WRIGHT, winston aaron {slayer}

Whatever he looks like, what people usually notice first about Winston is his quietness, his almost unnatural stillness. Winston talks as much as your average person, but always in a low and calm voice, hardly ever outwardly reacting much at all—whether the stimulus is pain or shock or anger or anything else. He appears absolutely unfeeling, though sometimes he pretends to smile if it’ll make his life a little easier.

When he’s not on the job, Winston keeps his mid-brown hair neat and wears a slightly oversized pair of glasses. People wonder why he bothers with the glasses over contact lenses in his line of work; they’re seemingly an affectation he can’t kick, part of his identity. Something of a smokescreen too. And speaking of smokescreens, Winston smokes. A lot. He’s absolutely hooked on menthols, and is the kind to light up anywhere it’s safe to without asking any permissions, even though he’s usually painfully polite… with just enough cold sarcasm for a bit of bite. This means he smells strongly of cigarettes all of the time. That mixed with his bergamot-and-clove cologne makes for a very distinctive scent to those gifted with smells, and he knows it. He seems to do it on purpose.

He stands at around six feet tall and is quite wiry of frame; he has a good set of lithe muscles on him but they don’t give away at all the inhuman strength that he was born with as a slayer. His unflinching, usually expressionless face is dainty and rather finely boned, with dark blue eyes that tend to flit around and watch everything far too closely. He’s trained in several forms of combat; the second-nature fluidity of someone who has been practising since childhood is particularly visible when it comes to savate. Yeah, he’s a kicker, and his long lean legs look on the thin side but can pack a hell of a concussive punch. He’s also fond of the quarterstaff as a weapon when he feels like going all-out; carved from wood and sharpened at the ends, of course.

Some other notable physical traits are his accent, which is distinctly English and from Manchester for those with a finer ear for dialect. He’s also fairly scarred from his encounters with night-beasts, including several criss-crosses that go over his lower back and around one hip, and a deep gouge that starts at the base of his throat and goes over his collarbone, which is sometimes just about visible when his clothing shifts.

Best get one of the most integral parts of Winston’s personality out of the way first: he is a borderline sociopath. He has a hard time connecting emotionally, and does not feel genuine empathy for the pain of others. He can grow fond of people (just as he can grow to despise people—and has grown to despise the supernatural types that live in the city), and those he holds dear he will go to the ends of the earth for, though his feelings regarding such people tend to be more along the lines of fascination than heartfelt affection. There are exceptions to every rule, but they are rare in his case, and seemingly only ever reserved for family.

Calm, collected and impossible to rile up, Winston is annoying in that nothing ever seems to bother him. Even when he loses, even when someone breaks his forearm over an iron railing, he barely reacts. There’s something scarily unstoppable about him, like an android. He’s also immensely capable when concerning his field of expertise; basically that of combat, supernatural lore and most of all, tracking and surveillance. Winston is a bit of a techie and tended to use a lot more modern technology than a lot of the old-school slayers back when he was an active professional slayer in England: tracking devices, bugs and taps, cameras and hidden mics. All home-made. He hates not knowing things, it’s one of the few things that deeply bothers him, and can get a bit obsessive when he’s on the prowl for information. He’s a lurker; a spy.

However, very little of this is apparent when meeting him for the first time. He comes across as a bit aloof and condescending, but can mimic a genuine-looking smile and get involved in a bit of banter. It can be hard to tell how much of his behaviour is genuine and how much is him deliberately parroting those around him in order to fit in: there’s something stone-cold about his eyes and his spirit, but when people are interesting or witty or sometimes just… different, he can get caught up in legitimately enjoying their company. However, aside from those that win over his undying loyalty (a long and hard battle), he can drop someone like a hot potato without batting an eye, and betray them without any guilt.

Winston enjoys the sophisticated things in life: fine art and literature, vintage wines, classic cars. However, he isn’t wealthy—since slaying isn’t a legal business anymore because of the truce, he took to being a freelance fixer of gadgetry, and also tinkers around with inventing and mechanics every now and again. Nonetheless, the social chameleon that he is, he tends to slip into big, luxurious events, get his drinks paid for by others on empty promises and is generally slick enough to get away with it.

But for all that he covers his tracks well, there is one thing that threatens all of his careful planning and blending in, trying to make himself and his actions untraceable: he keeps trophies. For no rational reason whatsoever, he feels compelled to collect little mementos of his misdeeds… and sometimes little mementos of nothing in particular. He just steals things and stashes them. Not even he’s sure why he does it, but it could well get him into trouble someday because that’s a dead giveaway, and he centres his life of intricate acts and lies on not giving a thing away.

Winston was born in Manchester in the north of England four years after his only sibling; his big brother Kilmory. Their mother was a renowned slayer in the area, as no such truce existed in England as it did in Chicago. She saw herself as a protector against the two supernatural abominations: the undead and the mongrels. She had a lot of influence over her children’s perceptions of the world. Winston hung onto every word she said, perhaps because he was born a very gifted slayer himself, showing superhuman capabilities from an early age. Kilmory, on the other hand, was a plain old non-slayer mortal, and was always fairly compassionate and gentle with a strong moral compass. He didn’t grow to hate the supernatural like his little brother did. Nevertheless, the two were always close, and still are. Kilmory is one of the few people in the world that Winston would die for. In a weird way, the hero-worship of his older brother that is fairly common in young children never quite went away.

Their father was not a slayer by birth, but worked alongside their mother in her quest to bring down the supernatural creatures in ‘her’ city. He wasn’t superhuman but he was strong, tough and resourceful, and he also knew a lot about both vampirism and lycanthropy. Both of Winston’s parents—Tegan and Hugh—helped to train Winston from boyhood to follow in the family footsteps. Kilmory trained alongside him, but enrolled in a law enforcement academy at the age of nineteen in order to become a police officer instead of a slayer, deciding to help people out with their smaller, less supernatural but nonetheless important problems. He passed with flying colours; like Winston, he’d been trained in fitness, combat and tactical thinking since childhood, after all.

At that time Winston was fifteen, and beginning to shape up nicely into the well-honed weapon that he would eventually become. By then he’d started to notice that he was a little bit… different to most people. He never had many friends; not everyone agreed with what his parents did, besides which his family had a lot of enemies. They were dangerous to know in the area, what with various covens and packs they’d pissed off by murdering whichever hapless members they came across. Other kids his age had always stayed away from him. It had made him disconnected, distant; he’d never really learned how to befriend people, or even how to interact with people in a way that wasn’t the military-standard order-taking he had with his parents or the endless battle, betrayal and murder that was his time spent with any of their targets. His big brother was the one exception—Winston became a lot more human around him, sometimes even animated, sometimes even happy. For the rest of the time, he carefully began piecing together the act that he continues to this day, now a master at blending in.

By the time Winston was twenty, he was an efficient slaying machine. Tegan Wright was very proud of her little boy. He’d already started on solo missions and taking on targets for whoever would pay to have ‘pests’ eradicated. Who needed friends when you had a KA-BAR hunting knife the length of your forearm? However, this was the year that things would take a turn for the worse and lead to him moving across the Atlantic to a new city and a new world. His father was turned to lycanthropy from a bite resulting from one of their skirmishes. But that wasn’t the big problem: the big problem was the fact that he decided after being turned that slaying was wrong. That not all werewolves were bad, and that the little unit of three should stop persecuting the supernatural the way they did.

Neither Tegan nor Winston could stand for that. The Wright power couple split and Hugh was cast out. He used to be a strong asset to the team; now it was just Tegan and her youngest son, who was talented but still lacking in the experience that Hugh had had. Slaying became a tougher uphill battle, and Winston felt a lot more betrayed by his father’s turning than he liked to admit. He was as hurt as he was disgusted.

Kilmory, then twenty-four, was the only member of the family that stayed in touch with their father. His career had taken off in the last five years, and he’d also proposed to a bonny lass from Glasgow who worked with the emergency response unit of the same police force. Winton hadn’t been sure of her at first, but he’d warmed to her over the three years they’d been together and eventually decided that she was an acceptable candidate for Kilmory’s wife. Besides, she made him happy, and Winston did want his brother to be happy. She ended up being the instrument of the most misery Kilmory ever went through, though, when on one night the unit was called in for a raid on an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Bolton due to suspicious night activity… and was murdered, along with several other members of her unit. Suspicion pointed towards the local pack of werewolves, whose lycans had been attempting to control the wild changed wolves that they had taken under their wings. Unfortunately, someone had thought something strange was going on inside the building and called the police—and they had entered it.

While Winston himself can barely comprehend deep emotions, Kilmory was justifiably devastated. The loss of his fiancée also triggered a loss of faith. Winston couldn’t understand grief, but he could understand that his brother was miserable and starting to break down, going through the motions of work and chores but no longer enjoying life. They both discussed in detail one night, sat in their old back garden like they used to do as children, and the next day Kilmory suddenly came to Winston with a wild-sounding proposition: Chicago.

The truce between the vampires, werewolves and humans in the city had made history when it was created, and as far as anyone outside of the city could tell, it was going just swell. People were safe and happy, and everyone got on wonderfully. Or so they were led to believe. Leaving their bitter, controlling mother behind (though Winston still regrets that sometimes), the two brothers decided to start a new life in Chicago. Kilmory’s plan was for Winston to get away from the dark, nasty business of slaying and to start completely fresh, without anyone imposing their views or expectations on him. But it wasn’t to be. What’s there to say? The call of being a slayer just spoke to him, as though he couldn’t keep away. Winston went into electronics, it having been something he always found fairly interesting, and made his living that way on the surface… but within a year of arriving in Chicago, he’d joined the ranks of the Gentleman’s Club in secret.

At first he was considered young, inexperienced and eccentric—not to mention a bit creepy—but he impressed them soon enough. That’s what you get for keeping up the family business. In the three years since then his reputation has grown, and his intolerance for the supernatural has only been allowed to fester. Members of the club know that he’s dangerous… but to the average citizen, he’s just another faceless stranger. And he’s perfectly fine with that.

The cat sat on the mat.