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[traineeassistantdirector]

Player Info
Name: Siobhan
OOC Journal: fiercebadrabbit
Over 18? Yes
Email/IM/Plurk: israfel103 (at) gmail (dot) com/blitztsunami/fiercebadrabbit
Current characters: None

Character Info
Name: Tony Foster

Canon: Blood Books/Smoke Trilogy

Age: 26

Canon/AU/CR AU: Canon

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Huff#Blood_Books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Huff#Smoke_Books
There is, to my knowledge, no Tony Foster fanpage in existence, and he didn’t appear in the TV show. I’ll have to rely on the history section.

History: Tony lived a fairly ordinary life as a child, but when he came out to his parents at age fifteen, he found himself out on the street. He lived hard and was going the right way to live short, dabbling in drugs and living off prostitution and petty crime. He was uncommonly observant and very sensitive (almost unnaturally so), but he mainly turned those talents toward finding clients and not dying. He did have one friend, a police detective turned PI named Vicki Nelson, but he could never bring himself to accept all the help she offered. Pride let him take a sandwich or a couple bucks, not space on her couch or letting her stick her neck out to find him a job.

Vicki introduced him to her partner, the centuries-old vampire Henry Fitzroy, under circumstances that demanded a somewhat spacey, highly imaginative teenager to roll with. Henry had been badly wounded in a fight with a demon and needed more blood than Vicki could provide to heal. Tony made up the deficit.

He accepted help from Henry that he never had from Vicki. The vampire put it down to his natural gifts as a ruler of men (he was the bastard son of Henry VIII and had never entirely moved on). Tony was more of the opinion that the guy was a vampire, and normal rules didn’t apply with the sexy undead. Tony was blood doll, lover, and vassal, and in exchange had shelter and access to education and work. It wasn’t an entirely mercenary situation, or even an exchange between ruler and ruled, as Henry would have had it. His feelings for the man were sincere, if lopsided and childish.

Over the years, he was endlessly exposed to the danger and trauma of the supernatural cases Vicki and Henry worked on and his strange gift of prescience became clearer. There was something not entirely normal about Tony Foster.

Which he didn’t mind in the least, but his aspirations weren’t to be the next detective fighting things that go bump in the night. He went to film school and moved to Hollywood North to begin a life without a vampire with possessiveness issues and to work on a cheaply produced, straight-to-syndication vampire detective show. The irony was lost on no one.

Life as a harried production assistant would have been plenty, but apparently he wasn’t allowed to escape the spookier parts of life. Over the course of a few years he faced down a dark sorcerer from another world and all his minions, began training to become a wizard himself, defended the cast and crew of his show from ghosts and evil incarnate in a particularly nasty haunted house, prevented the incursion of hell itself (well, one of several hells) by protecting the immortal woman who was the gateway, and fought a succubus for his boyfriend. And he still hasn’t been promoted above second assistant director.

Canon Point: After the short story “See Me”

World Information: Tony’s world is, on the surface, much like our own. He lives in Vancouver, Canada in the mid-00’s and works on a trashy TV show, and from most people’s perspective, he’s normal enough to be boring. However, a second world of magical creatures and dark forces is barely hidden all around him, and Tony seems to be a walking epicenter of supernatural activity. He did used to sleep with a vampire and once saw an ancient Egyptian sorcerer devour the life potential of a baby and, admittedly, he’s given up and taken to studying magic himself, but he’s really a very bad wizard and he’d rather the ghosties and ghoulies left him alone. Horrible otherworldly forces seem to be ready to descend on the citizenry every couple of months, and it’s a wonder that they’ve not only been thwarted every time but that most of the world goes on perfectly unaware.

Some of the creatures in the darkness are well-equipped to hide themselves. Vampires have mental control and superhuman speed and strength such that they’re very seldom interfered with and when they are, they can fix it. Werewolves keep carefully to themselves. Wizards are rare and easily mistaken for simple homicidal maniacs when they do go bad. Mad science is a new development, and it could still go any direction. But there are demons and the occasional strange monster that threatens to tear down all the barriers along with the throats it intends to rip out. Maintaining the mask is a full-time job, and almost everyone Tony knows has picked up on the world behind the veil by now. He’s even teaching magic to one of his boss’s daughters.

Personality: Tony can’t get away from magical horrors for five minutes, and is both profoundly good-hearted and deeply cynical, leading to a life of pessimistically dragging his feet on the way to save everyone and everything as best he can, then getting drunk and watching Firefly in the short interval before the next disaster. It leaves him even more of a wreck than he would be anyway.

Tony has, undoubtedly, had a rough life. He experienced rejection and privation and abuse early on and part of him has never recovered. The scars run deep and he can usually ignore them, but the odd trigger will leave him cringing and miserable. He prefers to bury all the old trauma rather than deal with it, and at least he’s good at the burying. Between his ruthlessly demanding job and the gig defending the world from evil that he seems to have picked up, he barely has time to breathe, let alone reflect, and he likes it that way. When he does have a minute, he usually spends it being a film geek.

And if a few aspects of mental health have to be sacrificed to constant busyness, so be it. His first healthy, adult relationship began when he was twenty-four, and he’d barely shed the vampire he used to sleep with before that. He responds to almost all stimuli with dry sarcasm, whether it’s a request (well, a bellowed demand) from the boss or news that the world is about the end in fire and fear. When something pesky like jealousy wells up, he’s almost paralyzed, out of the habit of having emotions as he is.

But while Tony’s a bit of a broken bird and he uses his work and his wit to keep the hard stuff at bay, it’s not all a facade. He really is driven and heroic, and he’s not just playing the obsessed workaholic. As a homeless teenager he was too proud to accept a leg up until a five-hundred-year-old godlike Adonis marched him into school, and he’s determined to make it artistically and professionally on his own. He’s had hundreds of chances to run away and let someone else save the innocent victims from the sentient shadows or the murderous ghosts or the domination-minded demons and so on, but he marches in every time. He laughs to keep from screaming, but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

It’s lucky for Tony that he’s more interested in spells and camera angles than people, because he’s not very good at them. He has his share of friends and admirers and he even dates a Z-list celebrity, but he can’t impress anyone by trying to. People tend to be fond of him despite themselves, and half the time he doesn’t notice they like him. At least he’s usually pretty good natured when his compatriots heap on the well-deserved abuse. He’s pretty good natured in general, just high strung and inexplicably burdened with defending Vancouver and the world at large from everything that wants to eat everybody.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitations: Tony would like it if everyone would focus on his directing prowess, or at least how good he is at doing sixteen people’s jobs at once in the cheapest and most supernaturally beset studio in Hollywood North. If you happen to be interested in the logistics of night-shoots or symbolism in film noir, he’s definitely the guy to talk to. However, he’s more likely to be called on to do wizard stuff.

Tony is a terrible wizard. It’s not entirely his fault. He learned from a woman from another world, and her magic was aligned to the energies of her home dimension, so he aims everything a little to the left of center. Added to that, she left almost immediately after he began his apprenticeship, leaving just a book of slightly wrong information and a dweeb in his mid twenties trying to make sense of ancient wisdom. There are highly complex ways to align energies so as to do the magic-worker’s will, but Tony doesn’t know them. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This has been known to work to his advantage. He doesn’t know what’s supposed to be impossible, and he’ll try to do it anyway. He mainly works active magic, like explosive attacks or banishing demons, by thinking about it really hard. That works, but with no artistry behind it, the spells take all their energy directly from him. This generally manifests in making him tired and starving. As if sixteen hour workdays weren’t enough to make him underweight and exhausted all the time, magic doubles the impact. After a big spell, he’s been known to eat a few thousand calories in a sitting and sleep for days, just replenishing his energy debt.

There is one spell he can do reliably and perfectly; he can call anything to him. When he initially began practicing magic he practiced by summoning a bottle to his hand (and it exploded at him a few times; he still has the scars), and through both repetition and the indelible strangeness of magic, it became part of him in a way no other spell is. He’s pulled demons out of their hosts this way, which is supposed to be advanced, complex spellwork. It something can be conceptualized as an object, he can grab it, wherever it is and whatever it is. Of course, then he’s got it, which can be a whole different problem.

Tony has always had a knack for knowing things he shouldn’t, but it took a wizard to recognize his odd perspicacity for latent magic. Tony’s knack could be best described as witch-sight. He can make connections from the simplest bit of information, and he discerns magic and supernatural beings for what they are.

Inventory: A hoodie, t-shirt, and jeans (taken in repeatedly after spell-related weight loss), sneakers, a pretty empty wallet, show notes, and a walkie talkie with no mate.

Appearance: Tony is a pale brunette, not classically handsome and a bit baby-faced, but cute-ish if you look sideways and don’t mind the exhausted-and-haggard look. He has a big nose and puppy eyes and his hair is always a little too long and out of place. He’s on the tall side of medium but very thin, thanks to his poorly-thought-out way of doing magic, and his clothes usually don’t fit very well, as much because he doesn’t care as because he keeps going down a size every time he’s got to fire a fireball at a demon. He delights in annoying people who equate gay with fashion sense.

PB: Alex Turner


Samples
Log Sample:
Tony flipped hurriedly through the script. He’d been handed the thing about five minutes before shooting, as regularly occurred. He’d been around two years and had his job title incrementally upgraded twice, but he was still generally mistaken for a PA, even by his nearest and dearest.

He needed the victim of the week on set in approximately negative five minutes. He hurried around a floodlight that definitely wasn’t where it was supposed to be, ran past the bathroom with its “DON’T FLUSH FUCK WHILE RED LIGHT IS ON--CAMERAS ARE ROLLING” sign, and let himself into makeup. The lady in question was across from Lee while his hair was finished, flirting a bit artlessly. Tony was half amused, given how clearly inept she was, but it still annoyed him even after all this time. He told himself he was teaching her a lesson about how not to get ahead in show business. After all, if she tried it on Mason, no awkwardness could save her from the sleeze. He leaned in and squeezed Lee’s arm possessively, miming a kiss two inches from his made-up cheek.

“We’re ready to shoot, uh... Lisa? Lisa. Try and look a little more drained than last take, okay? The licht has already devoured most of your soul. That’s not the sexy kind of undead.” He would know.

She gave him a poisonous look and stormed out. Tony caught himself watching her shadow for any unusual flickering. Even after so long, the studio had seen too many upheavals of reality not to be careful.

Network Sample:
[A scruffy, tired-looking young man wearing a scowl that looks stuck on addresses the network at large.]

Um... This is a long shot, but nothing about this makes a lot of sense, and that’s by my standards. Does anyone know of a Lee Nicholas here? Henry Fitzroy? Chester Bane? Victoria Nelson? Guys? Olly-olly-oxen-free! ...Just checking.

[He pauses, sighs, and shrugs.]

Barring that, a Moosehead and some decent poutine? Even bad poutine. If you have fries and gravy I’ll work it out myself.