Seemings Part 05 - Ogres

Ogre

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have is a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare to people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." - Bryan Mills, Taken

If the Ogre is a brute, a thug, a monster, it is because it is necessary for him to be. Of all the Changelings broken by their Keepers, none have such potential for tragedy. For them, the need for violence, for control, for consumption is a means of survival. For the Ogre, all becomes survival of the fittest. The Ogre knows what a fine line separates the hero from the monster, and how hard it is to walk it. Sick of having to say they’re sorry, they’re careful not to do anything they’ll feel obliged to apologise for. When they smash and maim, it’s because someone deserved it. Others may dismiss them as brutish and slow, but the Ogres keep it simple because to do otherwise is to drown in remorse.

For those around the Ogre, one has to question if survival is worth the cost. The Ogre puts up stone walls between himself and any danger, emotionally and physically, and when you dig in to why, it’s hard to even blame him.

Once upon a time: Ogres were bullied. Most often, this bullying was real, brutal, and constant. Bullying that’s better to call abuse. Rarely, but not impossibly, Ogres come from people who perceived bullying where it wasn’t really happening, and so the abuse that drove them was mostly from their own persecution complex. Mostly, though, Ogres were first people who were pushed and pushed and hurt and hurt until they had no choice but to lash out, to respond with violence or brutality, and that moment, when they snapped, they fled, flung, or were grabbed into the Hedge. The power to snap, the thing that pushed them over could come from within, but often, comes from the Keeper and his servants, to draw the Changeling in.

In Faerie, you were no knight in shining armour, no dutiful soldier marching under a banner. Such things; beings of love, honour and fellowship could never have been forged from such a pitiful creature as you. No, you were a brutal destroyer – a thug without mercy. You endured by dishing out more pain than you received, and you fed the terror you inspired. Even when you killed others to release them from this hell, or let them do the same to you, you all returned to life again the next day to start again.

The Escape: An Ogre-to-be spends her Durance waiting. He knows all about abuse before the Hedge, and although it’s fantastic and horrific, it’s just more of the same. He went in to the Hedge raw, skinless, vulnerable, but there’s no way he’ll stay that way. The Ogre-to-be bides his time, building up his strength and his shields, sculpting muscle and a new skin out of the violence and chaos around him. He doesn’t just make armour: He becomes armour. Eventually, when things get hard, when the pain isn’t just physical, he makes a choice. He sheds his very flesh, replaces it with rock or clay and becomes, he thinks, invulnerable. Liberated from the part of him that can still hurt, he makes a break for it. He watched, enduring, planning his escape. He destroys everything in his wake, moving with such unstoppable brutality.

Now: It’s an easy mistake to assume that all you’re just a combat focused meat-machine built to hit and be hit. Violence and inflicting violence has nothing to with fighting and combat. Sometimes, on the surface, you even eschew fighting, leaning on pacifism and that kind of morality. But the anger builds, regardless of intent, and so you manipulate and abuse violently, to protect others with brutal social rhetoric as much as your iron fist. Bullies happen in academia, the sciences, and anywhere there are people. You can’t erase what you did in Faerie, but you can make up for it. You’re the one they can count on to do the right thing, even when it happens to be the hardest thing.

Nicknames: Bruisers, Gargoyles, The Terrible

Regalia: Shields

Blessing:

Gain an additional dot of one Power attribute at character creation.

Whenever your character deals any damage to another, you may impose the Beaten Down Tilt, which lasts for three turns. This ability costs a Glamour if the Ogre makes the attack on his own behalf and not someone else’s.

Curse:

In addition to your character’s other breaking points, he risks Clarity damage with a dice pool equal to half his Wyrd (rounded up) whenever someone he doesn’t consider an enemy flees or cowers from him.

Tales

 He wonders how different his life now is from before. At least now he’s salaried, that’s something. The Earth Queen insists she’s doing what she must for the greater good, but as far as he can see it she’s no different from any crime lord. The people he intimidates into paying her titles and fealty probably believe he’d really eat them alive if they didn’t comply. Who knows? If she ordered it, maybe he would…

No one ever hit her, or called her names, they just left her to herself, and a child without love and support is a child abused. She turned her anger inward, hate and violence saved for herself. When she hurt herself bad enough to go to a hospital, she went to the Hedge instead. She’s whole now, and understands better what was done to her, and when she broke out, it was to get revenge.

They couldn’t understand how important he was, how much smarter. They were stupid, and ignorant, and he’d been planning his revenge for years. He never realized that his mistreatment of his little sister, the way that he vented his rage at her, would mean her one day selling him out to his Keeper. When he escaped, he came back determined to make them all pay. He doesn’t know that sis is still watching him, undoing him, and should he ever find out, well... It won’t be pretty.