Jacob
Ofanite of the Wind
Ethereal Forces: 3 Intelligence:
6 Precision: 6
Celestial Forces: 3 Will:
5 Perception: 7
Vessel: Caucasian Male/2
Role: "Jake" (Bounty Hunter/2, Status/2)
Skills: Area Knowledge/3 (LA, 'native'), Dodge/3,
Driving/2, Emote/1, Fighting/2, Knowledge (Angelic Lore/1, Demonic Lore/1,
Ethereal Lore/1, Occultism/2), Languages (English/3 ('Native'), Old English/1),
Move Silently/1, Ranged Weapon/2 (pistol), Savoir-Faire/1, Small Weapon/1
(Knife), Survival/1 (Ethereal)
Songs: Healing (Corporeal/1), Form (Ethereal/1),
Shields (Corporeal/1)
Attunements: Ofanite of the Wind, Mercurian of the
Wind, Ofanite of War, Rade*
*Homebrew Wind Attunement by Casca, for his game;
essentially, it allows Jacob to match speeds with moving objects. Very handy for adventures in LA...
(If Ofanite of War and Rade are removed, Jacob is a
balanced starting character.)
Jacob heard that story, once, about the swallow
flying through the darkness, and into a lighted room for a bit, then right back
out again into the darkness. A bunch of
philosophers run with that metaphor and tried to imagine what that swallow
might have felt, in that moment of light - and how it faced the fact that it
was going to be in the dark again right afterwards. A pity they never got a chance to talk to the Ofanite: he could
have set them straight immediately. You
see, it's actually no big deal for the swallow: he's just going to settle down
and wait for the next bloody room.
Trust Jacob on this.
Jacob is over one thousand years old: well, sort
of. His configuration of Forces has
been around for a bit more than a millennium: in terms of actual memories,
though, he's maybe twenty-five, if that.
He blames Legion - mostly because you have to blame somebody in
cases like this, and God knows Legion deserves all the blame that can be tossed
on it. Before the Legion Incident, he
was just a newly fledged Ofanite of the Wind, doing his thing. During the Legion Incident, he was one of
the innumerable extras whose major job was to charge in heroically and die well
fighting off zombis (for the record, Jacob was cool with that. Somebody had to do it). After the Legion Incident... well, Jacob was
in Trauma.
And, when he finally got out of Trauma several
decades later, he went right back down to Earth and started to do his
thing. Said thing, apparently, was to
charge in heroically and die well doing the Right Thing.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Over and over and over again.
By now, Jacob's at the point where Trauma has
stopped being an unbearably mind-shattering experience and started being a good
way to catch up on naptime. At the
moment, the cycle seems to be: come out of Trauma, spend about a month or so
running around, then get faced with a situation where he has to do something
heroic that will send him in Trauma for about a decade. There has been a noticeable decrease in the
amount of Trauma-time Jacob suffers; he's pretty sure that in another two or three
thousand years he'll be at the point where he might even be immune to it, al la
the Malakim, assuming of course that the War's not over by then. It's something to look forward to, at least.
What needs to be understood is that none of this
especially bothers the angel. Jacob's
gotten used to the fact that, all things considered, he's apparently going to
see at most a year out of every century; it may be inconvenient at times, but
at least it's never boring. One of the
nice things about being immortal is that most of your friends tend to be
immortal, too: you can always go back and finish a conversation later. There's
also the nice bonus that you can pretty much ignore stupid short-term
annoyances, because realistically they'll probably be gone the next time you
wake up. Servitors of the Wind have to
deal with that sort of thing all the time: the Ofanite is happy to not have to.
He's not quite the same entity he was, though. Jacob, like all Servitors of the Wind,
enjoys shaking up the established order whenever and wherever possible: however,
unlike many of them he tries to be a bit more complex about it. For example, he dearly loves to freak out
the Dominicans, as is only right and fitting - but he does it by being honestly
and truthfully respectful towards them and their tasks. If assigned a punishment (and Servitors of
Judgement have been known to give creative punishments to Servitors of the
Wind), he'll cheerfully undergo it without a hint of resentment or
sullenness. He always says 'Sir' or 'Ma'am',
never talks back to them, keeps them informed about things
and generally does his best to help them do their jobs properly.
This can confuse the living Hell out of the
newer Dominicans, especially since Jacob's traditional way of celebrating being
out of Trauma is to go steal the first Inquisitor's notebook that he sees and
use it as a gambling stake at Janus' Eternal Floating Dice Game. That's Jacob in a nutshell: simultaneous
embraces of somewhat contradictory attitudes and deliberate attacks on
stereotypes. Fortunately, the Archangel
of the Wind can see the joke.
Currently... well, he just woke up, again, and got
assigned a quickie Role maintained by a Reliever of the Wind (go ahead and
laugh: everybody else is, including the Reliever), again, and got sent down to
Earth on assignment, again. Los
Angeles: apparently it isn't quite Demon City anymore, which is nice, and some
of the angels down there need some backup, which is also nice.
Time to go see what interesting things are happening on this turn of the Wheel.