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THEMIS DATABASE: RILEY FALNER
RILEY FALNER | |||
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HUNTER DOSSIER. CLASS: Ascended (Last Vampire of the Fourth World, Childe of Constantine the Eternal) HOME COMPACT/CONSPIRACY: Netsach RANK: Inquisitor/Malice King POSITIONS HELD:
AFFILIATED COMPACTS/CONSPIRACIES:
OTHER AFFILIATED GROUPS:
TACTICAL DESIGNATION: Administrator, Liaison, Researcher FAVORED WEAPONS: Gun Sword (Greatsword) COMBAT ASSESSMENT:
HISTORY. The Falner Clan of the Fourth World was a line of distinguished vampire hunters. Testimonies from Riley himself state that they were his world’s equivalent of a Rivers Legacy, as they possessed a unique skill set and preternatural abilities that were geared towards dealing with (and ultimately eliminating) their favored enemy. Riley was at the peak of his career by the age of 21: he was the first son and the pride and joy of his parents, slated to inherit the “family business”. By 25, he was the head of the Falner Clan, and ready to marry his childhood friend Eleanor Harker. Eleanor was from her own distinguished line of hunters, and was, for all intents and purposes, the perfect match for Riley. What cinched it was the fact that they loved each other. Riley’s world came crashing down when Eleanor disappeared. On the night of their wedding, the couple received terrible news regarding Eleanor’s family: the dread armies of Constantine, the Eternal, had invaded the ancestral lands of the Harkers and slaughtered Eleanor’s father. Her mother was still missing. Constantine was one of the Progenitors of the vampires of the Fourth World, and a powerful force of Darkness that even the Mages tried their best to avoid. Wracked with grief and fueled by anger, Eleanor insisted on departing immediately and seeking revenge for her family. Riley, however, begged her to stay: he wanted to go with his wife, and help her destroy Constantine after they had rallied more people to their cause. He thought, at first, that he had managed to convince her. He woke up the very next morning to an empty bed, and an empty armory. Driven beyond all reason because of his loss, Riley ignored the wishes of his family and immediately went after his wife. He went alone, deep into enemy territory, interrogating and killing every vampire he saw. He wanted to make sure that he had Constantine’s attention, and aimed to rile the vampire lord enough to face him personally. He succeeded in one sense; he got Constantine to come down and meet him. What he was not prepared for was the fact that Constantine was a god in comparison to his own skills. The vampire lord soundly defeated him, and took Riley prisoner. He made Riley watch as he sent his armies to slowly but surely destroy everything he ever loved: the lands and people of the Falners, and his own clan. The last thing Constantine showed Riley was his beloved Eleanor: his beloved had become, through a program of torture and systematic brainwashing, Constantine’s new and completely insane undead wife. Riley was forced to kill her, and it was only in her final moments that Eleanor remembered who he was. Broken as he was from despair, Riley stopped resisting Constantine completely. He became the vampire lord’s favorite toy, passively accepting whatever attention Constantine gave him no matter how violating or brutal it was. Eventually, however, Constantine grew bored of Riley, and – in an attempt to make the hunter interesting to him yet again – Embraced Riley himself. What Constantine was not expecting was that awakening the Beast in Riley would drive him mad. Riley ended up murdering his sire, and promptly went on a rampage, single-handedly destroying Constantine’s entire vampire clan. For the next two centuries, Riley was the invisible monster in the lands that had once belonged to Constantine the Eternal. He haunted Constantine’s castle, leaving its sanctuary at night to swoop down on any unfortunate soul that stumbled into his territory – and, because he was constantly hungry, said “territory” kept on expanding, swallowing entire villages and towns. All mortals of the Fourth World whispered the name that they had given him in fear: the Weeping Sword. Nobody knew that this monster was Riley. The Weeping Sword’s activities eventually caught the attention of the Adamantine Arrows. The Mages felt that they could no longer stand by and watch as this dreadful creature destroyed innocent lives. As such, they sent their best to kill him: Aidan Clayce, a 19-year-old Obrimos Mage. The pair fought for over two weeks, chasing each other throughout the forest first and then taking their fight into the ruins of Constantine the Eternal’s castle. This gave Aidan more than enough time to study his target, and wonder who he was really fighting. He eventually succeeded in disabling the Weeping Sword, and getting a good look at his face. That was when the young Voidseeker recognized the monster from old records, and realized who he was dealing with. Aidan switched strategies at that point. He was no longer interested in destroying the Weeping Sword: he wanted, instead, to make the monster remember himself, and turn him away from the dark path that he had walked for hundreds of years. It took him three more days of fighting to get through to the Weeping Sword, and he held on to Riley as the vampire broke down, mourning the ruin that his life had become. Suffice to say, the Adamantine Arrows were not happy with Aidan’s actions. Riley was a powerful vampire, and had been a scourge to all mortals for too long, in their opinion. Aidan, however, would not listen to them: he believed in Riley’s goodness, and already viewed the vampire as his closest friend. In fact, in order to appease his elders, the young Voidseeker agreed to be Riley’s guardian: any action that Riley took in defiance of the Arrows would become Aidan’s responsibility, and that meant that Aidan would be punished in the “monster’s” place. Riley worked hard to redeem himself, and not be a burden to Aidan. He willingly became, in a way, their guard dog on a leash, using the fearsome powers at his disposal to protect people who did not care for him. Aidan, in turn, worked hard to reach a position of power within the Mystical Order, motivated both by his passion for knowledge and because he wanted to make Riley’s life easier. Fortunately, by the age of 24, Aidan was the First of the Arrows, and Master of the Tower. He made Riley an Adamantine Arrow as though he were a Mage, and named his friend the Head of the Peshmergei, the Arrow’s elite fighting force. The golden years of the pair were cut short because of Aidan’s obsession with the Void. Riley tried his best to keep his friend from going too far, and losing himself in his research. Aidan, however, was stubborn: he felt that Riley was, in his fear, not seeing the Void for “what it truly was”. By the time Aidan realized that Riley was right, it was too late for them to save the Fourth World. Riley, together with Aidan and Orin, took refuge in a space of Aidan’s creation as the Fourth World died, and remade itself into the Fifth World. He followed his companions, and helped Aidan process his grief even as he was struggling with the Beast within him. In fact, Riley is the one who came up with the idea of a group of individuals devoted to preserving the Balance, and using the powers at their disposal to guide the Fifth World in the right direction. Aidan was the one who worked to make it happen, and Riley served as his counsel. Much of Riley’s story from this point on is something that many Keepers of the Vigil are familiar with. He followed Aidan and did the work of the Methuselah, taking advantage of his nature as a vampire in order to keep the Kindred in line. He was the vampire lord who founded the Camarilla: he is the invisible hand that made the Masquerade, all in pursuit of his dream of walking under the light of the sun with as many companions as possible. He used his influence and the resources at his disposal to create places like the Falner Estate for the Methuselah. He took like-minded vampires under his wing, the two most famous ones being Marrigan Crowe, the Queen of Storms, and Lex, Dracula himself. The three of them, in fact, reached Golconda together during the 15th Century. Each one of them took on different roles as the new stewards of vampire kind: while Marrigan decided to become the Scourge of All Who Strayed and Lex decided to become the Mask of the Beast, Riley became the “Daywalker”, the vampire who would consistently become more human than human. The trade-off, however, was Deep Slumber: for the rest of his existence, Riley was fated to fall into a state similar to torpor for years on end, as his body would be unable to take the strain of having no real form of sustenance. After becoming the Daywalker, Riley flitted in and out of Kindred history, and the history of the Methuselah’s Vigil. He and Aidan arranged for him to remain primarily within the Falner Estate, and take any necessary action in the name of the Vigil from that position. Although he knew that all of this was ultimately better than anything else, he often wrestled with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. His condition, it seemed, made it next to impossible for him to be there for his friends when they needed him the most. Furthermore, while his reputation as the Daywalker was usually enough to keep Kindred in line, many of the wilier elders took advantage of the times when he could not be physically present or available to monitor them. Thankfully, one of Riley’s latest Deep Slumber cycles had him waking up in the middle of 2012 – this was, in actuality, a premature awakening brought about by the dreams that he had of Nyx. He bore witness to the events that led to Netsach’s founding, Operation Nyx, the Breaking of the Veil, and the First Reforms. 2012 was also particularly significant to him because it was the year that he met Barbara Gomez. Barbie, a young Filipina, was Embraced by a cruel sire who did not plan to use her for anything else beyond his personal amusement. Riley saved her life, arranged for her sire’s Final Death, and took her under his wing. She was the first vampire that he had ever done this for: Marrigan and Lex had been companions to him, and Riley had never viewed the pair as his students. Barbara joined the Methuselah because of Riley, followed Riley to Netsach, and later became the Golden Hand of the Daywalker: the Vampire Queen to his King, monitoring his “kingdom” in his place. Ultimately, what Riley was not available for was the Black Christmas and the entirety of the Darkest Vigil. He could not, in spite of his best efforts, fight off the Deep Slumber. He had already awakened well before his time in 2012, after all. CURRENT STATUS. Given the decreasing amount of time that Riley had “awake” in between each cycle of Deep Slumber, the Malice Kings and the majority of Netsach were expecting the Daywalker to be asleep for at least under two or more centuries. As such, the conspiracy, as a whole, is shocked to see Riley up and about in 2063, just three years after the Darkest Vigil and barely the quarter of a decade after he went to sleep. Riley is currently under “house arrest” at the Falner Estate. Healers from Ziz predict that it will take the Daywalker a month, at the very least, to recover and be fit for travel. PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE. Golconda has granted Riley with a level of humanity that is unheard of in other vampires: his gestures, his speech and his disposition are convincingly, eerily human, even more human that many other actual human beings. Unfortunately, Riley remains ultimately disconnected from both mankind and his Kindred brothers and sisters due to the enlightened state that he is in, as the perfection that he represents often intimidates others on a deep level. That, together with occasional shows of frightening power, differentiates further him from the rest of both the World of Light and the World of Darkness. The fact that he has been alive for countless of centuries aggravate this condition. Riley appears to have a strong need to remain tethered to concerns both mundane and supernatural, perhaps as an acknowledgement of the fact that emotional distance is an affliction. The long periods that he has spent in Deep Slumber, however, make this task even more difficult than it already is. THREAT LEVEL. IMMEASURABLE/NON-FACTOR. While Riley may not be as powerful as Aidan, he accumulated power, influence and resources in the World of Darkness – particularly among the Kindred – since the beginnings of the Methuselah, and has many strong allies. Furthermore, he is proof that Golconda is possible: most of vampire kind views him as a god that must be obeyed, and the best possible example of what they could all become. Thankfully, he is more moderate in his beliefs and his actions; he is also keenly interested in preserving the Balance, and has proven to be remarkably supportive of the Pax Deorum’s agenda. ELIAS' NOTES. | ||
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