Name: Abel Drakenhardt
Age: 319 [ looks about 22 ]
Birthday: January 1
Gender: Male
Category: Citizen
Occupation: formerly Loss Prevention/Security; unemployed
Appearance Description: Human
Abel definitely has the vividly red hair of his family, but it's more orange and often glints with violet in odd ways. He used to keep it short and mainstream-professional, but over the last year it has grown... longer. It currently brushes his shoulders and should really get brushed more often, but then again it's also usually damp and full of salt. It hides his tears
>.> <.< >.>
In keeping with his dragon form, Abel's human shape is long and lean... at least in proportion. He's casually about 5'5" and looks a few inches smaller; there really isn't much to him. He has red and white stripes across his spine that match his dragon form's stripes but are actually just tattoos. He also has tiny colourful fishes spread like a scattered handful of stars from his spine to the points of his hips, and a small blue heart around his ex's initials behind his right ear. His eyes are dark blue but vibrant, with flecks of every colour imaginable lurking like glitter under the surface.
They also ooze misery and tears and lethargy. Abel is not happy, and he doesn't have the energy or inclination to hide it. The edges of his eyes are strained and red more often than not, even when he's in the water, and it's very common for the creases of his eyelids to be gummed up and crusty with half-dried tears. His face is oval-shaped with a pointed chin, and a tiny pointy nose with a teeny birthmark just to the left of the tip's centre. He also has two similar, larger spots on his right cheekbone, just past his eye, and a couple of SUPER MYSTERIOUS ONES on the rest of his body. He frequently thinks the one behind his right knee is a bug and freaks. And then is sad because it isn't a bug.
Dragon
Abel is... somewhere between an eel and a shark as much as he's draconic, to be entirely honest. He's close to sixty feet long, yes, but his front legs aren't much longer than his human arms so he doesn't even measure four feet high at the shoulder. His tail is roughly half of his full length. The remaining thirty feet are split unevenly, with ten feet running from the tip of his two-foot-long head to the base of his neck and twenty feet from his shoulders to his hips.
He's also vividly coloured, with almost iridescent white bands running perpendicular to his primary bones (spine and limb bones) between rippling waves of red-orange. His stripes don't quite extend to his underside, but instead taper out and give way to a faint wave pattern in violet-black and indigo. He is fully scaled, and armoured like a dragon rather than a fish. There is a small spike on each scale that gives him a shark-coarseness when stroked against the grain.
Abel has the basic six-limbed western dragon limb arrangement, but he is structurally undeniably a water dragon. His arms and legs are quite small (and almost ridiculously finned and webbed), and his tail is edged with six pairs of stiff, triangular fins and tipped with a very sharklike fin that is seriously large enough for the bottom edge to drag on the ground when he holds his (extremely well muscled) tail level... and the upper segment is twice the height of the bottom part. He also has a triple row of fleshy, water-pressure-sensitive spines along his neck and upper back, which narrows to a single row down to the middle of his tail. His wings aren't as small as most oceanic dragons' but they do definitely limit his aerial ability and he really isn't much of a flier. He can hook the free digit on each wing into a gap in the finning by his shoulders and then seal the first wing finger along his side, producing tubes that greatly stabilize his swimming while he thrashes with his tail and also allow him to steer very well.
Abel's dragon head is a narrow, long-jawed tube with strange appendages. There are small horns behind his eyes that lean up and forward, unlike most dragon horns, and a small fleshy flag extends from the top of each nostril. He also has a pair of barbels on each side of his upper lip; these are long enough to touch the corners of his mouth if pulled back gently. Of course, his mouth takes up a foot and a half of his two-foot-long head, for all that it's less than four inches wide in places. He has a double row of tiny sharp teeth, and a very narrow tongue. The flesh inside his mouth is pale and only a little pink.
Personality Description: Abel is a very internal person. He used to be calm and mature, with a steadiness that couldn't really be shaken. At least, Abel always thought it looked that way. He is better at reading others than himself, but he's also insanely good at convincing himself that there's nothing wrong.
Usually.
Now that he's figured out that things were wrong, he can't get his his head out of that mess. It's everywhere, and everything, and every moment of life is just spiral nails holding him to the broken shards of his heart. Nearly everything reminds him of how happy he had thought he was.
Abel is, at his core, incredibly gentle and dorky. He might have once tackled criminals for a living, and he might be a sixty foot long mess of fins and spikes and teeth, and yeah he is a carnivore who will casually eat members of the same species as his pets, but he just wants to love and be loved and geek out over pretty sea creatures and talk about how everyone's day is going (well, 'everyone' being his aquatic pets, quack random people) and swim around and chill.
He is currently spending all of his time floating, not swimming, and just plain being miserable. He has no energy for anything, even beyond his caffeine dependency, no appetite, and no recognition of there being a 'better' to try to go for. There is just him and broken because there is no her.
Powers: Reeflord
Abel is a water dragon, and as such can breathe underwater without issue in both forms, as well as shift between his two forms easily. He does not, however, manipulate water. Instead, he commands all the living things within water, especially within salt water. The larger and more intelligent an organism - either individually or colonially - the more it becomes a negotiation than a command, but he's usually on pretty good terms with his big coral colonies and old fish. One of the advantages to working with his own tank.
Abel cannot force organisms to do things they are not physically capable of, but can direct them to do things they aren't mentally capable of. The further beyond their native abilities the task is, the more specific and detailed and careful Abel has to be with his directions, and he may have to show how to do something the first time. Yes, he will demonstrate how to change the temperature setting on his aquarium heaters to his crabs.
This power also allows him to keep track of a multitude of individuals at a time, though it is limited to those he can detect with his normal senses. He is very sight-focused and has relatively weak chemosensory abilities (taste and scent don't do much for him) so he really has to see things to keep track of them... but he isn't going to lose someone in a crowd. Ever. He can look at a crazy busy mix of points and recognize the positions and individualness of all of them.
Oceanic Translation
An unusual ability but one Abel takes for granted, Abel can understand and communicate in any language while underwater. He can only understand foreign words while he is submerged, but sounds originating outside the water are translated as well... though not as accurately. There's about a 25% chance that the translation will fail on any given term, and since Abel is only actually fluent in english and draconic he can't even understand what his sea buddies are saying properly if they end up out of the water.
Yes, this ability does extend to animals. However, his communication does not extend out of the water. For someone to understand him, they must be in the water with him. This both does and doesn't control his ability to command sea creatures: he can give them commands, both verbally and silently, but new commands to unfamiliar organisms run into major translation problems. Strong relations with individuals/colonies avoid this problem.
Biography: Abel's family knew him as a calm, mature guy who didn't get caught up in anyone else's insanity. He didn't react to things, just let them float on by while he did his own stuff. He was focused, not really attached to people, and was economically self-sufficient extremely early. He moved out, made it into management-level loss prevention at an extremely large, extremely successful store - no small part of that due to his zero tolerance for theft and ability to back it up - and started building his saltwater aquarium collection.
And then he met a girl he actually liked, and things went downhill really fast. He had very little to do with his family, being more occupied with workand geeking out over pretty fish and corals and new aquarium tech omg, but he let them know about this girl.
They dated for nine years - a drop in the bucket for a dragon already over three hundred - before Abel found out how sour things actually were. He was so thoroughly in love with this girl, so blindly adoring, that he didn't blink twice at her inconsistency, cheating, insults, or, well, anything. She finally insulted his tanks while he was acclimatizing a new lionfish to a quarantine tank and pushed the network of buckets and tubes over.
They, uh, broke up after Abel's mature green moray launched itself out of its tank to go after her and Abel tearfully got the lionfish straight into the tank, screaming at it not to sting him and getting stung anyway because the lionfish had no clue who he was or what he was doing just that THERE WAS NO WATER AND THERE WAS STRANGE FLESH THIGNS GRABBING IT GAHHHHHHHHH KILL IT KILL IT NAO
When Abel got out of the hospital and started listening to the angry messages on his phone - and saw a bunch of his stuff trashed, though fortunately she hadn't understood his aquaria equipment enough to actually mess with it dangerously and the tanks themselves were all enchanted against cracking - the whole failed relationship thing sank in.
Considering that the final break came from her attacking something he cared about, Abel couldn't wrap his head around it. He just knew that he loved her with everything he had, and none of it made sense. She was light and life and everything he'd ever wanted. He was growing a pearl in a back tank to make into an engagement ring. She was perfect.
There must have been something else. Some other factor. Someone else, manipulating her.
He started hunting, missing work and neglecting his tanks. He found someone else, all right. His beloved's husband of a solid seven years.
They sat him down - rather forcefully, and her husband was a skilled power negater so it actually worked - and explained things to him. She had been using him for money. It had all been fake, other than the sex.
Abel didn't get angry. He's never been much of one for anger at all. He did get... well, sad is a weak word. Sad is like a twenty gallon tank with a clownfish crammed in compared to the entire ocean.
Abel felt the ocean.
She broke him, and he had no idea how to put himself together. He tried to go back to work. He tried to go back to normal. He couldn't focus. When he shifted at work, trying to tackle someone he thought was trying to steal something but was actually just near the person who had - he couldn't see straight through his unending tears and uselessly strained, sleep-deprived eyes - and took out both sets of exterior doors and part of the wall, that was it. A few decades of perfect work at this particular place, and then just like that. He couldn't do his job anymore.
So now he gets to move in with his siblings, since he can't afford the rent on his former home anymore. All of Abel's money had gone to his tanks, and all the money that came from selling off the majority of his collection went to paying for the damage he'd caused. And the bill that came after being sued by the person he'd tackled and nearly killed...
Additional Information:
Age: 319 [ looks about 22 ]
Birthday: January 1
Gender: Male
Category: Citizen
Occupation: formerly Loss Prevention/Security; unemployed
Appearance Description: Human
Abel definitely has the vividly red hair of his family, but it's more orange and often glints with violet in odd ways. He used to keep it short and mainstream-professional, but over the last year it has grown... longer. It currently brushes his shoulders and should really get brushed more often, but then again it's also usually damp and full of salt. It hides his tears
>.> <.< >.>
In keeping with his dragon form, Abel's human shape is long and lean... at least in proportion. He's casually about 5'5" and looks a few inches smaller; there really isn't much to him. He has red and white stripes across his spine that match his dragon form's stripes but are actually just tattoos. He also has tiny colourful fishes spread like a scattered handful of stars from his spine to the points of his hips, and a small blue heart around his ex's initials behind his right ear. His eyes are dark blue but vibrant, with flecks of every colour imaginable lurking like glitter under the surface.
They also ooze misery and tears and lethargy. Abel is not happy, and he doesn't have the energy or inclination to hide it. The edges of his eyes are strained and red more often than not, even when he's in the water, and it's very common for the creases of his eyelids to be gummed up and crusty with half-dried tears. His face is oval-shaped with a pointed chin, and a tiny pointy nose with a teeny birthmark just to the left of the tip's centre. He also has two similar, larger spots on his right cheekbone, just past his eye, and a couple of SUPER MYSTERIOUS ONES on the rest of his body. He frequently thinks the one behind his right knee is a bug and freaks. And then is sad because it isn't a bug.
Dragon
Abel is... somewhere between an eel and a shark as much as he's draconic, to be entirely honest. He's close to sixty feet long, yes, but his front legs aren't much longer than his human arms so he doesn't even measure four feet high at the shoulder. His tail is roughly half of his full length. The remaining thirty feet are split unevenly, with ten feet running from the tip of his two-foot-long head to the base of his neck and twenty feet from his shoulders to his hips.
He's also vividly coloured, with almost iridescent white bands running perpendicular to his primary bones (spine and limb bones) between rippling waves of red-orange. His stripes don't quite extend to his underside, but instead taper out and give way to a faint wave pattern in violet-black and indigo. He is fully scaled, and armoured like a dragon rather than a fish. There is a small spike on each scale that gives him a shark-coarseness when stroked against the grain.
Abel has the basic six-limbed western dragon limb arrangement, but he is structurally undeniably a water dragon. His arms and legs are quite small (and almost ridiculously finned and webbed), and his tail is edged with six pairs of stiff, triangular fins and tipped with a very sharklike fin that is seriously large enough for the bottom edge to drag on the ground when he holds his (extremely well muscled) tail level... and the upper segment is twice the height of the bottom part. He also has a triple row of fleshy, water-pressure-sensitive spines along his neck and upper back, which narrows to a single row down to the middle of his tail. His wings aren't as small as most oceanic dragons' but they do definitely limit his aerial ability and he really isn't much of a flier. He can hook the free digit on each wing into a gap in the finning by his shoulders and then seal the first wing finger along his side, producing tubes that greatly stabilize his swimming while he thrashes with his tail and also allow him to steer very well.
Abel's dragon head is a narrow, long-jawed tube with strange appendages. There are small horns behind his eyes that lean up and forward, unlike most dragon horns, and a small fleshy flag extends from the top of each nostril. He also has a pair of barbels on each side of his upper lip; these are long enough to touch the corners of his mouth if pulled back gently. Of course, his mouth takes up a foot and a half of his two-foot-long head, for all that it's less than four inches wide in places. He has a double row of tiny sharp teeth, and a very narrow tongue. The flesh inside his mouth is pale and only a little pink.
Personality Description: Abel is a very internal person. He used to be calm and mature, with a steadiness that couldn't really be shaken. At least, Abel always thought it looked that way. He is better at reading others than himself, but he's also insanely good at convincing himself that there's nothing wrong.
Usually.
Now that he's figured out that things were wrong, he can't get his his head out of that mess. It's everywhere, and everything, and every moment of life is just spiral nails holding him to the broken shards of his heart. Nearly everything reminds him of how happy he had thought he was.
Abel is, at his core, incredibly gentle and dorky. He might have once tackled criminals for a living, and he might be a sixty foot long mess of fins and spikes and teeth, and yeah he is a carnivore who will casually eat members of the same species as his pets, but he just wants to love and be loved and geek out over pretty sea creatures and talk about how everyone's day is going (well, 'everyone' being his aquatic pets, quack random people) and swim around and chill.
He is currently spending all of his time floating, not swimming, and just plain being miserable. He has no energy for anything, even beyond his caffeine dependency, no appetite, and no recognition of there being a 'better' to try to go for. There is just him and broken because there is no her.
Powers: Reeflord
Abel is a water dragon, and as such can breathe underwater without issue in both forms, as well as shift between his two forms easily. He does not, however, manipulate water. Instead, he commands all the living things within water, especially within salt water. The larger and more intelligent an organism - either individually or colonially - the more it becomes a negotiation than a command, but he's usually on pretty good terms with his big coral colonies and old fish. One of the advantages to working with his own tank.
Abel cannot force organisms to do things they are not physically capable of, but can direct them to do things they aren't mentally capable of. The further beyond their native abilities the task is, the more specific and detailed and careful Abel has to be with his directions, and he may have to show how to do something the first time. Yes, he will demonstrate how to change the temperature setting on his aquarium heaters to his crabs.
This power also allows him to keep track of a multitude of individuals at a time, though it is limited to those he can detect with his normal senses. He is very sight-focused and has relatively weak chemosensory abilities (taste and scent don't do much for him) so he really has to see things to keep track of them... but he isn't going to lose someone in a crowd. Ever. He can look at a crazy busy mix of points and recognize the positions and individualness of all of them.
Oceanic Translation
An unusual ability but one Abel takes for granted, Abel can understand and communicate in any language while underwater. He can only understand foreign words while he is submerged, but sounds originating outside the water are translated as well... though not as accurately. There's about a 25% chance that the translation will fail on any given term, and since Abel is only actually fluent in english and draconic he can't even understand what his sea buddies are saying properly if they end up out of the water.
Yes, this ability does extend to animals. However, his communication does not extend out of the water. For someone to understand him, they must be in the water with him. This both does and doesn't control his ability to command sea creatures: he can give them commands, both verbally and silently, but new commands to unfamiliar organisms run into major translation problems. Strong relations with individuals/colonies avoid this problem.
Biography: Abel's family knew him as a calm, mature guy who didn't get caught up in anyone else's insanity. He didn't react to things, just let them float on by while he did his own stuff. He was focused, not really attached to people, and was economically self-sufficient extremely early. He moved out, made it into management-level loss prevention at an extremely large, extremely successful store - no small part of that due to his zero tolerance for theft and ability to back it up - and started building his saltwater aquarium collection.
And then he met a girl he actually liked, and things went downhill really fast. He had very little to do with his family, being more occupied with work
They dated for nine years - a drop in the bucket for a dragon already over three hundred - before Abel found out how sour things actually were. He was so thoroughly in love with this girl, so blindly adoring, that he didn't blink twice at her inconsistency, cheating, insults, or, well, anything. She finally insulted his tanks while he was acclimatizing a new lionfish to a quarantine tank and pushed the network of buckets and tubes over.
They, uh, broke up after Abel's mature green moray launched itself out of its tank to go after her and Abel tearfully got the lionfish straight into the tank, screaming at it not to sting him and getting stung anyway because the lionfish had no clue who he was or what he was doing just that THERE WAS NO WATER AND THERE WAS STRANGE FLESH THIGNS GRABBING IT GAHHHHHHHHH KILL IT KILL IT NAO
When Abel got out of the hospital and started listening to the angry messages on his phone - and saw a bunch of his stuff trashed, though fortunately she hadn't understood his aquaria equipment enough to actually mess with it dangerously and the tanks themselves were all enchanted against cracking - the whole failed relationship thing sank in.
Considering that the final break came from her attacking something he cared about, Abel couldn't wrap his head around it. He just knew that he loved her with everything he had, and none of it made sense. She was light and life and everything he'd ever wanted. He was growing a pearl in a back tank to make into an engagement ring. She was perfect.
There must have been something else. Some other factor. Someone else, manipulating her.
He started hunting, missing work and neglecting his tanks. He found someone else, all right. His beloved's husband of a solid seven years.
They sat him down - rather forcefully, and her husband was a skilled power negater so it actually worked - and explained things to him. She had been using him for money. It had all been fake, other than the sex.
Abel didn't get angry. He's never been much of one for anger at all. He did get... well, sad is a weak word. Sad is like a twenty gallon tank with a clownfish crammed in compared to the entire ocean.
Abel felt the ocean.
She broke him, and he had no idea how to put himself together. He tried to go back to work. He tried to go back to normal. He couldn't focus. When he shifted at work, trying to tackle someone he thought was trying to steal something but was actually just near the person who had - he couldn't see straight through his unending tears and uselessly strained, sleep-deprived eyes - and took out both sets of exterior doors and part of the wall, that was it. A few decades of perfect work at this particular place, and then just like that. He couldn't do his job anymore.
So now he gets to move in with his siblings, since he can't afford the rent on his former home anymore. All of Abel's money had gone to his tanks, and all the money that came from selling off the majority of his collection went to paying for the damage he'd caused. And the bill that came after being sued by the person he'd tackled and nearly killed...
Additional Information:
