Derek Nikolas Maddox

Name:  Derek Maddox
Age: 36
Race: Human (with ability)
Faction: S.C.P.D.
Face Claim:  Jeremy Renner

Personality:  A twelve-year veteran of the SCPD, Derek has a dry, often somewhat morbid sense of humor and quiet, methodical intensity that comes from a long career in law enforcement - and in the homicide department in particular. Even after the dropping of the veil, Derek tends to affect the air of the world-weary gumshoe: a man who has seen just about all the worst things humanity has to show, but carries on sifting through the gore and the garbage all the same in a search for Truth and Justice. Even if he will, frequently, make jokes about the apparent futility of said quest.

Beneath the deflection, Derek is an extremely dedicated public servant, a true believer in the protection of the law even in the time since the falling of the Veil. He believes more than ever in the job he and his fellow officers have to do, since now more than ever there are innocent people who need protecting, and guilty people who need punishment. In the service of that goal he tends to be a workaholic, a bloodhound always after a scent to the neglect of much else: personal life in particular. He has a few friends he values, mostly on the force, and he is close with his sister Eleora, but he tends to believe in quality over quantity in personal relationships and is frequently somewhat aloof with people he doesn't know. Part of that is his mindset as a detective - it's hard to turn off that part of the brain that is always trying to figure out what other people are thinking, what their motives are... what they might have done.

Likes:  Hunting, dogs, putting the bad people behind bars, MMA
Dislikes:  Criminals of most sorts, sand (dunes, beaches), the Yankees
Habits:  Though it's been fourteen years since his last deployment, Derek has a number of habits he picked up in the Marines that have yet to fade - partly because they come in handy as a cop. He is meticulous about his checking for exits, paying attention to containers by the sides of roads, and other such ex-military worries. He is an avid people-watcher thanks in part to his job, and often works on keeping his skills sharp by seeing what he can deduce from a few short looks at a person, though he doesn't always get the chance to test his theories.

As far as hobbies go, Derek is a hunter, and trains in muay thai and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu at a gym downtown. Much of the rest of his time is spent reading, either at home or at one of his favorite bars.

History:  First born of the Maddox clan, Derek didn't remain an only child for long, with his little sister Eleora coming along just before he turned two years old. That was never much of a problem for him - he and his sister got along famously pretty much from the start. He grew up very protective of his little sister, despite the fact that they had very different personalities. For the bubbly light of life that Ele was, Derek was the hard sibling, the one who got into fights in school (more than one over comments made about his sister), and it wasn't until middle school that he was able to turn that energy to something constructive. For him, it was sports - football first, wrestling later on, and some MMA style competition in the off-season. He was never the sort to do things by halves, but his family was one that treasured its time together - generally rigidly enforced by their Marine father. Derek didn't put up much of a fight in that regard when he was younger. Because of the empathy that ran in their bloodline, they were always at least somewhat aware of the supernatural - their mother occasionally taught her children what truth she knew of what lay beyond mortal science, though Derek was not one to take it so seriously. His sister was the one who had inherited the family gifts, not him.

The breaking of the seemingly idyllic family life would come with the death of his mother, in a violent car wreck when Derek was sixteen. Where Ele tried her best to help, unable to avoid feeling the crushing pain her father and brother felt, the men of the family reacted the only way they knew how. Ricard hardened himself, doing his best to be the rock of stability his children needed, while Derek threw himself more and more into sports and training. He was rarely home for weeks at a time, and it was in this time that he and his sister had their first real falling out. They dealt with the pain of their mother's loss too differently, and where she wound up spending more time with their grandmother, it was their father - in a blowout of a fight that lay waste to the living room one day when Ele was away - that finally got through to Derek. He and Ele were able to reconnect before Derek graduated high school, and like their father enlisted in the Marines.

Derek spent four years in the Marines, though since those years were during the relatively peaceful 1990's, his active-duty years didn't yield a great deal of danger or excitement. He decided at the end of his enlistment not to re-up, that the Corps was not where he would spend his life, and he returned home to Starling and his family. He had been taking correspondence classes while overseas, and finished his degree in criminal justice before enrolling in the SCPD academy. He graduated at 23 and became a beat officer, where he quickly made a name for himself as a dedicated and skilled officer thanks in part to his military training (and ability to know when NOT to apply said training, it should be noted). After a couple years, he was assigned as a detective's assistant, still a uniformed officer, but attached to the SCPD Homicide department under Detective Aaron Ecks, who would become a mentor and close friend.

In 2001, after the attacks of 9/11, things began to change quickly. Though he had left the Corps, he remained a member of the Reserves, and his unit was called up and deployed three times to Afghanistan and later Iraq over the next few years. He took leaves of absence from the SCPD during these deployments - sentiment at the time, of course, was such that there was no one who was about to complain, and he was far from the only officer who was either a Reservist or in the National Guard. He completed his last deployment in 2005 - it was shortly after returning home that the second great tragedy of his life struck... almost.

Visiting with his sister, celebrating a chance to spend some time together and his recent return from the Middle East, the pair were accosted by a robber who demanded their money at gunpoint. It should have been a simple situation - Derek's training in exactly these sorts of situations was extensive, but in some cases there is no amount of soothing tone or compliance with orders that is going to prevent a man no longer in control of himself from making a stupid decision. Derek was ready - he knew well that he could take a bullet and remain on his feet long enough to kill the man and save his sister as long as he kept from being hit in a critical area, but it was Ele who made the call to save him first - and before he could do anything to stop her. The seconds seemed to stretch into decades - the bullet slammed into his sister, stopped by a bone somewhere in her body from passing through and into him, and he let his training take over. His service pistol was out and firing just as she hit the ground. Three shots, center mass... too late.

Horrible as that was, it was all explainable. What happened next wasn't. Ele had been hit critically - he knew she was going to die, even had she been shot inside a hospital there was no surviving a shot that hit the aorta, but she didn't die. There was a brilliant light instead, the sign of an angel choosing his sister as a vessel... and she survived. Not without catches, certainly... but she lived.

It was a clarifying incident in more than one way. Vows to never let something like that happen again went only so far, but it was the sort of thing one did anyway, and the personal near-death (of a family member) experience only refocused his dedication to his job as a homicide cop. No longer in danger of being deployed, his promotion to Detective came quickly, and he continued to amass a record of distinguished service in the years that followed.

Thanks to his personal and family experiences, the dropping of the veil, despite the chaos it caused, was less of a shock to Derek than it was to most. Thanks to the forewarning he had, he was better equipped than just about anyone else in the department to muster their forces against the newly emerged threats of the supernatural, and he was awarded one of the first spots on the SCPD's supernatural task force when it was commissioned.
Bad Experiences: Sister's almost-death, multiple things that happened on deployment
Best Memory: Found two young children alive at the end of a terrible serial killer case, returned them to their family
Misc:  I think that about covers it...


Abilities: True Sight
While Derek always thought his sister was the only one in the family with a power, he was always able to see magical currents and energy to some degree, it just never occurred to him that it was anything particularly special. Since it was generally innocuous, it wasn't until much later that he even realized other people COULDN'T see what he saw, at which point he was old enough to realize it was the sort of thing one kept under wraps.

After the Veil fell though, his fairly minor power got a considerable boost. It had been the veil that shielded his eyes from the worst of it all those years, and the experience of what he could see with it gone nearly blinded him in the first few days after the event, before he learned that it was something he could shut off. Since then, he keeps this metaphysical set of extra eyelids closed most of the time, since opening them is something he can't afford to take lightly.

With 'both sets of eyes' open, so to speak, Derek is able to see far deeper into the world than any normal human, or even most supernatural creatures. More than just allowing him to see spells and enchantments and residual magic hanging around an area, his vision is able to represent the truth of what it sees, though his brain tends to interpret this in ways that could often be charitably referred to as 'bizarre'. These manifestations often represent more than just what is visible in a place now, but say something as to the character of a place - and the effect is more potent still where living creatures are concerned. Practically, this lets him see past glamours and other spells of concealment to see the true form of a creature in his sight - he can also see the angels within the Annointed, or demons within Afflicted. Even a werecreature is likely to show their beast in some way, for instance the shadow they cast may come to resemble their animal when he Looks upon them. Even for 'normal' people, however, the Sight can reveal something about their character.

This leads into the difficulty of his power, of course. The Sights are often abstract in some fashion, reflecting the difficulty his mind has in processing the raw information provided to it by his ability. Because of this, it does not always give him a good sense of someone's character, and the Sight of something he doesn't know of or understand is very likely to be confused - if he has no frame of reference, he can hardly paint a good mental picture. A more practical limitation is this: for lack of a better word, the world his Sight allows him to See is 'bright', beautiful and terrible and actively painful to look upon. This limits him to using it for short durations, usually a few seconds at a time, lest the sheer psychic stress of Seeing cause him harm. Even used moderately, he usually suffers for it in the form of headaches shortly afterward.


Alistair, it was safe to say, was probably a little highly ranked for this particular sort of bullshit.

Despite that, however, the Overseer of the Order of Ulrich in New York and currently the ranking senior Magus in the North American territory was out in Central Park again, dealing with yet another relatively minor incursion. He didn't mind in particular, if he'd been genuinely expected to sit at his desk and let the Inspectors and Centurions handle everything now that they'd promoted him, he thought he just might go one level of insane or another. That would probably not be the best thing for the Order's image and his reputation as a leader, however... so it was a decent justification for his every now-and-then getting a bit of field work in.

Of course, when he'd gotten word that the oft-recurring portals through the Veil had decided to crack open a bit again, he hadn't quite expected there to be four of them... or for them to be the same bladed horrors that had shown up at the harbor the year before.

Alistair hated those things.

He brought one arm up, wincing as claws that seemed made of jagged and broken obsidian crashed into the spell-reinforced fabric of his duster coat. The coat took the blow like the armor he'd turned it into, but still transferred a bit too much of the demon's inhumanly-strong blow into the human mage's arm, knocking him back a few steps before it let out its otherworldly screech and leapt for him again. Not the wisest course of action, actually. Alistair threw his other (and as yet less-bruised) hand out toward it, palm out, and released the mana he had been gathering, channeling it though carefully laid patterns that he'd spent years drilling into his mind. Alistair wasn't the sort of mage who commonly chanted, or yelled any Harry-Potter style incantations when he threw a spell. He'd been an electrical engineer - he thought in paths of current, designs and schematics. Runes were close enough, and he'd gravitated toward that variety of spellcasting. Since he had the uncommon talent of being able to hold those in his head without having to draw them out, it made for a nasty surprise when his opponent wasn't ready for it.

This particular bastard wasn't in any way ready for it.

For a fraction of a second the air buzzed with tremendous energy, electrical charge building on the Magus and the demon who was his target, then the dimly-lit clearing was filled with blinding light as the arc snapped into existence. Movies like Star Wars really gave people the wrong impression of what electrical magic looked like. If there was enough current to produce a visible arc of energy, that energy was plasma - violent and hotter than hell, quite literally if its effect on demons was any indication. The pressure wave the heat created was nothing to sneeze at, either.

Of course the energy involved meant it was no drawn out, convulsion-inducing bolt, either. The arc lasted less than half a second, but the energy it produced in that time was enough to blast the demon back from its intended prey, the heat charring a massive patch of its crimson skin to a blackened crisp as it hit the ground, screeching in pain.

Two others already lay dead, not far from the scorched patch of grass where the portal had opened up, and the one more that was still on its feet had a similar scorch mark, its left arm hanging uselessly, warily trying to circle around the Magus as the other thrashed in the dirt, growing feebler - it had taken the shock full on, he doubted it was going to live much longer before it fell to dust, returned to the pit it crawled from. Of course... that did leave the last one. "They do say the burned hand teaches best..." Alistair growled in its direction, as though daring it to make a go at him, and trying to keep his own weariness from showing. Oh, Alistair could throw some serious power for a human mage... but he did have his limitations. It helped to carry a pistol - but for the moment he couldn't find his, and his battered left arm hurt like hell.

Gathering power for another arc flash was going to take a moment, too, and one he might not have. He had a short sword as well, but it had been knocked away when the third one ambushed him - bad night for that. As it turned out, he really didn't. The creature turned and rushed at him, terrifyingly quick, and Alistair did all he could do. He extended his left hand, kicking up a blast of wind to slow the creature down (something that met with limited success) while he grabbed the folding knife from his pocket. The monster tackled him before he had a chance to do much, claws sinking into his leg through his jeans and drawing a cry of pain from the mage - but he'd been in these situations far too many times to let that slow him down. He brought his knife up before it could claw at him again, sinking it into the hot red scales, then he clamped his other hand on the side of its head and brought his power to bear again. The two points of contact let him send a more modest shock through it than the arc that had scalded the last one - but with a direct path into its blood, he needed much less.

The demon went sharply rigid, like a body that had just taken a defibrilator shock, and Alistair shoved it back off him, the blood on his knife smoking from the heat. It thrashed once, weakly, then went still. The other bodies began to crumble slowly, and Alistair sat up just a little, glaring in the direction of that last kill before it began to fade as well. "Yeah, and fuck you too..." He winced then, sitting up slowly and looking to the blood welling from the wounds in his leg. He pressed a hand against it to apply at least some pressure, and began checking his pockets for something he could use. He usually carried something - he'd been hurt more than his share of times in one fight or another. Tonight was supposed to have been a simple check, maybe burn a few imps... It was always something, wasn't it?

OOC Name: Kenny
Age: 26
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