makes a little too much eye contact? He's a bit intense, even when he's laughing? Jasper tends to give a good - or at least eccentric - first impression, one that can degrade over time as his oddities pile up. There is something off about him.

Morals for Jasper are a murkier thing than his ability to sound like a tolerable drinking buddy. Jasper wants to feel safe, and he wants any vulnerable people - especially children - that he comes across to also feel safe. That is always his highest priority in any given situation, and the nexus around which he's built everything else. It would be fair to say that Jasper figured out what he wanted first (to not feel victimized) and then crafted the rest of his morals around that (killing is fine, as long as the person he killed gave him the heebie jeebies). Jasper doesn't relish or enjoy killing except for the endorphin rush of relief it gives him. He knows it's seen as wrong by society, but he's very convinced that he's seen proof that society itself is often mistaken about morality. If he can't trust rules...he's going to go with his gut.

Related to the above, despite how fanatically religious Jasper can sound in speech - he will regularly invoke or discuss God as if he were a real entity, same for the loosely-Christian idea of the Devil - Jasper doesn't seem to care much for any other old-testament morality that might be suspected of someone raised the way he was. He believes the entities exist, but thinks their rules might be archaic, mistranslated, misinterpreted, or just plain not for him. Jasper sees himself as damned, but is less interested in deciding whether or not others are unless they hit on any of his own personal triggers. Unless you're killing, threatening, or hitting someone else, Jasper will probably give you a sneer and a pass.

Having grown up in a place full of "silent holy days", Jasper is afraid of places that are very quiet; he gets anxious when in silence for too long and always has background noise playing when alone. He's that guy who sits in a cafe screwing around on his laptop all day like it's his home office. This is a chief fear of Jasper's - silence and quiet, impending disapproval.

Less tangibly, Jasper mostly fears losing his independence, free will, and what he views as the ultimate fate of his soul: going to hell. Jasper has regular nightmares about what he imagines to be hell itself - given that he has a tie to a literal demon, he's taken to believing these visions are real and passed over to him through his demonic familiar. Things that superficially resemble hell (bonfires, drawings of demons) don't frighten him, but ones that evoke it in a more visceral or guilty sense (screaming, discussions of fate and damnation, a sense of being caged) can throw Jasper into a rapid mental deterioration.


Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping: In Jasper's universe, demons interested in possessing humans can't just pick anyone. They go for people with something dark or hurt within them already; existing mental illness, doubts, bouts of sadness or trauma, things like that. Jasper himself attracts demons almost as soon as they sense him nearby; the man has, by circumstances outside of his control and then his increasingly dark and secretive choices, become a lightning rod for them.

But demons don't affect Jasper the way they do others. Jasper is still in control; there is one main demon that has attached to Jasper and it keeps the occasional flow of demons into its preferred host at a manageable level. One of the Demon Marquises of Hell, Phenex, attached itself to Jasper when Jasper was a child and after he killed his parents; at a moment when he was most vulnerable and had made a morally questionable choice. Phenex filters, absorbs, kicks out, and ultimately just recycles any demons the two of them attract inside. And Phenex is ultimately interested in its host remaining free to do what it wants, because what it wants is pretty goddamn wild, as far as Phenex is concerned.

Jasper is aware he's in a nigh-symbiotic relationship with a demon. It's why he decided to act as an exorcist; he's already damned, and since he's now a free-willed demon-sponge, he might as well absorb other people's demons for them. There is no intentional element of trickery from Jasper about this; he knows his main demon will dispose of the incoming ones and so he endures any pain of absorbing new spirits into himself on behalf of whatever possessed person he's most recently come across.

As far as how this affects Jasper, he actually doesn't receive many overt powers from this relationship. What Jasper does get is an innate sense of demons and demonic energy in others, an instinctive ability to attract those energies, and a general resistance to demonic influence himself. Essentially, Jasper is so willing to do terrible things that demons flying into him just...doesn't do much. Coupled with his main demon's added "cushioning" effect, and Jasper tends to be resistant to supernatural mental influences. That said, it's all demonic-inspired, so this means Jasper is easily sensed by anything that can also sense demonic power as well as potentially harmed by angelic energy.

In-game, I'll negotiate with players and read through events carefully to see if Jasper's powers can interact with anyone else's powers or game happenings, but I see it potentially meshing like this: Jasper will have some natural resistance to negative mental effects from the game (ie, food that makes people angry) but an increased impact from positive mental effects from the game (ie things that inspire familial feelings, love, or giddiness). Jasper will be able to sense demonic presences as normal (contingent on discussing that with any affected players!) and also be sensed as housing a demonic presence by anyone else with that power.

Phenex is a separate entity from Jasper, although they are entwined and Phenex tends not to interact with anything except other demons. Phenex only very rarely appears visually when in Jasper's normal universe, although the two have a very limited form of telepathic communication at all times. This communication will be warped by the setting. At times it will be stronger and distracting; at other times it will be missing entirely; and occasionally, the secret of it will be ruined, because Phenex's voice or even form may end up visible to other characters.


Inventory: • one day wear outfit (tshirt, hoodie, jeans, shoes)
• one pajama set
• one bug-out/travel bag containing (a wallet with now-useless debit card, costco membership, a faded photo of a cat (not his), two different IDs with two different names; a change of clothes (jeans and a polo shirt), toiletries (including hair gel that looks like he bought it at a grocery store, because he did), a hunting knife with a three-inch blade, and a little postcard picture of saint olga)
• one sizable (albeit cheap and without a frame) print of Judith Slaying Holofernes by Gentileschi
• several now-useless "get a free drink after ten stamps" cards for various coffee shops across multiple states