Max Lang (Finished)

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Name: Sisco again
Age: Under investigation
Roleplaying Experience: About 5 years
How you found the site: A friend who’s been here for a while

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Name: Maximillian Frederick Lang (Max)
Gender: Male
Age: 34
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Dark Brown
Skin Tone: Lightly tan with yellowish undertones, courtesy of his half Asian heritage
Height: 6 ft 3 in
Weight: 190 lbs
Wealth: Average
Sexual Orientation: Gay, but prefers to stay quiet about his interests and is in no mood to look for a companion at this point in time.
Why they are in La Campana:
Max initially hadn’t ever thought of crossing oceans in search of a job, but life has a way of bringing unexpected options such as that into view. La Campana came about in the form of a handout from some job fair, then as an internet search, and finally as a mailed application and a few interviews. At this point in his life, Max was ready to take whatever fate handed to him. In this rare instance, the hand dealt him was a kind one.
The offer came just after the very confusing and painful death of Max’s partner, Ben. With nowhere to go and no desire to return to the town where he had spent 5 years teaching high school and had met Ben in, Max decided that he might as well apply for a teaching job at a boarding school in Barcelona. A change of scenery would help him think things through, he had hoped, and hopefully would take the edge off of the reoccurring nightmares he’d been having ever since Ben’s death.
After completing the process with promising results, Max booked himself a flight to Spain and headed towards Barcelona, then on to La Campana. While the school was different than any of his former workplaces, it was pleasant enough. This semester he’s teaching several classes in Beginning Art, as well as a Graphic Design class and one British Literature class. His work keeps him busy, which is really all he could ask for. [/size]

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Likes:
1 Coffee, specifically Raven’s Brew flavors
2 A good night’s sleep
3 Drawing with ink
4 Hardworking students
5 Quiet time
6 Five a.m. walks
7 Good memories
8 Productivity
9 Big dogs (Newfoundlands and shepherd dogs)
10 Second chances
11 Reading
12 A select collection of videogames
13 Psychoanalytical studies and texts
14 Newspapers
15 The X Files
16 Whiskey, gin, scotch and Oberon beer
17 Jogging, most types of exercise
18 The upper Michigan landscape
19 Coffee ice cream
20 Moments of peace

Dislikes:
1 Mirrors
2 Shadows
3 Filthy establishments
4 Nightmares
5 Rot
6 Loneliness
7 Powerlessness
8 Obsessive habits
9 Grime under his nails
10 Unalphabetized books or any such media
11 Closets
12 Nosy people
13 Memory loss
14 Large birds
15 Cloyingly sweet things
16 Wide open spaces
17 Very tight spaces
18 Confusing spaces- mazes
19 Instant coffee
20 Guilt

Turn Ons:

1 Someone who can keep their home clean but lived-in
2 Reading aloud to his partner or vice versa
3 Really good homemade food
4 Shoulder massages
5 Level-headedness

Turn Offs:

1 Overly dorky behavior
2 Adult men who look like they haven't hit puberty yet
3 Bad hygiene
4 Dominating individuals
5 Passive individuals

Nervous Habits:

1 Obsessively cleaning his living quarters until every last inch is spotless
2 Organizing everything in sets of 26 or factors relating to that number
3 Rubbing the back of his neck when he’s uncomfortable
4 Tapping his fingers when agitated

Fears:

1 Finding a partner only to have something horrific happen again, resulting in their death
2 Having his own sins catch up and swallow him alive
3 What will happen to him after death

Goals/Aspirations:

1 Remember what exactly happened when he lost Ben, figure out if he’s just completely lost his mind or if what he thought happened was true, and if so, how.
2 Somehow save himself from what he turned into, “make his amends to the dead”
3 Not die before he completes item 2

Appearance:
Max’s build is almost imposing and is attractive in the right context, but he keeps himself well-hidden under large, dark shirts and standard jeans. His shoulders are moderately wide, with developed arm muscles and a well-cut chest. Lean hips attach to long legs that attest to a habit of running. All in all, he's got the body of a predatory hunter. Not like the modern “predators” that we know now, but in a traditional, animal sense.

His facial features show off his Korean heritage by the slight almond shape of his eyes, but other than that he looks very much like his father. He is a reasonably handsome man with a radiant smile, but that smile is difficult to coax out these days. Max has what his mother’s relatives call “a very nice, American nose”, meaning that it’s straight and has a nice bridge. Would his face be any thinner, Max would look rather severe. Even as it is, the man has a distant look to his eyes and gives off the sense that he really isn’t the type of person you would want to mess with. As for his hair, it is cut close to his head in a standard male cut. He doesn’t style it except for brush away the bedhead and occasionally add gel. Max tends to stay clean-shaven, but there are days when he lets it get to that five’o’clock shadow look.

Littered across his arms are deep scars, three on his right arm and one deep scar cutting into his left shoulder. An even more horrific scar curves upwards across his side and nicks his ribs. All of them are from the same kind of weapon, which forensics determined to be some giant kind of blade, almost similar to a butcher's knife in shape. Thinner scars from an unidentified animal's scratching mark Max' stomach and back, along with a few stripes on his thighs and shins. Small areas of his hands and wrists were scarred by acid, but his right hip bears more of the splattered marks from that same kind of acid. The scars are fresh, all from the incident on the mountainside town. Atmospheric and temperature changes often cause his more serious scars to ache.

Personality:
Very quiet and rather unassuming, Max prefers to be left alone. His actions are usually very careful and accurate, slow in a thoughtful way. He comes across as stoic and emotionless at first meeting, but if you manage to work your way under his skin, he'll more likely than not open up to you. His loyalty is fierce, but only if you get that far into his heart. That isn’t exactly an easy task, especially not these days, not after what happened to Ben.

Max is somewhat obsessive-compulsive, though not to the point of it being a handicap, and is recovering from acute paranoia. While he displays some schizophrenic symptoms, he doesn't cleanly fall into that category. The number 26 plays hugely into his life, and he is always looking for multiples and factors of it in his daily life. You can usually see him silently counting or tapping the numbers out with his fingers. Up until recently, he has had a phobia of mirrors. He still fears the deceptive nature of deep shadows, and will not enter his home at five 'o clock pm, ever.

As for guilt and conscience and all those other pesky things that would make his killing career rather difficult, Max specializes at compartmentalizing his dirty deeds away from the rest of his mind's processes. It's at this point that he plays a little Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game, but the issue of control is taken care of. Max effectively shuts out the dangerous part of himself and lives his normal life quite happily. When he does go in for a kill, he spends weeks stalking his victim and assembling a file that exposes every vulgar thing his prey has done, cementing the reason into Max' mind that killing that person is completely worth it- they are nothing but scum. Additionally, the power trip in the wake of a murder is intoxicating. The rush and excitement had been worth all that trouble.

At least, it was. Every kill he'd made had seemed so very worth it at the time, but now...now things have changed. The urge and the thirst for that kind of power still sometimes show up, but not since the incident has Max been able to act on those wants. What goes around comes around, and in this case, it simply cannot end well.
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Father:
Gareth Lang, deceased

Mother:
Marianne Lin, 57

Sibling/s:
None

Other important relatives:
Ben Harris (partner), male -deceased

Kinni Barrow (friend), female -deceased

Pets:
A bubble-eyed black goldfish named Nabokov

History:
Max, sadly, had a very dysfunctional childhood. What a child goes through shapes who they are, and in Max’s case, his environment nurtured a monster.

He had grown up in upper Michigan, not a bad neck of the woods, but a neck of the woods nevertheless. He grew up in moderate isolation, often spending long hours out in the hilly forests around his family's inherited farmhouse. The human contact he had was limited to his father and his schoolmates, the former of which taught Max just how depraved a human can be and get away with it. From the time Max was six, he had learned that his best friend was himself, he was the only one he could count on to make it out of his home alive. While his Newfoundland/German shepherd mix named Finner was a steadfast friend throughout his growing years, Max was very much alone.

His school years went by without many problems. He was under the radar in most subjects, intelligent but quiet, content to fade into the woodwork and get through his classes with B's and A's. Art, however, was his forte. His favorite medium? Black ink or oil pastels.
His works impressed staff and students alike, but no one could deny that every piece always seemed a little off emotionally, a little too dark, a little bit twisted, and sometimes a bit nightmarish. But that was half of the charm.

Max stuck with art throughout his high school career, but even though his teachers begged him to apply for scholarships and get into an art school, he ignored them and went to someplace more affordable and far away from his father. He majored in literature and minored in art, focusing on secondary education. Relations with his father remained strained, even though Gareth wasn't paying a penny towards his son's education. They had demons between them that made peace impossible.

After a long history of verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse, Max finally had had enough with his father. Partially inspired by the acts of Lizzie Borden, but mostly just fed up with everything he'd endured, Max took a wood ax and hacked the man's face apart while he slept. The boy was eighteen at the time and had snuck home from college, unnoticed by a soul, and committed the crime. He was never found guilty in court.

His mother was long gone from the picture. Marianne lives still, denying that Max was ever her son or that Mr. Lang was her husband. She knew of the abuse that took place when Max was a child, but the woman was emotionally defunct and didn't want to deal with the kid after he had outgrown his adorable pet stages. She divorced Max's father when the boy was eleven years old. Her son never acknowledged her, or any other women, in any way for most of his adult life.

That is until a drug-addled teen named Kinni broke in during his 24th year alive and ate his food and slept on his couch and turned his quiet double life inside out and upside down.

A very long story turned very short tells us that after letting her stay with him for about a year, they formed a sort of friendship. She was wild; he was working at a butcher shop and attending college, working towards his teaching degree. She was avoiding foster care or the women's shelter; he was hiding a hobby as a serial killer. She eventually found out about his morbid hobby but never said a thing, as Max's targets were the kind of men she wouldn't mind killing herself.

She saw his deeds as a service to the community; Max just saw them as a thrill. Why hunt down the weak girls or little children when he could take down the predators would fight harder and be more satisfying to carve apart?

All good things have to come to an end at some point, however, and fate decided that Max and Kinni had had a long enough run- it was time for some tragedy to strike. Kinni went to the wrong party and came back bloodied and broken. Max was reasonably upset. He found the names of the people who'd hurt her, but it wasn't until she died of an infection she wouldn't tell him about that he took revenge.

When police found the five mangled corpses of her attackers in the woods, Max had long since covered his tracks and Kinni was buried respectfully in a different forest. He lost himself in a silent depression for about a year, but worked his way through it by throwing himself into his college degrees and taking various side jobs. Max eventually graduated with his Masters, then went on to Vermont to find a teaching job.

As luck would have it, he landed a job at a public high school and ended up teaching various literature and art classes during his five year stay. During that time he completed seven other kills in four surrounding counties, all the while keeping his own identity perfectly protected from the investigations.

The biggest change in his life was not due to any of his killings, but due to the intrusion of one man into Max’s heart. Ben Harris was a special ed teacher at the school Max worked at. What started out as a work-based friendship turned into a closer relationship, and eventually the two of them came to terms with the fact that they were in love. Ben moved in with Max and they lived fairly happily together for two years, until the district's funds dropped and teachers had to be cut. Ben, unfortunately, was released in the first round of firings because he was an even newer teacher than Max was. But as luck would have it, after only a few months into looking, he got a job offer several states away. After some heated discussions concerning their future together and what this could do, Max decided to quit his job in Vermont and go with Ben. So two months later, they loaded up their belongings and sent one truck to the new apartment while they drove on along behind.

The drive was uneventful for most of the trip, up until they reached the mountains. The car was in good condition and they had checked it before leaving, so both Max and Ben were bewildered when the engine died. Of course, they were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Ben made the mistake of joking about how it was just like a horror movie. The car breaks, the phones don’t work, it’s foggy and nearing evening. Intelligently, instead of getting out and looking for help after several fruitless attempts to find and fix what was wrong, they waited until dawn the next day to head out and look for either a spot with phone reception or some gas station where they could call for a tow truck. They walked and walked, and indeed they found a small town, but there was something…off about the place.

Max forgot what happened after that. He still doesn’t know what happened after they looked around that town and found not a single person, after the air raid sirens went off.

After the sirens, the next thing Max recalled was being in the back of an ambulance with severe gashes marking his arms and his left side, along with a scattering of other more minor injuries. Ben was in the ambulance as well, all bundled up with tubes and a mask, with a gaping wound right through his abdomen. Ben didn’t make it to the hospital, he died grasping Max’s hand, telling him three things. One: that he loved Max with all his might, two: Never, ever, ever go back there, and three: It was real. It wasn’t a nightmare to be woken up from, it was real, and it would have consumed Max alive had he, Ben, not done something first.

Max didn’t know where there was, and it was after he had been hospitalized and brought back to a stable state that he was told how he and Ben had been located. Someone passing through the area on the other side of that town had seen Max half-dragging, half-carrying the body of another man. Both were soaked with blood and scared the driver, who called the cops. Max had still been wandering down the highway in a shocked state when they were taken into custody. Apparently the whole time, Max had been talking frantically about the “butcher man with the iron helmet”, too horrified to make any sense. He was told that he had kept on sobbing and telling them the butcher man was after him, it was his fault, the butcher was after him and not Ben.

He couldn’t tell the police how he had survived. He didn’t know the name of the town. When the police tried to track the bloody footprints back to the place, the fog was too thick to get through. When they returned later to investigate, the electrical devices they all carried started to break up and fizz out. After a time, the investigation was called off due to continuous problems with getting anywhere near the supposed town where Max and Ben had been attacked.

Max still bears the scars from that encounter. While he escaped jail and complete financial doom because the court hearing about what happened was on his side that he didn’t kill his partner, Max isn’t much closer to feeling better about the situation. He wants to know what happened, he wants to know why he can’t remember it; he wants to know where they were and why it was Ben who died instead of himself, what Ben was talking about when he said it would take Max alive if Ben hadn’t gone first.

He wants to know why the figure that keeps showing up in his memory is similar to a monster from a videogame series he has. He wants to think that he’s gone crazy, but he can’t shake the nightmares of that horrifying place and the butcher who’s always bearing down on him.

Max wants it to all be in his imagination, because videogames can’t be real. They just can’t be.


Roleplaying Sample:

It took him a long time to register the sight above him. When he did, his first reaction was to screw his eyes back shut and wish the scenery away. But his eyelids remained frozen open, forcing Max to stare up at the discolored and broken tiles that made up the walls of this place, up at the decaying ceiling that was spotted with mold and water stains the color of dirty blood. Rising up on all sides of him were filthy porcelain walls, high enough that he could only see the upper half of the walls and a portion of the ceiling.

He didn't need to see anymore, he knew this place.

The overwhelming need to flee from this room took over, and Max did his best to haul himself upright and hightail it out of there. But just like with his eyes, the rest of his body refused to move. Every desperate attempt to jerk his body into movement failed, leaving him in a growing state of terror as he began to notice that the bottom of the disgusting bathtub he was laid out in was slowly filling with a chilly red substance. At first he thought it was red paint, but realized that nothing was being poured into the tub from above. Aside from that, where the faucet and knobs should be gaped chipped holes. The liquid was flowing from the gashes on his side and shoulder.

He was ear-deep in the fluid when the flow slowly stopped. Panting and still straining to break free, Max nevertheless heard the telltale scraping as it came closer. His efforts tripled, but did nothing. The scraping sound entered the room, then stopped. Max could only stare on in horror as the familiar monstrosity towered over him, blade tip poised right at Max's face. He attempted to choke out a plea, but the knife didn't care. It picked up speed and rushed downwards, aimed for its victim's mouth.

"NO, DON'T-"
Max jerked forwards, waking himself up with the sharp action. Wincing when the movement pulled at the still-tender flesh of his side, his instinctive reaction was to clutch at the pained spot and lean forward until the worst of the pain passed. Groaning in both pain and horror left over from the nightmare, Max sat there for a long time trying to regain his composure. The nightmares had been getting worse, which made going to sleep harder, which affected his functioning, which ended up making classes harder to teach.

This was the third one this week, but was the seventh vivid nightmare he'd had since coming here. If they didn't stop soon, he would go and see if a prescription would help. Max groaned again and sat up a bit straighter, running a hand across his face groggily. He squinted at the neon numbers of his clock, then glared at them as if they intentionally were trying to upset him by stating that it was 3:52 in the morning.

Trying to go back to sleep was useless. The nightmare had left him wound up and sore, and another terrible dream wasn't going to make matters any better. He flicked on his bedside light and slowly got out of bed, wandering over to his dresser and pulling out a rice-filled heatpad. On his way out to the kitchen he slipped into his charcoal gray bathrobe, flicking on another light as he went into the other room. The hot pack would help ease the tight pain around his scars, but fresh coffee would do his sleep-deprived brain wonders. Max tossed the pack into the microwave and let it cook for a few minutes while he made up a new pot of coffee, taking it out once it beeped at him and holding it to his side for now.

A few minutes later found him sitting in his favored armchair with a mug of black coffee in one hand and a book the other, his TV softly droning on in front of him as white noise.

Maybe he couldn't sleep, but he could still use this time to do something even mildly productive. Reading worked well enough for him.