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exsecratum) wrote2020-04-22 01:17 pm
info post
CANON: Vassalord
AGE: 400-500; physically about 42
GENDER: Male
SPECIES: Vampire
DETAILS
HEIGHT: Around 6'2"
BUILD: Statuesque - buff but not bulky
HAIR: Long, wavy, dark brown
EYES: Light brown - red when using vampire abilities
FEATURES: A slightly forked tongue!
ATTIRE: Skinny jeans and button-downs is about as casual as he gets.
INVENTORY: Cigarettes and grave dirt
WEAPONS: Himself B)
VOICE: Voiced by Keiji Fujiwara!
BACKGROUND
FAMILY: Charles J. Chrishunds (partner), Rayfell (twin), Alford Waynes (son), Minea (cat/maid)
OCCUPATION: Professional snacc
IN-DEPTH: read more
BLURB: Johnny Rayflo is a charming, flirtatious man who is incredibly conscientious of those around him and absolutely loves to tease. He treasures humanity and tries to do what he can to preserve it.
EXTRA: From his canon point, he is in search of both of his sons and doesn't know how to handle losing them.
PERSONALITY
ATTITUDE: Flirtatious, charming. Serious when he wants to be, which isn't often.
QUIRKS: He assigns nicknames to people he likes!
LIKES: Charley, smoking, traveling
DISLIKES: Barry, ignoble persons
VIRTUES: Kindness and charity
VICES: Smoking, secretiveness
IN-DEPTH: read more
ABILITIES
SKILLS: read more
PERMISSIONS
THREADHOPPING: ✔
FOURTHWALLING: ✘
ROMANCE: ✔✘
MINDREADING: ✔
MANIPULATION: ✔
INJURY: ✔
FIGHTING: ✔
KILLING: ✔
PREFERENCES
DO NOT WANT: N/A
SHIPPING: Men only, he's very gay.
MAIN PAIRINGS: Charley/Johnny
TAG STYLE: both brackets and prose, brackets preferred
TAG SPEED: medium to slow; I'm a grown ass adult.
PRISMATICA INFO
ARRIVAL: 4/22/2020
MOON BLESSING: Cordis
RESIDENCE: N/A
OCCUPATION: N/A
INVENTORY: Pocket whip, cigarettes, grave dirt.
CHANGES: None yet!
RELATIONSHIP: none :'(
CREDITS
HISTORY
Any wiki for this series is wholly ineffectual, so here's a writeup!
Vassalord takes place in the mid-2000's and follows two main characters: Johnny Rayflo, a playboy vampire, and his vassal, a man named Charles J. Chrishunds. Charles, aka Charley, Chris, or Cherry, works as a vampire hunter for the Vatican and thoroughly renounces his own vampirism; despite that, he cannot resist his nature and so returns to Johnny's side whenever he's starved for blood. His logic is that if he drinks a vampire's blood, then he won't stray any further from God's side than he already has. Since Johnny only drinks blood purchased from blood banks anyway, there's no true harm in it. It's a tense relationship, where Charley refuses to admit that he cares for his "Master" and where Johnny ruthlessly teases him.
Information provided through flashbacks have shown that Johnny used to be a knight, presumably from the Middle Ages judging by his armor. He was known to be a virtuous knight, kind and beloved by the royal family he served and the people he protected. One day, their kingdom came under attack; the king and queen were killed, and in his desperation after suffering a sound defeat, he made a deal with a demon and thus became a vampire. That demon, in a mockery of the Bible, took one of Johnny's ribs and created a feminine version of him, lovingly naming them Adam and Eve. He then created an avatar of himself in the shape of the queen Johnny had once served, imbued it with his power as both incubus and succubus, named it Barry, and left it on Earth to be both companion and tormentor.
From there, Johnny's history stops. We know that his princess was turned into a vampire as well; whether that was by Johnny's hand or not is unclear, but he continued to serve her until her bloodlust became too great and called too much attention. In an act of mercy, he planted a stake through her heart - but did not kill her, instead remitting her into the care of the church and asking them to keep her safe. We know that he was a playboy throughout history, collecting money and staying on the downlow, but we don't know when he made the decision to stop drinking fresh human blood. He's also been shown to wear a priest's cassock, but since he's a vampire, it's fairly safe to assume it was just a ruse. How long the ruse went on is unclear, but he does have Bible verses memorized.
With regards to Charley, we know a little more about him; he's been a vampire for 145 years and appears to be in his late 20's (28 if his fake ID is to be believed). Doing math, it's safe to assume he was born in the early 1800's, and his name being Germanic implies it may have been during one of the many wars to unite Germany. He was found as an orphaned and traumatized child wandering a bombed-out graveyard in a warzone; upon stumbling on a certain vampire feeding off of corpses, the boy was adopted and cared for in what small ways were possible. The child was happy and Johnny loved him dearly, but it didn't change the fact that he was clearly only prolonging the boy's inevitable death if he didn't rejoin civilization. So he named the boy Chris, cleaned him up, and took him to the nearest town untouched by the war. He left the boy with the local church, and vanished from his life. It's not clear at what point Charley reentered Johnny's life, nor how long they spent together - all we really know is that Charley was dying in his arms and after a heartfelt plea, Johnny turned him into a vampire.
History once again becomes unclear. They separate, Chris becomes Charley and turns himself into a cyborg so that he can perform his priestly duties despite being a vampire (robot hands that can touch sacred silver, artificial vocal cords that can recite verse, etc) and in the very early 1900's, they reunite, with Charley as predator and Johnny as prey. It's a long con cat-and-mouse game, and gives Charley the excuse he needs to guiltlessly feed off of Johnny's blood.
The manga begins with just such a game, resulting in Johnny's pool being destroyed with a grenade. They discover that Princess Marie had been awoken from her perpetual slumber, go to where she's being kept, and end up killing her for good. It's revealed that Johnny has been avoiding Barry for some time; the incubus finally finds him and reasserts his dominance over the man by tearing him to shreds before offering his neck. Reminded just how dangerous Barry can be, Johnny separates himself from Charley in order to keep him safe and visits him from time to time to keep him fed and healthy, but otherwise keeps his distance.
That is, until Carnivale rolls around. Johnny sends Charley an invitation to watch the Phantom of the Opera, where they quote Raoul and Charleytine's lines about escaping the Phantom at each other while Barry watches Charley feed. They go to escape, and are separated by Barry; the ensuing fight sees Charley well matched but on the losing side. Johnny realizes that the only way he'll be able to defeat Barry is to reveal the name of the demon who created him and banish the power he lends his avatar, but there is no way to do so without cluing Barry in and risking their lives. Instead, he begins reciting a passage from Corinthians that bears the demon's name despite knowing that to do so is practically suicide; Charley picks up where Johnny falters and manages to banish the demon's power from Barry, making it possible to defeat him.
This does, unfortunately, mean that Johnny is dying. Charley had replaced his vocal cords to recite scripture; Johnny had done no such thing, and so he very much suffers for his actions. A mysterious organization then appears, offering to help in exchange for the two of them to join up; Charley readily agrees if it means it will save Johnny's life. Johnny wakes up some undisclosed amount of time later, and the deal is explained to him: Charley is to act as a liaison between humanity and a new breed of vampires to try to broker peace and eventually sway the humans to join the vampires through the use of a drug called Vassalord.
After what appears to be a month of this, Johnny devises a plan to escape. One of the heads of the organization, another reverend-turned-vampire, appears to feed off of Johnny's blood; he uses this as a distraction and an excuse for Charley to avoid him and push himself to the point of bloodlust. The escape goes off without a hitch - but it does mean that Charley gets left behind, as the escape involves turning into a cloud of bats which he cannot do.
Once on the outside, Johnny reconvenes with some allies - a detective from LA with a grudge against vampires, his clone Rayfell and her beloved Cheryl, a drug addict with mafia ties, and Barry, now stripped of the demon's powers but still powerful in his own right. They launch a rescue to retrieve Charley and those that had helped him escape; Johnny manages to track Charley to an underground train with the leader of the organization, and despite chasing after them, Charley leaves him behind. (It turns out a proximity bomb had been implanted in his head, and to leave the leader's side would mean it would detonate.) He bids Johnny escape, and then Johnny gets attacked by an experimental monster of a vampire. This is where I'm taking him from.
PERSONALITY
Johnny is a charmer through and through. He's almost never without a smile and a smooth word to put those around him at ease, and can be seen to be levelheaded at even the most stressful of moments. He flirts voraciously with those around him (if they seem receptive to it) and is coolly cordial even with those who are shitty to him.
Beneath that flirty exterior, it's revealed that Johnny is secretive, calculating, and keeps every drop of helpful information incredibly close to the vest. He's full of self-loathing: he laments having "stolen something so pure from its proper death" aka turning Charley into a vampire; he hates that he'd been so weak as to accept the demon's offer of power; and he hates the things that have come as a result of his very being (Charley's vampirism, Barry's existence, the fall of his kingdom, a disturbing revelation that the Vassalord drug has something to do with him personally), bearing a lot of guilt for things that aren't actually completely his fault but conflicted at the opportunities it's granted him: if he hadn't been a vampire, then Charley would have died centuries ago, back in that burned out graveyard.
Since Charley is a vampire of Johnny's own making, he refers to him as his “son,” teasing the hell out of him at every opportunity. (It’s how he shows his affection, and if he drives Charley nuts with it, then that’s just a plus.) His son is more important to him than his own life, seeing himself as something tainted and disgusting while Charley is pure and clean. As such, he’ll do whatever it takes to protect him - including intentionally causing a rift between himself and Charley so as to keep Barry's eye off him. He’ll take all that pain and hurt on himself again, so long as Charley doesn’t have to know about it, doesn’t have to suffer it, too. It’s been shown how jealous and possessive Barry is - an actress-turned-vampire drank some of Johnny’s blood, and so Barry had her killed in a bomb blast. Johnny doesn’t want anything bad to happen to his son as well, and he’s more than willing to suffer for it. He acts somewhat impish around Charley, letting the cool demeanor slip away; it’s possible that this is a ploy to drive him even more insane, but it also seems to be his way of showing that he knows that he can be as he wants with Charley, that he knows he's safe and with good company. But he takes what Charley says to heart, puts his full belief and trust in him. In fact, Charley may or may not be the only one he does trust so much.
He is, as mentioned, an obscene flirt, even when he doesn't necessarily feel it. For example, the aforementioned actress who drank his blood, Miranda Segal. They meet her while on a flight to meet with Rayfell and Cheryl; upon the discovery of a time bomb in the cargo bay and that Miranda is its unknowing bearer, Johnny assumes the guise of a hijacker and demands that all passengers be buckled and that they land at the nearest airport immediately. He, Charley, and Miranda (albeit unwillingly in her case) then leap out of the plane, taking the bomb with them in order to keep it from killing everyone else; as soon as she wakes up, she’s consumed by a bloodlust and nearly goes mad. He tells Charley that vampire or not, she's still a lady, and you must always treat a lady right before feeding her blood to calm her down. Once her bloodlust has been sated and she comes to her senses later in a hotel room, she comes on to him and he reciprocates, despite the fact that it's not at all what he'd intended to happen.
Johnny is also selfless to a fault. He only became a vampire in order to have enough power to protect what was important to him; when it becomes apparent that Princess Marie is willing to kill Charley to get Johnny back, he very nearly lets himself be incinerated in the sunlight in order to stop her from killing his son (this is where we learn about the bat+regeneration thing); when Barry swans back into the picture, he accepts that he has to pull Barry's attention as far from Charley as possible in order to keep him safe - despite the fact that this typically involves evisceration. He's more than willing to sacrifice himself to protect others, though he can take it to an extreme (i.e. constant near death experiences).
All in all, despite being the cheery, kind, suave person he puts himself off as, he's still incredibly secretive. The only people who seem to truly know him are Barry and Rayfell, and even then, they don't know all there is to know about him. Cherry knows only the side of him that he's seen: the almost overbearing, protective, somewhat irritating man; he has no idea of Johnny before that, and Johnny is happy to keep it that way. In the right situations, he has a sort of quiet desperation that he tries to hide, and though he tries to play everything off as a joke, he can still be wounded by things that are said in jest to him. He tends to keep his own agendas, though they aren't anything that could hurt anyone, and can be selfish from time to time (i.e. near-abandoning Charley in order to save him from Barry). He does what he thinks to be right, and doesn't often see the need to explain his actions: they're a way to keep those close to him safe, and so it's fine with him. Concerned for the safety of those around him, he does still treasure life very much, despite his being a creature that by all rights feeds on it. He may not tell you what his plans are, but it’s safe to say that he (usually) has your best interests at heart.