Drake Edelphius Walker
“All men are fated to die…but that one…he just keeps on walking.”
Also Known As: “Dead Man Walking”
Parameters:
- Strength: 9
- Endurance: 22/42 (+4 Battle Continuation, +8 Enchant, +8 from Touko Aozaki’s runic enhancements)
- Agility: 9
- Magic: 10
- Prana: 13
- Luck: 12
Skills:
- Battle Continuation: 4
- As someone who lived as a soldier of the Mages Association and then as a mercenary, who was given the precise date and time at which Fate had decreed his body would expire, and who fought to find a reason to live, even on the threshold of Death’s Door, Drake has developed an understanding of exactly how much punishment his body can handle before it will finally give out. No longer feeling pain, he is ruthlessly efficient in his movement; so long as his body is biologically capable of moving, then he will keep fighting – there will be time to rest when he’s finally dead. Drake no longer requires sleep or food – simply prana – though he still goes through the motions of both.
- Enchant: 4
- Drake is no longer a human being. Though still the sum of his parts, the connection between his mind – or his soul, rather – and body has been severed, leaving Drake ever the external observer. Binding himself to what became his most prized possession, his own body, Drake has tapped into enough magical energies and unwritten contracts with the cosmos that he remains “tethered” to his body, beyond death. As a result, he has developed the ability to puppeteer his own body from the outside to the same degree of efficiency that he had in life. What’s more, as the object of this Skill, his body is empowered by a magical contract so long as he manages to stay alive – a skill in which he displays stupefying skill.
- Expert of Many Specializations: 1
- Existing outside of the magical “object” of his body for far longer than his physical form would indicate, Drake has had the time to acquire a great many skills. At this level, he is capable of bearing notable talent in six additional fields beyond what might be expected of him – those that are known being criminal investigation, hostage negotiations, anatomy, and interrogation.
- Magecraft (Reinforcement): 3
- The current son from a relatively unknown family, Drake inherited the power of “Steel” that had made his family the banner bearers of many a prominent Lord of the Clock Tower. Drake’s leaps and strides in the field of his family’s Magecraft can largely be attributed to the fact that, unlike the vast majority of magi, he refined his craft on the battlefield, where failure meant death. His craft is notable enough that, prior to his Sealing Designation, he had brought the Walker name up to the 4th Rank.
- Military Tactics: 2
- Having survived a lifetime on the battlefield and served in more companies as a mercenary than most trained soldiers, Drake has managed to acquire considerable skill at assessing the flow of battle and optimizing his limited resources. He is not one who has much experience as a leader of men, but rather is experienced in small-arms tactics and modern army combatatives – his ranks in this Skill are not counted towards his own ability to tactically lead an armed unit, but rather subtracted from his enemy’s rank in this Skill.
- Unfettered Blows: 3
- Under normal circumstances, the human brain and nervous system prevent a person from exerting the maximum potential that could be demanded from the body’s muscles. Drake, however, puppeteers his body without the fear of bodily degeneration and without needing the consent of his brain, and can utilize the full of his body’s physical potential – he is capable of adding a number up to twice his Rank in this Skill to his Strength, but at the penalty of subtracting that same number from his Endurance.
Qualities:
- Spare Parts – “While the Mind may Fail, the Body will Forever Heal”
- Ignoring the sheer ridiculousness of the fact that Drake Walker has managed to tether himself to his own animated body, the fact that his organs do not function should mean that, when it actually does sustain damage, his body should be beyond repair. Somehow, though, Drake has managed to retain the ability to manipulate his magic circuits, and as a result, is capable of performing Spiritual Surgery upon his body in order to maintain it – effectively, he gains access to “Spiritual Surgery: 4,” but only with respect to his own body.
- Scavenger
- Drake is a genius when it comes to discerning the locations of powerful Conceptual Weapons and Mystic Codes – a skill he cultivated during the days when he could move about unnoticed by the Clock Tower. In order to avoid provoking the wrath of the other conspiracies, however, he managed to refine his “sixth sense” to the point where he can detect dormant or unbound Mystic Codes anywhere within a ten kilometer distance of himself.
Story Thread:
It is the unfortunate circumstance of fate that many great men are only made famous long after they have passed from this world.
…In the case Drake Elelphius Walker, however, he has managed to stick around long enough to enjoy his newfound fame.
His origins are not so much shrouded in mystery as they are surprisingly unremarkable; he was born into a family of 2
nd Rank within the Clock Tower and garnered a small reputation for himself as a hunter of Mystic Codes for the Association. The only act of special note he would commit during his time at the Clock Tower would go largely unnoticed, as he managed to slow his own aging through the use of a subtle, continuous reinforcement of his internal organs, producing just the right cocktail of enzymes to preserve himself in peak physical condition. This single, small action was perhaps the first sign of what would become the driving struggle in his life.
Yet he could not stay at the Clock Tower indefinitely before attracting unwanted attention, and he was forced to conclude his studies in his tenth year under their tutelage. Turned out into the world without direction, Drake turned to perhaps the only profession that demanded the experience he had acquired during his time at the Clock Tower, and became a mercenary magus, once again putting his abilities to use to track down Mystic Codes for the conspiracies of the magical community. It was during this time that, on a routine visit to a clinic to immunize himself to the local bacteria living in the Amazon basin before his next mission, that his cancer was discovered.
He did not take the news well.
Drake all but vanished from the world, abandoning his contracts and employers and sinking into a deep depression – later he would confess that in this time, he had wandered into the wilds in a state of delirium and nearly died. Perhaps he had actually meant to. Nearly the span of two years passed and Drake’s family grew frantic for news of their missing son – they hired dozens of magi and even enlisted the help of a Magus Hunter, but to little avail. After a while, the world at large seemed to have forgotten about him, a man of little repute in the first place.
Besides, to speak about South America became taboo once the Americana Incident rocked the world. The catastrophe annihilated half of the entire continent, and when the Alchemist Order of ATLAS shut their doors to the world and refused to lend their aid, the hidden wars of the great conspiracies exploded like never before. Of the twelve survivors of the Americana Incident, only the name of one magus was ever made public within the magical community – Gin Ryougi, the “Walking War.”
But amongst the ashes, burnt and bloody, Drake Walker pulled himself from the basin of the blackened river, quite alive.
He had survived what so many hundreds of thousands did not; not through preparation or natural hardiness – this was not something that could be attributed to luck, either. It was a miracle, and from that moment onwards, Drake Walker decided that fate had much greater things in store for him. Fighting against his despair with an equal hope that he was meant to live – to survive – he reentered the world.
In his desperation to stave off the decay of his body, Drake tried any number of methods to save himself. Nothing was too obscure save the possibility of becoming a Dead Apostle – he wanted to
live, not become a walking corpse that preyed on humanity. For several years, Drake – no longer the “Cold Iron Magus” of the Clock Tower – even went so far as to pursue lead after lead in the search for Touko Aozaki, calling upon every contact he had ever made as a hunter of Mystic Codes and executor of Sealing Designations. What he did not realize was that, by revealing his inexplicable survival to one person after the next, that he was weaving the threads of fate around himself once more.
Finally, in a fit of desperation, he attempted to recreate the same bodily Reinforcement he had in his younger years on a much larger scale. Reasoning the aging process to be a complicated biological defect that even the advanced biology of a Dead Apostle could not completely inhibit, he endeavored to iron out the defects in every organ, one at a time. Perhaps he overestimated his survivability, because fate was not about to let a man make himself immortal. Something went wrong; his body mistook the Reinforcement as a mutation and began to reject it; the spell went haywire, and Drake did not have time to realize the folly of his actions before-
He died.
But not properly.
Drake Walker, who had gone mad and become addicted to the sensation of living, found himself looking down upon his own body, standing immobile in the center of the crater that had been his workshop. For a moment, he could not believe it- it was something out of a storybook or the mind of an irrational child; something even a magus could not comprehend. His body was there – his Od, however, was not.
“So I hear you’ve been looking for me.”
And the bodiless entity that was “Drake” looked up to see a woman with deep burgundy hair leaning against the frame of the door. She took a long drag from her cigarette before flicking it over her shoulder, and shifted the weight of her briefcase as she strode into the workshop. What she did then, Drake could not to this day explain; he only knows that by the end of it, as she packed up her vials and tools and left him there in the ruined building, that he could once again move his body.
Drake Walker died once in the Americana Incident and then once again at his own hands – what he found was not eternal life, but something else.
But he would never be the same.
Drake is tethered to his body by a form of Magecraft completely beyond his understanding and now finds himself a puppeteer over his own physical form. His body was made almost indestructible by his final act of Magecraft. To him, it is a fate worse than death, and his fanatical desire to enjoy the pleasures of life leads him to immense acts of indulgence and personal risk, but his is an outside observer merely tugging at the strings of his body: he cannot enjoy the taste of food, the comfort of sleep, or the thrill of a fight. Desperate, he attempted to recapture the idealism of his youth by campaigning against the wars engulfing the world, but his actions only left him hunted by the Association and the Holy Church. Over time, he grew numb to everything but that burning desire to live – or rather, he is painfully aware that he has begun to
forget.
It was only recently, as he threw himself into the Second Hundred Years’ War that learned about a young man in Spain who had wrapped himself in the legends of old and gained tremendous powers. Suddenly, he understood; he saw a way out. He now realizes that the ancient, buried power from ages past has begun to once again appear on this planet – those who fight against fate and garner the power of legends around themselves are those with the right to decide their own future. He has a chance to become human once again.
He would become a legend.
Now he walks every battlefield; he makes himself the nemesis of every powerful figure he can find;; he accrues treasures of old as quickly as he can – in every small way possible, he tethers himself to the world. He reasons that if he gains enough power, the planet itself will have no choice but to recognize him. He does not realize that in interfering with the affairs of the conspiracies and great powers, he binds himself even more tightly into the role fate has intended for him.
Most recently, he entered the Crystal Valley and was instantaneously obliterated by an unseen force. Seven months later, after having been presumed dead for a third time, he appeared before an assembly of the Lords of the Clock Tower, completely whole and grinning like a madman.
His plan is working – he had
survived.
Quotes:
- Drake Edelphius Walker, to Touko Aozaki: “…price is not an issue – hell, if you’d be willing to do it, then I’ll work off the debt until the day you die.”
- Drake Edelphius Walker, to Dead Apostle: “No, you listen to me. I may not be the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest, but let me tell you this – fighting me will cost you. You will lose time, you will lose resources, and by the end of it all, you will have lost more than a night’s sleep, because I will never stop coming after you. One of us needs to die, and friend, dying is the one thing that I will never learn how to do.”
- Drake Edelphius Walker, to Louvre: “Let me tell you what’s going to happen: you’re going to rip me apart, batter me, and hit me with enough weaponry to bring down this entire castle around us. Then, when you’re out of prana and can’t use any of those little toys, I’m going to pick myself up out of the rubble and take them from you – somebody else will come kill you soon enough – and walk away, because that’s just what I do.
- Gin Ryougi, to Drake Edelphius Walker: “…haha…stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but we’re not all that different, you and I…”
Trivia:
- The Holy Church has classified Drake’s animation and puppeteering of his own body as necromancy, one of the forbidden schools of Magecraft. As a result, he is hunted by their agents in a joint effort spearheaded by the Enforcers of the Clock Tower.
- Drake has on several occasions come into conflict with Gin Ryougi, the “Walking War,” who has become something of a personal nemesis over the years. While Drake attempts to finally put an end to the walking calamity, Gin is ecstatic to have finally met someone just like him – a deathless soldier.
- For a short time, Drake was believed to be the current incarnation of Michael Roa Valdamjong due to his regenerative properties and uncanny ability to seek out the places where great conflicts will occur.
- Drake was able to regenerate his body after being obliterated by the sleeping ORT down to a single rib, suggesting that so long as any part of his body remains, he is capable of regenerating from any wound, given enough time.
- During his hunt for Touko Aozaki, Drake does not know that on several occasions, he had spoken to her face-to-face, or rather, a puppet of the various likenesses she had assumed over the years, and that she had been feeding him false leads from the very beginning.
- Drake's mind has deteriorated to the point of fanaticism - there are many who believe that he does not even remember his life before losing his body, and that his entire reason to exist is to reclaim his mortal life.
Originally Posted by Mike1984
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PaD NA ID: GameManDan (318,600,328)Rank: 530Main: Savior Lightning, Shirou, and whatever flavor of the monthWorking: plus farming for days
