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Johnathan Crenshaw
Played By: ThePoet

Johnathan Crenshaw by ThePoet

TEAM: The Syndicate

SECTOR: INDUSTRIAL

KIT CLASS: Empathy


The Syndicate Team Lieutenant

Hall Of Fame!

Survival - 10 wins!

Brutal - 1 fatalaties!

Fight Record
League Wins: 8
League Losses: 3
Out Of League Wins: 2
Out of League Losses: 2
Total Wins: 10
Total Losses: 5
Who killed Landon Morisato? - Win 11-5
Murder Mind - Win 9-5
Tortured Twin; Life of Sarah Lynn - Win 7-6
Run, Dante, Run - Win 10-6
Rederick, Hell's Bounty Hunter - Win 11-4
The Door - Loss 3-8
Agent Pendragon, K.A.F Division 13 - Win 12-3
Mort - Win 9-5
The Last Virgin of Pele Island - Loss 7-8
Master of Disguise - Loss 4-6
Intellect's Antichrist - Win 5-3
Fastest Pussycat - Win 8-7
Toc Darkone - Win 8-4
Lord Canelaser, Eater of Widows - Loss 5-6
The Door - Loss 20-26

Ah Khazan City, the Nexus of all realities, home to great and small alike. It seems that every living creature passes through this city at some point in their existence. Home to the natural, supernatural, and any other kind of "natural" there is, Khazan has played host to many powers, dominations, denominations, epic battles, cataclysmic events, and many other major events. It has also played host to simple street muggings, bar fights, property disputes, petty thefts, traffic violations, and numerous similar mundane occurrences. Then of course there are the happenings that fall somewhere in between those two categories. Events that are not as noteworthy as epic battles or colossal beings, but events that are more than average and seldom explainable. These are the kind of events that make common folk scratch their heads and leave even the mightier beings a bit baffled as to the exact nature of these occurrences. These are the things you would see on "The Twilight Zone" or "The X-Files" and maybe even on "Unsolved Mysteries". There are a host of them, you just have to know where to look. These events are what I deal in. Well, I don't deal in them per se, but they are pretty much an everyday occurrence for me. They happen so frequently that I'm not usually shocked by them at all. If something bizarre happens that I don't understand, I just reason it out logically. I tell myself there must be an explanation for it; otherwise it wouldn't have happened in the first place. But I'm getting way ahead of myself...

My name is Johnathan Crenshaw. My occupation, if you could call it an actual occupation, is gambling, smuggling, thievery, and hired light crime. It may not be a technical job, but it's what I do for a living. I never do one over the other, it's just whatever I'm in the mood for or whatever will bring in more money, which was usually a Syndicate job. I don't have a problem breaking the law, but if I don't have to break it, that's one less headache to worry about. I tend toward gambling when my conscience sneaks up on me, but that doesn't happen very often. I usually pick up jobs from the Syndicate to steal a particular item for them or smuggle certain goods into or out of a given place. We have a good relationship and they pay well because I never let them down, but I�(TM)m not a full time employee, more of a contractor. I don't work for the Fallen because even as supernatural as my life is, those beings just downright creep me out. There are people who would tell you that I'm not making the most of my talents and I wouldn't disagree, but my life is relatively simple in spite of those talents and that's the way I like it.

Until I was 16, I lived in an orphanage in the Industrial Sector of Khazan. There were many of us there, often sleeping three or four to a bed because of the limited size of the orphanage. I never knew my parents. Never spoke to them, saw their faces, or even knew their names. When I was twelve years old, I asked one of the directors of the orphanage who my parents were because natural curiosity had finally caught up with me. He took me aside for maybe five minutes to explain what little he knew. My mother had brought me to this place when I was a week old. She was found two weeks later in a gutter, dead from alcohol poisoning. The orphanage had never seen hide not hair of my father. The only thing they knew for certain was that he had gotten my mother pregnant. It wasn't much information, it was hardly more than a scrap, but it was a start. It was enough to springboard me to find out my origins and lead me down the road I currently travel.

 

Personality: Attitude, hmm... No one had ever has me about my attitude or personality before, so I really don't know where to begin. For some reason I think my views and personality can be better said through some of my favorite quotes, sayings, and platitudes. So here goes.

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

"Curiosity kills the cat, I'm glad I'm not a cat."

"Work smart before you work hard."

"Be prepared."

"Discretion is the better part of valor."

"Never underestimate the enemy."

“I don�(TM)t fail; I succeed in finding what doesn�(TM)t work.”

There may be more sayings, but those will suffice for now.

 

Strength:

 

Weak BELOW normal human strength -
can bench press 50 pounds (maybe).
Agility:

 

Standard Normal human agility.
Body:

 

Standard Normal human endurance. Mind:

 

Superior Highly educated and ingenious.
A smart cookie.

Family History

Eileen Crenshaw, that was my mother's name. Her name was on the forms that committed me to the care of the orphanage until I was old enough to fend for myself. That was all I had to go on to find out my own origins, history and any background whatsoever. It wasn't much, but it was a start. After hearing that my mother drank herself to death, part of me had to know why she had done that, and why she had simply abandoned me without a second thought. I know it seems stupid. Why should I care so much about someone who didn't seem to care about me at all? The truth is that there are a lot of things that I wonder about that I'll never find the answer to. But in this I had a chance to find out the answer and unlike so many other things, I had a personal stake in this. This was going to harp on my mind all day and all night until I figured it out.

As I said, a name wasn't much to go on. That's why I'm glad technology is so advanced. Once a week, the directors would take us to the library to get books, get help with homework, or simple sit quietly. I used that time to go on the internet to find out information about my mother. Having only an hour a week made the process very slow, but over the course of several months I gathered little tidbits and started to piece the story together. She had been in and out of jail for most of her life. It was usually petty theft or robbery, enough to get you in to jail for a little while. Because she was in jail so much, they had many of her known addresses. I cross-checked those with the city records that showed her last known address before she died. There was a match. I found out that it was a one room apartment. When I got a map and checked where it was, I became very nervous. The apartment was in the shadiest part of Lowtown, which unto itself is completely shady. This was the kind of place that a young teenager would get killed, kidnapped, or mugged. I knew that, but my longing desire to know overcame any fear I had. I had to find out, pure and simple.

One night about a week after I turned thirteen, I set out. I took a bus as close as I could get to the apartment building, but I still had over a mile to walk, public services just don't run in that part of town. No matter, I knew the way there from reading that map so many times. As long as I didn't get mugged, I was fine. Through some good fortune, I reached the place untouched. It was several stories high and seemed to be an office building as well. I checked the directory, but there was only one person there, Arick Huebris: The Mortician. I had heard the name mentioned several times, always in disgust, fear, and a little bit of nervousness. I wondered why this guy was the only person here. Was he so dangerous that everyone just goose-stepped, or was it that this building was about to fall over because it was so old and dilapidated. Whatever the reason, I had come too far to stop now. I went in and up to the top floor to the apartment my mother had lived in. As I opened the door, I prepared for the worst.

It wasn't bad, especially considering the neighborhood. There was a stove in one corner and a dresser in another, both covered with dust and mold. There was a single bed with covered with books, clothes and a few other personal items. I started sifting through that pile and found what appeared to be a journal or diary of some sort. It was worn and moldy, but most of the writing was still legible. There was nothing of much interest until the last entry. "Damn that bastard Jason, if that is his real name. Stupid wizard was all sweet and charming; probably cast a spell on me to get me to have sex with him. Now I'm pregnant and about to give birth. I got fired from the restaurant because I can't wait on tables when I'm this pregnant. If I ever find that bastard I'll wring his neck. Damnit, I will never trust another man as long as I live. Sure he was cute and a little... blah he was a wizard. He could have enchanted himself to look like that. What in the blazing hell am I gonna do now?"

Paternal Legacy

  • Power: Spellcraft
  • Level:Superior
  • Kit Power Link: Empathy
  • Area Effect This attack causes damage in a large area.
  • Multi Attack Attack can hit multiple times during one strike.
So my father was a wizard. That was a shock to say the least. In the end it left me with more questions than I had originally. Was he still alive? Was his name Jason? What kind of wizard was he? Did he even know he had a son? Was his gift for using magic genetic or learned? That last question was the most intriguing. It was so intriguing that the other questions soon faded from my mind. In part it was intriguing because I was always curious about the supernatural. The other part was the thrill in thinking that I could be supernatural. I thought about this for awhile as I stood there in my mother's apartment. I decided that I should do the same thing that had brought me here, do the research and find out. It wasn't as simple as going to the library though. For one thing, as magical as Khazan was, wizardry and spellcraft were frowned upon by the orphanage directors. When I tried to check several books on the subject out of the library, they stopped me. When I tried to look for it on the internet, they stopped me after a few minutes. I guess you could say this is where my thieving and trickery skills started to manifest. I resorted to taking brief peaks at web pages when they weren't around. I stuffed magic books into a larger, more mundane book such as "Moby Dick" to smuggle them out of the library. It was tricky business getting those things past the clerks and door detectors.

I started off simple, the history of magic. I learned many things. First it was a mixture of genetics, knowledge, and self-discipline that allowed one to wield magic. Wielding magic was tapping into supernatural and metaphysical energies around us, then harnessing, channeling, and converting that energy into the form you wanted. There were mental techniques, certain gestures based on the type of magic, incantations, herbal concoctions that supposedly supplemented your magic, and many other minute details that would make magic very difficult to even create let alone control. And for all of the detail and severity of it, I had to try. It was in my blood so to speak. So I kept studying it in secret for several years. I learned different techniques and other various tools, but I didn't actually attempt anything until I was sixteen years old.

My first attempt at magic was a complete disaster. It ended up getting me thrown out of the orphanage it was so bad. A simple fireball, I just wanted to conjure it and hold it in my hand for awhile. Simple, right. Well, the first part went smoothly. I conjured a ball of fire the size of a lemon and just held it, gazing at what I had created. After several minutes, I decided to put it out. That was where things went awry. Instead of dissipating like I wanted, it grew and expanding until it was about the size of a watermelon. Then it exploded. The bedroom where I was had severely scorched walls, charred bedding, singed clothes, and my own eyebrows didn't grow back for five months. The directors came running and asked what happened, and that no-good Sherri Trailan had been watching and told on me. They gave me thirty minutes to gather my things and then it was out the door. Ah well, a minor setback, especially considering the fact that now I knew I could use magic.

The Streets

  • Power: Lucky
  • Level:Superior
  • Kit Power Link: Empathy
I was thrilled for the moment. It didn't matter that I was thrown out of the orphanage and had nothing except a bag with a few things in it. I had made a fireball. Sure it didn't work as I had planned, but I had wielded magic and I felt that over time I could learn to control and even use it. Full of glee, I wondered about aimlessly for hours until the sun started to set. When I noticed the change in daylight, I also noticed I was very hungry and a bit thirsty. And then it hit me that I couldn't simple go back to the orphanage for something to eat. I had some money and I decided it was worth the couple dollars I had to buy some food. So I walked, in search of a cheap restaurant where I could eat, drink, and think.

I found a restaurant, not a nice, upscale, fancy restaurant, but it had cheap food and that's what I wanted. I bought a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake. Then I sat down and pondered my whole situation. I had the clothes on my back and a spare change of clothes in my bag. I had about 100 dollars. And I had very personal items like a comb, toothbrush, wallet, small magic book, and a couple other things. I would need a place to stay and that usually cost money, unless I wanted to go use my mom's apartment. I decided that would be a last resort. I would also eventually need money. I knew basic thievery, but I was far from a professional pickpocket. Supplies and possessions were always limited at the orphanage, so had learned to squirrel things away discreetly. Trying to rob someone would more than likely get me killed. Long story short I needed other possibilities, and luckily fate intervened this time on my behalf.

I walked out of the restaurant and down an alley in search of a hotel. I didn't find one, but I found about six men squatting in a semicircle farther down the alley. As I walked up on them, I noticed they were throwing dice, gambling it seemed because money was constantly changing hands among them. I stood there watching for awhile, trying to figure out the game, but it moved too fast for me to really catch on.

One of the guys noticed me standing there for awhile and said, "What you staring at, son?"

"Just trying to figure out what you're playing." I said in a weak voice.

"It's called "3s". You got any money to play?"

I thought for a second and noticed they were only playing for coins and a dollar bill here and there. Even if I lost badly, I could still have even money to survive. And if I won, it would help a lot. So I said, "Yeah, how do you play?"

Turns out it was an incredibly simple game to play. It was five dice and the object was to get threes or else the lowest number you could. The player who rolled the lowest in a given round won 50 cents from everyone else unless he got all threes, then it was a dollar. We played for what seemed like forever. I ended up winning twenty dollars. Some of the guys hated losing, but they weren't about to get sore that a teenager outplayed them. One by one they all left until it was only me standing there. I was happy I'd won, even borderline ecstatic, but this really hadn't solved any problems. It had only delayed the time when I would be desperate. Something had to give, otherwise I was done for.

Means of Survival

The more I studied magic and spellcraft, the more I realized that its scope was indeed vast if not infinite. It could be used to devastate entire areas with fire and ice, it could be used to charm or seduce a particular person in the case of my parents, it could even be used to heal people and cure the most life-threatening ailments. There had to be something I could use to gain money from this. I had found a hotel. It was an extremely cheap hotel because the twenty dollars I had earned paid for a week's worth of rent. I sat on the grimy bed and thought about it for a long time. It finally dawned on me. Magnetism. I could use magnetism to jimmy door locks and get into houses or businesses and steal money. It didn't exactly seem ethical, but I felt it was my best option. I wasn't about to work in a fast food restaurant or a grocery store, those seemed pale compared to what I knew I could make in the way of money. Besides, I was a wizard. Not a good one yet, but I was a wizard. Wizards didn't strike me as the type who had menial, mundane, everyday jobs.

I still had my library card, so I went to the library to find a book on magic and magnetism. There was only one, but luckily for me it was there and I checked it out. I also printed some internet pages that looked helpful. Now the hard part began. I didn't have any metal to practice with, so I ripped some of the springs out of the hotel mattress. Some of them were already sticking out so it wasn't a big deal. I started reading and practicing the proper mental techniques for magnetism and after three days I was ready to try it. This was kind of a repeat of the fireball incident. It started out well, but I lost control of the magnetic field and ended up with a spring sticking out of my palm. Geez did it hurt. I pulled it out and thankfully it wasn't rusty yet. This was going to take practice and I didn't know how much my hand could take, but it was this or work or starve. The last two appealed slightly less that a disfigured hand. So I practiced. "Practice makes perfect" is another quote I like, because it's mostly true. I only scarred my hand five more times in the next three days. I also put quite a few dents and holes in the wall, but that didn't really matter. I was learning and by the end of the week I had a pretty solid foundation with using magnetism. I locked and unlocked the door to my room and the janitor's closet. He still had no clue where his First Aid kit had disappeared to. I paid for another week at the hotel and then decided to go and test my newfound skills.

Picking locks would be easy enough. Finding a stash of money or a safe would be easy enough too. It's the people that worried me. They were the only factor in this that I had absolutely no control over. I just decided to watch. I picked residential streets at random and just watched the houses, inconspicuously of course. All I needed was for the entire household to be gone for a few minutes so I could go in and find their valuables. It went off like clockwork. One family would go to the movies, another to dinner, and another to a party. I would walk in unnoticed and search for money and other assets. There wasn't always cash or a safe to be found, but there was usually jewelry. Any jewelry I got I took to some shady pawn shops in Lowtown. I didn't get as much as I could have gotten in other places for the jewelry, but chances were next to nil that anyone in Lowtown would turn you in. It seemed that everyone there had one reason or another to avoid the authorities, and that suited my purposes just fine.

Escape Route

So that's the way things went for me. Stealing what I could, where I could. It wasn't always a lot but it was enough to live on. I moved out of the hotel and into a sort of run down apartment near the factories in the Industrial sector. I got some more clothes, some of which I stole, a bed, dresser, bookcase to hold magic books, and anything else I absolutely needed. All my other money went toward spell books or magic lore books. It was an insatiable quest for knowledge really. I'd stopped caring about knowing my father even though this was his legacy; I just cared more about the legacy part. I mastered fireballs finally after about five years. Those things were just so tricky and luckily none of them burned me like the first one had. And so that's how life went for me. Fairly simple, breaking the law, but fairly simple and low risk. I wish I could say there was no risk involved, but that'd be a lie. There was one time I got caught and very nearly arrested.

It was a routine job. I staked out a well-to-do family's house and waited until they left for an evening out. Five minutes after they left, I casually entered the house and began looking around. I found a safe with some money and bonds in it and grabbed them. As I was making my way toward the front door to leave, the family walked in and saw me.

"What the..?" the father gasped, "Put those down, I'll have you arrested."

He and his two teenage sons advanced on me. I might have been able to defend myself with a fireball, but I was too stunned to concentrate and perform any sort of magic at all. I panicked. I threw everything in the air and made a break for the front door. One of the sons grabbed my coat but I wriggled loose and bolted out the door. They followed me for several blocks before I had turned and backtracked enough to lose them. Even so, I was winded and a long way from home. I had escaped just barely and I had no desire to relive that experience. I started walking toward home. Fearful that my face was on the news and police frequencies, I took many back alleys and dark streets. I decided that I needed a better profession, but I also needed some sort of escape route. I settled on teleportation. I was a wizard after all and magic had proved to be my ally in the past.

I did the same thing I always do. I got the books and researched it. Still, this was more complicated than anything else I had tried. I read that wizards had severely hurt themselves and even died from a teleport gone wrong. With all those risks, I still decided to try. I started small. At first I tried going two feet straight ahead of me. For once it worked, my first attempt on teleportation actually worked except everything in my pockets was left right where I had been standing. But I was whole and so excited about this. I practiced every chance I had and soon I could go almost a full city block. It wasn't a huge distance, but it would get me out of a house in a hurry and confuse the heck out of the owners. Regardless of that, I still wanted a new profession. I decided on gambling because the one time I had done it, I had won. Ironically it turned out that gambling was as dangerous as thievery.

Trump Card

Gambling was more of a challenge than I thought. At first I just played dice games, like "Blisters" and "3s". But I couldn't find enough dice games that played with the stakes I wanted. Quite simply, I wasn't making enough money to live on. I wasn't losing money, but that wouldn't cut it. I started looking for anything with higher stakes. The only thing out there I could find were card games, either blackjack or poker, mostly poker. This was a whole different arena for me because it actually involved strategy. With dice games, 99% of the time it was luck and the dice dictated whether you won or lost. With cards, I actually had to think and strategize. There was a very steep learning curve and I was played for a fool many times before I started to get the hang of things. Luckily, I never lost more than I could handle because I often had good cards. Even so it was frightening to know that my income was based on this game. Frightening because I still didn't know if I would win on any given night. It was also frightening because some players hold a grudge and don't like to lose.

One night winning got me in trouble and I'll admit I was doing well that night. It was a normal night at one of the better casinos in Khazan and I was on a roll. I got pocket aces in Texas Hold' em more times than I could count, I got multiple royal flushes and it seemed nothing could go wrong. And I won too, I won big. Almost everyone at the table was awestruck at how good my luck was. Some of them were getting a little upset too. One man in particular left the table in a huff because I had taken the last of his chips. He excused himself to go get more while muttering something about cheating and "the devil's own luck". Ten minutes later I felt a searing pain in my shoulder blade. I turned around half-dazed and blinded by the pain and saw the man standing there with a sick, satisfied expression on his face. He was holding a knife and from what other people were shouting, he had stabbed me in the back. As he raised the other knife to stab me again, I teleported away.

In the alley behind the casino, I pulled the knife out. It was covered in over two inches of blood. I painfully took off my outer shirt and used it to stop the wound. The wound was deep, but it wasn't going to kill me. It did slow me down and it took me a long time to get home. Gambling was certainly easier, but I had never been physically assaulted when committing robbery. I looked for a magical way to prevent this from happening again, but I found none. I found no magic that could stop a surprise knife attack, go figure. During my research I did stumble across an article on police equipment. There was body armor in that article and I thought it was a good idea. I bought some top line body armor, the kind SWAT officers use. Not only that, but I even enchanted it with any magic I knew to reinforce it. I put the armor on a discarded store mannequin to test it out. The knife that went in my shoulder didn't make it through that armor, it didn't even come close. I was satisfied and I began to wear this vest everywhere I went under my clothing. It wasn't exactly comfortable, but I'd rather be itchy and alive than comfortable and dead.

Remembrance

Now that I had working body armor, I had to decide what to do with the knife. It was a good knife. It was sturdy, sharp, decent length, a nice piece for anyone who used a knife. I decided to keep it both as a secondary defense and a reminder that although I had some pretty good spells and magic wielding ability, I was only human. I enchanted the knife too. It wasn't with any fire, frost, armor penetrating, or defense piercing spell, it was a spell that made the knife unusable by anyone besides me. I did this mostly because I didn't want anyone to use my own weapon against me, but also to make sure that I kept the knife. In a weird way it held a special significance for me, almost like a keepsake. Truth be told it's the only physical keepsake I have besides my mother's diary. Everything else is mental or genetic like my use of magic.

Being stabbed wasn't necessarily a wake-up call, but it brought reality back in to focus. I had been just coasting along, happy and nonchalant, almost idyllic. But now I needed something concrete. I needed a regular job or something of that nature. The problem was that my skills did not lend themselves to any respectable or even legal profession besides gambling. I toyed with various ideas before finally settling on organized crime. I don't exactly know why I chose it, but organized crime seemed to naturally fit my skills and even give me a sense of purpose. I sought out the Syndicate, the upscale criminals who aren't bent on world-domination, just profit.

After several months, I managed to grab their attention. The rumors in town were that they were looking for gems. I guess gems were a hot item on the market or something. So naturally, I stole from several jewelry stores and some of the mansions in uptown Khazan. Next I had to find them. The Syndicate didn't exactly advertise so I had to sniff them out. It took me several weeks, but I finally found a warehouse that was a front for their operations about a half-mile from my apartment. I was pissed at something being right under my nose, but it was nice to know I'd be dealing with professionals.

The warehouse itself was an old fish cannery, the kind of place that no one wants to investigate because of the smell. I walked in and asked a guy at a desk if he wanted to buy some gems. He promptly pulled a shotgun from behind the desk and asked, "You a cop?"

"No" I said setting a handful of jewelry on the desk. "I'm your new business associate."

He still had the shotgun on me but he started inspecting the jewelry. He picked up one piece and eyed it carefully. "This necklace looks like one that was reported stolen from a mansion about a month ago."

"It was" I flashed a mischievous grin.

"You got more?" he asked

"Yeah" I said, "How much you payin for this stuff?"

"Depends if you got what we want." he said, finally lowering his gun. "Tell me what you got and I can give you a price."

They ended up giving me fifteen thousand dollars for the lot, not bad for me at all. I asked him if there was anything else they needed and he said to just keep bringing in gems for the moment. I guess I had to earn their trust. It was a start and a very lucrative one at that. I brought in gems and they paid ten times what I could have gotten in Lowtown. After awhile, I forget how long, they started giving me specific targets for things they wanted stolen. They paid handsomely for the named items as well. So that's how life went. I worked for the Syndicate, gambled a decent bit, and even stole for myself if I found something I really liked. Not a bad life at all. I've enjoyed it for the past fifteen years and even at the ripe age of forty I doubt I'll stop anytime soon. But only time will tell.