application;

[pridecroweth]

CHARACTER

NAME: Samuel Crowe
AGE: 35
CANON & CANON POINT: OC / after a scuffle with a local magic-user who Really Hates Shifters.
HISTORY: Just a general CW for the app - there's some talk of child neglect/aspects of emotional abuse, suicidal ideation and survivor's guilt, PSTD and other aspects of mental health. I've marked where these discussions occur.

the short form:

✴ Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Sam is from a pastiche of urban fantasy stories — he's a shapeshifter that can turn into a crow. Other features of the world include magic, vampires, etc. All of this is 'hidden' from common society, and Sam keeps his shifting under his proverbial hat.
✴ Went to a private school most of his life, switched to public school at fifteen when he left home and moved in with his (much) older sister.
✴ Had an eventful 18th year — he got married to his highschool sweetheart, Billie Shaw, and joined the army.
✴ Served in Afghanistan and Iraq with distinctions for five years, he transitioned over to the 75th Ranger Regiment about a year in. While on a routine recon mission in Iraq, his unit got ambushed and everyone was killed. Except Sam, because he has the survivability of a cockroach. Survivor's guilt is one helluva thing.
✴ Got divorced. Spent eighteen months walking across Europe and then Australia.
✴ Came back to Chicago, got his shit more-or-less together, became a beat cop. Took night classes in criminology and psych.
✴ Graduated the Detective's Exam at thirty. Moved on into the department on fraud. After two years of that, he made a lateral move into the juvenile crimes unit. He now works with at-risk youth, does community outreach and has absolutely zero free time, mostly because he's pretty sure if he stops moving he's going to keel over on the spot.

The tl;dr version is thus: Sam was born to a fairly affluent family. His mother is a lawyer with a speciality in Tribal litigation for First Nations bands, she was largely absent for most of his life. His father, who was sixty at the time Sam was born, was a rather cold man who believed strongly that children should be seen and not heard. While his father tended to a small-time career in politics, Sam went to private schools, played football, had that good ol' fashioned American upbringing. When he turned fifteen, his parents separated and his mother took his youngest sister to South Dakota and Sam, not wanting to leave his friends and definitely not wanting to remain with his father, moved in with his older half-sister. He transferred to a public school, went through that whole gamut of social shock, had a successful small-time football 'career' and a steady, long-time girlfriend named Billie Shaw.

When 9/11 happened, Sam was on the cusp of turning eighteen. After his birthday, he married Billie and signed up for the Army in the same week. After a year of service in the Army, primarily in Afghanistan, he qualified for the Ranger Corps and continued serving both in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Five years into his service, his recon patrol was ambushed by an American mercenary band stirring up trouble. His unit was dead to a man, except him. Shifters, you see, are a little... hardier than your garden variety human. Sam took six bullets and still, somehow, walked out of the desert.

When he returned stateside, his life had all but fallen apart. His wife now seemed a stranger, he had a hard time integrating back into society. He struggled with very severe PTSD, verging on crippling, and refused to do anything about it, see anyone, or even discuss his feelings on the matter. He needed to get out of his own head and Europe seemed like a good place to be. He had never been there, no one knew him, he knew no one. He started in France and walked in anything but a straight line from one corner of the continent to another. He worked for food, shelter, stayed in hostels (and the occasional ditch). He picked up local languages and dialects. Spent a long, long time just trying to exist outside of himself and his trauma which eventually lead him to a sort of tenuous but growing grasp on recovery.

He came back to Chicago and got to work. Became a cop (easy, with his military credentials) and then started studying for the Detective's exam. Passed that with flying colours and stepped on into the fraud department. Eventually he requested a lateral move to juvenile crimes.

PERSONALITY: Sam is one of those guys that comes off as absolutely rock-solid. That dependable dude who is always on time, never flakes out on plans, follows through with every promise and is always a phone-call away if you need him. He seems to exist in this state of perpetual chill. Very, very few people ever really sees him get mad, raise his voice, show grief or stress or upset. He's difficult to rattle. Turns out, living in a warzone for several years really takes the fear of god right out of you.

It doesn't mean those emotions don't exist in him. It just means he doesn't show them. Oh, sure, he'll sometimes seem annoyed or frustrated — he's only human, but he knows how to temper himself. If he talks about his feelings it's with this sense of detachment, like he's addressing something that happened to someone else in a galaxy far, far away.

He's in a position where he has the power to stand up for others and he does. However, Chicago has a notoriously corrupt police force and he hasn't made a lot of friends within its ranks, which has lead to some... professional difficulties. He does not navigate these with any real deftness or grace. A more politically-minded man would probably learn to play the system, but Sam is so sickened and disgusted by the system that the only thing he really wants to do is burn the whole thing down.

Which he, for a variety of reasons, is well aware he can't do. He does his best to protect others — he puts almost his entire sense of worth and value in doing that. He's the first one to step in to defend someone, verbally or otherwise. If he sees himself as having failed in that self-determined quest, it sends him into a negative feedback spiral of failure and self-loathing that avoids being crippling only by dint of years of distance and therapy from the source of it.

Okay, and here's the beef — while all of the above is true, yes, Sam can also be remarkably petty when he decides he doesn't like someone. (seriously, he has plenty of moments like this.) And while he goes out of his way not to judge youth or people he gauges as having been through trauma, he can still be very judgmental of other adults or people he perceives as not having 'had it tough'. Because his purview is people who have experienced hardships and abuse he has little sympathy for others when those conditions aren't met, especially if they seem upset/depressed in some way. He still clings to some old, outmoded ideas about mental health (wrt chemical imbalances versus trauma) and changing this behaviour is a very slow process. He can still be very reactive about it and while he knows this isn't The Best Way to go about it, fixing this is a matter of addressing the problem at its root and he's not... quite there yet.

Another example is magic users: he distrusts and dislikes those with magic on principle and while he's rarely openly hostile he is certainly guarded and wary in a pretty obvious way when he's approached by them.

Sam struggles with the effects of his PTSD and, having lost several friends and acquaintances both in the military and on the force to suicide, he's aware he's very much at risk for it himself. He's a single man that lives alone and has a 'Plan'. When he backslides, he backslides hard. However, thanks to some very conscious decision-making on his behalf, he is at least aware of his triggers and takes steps and care to maintain his mental health in a way that shores it up against them. He is deeply, deeply uncomfortable at the idea of discussing/talking about mental wellness issues, but recognizes the fact that it isn't really about him and his comfort, it's about showing vulnerable youth that it's okay to seek help and acknowledge your emotions and trauma. He advocates quite strongly for therapy in a variety of public venues. CW — hover here for discussion of suicidal ideation/discussion of PTSD.

In some respects, despite being a millennial, Sam can be very old-fashioned. He has a bit of a biased view of gender roles and the respective positions of men and women in society. He thinks that men have a duty to protect and women to nurture — he has no issue with women working (even in dangerous fields like his own) but he thinks that the hierarchy within a house should involve the woman in a relationship being a mother and homemaker while he's out paying the bills. He's... somewhat aware that this is a narrow-minded worldview, but the fact remains.

Sam is a very community-driven and -minded man. He does intense amounts of emotional labour to build structure around him. He's motivated by his love for his family (his sisters, nieces/nephews, his mother) and by his passion for youth care and it shows very strongly in his personal life. On the family side of things, he's usually the one organizing birthday parties, get-togethers, family barbecues, reunions, the whole nine yards. On the community side of things, he works a lot on things that will bring people together. It's a rare week that goes by without him putting on some manner of event — even if it's just something as simple as a Fortnight tournament at the local youth center. He has organized his life in such a way that he almost never has personal time to himself for a reason.

When he isn't tending to either of those two things, he's doing the same in the local Shifter community. Making sure they're safe, protected, that they have a chance to build ties with others locally.

Essentially, he's someone who tries to show others that he's stronger than he feels he truly is. The idea of failure all but guts him. He deals with intense survivor's guilt and he'll probably never really be 'out of the woods' with regard to his mental wellness. But. He tries. Fake it until you make it, right?

ABILITIES/SKILLS: I apologize in advance, this is going to read like the skillset of the main character of a Clive Cussler novel. Dirk Pitt whomst? We just don't know.

  ✸ ARMY RANGER. He's competent at a wide array of survival skills as a result. In order to qualify for the Army Rangers you have to first complete an Airborne component, and then continue on into 'Ranger School'. He ran through SERE ('survival, evasion, resistance and escape') and did tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the 75th Ranger Corps. He's handy with most commonly issued firearms in the American military, has EMT-level first aid skills, knows how to navigate in most forms of terrain and at sea, and can jump out of a plane with only minimal bitching about the state of his knees.

  ✸ DETECTIVE. He's up to date on investigative techniques. Mostly, though, being a detective in juvenile crimes is about 98 percent paperwork and interviews. So if you need a guy to fill six million forms, I guess he's probably your dude. He doesn't mind the desk job.

  ✸ HAPKIDO INSTRUCTOR. He's a first-dan black belt in Hapkido. He teaches regularly at a youth center, which involves the Wrangling of The Youths and strong leadership and organizational skills.

  ✸ MULTILINGUALISM. He likes to be able to communicate with people, and he has a natural talent and flair for picking things up. He isn't 100 percent fluent in anything but English, but he's almost fluent in Lakota. He has a working knowledge of Spanish (+can kind of fake his way through the similarly-patterned romance languages as far as comprehension goes but perhaps not speaking) Pashto, Kurdish and some Arabic. He also knows ASL thanks to his work with a deaf youth who's been in and out of juvie.

  ✸ SHIFTER. Sam is a shifter, which means he's quite a bit hardier than a normal human (think of it like a 25% bonus to constitution/strength stats) and also he can turn into a crow. His crow-form is a bit bigger than your average corvid but is otherwise unmistakable from the real thing. The crow form itself doesn't come with any special abilities unless you count human intelligence. He almost never actually shifts under normal circumstances. That said, if he's fighting other shifters or supernatural creatures he does go between human and crow rather quickly as a way to disorient people in a fight.

INVENTORY/COMPANIONS:

  ✸ TECHNOLOGY: an ancient iPod. Seriously, it's one of the early 'classic' models with 160 gigs of music he probably hasn't changed or added anything to since his teens. This thing went with him to Afghanistan and Iraq and by now he's pretty sure its life force is inexplicably tied to his own and it's not going to die until he does. The battery life is kinda shitty these days, but. You know. He also has a shitty flip-phone. He knows how to use a smart-phone and all adjunct technologies, he just. Doesn't like them.

  ✸ WEAPONS: he has his standard-issue sidearm, a 9mm Beretta and one extra mag. He also has a boot knife.

  ✸ CLOTHING: leather jacket, probably some plaid shirt, jeans, engineer boots. He dresses like he's on his way to a concert headlined by Nickelback and Rascal Flatts.

SAMPLES

NETWORK: meme example, tdm example.

LOG: TDM toplevel here + replies.

Comments

[pridecroweth]

  Shifters in general are genetic, passed down through family lines. As communities throughout history consisted largely of numerous family groups cooperating in an area that would become a township/city, this meant that historically, where there's one shifter there's usually a dozen more. Togetherness for shifters enabled a sense of safety and security that the world itself and all its sundry prejudices often denied them. Shifters were revered in some cultures (primarily ones that skewed towards a more paganistic approach to religion) and hunted and killed in others. For many, 'shifter' was the first identity they had, with gender/religion/race coming after. There were many points throughout history (the Inquisition, for example) when they, depending on where they were, lived in absolute fear of being discovered and killed.

  There are instances of people being 'forced' to shift, which is facilitated by magic (through some pretty nasty rituals) but the individual needs the latent genetic marker for it. An easy example is to think of it like eye colour — you may carry the marker for blue and brown, but have brown eyes. However, said nasty magic ritual might force a change to blue. The shifters created through this method often experience more unpredictable shifting and sometimes more volatile animalistic tendencies. 'Natural' shifters (who can be a bit elitist about it, Sam isn't quite one of those but he does sort of pity the shifters produced through the 'forced' bloodlines, who are often identified in myth and lore as were-whatevers but whose changes aren't actually tied to the full moon) tend to have an easier time of it, both with the physical act of shifting itself and with the integration of animal instinct.

  Sam is from a long line of shifters on both sides of his mother's heritage. His grandmother's lineage has primarily been crows, and his grandfather was a bear shifter (said grandfather was the first in six or seven generations to have it, whereas his grandmother was the first in several generations not to be a shifter). For Sam's part, he essentially cannot remember a time when he was unaware of his ability. He learned walking and flying essentially in tandem.

  I definitely should have touched a bit more on his grandparents because that ties into your other queries considerably! His grandfather (Charlie Two Bears) was one of Sam's primary male influences in his life, and his grandmother (Margaret, who later in life preferred to go by Pretty Deer or Sitéȟaská Wašté) was a much steadier presence than his mother herself. He spent most of his summers growing up with them. In addition to a house in Woodstock Illinois, they had a cabin in the southernmost part of Saskatchewan, near but not on the Wood Mountain Dakota reservation.

  As an aside: the difference between Dakota/Lakota is etymological, both words mean the same thing ('friend' or 'ally' in variances of dialect) and the people are descended from a singular Plains tribe and they largely consider themselves to be one 'people'. His grandmother was originally from the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation, his grandfather was descended from the Canadian contingent of Hunkpapa Lakota lead by Chief Sitting Bull that lived in exile there after 1877.

  So. Back to the cabin. It was the sort of place that has no running water or power, that is almost inaccessible to those that are not shifters themselves or who aren't very confident and capable bushmen/women and definitely wasn't on any government map or census. This was a place where Sam had significant exposure to the culture and values of the Lakota — however, as a child, he felt torn between the two worlds and often preferred to align himself with a more modern 'westernized' approach, believing his grandparents' teachings to be old/useless/embarrassing. He struggled a lot with internalized prejudice against that part of himself and the duality of his presentation to others — he certainly looked Indigenous, but the specifics of his upbringing and his schooling better reflected the Irish Catholic side of his heritage due to how much he repressed of the other half. He spent much of his time with them over the summer pining for his Super Nintendo, and often participated in his grandfather's attempts at teaching him hunting/leatherwork grudgingly at best. His grandmother, who would be considered a language keeper among the Oglala, tried to teach him the language with mixed success. Sam always understood more than he spoke.

  However, as his grandparents had a larger hand in raising his elder half-sister Winona, the language had been passed on to her. Sam's mother actually knows very little Lakȟótiyapi herself despite her position simply because of the generational impact of the trauma of residential schools.

  He didn't start learning Lakota in earnest until he was in his thirties, and it was as an act of contrition and tribute to his grandparents — both of whom had passed on by the time he finished his military service. He's much more comfortable in his own skin as an adult and whereas the boy he had been would have preferred align with the 'white' side of his heritage, he's found peace and balance in both now that he's grown.

  Sam is on the conservative side of things as a direct consequence of his primary male influences being elderly men. His father John was sixty when he was born (in '84) and himself a WW2 veteran. He may have been a part of the 'Greatest Generation', but hoo boy did he believe in a toxic adherence to 'tradition'. He believed a man should rule the household, a woman should Know Her Place and he objected to modern forms of feminism almost as a rule. He didn't even especially like it when women wore pants. As a small-time politician he could turn on the charm and play nice for the cameras and espouse 'modern' views on equality (between sexes and races both) but the truth of the matter was as soon as the curtain came down so too came his veneer of modernity. Sam's grandfather was roughly the same age as his dad, and although his brand of 'masculinity' was less toxic than John's, he still held to fairly conservative values as well, especially when it came to gender roles. Existence in that milieu made his attitude an unfortunately foregone conclusion. He's in a place in his own life where he is capable of challenging his own negative views and his relationship with toxic masculinity, but undoing formative opinions is an emotional labour he doesn't always have the energy to unravel. It really doesn't help that every job he's held as an adult is an 'old boys club' type setting — first the army, then a police department. Respect for equality just wasn't a concern to teenage boys sitting in Humvees talking about Pamela Anderson's titties.

  Due to his father being a WW2 veteran, he also grew up around the very, very idealized American purview of that conflict. His father had sort of gradually inflated his own relevance and importance to the war over the years and given Sam a grandiose picture of heroism and bravery that, even though he later came to be estranged from his father, he always wanted to emulate for himself. It's why he joined the so-called 'War on Terror'. It's also why he's so quick to place himself into danger for others — he believes that being a protector is an inherent part of a masculine identity, possibly its most identifying feature. It's also one of the primary influencing values he took away from the Lakota side of his heritage as a youth — he may have eschewed much of the culture but he related heavily to the fact that the Lakota people were considered some of the fiercest warriors among the First Nations tribes and that the men were the protectors of the family units. If he were to lose the ability to do that, he would almost certainly be absolutely unmoored in his own life because he has put all his identity eggs into that one singular basket.

  It was his ex-wife Billie — also a shifter from a family of shifters, though she's a wolf — that gradually drew him deeper into the Chicago chapter of shifters, themselves several hundred strong. Billie's family had been in Chicago for generations and were very entrenched in the local Shifter culture (and probably also helped to found it) and they brought Sam into the metaphoric fold with open arms. The sense of belonging, the lack of judgement and the overall togetherness he experienced there shaped his life from the time he was fifteen until he was eighteen (when he was already struggling with his estrangement from his father and his mother's absenteeism) and really was the impetus for him engaging in the community as he does as an adult.

He followed Billie's lead more than he knew (and would probably be comfortable knowing, given his outmoded and sexist views) when it came to helping to foster that sense of community. He looks out for the shifters because he feels it's his duty, there was no single catalyzing event that caused it. He feels he owes it to them for the sense of belonging given to a struggling kid once.

  As a detective, he deals primarily in 'human' crime and doesn't deliberately seek out shifter-specific crimes. However, due to the nature of the community most other Chicago shifters know at least of him and that he's a 'safe' cop to talk to, which has lead to some off-the-books work.

  If a case with a shifter known to him comes across his desk, he'd probably go a little more out of his way to work/solve it than he would otherwise, and he would also do his best to disrupt cases that run the risk of 'outing' a shifter. He's not going to protect a shifter who's murdered someone, per se, but he might certainly attempt to make that individual available to shifter rather than human justice. However, he looks after the shifter community more by helping to mediate internal conflicts (he isn't the only one called on to mediate of course, he isn't the Be All End All Leader of the Shifter Community, he's just a very active member. There are other shifter cops, firefighters, EMTs, lawyers, politicians, etc with greater importance than him!) being on the alert about any foreign shifters that may show up (are they dangerous, what do they want) as well as any magic users. Sam makes a concentrated effort to keep tabs on any magic users in Chicago — easier said than done — simply because of how much the storied history between shifters and magic-users has been and due also to his own innate prejudice and dislike.