Name: Caius D’Angelos Uriel
Age: 24
Aliases: Mister Satou
Titles: Crimson Sockets

Height: 198 cm
Weight: 87 kg

Personal Backstory:

Where was he born? The memories of such a place are present, yet the exact geographical location where he was brought into the world has been lost to his ancestry. Despite having vague recollections of a shack somewhere in the woods, the moon red with his coming, his parents never truly cared to tell him anything.

That was because he never truly had parents. He was an unwanted wretch, shunned even by the Romani tribe called the Uriel that were themselves shunned by other peoples. The reason was twofold: he was a child born as a bastard and more importantly, he saw things far too differently than others.

His people were not accustomed to the modern world, isolating themselves in the mountains in order to practice their folk beliefs in peace. They were nomadic, constantly moving in order to avoid persecution. They had done this for centuries, and would do so for the foreseeable future.

But Caius was born with a defect, a perspective that distinguished him from all the others: a mind of inquiry. Many of the people around him attributed it to the line of his father, who had disappeared along with much of the information about him. But one thing remained clear of the man that had conceived of Caius: that he was of a noble bearing that the Uriel despised.

And so, with the superstition of the tribe, he would be silenced. Every time he would speak, it was said that it was a curse that would afflict the tribe for months. So, he learned to be quiet, completely isolating himself from the others. His world of inquiry and search would be shared only within himself.

From the nomadic patterns of his tribe, he would pick up knowledge from all sorts of places. Europe, the Middle East, North Africa— all sourced from the little time he would find himself sneaking into the centers of civilization. All those places where he wandered off to were abandoned, towns that had been long-vacated by their residents due to disasters and misfortune. But within them, he would find lore and speaking of outside cultures, and more importantly, traditions of other religions.

He would learn of the Astrology of the Western and Eastern peoples, of the Alchemy that were buried in the libraries of what he didn’t know were abandoned workshops.

The reason that such knowledge had been found by Caius was simple: the places they were going to were once the residents of people that had vacated their residences, the old libraries speaking of the beliefs of the people that had written them. These pieces of knowledge were scattered and sparse, not even enough to allow Caius to distinguish between the worlds of mundanity and thaumaturgy. To him, it seemed that both worlds were the same, melding into each other without a fuss.

Little Caius’s luck seemed to be increasing with every find. Even though he had only discovered places that were of a mundane nature, it seemed that his understanding of other cultures had cultivated something within him.

That was the concept of God.

He did not view God as others would. Not as a benevolent creator or foolish shaper of reality, but instead as a foreign force to be understood. After all, if so many different traditions existed, then why would God be something static? Why would He be something that abided by the beliefs of mankind’s feeble minds?

God was the horizon. Every time mankind believed it had reached Him, the horizon merely retreated another step. God was not good or bad, but someone who granted knowledge to those that sought the truth in its rawest and most untamed form. He would grant blessings to those who were virtues— those that would disassemble and destroy the world from the inside out and glimpse the truth from that which they rebuilt with its ashes.

Morality, science, magic, knowledge. All of those were fallible and crafted by centuries of human weakness. What had to be done was to burn those things down and see what lay beneath, like the lens of human imagination refracting light, but not seeing the truth.

His pursuit of this splendor would continue in isolation until his tribe would encounter something unforeseen: a Forest of Einashe. It had been pure bad luck, encountering something of that level of danger.

One by one, his people would be slaughtered and eaten. Because of Caius’s isolation, he would be the last to survive.

But like a rainbow following a storm, his luck seemed to finally eclipse the misfortune that he had been dealt. Agents of the Holy Church would arrive to burn the forest to the ground, and in a patch of uninfected ground, they would find Caius.

The young boy would be given an ultimatum: join the Holy Church or die in the woods on his own accord.

Caius chose the latter. This was not a choice of desperation or from a will to survive. It was a choice made through hearing the prayers of the executioners and hunters that had saved him. He saw that they prayed to God, and so would choose to join their ranks because of their supposed connection to the divine.

Later on, he would be observed and tested by the members of the Church, and they saw that he possessed high capabilities and compatibility with their so-called “Power of Prayer.” Instead of being given a role as a hunter of vampires, his aptitude for inquiry and his understanding of mystics would be given to an Order within the Assembly of the Eighth Sacrament that studied countermeasures for magecraft and mages in general.

Caius would be isolationist as always, but excelled in his duties of researching holy artifacts and sacraments as well as the properties of thaumaturgy. But as he knew the Church better and better, he grew to find them disappointing.

He had joined them in search of ways to explore the glory of God, yet they focused on prostrating themselves to a singular and inflexible deity that only partially resembled the God that he found.

Slowly, he would gradually begin to internally defy the tenants of the Holy Church. And when the time came that his research was discovered and deemed to be too unorthodox— as he had concluded that thaumaturgy and sacraments were indistinguishable— his work would be drenched in holy oil, burned to the ground, and he would be stripped of much of his status and rank, reduced to nothing more than a menial.

They said it was a mercy that he was not killed, but Caius would rather have been killed than witness his scholarly work be destroyed with such brutality.

Even though he would regain a portion of his status, his humiliation would forever mark him with suspicion of heresy.

So, as any respectable researcher and seeker of truth would do, he would go rogue. It was incredibly difficult to abandon the little research and work that he had built up over the years, but his decision was final after witnessing that even after so much time, the church still suspected him of harboring dissident thoughts.

After narrowly evading the Church’s investigators, he would be able to fake his own death at the hands of a rogue mage that he was assigned to assess and research countermeasures for. Church Executors would pursue any lead they could, but would find nothing but dead ends.

Caius would flee to a relatively backwater place that both the Mage’s Association and Holy Church would struggle to find him: Japan. There, he would continue his research.

After rebuilding his thesis and further evolving it, he would find that his human body was far too frail for his work. It was only natural that he would resort to what he did next.

Using the concentrated essence of a slain Dead Apostle, he would mimic the underdeveloped Principle of the slain fiend, and would subsume it into his own, assimilating all the memories and information of the Dead Apostle and ultimately becoming one himself.

In the end, only an eternal life could truly comprehend the infinity of God and receive his utmost graceful blessings.

Crest History:

What can be called Caius’s magecraft is technically “borrowed” from a family that began its roots a thousand years ago. Much like its present-day user, they were born from a Romani line that fragmented from the main fortune-telling traditions of the people.

The very first of their kind is now lost to time, although it is noted by the information within the Magical Crest that he founded the idea of their snake-skin magecraft with inspiration from the place where they had permanently supplanted themselves in: Spain. Inspired by the Jews under the rule of the Islamic Spanish kingdoms, they utilized the idea of a centripetal and ever-descending force as a spark for his own lineage.

Within the southern kingdoms ruled by Islamic leaders, the tolerance of non-orthodox mystical practices was harsh, and so the D’Angelos founder would hide his craft as a form of Arabic Alchemy that aligned with esoteric Islamic traditions.

It was this societal pressure that allowed him to develop several fraudulent behaviours and strategies that allowed him to bypass the various authorities that would have potentially identified with them. As the religious organizations of the time had their own mysteries, the founder concluded it would be unwise to use magecraft as a way to conceal his activities. With this conclusion came the natural tendency towards deceit, passed on to his children, and that which eventually bided enough time for the lineage to outlast the Islamic regimes over the course of centuries.

In those times, they would shed identities like they were nothing more than paper skins, moving and never settling down. It was in their very nature that they would live lives of deceit, discarding relationships in their long lifetimes as a breath is swept away in the wind. This is what allowed them to survive.

With the arrival of the Reconquista, the D’Angelos were eventually able to come into contact with the Clocktower with the violent divorce from the Islamic traditions of magecraft, and would quickly instate themselves as talented mages within the halls of the academic institution.

Over the centuries, they would be known as great spies and conmen, with the only thing that kept them afloat in terms of legality being their immense utility that they provided to their backers. However, some time in the eighteenth century, they would mess up for the last time, angering both the influential forces of the Mage’s Association, and involving themselves in a conflict with the Holy Church.

Because of the indifference of the former and the ire of the latter, the family would be wiped out. The last living member of the family would be greatly maimed, their magical crest severely damaged.

The remnants of the family’s crest would be sold off to criminal elements, getting passed on from different owners and buyers, until the severely-degraded crest would land itself in the hands of Caius.

Magical Parameters:

Magical Circuit Quantity: B
Magical Circuit Quality: B
Composition: Normal

Magecraft:

General Fundamentals:

Not acquired through usual channels, but through black market acquisitions and research into the workings of mages.

Ekydysis — Sediment Skin

A legend born from the first snake’s consumption of a plant of immortality. This is the most basic foundation of the D’Angelos magecraft. It is represented by the shedding snake, leaving behind that which drags down.

To the D’Angelos, this was a path to discarding that which has been accumulated and collected. By shedding one’s skin, they leave behind the flaws and sediment that they have collected within their human factors. This allowed for a form of rejuvenation, and as such, many members of the lineage lived far longer lives than would be normal for even magi.

Although the rot of the soul still crept, through purification of the body and mind, it became possible to prolong one’s life towards a form of longevity nearly unheard of. Aside from that, the D’Angelos used their discarded skins as a way to record the things that they had recorded within their bodies and minds.

However, even things that were external could be affected by their magecraft, even things that were not living such as blades and other objects.

Ekydysis — Layer Molting

Caius’s interpretation of his own magecraft. Instead of viewing the shedding of skin performed by a snake as a casting off that which has accumulated, this is instead the view that only the topmost sediment— layers of skin— are discarded upon molting. The way Caius views it, skins are merely layers that cover up the innermost truth of an entity or object.

A soul is a skin that covers and centers around the Origin, and a Body and Mind are skins that cover the Soul.

The only thing that can be discarded easily are those things that humanity can leave behind: identities, family, relationships and many other things. To mages, even the body can be discarded for the sake of longevity.

But to Caius, all things can be stripped away. Inspired by the Alchemical processes, he has developed a magecraft that can both split the human factors from each other, and violently melt away their boundaries, layer by layer.

Currently, he is only able to manipulate the body and mind— or equivalents for inanimate objects— with precision, ultimately performing something highly similar to Spiritual Surgery, and is only able to influence the soul through an indirect connection to the other two factors and the relationship between those emanations.

Ekydysis — Venom

A simple solution that Caius and the D’Angelos both developed independently. Instead of storing literal and conceptual skins as they are, they are condensed and coagulated into a form of “venom” that can rapidly strip away the bonds between skins.

This venom can both store and inject the essence of dissolved skins, and homogenise any skin layers that it comes into contact with, although the potency of the venom depends on its preparation and quality.

Baptism Rite:

Caius’s specialty. In his time in the Church, he only truly studied Baptism and mastered it to his own logical conclusion. This form of Baptism is fused with Caius’s magecraft, allowing for the acquisition of insight through its use. This is especially effective against spirits, which are more malleable than concrete existences.

To put it in concrete terms: the layers that make up an object or entity are violently and rapidly stripped away, revealing the core essence that is quickly condensed into a variety of Caius’s venom. Through the consumption of this venom, or through its infusion into something else, knowledge of a being can be glimpsed and temporarily manifested, such as their collective memories or even a mage’s magical circuits.

Mystic Codes:

D’Angelos Magical Crest:

The fragmented crest of the D’Angelos. At first, it was greatly degraded, but through the use of Caius’s magecraft, the memories of the world were used to reconstruct the lineage’s former glory. In terms of knowledge, most of its information is reconstructed, and as such, is rather blurry and somewhat vague.


Holy Sediment Garments:

An outfit infused with the skins and venom of countless things. In particular, they are infused with the grudges of spirits and wraiths and concentrated to form a defense that is formidable even for high-level mages of the current day.

Such a thing can protect from all sorts of things, from curses, manipulations of fate, to physical and magical damage. It possesses the property of “soaking in” positive magical effects, more effectively processing things such as blessings for the benefit of Caius.

Book of Ends:

A full, one thousand-page scripture that contains the skins of a variety of creatures. The paper is made from their layers, while the ink is made from venom. This can be considered the greatest thing that Caius has preserved, allowing him to absorb and summon the capabilities of countless magical beasts that he has slain and experimented on for extended periods of time

Some pages are composed of the essence of slain mages, concentrated to allow for specific reinforcements of Caius’s body. Through manipulations of the pages, and his personal applications of Sacraments, he is able to manifest variations of things such as Black Keys and Ash Locks.

Skills:

Piguaquan:

Traditional, long-ranged Chinese martial arts that Caius was taught for self-defense. Within the Holy Church, there are some that admire the fighting styles of various foreign cultures, and one particular individual was able to teach Caius this martial art. In terms of skill, Caius is rather proficient in using, able to kill a man in one strike even without reinforcement.

Rank IV - Nightkin

The physiology of a low-class vampire. Caius did not care much about his capabilities as a Dead Apostle, and has only recently become one in the past few days. As such, he has yet to manifest a Principle or anything similar and only has the rank of a fourth-rank bloodsucker.