Character sheet first draft ready. Cauchemar Nezumi bruiser..
Flavour text:
Long story short? 2000 was not kind to Andrus Poder. Really, few years before it were, but that was the year it came to a head. Given his prior... activities... he'd expected someone from the firm might hunt him down, that he might need to move again, but he wasn't expecting it to be rats. Their bite took his wife, Carolina, and her unborn child; what it did to him was... well, 'different' is indisputable.
For a while he tried to stick to business as usual. His therapist initially mistook his new Master Passion: Rage for natural frustration at having been dealt a bad hand, and it took him a while to distinguish his new Tongue of Beasts for his old affection for animals, but the issues with bureaucracy got worse, and with them the stress. He dropped out of his job as a bus driver, unable to take all the people and the delays in payment and acknowledgement, and instead went into business as an unregistered cabbie... which was kind of a mistake, as a move to avoid stress. Sure there were less people at a given time, but he couldn't repeat a route the same way as before, and it felt like the authorities started actually going through his workload once he went off the books.
Finally, some guy pulled a knife on him on the way back from the shops. Rather than take a breath and hand him a wallet, rather than insult his ancestry and make a break, Andrus... he doesn't remember the details but it ended up with him taking a few deep breaths over a barely recognisable corpse.
He shed a few tears over it, but ultimately decided to throw the body in a woodchipper and dispose of the results. It was a few months before he Frenzied again; this time, he did so in a pub, but more importantly in the presence of a gate to the Dark Reflection. There was no question of wood-chipping all the bodies this time, so he headed to the ritually cursed mirror in the men's loo, and jumped through.
In some ways Limbo was simpler for Andrus. Yes, it was nightmarish visions all around, but there was no need to fill out tax returns or deal with people - and Andrus soon realised he (and presumably his particular strain of Nezumi) had the Patience of the Mountains, so he didn't even need to seek food. Of course, no one can hide forever; within the year a Baali had found him... but within a year he'd reached LA's Dark Reflection, and the Baali who found him happened to be a Cauchemar specialising in the Progress of Glass. A vacancy was mentioned, a pact was made, and Andrus was allowed back into the mortal realm circa 2003.
The last ten years haven't been nearly so cruel - he knows what's going on now, and can act accordingly. Indeed, much of his present skill set has been gained through these days, As it happens, the Cauchemar were quite willing to take him on, give him enough jobs to pay the cheapest rent the city offered, and allowed him to just dive into the sewers for a month when it all got too much. With the exception of the occasional stress-relieving pre-arranged execution Andrus hasn't brutally killed anyone since moving to LA, so all in all, everything's gone better than expected.
Crunch, which I can't help but suspect I botched somewhere:
Attributes:
Physical 4
Strength 2
Agility 4
Mental 5+2
Intuition 5
Logic 4
Social 2+1
Willpower 4
Charisma 1
Edge 3
Potency 1; Power 13/13
Physical 24+2 + 2 Specs
Combat 6, Drive 6 [Navigation], Stealth 6 [Shadowing], Perception 4, Larceny 4
Non-standard vehicles: Oversized [semis & buses], articulated vehicles, emergency vehicles, motor boats, construction equipment, armoured vehicles, light aircraft, agricultural vehicles (I had tractors in mind but didn't feel it was worth another spec if a thresher came up)
Social 14 + 2 specs
Animal Ken 2, Empathy 6 [Action Anticipation], Persuasion 6 [Acting]
Technical 19+1
Operations 6 [Piloting], Rigging 4 [Repairs], Research 6 [Datamining], Medicine 4 [First Aid]
Backgrounds: Vehicles 6; Biology 6; Bar Scene 6; Hell Mouths 5; Limbo Politics 3; Map of LA 3; Occasional Catholic 3; SVR 3
Resources:
Contacts 3 (Andrus has dirt on several people-smuggling rings and is quite happy to help their operations for cash)
Languages 2 (Polish, Russian, American. Which of these is his mother tongue is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Destiny 2 (The notes of Dr Steve Morituri, being a stack of lever-arch files of isnane scribblings and cryptic writings left by the previous occupant of Andrus' bedsit which, when deciphered, contained instructions for becoming a Baali and performing Infernal Sorcery. As a Nezumi, Andrus has no use for the former and plenty for the latter.)
Assets 1 (A bigmcfuckenlargehuge number of literal gutter rats, all of them even less effectual on their own than his Animal Form)
Finance 1 (Down payments for upwards of a decade on a cheap terrible bedsit)
Secrets 2 (A slightly-more-safe-than-being-found-by-mobsters house in the Dark Reflection)
Obligations:
Addiction 1 (Smoker)
Enemies 2 (While Andrus' defection from the SVR is very much a cold case at this point, he'd still rather stay ahead of them)
Motivations
Master Passion: Rage. Andrus never really recovered from the circumstances that made him a lycanthrope, and is adamant in blaming everyone and everything else for his misfortune; anything that reminds him of his married life, or any hint of disrespect, can potentially set him off. Given that this list includes children and buses, he's often quite frustrated, and carries a stress ball wherever he goes.
Driving Passion: Andrus feels like he hasn't led a meaningful life since becoming a Nezumi, and wants to change that. Of course, the only pattern he knows for doing that involves becoming a husband and father again, and even if he wasn't specifically a wererat that would come with all the rage triggers ever, so he tries not to think about it. [Also, I took Aimless, so his DP is flavour text.]
Ethics: Solidarity Ethics as described
Ideology - Honors: pulling your weight (given the chance), keeping your word, women who dress sexy, looking out for others, sweating the details
Ideology - Despises: slacking, unsolicited criticism, hurting women, betrayal, provocations
Advantages and Disadvantages
Red Taped (Nezumi), Feared by Children, Infectious Mood, Aimless, Temperamental, Loyalty, Time Sense, Direction Sense, Fighting Finesse
Powers:
Core Discipline: Beast Form, Tongue of Beasts
Nezumi Basic Powers: Abyss of the Body, Hide From Notice, Learn the Heart's Pain, Revive the Flesh
Strain Basic Power: Patience of the Mountains
Andrus Basic Powers: Poison Heart
Nezumi Advanced Powers: Hide in Plain Sight, The Beckoning
Andrus Advanced Powers: Banishment, Holistic Ventriloquism