it's also kind of fucked a little bit that the whole adeo shitshow ruined their view on more than just men?? like it could easily have become the kind of thing where they were left with "because a man abused me i hate men" but it's decidedly not that. it killed their optimism about the entire human race. they respond differently to different genders, but like.... gestures to the way 90% of their ships lean masc. DSJKFHUSIFHDJNS in terms of viewpoint they don't give a shit that he was a dude. he was human. that was the problem.
content warnings: homophobia, implied parental abuse (take a wild fuckin guess who warrants both of those)
AMARI FLETCH (they/he), a.k.a. THE TOWER
leader of the unseen (historically known as umbra), a global shadow syndicate quietly nudging politics this way and that by way of bribes, assassinations, extortions, etc. also has a major foothold in the underworld scene of most major cities. elusive is NOT fletch's middle name, as they are a well-known high society socialite known for being unapologetically nonbinary in a relatively conservative, traditional space.
fletch is a soft-spoken, well-mannered and calm individual. they are known for never raising their voice or losing their cool, often able to talk down unhinged or pissed-off people with a simple conversation. when they do lose their temper, it is often in an extremely controlled way, a terrifying outburst of violence bookended by serenely removing and then donning their gloves.
they are also incredibly smart. fletch is an expert at loaded questions and layered statements, their conversations often leaving people thinking about what they said for weeks to come. i call him "the spider" for a reason — they are always working an angle, always spinning a thread in their vast web of influence.
though this is known to no one, it's important to mention that a very, very long time ago, amari fletch gained immortality by cheating death in a game of dice. muses who are directly connected to death might know them or know of them because of this!
touchstones: hannibal lecter, gus fring, olrox
ALLIES: persephone aisa ( @huntershowl, right hand), anah tannar (umbra employee in some verses), korin derege (tensely)
ENEMIES: adeodatus damiana (politically opposed — adeo is the well-loved underdog to the tower's established rule)
KORIN DEREGE (he/him)
in modern verse, he is the wealthiest man in shelter island and one of the wealthiest in the world. korin is the CEO of midas holdings, a huge corporation that owns many smaller corporations and businesses, though his largest is midas' consulting company (name tbd). the derege family is old money. they have been around for centuries, said to be composed of a long line of men who ruled their fiscal domain — and family legacy — with an iron fist.
he is also, secretly, a five thousand year old dragon. very few people know this, as it is a dangerous secret given the fact that dragons were hunted to extinction so thoroughly that they faded into legend. nowadays, he and his son carry charms that trick those with magical creature-sense, giving off the essence of human phoenix sorcerers rather than draconic ones.
korin, like fletch, is near-universally feared, though unlike them he is very rarely loved. he is well-known to be classist, catholic in a bigoted way, and homophobic. he rules his family like his company: iron fist, hard delegation, everyone serving a role. his wife, charlie, hasn't spoken a word in over a decade and has largely faded into the background. he had a daughter, but she died. his son, keon, is the sole inheritor of the family's legacy, and korin has his claws deep into the boy's life — keon was created and molded to be an extension of his father.
speaking to korin derege tends to feel like being pulled apart and scrutinized from all sides. it's common to feel uneasy around him, as if he could snap at any second and verbally berate you for simply existing. the presence of other people is an inconvenience at best. but his people follow him staunchly: so long as they perform their role properly, they know their lives will always be bountiful. and it feels good to be on his good side.
in fantasy verses, korin leads the midas trading company, the largest shipping empire in xyz coolworldname. he often serves as a close advisor to an emperor or king, though even in magic-forward worlds his draconic identity is a secret.
touchstones: logan roy, fire lord ozai, omni-man, dracula (castlevania)
allies: keon derege (until a character arc turning point), amari fletch & the unseen (tensely), peter lukas (old-money shitfamily pals), riposte alaric (recipient of korin's sponsorship at school), adeodatus damiana (privately)(?)
enemies: adeodatus damiana (publicly/politically), rival mafia clans, competing corporations, most people with a conscience, anyone who cares about keon
ADEODATUS DAMIANA (he/him)
ahhhhh, the politician. see, here's the thing about adeo: he hates politicians. he hates politics. at least, the way they are right now. see, you get together a group of people and put them on a patch of land and they have to live together somehow. they form a society. but in a society, you need to figure out the rules: what's okay to do, what's not okay to do, what happens if you do something that's not okay, how rule-breaking is punished, how rules are regulated... et cetera. so you create a form of law enforcement and you create leaders. every group has a leader. usually a few leaders, so that one guy doesn't get all the power and go wild with it. voilà: politicians are created.
but here's the thing about politicians: somewhere along the line, they stopped caring about the city as a whole. the started really caring about themselves, and about money. the only way to have a lot of money is for other people to have very little. an extreme cannot exist without its opposite. if everyone could be rich and comfortable, nobody would be, right? and because these guys helped make the rules, they thought, of course i should be rich and comfortable, i'm important.
but adeodatus grew up poor. the part of the city he's from has been abandoned by law and government. infrastructure stopped getting funded: dilapidated buildings full of asbestos and hazardous debris, roads broken up and riddled with potholes, entire districts dominated by gangs of technomancers, and behind it all, the fucking unseen, profiting from the chaos — scooping up people with nothing left to live for and making foot-soldier criminals out of them. but every group needs a leader, right, so what happens when yours abandons you? that's what we in the biz call a power vacuum. when a leader steps away, another takes his place, and in the outer ring of shelter island, that vacuum was filled by the mafia. no one else had enough influence, money and power to enforce some form of order.
so now you have a whole half of the city where the little guys live in fear of their shops and homes being smashed up if they don't pay their protection dues — or worse, the folks they love being hurt, killed, one by one. they get desperate. they can't get a job in the ring, because no one pays well enough. they can't go to city-proper for work, because they can't afford to look nice enough to get hired and commuting would drain what little funds they have left. so they start to steal. they're honest men, they are, but they have nothing left — no one will reach out a hand and say here's some stability, so you can rest.
two-thirds of the wealth in this city goes uncirculated. it sits in the hoards of a handful of people who — in adeo's honest judgement — are not always evil diabolical villains, they started out the same way as everyone else. they just got lucky, right? and they wanted to hold onto that luck, that stability, so they grew it and grew it and grew it, and now it's a machine that churns out good fortune.
all adeo wants to do is work with these people to create a little more balance. all he wants to do is reduce the suffering that leads to people feeding the umbral machine, people being led blind into the tower's maw and coming out with blood on their hands. give them a chance to catch up, get jobs, make jobs, get one good night of goddamn sleep. feed their kids without risking their lives to do it. turn the ring into a place where you can ask for help and get it. just redistribute a tiny bit of that unused money — he promises, you won't miss it.
TL;DR: whoops — sorry, got into campaign speech mode there. i hope that gives you a general idea of what adeo's all about: he's a socialist politician primarily focused on creating better social security programs and funding for the impoverished areas of the city by redistributing wealth. however, at the same time, he makes behind-the-curtain handshake deals with the very corporation owners he publicly opposes so that he remains friends with everyone. we can all have a slice if we just work together about it. adeo's point of view on life is that everyone, somewhere deep down, wants to do the right thing for them and those they care about.
his major campaign circuit ran five years ago after he baptized himself and left a life of crime. alas, his opposition to umbra/the unseen (the one organization he couldn't come to an agreement with) led to an assassination attempt that caused a house fire, killing his fiancée and causing him to flee the country — never to be seen again. there were three days of riots in the ring after his exit, colloquially called the exile riots. he left the city as a martyr, and not without igniting a spark of hope in the people he swore to protect. many of the ring's citizens still wait with bated breath for his return.
touchstones: zahir (lok), all might (mha), apollo, [the rest are spoilers for other aspects of him that aren't public knowledge]
allies: genuinely Most People but especially those who have been personally victimized by the unseen/the mafia/crime in general/rich people, korin derege (privately)(?)
enemies: amari fletch, persephone aisa (if you know you know)
IMPORTANT NOTE: adeo is a tricky character. there are darker aspects of him that i keep hidden because i like immersion and it's always a fun mystery to weave for folks, but would never keep a partner in the dark ooc without their explicit consent.
today i'm thinking about how adeo was so masterful in his manipulation that even to this day, five years later, persephone still wholeheartedly believes everything he told her about herself..... that, no, when you're as much of a monster as they are, you don't deserve healing, you don't deserve redemption, because there is nothing good to draw out — the only redemption for a thing made of sin is eradication, so the best you can do is keep yourself tame and direct your evil eye the right way.
IT ALWAYS SURPRISES HER HOW adept he has become at reading her body language. it's no secret that persephone's face is near-constantly fixed in a glower, eyes dark and seething with some distant and simmering rage that no one else could ever hope to understand.
their body, too, they carry with perpetual hostility. of course, it's worse when they're by sukuna's side: an unnecessary guard dog as much as a prized thing, she is his first line of defense in this new and chaotic world he has carved out for himself. everyone is an enemy.
some more than others. it's barely a shift in her body language: tension in her shoulders not like she's ready to attack, but like she's ready to run. it's always the fuckers who have the audacity to lock eyes with her and not cower immediately — the men who sneer, who call her a whore behind her back and expect her not to hear it.
she hears it.
❝ ... ❞ despite being pinned under her glower for more than enough time, the idiot doesn't shrink away even when the friend he was talking to is smart enough to make haste out of the room. ( they'll hunt him down later. ) the way this one looks at her makes her skin crawl. but if persephone retaliated against every asshole who insulted her, she'd be too busy to catch a moment to breathe. she's never been much good at defending against them, not when most of the time she believes what they're saying.
it's only when sukuna takes notice that the man stiffens from head to toe. satisfaction and disgust warp together deep in her stomach until they become bile; it's impossible not to notice the gap in respect, but then, what else are they to expect from someone so insignificant? ❝ don't care. you heard him. ❞
❝ THEN YOU LOOK GREAT. not that you don't always. asshole. ❞ something about izuku all in black just gets her — and he knows it does, no matter how many 'you look like you're going to a funeral's she tosses at him. persephone can't resist bending down to press a kiss to his mouth, then his jaw, then the pulse point where it meets his throat. a cold hand finds his waist, tugs him closer, gentle in the way of a restrained, starved thing.
❝ ... you smell nice. ❞ it's new, though she can't tell if it comes from a cologne or a body wash; either way, she wants to eat him for it. her head dips lower to bite into the junction of his neck and shoulder gently enough to avoid leaving a mark. ❝ sure you have to go? ❞
Eyes cocked, mouth scrunchy. Reeeeally thinkin' about it.
‘Nnnope!’ (Jinx, like, makes stuff - just that she makes stuff to mess up other stuff. Oval of life, or whatever.) ‘Nada. I huffed on this toluene stuff before but it bl-ooows. Silco was all,’ gritty deep accent-y voice, ‘“You can't do that again, Jinx,” “This is how they diminished us, Jinx,” like, yeah, no shit! But that was because'a the mines. It's not even the same. So what's chainsmoking like?’
She folds herself in half, tucks up, arms cozying round her knees. Face-to-face.
❝ HA— ❞ IT'S A BARK OF A LAUGH, genuine and harsh and not pretty. there's something about the way jinx's face scrunches up when she impersonates silco that always catches them off-guard. ❝ and yeah. tried that too. most things, actually. ❞ except for shimmer, which fletch has kept persephone as distant as possible from — hence the hextech thievery for their arms.
both of their interest lost in the petty gang war below ( really, their attention span becomes dismal around her ), seph draws a knee up to her chest and rests her chin upon it. ❝ it kind of feels like drinking water when you're really fuckin' thirsty. or eating something you've been craving for weeks. feels great, as long as you have a cigarette on hand. you get a buzz without getting drunk, literally whenever you want. ❞
as if on cue, they pull a roll of dark paper from the silver pack in their pocket and light it with a snap of the prosthetic fingers. ❝ with the small caveat of an early death, which i don't personally give a shit about. wanna try? ❞
❛ it looks so pretty on you. you should keep it. ❜
the bear. | ACCEPTING
❝ UGH... ❞ AN EMBARRASSED grumble as she turns this way and that in front of the mirror — not to look at herself from different angles, but to stretch, twist, make sure nothing will rip or tear when the night inevitably goes bad. the dress brings to mind pomegranate seeds, with its rich merlot-to-black gradient and the red beads that dangle from the sleeves like hovering raindrops; it's cut with a diamond-shaped open back, the fabric pulled apart to reveal an intricate tapestry of tattoos across their tough scarred flesh.
they don't hate it. they've always had an irrational fondness for a deep plunging V-neckline, their pallor ever-starker against its dark red frame. still...
❝ i dunno, P. don't really wear this kind of shit. it'll get destroyed. ❞
this scene......... had me in shambles. the intimacy of writing the sutras over your entire body and, being a person who trusts no one, giving your back to your only friend, the friend who you betrayed.
because you're finally admitting that you can't do it on your own instead of pushing him away like you have every time he's opened his heart to you!!!!
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
origamiaround
pixelskylines
theartofmadeline
