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History


Character Information
Character Name(s): Mircea Grey
Nicknames/Aliases: Jack Ransom (the name he currently goes by)
Gender: Male
Race: Animal Shapeshifter
Actual Character Age: 92
DOB: August 19, 1916
Physical Description: Jack is a wiry man who stands just about five foot nine inches tall. His hair tends from a dark brown in the winter months to a lighter blonde streaked brown during the summer. His clothing is never bland - even when wearing plain colors he wears multitudes of bracelets, necklaces and rings. His eyes are a warm deep brown and his face has the air of an Eastern European aristocrat. His smiles are often, lighting his entire face with a sincere friendliness. He has the build of a man who isn't adverse to some heavy lifting or hard work.
Distinguishing marks: Various tattoos of different quality (some are much older than others, having been done in the 30s to 50s) - most noticeable are the large heart on his upper left arm and a black bird on his lower left forearm. He keeps his beard and mustache trimmed in a neat goatee.
PB: Johnny Depp
Birth Location: Chicago, IL
Personality: Jack is a mercurial and moody individual. On the outside, Jack is a genial drifter, finding friends in the oddest of places and seeming to be a helpful and good human being. He is courteous and a gentleman, treating men with respect and women with charm. On the inside, Jack is anything but. Long consumed with an obsession with his own death, Jack, who was once a carefree and jovial young man, has become a devious user, helping only when he can get something out of the deal. He has come to care for no one but a select few people and has the mentality that all non-Rom are to be cheated and lied to and to be taken advantage at every turn. He makes no lasting bonds, save those that benefit him in the long run. The only people he has true feelings of warmth for are those who are considered family to him. Few people have managed to break into his family mindset and those few people are considered precious to Jack.

Personal Background: Born in Chicago in 1916, Mircea's parents were Hungarian gypsies (of the Roma) come across from Europe only a few years before his birth. Both talented animal shapeshifters, they traveled to the US in an attempt to survive the hatred coursing through Europe for the Romani and magic users in general. His family, disliked by Americans as well, joined into a large group of Travelers, eventually landing in Kansas and working as farm hands. His childhood was spent on long hours on the farm and seeing little show for it. His own magical heritage was put to the wayside due to the paranoia of the farm owners and his own family. They could lose work if they were even suspected of being involved in "Gypsy witchery", so Mircea and his siblings were denied the magical education owed to them by their parents.

The poverty and excessive work only increased when the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression hit. The Romani in particular were hit incredibly hard. Being a roving people and having nowhere to go, whole families died of starvation, including most of Jack's family. In 1935, he made the mistake of stealing food for himself from another Roma's caravan. He was cursed by a witch in that family then, with the idea that since he felt no compunction about changing the fate of one family to save his own life, since a meal could very well mean life or death, he would be unable to change his own fate ever again. He would die when he was fated to die and nothing on Earth could change that. For a gypsy, the inability to alter one's fate through any means truly was a curse.

The mark of the curse was upon him as a tattoo of a black bird on his forearm, the symbol of death. Marked as marime, cursed, he was ostracized from the Travelers and the Rom both, forced to find his own existence. Joining up with a traveling carnival and changing his name to Jack (a much more American sounding name), he worked as an animal hand, meeting a man who taught him to throw knives as well as run the rigged games. He did both jobs for quite a while before he met a young woman, Ilsa, who had joined the freak show. There was nothing outwardly strange about her, so one day he asked her why she had been accepted. She explained to him that she could shift her body into that of an animal's and sometimes it was beneficial to the show to have a large cat in the menagerie. Remembering his parents' own stories, he begged her to show him how. At first, she believed she was humoring him since she fancied him as well, but then she realized that he wasn't bluffing. He could shape shift.

Over the next twenty years, Jack practiced his talent with Ilsa, first mastering the form of a large black crow (as an ironic tribute to his curse) and then taking on the shape of a black wolf. One night in July of 1955, the traveling carnival was suddenly disbanded due to a violent reception. A crowd in Mississippi, angry that the freak show harbored people of all races and creeds, attacked and dispersed the group, forcing them to escape in separate ways. Finding the incident a prime opportunity as he'd felt he'd learned everything he could from Ilsa, he ran off.

For the next twenty-one years, he roamed the South, finding quick ways to scam cash out of people so that he could keep surviving and finding that he was quite good at it. He was careful and methodical, traveling with other Gypsies and itinerants for a little while before leaving and joining another group. He never made any lasting attachments, preferring instead to move on after a couple of years with one group.

In 1976, he managed use his own black market and underworld connections to purchase fake documentation to allow him to attend a private college in North Carolina that held one of the best occult libraries in the United States. While he never graduated from Stoneloft, he did read nearly every single occult book in the library. They were informative and he learned quiet a bit about methodology and the nature of curses, but he never found out how to undo his own curse.

After ten years, he picked back up where he had started, disillusioned by the idea that no matter what he did, he plodded inexorably to the same fate. No choice altered the future. Everything was set into motion without him.

Depressed by the thought, over the next ten years he began taking greater and greater risks, blatantly stealing from non-Rom, getting caught and beaten quite a few times. He even landed himself in jail for a month or so before he escaped by shifting into a crow and leaving.

It wasn't until 1996 that he felt the first ray of light in over twenty years. Picking up the newspaper one day, he read the story of a young woman, Cassandra, who claimed to have had visions of the future. Most people believed that it was a hoax, but Jack knew that it might not be. Having had experiences with fortune tellers in the carnival, both charlatans and real psychics, Jack headed out to discover which one the little girl might be. Thus determined to see if the girl really could predict the future, Jack made his way to South Carolina to find the girl, and as fate would have it, he found the young woman huddled on the side of the road, tired and lost. Offering her shelter, he took her with him to his temporary home and took a little bit of time to figure out where to go from there.

He was both running out of money and determined to know his own fate, so he decided to kill two birds with one stone. He could use the girl's ability to bolster his own pockets as well as try and reveal his own future. He took what he believed was reasonably good care of her, recalling his own needs as a child, and he brought others down to try their luck at fortunes, but it didn't seem to go as well as he'd planned. He even set up a camera just in case the girl would somehow have a vision whilst he was away.

Twice, Cassandra escaped and twice Jack had to hunt her down, thankful for the girl's bare resemblance to him and the fact that no one had reported her missing. It was easy to claim that she was his daughter and take her back. After the second attempt, they left and moved cities, starting in a new safer place.

This time, though, Jack locked her in the basement. It wasn't a step he'd wanted to take, but he couldn't afford the police getting suspicious about his methods. He brought Cassie a little bit extra, since she had succeeded in making him quite a bit of money through lottery tickets and the such, but her health began waning, her spirits fading.

While her popularity spread amongst the occult-friendly people of Charleston, Jack charged a little more each time per person for a chance at the future. The more people he brought down, the more constant her visions were. He could tell that it was wearing her out, so he determined to use her for as long as he could before she eventually burnt out. He knew that she would, given her frail nature, and he hoped that by the end she would have shown him what he wanted to know.

Jack wasn't necessarily a callous man, but the things that children needed while growing up were lost on him, as were notions of . He'd had nothing growing up, no books, no toys. It had only been work. It wouldn't hurt Cassandra to grow up the same way, and she wasn't surrounded by dangerous farm equipment and malnutrition. In a strange way he began to think of Cassandra like a daughter. Cursed into a strange fate just like him, he wished that he could have let her go, but knew that he couldn't. Not if he was ever to get the key to altering his own fate.

It wasn't until one night, when Cassandra was seventeen, that Jack decided against his own greed and determination. He came downstairs to bring Cassandra a glass of water and found her bleeding out from wounds on her wrists. Knowing that the girl had tried to kill herself, he unchained her and took her to the hospital, leaving her at the emergency room without a word. Turning his back on his fate, he made a call to a connection he had made at Stoneloft. At least if she was recruited to Halcyon Halls, he would know where to find her.

And she would learn how to control her talent, and maybe, just maybe, tell him his fate, once and for all. Now, a year later, he's contacted Halcyon Halls and applied for the position of Librarian, using his years at Stoneloft for experience. He plans on seeing Cassandra again and hoping that maybe, just maybe, she's learned more control over her power.

Family: Extensive Traveler and Roma family that he has no contact with anymore.
Weakness: Jack's weaknesses are mostly human. Anything that can kill a human can kill Jack, save the majority of human diseases. He can't keep either animal shape for too long without pushing himself into exhaustion, though while he is in those shapes, he still retains his own mind. He is also arrogant and sees everyone as a mark and is eager to rip off whomever he can. Jack has a hard time identifying with the luxuries of today - he is a bit anachronistic and prefers to live on the austere side. He trusts no one and believes most people to be soft-minded spoiled children thanks to the quality of life they have grown into. Jack is also a chronic smoker and he has a soft spot for drinking as well.
Magical Abilities: Jack can shape shift into a large crow and a black wolf. Jack can heal better than the average human being, thanks to his shape shifter heritage. He also has a longer lifespan than humans, averaging 2-300 years.
Any Training: Jack has mastered throwing daggers and is somewhat good with fighting with them. He also is an accomplished con man.
Special Skills: He can speak fluid Romani, English, and Spanish.
House: Head of Halcyon
Start Date at Halcyon:: August 2007
Classes: None
After School Clubs:
Teaches: N/A
Job: Librarian
AIM Name: N/A
Rooming with: None

Your information
Characters insanejournal name: marimeruv
Your email: theicecreamassassin@gmail.com
Your messengers (aim/yahoo/msn): corsetcombapple
Your name (internet or real): Shae
Your age: 27
What are the mods names?: Linda Stacey
Link to colored photo for characters page:
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