Things to Know
//This is the rules and about for mobile users. This will be under the cut, as it will be quite long.
Guidelines are as follows:
We are selective and non-exclusive for IC interactions.
This blog has two muns, Cyan and Cerise, both of whom write the muse
This blog is a sideblog of angel-dust-addict. All follows will be from there.
This blog is an OC and multi-fandom friendly blog.
Muns and muse are all well over 21.
We will not RP with anyone who does not have listed somewhere on their blog that they are 18+. If this is not listed and you interact, we will block you. Simple as that. Cypher lived a turbulent life that included sex-work, sex-trafficking, childhood sexual abuse, drug addiction, and close proximity to a number of murders. His afterlife will likely reflect this to some degree. As such, there will be a range of adult material on this blog. If you’re a minor, kindly just close out this tab and leave our blog.
Don’t godmod.
Do not like our open starters if you have no intention of answering them. This goes doubly for non-RP blogs and we will block any non-RP blogs who do this. By doing that you drive away people who might actually want to answer them.
There is smut on this blog, but we're more selective about those threads. Please see the FAQ and About pages for more on shipping.
We are always completely fine with fading to black. We will not ask you to write something you aren’t comfortable with.
If we find out you have lied to us about your age, we will block you and will report you if this was done in order to RP smut.
We will do our best to try to tag things that are NSFW or that may be triggery or otherwise cause problems for people. If we miss something, let us know. RP is meant to be fun for all of us.
The Not Safe For Work tag is simply “N.SFW” and it covers sexually explicit material, excessive gore or violence, etc. The sex-specific NSFW tag is “oranges and lemons say the bells of st. clemont's || smut”, if you just want to block sexual content. Thread posts that contain NSFW or particularly triggery material will be placed under a read-more at our partner’s request. This blog is 18+ and everything will be tagged appropriately.
The trigger tag is “tw: [tagged trigger]”, so for example “tw: violence.”
The content warning tag is “cw: [content]”. This is used for things like sexual content, gore, torture, anything that would earn a post an NSFW tag, as well as for minor instances of things like period typical homophobia. For instance, Cypher was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and sex-trafficking during his life. If we're mentioning something about that in passing, it will be tagged “cw: abuse mention.“ If there’s anything graphic, such as in depth discussion or scenes containing any type of abuse, it will have a “tw:” tag instead.
Do not push ships on us. We're generally fine with shipping, as long as we discuss it first. But if either of us have said no to something, that means no. It’s usually because we're uncomfortable with it for some reason, and we will generally make that reason known. Don’t keep pushing If you do this, we will not RP with you.
The muns are not the muse. That should go without saying. Cypher may say or do things that we would never say or do and that we disagree with. But that’s Cypher, not us. It will be clear when we're talking OOC, as those posts will start with a // (cowritten), a 🎵 (Cyan), or a 💎 (Cerise). If it doesn’t have a // or a 🎵 or a 💎, it’s Cypher. If something he says or does is triggery to you and you would like us to tag it, please let us know and we will be happy to do so.
Please, please do not reblog RP threads from us that you are not involved in. Liking is fine. Reblogging is not.
We - especially Cyan - do not generally send in “passwords” and whatnot. However, we also almost never follow anybody who doesn’t have rules somewhere on their blog, as we do make a point of reading those so we know how they run their blog. Cyan's just an anxious mess and sometimes it’s hard for us to reach out to people and that does extend to sending passwords. Or any messages, for that matter. Cerise is better about it, but sometimes Cyan's anxiety still gets in the way.
Unless otherwise stated, interactions with each character our muse interacts with are treated as separate.
If your muse is not from Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, or London Spy, that does not mean we won’t play with you. However, if your muse is not someone Cypher could be reasonably expected to know, he won’t know them straight off unless we have specifically plotted for him to know them.
Meet Cypher:
Name: Cypher
Aliases: Danny, Daniel Edward Holt
Gender: Male
Years living: 1988-2021
Age, at death: 33
Age, total: 36
Height: 5'6"
Including ears and antlers: 5'10"
Weight:
Appearance: Cypher has deer ears and two multi-pronged antlers, each about four inches long. Rather than the normal beige, though, his antlers are a bloody red, as though he has just shed his velvet. His hair is auburn, as are the backs of his ears. The insides of them are steel gray. His eyes are also steel gray, although they look like deer eyes rather than human eyes, with rectangular pupils. His teeth are no longer human, but more like a shark in appearance. His most notable markings are strings of numbers around his neck and wrists. They appear in a deep red that resembles dried blood. He has a deer tail, which is reddish-brown on top and steel grey underneath. His upper arms are the same as they were when he was human. His hands, however, are now reddish-brown with sharp, black claws. The reddish brown continues up to his elbows before fading out. This is interrupted only by the band of numbers around each wrist. His legs are now like those of a deer. They are reddish brown in color up to the knee, digitigrade, and end in black, cloven hooves.
Distinguishing marks: Numbers around his neck and wrists.
Neck: 4389617908
Left Wrist: 8752647
Right Wrist: 3064759
Orientation: Homoromantic, homosexual.
General bearing: Cypher is a hedonist. He has never been one to turn away from drugs, drink, or sex. Despite this, though, he is a fairly quiet person and not particularly outgoing. He has an easy enough time meeting people, just not letting them close. He also doesn’t have much confidence in himself. All of this shows in the way he presents himself.
Style of dress: Casual clothing. He typically wears t-shirts, jumpers, and jeans.
Alignment: True Neutral to Neutral Good
Languages: English
Abilities: Cypher is a walking lie detector. This ability works best on other sinner demons, imps, hellhounds, and any of the other less powerful races. It does, however, work on any race of demon. The more powerful a demon is, the more trouble he might have being sure if they're lying, but his ability works on everyone.
Positive traits: Devoted, persistent, and generally honest.
Likes: Crowds, music, anything that will let him forget for a while.
Weaknesses: The short list of people he cares about, his own self-doubt, and his tendency for over-indulgence.
Negative traits: Over-indulgence, doubtfulness, mistrust, self-centeredness.
Dislikes: Being reminded of his past, being lied to or about.
Weapon of choice: Persistence
Affiliations: Alex (boyfriend - former), Scottie (mentor - former), Rich (drug dealer and pimp - former)
Kinship ties: Both parents still living. No siblings. No extended family with whom he has any contact. Scottie was a mentor and father figure to him.
Relationship status: Single, but not necessarily looking.
History:
Cypher grew up in London, in a middle class family that didn’t want him. His parents were neglectful, though not outright cruel. Still, that was enough to affect him. He sought attention and praise wherever he could get it.
When he was a teenager, Cypher realized he was gay. For a family that had never wanted him to begin with, this was the only reason they needed to cast him aside entirely. Left on his own at 16, Cypher only barely finished high school. He began drinking and using drugs. He also threw himself into all the seediest parts of early 2000s gay culture. That was how he met Rich, the man who would become his drug dealer and keeper.
One night when he was 19, in a moment of despair, he posted an ad online. Anyone could come round and do whatever they wanted to him, the only condition was that they not speak. And they did; he didn’t bother to count how many. The experience was deeply traumatic for him. The next morning he called Scottie, whom he had only known for a few weeks, distraught and scared. Scottie took him to the hospital and waited with him for the results of all of his blood work, offering the kind of support Cypher had so desperately needed.
After that, he settled down a bit. He still drank, did drugs, and partied. He was even involved in the occasional drug-fueled orgy. But he never did anything quite as reckless as that night again. All of that stopped, however, when he met Alex.
Cypher had been out all night, which wasn’t unusual for him. He had gone to the Thames and, upset by a phone call, had dropped his phone and curled up against the bridge wall. Alex happened upon him on his morning run. The quiet man stayed long enough to make sure he was okay before Cypher ran him off. He did, however, leave a water bottle with Cypher.
A few days later, determined to return the bottle, Cypher waited where he had met Alex the first time. Sure enough, Alex came by again on his morning run. The two began talking and eventually, it evolved into a relationship. Alex was Cypher’s opposite in nearly every way. Soft-spoken, introverted, straight-laced, and extremely brilliant, Alex worked as an investment banker at a prestigious bank.
For eight months, they had a happy, healthy relationship. Then Alex stopped returning Cypher's calls. For two weeks, Cypher heard nothing from him. Scottie advised him to move on, but Cypher didn’t feel that he could without trying one last time. So he visited Alex’s flat and found it disturbingly empty, frozen as though suspended in a moment. There was, however, a ladder up to the attic. What he found there would change the entire course of his life.
The attic had been staged like a BDSM dungeon. Various paraphernalia was meticulously stored throughout the main room. But the whole attic was rank with the smell of death. In a small side room, Cypher found the cause. Alex had been locked inside a steamer trunk and left to die.
Cypher was arrested for Alex’s death. The newspapers called it a sex game gone wrong. But Cypher knew that that wasn’t true. He had been Alex’s first and only. His first relationship and his first sexual partner. He began a quest to uncover what had really happened to his boyfriend.
The first warning came during an interrogation: leave it alone. Do not question who killed Alex or why. He was presented with “evidence” designed to make him doubt Alex and their relationship. This worked to an extent. He did begin to question whether he had really known Alex.
What the people who were threatening him did not know was that he had stolen a flash drive from the attic. The only problem was, it was locked with a combination lock. And Cypher didn’t have the combination. He only discovered that as he discovered that his relationship with Alex really had been genuine.
Determined to prove his own innocence - and that Alex was murdered, not killed accidentally - he set out to find answers. He enlisted help from Scottie, who he learned was a former MI6 agent, and from some of Scottie’s associates as well as his own. The battle for the truth proved to be a grueling and costly one.
One by one, avenues were closed to them. Cypher was intentionally infected with HIV during an interrogation as a means of discrediting him. After all, what worth did the word of a reckless partier and druggie hold? But the cost to Scottie was even greater, and their quest saw him killed.
Cypher had, though, managed to find out what was on the flash drive that could have gotten Alex killed. While Cypher had known Alex was good at math, he hadn’t quite realized the true extent of the other man’s genius. Alex had created an algorithm for a lie detector. This was the research that made him too dangerous to the world’s governments to live. Cypher has also found Alex’s parents - both real and false - and he uncovered the truth about Alex’s history.
Having lost everyone he cared for and who cared for him, Cypher began a new chapter of his life. He was learning to live with his losses and with HIV. He had allied himself with Alex’s adopted mother to help bring to light Alex’s murder and to figure out how to put Alex’s creation to use.
Present Day:
Cypher died in 2021 at the age of 33. His cause of death was complications from pneumonia and AIDS. After waking up in Hell and realizing that his body was changed, he went looking for a place to hide while he adjusted. It didn’t take him long, however, to discover that he could tell when someone was lying. This makes him a potentially very powerful demon, though he does not seem to command much in the way of magic. He has been cautious about allowing people to know about this ability, as he does not want to be subjected to conditions like the ones that eventually resulted in his death. He does find a great deal of irony in the fact that part of the information MI6 was seeking when they murdered Alex and began the long, slow slide towards Cypher’s death is now permanently written around his neck and wrists. And in the fact that he now holds the power they wanted badly enough to kill for it.
At present, he is looking for a place to stay and a job. He is currently hiding out on the west side of the pentagram. However, he has seen ads for the Happy Hotel and has been debating checking himself in there.
