Tadesse Schwarz

38 | 6/4 | Male | Crocotta
Citizen | Cognitive Therapist

Tadesse, in his human form, can be either male or female, though he prefers his male form. He is 5'10" in his male form and 5'7" in his female form and both forms are fairly muscular, in the same way a predator might be. Built for bursts of effort rather than sustained work. In both forms he has short hair that is graying at the sides. Both forms sport a plethora of scars, mostly around his torso. One large scar cuts across his face from his right jaw to just under his right eye, which is unnaturally red and bloodshot.

An interesting feature in his human form that he keeps from his Crocotta form is that Tadesse does not have individual teeth. Instead, he has a single bone plate that takes up the space where individual teeth would in his mouth. So he essentially has two long, somewhat jagged "teeth", one on the top and one on the bottom jaws.

In both forms, Tadesse dresses in what could easily be called smart casual. He looks very approachable, rather than stiff and formal. This carries into his speech patterns. He has small ticks, such as tapping his fingertips against his thumb in sequence when agitated or thinking intently.

Tade's Crocotta form is a strange hybrid between a lion, a hyena, and a bull. Generally speaking he has the body shape of a hyena, but is roughly the size of a lion and with a lion's tail and mane. But instead of paws, he has cloven hooves. His teeth, much like in his human form, are solid plates of bone but are much more jagged in this form.
Crocotta Form Image Reference

Tadesse is a man who struggles with a number of severe, inhuman thought processes. He has predatory instincts which tends to color how he interacts with other people. These people can be broken down into four major categories: superior predators, lesser predators, prey, and uncategorized. His ineractions with each of these groups are different, and he broadly assumes a different stance depending on the highest ranked person in that hierarchy around him.

He works hard though to maintain an upbeat, personable attitude however. Especially at work, he is clearly making an effort to bypass his instincts and treat people as individuals rather than members of a broad, sweeping group. He also has some particular prejudices against humans, but again he is working on it constantly.

Active
Crocotta Shifting
As a Crocotta, Tadesse can shapeshift between his human and Crocotta forms at will. Likewise, he can shift his biological sex at any point in either of these forms, also at will.

Crocotta Mimicry
Crocotta can mimic any sound they have heard before, in both their human and Crocotta forms. This allows them to speak in their Crocotta form, usually by piecing together words and phrases they have heard from various sources into sentences, which likely sounds quite unsettling.

Crocotta Stare
Any non-sapient animal that Tadesse stares down finds itself paralyzed, so long as he maintains his stare upon it. Likewise any time his shadow falls over a non-sapient animal, the creature becomes incapable of vocalizing while it remains there.

Passive
Crocotta Physiology
In his Crocotta form, Tadesse can run somewhat faster than the average racehorse (though he can only run in short 2-4 minute bursts before needing to rest for a few minutes more), is as strong as a bull, and can heal from injuries slightly faster than a human. In his human form, his speed and strength diminish to normal half these levels but the healing rate does not. Tadesse is also very long lived and will be at 'middle age' when he's approximately 100. As a predator, Tadesse can also eat raw and even rotted meat with no ill effects.

Crocotta Immunity
Crocotta are, in theory, entirely immune to damage caused by metallic weapons. Iron, steel, bronze, etc., none of them are actually capable of doing anything worse than causing moderate surface bruising. Really any kind of enchanted weapon bypasses this immunity.

Weakness

A little under forty years ago, a Crocotta pup was sold to a group of German occultists who had fled to Brasil after their side had lost the second world war. Tadesse, who was known by a serial number at thst time, was experimented upon heavily to determine his nature. What they were trying to do, he never learned.

The experiments didn't last too long however, a handful of years at most, before the agents of the Veil caught wind and sent in a Scout Extraction team to retrieve the experimented upon supernaturals.

Adjusting to life on the island was hard for Tadesse, given both his own mostly feral nature and the damage done by the experimentation. But through years of therapy and school, he came out on the other side mostly intact. He went on to study psychology and eventually settled on trying to help people the way he had been helped.

At some point in his life, Tade decided upon his name; Tadesse, a name from his place of origin, and Schwarz, the 'pet name' he was given by the occultists who experimented on him. One to show he was new, and one so he wouldn't forget his past.

Tadesse has a nice home and an office in the downtown, and a steady income from his job.

Tadesse does general therapy, but he specializes in helping those who are having difficulty adjusting to the island's culture.