Agents of Gargoyle Manor

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Agents of Gargoyle Manor

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Jack Norton, and the Fugitive

Biography:

There are many men who seem to be headed for a perfectly ordinary life until some remarkable event changes everything for them, Jack Norton was not such a man; he was never likely to be normal.

Jack’s father, Malcolm, could have been normal, but growing up he had wanted to be a spy and a wizard and to have exciting adventures and, increasingly as he got older, meet exciting girls all over the world. This was a very difficult proposition, but in spite of the physical, mental and social challenges involved in doing so, he managed to learn enough, train enough and build up enough of a disreputable portfolio to be offered a job with a branch of MI6 linked to Gargoyle Manor. At some point during this time he met a young woman named Kanti in a remote Nepalese village boasting a large number of ancient arcane secrets. The two of them quickly fell in love, and she quickly became pregnant. Following this Malcolm decided to hang up his guns and runes and, after some discussion, the young couple decided to move to his home city of Liverpool. Kanti gave birth to a son, who they named Jack, after a friend who had not made it out of the mountains. Despite their best attempts to warn him of the dangers involved, Jack grew up wanting a life of adventure, and perhaps surprisingly, they taught him all they could of the skills which had served them in that life. Kanti in particular seemed intent on teaching her son the methods of meditation and mysticism which she had inherited from her people, and young Jack spent so much time learning these things, both from his mother and various contacts of hers that he became something of a recluse. Kanti cut down the time her son could spend with his friends and at his school in favour of training him in esoteric disciplines or sending him to learn similar lessons from local mystics. As he grew older she became steadily more convinced that he would need such magical protection, even going so far as to sew a number of charms under her son’s skin.

Of course, there was more to their decision than met Jacks’ eye, for they never told him the truth about what had happened to his namesake, and how they had avoided the same fate. But one day a remarkable event brought him the knowledge.

Jack was 18 when it happened; one year after his father had vanished, taken away by his former master’s for one final job, a mission into the depths of the Congo that could have given them the means to cut the cancerous reign of Mustafa Crimson out of the heart of Africa. Things had not gone as planned, and Malcolm Norton had been lost to a jungle turned by dark magic into Hell on Earth. It was on this day that a slim young Latin American woman going by the name of Carla came to their door, saying that she knew his parents and needed to talk to his father. Jack told her simply that his father was gone, at which her face took on an altogether unpleasant aspect, and she said, ‘well, that makes things complicated.’

With that she pushed him aside and stormed into the house, flinching as she expended the spiritual force needed to brush away his mothers’ wards against evil, and drew an enchanted gun. When his mother came downstairs, passing through the ceiling like a ghost, the woman shot her through the shoulder and she fell to the ground, material and helpless.

Carla told Kanti that the terms were fulfilled, and she had come to take up her husband’s offer, and she then took some satisfaction in explaining to Jack that it had been her intervention which had saved his parents 19 years ago from an attack by terrifying mountain monster, still unidentified even by Gargoyle. She had expended considerable spiritual power in moving all of them far out of the monsters’ reach, but in exchange had demanded of Malcolm that since she had found refuge for his flesh, so one day his flesh would give her refuge.

This cryptic contract was then explained further; Carla was merely the latest body of the being that addressed them, who had met Jacks’ parents in the form of an old man who had been assigned to Malcolm’s team. The creature had no real name, not that it had told anyone, at least, but Kanti’s people called it the Hunted Ghost, which Malcolm had translated as the Fugitive. Whatever manner of creature it was, it claimed it was hunted by spirits not of this world, and it strove to hide from them by residing in the bodies of human beings, and now it wanted the flesh of Malcolm Norton for its new home. It seemed the creature was pursued by some particularly vicious enemies, and had found itself unable to simply leave Carla’s body, as it had abandoned previous hosts, but Malcolm Norton was gone, and his flesh and blood survived only in Jack.

The Fugitive was clear in its intentions, it wanted the body of Jack Norton, his parent’s agreement in the mountains of Nepal would grant it access which it might not have to any other human being. Plus, it pointed out, Carla was a feeble and dull little woman, the power it wielded in her body while well beyond an ordinary human being, was still nothing compared with what it would have preferred. Jack was physically and mystically exceptional, imagine, said the creature, the fun they could have together!

Kanti seemed strangely calm about the proposal, and when Jack seethed with hatred at the creature before him she reminded him of an old story she had told him as a child, of a demon bound in stone by a wise Buddhist monk, and touched right arm, where she had years ago sewn a charm beneath his skin. The Fugitive did not understand this, but Jack took her meaning. So a ritual was performed, the demon was released from its human body, and as Carla Alvarez collapsed on the floor, letting fly the screams of ten long, hideous years, the spirit of the Fugitive was bound in a charm within the flesh of Malcolm Norton’s son. The Hunted Ghost was beyond the reach of its hunters, but denied any control of its new host.

So it would have ended, had the ghost’s pursuers not come to trouble its hosts.

Only the Fugitive itself knows if the arrival of its pursuer, a mad, demonic creature calling itself ‘Darkness’, within an hour of its binding to Jack Norton, was blind chance or precise planning, and it will tell no one the truth of the matter. The creature stood outside their house, demanding that its quarry come forward, then with a cackle of pure mad delight, it began to destroy the surrounding houses. Kanti called up the Fugitive, speaking to it through its mystic restraints, and it told her that with its own power amplifying that of her son it could fight off the demon, but only if it were released from its bindings.

Kanti was loathe to give in to the demon after she had spent so many long years warding her son against it, after she had thought herself finally free from the fear of it, for she knew that if the Fugitive was allowed to take control of Jack’s body she could never fully restrain it again. But it was not to be her decision, for Jack took the matter into his own hands. Unwilling to let the thing outside wreak havoc on the city unopposed, he touched the charm within his right arm, and, remembering the old story, recited the holy Buddhist mantra.

‘Om Mane Padme Hum’

The Fugitive had full control of Jack’s body, and through its power it could increase his abilities many times over, adding its own tricks and skills to his as it did so. It whooped for joy with Jack’s mouth as it burst through the wall of his house atop a glowing cloud of mystic power. Darkness saw its quarry and grinned a grin to put a Medusa-faced Greek shield to shame, and the Fugitive gave it one to match.

The two battled furiously, but Jack’s control of his own mind was greater than the Fugitive had expected, and it found itself struggling to keep the conflict from harming any of the innocent people around it. It saved many lives, but it put itself at a great disadvantage, and despite its power may have lost the fight, had not the demon drawn the attention of Gargoyle Manor and RACKET, who dispatched a MERLIN (Magical Entity of Ruinous Liability Interdiction and Neutralisation) team to the scene. Darkness, knew itself to be outmatched once the team arrived, and fled, calling down the obscene vengeance of the powers of Hell upon all who had defied it that day. Jack and the Fugitive did not listen, they had other problems.

The Fugitive had some control of Jack’s body, and its brief time in such close communion with his mind meant that it could resist any attempt to reduce it to the status of a dormant, trapped ghost. However, though its presence was assured, its control over Jack was only partial, and his mother’s painstaking instructions to him in the arts of meditation meant he could impose a measure of his own will upon the creature. This coupled with the bonds that tied the demon to his subdermal charms meant it could not live comfortably in opposition to the wishes of its host. Thus, peculiarly, the two of them came to an agreement; the Fugitive was to be kept imprisoned in the charms, as had been Kanti’s intention, but an alteration to the spell would mean that the demon would see through Jack’s eyes and feel some of his senses, unless he exerted special efforts in preventing such a thing. And when Jack had need of the creature’s power, he would say the words to release it, and the creature could, for a little time, have its fun.

It was not long before the men from Gargoyle Manor inquired of young Jack Norton whether he required employment.

Abilities and Weaknesses:

Jack is an unbelievably fit man, his body honed by a lifetime of training, and is knowledgeable in a couple of different martial arts and most particularly in the White Lynxes Way, a style reminiscent of Nimaru practised by his mother’s people. He has also received a certain amount of training in mystical arts, including meditation which allows him to sense the presence of various spirits and interact with them. He has a basic knowledge of charms from various places around the world, but has largely focussed on using magic to improve his physical prowess.

When he releases the Fugitive with the mantra ‘Om Mane Padme Hum,’ he becomes much stronger and much more durable, as well as able to fly on what appears to be a cloud of light. He also has a certain ability to change his shape and the composition of his body, becoming less constrained by material bonds, able to make himself somewhat larger or smaller. A very strange aspect of this is his ability to remove parts of his own body and alter their physical traits. His favourite technique is to pull out his own hairs, which he can then change in size and shape to become anything from microscopic scalpels to ropes and spears. In one instance he was also seen to knock out one of his own teeth, before making it expand to the size of a house and dropping it on top of a foe.

The Fugitive can be constrained back to its charm by someone of sufficient mystical strength, including Jack himself if he has enough control to do so, repeating the mantra where the Fugitive can hear it. Jack has a communicator implanted within his ear which his mother or other mystically competent personnel can use to return him to normal should the Fugitive become unmanageable.

Jack is a normal human despite his strength, if he dies the Fugitive claims it will leave his body and drift on the winds, or it will remain locked in the charm beneath his skin, it isn’t quite sure. The greatest weakness in both of them, though, is probably the fact that neither wholly controls Jack’s body, neither truly knows the other’s strength and share of the control, and both resent the other’s presence.

Occupation and Relationships:

Jack is a trained magical fighter attached to Gargoyle Manor, which means that most of his jobs involve acting largely as security for Gargoyle investigation teams in high risk situations. He has also received a certain amount of training in the squad tactics used by MERLIN teams and has been employed by such units in the past. Gargoyle uses him more often because of their particular interest in the nature of the Fugitive and their connection with his mother, and because magical emergencies requiring the attention of MERLIN teams are rare compared to the number of fact finding missions for which Gargoyle requires security, at least in the British Isles.

He has a good relationship with his mother Kanti, who has taken up a job with Gargoyle and is referred to as the Fugitive’s handler, because it is most often her job to ‘turn him off’ after a mission. She attempts to keep as close an eye on him as she possibly can to make sure that the Fugitive does not overstep its boundaries.

He is also, surprisingly, friends with the Fugitives former host Carla Alvarez, who is unwilling to return to her former home in California, since all the interactions she had there for the years during which the Fugitive controlled her were not her own. Following four years of therapy in a psychiatric ward, Carla has now found a new life in a small town in the English Midlands, Jack has found that he enjoys Carla’s company, but also wishes to help her recover from what the Fugitive did to her and also to learn whatever he can from her about his... soul mate.

The Darkness is for some reason convinced that it must capture the Fugitive and ‘bring it to face the justice of the Dark Ones! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!’ No one knows whether Darkness has actually been sent after the Fugitive by its enemies, whether the Fugitive tricked it to bring about the terms by which it could possess Jack, or whether this is just a product of the creature’s obvious mental derangement (even by demonic standards). The only creatures that might know are Darkness and the Fugitive, both of whom are pathologically uncooperative.
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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Re: Agents of Gargoyle Manor

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Lily Quinn
Biography

Once there was a man who wanted to rule the world.

But before that he was Arthur Hayter, investigative agent for Gargoyle Manor, and husband of the mysterious sorceress known only as Quinn. In 1990, in spite of all the dangers that doing so entailed for them, and against the warnings of a number of agents older and wiser than either of them, Arthur and Quinn had a child. A girl with skin of dark bronze, hair of gleaming, metallic copper, delicate, inquisitive hands, and wide, dark eyes that seemed, when the light caught them, to flash with silver.

Quinn decided that she would call the girl Lily.

For her first three years the girl had as normal an upbringing as could be expected with such a background. Her parents were often absent, and her house was attended at times by security guards and defended by arcane symbols and rituals, but she came to little harm, her life might have been much freer if everything had not changed on her third birthday.

Her parents were assigned to investigate a spate of strange activities in Salisbury, occult phenomena and sightings of paranormal creatures had led to the disappearance of livestock, then of local people and two soldiers. Their investigations led them, inevitably, to Stonehenge, where they confronted a troop of strange, snake-like creatures, and where Arthur vanished without a trace.

Even Quinn, renowned as she was among the staff of the Manor for an almost icy calmness and control, could not help but be shaken and, fearing for her daughter’s safety, made the request that Lily be brought to the Manor itself. Few would have made such a request, for, situated where it is, between the world of men and the eldritch realm of the Dreamlands, it is not an ideal place to raise a child. Nonetheless, its strange position and its centuries worth of charms and wards make it practically impregnable to mystical attack.

Nonetheless it was not six months since Arthur Hayter’s disappearance that his daughter was taken from within the occulted walls of Gargoyle Manor itself.

Frantic activity followed this attack, the Lady Warlock and all her staff furiously attempting to find the hole in their defences through which the interloper could have slipped. But the young Lily was aware of none of this, for her fate was one hardly anyone in the ancient house had considered. She had been reunited with her father.

Arthur Hayter had changed, though, since the girl had last seen him, in ways that were plainly obvious even to her. He dressed in long, heavy cloaks and spoke in long, extravagant speeches, telling his daughter at length about things she did not understand, talking about destiny, duty, his rightful place and true form. He moved around a great deal, so that she quickly came to miss the houses she had lived in before, then forget what it was like to live in one place for more than a few weeks.

As Lily grew older, Arthur grew more obsessed with his strange purpose, and his contact with her became increasingly aloof and imperious. He handed down instructions to her and delegated her care increasingly to his band of followers and attendants while he himself saw to other things. Increasingly he seemed only to talk to her in order to remind her of the need for obedience to him and to rebuke her for failing to understand his plans.

For five years she lived moving from one place to another, sleeping under the stars one night and in lavish guest rooms the next, depending upon where her father went at the time and who his benefactors were. During this time Arthur attempted to instruct her in the nature of his destiny and the strange magic that was consuming him, telling her, whenever he did speak to her, of the confused dreams of power that danced and changed in his mind. Even as a child she knew that there was something in his ramblings that did not make sense.

Her life of wandering came to an end when she was eight, and Arthur’s schemes and dealings finally bore fruit as he created for himself a huge fortress which he called the Omen-Tor. This monstrous black castle, crowned with savage crenulations that had the power to rise up into the air, became their new, permanent home. Arthur gave up on all vestiges of his old identity, fully assuming his role as the distant, bombastic tyrant the world would know as Artos the Omen.

Moving into this strange place showed to Lily that in some sense her father and his cultists had been right to boast of his power. The castle’s existence proclaimed to the world that Artos was truly a man of unparalleled magical power, a man born to inherit a mighty destiny. More than this, though, she could feel that a great shadowy animus lay over the lives of all who dwelt within the Omen Tor, moving them as irresistibly as the force of gravity moves the planets in their orbits.

It was not long after the final rituals were completed that the Omen Tor took its first flight, and the infamous career of Artos the Omen began in earnest. His first appearance to the world came on a cold November day in 1998, when he turned the sky dark with a cloak of cloud and hatched an attempt to seize the caves of Lascaux, a place of such ancient powers that he believed it would allow him to rule all of Europe. Though he was thwarted and forced to flee by the agents of EUFIXIT and Europol he was not deterred, and nor were his followers, in fact, his cult seemed to grow by the day.

As his cult grew and he became more and more a figure of worship among its dispersed members Artos sunk ever deeper into his role as a godlike overlord, and Lily became his half-divine child. She sat at the foot of his throne, his followers were told that if they pleased him she would be given to them in marriage, to sit beside her at his feet, while he promised her that she might one day sit higher than any of them, at his right hand as a secondary god. What he required of her was to match the godhood he saw in himself, and to this end he commanded her to study the ways of magic day and night, to read through strange grimoires which he acquired from forgotten places and show him, at every opportunity, the power that she learned.

She did all of this dutifully, for she wanted to be accepted at his right hand, she wanted to know the secret plans of his heart and to move along with the currents of destiny, to be a goddess. By her tenth birthday Lily knew the languages of wind spirits and ghosts, she knew how to see into a man’s soul and bedazzle his mind, she could not control the elements, but she could influence them, and every day her knowledge grew. Magic came naturally to her, it seemed, as well it might, with her upbringing, and she knew that she would not be denied a place at Artos’ side for long.

On the 7th of September, in the year 2000, events were set in motion which would destroy her childhood hopes.

It was on this day, after two years of slow and incremental gains measured against repeated defeats, of gradual gain carefully measured against so as to avoid giving advantage to his enemies, that Artos the Omen had his greatest triumph. This was the day he stole Stonehenge.

Lily watched in awe as her father’s cultists worked to enact his cunning plan, and with some fear as the slow, cold, sinuous forms of snake-men moved among them. Too late did RACKET and a number of British superheroes rush to the scene, deploying their most skilled soldiers and a team of their most illustrious and skilled MERLIN wizards. Though the enemy arrived late, Lily had to admit that the battle was fierce, with a number of the enemy even boarding the Omen Tor itself, forcing her to hide with her glamours and strike out at those who came near her with swift magic that seemed to do little more than annoy. Still, it was all for naught, for before the enemy could stop Artos, Stonehenge was his, and as he duelled the MERLIN captain atop his black tower he felt the strength course through his mighty edifice. He felt the earth and sky shudder as the stones were pulled out of their place, and the shivering lines of supernatural power were cut loose, sending unnatural pulses of energy across the world.

His golden dragon mask fell to the floor just as Lily rushed to his side. He grinned at the MERLIN captain, a tall woman with dark auburn hair, and cried, “Now, gargoyle, do you see my power? Do you see that you shall have no comfort when the Dragon Lord of Albion closes the gates of his arboreal realm?!

The woman gave no reply and simply looked at him with shock stained by anger, then looked to Lily. The Omen’s daughter saw blue eyes that she seemed to remember from elsewhere, then the woman was gone, her own magic carrying her to safety.

The soldiers withdrew, the helicopters fell back, the army readied their heavier weapons. The wind howled, lightning crawled across the skin of the Omen-Tor. The sky darkened, the clouds roared. A strange tune sighed up out of the ether, a tone that became a melody that some say began to sound like a song, a shiver ran up the souls of all who stood there, and Salisbury Plain was tinted with the silvery unlight of places that do not exist.

Hollow thunder echoed like a drumbeat across England, the Omen-Tor vanished as the clouds parted, and the Tellurian descended like a furious angel from the depths of Heaven, mere seconds behind his quarry.

Meanwhile Lily clung to her father’s robes as the Omen-Tor plunged into the world that was not, skimming precariously along the skin of the Abyss itself. Despite the omnipresence of danger that the whole edifice might fall, might be swallowed up into sheer, lightless, soulless, dimensionless nothing, still the Omen-Tor maintained its hold on the tenuous strand of being. Through all of this Artos the Omen stood atop his tower, geometrically straight, unmoving as a stone, Lily was surer than ever that it was the force of fate itself which held him in equilibrium.

Then, after a spell of time all but impossible to measure, they emerged from the shadowed half-world above the Abyss, and Artos once again set about his work.

In years past the bitter, the ambitious, the hopeless and the deluded had flocked to the banner of the Omen, but after he emerged from the darkness of the Near-Abyss, they swarmed. The Omen-Tor was filled with new supplicants, begging for some scrap of their overlord’s attention. Many were unworthy of his attention, and were sent back into the world until they could learn and do enough to impress him. Some managed to remain in the Omen-Tor, hoping to catch some of his reflected glory. One came to sit at his feet, and took everything from under him.

She called herself Elzhania, and claimed she shared his link to the powers of the antideluvian past. She seemed unaccountably, intimately familiar to Lily, and the connection made her nervous. Artos acknowledged her when he saw her, and informed his court of cultists that, in some murky past, a man who had known something of him had known the woman as Quinn, a spy for the pitiable race that dwelt now on his land of Albion.

She smiled and, with a quiet but intense conviction, told him how she had pretended to align herself with the men of the present age, all in accordance with the workings of destiny. In the age of antideluvian Empire and sorcery, she told him, she had stood at his right hand, his most trusted consort and advisor. She looked at Lily then, and said “Afterall, my Lord, it is through me that your power is multiplied and sent out into the world, look at what good work I have already done you”

Brushing aside the muttered concerns and misgivings of his jealous cultists, Artos accepted the woman into his inner circle. Lily watched many of her father’s familiar acolytes disappear while the woman gained more of his trust. She soon learnt, harshly, when she tried to speak against Elzhania’s assumption of such a position, the reason for her father’s confidence.

Elzhania, it seemed, was her mother.

Her place in the world was forever altered, as she went from a single child trying desperately to gain the attention and acceptance of a single parent to a child caught between the attentions of two parents whose intentions she could never be sure of. Elzhania continuously challenged her belief in her father’s power, pointing out his flaws and failures even in front of his servants and acolytes, making changes to his plans which she insisted were for the better, and telling Lily, whenever the two of them were alone, that he was not all-powerful.

It angered and upset her to hear her father, the mighty Artos the Omen, the Dragon Lord of Albion himself, being disparaged such. But it seemed to her that she could never identify to her father what Elzhania had said to her which caused such disloyalty. Whenever she told him of any such things he would simply punish her for her disobedience and for trying to cast doubt upon her mother.

She came to hate her mother quite intensely for some time.

Sometimes the doubts caused her to think that, perhaps, her father was not the god she believed him to be. Would a god have hidden in caves, as they had when she was younger? Would a god conceal his fortress in remote valleys or in the shadow of mountains? Would a god flee from the attentions of someone he so breezily named ‘the Pretender to the Earth’?

Her doubts interfered with her attempts to learn and practice witchcraft, which in turn led to a failure in her performance, which led to disapproval and punishment from her father. Despite the pain and confusion that wracked her in the first few years of the new millennium, she was better with that doubt than she would have been without it on the third of April, 2002.

It was an unseasonably cold day, not that Lily knew much of seasons from the insulated chambers of the Omen-Tor, but she still remembers the coldness. The Omen-Tor had flown under the sea, protected by powerful charms and stolen technology, and had burst forth out of the ocean near Dover, from where it began to tear over the country towards London.

It was a trap. The flying fortress had not come ten miles inland when it found the forces of RACKET and the British Royal Army waiting for it. Caught unprepared, the tower’s defences were broken with thoroughly British precision and timing. Once the Army had cleared a path for them two MERLIN squads were landed on the top of the fortress and immediately began slicing through Artos’ mystical defences as if they barely existed.

Lily merely felt the tower shake and heard the cries of battle being joined, she tried to reach her father, so she would be by his side during the battle.

When she reached his throne room she heard him and Elzhania, they shouted at each other, then cursed each other in antique languages of which she knew only the barest minimum. Silence fell, and she entered to see her mother standing alone and whispering something to herself.

Elzhania ordered her back to her room, but as the castle once again shook she changed her mind. It was only a few minutes after this that the fighting was finished and the throne room filled with a number of strange people.

First came the MERLIN squads, one headed by the auburn haired woman Lily had seen fight her father two years ago. She looked on Elzhania with the same shock and anger with which she had greeted Artos years before, and the two of them spoke earnestly, the words ‘undercover’ and ‘confidential’ flitting between them. Then the British wizard sighed and smiled, saying with a faintly halting breath ‘as though I’d ever doubt you, Quinn,’ and laughed, Elzhania smiled.

Lily stood and watched, struck dumb as her world collapsed around her.

Then, to compound matters, came the arrival of the man her father had named ‘Pretender to Earth’, but was better known to the world as the Tellurian.

He and Lily’s mother argued. The Tellurian seemed on edge, almost frantic, claiming that the powers Artos displayed and the things of which he had spoken should not have been known to him. Briefly losing his composure, he grabbed Lily by the arm and demanded that she tell him all she knew.

Elzhania and the auburn haired woman demanded he remove his hand. He did so, though after she had struggled for seconds too long in his irresistible grip.

At last the silence was broken when Elzhania explained that Artos had disappeared when she tried to arrest him, perhaps taking himself bodily into the shadow of the Abyss as he had once taken his whole fortress. This was not enough for the Tellurian, who demanded to know more, claiming that the issue of Artos’ power was one that endangered the whole world. But no more was spoken of it at that point, the gargoyles demanded that they leave the issue for another day.

Unsteady, adrift and confused, Lily was taken back to Gargoyle Manor, that eerie house on the Dreamland Marches, proof, so it had been thought, against all enemies. She sat very still, unwilling to look at any books under the stern eyes of the Manorial staff, while her mother and the MERLIN woman, who she was told was Lady Katherine Otherwood, discussed her fate with the mistress of gargoyles. At long last the three women emerged, and informed her that she would stay there, in Gargoyle Manor, until she was old enough to leave, the danger of her father’s return being too great to allow otherwise.

In part she wished for nothing but to go back to the Omen-Tor and toil under her father’s supervision again, desperate for his attention and approval, dreaming of sitting by his side. But in another part she knew such a thing was utterly impossible. Even if the Omen-Tor were rebuilt, all the cultists and acolytes alive and well and he returned in glory from beyond the veil of darkness.

She had seen her god struck down and defeated, she couldn’t believe in him again.

Gargoyle Manor is not a normal place to grow up, but Lily’s teenage years were at least less turbulent and somewhat less stressful, than those of her childhood. Her mother, though driven by concern more than the megalomania that moved her father, was nevertheless not an easygoing guardian and teacher. She was strict and demanding of her daughter, demanding that she continue to practice and hone her magical skills, and increasingly trying to ensure that she abandoned all attachment to her father. And where Artos had been distant and commanding, Quinn spared no effort in inspecting her daughter’s progress, to make sure her education and understanding of the world proceeded satisfactorily. Under her mother’s tutelage she decided to change her name from Hayter, or from the name she had taken in the cult, Lily of Destiny, to Quinn the Younger, gaining as she did so a deep resentment for her father for all his lies and weakness.

Still, within the Manor there was at least some influence to counterbalance her mother’s harshness, other voices which compelled her, after a few years, not to be as demanding to her daughter as Artos had been, and to bring her out into the world beyond the Dreamsmarch. It was only reasonable, after all, she could not stay there forever.

Thus from the age of fifteen, by which time her magical prowess had already increased impressively under her mother’s tutelage, she was increasingly allowed to take trips into the world, both the world of men and into the eldritch countries of the Dreamlands. Both places were strange to her, chaotic and bizarre compared to her own upbringing. Strangely, though, she seemed to find the world of men more confounding than the Dreamlands, which at least did not pretend to rationalism or sense. Despite her mother’s best efforts Lily nevertheless ended up involved in a number of strange and unusual adventures wherever she went. In all of these instances, though, she put her skills and experience to good use, escaping from the clutches of the Third Horse in the Dreamlands and holding helping to drive off a creature of the pre-human night summoned up by cultists when she attended a university open day in Oxford.

With her evident skill for combat magic it was perhaps inevitable that the organisation which had cared for her for so long would look toward finding a place for her in its military role. Such a career is an exceptionally dangerous one, but it seemed that Lily was more than ready for it by the time she was twenty.

Lily Quinn’s first assignment with a MERLIN team occurred on the first of May, 2010.

Relationships and Occupation

Lily currently still lives at Gargoyle Manor most of the time, along with her mother, who for the last several years has served in an increasingly advisory role to the Lady-Warlock. Her mother has taken it upon herself to scrutinise Lily and ensure that she is sufficiently experienced, skilled and sensible to deal with the danger presented to her by the lingering presence of Artos and his remaining cultists. As can be easily imagined by those with experience of young women, and even more easily by anyone who knows Quinn the Elder’s often controlling and abrasive nature, this has caused some friction between them.

She is on good terms with many of the staff and agents working within the Manor, and is closest of all to her mother’s old friend Kate Otherwood, an extremely experienced and knowledgeable witch and MERLIN team commander. Lily sees her as something akin to a more lenient and reasonable aunt, or perhaps an alternative mother, whose generosity balances out her mother’s harsh and demanding nature.

Dame Amelia Duvalier has had relatively little contact with her, and it has for the most part been formal and matriarchal. Nevertheless the Lady-Warlock is not a cold woman, and she has sought to offer her assistance to Lily at various points. Enough, at least, that Lily does not see her as a distant and godlike figure after the fashion of her father.

The Tellurian has sought to speak to her on many occasions to interrogate her about her father’s power and origins, and she has studiously avoided doing so. There is a suspicious, angry antipathy between her and the Defender of Earth, and it has harmed relations between him and Gargoyle Manor for eight years.

Finally, Lily is very much aware of the fact that her father may still be at large somewhere in the wider world. She harbours a deep, searing resentment towards him for his failures as a god, but cannot shake off some residual loyalty to and fear of him, as the one who dominated her world for so long, and the centre of such strange forces. His current whereabouts are unknown. All that can be supposed is that he has gone the way of other men who wished to rule the world.

Abilities and Weaknesses

Lily is an incredibly gifted sorceress for her age, able to communicate with many kinds of spirits and place glamours over people’s minds with consummate skill. Her greatest skill, however, is in summoning and controlling lesser spirits, a skill which has recommended her for a MERLIN position despite her youth. She is able to force many lesser demons and other creatures out of the mortal world with a minimum of ritual, and with a certain amount of preparation is able to do the same for much more powerful entities. She is also able to compel certain spirits of the surrounding world to do her bidding, and, more unusually, to almost create spirits out of some unknown potential.

This ability is derived at least partly from her father’s personal style of magic. As Arthur Hayter he was practiced in a number of kinds of magic native to the island peoples of coastal British Columbia, he being a member of the Cloud Snake Tribe. These magicks include being able to make a painting resembling an animal take on the properties of that animal, a skill which Arthur refined into creating creatures out of his pictures. As Artos the Omen he used this power to create a multitude of strange and monstrous beasts to do his bidding, and Lily has followed his examples. The creatures she tends to create, though, tend to be more simple, easier to create, and more dangerous. All she needs do is flash a piece of magical glass she carries with her in the light, or draw lines or shapes with her fingers, and she can create creatures that resemble serpents, spiders and other, more abstract things out of lines of silver light.

She is also unusual in that she appears to be able to draw some power from the Abyss for much of her sorcery. This is something of both interest and concern to the staff of Gargoyle Manor, and which has several times attracted unwanted attention.

Oddly, it seems that many of her powers are weaker within Gargoyle Manor itself, and other places where the world has 'good foundations' making the Abyss less accessible. Certain times of year also increase and decrease the strength of her powers due to something that is not fully understood. The strangest instance being that on the 7th of September her powers are particularly strong, whereas on the 10th, a mere three days later, they weaken until she can no longer draw power from the Abyss at all.

She is also, of course, young and inexperienced, and ultimately, only human.

*******
That one took a while.
I used a lot of Siege and Vic's ideas in this one, so if you guys have a problem with it then let me know and I'll see what needs to be done.
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Re: Agents of Gargoyle Manor

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Daddy's little girl! Daddy, who happens to be the DRAGON LORD OF ALBION! :lol:



God, Bal Sagoth.

That is a good article. Man, you've totally fleshed out Gargoyle. It was your original creation too, back in old-old-old school Comix, right? Good to see you in top form, and good to see you ingeniously weaving a tapestry out of the assorted mythologies written by Vic and Siege to make this good work mang. I am really, really looking forward to more of your stuff.
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Re: Agents of Gargoyle Manor

Post by Invictus »

My only issue is with Lily drawing "power from the Abyss", since the Abyss is pure, definitional nothingness and I'm not sure what she would be able to draw from there. Unless you are implying that the Artos-taught magic she uses lets her open a conduit "across" the Abyss to Ominous Gard and draw on its twisted power for her more outrageous conjurations, of course.

It also implies that her mother, being a soulbound member of Ominous Rex's inner circle, should be able to do this as well, but in her current undercover state she is either avoiding doing so or had the ability temporarily sealed. But why are the gates to the Dragon Lord of Albion's arboreal realm open wide for Lily does this bond exist in Lily without her having to go through whatever soul-binding ritual her mother went through? Does this mean that Ominous Rex has a potential rogue agent in her?
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Re: Agents of Gargoyle Manor

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

My only issue is with Lily drawing "power from the Abyss", since the Abyss is pure, definitional nothingness and I'm not sure what she would be able to draw from there. Unless you are implying that the Artos-taught magic she uses lets her open a conduit "across" the Abyss to Ominous Gard and draw on its twisted power for her more outrageous conjurations, of course.
The idea was that she has a link to Ominous Gard, she didn't go through a soul binding ritual but her mother did, and she lived in a place suffused and moved by Ominous Rexes power for years, so there's a link through the laws of sympathy and contagion. I did also have the idea that she could draw on the Abyss itself for certain things, particularly when banishing demons and the like she could open up a hole to the Abyss and use the 'pressure difference' as it were, against them.

Though also, Jurgen Baccara was summoned out of the Abyss somehow, so it's obviously possible to do something with it.
But why are the gates to the Dragon Lord of Albion's arboreal realm open wide for Lily does this bond exist in Lily without her having to go through whatever soul-binding ritual her mother went through? Does this mean that Ominous Rex has a potential rogue agent in her?
Best way I can put it is that, like I said in Character Concepts, she is a human grappling hook. Because her mother is one of OR's soulbound minions and her father was a man of the mortal world every time she uses her own kind of magic she brings Ominous Gard closer to the world of men, and it does this more effectively than his other minions would because she has a blood link to both worlds. Therefore he's ok with her drawing on his power because it's very useful to him, whereas he prefers to have her mother bide her time until it's time for some of his more momentous actions.
He definitely has a potential rogue agent in her. He can influence her but he can't completely control her, or at least it'd be more difficult for him to control her than it would to control his soulbound minions.
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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