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ooc >> information
Character Name: Lochlann Tait.
Physical Description: In human form, Lochlann appears to be a 5'8," white with dark curly hair and large brown eyes.
Most of the time he dresses casual and almost always wears handwarmers in public to hide the very violent looking scars in between the fingers on both of his hands.
World: Your usual urban fantasy type of world, where regular humans either cannot comprehend the true nature of reality or are kept ignorant of its true nature by the bigger various supernatural factions (vampires, werewolves) or freelancers such as Lochlann here.
History: Lochlann's paternal side of the family is from Shetland, an island off the North East of Scotland. By the nineteen-eighties, stories of Selkies were something that people told children, not anything anyone took seriously. So when his father found a seal skin on the shore without the trace of any bones or entrails, he thought it was an odd thing, picked it up, and took it back home for the novelty of it.
When a very naked young woman showed up on his doorstep that night, demanding what was rightfully hers, he realised that the world wasn't as mundane as he'd thought. He wasn't an extraordinarly cruel or vicious man, but he did have a sense of entitlement, especially where women were concerned. It didn't help that he didn't view Lochlann's mother as human or real, so much as a thing. A mythical sex fantasy that had come to life. He didn't return the seal skin, but took the woman in as his 'wife' and convinced himself that this was perfectly fine. That this was how the story was meant to go.
With no power and no place to go, his mother decided to stay and do everything to try and find her skin. When she did, Lochlann's father learnt the part of the story left in the children's version - a knife in his neck as he bled out on the floor of his kitchen.
Of course, things didn't quite end there. Nine months later, a newborn boy was abandoned on one of the more frequented beaches, wrapped in bundles of seaweed. He was found by tourists and flown to a mainland hospital. Other than an unusual sort of syndactyly, he was your usual red-faced, crying baby. When no one came forward to claim him, he was handed over to social services, and before he was a year old, he was adopted by a family in East Lothian.
Lochlann hit all the usual developmental markers for a child, despite his mixed-heritage: walking, first words, teeth, etc. The trouble began when his general physician recommended him for surgery on his hands and feet. Iron is incredibly harmful to anyone of fey heritage, and most surgical tools are stainless steel, an alloy of carbon and iron. Lochlann bled out profusely, leading to a diagnosis of a rare kind of hemophilia - no one, of course, would suspect magic to be the problem. Even though the doctors proceeded to tread carefully as they tried to correct their mistakes, they were more or less stumbling in the dark and only made it worse. He was left with vicious scars in between his fingers and joints that would forever ache. Thankfully after their failure, both the doctors and his parents decided not to continue with the surgery on his feet.
Lochlann learned to adapt, which in some ways was very easy as a child, and in others harsh. He got used to being stared at by other children, called names, even pushed about on occasion. Some kids might become more ostracized; he became more extroverted and sharp tongued, with a cheekiness that could become downright mean and often got him in trouble with the teachers and other children alike.
Then as a teenager he started falling into heavier bouts of melancholy and sombre moods that his parents put down to <EM>teenagers</EM>, but in reality it was something else. He began to experience reocurring dreams of the sea and oscillated between finding it difficult to function day-to-day or acted out in more and more to the tune of vandalism, theft, running with joy riders, underage drinking, and casual drug use.
Eventually the sea longing became too much and one night one night he slipped out of the house and walked the mile to the beach, where he was approached by a strange woman. Smiling, she led him into the sea - before dragging him deeper, and further out, changing into an inhuman creature and keeping hold of him with a preternatural strength.
On the depths of the sea floor, something reacted within him and his selkie self split out and through his human self. The woman - his birth mother - was glad to finally have the child she'd had to abandon for his own safety back in her life, but Lochlann was in a lot of pain and understandably freaked the hell out, refusing to go anywhere with her and high tailing it away as fast as possible.
The next again day when he was found damp, disheveled and in a precarious mental state, no one was sure whether to judge it as sleep walking or suicide. As protocol, he was admitted for twenty-four-hour psychiatric observation at the nearest hospital, which was extended as he began to have a mental breakdown over what had happened. Essentially, he shut down and withdrew into himself while he tried to process what had happened and the changes to his body.
It was a year before he started to live outside of any sort of institution and when he did it was monotonous and just as much going-through-the-motions. He completed his secondary school qualifications through the local college and eventually persuaded his parents that living on his own with visiting support would be A Good Step to take, although in reality he wanted to keep them as far away as possible from the 'trouble' he seemed to bring them and because he had every intention of finding out what he was and getting involved in even more.
Physical Description: In human form, Lochlann appears to be a 5'8," white with dark curly hair and large brown eyes.
Most of the time he dresses casual and almost always wears handwarmers in public to hide the very violent looking scars in between the fingers on both of his hands.
World: Your usual urban fantasy type of world, where regular humans either cannot comprehend the true nature of reality or are kept ignorant of its true nature by the bigger various supernatural factions (vampires, werewolves) or freelancers such as Lochlann here.
History: Lochlann's paternal side of the family is from Shetland, an island off the North East of Scotland. By the nineteen-eighties, stories of Selkies were something that people told children, not anything anyone took seriously. So when his father found a seal skin on the shore without the trace of any bones or entrails, he thought it was an odd thing, picked it up, and took it back home for the novelty of it.
When a very naked young woman showed up on his doorstep that night, demanding what was rightfully hers, he realised that the world wasn't as mundane as he'd thought. He wasn't an extraordinarly cruel or vicious man, but he did have a sense of entitlement, especially where women were concerned. It didn't help that he didn't view Lochlann's mother as human or real, so much as a thing. A mythical sex fantasy that had come to life. He didn't return the seal skin, but took the woman in as his 'wife' and convinced himself that this was perfectly fine. That this was how the story was meant to go.
With no power and no place to go, his mother decided to stay and do everything to try and find her skin. When she did, Lochlann's father learnt the part of the story left in the children's version - a knife in his neck as he bled out on the floor of his kitchen.
Of course, things didn't quite end there. Nine months later, a newborn boy was abandoned on one of the more frequented beaches, wrapped in bundles of seaweed. He was found by tourists and flown to a mainland hospital. Other than an unusual sort of syndactyly, he was your usual red-faced, crying baby. When no one came forward to claim him, he was handed over to social services, and before he was a year old, he was adopted by a family in East Lothian.
Lochlann hit all the usual developmental markers for a child, despite his mixed-heritage: walking, first words, teeth, etc. The trouble began when his general physician recommended him for surgery on his hands and feet. Iron is incredibly harmful to anyone of fey heritage, and most surgical tools are stainless steel, an alloy of carbon and iron. Lochlann bled out profusely, leading to a diagnosis of a rare kind of hemophilia - no one, of course, would suspect magic to be the problem. Even though the doctors proceeded to tread carefully as they tried to correct their mistakes, they were more or less stumbling in the dark and only made it worse. He was left with vicious scars in between his fingers and joints that would forever ache. Thankfully after their failure, both the doctors and his parents decided not to continue with the surgery on his feet.
Lochlann learned to adapt, which in some ways was very easy as a child, and in others harsh. He got used to being stared at by other children, called names, even pushed about on occasion. Some kids might become more ostracized; he became more extroverted and sharp tongued, with a cheekiness that could become downright mean and often got him in trouble with the teachers and other children alike.
Then as a teenager he started falling into heavier bouts of melancholy and sombre moods that his parents put down to <EM>teenagers</EM>, but in reality it was something else. He began to experience reocurring dreams of the sea and oscillated between finding it difficult to function day-to-day or acted out in more and more to the tune of vandalism, theft, running with joy riders, underage drinking, and casual drug use.
Eventually the sea longing became too much and one night one night he slipped out of the house and walked the mile to the beach, where he was approached by a strange woman. Smiling, she led him into the sea - before dragging him deeper, and further out, changing into an inhuman creature and keeping hold of him with a preternatural strength.
On the depths of the sea floor, something reacted within him and his selkie self split out and through his human self. The woman - his birth mother - was glad to finally have the child she'd had to abandon for his own safety back in her life, but Lochlann was in a lot of pain and understandably freaked the hell out, refusing to go anywhere with her and high tailing it away as fast as possible.
The next again day when he was found damp, disheveled and in a precarious mental state, no one was sure whether to judge it as sleep walking or suicide. As protocol, he was admitted for twenty-four-hour psychiatric observation at the nearest hospital, which was extended as he began to have a mental breakdown over what had happened. Essentially, he shut down and withdrew into himself while he tried to process what had happened and the changes to his body.
It was a year before he started to live outside of any sort of institution and when he did it was monotonous and just as much going-through-the-motions. He completed his secondary school qualifications through the local college and eventually persuaded his parents that living on his own with visiting support would be A Good Step to take, although in reality he wanted to keep them as far away as possible from the 'trouble' he seemed to bring them and because he had every intention of finding out what he was and getting involved in even more.