[OOC] Profile Information

[seenicroute]

ULARI ORAKOS

The future isn’t set in stone, but stones can be engraved.

stats

NAME: Ulari Orakos

DOB: 03/15

AGE: 35

CLASSIFICATION: Seer

OCCUPATION: Financial Advisor

SPECIES: Anima

APPEARANCE:
5’10”. Long, wavy white hair he keeps often in a braid. Heterochromia. One eye is purple, the other is a grey blue with yellow flecks. As an anima he has the features of a Deer, with antlers, pointed ears, and a nose that resembles the rhinarium of a deer. Slender in build, but also soft. Not the muscular type. Casual and unconcerned demeanor. Looks so easy going that at times he comes across apathetic. Wears very loose clothing that look baggy on him but very soft materials.

basics

A Seer from a modernizing fantasy world where there are humans and Anima, people with animal features. Ulari is from a middle-class family of business owners who awakened his Sight at a young age. If he touches someone or is touched by them, or he touches something of sentimental value to a person, he can see both their past and future (the stronger the images the more Certain that Future is what will happen). As a child he would gain praise for his "Intuition" when it helped him and his family, but when he began to get visions of negative futures and tried to intervene in them, things would go wrong, and the worst scenario would come to pass anyway. In the end, people stopped listening to him and he was stuck with dealing with these horrific premonitions on his own, but he didn't give up. Not then.

But by the time he was in his late 20s, he had become so worn down and disillusioned that he was ready to throw his own life away. His closest friend shook him up and convinced him to let go of his obsession with stopping the bad things in the world from happening and instead to just embrace life as it is and leave everyone else to their own devices. Of course, his friend also didn't mind getting tips and advice from him to boost his own success at the time...and that gave Ulari the idea for his own future. He became a remote financial advisor. He lives in a small but decadent house in the woods and gives his clients financial advice to keep them rich and takes a 40% commission. Steep, but worth it, many of them will find. He now lives a carefree life of luxury, partying and relaxing, but for the past year he's been having regular visions of an oncoming apocalypse and the imagery has become so clear he's certain it must be a guaranteed Future. Will he do anything about it? Should he?

Maybe when he's not busy giving no fucks.

setting

The continent of Avari is on the world of Celest, a place that has seen it share of struggles as the planet has gone through the hiccups and catastrophic phenomenon that hindered evolution and growth. If it wasn’t for people being able to tap into the inherent magic of the planet, learning intuitively to harness it and help survive, perhaps thousands of years later there would be no advanced life forms on the planet at all. But they did. And eventually humans thrived. And they were not the only ones.

Anima as people with animal features, considered a separate species from humans, but whether humans or anima came first of if one came from the other, none know for sure. Not that it matters much to them. There are some countries in which humans or anima are treated less equally than the majority, but for the most part equality is the rule of the land.

Imagine a world with a 1950s retrofuturism aesthetic. This is a fantasy world where magic has taken a turn in recent times. With the rise in mixed technological advancements the industrial revolution came and went some decades before. Now it is the Second Evolution as much like to call it. The time when many believes humans and anima will grow to a new stage of advancement. Many forms of magic are used and accepted, but they are treated as a "science" like anything else.

Less scientific forms of magic or special abilities (curses, blessings, fortune telling, etc) are seen as either backwater or outright abominations. People with inherent magical abilities tend to downplay them or hide their use altogether to avoid being stigmatized. If it isn't a magic that can be studied, categorized, and broken down to base components, accessible to all who are willing to learn, then people generally think it's either a fraud or don't want anything to do with it...unless it proves beneficial to them of course.

Humans and anima are not the only beings on this world, but they are the only ones accepted. Others have to find a way to make themselves fit into the world they live in, unable to co-exist as they truly are. Lythirians (were-people) mask themselves as anima. Vampires often appear human, but with “special medical conditions,” depending on which country they happen to be in. Faes also pretend to be anima, or use glamour spells to hide as humans.

The more that you look like you belong to the two races with the most control, the less you are treated as an Other. Just as some forms of magic are seen as more “freakish” and less accepted by society, beings that seem to embody that are also outcasted. Anima and humans with special abilities are believed to have some genetic ancestry to these more supernatural groups, but there’s no proof of this. The populations of Supernaturals are vastly undercounted in the world because of the fact so many hide themselves as humans or anima.

The only group that seems to be exempt from the derision and negative perceptions of indefinable magic is religion. Because Faith is not treated similarly to magic thanks to centuries of propaganda that Faith is the Companion of Science. While science explains the Mortal World, Faith in Religion explains God’s Realm, meaning that of the soul. This allows religious leaders, many of whom not even possessing the special abilities they claim that are afforded to them by their Gods, to proclaim themselves Holy Speakers and Priests, while also insisting that those who have magic that cannot be explained by either Faith or Science as impure.

In recent years the power of Faith has dwindled in more diverse nations as more and more people ascribe to the Scientific Method Philosophy of life, but they still hold a great sway over large percentages of the population and in some countries the theocracy is more important than even science.

history

Ulari comes from a middle-class business family and was born with the Sight. An ability to use touch to see visions of both the past and the future. As a child, he used this to try and help his family's business, but under the guise of having "business acumen" and a "strong intuition" because having an ability like the Sight is looked down on or even treated as being a freak. Even at the age of eight, he knew how much an ability like his was disliked by people and tried to get around it with flowery language and vague statements. The only person he ever told the truth to was his Grandmother, Nilli, the person he trusted most in the world, and his best friend, Vez.

His grandmother didn’t care about the state of “social propriety” nearly as much as the rest of the family. She was old, she’d seen and done so many things in her life that Ulari was always in awe of her stories as a child. That is until he was old enough to realize that Nan Nilli was lying through her teeth and made up all of those stories just to entertain the eternally hungry child that soaked up everything she told him as if it was fact. But when he had told her about his visions, it was one of the few times she had been very serious. She believed him and told him that he should watch who he trusts and how he trusts because his was a magic that could change the world if he wanted. But she also warned him not to get lost in the visions, to think that everything was predetermined because people were too unpredictable for that.

Ulari, being the precocious and eager child that he was took that to mean that if he chose to, he could change the future he saw in his visions or make sure that they happened. He would use this to help his father and mother with their businesses, providing advice and suggestions that they were surprised to find were actually…helpful. So helpful that his mother’s pottery business exploded with clients and she was able to expand into other counties within only a year. His parents were shocked by how well his advice was working for them and he was praised left and right by them and their business partners. His mother even encouraged him to go to school for business. She talked as if she wanted him to join her and take over one day.

But when his visions started turning dark in nature, he tried to intervene to prevent the negative outcomes from happening…only to make things worse. He tried to protect his father’s business and led to the loss of a major client. His mother’s company suffered the loss of a large shipment. He saw one of his friends suffering an injury and tried to prevent it, only to cause them to be even more injured, to the point they were put in an induced coma and spent years in recovery. Nothing he did went right now. Every time he tried to intervene or save someone, bad things would happen. Suddenly, the intuition and good luck he had was gone. People stopped believing him and at times even blamed him for the negative events coming to pass. But he kept doing it anyway, because he was young and full of belief that to have his gift meant he was supposed to do something with it. How could saving people and helping them succeed not be the purpose?

For years he kept trying to save people's lives, prevent economic downturns, and once he was a suspect in a murder for a year until the real killer was apprehended. That situation really sent his reputation into a downfall and he was at the end of his rope. At this point, maybe it would have been better to tell people the truth about his Sight. Maybe they would see that he wasn’t at fault and even if some people turned on him, at least they would know that he really was trying to help. But would it be considered illegal? Would his parents’ businesses suffer even more if people knew he had been using magic to help them for so many years? So he chose to stay silent. Better to take the blame on himself than to screw his parents over in the process.

Ulari was a suspect in a murder because he saw a vision in which the person was committing the murder but did not know who the person committing the murder was. He ended up finding the body himself and called the police, which put all of the suspicion was put on him. The investigation and interrogations were intense and his family’s reputation took a hit. He almost had a breakdown trying to find out whose memories he’d seen and prove they were the real murderer without revealing his Sight. It was a very rough year and ended with him in the hospital himself when the murderer (a college classmate he’d never spoken to directly until he got deep into his investigation) tried to kill him too. It is how he got the scar on his face and other scars all over his body that he doesn’t show off. He was only freed from suspicion by becoming a “survivor” of the murderer, but the public opinion of him was still ruined.

It made him feel rather hopeless at the time. If he couldn't stop all of these bad things from happening, why did he keep having to see them?

Vez stepped in and helped him work through the trauma...by convincing him to not give a fuck anymore. To focus instead of living a happy life himself and leave other people to their fates, no matter what they may be. It's not his job to save the world (even if some part of him really does think maybe he has this ability because he's supposed to save the world). It reminded him of what his grandmother had told him all those years ago. He did what he could, and people turned on him for it, so fuck them. Focus on himself and the people that mattered. And everyone else would be fine.

But also maybe could he help Vez out a bit by giving him some advice? The request did shock Ulari into a laugh, but it was also refreshing to know that no matter what Vez somehow still trusted his abilities and Sight even when Ulari himself didn’t.

So he stopped listening to his conscience telling him there was more he could and needed to do and started listening to his wallet. He became a remote financial advisor to some very wealthy (and many very corrupt) individuals who would send him sentimental objects and items from their lives that he could use to see into their futures and give advice on what things they could do to increase their wealth and success. He took no money if the advice wasn’t successful, but if they tried to stiff him of his 40% commission, he had dirt on them he could use against them. It was a tenuous career built on trust and shady dealings, but it managed to net him a substantial income and wealth that he used to fund his lackadaisical and uncaring lifestyle. He parties and goes on trips and travels the world however he wanted, but he lives a very solitary life in his small but very luxurious house in the woods.

Sure, this means he has a lot of dirt on a lot of very influential people, but they don't know who he is because he keeps his real name and location a secret and instead has random couriers around the country who nondescript packages from different drop boxes and then have them sent to him.

But recently…a lot of the futures he's been seeing all have a similar thread. Death, destruction, massive devastation on a global scale. An apocalypse is coming. He hasn’t told anyone about these visions because he keeps telling himself they don’t matter. He’s been living a life of not giving a damn for a decade now and even if his conscience tells him that he should care, and that he should be doing something, he just remembers how badly everything went before. He’s comfortable how he is now. He’s safe.

It’s so much easier to just let the apocalypse happen sometime in the future than to worry about it in the now.

Then he finds out one of his clients had died in a very gruesome and unexpected way and the police might be looking for the mystery financial advisor he’d been in recent contact with… Despite the fact he hadn’t had any visions of Bori Greysburg dying.

personality

When Ulari was younger he was what some may call “high strung.” He cared far too much about other people’s opinions of him, he wanted too much to be praised by them and to do for others so they could appreciate his value. Add in his Savior Complex and need to fix things for others and the boy was very stressed all the time about Doing More and Being Better.

That’s not who Ulari is now. Not entirely. He’s relaxed, accepted that the world is the way it is, and he shouldn’t be interfering as he once did. He did what he could when he was younger and now, in his thirties, he just wants to live a quiet life with a bank accounts full of money. Sure, maybe he also donates way more of that money than he would ever admit, but he’s still got more than enough to fulfill his lavish whims. Maybe donating money when he sees one of those infomercials about abused pets in need or homeless people not having enough resources is also one of his whims, you don’t know him.

Ulari is at a point in his life where he truly believes that caring is just a waste of his time, resources, and mental and emotional wellbeing. He’d rather people think him a lazy mess who is too busy banging dozens of people a week on some beach than to worry about who is going to suffer a horrible death or what stock is going to tank. Not unless it has something to do with one of his clients. And even then, he only tells them as much as he needs to. Maybe his conscience niggles at him sometimes but he tells it to shut the fuck up and goes off to do something fun and carefree because he’s rich and single and that means life is fair game.

Sure maybe he feels lonely sometimes because he’s cut his family out of his life for the most part, and maybe going to clubs to meet strangers for a late night hook up doesn’t fill the void, but it does come really close. He’s not looking for a relationship, that would be too complicated and who wants complicated in their lives? Paying someone to work their non-literal magic on his taxes every year is complicated enough. So what if it sounds selfish and uncaring. He spent most of his life all but killing himself trying to do for others. Almost got other people killed.

Giving no fucks was the best thing he ever decided to do with his life. He’s much better off for it and so is everyone else. Or at least that’s what he tells himself.

miscellaneous

• Ulari has three siblings. One older brother, one older sister, and a younger brother.
  
• Ulari is a vegetarian as are majority of deer anima. Their digestive systems aren’t designed for meat, but some will still eat a little meat sparingly.
  
• Ulari cannot have visions of his own past or future directly but he can have visions that include him in the past, present, or future of someone else.
  
• Only significant fear is a feat of heights. Also does not like slimy animals.
  
• Ulari is well read and does a lot of reading in between his partying lifestyle. He prefers nonfiction because he finds the world ridiculous enough without fictionalizing it.
  
• Favorite color is yellow.

abilities

SIGHT: The ability to see visions of a person’s past, present or future through touch. Whether he touches them or touches something of sentimental value to them with his bare hands. These visions come in the form of images, sounds, smells, and even memories from the other person. The more concrete the images, the more they feel like he’s watching high-def television, the more Certain that this future is what will happen.

ENHANCED SENSES: As a deer Anima, he has heightened senses. Enhanced sense of smell, enhanced hearing, and his skin is rather sensitive so it can feel the shifts in the wind easily.

MAGICAL COMPATIBILITY: Due to having natural magic abilities, Ulari is compatible with performing less standardized forms of magic, although he’s never attempted to do so himself outside of random tricks at parties. He once cast a group spell with some people during an orgy to basically give everyone a sex high but that’s about the extent of it. He can also do standard magic such as healing, making something cold or hot to drink, but his skills are rather outdated after years of not bothering to use it.

visuals