stealyoursoul: (Sooner or later God'll cut you down)
[personal profile] stealyoursoul
OOC:

Player Name: Shade
Age: 27
Contact: [plurk.com profile] Light_shade

IC:

Name: Leo Flynn
Canon: Monsters of Verity series
Canon Point: After he's killed by his brother
Age: Looks to be in his twenties, but technically was "created" about eight or nine years ago

Spoken language(s): English
Username: Sunai
To the Mods: So I put this down as a question in the FAQ a while ago, but Leo requires human souls to eat so he can survive. To this end, he'll need a musical instrument and a soundproofed place he can feed off his victims.

History: Sadly, the Monsters of Verity wiki hasn't even got a page on him yet, so write-up it is.

Monsters are created in Leo's world from violent acts. Corsai come from violent but nonlethal acts, Malchai are created from killings and murders. Sunai? Sunai are created when something so bad happens it upsets the natural balance of things. Therefore, they are the rarest type of monster, with only three of them in existence. Ilsa, his older sister, was created from a bomb going off in a basement where people had taken refuge when the monsters first appeared. His little brother August came from a middle school shooting. Leo himself came from a cult who thought it was the end of the world. They threw themselves off a rooftop to die, but rather than just taking themselves, they forced their children, parents, and family to jump with them. Leo woke up amidst the dead and the dying, fully formed already as a teenager. Because Sunai tend to be imprinted with the personality of the event that created them, Leo is very righteous, seeing it as his duty to seek out sinners to eat.

It's not clear what happened to him afterwards, but he discovered his Sunai abilities early on. Like their personalities, Sunai imprint on the first bit of music they hear, only able to evoke their abilities with that type of music afterwards. Unlike his sister and brother, who can only create their song through their voice and violin respectively, Leo can create his song with any musical instrument he can get his hands on. August speculates this is because, despite what he comes off as on the outside, Leo sees beauty in everything around him, and heard a song composed of most instruments.

At some point, he discovered his older sister and the Flynns. Henry Flynn was in a war with the Harkers, a family who controlled most of the Corsai and Malchai monsters. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Sunai were far more powerful. Leo became the face of the Sunai, the one always on the front lines. A truce was formed and the city he lived in was divided in two, North City and South City, when Ilsa "went dark" and obliterated over two-hundred people in a single instance. August came to them after all this had already happened. The years rolled by with Leo trying to protect his half of the city.

Leo held no compunctions about being a monster and frequently "went dark", which burnt a little more of his humanity out each time he did so. By the time This Savage Song begins, he's become disillusioned with Flynn's idea of the truce holding. He wants it to break, thinking that it's the only way the wicked can truly be punished. But he still works with him to protect South City and his family.

To break the truce, he teams up with Harker and his pet Malchai Sloan to break it by going after Harker's daughter Kate and framing his brother August for it. Things go pear-shaped when the two escape and evade everyone for a few days. Ilsa helps her little brother during this time, which seemingly leads to her death, something Leo is saddened by, but sees as a necessary sacrifice. When Leo finally finds August, he's been tortured by Sloan, trying to make him "go dark" so that he'll feed on Kate.

Leo kills Sloan, for his brother's torture and death wasn't part of their deal. He tries to get August to see his side of things, but his brother is horrified by Leo's admittedly skewed ideas of how to run the city. When August finally goes dark, he turns on his brother, and burns him into ash, killing him in one of the only ways a Sunai can be taken down.

Personality: Leo, first and foremost, got his personality shaped by his creation. Sunai get imprinted with the chaos that shapes them. Leo was formed from religion badly warped, so his personality is extremely righteous. He sees the act of feeding on sinners to be something good, purging the world of one bad soul at a time. Unlike August, who yearns to be human, and Ilsa who is much more passive in her acceptance, Leo knows that first and foremost that he's a monster. He knows he's never going to be human and accepts that. It's one of the reasons he goes dark so often, for the act burns out the bits of Sunai that are human each time they do so.

Of course, Leo is also something of a hypocrite. He might act high and mighty, but at his core, he's a brute. He enjoys torturing people enough that Harker has an entire file on his computer dedicated just to video of Leo torturing people to death instead of letting them go in the much easier route of listening to his song. Though it's not shown, he tries to claw Sloan's heart out of his chest during their fight instead of just ramming a spike through him as most Malchai are dispatched.

Surprisingly, for a brutal monster, Leo does seem to care about people in his life. He considers Ilsa and August his siblings, and while he may have a skewed idea on how best to help them, he does seem to try to get them to make peace with the fact they're monsters. He's shown arguing with the Flynns several times in what he sees as August's best interest. While he does ultimately betray them, he also remains loyal to Henry Flynn and his wife for many years, choosing to side with them over Harker when the city gets divided in two.

There's also a suggestion in the book that there is a softer side to the monster he is. The first is seen caring for his family. The second is in how he creates music. Leo can use any instrument in contrast to his brother and sister. This is because they imprint on the first piece of music they find, something so beautiful that it colors their perception of reality from then on after. The fact Leo can do this with any instrument, August speculates, means that Leo finds beauty in everything. He seems to find this a hard concept considering how brutal Leo usually is, but there is some truth. Leo sees purging the world of sinners as leaving it a better place each time he does so.

Abilities/Skills: Sunai monsters have the siren-like ability to entrance people with a song. As long as someone has a set of working ears and a soul, from the first note, they are entranced by the Sunai's song. They fall into a calm and blissful state, not even knowing their own name, though they will compulsively tell all the sins on their soul. This allows the Sunai to feed on their soul, an act which causes the victim to glow red, and that glow to be drawn out and sucked into the Sunai, leaving the victim dead and with their eyes burnt out of their skull. Leo in particular can do this with any musical instrument he can get his hands on. He also discovered through trial and error that he can do it as well by torturing someone close to death. Though he's unaware of it, love can also bring a person's soul to the surface with a passionate kiss or hug. The only people they can feed upon are sinners. Those that have killed, raped, tortured, or otherwise done unspeakable acts to their fellow man. They're marked as a Sunai can see their shadow differently than a normal human being, which rises up and writhes unnaturally behind them. They cannot feed upon Corsai or Malchai and doing so makes a Sunai violently ill. They also can eat human food, but it tastes like air and ash to them, providing no substance

Sunai are nearly invincible while in human form. Blades can't stab them and bullets can't pierce their skin. They can jump off a building that's multiple stories and suffer no injuries. However, they're also very dense and unable to swim, so when in water, they sink very rapidly, and can drown. The most injury Leo every receives is a small scar through his eyebrow from an altercation with Sloan, who is a powerful Malchai monster. However, if they haven't fed recently, they can receive injuries and suffer pain, though they will never die. Leo in particular is also shown to be stronger than a normal human being, nearly clawing Sloan's heart out of his chest on one occasion, and slamming an iron bar straight through him on another.

Sunai, like the other two types of monsters, can never tell a direct lie. They can, however, tell a version of the truth, or one they believe is true, to get around this limitation. On the flip side, Sunai provoke people around them to tell the truth, an unconscious thing that happens no matter where they go. It's a bit of a compulsion for the people around them to start telling things they normally don't tell other people, usually the worst things they've got on their conscience at the moment. While it is unconsciously done, it can be focused on a group or individual if a Sunai is in an intense emotional state.

Every day a Sunai doesn't go dark, their skin gains a mark burnt into their skin which resembles a tattoo. For Leo, this is a small black cross that starts on his left arm. If left long enough, they will go across his chest and back, then down his right arm. Usually, because of the frequency he goes dark, Leo only has them on his left arm. They also have a peculiar trait in that they can't be photographed correctly. Their eyes show up as two completely dark black spots instead of looking normal, one of the few ways to tell they're not human.

"Going dark" for a Sunai means starving themselves, going without feeding on a human soul for days on end. At first, this results in emotional changes. A Sunai goes through four stages: anger, madness, joy, and sorrow, experiencing each one acutely in turn. After this, their skin begins to heat up, first just at the temperature of a fever, but soon reaching temperatures hot enough to burn straight through human skin. Their marks start to light up, burning right through their clothes. Cold water can cool them down temporarily, though it does produce steam where it hits their skin. If a Sunai still refuses or is unable to feed, they finally go dark.

In going dark, they assume their true form, a demonic like creature made of smoke and fire. They have horns, wings, a tail, and their eyes and heart burn. In this form, they will kill indiscriminately without discerning between sinners and innocents until their hunger is satisfied. While they are the most powerful in this form, they are also the most vulnerable. They can be injured and even killed. Ilsa has her throat slit while in her form and barely survives. When she goes up against a very powerful monster called a Chaos Eater while in true form in the second book, she kills it, but the effort also ends in a mutual kill when she is destroyed. Funnily enough, Leo is actually shown to be the weakest of the Sunai, compared to a torch in the way he burns, as opposed to his sister who burns like a wildfire, and August, whose true power isn't measured, but is shown to be enough to easily overpower and kill his brother.

Samples: Log sample.

Network sample

[Leo's never had to do this before, and by God, he really wishes he didn't have to. But he's getting hungry and that'll be bad for everyone in question in a few days. So it's time to explain to the populace just what they're dealing with when it comes to a Sunai monster.]

This is a rather awkward thing to explain, so bear with me. I know I look human, but I'm not. I'm something called a Sunai monster. Long and the short of it is I need to feed off the souls of sinners in order to survive.

There's two problems with this. One is that the process kills the person in question. The other is that the process also creates a lot of noise. I'm figuring out a way to deal with the second problem. But I'll need help with the first. Now, I know asking someone to die around here isn't as big a deal as it would otherwise be, since you'll come back, but I understand it's still not the most pleasant thing to ask someone to do. I can promise you I'll make it as painless as possible. So I need some real sinners to volunteer, people who've committed murder, rape, torture, that sort of thing.

Trust me when I say you don't want to see what happens if I have to starve myself....let's just say it'll be bad for everyone if that happens.

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Leo Flynn

April 2019

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