User Profile

Physical Description

John is tall, dark, and not particularly handsome. He's not ugly; he's just relatively common looking, other than a certain intensity that's hard to miss.

Personality

John's had a hard childhood.

His mother, a mystery wrapped in an enigma with a side order of puzzlement, went away when he was a child. If anyone knows who or what she was, they're not telling; it's one of the mysteries of the Nightside. His father, who worked with the Authorities, drank himself to death over whoever or whatever she was. As one might expect, he had little love for John and spent most of his time researching in the archives when he wasn't poisoning his liver.

After his parents were both gone, he was taken in hand by a friend of his father's: Walker, the man empowered by the Authorities to take care of business in the Nightside. At times, this worked; at others, not so much. Both John and Walker are stubborn people and they occasionally have very different ideas of right and wrong.

It doesn't help that John's got even more problems than that. He's got a strange group of faceless creatures called the Harrowing after him, all manner of creeping, crawling, terrifying creatures coming to see him to swear fealty for reasons he can't even guess, and let's not even get into the typical problems a teenager has to deal with.

Despite this, John's a pretty decent type. He's not the sort to start a fight, though goodness knows he'll end it. He's got something of a white knight complex, always rooting for the underdog (which he frequently is) and he's always willing to give something a try even though he knows what's out there. He's not fearless; he's got plenty of fears, but usually he bluffs even more when he's genuinely scared. He's also got one hell of a temper and it can get him into trouble more often than not.

Abilities

A result of John's unusual and confusing heritage is his abilities. The first, he's rather known for: he can find anything. It's hard to explain how it works for him, but it only works in the Nightside and he'll hardly ever use it as it's a beacon for the Harrowing to find him.

Another is the ability to stare someone down. If he gets his eyes on you, you can't quite look away and there's a tremendous pressure to submit that can do anything from make your nose, eyes, or ears bleed (if you really resist) to sending you into a shaking fit. It's not something he does lightly.

The last are an assortment of small charms and magics that he, as a denizen of the Nightside, keep on him. He's no wizard, no spell-slinger extraordinare, but when it comes to quick and dirty magic, he can pull up a good share. Summoning, well, he's been explicitly forbidden from ever since that incident with the hotel and the city block-radius explosion.

---

John Taylor is from Tales of the Nightside, and as such is the property of Simon R. Green and Ace Fantasy Publishing. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.