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OKAY THIS IS NOT THE THREAD WHERE THE RP WILL ACTUALLY TAKE PLACE. It's just an intro where I lay out the rules, setting, character app templates, etc. After you send me your characters and I approve them, you post them here yourself. Got it, guys? Just PM me if ANYTHING confuses you.


IN-GAME STUFF

SETTING: LAS VEGAS
A “hotbed of supernatural activity” (as described by Shegorath), Las Vegas is one of the few places where the openly supernatural can find work, as they are in demand for all sorts of freaky stage acts and the like. The Garden of Earthly Delights masquerades as just one such show, giving any police who might come by a good excuse for having a bunching of half-naked monsters slinking around.

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
If you don’t know what this is, you didn’t read the intro. Go do that now!

THE UNDERWORLD RAILROAD
Created by Shegorath, who describes it like this:
“An underground railroad of sorts for preternatural kids and adolescents who have been kicked out of their homes. Like kids and teens who are lycanthropes, or psychic. They help them find foster homes who will keep them safe and help them, like finding werewolf foster parents for a werewolf kid. I mean, just imagine if some werefox kid got placed with people who were with Humans First? So they circumvent that by legal and not so legal means. Some of the members of the group have multiple arrest warrants out for them, for kidnapping, and possibly liberating a group of weres from a so called government safe house for new lycanthropes that Anita mentioned once was more like a prison/institution.”

WHAT TIME IS IT IN THE BOOK CONTINUITY?
Is this before Blue Moon? During Obsidian Butterfly? Between the first and second books? I don’t know. That will depend on who, if anyone, is the first to submit a canon character. See, canons aren’t a requirement. You can play an OC of your own, or a canon, it’s your choice. If nobody applies as a canon, continuity doesn’t matter. But if somebody does, they have to SPECIFY what time in the series they are playing, so that other people applying for canons know and submit their canons from the same time. For instance, if we get an Anita who is the Anita from the first book, we can’t really have a Richard from the latest.

RULES
1. No godmodding/power-playing/autoing. I know this is difficult, since we’ve got creatures who can heal amazing damage and mind-control others, but just try not to push things over the brink. I’ll let you know if you do, and you can make a case for why you aren’t if you feel that you were in the clear, and I’ll decide.
2. NO SEX! I know this is a brothel, but we’re still on Gaia, and the rules still apply, even if you’re playing one of the hookers and/or customers. It’s like one of those movies where you know there must be sex going on off-screen, but you never get to see it.
3. There are no limits on the number of characters you can create. Just don’t make more than you can keep track of.
4. NPCs are allowed without a profile (like the cops around a crime scene or the wife of a suspect), but if they start turning into regulars, I’ll ask that you make them one.
5. No posting limit or posting requirement, but if you’re not going to be able to post for a week or more, do let me know.
6. There is no requirement for post length.
7. PM me your profiles, loves! THEY DO NOT NEED TO BE AS LONG AS MINE. I’m just a freak when it comes to pimping mine out into ultra-detail, but this NOT the required standard for others, don’t worry.
8. After I approve your characters, post them here yourself, then mosey over to "The Garden: RP Thread" to start playing!


WHO SHOULD I BE PLAYING?
Anyone you want! One of the investigators that Hieronymus has brought in, one of the sex workers or customers at the Garden, somebody who just wandered into the whole thing by chance, or whatever else you think of!

As far as species go, you can do anything found in canon. If you want to play something that isn’t in canon, ask me about it, and I’ll decide if I think it’s plausible in the Anitaverse. For instance, we’ve had a fey vampire and a panwere in canon, so a siren vampire or a biwere could probably exist, in my opinion. But if you want to play, like, a wereunicorn kitsune, forget it. Also, since some creatures are very rare in canon, I might be able to only accept a few. For instance, I’ll take a lamia, but if I get, like, five apps for lamias, I’ll have to say “Okay, nobody else can have a lamia now”. In other words, it’s first come first serve as far as the very rare things go.

A NOTE ON PLOT
I’m making a lot of this up as I go. If you have any ideas about things that can be added to the plot, killer suspects or even the killer(s) themselves, or anything like that, please oh please PM me, I so want to hear your idea!

CHARACTERS

Player Name: xSheogorathX
Name: Alexandria Lamont
Nicknames: Andi
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Occupation: Casino Cashier/ member of the 'railroad'
Appearance: Stands at 5’3 with shoulder-length brown hair and yellow eyes.

Personality:
Most of the time she is pretty easygoing, but seeing a kid in any kind of trouble can set her off into a fit. She is an insomniac, and only sleeps a couple of hours at a time. So she is all too happy to take phone calls at any time she isn't at work. She goes out of her way to avoid vampires, having an irrational fear of being 'rolled' she always stares at her shoes when speaking to one.

Andi lives in a suburb of Las Vegas with her friend William Cairn who is a construction worker, and one of the Lukoi. They are both members of a secret organization sometimes called the preternatural underground railroad. They help children and adolescents who have been kicked out of their homes or been otherwise displaced due to latent preternatural abilities, or having been infected with lycanthropy. She works during the day as a cashier at the Bellagio hotel and casino.

History:
Andi is the offspring of a human and a vampire. Her mother Renee never told her biological father that they had a child together. When Andi was 10 her mother died a long bout with cancer. She was shuffled into foster care as she had no other available family to take her in, and there was no father listed on her birth certificate. She eventually ended up being placed at the home of a couple who were members of the group "Humans Against Vampires" When they learned that she was the child of a vampire, and thinking that her unnaturally yellow eyes were a sort of evil vampire gift, they tried to exorcise her 'vampiric spirit'. When her social worker next came to visit, he found that she had been tied to a bed, starved, and beaten. He took her to a safe house, and she grew up to become a stop on the same railroad that helped her.

Special Powers: None

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Player Name: rodentfanatic
Name: Hieronymus VanPelt
Nicknames: Hiero
Age: 47
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Occupation: Owner of The Garden of Earthly Delights
Appearance:
Hiero is a moderately tall fellow, standing at six-foot-one, and at well over three hundred pounds he’s more than moderately wide as well, with a thick neck, monstrously broad shoulders, slightly long legs for his height, fairly strong arms, huge hands, and a very large stomach. Unusually for an overweight person, his face doesn’t seem to have much, if any, excess fat in it, and is actually quite gorgeous, comparable to an archangel despite the laugh lines and the small crow’s feet that show up when he makes certain expressions. Get past the huge gut, and he’s actually very attractive, in fact, with amethyst eyes, peachy skin, and short curling golden hair.
Hiero’s most common choice of clothes is black dress pants with a black suit jacket and long-sleeved button-down shirt in white, dark emerald, maroon, or a purple that matches his eyes. Sometimes a black tie too. There are always no less than four cuff links on his jackets, often made out of gold or human bone and set with pearls or rubies or some such gem. . He’s always got a number of rather obscenely large and old and ugly rings on his thick fingers, in solid gold or silver and set with big ol’ precious stones. The jewelry he clips on his ties (or whatever else is at his throat) is similar; we’re betting quite a few of those huge pins and tie clips might actually be his grandmother’s brooches and that she’s being mocked from beyond the grave by him. He particularly likes extraordinary crosses, despite his attraction to vampires and his long separation from any church. He likes the hypocrisy that they imply about him. His favorite is a solid silver crux gemmata, meaning a cross with thirteen different stones in it, with a big purple one in the center to match his eyes.

Personality:
Hieronymus VanPelt is, to put it concisely, an extremely bizarre individual who revels in his own strangeness. He tries his best to be an all-around affront to decency by anyone’s standards, and is a puzzling example of a person who’s totally debauched and perverse and sinful…and yet, really not all that bad, believe it or not. Of course, that’s a matter of opinion at the end of the day, and he really prefers that his reputation as a cruel sex fiend be kept. He puts on the mask of a cool predator when in the presence of most people, but his real self is someone who’s happy, jovial, and upbeat, though he still remains a wanton and decadent hedonist who practices self-indulgence in all manners of carnal pleasure. That part is true. But he doesn’t hurt people. He just wants you to think he does. He likes having as disgusting and sadistic a reputation as possible without actually getting the attention of, say, the cops. It works, too. As far as everybody except the Angelbright brothers know, he’s pure evil, a fiend in human shape, and you’d best hang on to your children and your virginity if he’s around. According to what people will tell you about him, he’s ruthless, depraved, and absolutely heartless, and a practitioner of rape, incest, *****, and bestiality. Utterly untrue, all of it, but you’ll never know that, now will you? Most people are ashamed of their flaws; Hiero is ashamed of his virtues.

He’s very intelligent, but he lacks common sense, and he often says the wrong thing or, even more often, forgets what he was about to say right when he was about to say The Right Thing. It never fails. He’ll have something perfect on the tip of his tongue, but then poof, there it goes, leaving him speechless and stupid-looking. Luckily, he’s a good actor, and he’s always doing improv when interacting with others, in order to keep up his big bad rep, and this sort of problem doesn’t occur when he’s not being his real self. He is undeniably rather scatterbrained on the whole, though, which makes it a good thing that he has Phoebus around.

Hiero’s very much in love with carnal pleasures and the bizarre. He is drawn to all things dark, decadent, dangerous, luxurious, and taboo. He adores creatures of the night and the indulgences only they can give, and he is excessive in all things he loves. Enough is never enough until it is too much, that’s the way Hieronymus lives. Silk sheets, cheesecakes, vampire orgies, more more more. His digusting and over-the-top hedonism is one of the key features of his personality, and the sins of lust and gluttony control him, as he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, a lot of things about this guy just don’t seem to add up. If he’s not actually as bad as the rumors say, how did they get started? Sure, people talk, but that’s some seriously sick and outrageous stuff—where did it get started? And if he’s really a big softie underneath the bad-guy façade, what’s he doing running a brothel? A brothel that has underage and unwilling workers in it? Does he even know what’s going on in his own Garden Just what is going on with this guy and his business?

It’s YOUR job to find out, slick. Start digging.

History:
Hieronymus was born into a wealthy and powerful family, but he never fit in. Not with the family, and not with anyone else. An unusually bright child, he could into connect with his peers, being so far above their level, but he couldn’t connect with adults either, as he was still a child no matter how smart he was. Besides, he loathed all their rules and conventions. Not fitting in never bothered him, as he didn’t feel the need to. He always felt more like an outsider looking in at the world of people, and preferred to run off to the woods or library to enjoy his own imagination. He had an early fascination with vampires and weres, and during his teens this fascination became a fetish, a sexual fixation, and as a young adult he used his family’s money to start the Garden, then promptly had nothing more to do with them. He never really liked his family, y’see. He knew, though, that the Garden was a good bet. He couldn’t be the only one who was drawn to the darker side in all the wrong ways.

He was right. Business flourished, and he became independently wealthy, which he liked, as it was just sort of a kick to the family in his mind. Through unknown circumstances, he “acquired” the twins Phoebus and Cynthia Engelbrecht, whom he quickly re-named Angelbright, the English translation of their surname. He just thought it sounded prettier, is all. They weren’t brought up as his own children so much as they were a combo of pets and servants. In the boy’s teens (Cynthia was now a boy named Lefty; see Lefty’s profile for more details) he deliberately had them made into lycanthropes. He paid off a witch to curse Pheobus into a wereswan, and experimented with infecting Lefty with two strains of lycanthropy, dog and jaguar. Rather than canceling each other out, lefty became a “biwere”, just as Hiero had hoped.

And recently, that nasty killing business in his brothel has started happening…

Special Powers: N/A

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Player Name:rodentfanatic
Name: Phoebus Angelbright
Nicknames: Pheebs, Phoebe, Phobia, Apollo (born Phoebus Engelbrecht)
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Species: Wereswan
Occupation: Bodyguard and personal assistant to Hieronymus VanPelt
Appearance:
Phoebus stands at 5’10, and has a toned body that is just fit enough to get him called a “gym bunny”, but not in the range of being a bodybuilder. Athletic, sure, but in a pretty boy sort of way rather than a steroid freak. His face too borders the line between an effeminate pretty boy and a carved Adonis, and he has piercings in it. A gold hoop in one eyebrow, a gold stud in his nose, and a pair of gold “snake bites” on his lower lip. His heritage is Greek and German, which, in addition to the crazy amount of time he dedicates to sunning himself tan, gives him a healthy warm golden-brown complexion. His hair would be honey brown and curly if he let it alone, but he’s gone and used a flat iron to make his tight little curls into nice big sexy loose ones, and has dyed his hair every shade of blonde, from deepest gold to palest platinum. Highlights, lowlights, streaks, you don’t even want to know what it all costs. Sure looks good, though. Still, for all his attractiveness, there’s something artificial about his beauty, as though he’s as plastic as a Ken Doll.
Phoebus dresses in whites, pinks, golds, yellows, oranges, and reds, with gold jewelry and often white shoes, and designer sunglasses when out in public ala Jackie O. He’s quite trendy, but a lot of straight men would probably err away from what he wears. Like that pink shirt with the neckline that goes right between his pecs paired with the white jeans. While working, however, he tends towards a white suit with a silver tie and gold tie clip, rather Great Gatsby-ish.

Personality:
Practically Perfect in Every Way, or so he tries to be. Phoebus is the one who keeps things in order and others in line. He’s proper, polished, modern, and more than a bit of an overly-organized neat-freak. Sure, he's all light and dreams when everything is going perfectly…but things sure aren’t going perfectly these days. He’s very interested in his fellow individual when interacting, not so much from a personal perspective as an artistic one. He can be very charming and persuasive, despite his ego, and is almost a scientist in some ways, categorizing and analyzing the traits and qualities of his fellow beings as though sorting them into various taxonomies only he knows of. He occasionally attempts being something of a self-styled Muse, trying to encourage and bring out the latent abilities he believes lie hidden in the world’s philistines, but only if they let him and only if he thinks that something truly worth his while will result.

In contrast to Hiero and Lefty, his “father” and brother, Phoebus is all about order and temperance. No matter what something is, it must be in moderation. He frowns on all the excess going on this place, but he’s been taught to keep his mouth shut…most of the time. He always makes sure that everyone knows what he’s thinking about all this, however, even if he has to be indirect to do it. He’s uncomfortable with lying, you see. Doesn’t mean he won’t do deception, just that he tries to find ways around it without telling outright falsehoods, which makes him even trickier than someone who just lies. Phoebus also likes his boundaries, thank you, and can turn nasty if things began to take an unwelcome turn towards the disorderly. Strangely, he doesn’t mind things like fighting or personal strife, be it his own affair or between others, so long as it isn’t messy. It’s been said that if he ever got he murdered, his ghost would only take issue with the mess made by the blood and the disruption rather than his own death, though this is quite an exaggeration. Really. It isn’t peace he gives a damn about, it’s order, pretty much, if that makes sense.

He’s also vain about his looks, if you couldn’t tell, and is searching out ways to be prettier. Currently, he wants some plastic surgery done.

History:
Acquired at a young age by Hiero along with his twin then-sister Cynthia, Phoebus was brought up to be loyal to the man, and willing to fight to protect him, though he also became something like a companion, more a pet than a son. His childhood was anything but normal, with all his education coming from Hiero or people Hiero had hired, and his only consistent companion being Cynthia. Cynthia becoming Lefty bothered him greatly, and though he of course cares very much for his brother (when he’s not at his throat; they’ve very love-hate) he misses the little girl his brother used to be. Not long after this occurred, Hiero arranged for Phoebus to become a werswan. We’re not sure exactly how Phoebus took this…

Special Powers: N/A

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Player Name:rodentfanatic
Name: Eleutherios Angelbright
Nicknames: Lefty, Dionysus (born Cynthia Angelbrecht)
Age: 27
Gender: Intersexed Male
Species: Bi-were (Leopard and Dog)
Occupation: Bodyguard and personal assistant to Hieronymus VanPelt
Appearance:
Lefty stands at 5’10, has a kind of skinny-average build with some measure of wiry muscle built on, and seems a touch awkward in a lean sort of way. His facial features are satyr-like and bestial, but have a sort of animal androgyny brewing beneath them, which could give him a wild sort of beauty if you’re in a forgiving mood and like that kind of look on a guy. His skin is a deep olive-brown, and his dark brown eyes can, in certain lights, appear greenish, or even purplish. His coarse, rather greasy black hair is long, falling a bit past to where his breasts would be if he were a woman, and is tightly curling. It is unevenly cut in places, and clearly not well-cared for at all. He goes shirtless or wears dark tank-tops in blue, green, or gray, with horribly worn’n’torn jeans, cargo pants, or shorts, and bare feet, sandals, or combat boots. He typically has a bandanna or other scrap of fabric, usually leopard-print, tied around his upper arm or around his thigh like a garter.

Personality:
Almost chaos personified, Hiero is the one thing keeping Lefty in line and out of jail and, thank god, off the streets. He’s a creature of pure impulse, never thinking before doing, only feeling. He’s got strong feelings, too. He’s all for excess, and encourages it in others, is a radical who would like to see nothing more than the disintegration of society as we know it and a return to all things natural. The polar opposite to his brother, Lefty thrives on disorder and destruction. All that keeps him from trying to accomplish this is his loyalty to Hiero, his “father”. Oddly, Lefty does like his own brand of peace. That is, peace between people, living without war in a state of ecstasy and intoxication as he thinks nature intended. He’s sort of a very aggressive hippie, really. Destruction, yes. Disorder, yes. War? Pain? Death? No no no.

Other than that, he likes people. Maybe it’s the weredog in him, but Lefty wants to be part of a group, preferably as the leader. He’s a social animal, and is drawn to packed parties, crowds, and the like. Of course, Hiero keeps his boys from joining a pack or group of werecreatures like themselves, as that might compromise their loyalty and put them in danger. We know Lefty wasn’t happy about becoming a shapeshifter in the first place…

History:
Acquired alongside his brother at a young age by Hiernymus VanPelt, Lefty was once a girl named Cynthia. She was wild child, a tomboy, but still Hiero’s favorite, and her brother’s best friend. However, at puberty, something just wasn’t right. She wasn’t changing in the ways she should be, and she was changing in some ways that she shouldn’t. After getting “her” checked out by a doctor, they found that Cynthia had a type of intersexuality, also known as hermaphrodism, called 5-Alpha-Reducatase Deficieny Syndrome, in which an XY baby is born with externally ambiguous or female genitalia, but whose true gender reveals itself at puberty. She was a he. And he probably handled it better than anyone else. Certainly better than his brother, the pnasy. It wasn’t that Lefty had always felt like a boy…he’d just never quite felt all the way like a girl. So, it was less of an adjustment than it might have been. Still pretty huge, though, of course.

After that came the exposure to lycanthropy and his becoming a biwere. Lefty wasn’t what you’d called trhilled, but he’s still loyal to Hiero…right?

Special Powers: Uh, he’s a biwere. That’s special enough.

Andi Lamont pics:

Andi