Post by William de Torquemada on Jun 24, 2012 23:31:46 GMT -5
William de Torquemada
“It’s nothing strange. Some men cut open the dead to understand the nature of life. I want to understand the nature of death, so I experiment on the living."
“It’s nothing strange. Some men cut open the dead to understand the nature of life. I want to understand the nature of death, so I experiment on the living."
NICKNAMES[/color]: // Will, Willie, The Torturemagus
AGE[/color]: //17
DATE OF BIRTH[/color]: //August 15th, 2010
GENDER[/color]: //Male
ALIGNMENT[/color]: //Lawful Evil/ Sociopath
OCCUPATION[/color]: //Torturer, murderer, magus, heir to the family’s wealth, and serial killer~
[/size][/ul]
Haah... I'm not going to lose that easily!
Another body for the gutter.
Hmm. Bored now.
Eheh... that's a lot of blood...
It's always more fun when they try to fight back~
HEIGHT[/color]: //5’3” or 160 cm
WEIGHT[/color]: //115 lbs or 52 kg
EYE COLOR[/color]: //Brown
HAIR COLOR[/color]: //Black
PIERCINGS[/color]: //None
TATTOOS[/color]: //None
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES[/color]: //He’s a shota: short and cute but surprisingly strong for his size.
[/size][/ul] [/blockquote]
- Evilly Affable
- Hey, how are you feeling? How is your wife? How’s work? No, keep looking at me. Don’t look away, that’s how you make me make mistakes. I’m only cutting out your eyes, I don’t want to carve open your skull by accident.
- Unfailingly Polite
- Ugh… did you really just spit on me? How crude. Just because I’m giving you the opportunity to be part of my grand experiment, you act as if it’s okay to be so rude. It’s okay, of course, I forgive you, but you really should keep your manners in check. A sense of propriety is important to being a man.
- Sadistic Bastard
- Ahahaha~ Where is your defiance now? All I did was cut your Achilles tendon. Go on, the door is right there. Crawl for me, you pathetic wretch. Crawl toward freedom! You don’t want it badly enough? You won’t try to cling to your pathetic life?
- Arrogant
- Strength is the most important attribute a man can have. I am the strongest that a man can be. Weakness was purged from my body. I was put through a trial by fire, put through pain unimaginable to any who have not gone under my knife. I survived. I came out the other side stronger than human. What can you possibly do to me when I have dueled with Death and won?
- Jaded as All Hell
- You’re appealing to my sense of decency? Of my faith in the nobility of the human spirit? That’s cute. Really, keep trying. You might be able to reach my positive memories and invoke some form of pity from me. You know, those good memories from my childhood that I don’t have? Yeah, keep trying to make me feel something. It’ll just prolong your death, not stop it.
- A Bit of a Blood Knight
- I cannot feel anything. Nothing at all. My father’s ministrations banished weakness from my body, but also many of the pieces of my soul that allow me to have satisfying relationships. Duty and honor I can understand. Loyalty I can understand. But love is a foreign concept and friendship seems like a pathetic excuse for weakness. The only feeling that I lust for, the only thing I desire, is the thrill of battle. Come, fight with me; let us dance with death.
- Manipulative
- Empathy is a kind word for stupidity. People exist to be used. To be controlled. To be puppeted. People like me have always preyed on those weaker than us, those more trusting than us. That is the way of the world.
- Schadenfruede
- Very little in this world makes me smile, but causing pain always seems to paint a huge grin on my face~ Your pain is my pleasure, your sorrow my joy~
LIKES[/color]: //
Causing pain
Apples
Fighting
Tea
A good conversation
Torture
Discussing his work
DISLIKES[/color]: //
Those who don’t understand
Boring people
Being treated like a child
STRENGTHS[/color]: // Will is a neuropath; he has a medical condition where his nerves no longer work, meaning that he feels absolutely no pain. Any spell or attack designed to inflict pain will have no effect on him. A maiming attack will work just fine, breaking his arm will still break his arm, but he won’t react at all to small cuts or spells that cause physical pain.
William is also a skilled swordsman who has trained mainly in blades, but also knives and unarmed combat. He knows how to care for all of his weapons and takes the time to make sure that they are all perfectly honed and ready at all times. He exercises regularly to keep his body as fit as possible.
On top of his physical skills and inhuman pain tolerance, the Torquemada family’s research was based into perfecting reinforcement. Will can greatly improve both his strength and speed with magic, making him almost impossible for another human to match in melee combat. He’ll still get stomped by a Servant, but if he can catch the master alone, they’re dead.
WEAKNESSES[/color]: //Will has no “traditional” magic and an extreme distaste for guns. Range is his weakness and anyone who can keep out of melee will be able to wear him down eventually. He also has no protection against magically induced pain and having been without pain for so long, he is much more susceptible to pain than a normal person.
Will’s neuropathy also means that he is susceptible to injuring himself and not noticing, meaning that even minor wounds can be serious. It is quite possible for him to not be aware of how injured he is and accidentally bleed to death even after a fight has ended.
Additionally, though this isn’t quite a weakness as it is a personality flaw, Will is incredibly arrogant and narcissistic. While he is not opposed to retreating or even fleeing a lost battle, good luck to whoever is trying to convince him that he will lose.
[/ul][/size][/blockquote]
MY FAMILY LINE[/color]: //The Torquemada line has existed for a little over eight hundred years. The family was established in the early 1200s, but existed mainly under cover of darkness until Juan de Torquemada, the family head at the time, became a Cardinal. He kept his magic and his family’s research completely hidden, so the Church had no idea that one of the heads of their organization was a heretic.
The first thing that made the Torquemada family different than most other magi families was that they were not in direct pursuit of Akasha. They viewed the families that devoted themselves to such a pursuit as self deluded at best and utterly insane at worst. The Torquemada family had smaller and more useful goals in mind; they sought to find perfection in manipulation of the soul, which would then allow them to discover human perfection. It was decided that the best way to discover the nature of the soul was to create environments where the soul would be brought to the forefront. The best way to do this was to dehumanize your test subjects, to grind them into dust, to make them squeal with unimaginable pain for days on end, dangling the sweet release of death in front of them without ever letting them get there—it was then that the person would reveal the true nature of the human soul. To date, no subject has ever lived long enough for a Torquemada to gain conclusive information about the soul and the manipulation thereof.
The Torquemada family continued its working relationship with the Church for nearly five hundred years. Younger children, those not taught magecraft, were sent to the Church while their elders inherited the family crest.
In 1483, Tomas de Torquemada, Juan’s son who was quietly called his “nephew” due to religious obligation, became the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He had spent the last fifteen years gently directing Princess Isabelle, leading her to marry Ferdinand of Aragorn, then telling her that the non Catholics were trying to usurp the royals. Naturally, they needed to be expelled and the converts questioned… strenuously to ensure their loyalty to both the Church and the Crown.
Of course, the Torquemada family generously offered up both their homes and their services, all in the name of the crown. Tomas de Torquemada himself is credited with killing over 2,000 converso who failed to pass his incredibly difficult tests of faith and loyalty. One of Tomas’ favorite styles of execution was a burning at the stake, primarily to appease the crowds who hungered for blood and to keep them from wondering what happened to the men and women who went inside his Tribunals and were never seen again.
Tomas passed his leadership on to his son, but no other man from this de Torquemada family would hold such high office again. When the Inquisition officially ended in 1530, the family took the money they had collected from both their victims and the nation to buy a large mansion and quietly disappear. They continued the practice of keeping their magic completely hidden and maintaining a small amount of connection to the Catholic church, but as the years passed it became less and less worthwhile for them to take so many precautions to keep their status as magi hidden while working within the Church. When the family head finally decided to cut the remaining nominal ties, they took with them a number of artifacts that Tomas had been granted use of during the inquisition. (Nightmare will be detailed in the Spells portion, the others have no bearing on the rest of the story or on Will.)
To continue their work on unsuspecting villagers, the family had to travel far and wide to keep their activity from being noticed or remarked upon. In fact, Torquemada has had far less crime and vagabonds than most other cities in Spain for several hundred years now. The populous likes to flaunt this fact, unaware of the messy reason for such prosperity.
Unfortunately for the men and women who have gone under the knife of a Torquemada, the family is no closer to unlocking the secrets of the soul than they were when they first began torturing and killing those unfortunate enough to be captured by them. The number of people who have died as a test subject is unknown, but it is undoubtedly large enough to earn every Torquemada a special place in Hell.
MY HISTORY[/color]: //Will’s life began in an room filled with blood. The Torquemada family had picked up the strange belief that a death was a lucky wish for a life being born, so a murder always took place in the same room as a birth. The man who gave his life to usher in that of Will was probably not as happy as the expectant father. Guárico de Torquemada was ecstatic to see the birth of his heir, so he made sure to get the strongest sacrifice possible and spent weeks nursing him back to health so that he would donate everything to the boy.
Unfortunately for both the man and William, there was not a single boy born on that day. William’s older twin, Guillermo de Torquemada, was born about fifteen seconds before William. Their mother, Rosa, was overjoyed to hold both of her healthy sons on the floor, but more than one member of the Torquemada household wondered what would happen to the blessing that had been offered to the heir.
William and Guillermo were raised by their mother away from the family’s work for the first years of their lives. The young woman was kindly and attempted to bring them up in the fashion of her family of typical, unremarkable magi, until the boys were about four years old.
Their father brought them down into his basement and showed them a man, strung up from the rafters, his body flayed open, organs struggling to beat as the last of his life blood dripped slowly down his skin and bone to puddle on the floor. “Do you know what this is, boys?” the man asked gently as he put a blade against the dying man’s throat. “This is weakness. He has given up on living because he is too weak to fight for it. That is the only truth of this world.”
William and Guillermo both watched their father end the man’s miserable life, then put his body into the furnace already stoked and ready. They helped clean the blood from the floors and his tools, and then they were shown the family’s prized possession: a veritable prison wing with subjects of every type, young and old, male and female, rich and poor. Strength was not found exclusively in one walk of life, so the Torquemada family had no particular preference in test subjects. Only those that were strong enough to catch the eye of a magus were even brought to the mansion, and many died in only the preliminary evaluations.
For a year, both boys worked on the research with their father, cutting men and women alike, learning how to cause incredible amounts of pain without killing someone. The goal of every experiment was to find a subject who could resist death through sheer force of will; through pure power of spirit. It was that subject that the Torquemada believed would unknowingly hold the secret to manipulation of the soul. Unfortunately for those subjects, not a one fit the bill. Fortunately for them, Guárico had found a new favorite subject.
William was the second son, an accident, a child only good for marrying off to another family and even then only worth a moderate price. Instead of bringing power into the family, he would be giving secrets away. Guárico had little interest in teaching the boy enough of the family’s magic for him to reveal much to a rival family, but he taught him what little he would need to be a magus husband suitable for breeding. Then, they started to work.
William had his bones broken and then set, to heal so they could be broken again. He was burned, he was scalded, he was put into bathtubs of boiling water then forced to move to ones full of ice. He had electricity run through his body from the system his father had installed in the dungeon and he had each and every one of the knives his father owned used on him, all in the name of progress. However, unlike the body of an adult who had already lived a life in the presence of every day pain, Will’s body took this extreme level of discomfort and torture to be normal. After only a short time after he began facing torture at his father and brother’s hands as a daily occurrence, Will became afflicted with neuropathy, a disease caused by the constant abuse that told his nerves to simply stop working. He could no longer feel pain or any other sensation beyond simple pressure when something was pressed against his skin. Torture, in short, was useless. Will could take any amount of punishment without flinching, though the damage to his body was extreme.
The boy spent two years bedridden, unable to move much without blood pouring from his wounds and his muscles refusing to obey his commands. His mother, who had some minor amount of skill in spiritual surgery, nursed him back to health, but his nerves were too far gone for any hope of saving them. His body was left in worse shape than it had been before, but after painstaking months Will learned how to walk again and tried to resume his life as a Torquemada.
Guárico was suitable devastated by his overzealous advances on his son, which meant he pretended it had not happened and tried to teach Will to be a useful assistant to his brother. With his disease, which was only spoken of in hushed tones when Guárico wasn’t around, his prospects of marriage to a powerful family dwindled to almost nothing. Killing the boy would have been expedient, but even a Torquemada had to draw the line and murdering his own family. No, Will would grow up a Torquemada even with his… disease.
Will cleaned cells and equipment, took basic care of the generator that supplied power for the torturers—Guárico would never stoop to being like one of the many normals that used power tapped from a technological grid—and did all of the work that was needed to make sure that his brother would never be interrupted in the middle of an experiment. The boys quickly became less and less affected by the pain of others, blood and bone and tears being normal sights every day they worked with their father. Guárico spoke of purging the weakness from their bodies; he didn’t know that Will took this lesson far more seriously than Guillermo.
Guillermo, despite being the elder brother and designated to be the heir, took far longer in his studies than his younger twin. Will had an unabashed love for causing pain, sometimes spending hours simply watching his father work. Guárico taught the boy as much as he could, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, but he never intended to give Will the Crest or make him the heir. As far as the family was concerned, William was damaged and no longer suitable for use. Fortunately for him, none of them saw fit to explain what his destiny was to be.
When the boys were eight years old, Guárico showed them the family’s greatest treasure. It was a blade as black as night. Light seemed to bend around it, giving it a permanently dark gleam. The true use of the blade was in its ability to cause pain without ever drawing blood. It simulated wounds caused by it perfectly, even to the point of showing a victim their last moments as blood poured forth from a wound they could never hope to stem… and then wrenching them unceremoniously back to the real world to realize that they had hallucinated every moment of it. Over and over again. The wounds didn’t have to be fatal, either. Severing fingers could be simulated, even something as delicate as peeling the skin and muscle from a man’s chest. As long as the wielder supplied prana to the blade, it wouldn’t injure its victim—at least, it wouldn’t injure them physically.
Will was never allowed to use the blade, but he longed to see what it could do in his hands. When he was given the chance to experiment, he was far better at inflicting pain than his brother, despite his neuropathy. Though he had a difficult time explaining his methods, Will’s experience on the other side of a knife taught him how to inflict terror as easily as pain. He began to calmly question his subjects about their lives, even form a small version of rapport as he brought them their meals or tended wounds caused by his brother or father. The men and women getting such treatment never believed that a small boy who walked with an awkward gait and seemed so precise in all of his movements was just as twisted as the rest of his family. They learned that lesson at the tip of his knife.
Despite doing his mother’s best attempts to ‘fix’ him, Will’s nerves never healed. This proved to be a major issue when teaching him to form his magic crests, because he was almost unable to resist the pain that tore through his body every time he tried. Pain caused by damage to his soul still flowed directly into his brain, but the lack of sensation had made him even more vulnerable to dying from prana overload than normal. A touch too much effort, or staying a second longer than he absolutely could handle could leave him utterly burned out. His mother was actually the one to monitor him while he worked, doing her best to make sure that he didn’t kill himself on accident after spending years struggling to live.
After Will managed to overcome that, with significant difficulty, he began to realize just how far ahead of his brother he was. While Guillermo was technically stronger than he was, the difference between their innate abilities was actually rather small. On top of that, Guillermo was weak. Pathetic, actually. Will once bound up his hand after a subject had sunk his teeth into the boy’s flesh and torn a chunk away. Guillermo actually cried as Will bandaged him up and cared for the gash. It was in that moment that Will began to feel contempt for his brother. How could the man he was told he would dedicate his life to serving be so weak? So self-centered? So… ineffective? Even Guillermo’s studies were sloppy.
When William spoke of his concerns to his father, he was beaten. It had little effect other than to give Guárico a chance to vent his anger, but it was the first time Will had seen weakness in his father. He didn’t know how the man could be so blind. It wasn’t Will’s fault that Guillermo was weak. He had only suggested that his brother undergo the same treatment he had, in an effort to make him as strong as Will was. Without pain to dampen his ability to learn, Will had been able to devour his father’s lessons with an avaricious appetite. Causing pain was something he took to as naturally as breathing. Guillermo was always slower, always more clumsy. He always took longer to accomplish the same things.
The boys began to practice with their hands and with weapons, focusing on the sword but also using knives, darts, and needles to kill or maim an attacker. While Guillermo steadily improved, William grew in leaps and bounds. He trained longer and harder than his brother at the cost of health; his neuropathy meant that he would work his hands raw, cutting himself with his weapons, busting his knuckles when he punched a wall, having his flesh torn open by his father’s blade when he slipped up and caught a swift, but fair, punishment for it. As time progressed, these punishments became less and less frequent. Much like torture, Will took to combat easily.
Guillermo, however, was not as adept at any of the training as his brother. The older twin had to struggle to grasp magicks that Will could use effortlessly, clenching his jaw tight and holding back tears as the pain of forming and using circuits filled his body. After only a dozen merciless beatings from Will, he would lay on the ground and sob, unable to muster even the willpower to climb to his feet and accept his defeat gracefully. Will knew there was no shame in defeat, but it shamed him that his brother would rather sob like a child than strive to become a man.
Of course, when Will mentioned this to his father, he was beaten severely. It took a full day before Will could walk again, but the lack of pain only strengthened his belief. Guillermo was weak. And somehow, that weakness had spread to their father. Couldn’t he see that he was letting emotion cloud his judgment? Will cared for his brother as well, but he understood that the Torquemada family deserved a strong head, not a weak sniveling child. Will had taken to his training with ease and learned everything he was taught. Guillermo sobbed at the thought of pain and was barely adequate at the skills he would need to be an effective heir. The choice was logical, but Guárico refused to see it.
Weakness was rampant, now that William had begun to see it. His mother, she was weak. She bowed to his father’s every whim, even when it killed her inside. The boy saw her clench her fists when she was ignored, saw the silent tears she cried when Guárico refused to listen to her. She never fought for what she desired.
Guárico had his petty notions of honor, his simple devotion to unreachable ideals. He couldn’t see how he blinded himself to the truth, trying to preserve what he wanted to be true instead of what was. He was weak. The boy saw his impotent rage when he was questioned and how he had to use force to establish his dominance. He knew no other way to earn respect than through fear of force.
Guillermo never learned self control. He couldn’t handle failure, couldn’t harness his rage, his shame, his tears and turn them to his fight to become better. When Will bested him, he would cry at the unfairness of it all rather than struggling to become better. He was weak. He had been given everything Will desired, but he couldn’t savor the taste because he hadn’t earned it. He sat amongst the wealth of the world and saw none of it.
William silently began to hate them all. The powerlessness of his mother, the greed of his brother, the pettiness of his father. They were the reason the family failed, generation after generation. They were the reason the Torquemada were no closer to true power than they ever had been.
His rage bound itself tightly inside him, pushing him farther. He continued to train past his body’s breaking point, continually injuring himself by using muscles that pleaded for rest to dead nerves. Some days, he would be too exhausted to even clean the blood from his body before he crawled into his bed, but he never once considered stopping.
William’s growth became even more pronounced as the boys grew older. By the time they were fifteen, he was so far ahead of Guillermo that they were almost incomparable. While the older twin still sobbed and cried when trying to use the family’s particularly painful form of reinforcement, William had mastered things that even Guárico could not force himself to do when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. The magicks were such that his mother and brother had never managed to use them, and his father had only done so a dozen times, but William began to reinforce himself weekly for training. He would become harder. He would become stronger. Nothing would stop him.
And yet, he was still ignored. Guillermo was lauded as the more impressive son, despite his every action being less impressive than Will’s. Guillermo was still the heir, despite William being stronger and more skilled. Guillermo was still set to inherit everything that made the Torquemada who they were while William would be an assistant. A footnote to another uninteresting branch of history. He knew that he could do better. He knew that he would be a better head than his brother, but Guárico would never listen. No matter what the boy said or did, he was ignored by his entire family.
And then the worst thing that could have happened did. Guillermo let his brother know that he was to begin receiving the Crest. He would be designated, once and for all, as the Family Head. He would lead the Torquemada to mediocrity. William couldn’t allow that.
His knife found his brother’s yielding stomach before the other boy could even scream. Against William’s strong, wiry arms, Guillermo might as well have been a child. Rage boiled within Will, but he forced himself to be calm. He stitched the wound he had made in his brother’s stomach, then bound and gagged him in a bathtub on the grounds. He wouldn’t be discovered for long enough for William to find out what had happened and deal with the consequences.
Before he left the room, Will quietly apologized to his brother. Guillermo was crying again.
“Father!” Will demanded as he strode into the room. Guárico was deep at work, sliding Nightmare’s edge lovingly across one of his subject’s chests, making the man feel his skin peeled away over and over again. Will could see that he was already close to breaking under the stress and becoming nothing more than a gibbering husk. Guárico, of course, continued unfazed.
“Son,” was all he said. There was no accusation in his voice. There was barely recognition. Now that the decision had been made, Will was nothing to him. His place was secured; he was a nothing and he always would be.
Will found himself viciously muttering the self hypnosis spell that would make him stronger than any man ever was. Guárico turned to see what the matter was, then felt his teenage son’s hand around his throat, lifting him into the air, pressing him against the cell wall.
“What in the nine hells were you thinking,” Will spat. “You know Guillermo is weak. You know he cannot lead this family. What the hell were you thinking!?”
“He is… the heir… you are… only… a failed experiment…” Guárico gasped for air, but to the last he was unwilling to repent. William expected to find rage, but there was nothing. There was only a calm desire to right wrongs that had been committed. So he smiled.
He smiled up as his father as the man’s skin began to pale, as his eyes began to bulge. He smiled as he spoke the words that would cause sweat to begin to pour from the man’s every pore. “I am going to take the Crest from you. I will not allow this to happen.” And then he lifted his father and smashed him against the wall, knocking him unconscious in an instant. He took Nightmare and its sheath and donned them as his own. The blade was his birthright, after all. Will gagged his father and locked him into one of the cells, where hopefully he would remain quiet until after William was done. He knew what had to be done.
It was simple for him to mix a poison. His time as an assistant had taught him how specific doses of various sedatives needed to be not to negatively impact a subject’s health—and which ones would cause death when too much was used. With that in hand, he went to the kitchens and quietly slipped it into his mother’s meal without the cook noticing. Then, he went and ate with the woman. She was pale, as if she felt something off about the day, but William quietly and politely told her that Guillermo and Guárico were still working. He had finished his duties and come to eat with her as a devoted son, but it wasn’t uncommon for the Head and the Heir to work side by side through meals, sometimes not seeing her for weeks.
And then she died. Will did not feel regret or sadness. It had been quick and it had been painless. She would not suffer for her weakness. Will quietly told the servants to see to her body. He had other work to do.
William used Nightmare for the first time on his own father. Guárico tried to resist, but unlike Will, he had never experienced the other end of the knife. He could do nothing as Will spent days cutting him, just to watch it happen. He logged every scream in his notes. He even put his brother in the cell across the hall, so that he could watch as Will tortured their father. As he forced Guárico to give him the Crest, rather than his undeserving brother. Guárico resisted admirably, for a while. After a few weeks, the pain just became too much and he began to do whatever it took to make Will stop cutting him, even for a moment.
Through it all, Guillermo watched as Will forcibly took his birthright. It was only right. His family had grown weak. They were a cancer upon the Torquemada that had to be cut out before they could damage too much to be repaired. Taking the Crest was only the beginning. After, Will introduced Guárico to all of the most painful deaths one could die to the sword. After only a few short hours of that torture, the man succumbed to the pain and allowed himself to die. His heart simply stopped beating as Nightmare cut through his neck, though his body bore no wounds. And William looked over his work and was pleased.
“It is done, Guillermo. I have cut away the weakness that plagued our family,” Will said. “Mother and father have both died to keep the line strong. I have taken the Crest to keep the line strong. Stand beside me, brother. Fight beside me. Let us make our family stronger than it ever has been.”
Guillermo refused to see reason. He refused to accept that things were better this way. He looked past Will, to the cell where the body that had been their father rested and sobbed. “Don’t be a baby,” Will spat. “He’s dead. You know what death is. He taught us both. He died because he was too weak to continue living. That’s the only truth in this world.”
But Guillermo was irreconcilable. Nothing Will could say would get him to accept the pain, to force himself to use the magic that had been taught to him and break free. Will had left him ungagged for a reason. He was coherent and he was able to cast a spell. He could free himself if he only had the desire. The only thing that was lacking was a person willing to do whatever it took to free themselves.
So Will tried to give Guillermo a reason. First he cut his brother in the way one prepped an experiment for the greater pain to come. Not with Nightmare; he wanted to force Guillermo to overcome the pain, not torture him. With clean, razor sharp knives, Will cut his brother’s chest, his arms, his face, his legs. He cut thin strips across the other boy’s body. He did anything in his power to provoke Guillermo’s rage.
He only got sorrow. With every passing day, Guillermo began to cry more, until his tears had dehydrated him so much that Will had to spend a day forcing him to drink so that he would not injure himself. His disgust with his brother grew with every day, but he would not give up and accept defeat. He had become strong enough to accept pain and no longer concern with it. Why couldn’t his brother do the same?
The more he worked, the less it seemed to do. Guillermo retreated into a shell that Will couldn’t penetrate, instead of breaking free. Mild pain could no longer provoke any reaction; Will took that as a good sign and stepped up his work, but that only seemed to drive Guillermo into a more frantic retreat into himself.
Finally, after months of pouring all of his energy into helping his brother, Will found that it was no longer worth it. Let the sobbing boy drown in his own tears. He could not master himself, he could not do anything but cry about how difficult life had become. He had learned nothing as the pampered child. He had no learned that one had to take what one wanted. Will would offer him only one final chance.
First Will took his toes, and then his fingers. His feet, strip by strip, and then his hands. He cut away Guillermo’s legs, up to the crotch, letting all of the blood that poured out collect in a bathtub, but he worked quickly to avoid letting his brother die of blood loss. The older boy’s arms were next, and then as many pieces of his torso as Will could carve away without killing him. Through it all, Guillermo struggled only weakly. He never even managed to break free of Will’s grasp. He had accepted his fate, so William left him to it.
Will’s only wonder as he watched his brother’s destroyed form sink to the bottom of the pool was if the boy would bleed to death before he drowned on his own blood.
With the Crest and Nightmare in his possession, as well as the last surviving member of the family, William became the perfect head of the Torquemada family. He was as strong as he was ambitious, as young as he was ruthless. He appropriated his father’s notes, taking generations of research and combining it with what he knew about himself. The Torquemada had never experimented on children; kids weren’t known for exceptional strength or even considered good representations of the soul. William was the only one who had become so broken that his body had rebelled—and won.
As he delved into his research, Will began to understand how incredible his body was, but at the same time he realized that he had failed to find true perfection. He had never dominated pain, made it his own, gained the power that came from accepting his weaknesses and overcoming them. Instead, he had sidestepped that entire struggle by forcing his nerves to stop feeling.
For a while, Will looked into trying to fix his nerves, but he had no real skill in spiritual surgery. After a few short months of study, he concluded that he could not reverse his condition. Instead, he would simply have to continue forward; more study would unlock the secret of the soul, and if he had that, the quality of his flesh would be irrelevant. Perfection was attainable, if only he tried harder.
Of course, the nature of the soul continued to elude him. Despite his skilled touch, despite the amount of pain and anguish William could give a subject, they refused to bare the soul to him. He quickly became frustrated with his failures. He refused to fight so hard to become the head for it to be worth nothing. He would discover a way to manipulate the soul and with it, a way to attain perfection. He would be immortal. He would be a legend. All he had to do was continue to fight.
William began to put more effort into being a member of the association, though even other magi would flinch if they knew about his work. He kept quiet about the circumstances that made him what he was, but his natural charisma attracted others to him anyway. He cultivated a small group of friends, using the knowledge they could provide to aid him in his work. While none were particularly powerful or represented important families, they could listen at keyholes he could not.
One of his ‘friends’ was the one who brought him news of the Holy Grail War. A war fought by heroes of the past, summoned by powerful magi to fight over the Grail itself, an item so powerful that it could grant its owner any wish. Even, perhaps, mastery over the soul. William began to ponder the benefits of such a war while he waited to learn more about it. As more and more little birds flocked to give him news of things they had heard or seen, he became certain that the benefits outweighed the risks. He might lose his life in the war, but even if he couldn’t obtain the grail, the opportunity to study a Servant was too tempting to resist. Even just a cursory inspection of a being so far beyond human as to be unrecognizable would grant him incredible insight.
Will made certain of the date and quietly purchased a small mansion in Lucca, then began personally building the modifications he would need to use the area as a base.
When the time came, he simply disappeared, leaving his admirers uncertain of his whereabouts or his intent. Perhaps it had been sloppy to leave them alive, but it would have been far too much work to care for each of the bodies.
MY GOALS[/color]: // Will’s goal is primarily to obtain the Third Magic (though he doesn’t know that the Einzbern already did that or even that Manipulation of the Soul is one of the True Magics) and secondarily to win the Grail and wish for the Third Magic. He believes that through the manipulation of his own soul, he can attain immortality and perfection both. Whether this is a delusion of the Torquemada family or not is up to interpretation. What should be stressed is that one should never underestimate Will’s ability to get what he wants or the utter disregard he holds for the lives of anyone foolish enough to get in his way.
[/size][/blockquote]
In his home of operation, which must have a basement large enough for Will to personally create several cells to house his subjects, Will will have several dozen blades of different size and purpose, ranging from exacto blades to box cutters to kitchen knives. He will also have restraints and chains, several sets of handcuffs, rope, duct tape, garrote wire, various drills; both electric and hand powered, needles, syringes, sets of easily obtainable sedatives and mild poisons designed to cause pain, pepper spray, lemon juice, salt, corkscrews, and the occasional cup of wine to drink while he listens to the sweet sounds of a broken subject.
RANK[/color]: // 6th Rank
ELEMENT[/color]: // Earth
EXPERTISE[/color]: //
La Verdadera Destreza
Will is an expert in a Spanish style of fighting known best as “the true art”. Destreza does not use a particular weapon in its style, but can be used with a single sword, a sword and dagger, two swords, sword and shield, sword and cloak, or any variation upon that idea. The form emphasizes quick steps to move into better positions to strike from, as well as a powerful defense in the form of a primary blade to parry and a second to block. Destreza teaches the user to minimize their profile like in most forms of fencing, but the main difference between Destreza and French or Italian fencing styles is the use of sideways steps, as well as a second weapon. The primary killing blow in this style is the Movimiento de Conclusion, an incredibly quick move to close the distance between opponents and disarm the target in a single motion.
Torture and related skills
Will is skilled in binding victims, in creating uncomfortable environments, in presenting a discomforting exterior, in lying, in administering precise amounts of pain. There is an art to hurting a target just enough to strip away their resolve and leave broken husks behind without causing any damage that would affect the information you desire to take from them. Apply too little pressure and your work stretches out indefinitely. Apply too much and you’re left with a corpse rather than a pliable font of knowledge. Will has been trained to tread the line with expert precision, reducing the time it takes for him to get what he wants in incredibly short amounts of time.
Reinforcement magic
The Torquemada prefer to fight in actual combat with enemy magi, relying on incredible reinforcement to see them through troubles rather than grandiose hand waving and incomprehensible gesturing. Through generations, better and better reinforcement has been researched and stored inside the crest, creating a successively stronger family with every head. A side effect of this is that William is perfectly suited to battle traditional magi, as he is so fast and strong that he can dodge around most magecraft and strike killing blows. Some magi will completely counter this strategy, of course, but those are the ones Will should probably be running away from anyway.
MAGIC CIRCUITS[/color]: // 29 circuits of 7 prana per circuit, for a total of 203 prana innate. The Crest also contains 29 circuits of 10 prana quality, for a total of 290 prana, meaning Will has a maximum total of 493 prana.
SPELLS[/color]: //
[Nightmare] ([Mystic Code])
Rank: B
Cost: 1-4 pr per attack
Range: The person hit by the blade only
Effect: Nightmare is a Mystic Code dating back far beyond the birth of the Torquemada family, though its full origin is unknown. The blade is of the purest black, unmarred by any impurity, so dark that it seems to absorb sunlight. In the hundreds of years that it has been an heirloom among the Torquemada, the edge has never dulled and no blood has ever stained the metal that created it. The sword can cut through non living materials like any other weapon, though an exceptionally well forged one: the interesting part comes when the user opens his or her circuits while wielding the blade. By consuming a minimal amount of power, the sword stimulates the wounds it would be causing without injuring its victim. The amount of damage increases the amount of prana needed, but it is always a reasonable amount. A fatal blow will generally take 3 prana to project.
Nightmare’s primary use is still as a sword, but the secondary effect allows a Torquemada to cause debilitating pain without killing a potential subject or force someone to experience death over and over again. Naturally, this effect is used often by Will in his experiments.
[Command: Strengthen] ([Earth: Reinforcement])
Rank: C
Cost: 24 pr
Range: Self (5 minute duration)
Effect: (Five line Incantation) Strengthen is the primary reinforcement used by the Torquemada family. It uses prana to convince the human body to override the blockers naturally kept to avoid injuring itself, while also increasing the durability of the caster’s musculature to minimize damage. However, damage and intense pain are unavoidable when using any of the Torquemada brand of Reinforcement. The return for this additional cost, however, is that the reinforcement allows for greater feats than most other types. This reinforcement strengthens physical abilities, movement speed, durability, and endurance to superhuman levels. Additionally, the effect combines with Heighten and Enhance.
The downside to the use of Torquemada Reinforcement is that none of the consumed prana is used to protect the magi's body. In the case of Strengthen, the amount of damage done to the user's body is increased to a ridiculous amount. For anyone other than Will, use of Strengthen for 20 minutes would leave them unable to walk for an entire day. Will can do so, but at the cost of irreparable damage to his body that would leave him weaker for the rest of his life.
When any two reinforcements are cast at the same time, the cost of both increases by 25%.
[Command: Heighten] ([Earth: Reinforcement])
Rank: C
Cost: 24 pr
Range: Self (5 minute duration)
Effect: (Five line incantation) Heighten is the mental counterpart to Strengthen. Instead of superenergizing the body, it pumps prana into the caster’s mind, creating temporary magical synapses that allow a magus to process information at roughly twice normal speed. This should not be confused with an alchemist’s thought partitioning; Heighten does not allow Will to think in multiple directions at once, it only allows him to think more quickly. This reinforcement heightens his reaction times, allows him to parse information at an incredible rate, and indirectly benefits problem solving ability. Additionally, the effect combines with Strengthen.
The downside to the use of Torquemada Reinforcement is that none of the consumed prana is used to protect the magi's body. In the case of Heighten, a surge of dopamine is released into the user's brain at the same time as the prana forms temporary synapses, so the magi actually feels an artificial high that masks the pain as the spell takes over. However, there is no such rush when the stimuli is removed, so the user will feel intense pain as the body is forced to remove the synapses formed through magic.
When any two reinforcements are cast at the same time, the cost of both increases by 25%.
[Command: Enhance] ([Earth: Reinforcement])
Rank: C
Cost: 15 pr
Range: Self (3 minute duration)
Effect: (One verse incantation) Enhance is more of a utility ability than Heighten or Strengthen. Rather than increasing his physical or mental abilities, Enhance increases his ability to perceive information by feeding prana into the nerves that accept stimuli. His eyesight, hearing, smell, and taste are all enhanced considerably, though William’s Neuropathy means that his sense of touch only becomes about as good as a normal person’s, perhaps even slightly worse. While this does allow Will to chase a target more easily, it does not stack with Heighten. He can use Enhance and Strengthen simultaneously, but magically enhancing his senses overlaps with magically heightening brain function so only one may be active at a time.
The downside to the use of Torquemada Reinforcement is that none of the consumed prana is used to protect the magi's body. In the case of Enhance, after the spell has ended, the user's brain is overloaded by the amount of sensory detail taken in and the user develops a searing migraine.
When any two reinforcements are cast at the same time, the cost of both increases by 25%.
[Command: Stop] ([Earth])
Rank: D
Cost: 8 pr
Range: 10 meters Effect: .5m diameter sphere Duration: 30s
Effect: (One verse incantation) Stop is the only non reinforcement spell in the Torquemada arsenal, but it has proved its usefulness time and again. About two seconds after the caster finishes the three line chant, the designated earth-based area begins to decompose at a rapid rate. The Torquemada's invading prana separates and liquifies the matter, turning dirt to quicksand or cement to a sucking, slurping hole of rock shards.
The effect lasts a total of thirty seconds after the cast, when the prana has worn off and the affected area is no longer forced into a shape dictated by the magi. However, this does not "fix" the area immediately. For instance, the created quicksand would not revert to packed dirt, but would remain a pit full of loose sand it is easy to fall into and difficult to climb out of.
This spell is not affected by any form of resistance, but a magi or Servant should have absolutely no issue escaping the pit after they've fallen into it. The only trouble such a person would have is losing a few precious seconds while the Torquemada pursues them.
PLAYER'S NAME[/color]: //Keien
FACE CLAIM[/color]: //Kirito, Sword Art Online
OTHER CHARACTERS[/color]: // Sal, Roy, Xeno
MISC. INFORMATION[/color]: //The Manipulation of the Soul that Will is after was already discovered by the Einzbern and is called the Third True magic, but Will doesn’t know that. This doesn’t really have any effect on him as a character, I am just noting this for the convenience of my readers.
[/size][/ul]
