Ivan on Spindizzy

Vital Stats

Name: Ivan Caskill
Classification: Demon
Species: Fire Salamander (Salamandra salamandra)
Gender: Male
Height:Slightly variable. On average, 1 foot tall
Weight: About 5 pounds
Eyes: Black, but his sclera will turn red and glow if he gets really angry
Song: "Mama" by My Chemical Romance

Abilities

Hellfire: Ivan can use fire in a number of ways. Most often he lights his tail spade on fire. This is suitable to serve as a lantern in the dark or to ignite. His second manifestation is one given that newts are a type of salamander, and salamanders were once held to be fire elementals. As such, Ivan can breath fire. While intense, the jet is not large but is still capable of doing significant damage.

Impervious to Fire: Ivan is not only impervious to fire, but it is also his choice of place to rest. There are rare magical fires and elemental fires that can harm him, but few if any of them exist on the mortal plane.

Summon Convenient Vice: An odd little magical ability that is part of Ivan's species of demon. He can manifest small objects that are generally associated in enabling a vice. This might be summoning a beer for someone who really shouldn't have it or a Molotov cocktail as a one off in a fight. Ivan very rarely uses this ability, so its limits are poorly understood.

Teleportation: Mostly a means of preventing the person he is bound to from locking him in a box. He doesn't seem to use it when trapped by other means, so it may be limited to interactions with his host soul, and it may also be blocked by enchanted vessels.

Shadow Manipulation: Ivan can interact with shadows as if they were independent objects. The most dangerous shadow is his own. His shadow can take on all shapes and sizes as well as interact with other shadows such that what it does to a shadow happens to the physical object. Because it attracts attention, he refrains from using his shadow often unless there will be no witnesses. He can also fake shape-shifting abil;ities by shaping a shadow around himself. His favorite is to add wings and claws to himself and fake being a dragon.

Gremlin Magic: Ivan's favorite. His little hands against most things are no more dangerous than the average person, but get him on an aircraft wing an he will pull it apart with his bare hands. The higher the level of technology, the more damage Ivan can cause to it. Gremlin magic is not demon magic but comes from gremlins, a species that appeared during great wars where aircraft first battled in the skies. Gremlin magic works best at contact range, but it an be used at distance to do other effects like causing cameras not to detect something. This works best on non-magical technologies but can be used against magic targets as well with more effort.

Soul Sufficiency: Because Ivan has his mortal soul, he is a self powered demon with unlimited range that can cross holy ground boundaries. He is powered by his own hate and loathing as negative emotions make him stronger. A side effect of his soul being present is that he counts as mortal and demon, so some rules concerning how devils and demons interact with him get complicated such as Mephistopheles being unable to force him to do anything rather than trick him into doing it.

Origin

Hell on Earth

Three folks out sick on a crew of eight, and two of those still working are so incompetent that you might as well have their workload for all the crap that comes your way due to their lack of skill. This could be many places, but there is no more insidious a place of torment than the consumer electronics IT help line. At least that is the way Ivan saw it. It paid the bills if you got enough hours, and it was one of the only jobs he was qualified for at the time. He actually had some skill in talking down callers, but nearly all of them made him wish he could talk them into jumping off a building if only so they couldn't call back. This got him from his late teens into his early twenties as he struggled to find a place to fit in at college. That is when he finally found some classwork he could enjoy.

Night School

Ivan was already taking night classes in an attempt to escape the call center and any other unskilled Hell when he found an advertisement for a program he could afford offering a number of courses he might find useful. Given that he had little to look forward to in his current job aside from scraping together money for a pistol and one bullet, he sent in an application. He nearly gave up when the approval letter arrived. This would become a turning point in his life as he settled into a major and minor track. He was not so naive as to be unaware of who was hosting the classes, but at that point he couldn't really care. If you can't beat the devil, then why not work for him?

Graduation

Classes were not easy, and competition was fierce among the top students, but Ivan managed to be among a select number of students that graduate with honors. In other colleges, you get a gown and a cap and an overly expensive sheet of paper attesting to your years of masochism. As an honors graduate, Ivan got to be among the front of the line through the hell gate and to the fires saved for the creation of new demons. Most are spawned, but Ivan and his fellow students willingly cast themselves into the flames to burn away the mortal flesh and leave behind their newly minted demonic souls. After a brief revelry with their fellow demons, they were allowed to help boot those that got cold feet into eternal torment followed by a reception with the rest of their graduating class back on the mortal plane who were destined to serve their purpose in other ways.

While Ivan holds a B.S. in computer science on his official mortal track, this was really only his minor. He was recruited by the School for Theoretical Alchemical Research or S.T.A.R. with a dual major in demonic and gremlin studies.

Vulnerabilities

Because Ivan is a demon with an intact soul, he has abilities other demons lack, but he also has vulnerabilities mortals possess. In his case, he has two major vulnerabilities that, if managed well, could propel him forward as a true terror, or they could just as easily.

Attachment: The most common flaw in the early generation soul bearing demons is attachments to parts of their former lives. In many cases this can be used to harden a demon by forcing them to destroy their attachment. However, Ivan's attachment is to another agent of Hell and a fellow student, Meluvia. His bond to her represents a risk that losing her favor might cause Ivan to doubt himself, his worth, and his abilities.

External Validation: Ivan is not as confident as he appears. He draws strength from his academic success and his ability to meet expectations. He was never praised as a mortal, and while his abilities have allowed him to do more, he still craves that validation that he is effective and needed. His attachment to Meluvia also feeds into this. Her approval and the approval and the approval of his infernal masters is the real force that drives him. His glee is ruining machines and eating people's pets are just little things he does because he figures it keeps him on the radar even when the bigger projects are slow.

If Ivan ever found out that he was nothing more than a dime a dozen prototype, just another version number to study and discard, it could crush him. Because he has a soul, being discarded won't kill him, but his loss of a link to Hell would limit his abilities and make him even more dejected with the only real way out being to start collecting souls of his own for power, but that is very difficult for his version to accomplish since they lack the ability to accumulate more than a handful of souls with the intention they would dump them in Hell and go back for more.

Instances

With Jamey

Ivan's relationship with Jamey is complicated. For the ringtail, he represents the artist's darker side an many of the things struggles to resist. Ivan's likeable personality may well be how Jamey nearly lost his life twice so far. After those experiences and the realization he does not want to go back to Hell all that soon, he's been trying to use smaller steps towards damnation including grudges and alcohol. He could blame Ivan for his ever growing love of beer, something Ivan would gladly claim, but his muse Scribble is as much to blame.

On Spindizzy

Ivan is currently bound to the magewright Pira in St. Marin's. Who cursed Pira with a demon or why remains a mystery that apparently even Ivan is not privy to. For the better part, he doesn't care. his mission is to get Pira to loosen up and live some more while doing the same to those around her. In other words, his task is to ruin her life through temptation rather than aggression.

A number of folks have met him so far and discovered him to be persistent as well as durable. His confidence gets him in some trouble as it puts him in positions where he can be booted off cliffs or such, but he has ways of dealing with it.

College Transcript

Year 1 Semester 1: Introduction to Curses; Writing 101: Basic Calligraphy; Infernal Languages 101; Art of Persuasion

Year 1 Semester 2: Infernal Languages 102; Drawing for Rituals; Writing 102: Exotic inks; Art of Negotiation

Year 2 Semester 1: Entropy 201: Gremlin Mechanics; Practical use of the seven sins; Spellcraft 201: Practical Spellcraft part 1; Basic Illusion and Non-Detection

Year 2 Semester 2: Entropy 202: Electronic Interference and Disruption; Spellcraft 202: Practical Spellcraft part 2; Geography of the Lower Planes; Opposed Entities and Tactics

Year 3 Semester 1: Advanced Etropy 311: Targeted disruption of modern technology; Shadowmancy 301: Shadows for support tatcics; Social Manipulation 301: Localized conflict creation; Theory of demonic power and usage 301

Year 3 Semester 2: Theory of demonic power and usage 302; Shadowmancy 302: Offensive applications of shadowmancy; Social Manipulation 302: Application of the Seven on social networks; Cult organization 301

Year 4 Semester 1: Physical Conditioning for demonic conversion; Shadowmancy 401: Casting through shadows; Thesis Project Semester 1; Bloodline and Soul-borne curses

Year 4 Semester 2: Mental Conditioning for Demonic conversion; Infectious and self-replicating curse; Control of Planar Gateways; Thesis Project Semester 2

Thesis Project: Optimized tactics for catastrophic power grid failure including meltdown.

Details Ivan doesn't recall or were actively blocked

College activities

College Radio: All the time Ivan spent on help lines did help him cultivate one positive attribute: his voice. Ivan has a very mellow , baritone range voice that is smooth and does well with the third shift at the college radio station. With a separation between him and others physically, he wasn't bad at handling requests and odd callers. He even had a short segment of scary stories from the campus that he would read dramatically, some of which included works by Meluvia, one of his only real friends. Overall, it seemed like something he enjoyed doing.

Karaoke at the college bar: The college bar actually had some good eats at prices an undergrad could afford now and again. It wasn't until junior year, when he finally turned 21, that someone got enough beers into him to get him up to the mic. While Meluvia was witness to it, no one could get her up there, and Ivan would't let anyone pressure her. Given his work at the radio station, Ivan finally acquiesced. As it turned out, he was decent at singing country, and "How do you like me now?" by Toby Keith was a favorite of his. MOst of his memories like this from the bar are missing.

Late stage STAR Activity

Falsified Graduation night: Ivan walked with his class like any undergraduate, and he received a real, well earned degree in computer science. His parents were present, and even Meluvia got her diploma that afternoon. Nothing about that day is within Ivan's ability to recall. In his mind, he skipped out on all of this ceremony and left with agents of the STAR program for what he considered his real graduation. He doesn't recall going back to his apartment to pack, saying goodbye to Meluvia, or going out for one last round of drinks ay the college bar.

Loss of his mortal body: The memory implanted in Ivan's mind involves his willingly leaping through infernal flame to burn off his weak body and become a demon. What he doesn't recall was feeling a bit off after a couple drinks at the bar. He also doesn't remember being pinned down on a sacrificial altar where her was killed and his soul stripped from his body to be used in the next stage of souled demon manufacture. His status of going missing, the man hunt to find him, and the mutilated body of a young adult salamander found in a mass grave of similarly mangled college age corpses is something he would actively reject even if given a photo of it, and there are indeed documented photos of that crime scene.

Manufacture and Activation of his demon body: Somewhere between mortal body, infernal fire, and demon, there is a large gap in Ivan's memory. HOw his shell demon body was infused with his soul, sealed up tight, and made functional is overwritten with memories of passing through fire and partying with other newly forged demons before being given their first assignments.

Liberation and Restoration

Kachi, Pira, and Mel braved entry into STAR to patch Ivan up and, in the process, liberate him from direct control by Hell. A number of things fell out of this.

Ivan got back access to old, missing memories such that he now remembers in hindsight memories that were missing and patterns he didn't notice
Mephistopheles and War obtained a feather from the wings of an Angel of Death, Meluvia in the process of liberating Ivan and the battle that followed
Ivan knows how badly and how long he was manipulated. What he does NOT know is that his family as well as Mel's were manipulated and even in places replaced by demons to play the long game of getting who they needed in the right place and time.

Ivan's Lineage

One might wonder why Hell would go through so much effort to mangle the life of one seemingly random person. The answer is not that complex: there are aspects unknown to most, including Ivan, that have made him a target.

Ivan's Great Grandmother: Much of what has happened to Ivan comes from his mother's side. His great grandmother was actually a succubus. Hiding as a fortune teller, she often swindles men out of their money or more. However, at one point the cards read something far more disturbing to her. She knew that her actions would soon bear fruit in the form of a daughter, and that child would bear her legacy in her blood. She also knew that the first son born of her line would be faced with great disasters and transformation. Abandoning her post in a greater scheme hatched by War, she bore and raised her daughter in secret, thus starting a new line of kin with tainted blood.

The tarot deck was claimed by War when she killed off the offending succubus. However, she was no fool, and so she laid a spread of cards out before her, and from this she learned that she must be patient an wait for the appointed time.

Ivan's Parents: Ivan's mother was a soldier in the army, and she carried with her the same succubus blood that her kin before her carried. As an operative, she was terrifying especially because she could manifest her demonic attributes. Mixed breeds like her were valuable assets as they were tough against common wards and more capable of operating on their own than demons straight form hell. One thing is certain: she did her deeds as a demon would, and she was smart enough to do so in a way that kept her from being trialed for war crimes. At least up to a point.

Enter a rather unassuming person with a little magic to himself and the kind of blessing you would get from having a solid guardian angel. Ivan's father was a conscientious objector, but he also could not turn his back on the wounded as a surgeon. That put him in the armed services where he filled the role of combat medic and field surgeon. He cared for any living being that came in front of him be it his side or and enemy. While some disagreed with his choices, his mercy was well known, and the press it generated was worth the extra supplies. If anything, no one in his unit ever doubted he would do everything in his means to save them if it came to that.

Eventually the two met, and his father's nature coaxed secrets from his mother that none could ever know. He knew what she was, and he knew what she could do as a demon, but that was all the more reason for him to try and save her. He wasn't the religious sort, and that left him on the kind of neutral ground it took to bring her into a relationship that would again undermine the destruction she was otherwise fated to cause. This time, a wise demon saw an opportunity, and he stayed War's hand long enough for six children to be born to this couple. Five daughters, and the last was finally the son War was waiting for.

Replacement: In carefully arranged strikes, Ivan's sisters and his mother were slain and replaced by skilled demons prepared to shape Ivan's psyche into something STAR would could use. His mother knew something was coming when she found the old tarot deck sitting in the living room. Ivan's father, however, went missing but was not found by the demons. It is unclear where he went or what his fate was, but he is likely still alive. Like the rest, he was replaced by a demon, but one thing was missing after all the slaughter and body swapping: the tarot deck. Ivan's father made off with it before War could retrieve it. It may yet be true that forces beyond himself are keeping him save for the time being.

Ivan's bloodline: Ivan is the first male of his line to have the blood of Lilith's children in his veins as well as the divine influence of a guardian angel. This made him an ideal substrate for conditioning to make a demon that could cross most wards and sanctified areas in addition to wielding aspects of the Angels or Death or the Reapers, traditionally unavailable to standard demons.