- █ █ B A S I C S
█ NAME ▬ Taylor Aaron Fleischer
█ AGE ▬ 36
█ NICKNAME ▬ "The Tailor" is acceptable, but lame. "Tay" if you want your teeth to go missing.
█ GENDER ▬ He's a man, man.
█ RACE ▬ Ghoul.
█ ORIENTATION ▬ Heterosexual.
█ OCCUPATION ▬ Prisoner, currently. Previously, a minder of certain kinds of merchandise.
█ PARTNER ▬ A wife on the outside. They're obviously separated currently.
█ SLAVE ▬ None.
█ █ A P P E A R A N C E
█ HAIR ▬ Plat blonde.
█ EYES ▬ Ice blue.
█ BUILD ▬ 6' even; fairly solid musculature.
█ TATTOOS ▬ This at the back of his right shoulder. In addition, the entirity of both hands and
the front half of each foot has a strange grey cast to the skin. People assume these to be tattoos. They are not.
█ SCARS ▬ All over the place. Notably at his eyebrow, all over his feet, and left side of his ribcage.
█ BIRTHMARKS ▬ None.
█ █ P E R S O N A L I T Y
█ THEME SONGS
█ ▬ STRANGELOVE
█ ▬ WHITE WEDDING
█ ▬ FEED MY FRANKENSTEIN
█ ▬ TRIP SWITCH
█ ▬ LANE BOY
█ ▬ EMPERORS NEW CLOTHES
█ ▬ FREAK LIKE ME
█ LIKES
█ ▬ His mother.
█ ▬ His wife.
█ ▬ His kids.
█ ▬ Lina Emerson, and women like her.
█ ▬ Fresh fish. This is not a euphemism. He's pretty much Smeagol over good fish.
█ ▬ Most painkillers. He has "chronic pain."
█ DISLIKES
█ ▬ Prison. He used to be the jailer, not the jail..ee.
█ ▬ Breaking his word.
█ ▬ Hypocritical moralistic cunts.
█ ▬ Electric mages. Downed power lines. Lightning.
█ PERSONALITY TRAITS
█ ▬ Practical.
█ ▬ Reliable.
█ ▬ A terrible influence.
█ ▬ Although, not always intentionally.
█ ▬ The easy answer just isn't always the legal answer.
█ ▬ Or the "humane" answer.
█ █ H I S T O R Y
█ BACKGROUND
Taylor comes from a mixed family-- that is, a ghoul father and a caim mother. His mother's parents, perfectly lovely middle class Americans, couldn't understand why their sweet girl would want anything to do with some ghoul who, admittedly, wasn't from the other side of the tracks, but.. And it wasn't a racial thing, but.. There's a certain reputation ghouls get, you know, and.. How can you think of spending your whole life with someone who has to have bloody meat sent monthly just to keep them from getting violent? It just isn't safe, Mattie! If this is a.. propriety thing, it can get taken care of.. you don't have to do this.
Well, ******** you, Nan, because Taylor's parents had the best ******** marriage he's ever seen in his life.
Of three kids, though, Tay was the only ghoul, and the only boy. He was never close with his sisters, who-- despite careful explanations from both parents about how and why they were different-- always made a point of pointing and gagging and calling names whenever he ate his government rations. Dad had to stop him from trying to hide in closets or behind the house to consume the raw meat. Had to explain how ghouls need different food to stay healthy, and how you can't just ignore what your body needs, or it leads to worse problems. It was just like how fairies can only eat vegetables, except that other people aren't made of vegetables, so that doesn't make them uncomfortable. Meat does. Blood does. So it's good to be discreet out in public, but he should never feel gross or abnormal with his own family. After all, mom loved dad, didn't she? And he ate his rations, just like Taylor did. She just made him brush his teeth after so he didn't kiss her with blood breath.
Ewwww, grownups kissing!
And if it had continued like that, things would have been fine. But sometimes, perfectly mundane things happen, and they knock life off track, and one such thing that happened was that Taylor's father had an accident at work and died when he was fourteen. So it's great that he had a strong ghoul rolemodel to look up to for all those years, but as he went into manhood he was the only one in his house, and it put strain on the family. Angsty, hormonal teenage boys are one thing, but angsty, hormonal teenage ghouls are completely another. He fell in with other kids of his own race at school who hadn't had the benefit of his upbringing. Started getting into fights. Cutting his classes. Did a short run in juvenile detention for shoplifting. Another, longer, for assaulting another student on school grounds. His new friends insisted that this was what being a ghoul was all about. If everybody else was just going to look at you like you were scum anyway, you might as well have some fun. You might as well do whatever the ******** you want.
Unfortunately, when you do whatever the ******** you want, you usually knock a girl up when you're sixteen, and then her parents kick her out, and your mom lets her come to live with you, even though she's supporting her own three kids by herself.
To his credit, Taylor picked right about then to man the ******** up, go out, and get a job. His dad hadn't been a deadbeat, and like ******** was he going to be one, either. Mom didn't like that he'd quit school, but she could use the help with the bills, even if the crappy jobs he could get only paid minimum wage. Between the two of them, they kept the roof overhead and the lights on. His two older sisters-- Ruth and Marie-- went to community colleges on student aid and moved out and got married and went on with their lives, but Taylor was still in the dead-end jobs, buying diapers, fielding arguments between his wife and his sweet mother, who was getting more and more forgetful by the day.
By the time he was twenty, it had gotten so bad that she couldn't work anymore, and although baby Shane was old enough for pre-K, Lilah couldn't go back to work either-- she had to stay home to take care of Taylor's mother. Through most of the day she'd be pretty lucid, but close to sundown she'd start getting disoriented. Forget who people were. What year it was. She'd talk to Taylor's sisters like they were still there, and still small. She couldn't be left alone. Anything could happen to her.
Suddenly, he was trying to support a four-person household on his own with only minimum wage at his disposal. They had to leave the house his parents had lived in since they were married. Moved into a shitty, tiny apartment, where he still couldn't afford rent and utilities and diapers and food. And God, his dad had always told him that he didn't have to play up to what other people thought he was, but Tay had skimmed the surface as a punky teen enough to know that there was an opportunity to make money if he was willing to take it. And he needed the money.
He spent a long time as a petty dealer, working in through the old "friendships" he'd had at school, people who were willing to give him a shot at settling low grade skank. And then he got a reputation. He wasn't late, he didn't let anybody skim anything, and probably the most important-- other losers didn't get away with stealing from him. Desperation was a great motivator for violence where Taylor was concerned, and just like when he was younger, he liked it. Had a craving for it, you could say. Maybe just because of the leaner times. Or that was what he told himself for the first couple years after he started. But a man with a family needs an entirely different kind of family to look out for him in this line of work.
It got to be, he wasn't carrying and he wasn't transporting. It got to be, he was waiting with a handful of other guys for a boat to come in. And his job was just to make sure that nobody messed with the shipping containers who wasn't supposed to. It was very, very simple work, guarding cargo. And Taylor didn't need to know what that cargo was. All he needed to do was stand there, hands in his pockets to keep a set of enchanted brass knuckles out of sight, shoot the s**t with the other guys on the detail, and keep his nose to the wind for the smell of bacon. Easy work, decent money-- not great, but better.
Couple more years, and he knows what's in the boxes. The big metal shipping containers. By then, he's the guy herding them, drugged and malnourished and beaten, into the back of a moving truck, keeping a gun on them in case any are stupid or aware enough to bolt. And the thing is, he's not a monster, right? But he's got a kid at home, and the doctors are suggesting a facility where mom can get "the care she needs", which really feels like a facility "that will make your life more convenient because your wife won't be constantly fighting with you about having to take care of her." And like hell, if he's going to send mom to one of those places, is it going to be a rat trap. So he needs the money. For the kid, and a good place for his mom. And what would he do anyway? Throw the crate door open and say, "Fly! Be free!" And get his throat slit before he's dumped in the river.
See also: Oxycodone "prescription."
See also: ******** other women with expensive tastes.
See also: He needed the money.
So then it's a few more years and a few more years and a few more, and suddenly he's the guy figuring out just how much food and water they need to keep them in sellable condition. He's the guy rationing out the sedatives that keep them from freaking the ******** out, or alternatively, administering the beatings to keep them from being able to fight back. He's almost never at home because he's moving with the inventory, from place to place. But his wife doesn't have to work, and his two kids don't have to rely on just the government supply, and his mom is in a place that's clean and smells good where every week they pile the old folks and nurses onto a bus and go on a field trip. He keeps his visits random, and he takes a picture of any tiny little mark he ever sees on her aging body, questioning the staff about anything that even looks like a bruise. This is so they know that he cares, that he's attentive, that he's ALWAYS watching their asses, so they can't slip up with his mom, they can't ignore her, or let her sit in her own mess, or leave her to lay for hours until she gets bedsores. What he doesn't say is that he knows about all of these things because this is his job, too.
Because he needs the money.
What Taylor didn't know was that there was a snitch in the works, and that his name had been brought up. What Taylor didn't know was that there was no concrete evidence, so any little excuse to search him, search his car, was what they were looking for. What Taylor didn't know what that at Kline and Parrish the speed limit drops sharply from 45 to 25 as you start to go through the old historical district.
And that's how you wind up doing five years for Possession of an Unregistered Enchanted Weapon, even when they don't find anything else on you.
█ ABILITIES
▬ SAVE IT FOR LATER
The secretion of most ghouls is there to help slow prey down so it can be reliably eaten. Taylor's, however, seems to impart a low-grade regenerative ability, creating-- if you're patient-- a sustainable source of meat. Problem is, it doesn't work on already-healed-over wounds, so you want to get your leftovers to the Tailor in a timely fashion for him to lick or bite at the injury. And it may be necessary for him to do this multiple times, depending on the severity of the wound. He can't do internal s**t, and the regenned area takes on this weird ******** grey cast, but hey. You've got a snack that's good as new.. between a few hours and a few days later.
▬ RACIAL BENEFIT: REGENERATION
Taylor's regeneration is quite good as long as he's well fed, and it's been posited that this might be the reason for his bite ability. If he's imbibing the amount of meat and blood that he realistically needs-- ******** the government nutritionalists and their bullshit prescriptions, this means he's either visiting a chop shop (not ******** likely in prison), or consuming outside his limit-- Taylor regenerates pretty ******** fast. This came in handy on the outside because it allowed him to n** off fingers or toes when his wife and kid got hungry. In prison, it's a good source of bribes, as long people tithe him a little something to keep the ol' body renewing itself.
█ EXTRA
His face claim is Spike from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
Taylor and his wife had two children. However, the eldest died in an incident involving a drunk driver during his second year in prison, and after that his wife stopped visiting. Although their marriage was far from perfect to begin with (between Taylor regularly being gone due to his work and Lina), the death of their firstborn (the reason they got married in the first place) seems to have effectively ended their union. Despite this, Tay has every intention of going right back to "work" when he gets out, in order to send support for his younger daughter.
Taylor is a member of Crownless whose primary function was the minding or handling of newly acquired illegal slaves. This makes him the middle man between the procurer and the distributor, responsible for the illicit imprisonment of and "care" for living merchandise. Particularly in circumstances where a procurer used undue force and there were no caims on hand, his bite was considered incredibly useful, since it stimulates tissue growth.
If the subject of religion comes up, Taylor will most likely share his opinion that Jesus of Nazareth was a ghoul. How else do you explain the resurrection? Ghoul regeneration, man. Definitely.
His voice claim is, predictably, Billy Idol.
