I'm going to be honest, Req; you brought this on yourself by giving me the opportunity to use a character I haven't had the chance to truly utilize.
Name: Kanin Vikona
Gender: Male
Age: 66
Race: Elf
Appearance: A lean and handsome man standing no more than an inch over most (human) citizens of Poria, Kanin is fortunate enough to get the absolute best out of his heritage when it comes to his appearance. Every movement he makes contains the fluidity and grace of his elven lineage, further accentuated by his fair skin, lean build, and fine facial features, as well as a complete inability to grow a beard. His eyes bear special mention; they twitch and scan rooms almost constantly in search of a threat, and seem to stare into the very soul of whomever is caught in their grasp. Furthermore, Kanin possesses an inordinate amount of power and muscle in his build for an elf, as well as dark brown hair, with bangs ending shortly above his eyebrows, that cast lingering doubts on the purity of his blood. Despite his age, he looks no older than his mid-twenties by human standards, putting a long lifespan clearly among the advantages his race affords him. Where one may expect scars to cover the body of a killer-for-hire, he has been such a success that he can afford magical healing to make it as though all but the most deadly wounds were never there - and even those are relegated to the occasional thin, white scratch, raised patch of skin, or suspiciously dense white spot on his body.
The most striking and recognizable aspects of Kanin's appearance, however, are those that he actively chooses, particularly his state of dress and the weaponry he carries with him. Outside of his home, or whatever other accommodations his job might require him to stay in, the discerning killer for hire constantly wears a two-piece suit, the jacket single-breasted, with a white dress shirt underneath and laced dress shoes, crafted to be as comfortable and suitable for fighting as is possible (he refuses to wear a tie of any kind for practical reasons, of course). At all times, Kanin not only carries a loaded 9mm machine pistol and extra ammunition hidden within his suit jacket, but has a five-inch switchblade engraved with elven text concealed within his trousers. When called upon to complete a task that warrants it, he may wield firearms with greater power; of course, such weaponry is not practical to keep on him. He also keeps a smartphone and a small, generic lighter within the inner pockets of his jacket.
Personality: With a demeanor as bitter and sardonic as one might expect from someone doing his job, Kanin is rarely anything close to a pleasant person. Not only is he rude and domineering, often demanding others to do things for him - demands which are not often denied, given his reputation as a killer - but he is more than content with intimidating or threatening others into doing what he wants. This dominant, threatening personality makes Kanin a very strong-willed individual, who will resist - usually quite violently - any attempts to cow, threaten, or intimidate him. Unsurprisingly these aspects of his personality earn him few friends, many enemies, and more terrified obedience than the average man in his already-fear-inspiring position would receive.
In addition to this, Kanin has a severe streak of guilt in him, but is entirely unsure of how to make up for his past misdeeds. The circumstances that he has, at times, barely managed to live through have led to him staying constantly on edge for danger (and making frequent, hopelessly paranoid use of telepathy on everyone around him), and his dreams are oftentimes haunted by the things that he did as part of his stint in the military. He finds it difficult to make friends or trust people in general, and occasionally has severe flashbacks that make him especially volatile. This has caused him to turn to alcohol to numb his memories as well as he can, and he finds that it generally helps with nausea and otherwise being too on edge.
That unpleasantness aside, however, when left alone - or even mostly undisturbed - Kanin doesn't come across as much more than an average, if apathetic, person, taking little interest in the affairs of other people unless they have something to offer him (or get in his way). What few friends he makes are usually people he is forced to put up with by his employers or those intelligent or lucky enough to keep on his good side during repeat visits to the Brigand's Barroom, a dive bar located in southeast Poria. Those that get in good with Kanin note that, when it comes to his friends, he is fairly generous and loyal, and willing to protect them or their interests without payment if it's not far out of the way. They also note a surprising (though, given his longevity, perhaps not) level of intelligence, claiming that when it comes to Poria's criminal underworld, Kanin is one of the best people to go to for assistance or advice; after years of such work, he is quite aware of the many intricate relationships between criminals, seems to have connections with every major syndicate, and is more than savvy enough to change sides if there's enough profit in doing so. In short, he's one of the most valuable friends or allies one could have in Poria's slums, but any such friendship or alliance is by nature built upon terra infirma.
History: Born in the slums of the East End, the bastard son of a long-dead, good-for-nothing drug addict he never knew and a frail, beleaguered elven mother, the early years of Kanin's life were anything but easy. He was derided as a weakling, coward, and crybaby by his human peers, an ugly, stupid brute by his elven ones, received only a basic formal education, and fought often. These fights, almost always provoked by the aforementioned insults (or truly awful comments about Kanin's mother) often ended with broken bones for other boys, until the beatings escalated into fighting young gang members and small-time criminals with knives at the age of eighteen; at twenty-one, he graduated to firearms, and conflicts that had once sent his detractors to the hospital began to, with increasing regularity, put them underground. It wasn't until he was twenty-six that he met, and made a surprisingly positive impression on, a human sorcerer named Fayrin Drakkan; soon after meeting the man, he was offered an apprenticeship as a young spellcaster, with Fayrin quite confident that Kanin would prove himself a more than capable sorcerer.
Working for three years under the mage made Kanin more knowledgeable than most on a few subjects; he was trained quite well in the use of the telepathic magic he was born with (and was only now becoming aware of), learned how to craft spells of his own - though he very rarely had the patience to do so - and was enlightened to various sources of power he could tap into. Willpower and magical energy in the surroundings were some such sources - but so too were darker sources such as the life force of one's self or others. Kanin took to well to all of these, both in theory and practice, but he failed when it came to the slow, methodical processes and ingredients of more traditional ritualistic magic. After repeated failures and refusal to learn from his mistakes on Kanin's part, Fayrin regretfully ended the apprenticeship, immensely disappointed that such natural talent would go to waste. Returning home to burden his mother, and both without any job and severely lacking in any skills that were both useful and legal, Kanin immersed himself in the one option that was always available in East Poria - a life of crime.
Lacking the necessary skills or knowledge to work as a burglar, racketeer, or information broker, Kanin started out as a debt collector for the Graggor syndicate. While he wasn't especially physically intimidating, his magical abilities came in handy when it came time to fight or to draw information from debtors, and he still had several serviceable knives from his violent youth. For the most part this debt collection service was standard; a few shakedowns here and there, but rarely any serious violence - until about a year in, when the Graggor family started to clash with the all-goblin Duende association. The next time Kanin went to collect from a goblin "client", said client wasn't alone - there were two Duende hitmen with him, set on ending the elf's life then and there. Surprisingly to all parties, Kanin left with not only his life, but no apparent injuries, the money of the now-dead hitmen and target, and a feeling of raw fulfillment. Those higher up in the Graggor syndicate took note of this - including old Ezra Graggor himself - and put Kanin on the fast track to the top, giving him the duty to collect from increasingly violent people before finally offering him a position as a hitman. Within eight years of joining the syndicate, Kanin had gotten respect, power - both "political" and otherwise - job satisfaction, and wealth, to a degree he had never before imagined; his mother, who had long toiled at a job she hated to support him, was sent to live in a pretty coastal village, blissfully unaware of her son's wrongdoing. Around this time, he began to make himself recognizable, wearing his suit constantly in public and making sure to always present the image of a cold, capable killer.
Ironically, Kanin's troubles began then, as he began to kill less discriminately, certain that the amiable Ezra wouldn't turn on him and doubting that any other groups would dare to draw his ire. It started with a hit on the Sylvan Brotherhood gone wrong, or nearly so; trapped with armed and all-too-aware men around him, the killer was brought to the peak of desperation. For the first time he drew on Fayrin’s lesson of drawing strength from the lives of others, empowering himself to a degree that he had never imagined possible from the remains of his principal target. The other elves began to gun one another down, seeing the hitman in their sworn brothers; the last, his mind frayed and twisted by the telepathic assault, turned his weapon on himself - even as the remains of the inadvertent power source’s thoughts echoed in Kanin’s mind, swearing to see him dead for betraying his people. That raw strength, the level of sheer force that it gave to the young elf, proved addictive - in the long run, almost fatally so.
From then on, jobs he was employed on became more violent, with collateral damage a commonality; at first an extra body or two, but slowly building up to entire households murdered, the buildings burned to the ground, and the corpses rendered unidentifiable without magic. Worse still, as the body count rose he became more and more unstable, more voices (crying, cursing, hateful, horrified, and everything in between) filling his head. Between the time he turned thirty and forty, Kanin had significantly increased the murder rate in Poria solely through his own work, and while it was common knowledge within the underworld that he was responsible, law enforcement never seemed able to pin it on him. Witnesses were killed, and evidence to link him to the scene never found, in large part due to the Graggor's continued interest in keeping him out of prison. The final straw, however, was Kanin taking the life of a young woman outside of a job; Ezra then explained to the killer that he was simply too dangerous to continue to employ on a permanent basis. While the reasoning was sound, Kanin could hardly have been called thrilled at being fired; he impassively accepted his termination, but butchered a young orcish man the night following. Callous in his choice of location and the brutal manner in which he killed the man, Kanin was brought in by law enforcement for the first time, and thus began one of the most controversial trials in Riordan's recent history.
Despite a clearly inordinate level of force used on Kanin's part, he was able to successfully plead not guilty of murder in the first degree; it was readily apparent that he had killed the man, but the reasoning behind doing so much less so. Further, in a final favor for his longtime friend, Ezra collaborated with Kanin to send dozens of perjurious (and, shockingly, several sincere) character witnesses to the stand for the defense, as well as still more testifying that the man Kanin had killed had been extremely drunk, violent, and dangerous - not to mention significantly larger than the elf. These arguments and more were successful insofar as keeping Kanin from a decades-long stint behind bars, though he was still convicted of murder in the second degree; further, an expert's analysis of the killer's mental health recommended he be put on antipsychotic medication for the remainder of his life. Between the character witnesses and his own sincerely remorseful apology to the family (after taking his medication, of course), he was sentenced “only” to fifteen years behind bars. Kanin ended up spending three years in a medium-security facility where he was constantly medicated, and his behavior improved greatly; further, he was allowed to spend much of his free time on the study of magic, provided that he was very strictly supervised, and received the benefits of a more complete education as well.
That year, he was made an offer. He was approached by one Colonel Jason Locklear of the Riordan Imperial Guardsmen, and told that in exchange for serving his country on the front lines of the war, parts of his sentence would be lifted and he would be provided a significant wage during said service. Eager to return to normal life (insofar as his life could ever be called normal), Kanin accepted, and was immediately transferred to a militarily-secured prison which was ostensibly only for the worst offenders. That, at least, was the official story; the truth was many shades darker, and led to things that he would come to regret worse than his time in prison - even more than the bloodstained years that preceded it. Kanin was recruited for a special operations force operating deep within the Mistlord Republic, and to that end was trained, tested, and to no small degree experimented on for an entire year and a half to ensure his fitness - physical, magical, mental, and emotional - for his duties. His telepathy was sharply honed during this period, and he was made familiar with the use of cutting-edge military equipment that, by rights, was often illegal; it would have been, at least, if the Empire cared about anything beyond winning. While his course of antipsychotics continued (indeed, at an even higher dose), Kanin was pumped full of aggression-enhancing stimulants to ensure he would be constantly vigilant.
It was only then that he was inserted into his unit, one too valuable and deadly to be given a name or even an official designation. They called themselves Ghosts, the Damned, or anything else that came to mind on a given day; what they did was both more important and more vile than the names attached to it. With eleven other men and women at a time (all heavily armed, magically powerful, and carrying ThaumDets, or “thaumaturgical unit detectors”), Kanin would slip past the front lines and infiltrate military bases and research facilities, or conduct campaigns of state terrorism; more than one village saw its end at their hands, the only survivors scattered to the winds wailing in terror. Mistlord accused Riordan of countless atrocities in those years, and most were well-founded; the evidence, however, was rarely there, and the staunch kingdom’s faith began to dwindle and be replaced by fear. The constant brushes with death and knowledge that, were it to happen, he would never be acknowledge publicly drained Kanin; the pervasive and unfamiliar knowledge that what he was doing was wrong made it worse, as he saw and took part in innocents, even children, being gunned down in streets and homes.
Worse still, he was continuously encouraged to draw strength from the dead where necessary, despite being a far more powerful and refined magician than he had been before. Thankfully, the antipsychotics held out, only the occasional whisper of disgust and hatred breaking through the shield they provided him. The last straw, for Kanin, came during a raid on an antimagic research facility, once his team had apparently been expected at. Things had been going smoothly, thaum readings normal, until they emerged into a large, mostly-open room… and blast doors slammed shut behind them while gunfire began to pelt through thin walls. The group took cover where they could and prepared to counterattack (having been more than suitably-trained for such situations) when thaum readings dropped; from 100% (“baseline” reading) down to 25 to one-tenth of a percent. Simul, then Clancy fell as Kanin’s mind worked frantically for a solution; Armin died returning fire, Michelle while radioing for support (as if they would get any), and he gave in to what seemed his only option. Each of these operatives had a single-use emergency “ration” of an experimental compound intended as an exponential magic enhancer, each consisting of a syringe and small vial of faintly-glowing purple fluid. Kanin injected himself with three such syringes in quick succession, and focused himself as best as possible while ducking for better cover. In a matter of seconds, the thaum count had went far past normal per the elf’s device, and was increasing even faster. His eyes began to gleam, then burn like suns, while his mind filled with the roaring thoughts of ten thousand men and women that threatened to shatter it like glass. He heard, but could not see, an explosion, homed in on the minds of the enemy combatants, and focused. Unlike before, there were no screams for mercy nor of hatred; simply the cessation of thought as their consciousnesses were shredded, as wheat in a combine. The strain, however, was too much - and perhaps mercifully, Kanin fell unconscious, into seemingly endless dreams haunted by the dead and dying, among still stranger and more nightmarish experiences that he to this day has failed to fully understand.
Only minutes had passed when he came to, but he felt as though on the edge of death, bleeding from a bullet wound to the abdomen and barely able to move. The facility had been cleared and valuable non-combatant hostages taken by those of his comrades who had remained alive, and he was assisted to the extraction point in silence. Of course, silence for his comrades was not silence for Kanin, and he vomited more than once on the return trip, his body wracked by tremors as he experienced maddening psychic backlash. He was questioned heavily on what had happened upon his return, and answered while offering his resignation at the same time; it was granted, with the clear condition that any word of how he had spent that part of his sentence would have severe consequences for himself and his mother. Following that he was transferred to a minimum-security prison (having been officially “corrected”) and put on a still higher dose of antipsychotics. At that site he was given a much broader range of privileges; he developed a keen interest in a variety of strategic tabletop games, magic, and in his own fitness as a result of having so much time to spend on both, completing the B90X program more than once despite recommendations against and finishing his sentence in peace and quiet that the traumatized man desperately needed.
However, like any good thing, Kanin's time in prison eventually came to an end; under unspecified circumstances (though, no doubt, related to his service) he was given a pardon from a high-ranking state official after another three years in that facility. The very day that he was released he retrieved his weaponry, bought new clothing, and returned to the East End to do the job it felt like he always had; however, he did not stop his course of antipsychotics. Though now taking on a much greater variety of jobs than his "cleaning" duties, Kanin was and continues to be recognized as one of Poria's - and, quite likely, all of Riordan's - most prolific and deadly killers, and he is the man many go to if they can't afford any errors involved in their jobs. In the decade and a half since he was released, the elf has matured into a much more stable and precise individual despite serious bouts with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe, persistent feelings of guilt, and has thus warranted trust and respect from his employers where he used to only merit fear and wariness. Further, he has taken a much more vested interest in magic than at any time before in his life, using a great deal of money to provision his home with a well-stocked library of the arcane arts, which he often peruses in his free time - in no small part hoping to find some sort of cure, fix, or even preventative mechanism for the damage that he has done himself.
Magic: Though he studied under Fayrin for years, and put a great deal of effort into understanding magic while in prison and since, Kanin's principal strength lies in telepathy - an power he has since morbidly dubbed Final Thoughts. He is capable not only of reading people's minds and silently projecting information to them, but also of altering their perception and mental state, either subtly or (with a great deal more effort) overtly. While his raw potential is vast, and even greater under the right circumstances, since leaving prison he has become far more refined in the application of his skills rather than worked to strengthen himself through raw power, having obviously had strongly negative experiences with as much. This ability can be used to mimic almost any mind-affecting spell, provided Kanin understands the mechanism by which to use it - and decades of experience and research mean that he very much does.
One very useful trick Kanin did pick up from Fayrin, however, is the ability to draw magical energy from his surroundings and from other people to fuel his spellcasting - and, thus, often avoid using his own reserves on his magic. Thus, in the presence of a strong magical field, Kanin's strength in the supernatural is greatly amplified; in a "null" zone, however, he must greatly exhaust himself to generate sorcerous effects. Owing to his training in drawing energy from the life force of others, he can empower himself through recently-dead or (willing) living people, though in the former case this has come at the cost of seriously eroding his sanity through absorbing traumatic memories of the deceased, as well as an intense addictive element associated with the sense of control he finds in it. He is unsure of the mechanism by which this functions, but is consumed by the nauseating thought that he could be inadvertently tampering with the souls of the dead, if such things exist.
Kanin's magical ability serves him very well in his line of work, both with the acquisition of information and in completing the more wicked aspects of his business unnoticed and unhindered.
Misc.: Kanin puts a great deal of importance on making sure he takes his medicine regularly, and to this end always keeps some on his person while remaining very well-stocked at home. He is a frequent and (unusually for an elf) fairly heavyweight drinker, though this is easily attributed to his alcoholism.
Kanin never prays; any god that would answer him in his desperation would have to be even worse than himself.
Kanin regularly corresponds with and sends gifts to his mother, though does not let on to the criminal activities which fund them, instead giving off the impression that he is a successful business specialist. If she is aware of his misdeeds, she is quite good at hiding as such.
Finally, the knife and pistol that Kanin carries with him are for much more than show; he has proven to be lightning-quick and deadly accurate in the use of both, whether his targets are expecting him or not; he is also a brawler of considerable repute (and, following his training, could nearly be called a master of unarmed combat), though avoids fighting unarmed wherever possible. His non-combat and non-magical skills include, unsurprisingly, great familiarity with forensic evidence (and the destruction thereof), reconnaissance, breaking and entering, and technical and practical knowledge of a wide variety of firearms (and some explosives).
