INFOPOST: CHARACTER HISTORY

[fingersandteeth]

Steven Durante was born in the year 1980 in San Diego to his parents, Luis and Donna. Luis was a computer programmer. Donna was a social worker. His mother’s mother, his Abuelita Espinoza, took care of him while his mother was at work--he spent a lot of his earliest years in the company of her and his Abuelito Espinoza. His father’s younger brother, Carlos, came to live with Steven and his parents when Steven was five in order to attend university in the city and study pathology. Carlos was the sort of person who burned very brightly and Steven admired him very much. He died during the AIDs crisis when Steven had just turned eight.

(Did we mention that Tio Carlos was LGBT+ and occasionally got into trouble with bigots because of this? Because this will be important.)

Later that year, his mother got unexpectedly pregnant with his little sister: Charlene, called ‘Charley’ (and named for the recently deceased Carlos.) Steven decided early on that Charley was his responsibility and that he would take care of her and protect her. When she grew older and turned out to share many of his weird and nerdy interests, he was quietly overjoyed. They ended up as close as two siblings with such a large age difference can be.

Growing up, Steven often felt uncomfortable in his own skin. He had a sense that something wasn’t quite right about him and had an idea that people would be disgusted if they knew. If he wasn't invested in something, he had a hard time caring at all about it. Occasionally he would have intrusive thoughts. Because of this, he worked very hard to be normal and innocuous--and because he had a talent for acting, he more or less was able to pass that way. Along the way he’d also gained the conviction that as long as he played by the rules, written and unwritten, he’d be able to keep safe. Safe from all the things outside that had hurt Tio Carlos and safe from anything wrong inside of him.

It wasn’t that Steven’s family didn’t realize he wasn’t quite like other children. On the contrary, they recognized it fairly early on: his maternal grandfather’s twin sister, Steven’s Tia Abuela Rosa, had possessed many of the same tendencies and it evidently wasn’t unusual for them to pop up in the Espinoza family line--enough that the family already had a host of techniques for dealing with a kid like him, how to hammer in at an early age that ‘everyone is a person’ and ‘you too are part of your community’ and to constantly encourage Steven to work on putting himself in other people’s place to counteract his natural problems with empathy. After long discussions with her husband, Donna decided not to send Steven to a therapist beyond grief counseling for the aftermath of Tio Carlos’ death, figuring the family had him well at hand and not wanting her son to be labeled with something that might haunt him for the rest of his life.

Steven, however, knew none of this at the time--wouldn’t learn about it until he was over forty. He’d assumed he really was a good enough actor to fool even his family. And perhaps because of that, there were very few people Steven felt comfortable enough around to stop playing at being a very normal boy and just be the weird kid he really was. When he was a little kid it was Tio Carlos. When he was a teenager, after the baby had become a person, it was Charley. Those five years in between were very lonely.

Steven did his best to teach Charley how to blend in better with other people, passing on a lot of what he’d learned or figured out on his own. As it turned out, she wasn’t quite like him… but she wasn’t neurotypical either. Unlike Steven, she did receive an official diagnosis, putting her on the autistic spectrum--unsurprising, really, given how Luis was likely on the spectrum himself, though undiagnosed--and due to no small part from his help, she managed to keep out of special education hell.

When Steven was fourteen, his dad got a job in Silicon Valley, which meant their family had to move north. They ended up in Santa Carla, a college town on the northern end of the Monterey Bay. (Basically the equivalent of the real world town of Santa Cruz.) Steven would spend his high school career there, joining the student newspaper and drama club both.

As a teenager (and later in life too, really), Steven was… well, he was kind of a huge nerd. He loved comic books and later anime--especially the ridiculously shonen stuff--and played a crapton of D&D. He was also a big fan of TV wrestling, especially the EWW. (The EWW--Extreme Wrestling Warfare--is a wrestling league in the World of Darkness that’s made up of supernaturals who’re hiding in plain sight.) And he had a definite soft spot for horror movies and creepy things in general.

In fact, Steven had a downright morbid fascination for death and all its trappings--one he kept very quiet and mostly explored through the old textbooks he’d inherited from Tio Carlos. He also had a great appreciation for vicarious violence, for all that he was skittish of actually engaging in any himself in real life, given how sure he was that he would like it too much. Still, there was something very cathartic about watching other people cut loose or playing games of pretend for Charley where she made him magic science weapons to use against all the imaginary bad guys who were after her.

It was in high school that Steven figured out (or perhaps admitted to himself) that he was gay, although he had suspected it for a long, long time. He ended up coming out to his parents and his little sister when he was seventeen. Luis and Donna were upset at first--they had the tendency to think of being queer as being a death sentence, thanks to the way Tio Carlos died--but they mostly got over it within a few days and after that they were very supportive. Charley was still young enough that she didn’t see a reason to get upset. For his part, Steven was grateful that his immediate family took it as well as they did. It was the late nineties, after all, and he knew it could have gone so much worse.

(… and did, when the time came to tell Abuelita and Abuelito Espinoza. They were in fact extremely upset about Steven’s sexuality--blaming all the time he’d spent with Tio Carlos, who they’d never liked--and while they never cut him out of their lives, things were tense for a while between Steven and his maternal grandparents, cooling down a bit by the time he’d finished college. By the time Steven was in his thirties they’d largely made their peace with it, even going so far as to defend him to their friends. Still, however temporary, the rift between them his sexuality caused was a long-term disappointment to Steven, who had always been closer to his mother’s family than his father’s.)

Once he graduated high school, Steven ended up at college at UC Santa Barbara, where he double majored in Journalism and Film and Television production. Unsurprisingly, he was again a part of the school’s drama club. He also worked at the college radio station. While at college, he quietly explored his sexuality in ways he really couldn’t while mostly closeted in high school. He had a few boyfriends and a few more sexual encounters. None were very serious.

After college, Steven went to stay with his family back in San Diego in an attempt to break into local television, doing sound and DJ work at some local clubs in the meantime. Eventually, he ended up getting hired on by the local CBS station and within a few years had achieved a position first as a news reporter and then later as a news anchor. Although out in his private life--even if he tried to downplay it around his extended family--Steven was still very much in the closet as far as his public life was concerned. He’d achieved a sort of mild popularity when it came to local television and didn’t want to risk his sexuality ruining that.

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t explore it. He did. But he did that in gay bars and other designated queer spaces, far from heterosexual eyes. From his adolescence onward, Steven had a tendency to compartmentalize the various parts of his life, which only grew firmer the older he got. Work was one box, Family was another, his Nerdy Hobbies were yet one more, and of course Sex had one all to its own--and rarely did any of those boxes meet.

The chance coincidence of two of those categories overlapping, when a guy who he’d played in a one-shot D&D game with showed up a few days later at the gay bar Steven had been visiting, ended up leading into the one serious, long-term relationship that Steven ever had. Steven dated Liam for two years and lived with him for three months, but they ended up messily breaking up over a combination of political disagreements sparked by the failure of the No On Eight campaign, Steven’s refusal to come out in his public life, Steven’s difficulty in confiding in Liam, and Liam seeing Steven as cold and willing to sacrifice everything for ambition.

But, perhaps most of all, their break-up happened because Steven had spent their entire relationship actively playing the role of the perfect boyfriend he thought Liam wanted and when the disappointment over Proposition Eight succeeding left him too weary to keep up the act, the contrast between Steven's real self and the self he'd been for Liam was disconcerting and actually, quite upsetting. And Liam's hair-trigger temper did not help things one bit. The experience left Steven convinced that someone like him doesn't actually get to have an actual relationship—so why even try for one?

(This did not stop Steven from having any number of hookups using Grindr after breaking up with Liam, but hookups are another story. Liam was his last attempt at having a steady boyfriend.)

Then, when Steven was thirty-two or so, everything changed. The EWW was doing a live show in San Diego and fanboy that he was, Steven made sure to have tickets. After the show was over, Steven attempted to use his press pass to sneak backstage to meet his long-time wrestling hero, El Diablo Verde: the heavyweight luchador (and secret vampire) who’d been with the EWW for nearly twenty years.

He never met El Diablo. Instead, he was detained by a personage lurking near the lucha’s dressing room, who introduced himself as El Pecador and promptly rendered Steven unconscious. When Steven awoke, he was in an underground facility, with very little light and a stable full of masked wrestlers whose training he was expected to supervise and whose daily needs he was supposed to attend to. Most of them were Beasts and Ogres, but there were a few Elementals as well, and even one or two each of the other three Seemings or Changeling categories: Fairest, Wizened, and Darklings, like Steven himself would eventually become. (Ironically, most of the wrestlers weren’t Latine, despite their Keeper’s choice of thematics.) Rations for everyone were… well, ghoulish to say the least. Steven learned not to ask where they came from. (In fact, they came from hobgoblins--creatures of the hedge--and mostly intelligent ones)

Slowly but surely, hidden away in the dark, Steven’s body began to change to fit in with his role and El Pecador’s sense of aesthetics. His fingers grew long, long enough for an extra set of joints. His ears grew pointed. His pupils narrowed to slits, like a cat or a snake, to better see in the darkness. His color grew sallow from lack of sunlight. His teeth became so very much sharper. In essence, he became a Leechfinger, a specialized Darkling kith that steals life from humans.

From time to time, El Pecador would drag Steven and his wrestlers to an underground stadium in order to stage matches for the entertainment of himself and his fellow fae. By then, Steven had developed the ability to drain energy through his now too-long fingers--called Sapping the Vital spark, it's the Leechfinger's trademark--and El Pecador used this ability of Steven’s to fix the matches to his preference.

Changelings almost always lose something during their Durances, something they can never quite get back. In Steven's case, what he lost was what had been once a keen desire to be-- if not a good man, not exactly, at least a better man than he might have otherwise been. As good of a man as someone like him might be, perhaps. Between the isolation in the Dark and his Keeper forcing him to prey upon those he was otherwise taking care of, Steven grew unable to see the point of struggling to be a better man--and much of the point in most of the ideals and principles he'd adopted over the years to serve as his guidepost. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten the principles that he’d been raised with. It’s just that they seemed very far away.

For long years--Steven would later estimate it had been five years, even if the time he’d been gone on the outside was merely three--this went on, long periods of routine in the darkness punctuated with bright, frenzied matches in the floodlights.

That's when a dozen of El Pecador’s wrestlers staged a break out of the facility--and took Steven along with them. Some of their group got separated in the process, but Steven and five of the wrestlers made it back through the Hedge to San Diego--only to find that despite how long they’d been gone, it was only late summer in the year 2015.

Of course, even those three years were enough for Steven's Fetch to make a mess of things. No longer a mere newscaster, Steven's Fetch had gained a degree of local fame as a conservative pundit. As Steven was staunchly liberal, finding this out utterly infuriated him and the fact that said fetch didn’t actually believe anything it was saying and had merely sold out for fame and success didn’t help one bit. But that wasn't the only change for the worse: Steven's little sister Charley had been missing, presumed dead since last winter.

And even using the passwords his Fetch hadn’t bothered to change to investigate her disappearance via social media wasn’t much help. Not even a month into Steven’s abduction, Charley had abruptly cut off most contact with the Fetch--and from what little Steven had to go with, it had almost certainly been because her brother had become someone she didn’t quite recognize or like. The rest of his family… as far as Steven could tell, they’d merely been highly concerned about the Fetch and had gradually come to terms with how this was his ‘new normal,’ even if they didn’t like it much.

(Which, in fact, annoyed the hell out of him--but he took some vicious satisfaction that at least Charley knew something was up. But then, she’d been brilliant and intuitive both, burning as brightly as her namesake.)

Two months after Steven and the wrestlers emerged from the Hedge saw the six of them living in a small rented (with cash) bungalow together and trying to figure out how to get their lives back together--said situation having been arranged for them by the man who’d found them and had provided their introduction to the local Changeling community: a fellow calling himself Spiders Georg. Steven had been doing under the table work to help contribute to the household's finances and was currently very uncomfortable with the fact that he no longer has a legal identity--and impatient at the fact that he’d have to wait for the local Freehold’s false papers man to return from a long trip back east. He was, in fact, seriously contemplating finding a way to kill his Fetch and take his life back.

This was despite the fact that the Winter Court--the Changeling support group that Georg was a member of and that Steven joined shortly after his return--strongly encourages its members to sever their ties with their old lives. Steven was trying hard to go along with these principles, even giving himself a new surname of his choosing, but giving up his old life was hard some days. Sometimes he just wanted to be Steven Durante again, instead of Steven Sharpteeth or DJ Longfinger or whatever Court alias he might be trying out.

Even so, things were looking slightly up at that point. If nothing else, Steven had thrown himself into learning the ways of the local Freehold and had become surprisingly knowledgeable for someone who’d only been out of Arcadia for such a short time. Little Peggy--the local Witch of the Bitter Wind--had even deigned to teach him the traditional Changeling magical arts of pledgecrafting and oneiromancy, the second of which Steven excelled at. Best of all, Steven had just been invited to take a turn as the anonymous DJ Otzal on Radio Free Fae, the local Winter Court's secret podcast, which would have allowed him to do something in his chosen field, more or less, even if he couldn’t use his own name for it.

And it would turn out that he was good at podcasting.

Maybe eventually good enough to do it as a new career.

--

Six months after escaping Arcadia, Steven found himself at knifepoint.

It was in the middle of the rainy season. Steven was on his way back to the rented bungalow he shared with the others he’d escaped Arcadia with, from the secret location where Radio Free Fae was currently being recorded--which unfortunately happened to be in a bad part of town. It was more or less a routine mugging, but Steven was absolutely certain that he was about to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, after the mugger finished one-handedly rooting through his wallet. It was at the point where the mugger withdrew the image of Charley that Steven had lovingly printed out from a social media account and promptly tossed it in a growing puddle that Steven, finally, had had enough.

The next minute or so was something of a blur for Steven. After spending thirty-seven years avoiding violence, he was ill-prepared to find himself suddenly fighting back so fiercely and viciously at the assailant--but fight back he did. And in the end, it was the mugger who was left unconscious in a puddle, bleeding shallowly, dark bruises around his neck. And as Steven staggered home, mind full of racing thoughts of what he’d just done and the satisfaction he’d taken from it, he began to make a few important decisions.

The first was to make a formal resignation to the Winter Court of San Diego.

The second was that he was going to kill his fetch, no matter what the Winter Court might advocate him to do. He’d resigned. They couldn’t make him leave it alone. He didn’t care anymore that he was supposed to make a brand new life. He’d liked his old life. It was a good life. It was his. He wanted it back. And he was willing to do a whole hell of a lot to get it.

The plan he came up with was this: using a false name and false images, Steven would create a Grindr account for his burner phone. He would then slide into the fetch’s DMs and lure him out to a cheap motel. Once the fetch arrived? Strangle him or better yet, break the damn thing’s fucking neck.

Needless to say? It worked. And luckily for Steven, his fetch was the kind that upon death crumples into the various bits of junk used to animate them, instead of leaving an all too inconvenient corpse. Steven then proceeded to loot the pile of wires and boom mics, tossed the trash that had once been his double into a garbage bag, and left to dispose of the pieces and walk straight back into the life he’d lost.

Something that was achievable thanks to what Changelings called their Mask: the illusion of a normal human appearance that's layered upon them when they return to the human world. Their true appearance, their Mien, can only be seen by other Changelings with a few exceptions: madmen, small children, seers and those ensorcelled. To those who'd been dealing with the Fetch, it was merely as if Steven had lost a bit of his color overnight, had perhaps gained a few stress lines. Nobody paid attention to his fingers being a little longer than they'd been--but then, they couldn't see how long they really were. If Steven's behavior as compared to the Fetch was a little more subdued, well, maybe the pain of his sister going missing had finally gotten to him, estranged though they'd been.

(Honestly, his family was relieved that Steven was acting more like ‘himself’ again.)

Steven's problem, now, was to deal with what the Fetch had done with his life. He realized that, at least for the moment, until he could make other arrangements for additional employment and take stock of his current finances--and likely get some more money socked away in preparation--he’d have to go along with the whole (ugh) conservative pundit thing. But he vowed that as soon as it was immediately feasible, he would get the fuck out. He then spent the next couple months dropping little hints that there was something ‘off’ about his pundit persona, all the while biding his time for the very perfect moment to go full Stephen Colbert At The White House Correspondents Dinner.

That moment came at the Republican National Convention the next summer. And while it was ultimately overshadowed by the very real business of choosing a presidential candidate, the glorious self-destruction of Steven Durante as a conservative pundit, where he revealed the persona to be both a sociopathic monster and a goddamn fucking lie, did make national television. Which, honestly, was pretty cool in its way. And even better: Steven was able to play it off that this had been his plan from the start and that everything the Fetch had done had been in the service of that long game.

Sure, he then lost his job, but honestly? Fucking worth it. And anyway, not too long afterward, he was contacted by some podcasting people, who had seen his shenanigans at the RNC and wanted him to take that monstrous persona, turn it up to eleven, and do it on a weekly basis, as a Night Vale meets Colbert Report kind of thing. Steven accepted with alacrity. Because the funny thing was that he’d actually started to enjoy the role, as long as everyone knew it was a big fat lie. If nothing else, within the monster pundit persona, he felt like he could relax. Stop pretending to be a normal guy. It was like his games of pretend with Charley, all those years ago. As long as it was all imaginary, he could be as awful as he’d like and then go back to passing for normal.

It seemed to work out fairly well too, if the number of Patreons and sponsors was any indication. As time went on, Steven eventually added a bi-weekly true crime show to his offerings, focusing on cold cases in California and other parts of the west coast, conveyed in a gossipy tone--and then a third, done on the off-weeks, which honestly he just used as a chance to nerd out over various media he liked.

The Changeling part of his life was going fairly well too by then. He’d gained a mentor of a sort, an elderly Fairest of the Larcenist kith going by the name of Fantomas--surprisingly enough, the same false papers man he’d been waiting to come back from the east. Fantomas had spent his Durance serving as a spy in an extended war game that his Keeper had been running for well over a century. He saw in Steven the potential to become quite good at his own, rather outre skillset and decided he wanted to pass those skills on. He taught Steven how to shoot, how to use knives, and how to pick locks, among other things. (He also taught Steven how to cook for himself.)

Fantomas also helped Steven join his own Court: Autumn, the Court of Fear. If the Summer Court focuses on fighting back, the Spring Court in drowning their memories in hedonism, and the Winter Court in lying low for safety, the Autumn Court chooses to take control of the supernatural elements of their life. Autumn Courtiers are most often mages of some stripe, but still others explore the Hedge or study and learn about the other supernaturals in the World of Darkness. It was this third path that Steven ultimately chose to pursue as his primary focus, even as he chose not to eschew either of the others. With Fantomas’ sponsorship, he even joined an entitlement dedicated to the academic study of other supernaturals, the Lord Sages of the Unknown Reaches

Going by the usename of ‘Steven Sharpteeth’ at the Freehold of San Diego, Steven slowly became a fixture of the Autumn Court and distinguished himself at several Hunts of Leaves in the next few years--that is to say, the annual free-for-all against the enemies of the Court. Having come to terms with his own capacity for violence in fighting off the mugger and killing his fetch, Steven saw no reason why he should hold back in officially sanctioned contexts. It came as no surprise to his associates that when the Court needed to appoint a new Barrow-Tender--official assassin and sometimes executioner of the Autumn Court, also called the ‘Ghul’--they would choose Steven.

His fellow escapees from El Pecador were also doing fairly well by then, Fantomas using his skills in forgery to provide new identities for all of them. None of the other five who made it out with Steven were at all local and returning to their own homes to try and confront their fetches seemed more trouble than it was worth to them--and in one case, they were legally dead anyway. Slowly but surely, the five former wrestlers made new lives of their own, while still keeping those ties they’d forged with each other and with Steven during the terror of the escape and those long hours trapped together. Even if Steven wasn’t entirely sure he deserved their regard after what he’d done on El Pecador’s behest.

For a time, Steven even ended up with something of a roommate: an Australian Ogre of the Gristlegrinder kith by the name of Gil Ryanson* who spent some time crashing on the daybed in Steven’s office after he finally escaped Arcadia, taking the wrong turn on his way out. While their relationship started out as something akin to Steven being Gil’s patron, in very little time it settled into an honest friendship--really, probably the closest he had after his sister’s loss.

Seven years after killing his fetch saw Steven solve that mystery too, as much as he ever would. Charley, he learned (or rather ‘Thorne,’ as she’d been going by her screenname in real life at that point) had later been turned into a vampire by her then-employer, the man she’d been about to have a job interview with at the time of Steven’s abduction. And the vampires of that world were at that point--

Well. They were all gone now, in a quiet vampire apocalypse.

It was closure in a sense.

At that point, Steven also had his sister’s notes on the vampiric apocalypse prophecies, which he would subsequently lend to Fantomas, who showed them to an old friend of his, an occult detective named Gou Tsukuyomi**--and incidentally, the recently rescued Changeling who ninety years prior Gou had been made the Fetch of: one Shinobu Tsukuyomi**, whose new identity as Gou’s “great-grandson” the old false papers man had been currently working on. Gou encouraged Shinobu to see if he might be able to summon the spirit of the writer of the apocalypse notes to ask her about the prophecies, as before his abduction Shinobu had been studying the ways of magery. And as it turned out, he was.

After sharing what she knew about Gehenna with the Tsukuyomis and Fantomas, Thorne’s spirit then demanded that she and Shinobu watch anime together, as it was something she missed in the lands of the dead. After Shinobu admitted he’d never seen any anime (having been taken to fairyland before it existed), Thorne declared that she would introduce him to it and they’d do that by breaking into her brother’s apartment and borrowing his Studio Ghibli boxset. He’d be at work at the television studio by now, anyway.

As Steven no longer worked in television, he was in fact home: something that he soon demonstrated by holding an unloaded gun up to the head of the home invader--at which point Shinobu immediately made Thorne visible and after something like a decade apart, the siblings were finally reunited. And once Thorne realized that the ‘Pod Steven’ that she had cut off communication with really had been a messed up fake and not just her brother selling his soul for acceptance… well, it was a relief in more ways than one. Even if he’d changed a whole hell of a lot since the last time she’d seen the real him.

The year that followed wasn’t always easy, but it was ultimately very rewarding. Steven and his ghostly sister re-established their relationship, with Shinobu’s help as an intermediary--all the while, quietly in the background, Steven and Fantomas had started putting the pieces in place so that when the reigning Autumn Monarch retired, as they were expected to in the next few years, Steven would take their place.

Later that year, when international travel had begun to resume something approaching normalcy, Steven even found himself in France with Gil, Shinobu, and Thorne’s spirit, where the four of them enacted a scheme to steal and replace some occult artifacts from a museum there, in order to summon two of Thorne’s ghost friends (a medieval magus and his apprentice) into the lands of the living as well.

He even, finally, told his parents about having been a Changeling, six years after his escape--and in turn they told him all the things about their family and his childhood struggles that they’d keep quiet about all those decades ago.

And if roughly a year after his ghostly sister’s abrupt re-entrance to Steven’s life, Fantomas asked him if he’d help him with getting a recently escaped old friend of his from his time in Arcadia readjusted to the modern world? Well, why not? After everything his mentor had done for him, Steven owed him a lot. And he kind of missed having a living roommate anyway.

*A Changeling OC created by my friend Rika
** Two Changeling/Mage OCs created by my friend Zoe