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patheticvillain) wrote2018-12-24 01:17 am
patheticvillain) wrote2018-12-24 01:17 am
Entry tags:
application @ tlv
User Name/Nick: Anne
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trustmeimthe
E-mail: tavrosno@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toto Sakigami, Marquis de Carabas, Alex Summers
Character Name: Cassel Sharpe
Series: Curse Workers {post-Black Heart}
Age: 17
From When?: Post-Black Heart; he's running away with Lila when some Brennans track him down and shoot him for reneging on the deal he broke, like, a book and a half ago. Oops.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Not only is Cassel technically a criminal, having worked as an assassin (semi-against his will and with wiped memories) and double/triple/quadruple-crossed people who mean everything to him, his worldview is so warped and simplistic that he has no chance of living a productive, non-destructive life without intervention. Without help, he'll never escape the mob, the feds, his family, and especially his own hideously self-destructive tendencies.
Abilities/Powers:
Canon: Cassel's a worker, which means he has a more-or-less-magical skill that he can use if he has hand-to-skin contact with another person - hence the gloves. Not only is he a worker, but he's a transformation worker, the rarest of them all and maybe the most dangerous. He can turn anything into anything else, with no care for where all that extra matter goes. (Don't question it, it's magic.) By extension, he can also kill anyone with a touch, simply by turning them into something inanimate. The catch to all of this is the bigger his work, the worse the blowback is, and he gets blowback of some kind every time he works. What you need to know about blowback is: he turns into a walking, talking, flopping, writhing bodyhorror for a couple of minutes. Then he's okay and has the normal number of eyes again.
Barge: I would like to reduce Cassel's transformation work as follows:
Personality:
Cassel Sharpe is a big ol' bundle of issues. He has mommy issues, daddy issues, brother issues, girl issues, but most of all he has trust issues. Cassel's trust issues are so serious that he can't even tell himself the whole truth most of the time and only manages half-truths half of the time. No matter how he paints himself, Cassel is just as much of a pathological liar as his brother, Barron, which makes a lot of sense, given how similar their lives have been.
The environment Cassel grew up in was toxic to say the least. The entire family was and is steeped in violence and organized crime. While Cassel doesn't talk much about his father, it's implied that he was one stone cold mofo and was as much a part of pushing his kids into a life of crime as Shandra was. Of course, Shandra was not only emotionally abusive but literally emotionally manipulative; she had the ability to stick her fingers in her sons' emotions and twist them around, and she used that ability almost constantly. She set out to create three little sociopaths, and three little sociopaths she did create, with unhealthy violent-switching-with-codependent relationships to each other, piles and piles of resentment, and the bone-deep understanding that their survival went hand in hand with the survival of the family, which went hand in hand with being able to be a good criminal, to run a good con. Besides which, when Shandra did emotion work her own emotions shifted violently with the blowback, leading her to physically and verbally abuse her sons on a regular basis. Cassel pays a lot of lip service to being aware of the dysfunctionality and abnormality of his upbringing, especially in White Cat, but while he might logically understand this he doesn't believe it on an emotional level. He can only ever see his family having been the way it was and can't conceptualize a childhood not tainted by curse work and cruelty.
In other words, Cassel was both explicitly trained by his family to be a sociopathic criminal and implicitly encouraged to do so in order to keep himself out of trouble, at least in the insular family context. Being a worker criminal in a worker family was considered the "good, normal" thing to do, and Cassel wanted more than anything to be a powerful, valuable worker. Instead, it seemed like he was a powerless kid, so he had to strive to be a good criminal, at the very least. Even so, he was always on the outside, not only of his family but of the Zacharov family, because he wasn't as useful as his brothers.
This was where his rival relationship with Barron came into play. It was really only a semi-rivalry, because Barron seemed to want to look out for him and care for him as much as Barron could care for anybody. It was Barron who watched scary movies with him on the stairs over Philip and Anton's shoulders even though it was against the rules; it was Barron who learned how to pick locks with him; it was Barron who helped him out of scrapes. It was also Barron who protected him from the fact that he was an assassin - which was a shitty thing to do, but was at least partially motivated by a desire to keep Cassel safe, even from himself. Cassel, though, considers Barron to be his chief rival and even pathologizes him as one of the major forces in the way of him achieving happiness, while on some level wanting desperately to have a normal, brotherly relationship with him. Hence Cassel writing in Barron's fake journals that they had pizza day once a week: he really wants that. He wants to have a normal brother and a normal family. He wants to be normal.
The problem with that is that he's also convinced himself that he can't be normal, not ever. While society has told him since he was small that it's wrong to be a criminal, it's wrong to lie, and it's extra wrong to be a worker, his family has always said the opposite: that you can't survive unless you're a criminal, that you can't survive if you don't lie, and that you're the best to your family if you're a powerful worker. Until he was seventeen years old, Cassel believed he was an outsider in his family because he wasn't a worker and tried to fit into society by acting as normal as he could. Once he finally found out for good that he was a worker, he sank into it with, frankly, a lot of gratitude and resigned himself to being an outsider in society but a valuable member of his own family. However, he was so used to be an outsider in his family and was so betrayed by the way Shandra, Barron, and Philip had kept the truth from him that he couldn't ally himself with his family either, so that in the end he forced himself into paranoid isolation, trusting no one, not even his friends or the girl he said he loved.
His self-perceived dual status as an outsider, in his family and in society, led him to romanticize himself as the anti-hero of his own personal narrative. It's said repeatedly of Philip that "it's not just a weakness but a continued romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege." Add the word belonging to that list and you've got Cassel in a nutshell. The trouble is that, as much as he wants to belong, as much as he wants to trust people, he can't bring himself to. He's pushed himself so tightly into a life of isolation, paranoia, posturing self-sufficiency, and above all lying that every time he takes a step forward, he slides two steps back. He can't bring himself to make himself vulnerable by telling the truth more than a few times in the entire series, even to those people he's closest to. Furthermore, he's so attuned to lies that he can read other people's tells like a book. He comes from the automatic assumption that people are lying to him, so when he catches a tell it just confirms what he already suspected, and he is always attuned to others' tells and vulnerabilities. He assumes that everyone functions on the same dishonest wavelength that he and his family do, so he gets caught off guard when people do manage to convince him they're being truthful. Even when someone does convince him of their honesty, though, Cassel truly doesn't believe there's a single person in the world with his best interests at heart. He also has trouble understanding empathy because he has trouble accessing his own, so it's almost impossible for him to put himself in another person's shoes and feel the pain they're feeling.
Cassel is pathologically attached to his own behavior patterns, and especially doesn't want to relinquish the thrill of the con. For example, he dismisses aloud Mina's desire to go after "the big con" while subconsciously agreeing with her 100%. Lying and fooling people, hoisting them on their own petard, is as much a thrill to Cassel as it is to Shandra and Barron; he's just less honest about that fact. He talks a big game about wanting to be normal, and he does want to be perceived as normal, but if normality comes at the price of running cons, he's going to find a sly way to sabotage himself. To him, the con is a way to do his family proud, prove his intelligence, and prove his value, and he's unable or unwilling to come up with a creative substitute for that that would allow him to live a civilian life.
Not that it would have worked anyway; is attempt to be normal at Wallingford was a colossal failure because Cassel is not as smooth an operator as he thinks he is. People are constantly remarking on how dangerous Cassel has always seemed, how they were afraid to set him off; his roommate Sam compared him to a tiger pretending to be a housecat at one point, something dangerous trying to wrap itself in an unconvincingly innocent skin. His family can read him even more easily, because he's never seemed normal to them and never tried to seem normal around them. He clings to a world where "worker kids have to play cops or robbers" underneath his attempt at normalcy, and that's what ultimately undermines it. People can tell he doesn't 100% buy into his act, so they don't either.
Cassel's also a coward, which is a true Sharpe family trait. Because they're workers, they as a family have never had to own up to anything or face up to any consequences, Shandra and Barron being the best example of this. Cassel talks to talk about guilt and owning up to his mistakes, but when push comes to shove he runs from the consequences every time, most notably at the end of Black Heart, when he literally runs away from all of his problems and into Lila's arms. Instead of facing up to his mistakes and his flaws, he oversimplifies the world into a false paradigm of good and bad. When he does bad things, he dismisses it and says that he's an irredeemable "bad guy" instead of facing up to the fact that he's basically a dick and working on his own malfunctions.
Cassel's biggest hang-up is on Lila Zacharov. He claims to have been in love with her since they were thirteen, but let's think about this logically for a second. Cassel knew Lila for a few months when they were thirteen. He probably did have a crush on her, maybe something more, but she was always an unattainable ideal to him, the spoiled, haughty princess of the mob family that Cassel's family worked for. She would never be his, not really, and that seems to have been part of the appeal. Then he thought he murdered her and pined after her for three years, even fantasizing about her when he thought she was dead. By the time Lila - the real Lila, not the idealized Lila or the dead Lila or the Lila as Cassel had preserved her - came back, she was an entirely different person than she was at 13, but Cassel was still in love with Lila-the-13-year-old. This Lila was vengeful, even crueller than before, and frankly a little insane from being locked in a cage as a cat for three years. Hell, she had tried to kill him. But Cassel never allows himself to acknowledge that she's not the girl he used to love. Instead he chooses to interpret her actions in a way that will allow him to romanticize her and preserve that idealized tragic love affair that he's so intent on. Her feelings hardly come into play for the majority of their interactions. Even when she's been worked by Shandra, the tragedy is his tragedy and not hers; he's been robbed of his true love, he's the one in danger of doing something bad rather than her being in danger of him doing something bad to her, and when he's had enough of "resisting" her he labels her as an irresistable femme fatale and very nearly rapes her under the influence of his mother's emotion work. But it doesn't matter, because she's dangerous, seductive Lila and therefore he doesn't have to take responsibility for his own actions.
The bottom line is that Cassel is a danger to Lila just as much as she's a danger to him. He goes so far as labeling her his "death instinct;" he wants her because she's exhilarating and at least used to be a door to the criminal underworld he wanted to be a part of. He built her up to superhuman perfection in his head and convinced himself (probably accurately) that he could never have her. Instead he possesses her in other ways, by rewriting her in his head to be the femme fatale for his narrative anti-hero. And by stalking her. Can't forget that one.
Beyond all this, though, Cassel is in a lot of ways a typical teenager: broody, mopey, moody, and overly dramatic. He's blatantly cruel, sardonic, and vindictive, especially when frightened or threatened as a means of self-defense. He uses taunts and sarcasm as coping mechanisms for negative feelings, especially fear, and also as a means of relating to his peers. Finally, Cassel is angry, every minute of every day. His feelings of persecution, justified as they may have been in the beginning, are off-the-charts paranoid by now. He thinks everyone is out to wrong him, and he is royally pissed about it 25/8.
Barge Reactions: Frankly, Cassel's biggest adjustment is going to be getting used to all these people walking around with naked hands. He's used enough to a motley, oft-sociopathic cast of characters in his life, so he'll definitely take the piss out of a lot of people from the get-go but he won't be that surprised. He will be annoyed with the fact that he's in space prison without a trial, because he's the most persecuted kid in the universe, Jesus, and even his mom got a trial even though she was super guilty.
The idea of having one person looking after him with his well-being at heart is going to make him laugh, frankly. He doesn't believe anybody gives a shit and will take a lot of convincing on that front. Otherwise, he's going to be just as rude to everyone equally. Floods, breaches, and so on will piss him off, but he'll just attribute it to ~getting what he deserves~ in all likelihood. In other words, he's gonna be half-pity party, half-troll until and unless his warden starts making serious progress.
Path to Redemption: Cassel's big, big issue is trust. He doesn't trust anyone completely, not even his best friend, and he doesn't trust most people at all. His inherent assumption is that everyone is lying to him and out to con him, which stems mostly from the fact that he grew up in a family where . . . everyone lied to him and conned him. His Warden's biggest task - and, frankly, the biggest task of anyone who wants to try to get close to him - is to get past the protective wall of sarcasm and cruelty that he erects and gain his true trust. This will scare the crap out of him at first, and he'll probably backslide a little after he realizes that he actually fully trusts somebody, but that's the only way to get him moving forward.
He also needs to be shaken out of his good versus bad worldview. Because he grew up in a family of criminals who pitted themselves against the laws that forbade the use of their powers and the non-workers who supported those laws, Cassel has always categorized his family and other crime families as "bad" and other people as "good". In Black Heart he has a millisecond where he realizes that this is way, way oversimplified, but at the canon point I'm pulling him from he's still wrapped up in his confused self-loathing over being a "bad person".
His friends back home will be mixed bags in terms of motivating him to reform. Lila, his love interest, is so deeply entrenched in the world of organized crime that what Cassel classifies as redemption will only take him farther away from her. Wardens will have to beat into Cassel's head that, again, the world isn't as simple as he acts like it is and that he can be "good" without distancing himself from the people he cares about. The people whose memories are most likely to be motivation for changing the way he thinks about the world are his roommate and friend, Sam, and his grandfather.
History:
In the world of Curse Workers, magic has existed since the dawn of human civilization. Magic workers have been known throughout the ages as theurgists, dab hands, workers, hyperbathygammic (HBG) individuals - or colloquially, people with heebeegeebies. "Work," as these skills are most commonly called, is genetic rather than learned and comes in seven varieties: dream work, physical work, memory work, luck work, death work, emotion work, and the rarest, transformation work. It's only since the beginning of the 20th century that non-workers have attempted to legislate and control workers, an attempt that has largely failed. Anti-worker laws went into effect at the same time that Prohibition was written into law, and while Prohibition was eventually lifted, curse work was decriminalized. In fact, workers were put into work camps during the 1930s, and it was during those years that the worker crime families came into being - and that the worker family mentality came into being. Watch out for the family, take care of the family, screw the other guy. Everything that would later define the Zacharovs and the Sharpes began in those camps.
The Sharpes and Singers served the Zacharov family for decades, from the time Desi Singer, Cassel's grandfather, started bodyguarding for the man who would become the head of the Zacharov family and Lila Zacharov's father. His daughter, Shandra Singer, married into the Sharpe family and had three sons, Philip, Barron, and Cassel. To Shandra, family was everything, and she ordered her sons to only rely on and trust each other, the family; she enforced these lessons with her emotion work, which forced the boys to feel overwhelming love for each other to the point that they collapsed in hysterical tears. Shandra used her emotion work to manipulate her sons and reinforce lessons throughout their childhood, which in combination with her growing tendency to collecting and eventually hoarding, the family's criminal instincts, and their connection to the Zacharovs made for a very unsafe environment for children.
Cassel was seven years old when he broke and entered for the the first time, on his mother's command. By this time he had been convinced by his family (and memory-wiped to reinforce the idea) that he was the only non-worker in a family of skilled workers when in fact he was the very rarest, a transformation worker. When Shandra insisted that Cassel could be useful to the family by stealing a certain item from a certain house, he did it enthusiastically. However, he also showed a taste for theft himself, pocketing a small cat figurine that wouldn't benefit the family in any way. Cassel had a great desire to be of use to the family, especially his eldest brother Philip, and saw in his worker brother Barron a rival for Philip's attention.
When Cassel was nine, he met Lila Zacharov, Zacharov's daughter and the direct heir to the Zacharov family name. She went away to school until she was 13, and when she came back Cassel fell madly in love with her in the absolute way that 13-year-olds fall in love. Unfortunately, despite the close and tense connection he and Lila shared, Lila started dating his brother Barron, which only intensified his rivalry with Barron.
During this time Cassel's family was conspiring to keep him in the dark about his transformation work. Philip and Lila's cousin Anton, who had aspirations to take over the Zacharov family, had started using Cassel to "remove" (generally assassinate) problematic family members or enemies of the family. Barron wormed his way into the proceedings and wiped Cassel's memory at the end of every job, planting the memory that he, Barron, was a luck worker as a safety. Lila got in the way of one of these jobs, but Cassel refused to kill her, instead turning her into a cat and telling her to run, though she didn't get far before Barron caught her and put her in a cage for the next three years. Barron gave Cassel the memory of killing her and laughing about it, and Cassel wrestled with the memory of killing Lila for the next three years, through the death of his father in a car accident.
Fast-forward to awkward seventeen-year-old Cassel trying to fit in at Wallingford Preparatory School, a swag boarding school for rich kids, with his mom in jail for carelessly grifting a guy who could put two and two together, his brother Philip in a loveless, compelled marriage, and Barron allegedly in law school. Compulsory hyperbathygammic (HBG/worker) testing laws were being pushed through by conservatives, though no one thought the results would truly stay private; this effort was spearheaded by New Jersey Governor Patton. And Cassel had started sleepwalking.
Even when transformed, a worker is still a worker. Turns out that the sleepwalking was all Lilacat's fault; she'd escaped the little cage Barron had been keeping her in for ~3 years and was trying to kill Cassel by making him sleepwalk off the Wallingford roof. Cassel woke up in time not to fall off the roof, but the Wallingford administration kicked him out of school because they thought he had been worked, along with a decent dose of anti-worker prejudice. Cassel went to stay with Philip, who was having trouble with his wife, Maura, and didn't want to keep him; Barron didn't want to take him in, either, so Cassel went to stay with his grandad at his mother's old house. They started cleaning out his mother's hoard, his grandad attempting to normalize the situation a little bit.
There were a bunch of feral cats hanging around the garbage house, one of which was white with one green eye and one blue. (Lila. Obviously.) Cassel started feeding them and taking care of the white cat in particular while he tried to con his way back into school. When he tried to get in touch with Barron, he found that his brother had dropped out of law school in order to help Shandra with her case and tracked Barron down to his squalid new apartment. There he found the cage Lila had been kept in and Barron's memory journals (which also served as proof that Barron was a memory worker and not a luck worker as Cassel had been worked to believe, since Barron's memory loss was a direct result of memory work blowback).
After this, faint memories of previous blowback started coming back, and Cassel went to visit a nearby worker mall to get memory charms. He cut them into the skin of his calf to protect himself from memory work. Lilacat was taken to a shelter; Cassel thought Philip was responsible and wanted to exact VENGEANCE!! However, he had to con Lila out of the shelter first, which he did with the help of his classmates, Sam (his roommate) and Daneca (his badass pro-worker rights not-friend). After this, Daneca managed to browbeat Cassel into meeting her mother, Mrs. Wasserman, a pro-worker lawyer and advocate. She tried to convince him to use his unique experience to work against crime families, with absolutely no success.
That night, the Sharpes had a seriously eventful dinner party. Cassel yelled at his mom over the phone and accused her of keeping secrets from him, confronted Barron about his memory loss, and got cornered by Philip, who asked him about his erratic behavior, to which Cassel was an evasive smart-ass. Philip also drugged his grandad for the purposes of coming to the garbage house later that night with Barron to plan another assassination with no interference. When Philip and Barron took Cassel to Anton, Cassel finally realized that Barron was the memory worker and he, Cassel, was the transformation worker. Anton, Philip, and Barron plotted the assassination of Zacharov, but when Cassel got caught by guards and accidentally killed them with transformation work, Anton demanded that Philip and Barron help him beat Cassel up to teach him a lesson and prove their loyalty.
Now that Cassel semi-knew how to use his transformation work, he transformed Lila back to human form. She told him what she knew about his time as a memory-wiped assassin!! for Anton, Barron, and Philip, her own transformation, and how she tried to kill him by sleepwalking him off a roof. After these revelations and a crazy amount of sexual tension, Cassel, Lila, Daneca, and Sam came up with con to take down Philip, Anton, and Barron. Lila and Cassel had a fun and fraught meeting with Zacharov. Cassel snuck into Barron's apartment and rewrote all of his journals so it seemed like Barron was on Cassel's side all along; that way Barron would double-cross Philip and Anton in their plot to kill Zacharov. This went down about as well as could be expected, minus the part where Anton tried to kill Cassel in a fit of rage. Fortunately, Grandad killed Anton with his death work and everyone went home happy, except for the part where Zacharov kept Barron and Philip in his employ in exchange for their lives and Shandra got out of prison and worked Lila to love Cassel. Spoiler: Cassel was pissed. Still, she was his mom, so Cassel spent the summer with Shandra, conning marks to pay bills. It was in part a way to get away from Lila, but she showed up as a student at Wallingford in the fall anyway in order to be close to him.
It had gotten out by now that Cassel was a worker and a valuable commodity. Two federal agents, Jones and Hunt, tried to forcefully recruit Cassel to be a part of a government division called the Licensed Minority Division using workers, especially worker kids, to fight worker crime families. First and foremost, though, they took him to their Trenton office, told him Philip had turned informant and been killed, and got his help tracking down Philip's killer.
On the Wallingford front, Cassel pretended to be Lila's fake boyfriend to make her feel better about being forcibly in love with him (this made sense to him somehow). A videotape of Daneca's pro-worker HEX club ended up on the internet and led to their teacher sponsor's resignation, but Daneca, Sam, Lila, and Cassel went to an anti-Patton protest anyway. After the police in attendance started a riot, they all got arrested and Cassel had to promise information to Jones and Hunt ASAP in order to get them out. Unfortunately, Cassel believed his mother may have killed Philip for being a snitch, and there was evidence that Lila was at Philip's apartment, also known as the crime scene.
After the riot situation, it came out that Daneca was an emotion worker and had been embroidering the truth a little as far as her status as a worker. Sam stopped talking to her because teenagers, and in an unusual effort to be honest Cassel told Sam directly that he was a transformation worker. Less happily, Barron found out by looking back in his journals that nope, that recent handwriting in his journals was in no way his own, and confronted Cassel, demanding that he join him in swearing allegiance to the Brennan family as a brotherly team of assassins or Barron would tell the feds that Cassel killed several of the murder victims they were investigating. Which was true. Whoops, Cassel. And in a remarkably poor life decision, Cassel kissed Lila, who was still cursed.
Then his brain started working again, and Cassel realized that Philip's ex-wife Maura killed Philip because he was trying to get her to join him in witness protection and she felt she could never escape his manipulative douchebaggery. Sam and Lila helped Cassel frame someone else for Philip's murder, enabling Cassel to get immunity from the government for his previous crimes and out himself as a transformation worker and former assassin. Lila got pissed at him for taking bets about her having slept with some other asshole at Wallingford, which made Cassel think that the curse had ended. He knew he'd never be sure, though, so in another fit of poor decision-making he asked Daneca to work Lila not to care about him. Then he told her that he loved her in preparation for when her memory would theoretically be erased, because that totally made sense.
Then, because he's awesome, Cassel wore a wire to incriminate Barron and force him into joining the Licensed Minority Division instead of joining the Brennans. After confronting Maura, Cassel found out that Shandra worked Patton to remove his support from the anti-worker Proposition 2, but Cassel knew she'd be caught. Then Lila figured out Daneca was trying to work her and made her confess what Cassel told her to do, realized Cassel was a jackass and thought he had been stringing her along the whole time she was cursed, got her Zacharov necklace (the chain of scars on the neck that marked her as an official member of the Zacharov family), and told Cassel to basically fuck off and die. Ha.
The Licensed Minority Division wanted Cassel to finish high school before they took him in for full-time training, so Barron got a head start on training. On one afternoon of what Cassel called an unauthorized stakeout and Barron correctly called stalking Lila, Cassel saw Lila talking to a death worker assassin named Gage. After he cornered Gage in an alley, the assassin told Cassel that he'd killed a guy who'd botched a job for Zacharov, then ran, leaving Cassel with his gun. Cassel hid it in his and Sam's room back at Wallingford.
Zacharov, meanwhile, had imprisoned Shandra in a classy penthouse, and Lila took Cassel to see her on her father's orders. Shandra told Cassel that she stole and switched out the Resurrection Diamond that allegedly made Zacharov unkillable; the one that Zacharov had been wearing for years was a fake. That was why Zacharov had had her work Patton and imprisoned her afterwards. Zacharov now wanted Cassel to find the real Resurrection Diamond in exchange for his mother's freedom.
At Wallingford, Cassel was approached by a girl named Mina who claimed that she was being blackmailed. It was clear she was trying to con Cassel for some reason, but it wasn't until Cassel carried out the fake blackmail scenario she'd concocted that he found out she was actually trying to blackmail somebody else. She was physically working Dean Wharton of Wallingford who had Alzheimer's, which was of course illegal; he was paying her, but she wanted one big pay-off so that she could stop doing it, since the blowback was hurting her. Cassel told her to screw off, but Sam, angry and feeling powerless in Cassel's wake and since Daneca had broken up with him, went and confronted Wharton with Gage's gun and ended up getting shot himself. Cassel called in a mob doctor and covered everything up, but Sam was still severely hurt.
In the meantime, Cassel told Barron about Zacharov and Shandra. Barron semi-apologized to him about memory working him/making him an assassin/being a dick, and Cassel accepted his apology before they went to talk to the man who faked the Resurrection Diamond for Shandra. However, they found out that there were two fake diamonds, one given to Zacharov by Shandra and one given to Shandra by their father, who was in on the scheme but double-crossed Shandra to teach her a lesson for cheating on him with Zacharov. Or possibly just to be an ass. On the way back to Wallingford from this excursion, Cassel found out that Barron was dating Daneca and spent the rest of the book trying to break them up in whatever stupid way he could think of, culminating in ripping up Barron's reminder picture of her that said "This is Daneca Wasserman; you love her" on the back of it. Classy.
Lila left Wallingford to work with her father full-time right around the time Cassel was instructed by Agent Yulikova at the Licensed Minority Division to take part in a mission to remove Patton from office (by turning him into an animal and squirreling him away somewhere, which Cassel was not a fan of). Cassel felt he had no choice but to take part in this mission, especially since an emotionally-worked Patton had tried to have his mother killed. Cassel thought that Yulikova was trying to set him up to take the fall for Patton's transformation, which Barron confirmed along with the fact that the government would basically be able to use Cassel any way they wanted once he got arrested for working and his civil liberties were taken away. Ultimately, Cassel transformed himself instead of Patton while Barron kidnapped the real Patton; Cassel made a speech as Patton confessing to all of the governor's crimes. Then Agent Jones pretended to arrest him, but really took him to Zacharov and Lila as Patton to be executed for Patton's crimes. Fortunately, Lila and Zacharov were a lot smarter than Cassel, knew it was him, and shot Jones instead. Because Cassel destroyed Patton's reputation, Zacharov let Shandra go. However, since Lila was the one who shot Jones, she had to skip town for a while, and Cassel decided to go with her and be her awesome mob groupie. The end.
. . . OR IS IT.
Sample Journal Entry:
[ Voice today, and Cassel's all contemplation. Still, you can hear the springs on his shitty cot bouncing slightly as he jogs the foot he's got resting on his knee. ]
I'm taking a poll. That's a good thing to keep me occupied and out of trouble, right? Poll is as follows: anybody here ever heard of a commissary?
I know some stuff about prisons, and decent prisons have a commissary so you can buy - whatever. Cigarettes, copies of the Bible, matryoshkas if that's your thing. Paper, charcoal, things to occupy yourself so you don't "accidentally" stab your cellmate.
What do we have here? I'm pretty sure what we have here is "do work because I said so and because being good is its own deeply personal reward," but, uh. Pretty sure everybody here's learned that that doesn't work.
Somebody set up a token system. Let's do it. I'll scrub dishes for matryoshkas any day.
{And also this.}
Sample RP:
Shit. So, the ship was like Wallingford for criminals. The state of New Jersey would be thrilled with the 1:1 ratio of guards - wardens, whatever - to inmates. Maybe when Cassel got home he'd write a letter to whoever the new governor was gonna be and suggest he set up something like this multiversal prison ship he visited one time.
That made Cassel laugh a little into his Cheerios as he watched everybody walking by, arguing, ignoring each other, and so on. Both the idea of talking to any governors ever again, because fuck politicians, and the idea that he'd ever get "redeemed" and go home. He might as well settle in here, because he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, not if standards here were like standards at home.
Don't be a dick. Don't kill anybody. Don't sell out your family. Don't kiss girls who are bad news. Oops, oops, oops, quadruple-oops.
Cassel wished Lila was here, but he also didn't. She could handle herself, here or at home, but there was something about being here that was embarrassing. He'd gotten caught. Not by the cops or the feds or Zacharov, but by some space traveler who apparently thought he was judge and jury of everywhere that had ever been or ever would be. Plus, she'd laugh at his room. Like Wallingford had been so good to them.
He toyed with the idea of flicking his Cheerios at the girl a table down, but let the idea drop. He didn't need to start trouble just yet. Trouble came to him, anyway, not the other way around. He guessed he'd just treat it like a vacation for now. There was no way in hell he was going to take it seriously.
User DW:
trustme_imtheAIM/IM:
E-mail: tavrosno@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toto Sakigami, Marquis de Carabas, Alex Summers
Character Name: Cassel Sharpe
Series: Curse Workers {post-Black Heart}
Age: 17
From When?: Post-Black Heart; he's running away with Lila when some Brennans track him down and shoot him for reneging on the deal he broke, like, a book and a half ago. Oops.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Not only is Cassel technically a criminal, having worked as an assassin (semi-against his will and with wiped memories) and double/triple/quadruple-crossed people who mean everything to him, his worldview is so warped and simplistic that he has no chance of living a productive, non-destructive life without intervention. Without help, he'll never escape the mob, the feds, his family, and especially his own hideously self-destructive tendencies.
Abilities/Powers:
Canon: Cassel's a worker, which means he has a more-or-less-magical skill that he can use if he has hand-to-skin contact with another person - hence the gloves. Not only is he a worker, but he's a transformation worker, the rarest of them all and maybe the most dangerous. He can turn anything into anything else, with no care for where all that extra matter goes. (Don't question it, it's magic.) By extension, he can also kill anyone with a touch, simply by turning them into something inanimate. The catch to all of this is the bigger his work, the worse the blowback is, and he gets blowback of some kind every time he works. What you need to know about blowback is: he turns into a walking, talking, flopping, writhing bodyhorror for a couple of minutes. Then he's okay and has the normal number of eyes again.
Barge: I would like to reduce Cassel's transformation work as follows:
➢ He can only transform things the size of a breadbox or smaller to things the size of a breadbox or smaller.
➢ He cannot transform anything living, nor can he transform anything inanimate to anything living.
➢ His blowback, which seems to be roughly 2-2.5 minutes in canon, will be extended to 4 minutes.
➢ Cassel can also make amulets against transformation work, a power I'd like him to retain on the Barge if possible because it would be a good tool for a Warden to use to access his unselfish side. Basically, in order to turn a special type of stone into an amulet, Cassel attempts to transform it and the stone stores his power, rejecting it in the future. It's only good for one-time protection and breaks after one use.
Personality:
Cassel Sharpe is a big ol' bundle of issues. He has mommy issues, daddy issues, brother issues, girl issues, but most of all he has trust issues. Cassel's trust issues are so serious that he can't even tell himself the whole truth most of the time and only manages half-truths half of the time. No matter how he paints himself, Cassel is just as much of a pathological liar as his brother, Barron, which makes a lot of sense, given how similar their lives have been.
The environment Cassel grew up in was toxic to say the least. The entire family was and is steeped in violence and organized crime. While Cassel doesn't talk much about his father, it's implied that he was one stone cold mofo and was as much a part of pushing his kids into a life of crime as Shandra was. Of course, Shandra was not only emotionally abusive but literally emotionally manipulative; she had the ability to stick her fingers in her sons' emotions and twist them around, and she used that ability almost constantly. She set out to create three little sociopaths, and three little sociopaths she did create, with unhealthy violent-switching-with-codependent relationships to each other, piles and piles of resentment, and the bone-deep understanding that their survival went hand in hand with the survival of the family, which went hand in hand with being able to be a good criminal, to run a good con. Besides which, when Shandra did emotion work her own emotions shifted violently with the blowback, leading her to physically and verbally abuse her sons on a regular basis. Cassel pays a lot of lip service to being aware of the dysfunctionality and abnormality of his upbringing, especially in White Cat, but while he might logically understand this he doesn't believe it on an emotional level. He can only ever see his family having been the way it was and can't conceptualize a childhood not tainted by curse work and cruelty.
In other words, Cassel was both explicitly trained by his family to be a sociopathic criminal and implicitly encouraged to do so in order to keep himself out of trouble, at least in the insular family context. Being a worker criminal in a worker family was considered the "good, normal" thing to do, and Cassel wanted more than anything to be a powerful, valuable worker. Instead, it seemed like he was a powerless kid, so he had to strive to be a good criminal, at the very least. Even so, he was always on the outside, not only of his family but of the Zacharov family, because he wasn't as useful as his brothers.
This was where his rival relationship with Barron came into play. It was really only a semi-rivalry, because Barron seemed to want to look out for him and care for him as much as Barron could care for anybody. It was Barron who watched scary movies with him on the stairs over Philip and Anton's shoulders even though it was against the rules; it was Barron who learned how to pick locks with him; it was Barron who helped him out of scrapes. It was also Barron who protected him from the fact that he was an assassin - which was a shitty thing to do, but was at least partially motivated by a desire to keep Cassel safe, even from himself. Cassel, though, considers Barron to be his chief rival and even pathologizes him as one of the major forces in the way of him achieving happiness, while on some level wanting desperately to have a normal, brotherly relationship with him. Hence Cassel writing in Barron's fake journals that they had pizza day once a week: he really wants that. He wants to have a normal brother and a normal family. He wants to be normal.
The problem with that is that he's also convinced himself that he can't be normal, not ever. While society has told him since he was small that it's wrong to be a criminal, it's wrong to lie, and it's extra wrong to be a worker, his family has always said the opposite: that you can't survive unless you're a criminal, that you can't survive if you don't lie, and that you're the best to your family if you're a powerful worker. Until he was seventeen years old, Cassel believed he was an outsider in his family because he wasn't a worker and tried to fit into society by acting as normal as he could. Once he finally found out for good that he was a worker, he sank into it with, frankly, a lot of gratitude and resigned himself to being an outsider in society but a valuable member of his own family. However, he was so used to be an outsider in his family and was so betrayed by the way Shandra, Barron, and Philip had kept the truth from him that he couldn't ally himself with his family either, so that in the end he forced himself into paranoid isolation, trusting no one, not even his friends or the girl he said he loved.
His self-perceived dual status as an outsider, in his family and in society, led him to romanticize himself as the anti-hero of his own personal narrative. It's said repeatedly of Philip that "it's not just a weakness but a continued romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege." Add the word belonging to that list and you've got Cassel in a nutshell. The trouble is that, as much as he wants to belong, as much as he wants to trust people, he can't bring himself to. He's pushed himself so tightly into a life of isolation, paranoia, posturing self-sufficiency, and above all lying that every time he takes a step forward, he slides two steps back. He can't bring himself to make himself vulnerable by telling the truth more than a few times in the entire series, even to those people he's closest to. Furthermore, he's so attuned to lies that he can read other people's tells like a book. He comes from the automatic assumption that people are lying to him, so when he catches a tell it just confirms what he already suspected, and he is always attuned to others' tells and vulnerabilities. He assumes that everyone functions on the same dishonest wavelength that he and his family do, so he gets caught off guard when people do manage to convince him they're being truthful. Even when someone does convince him of their honesty, though, Cassel truly doesn't believe there's a single person in the world with his best interests at heart. He also has trouble understanding empathy because he has trouble accessing his own, so it's almost impossible for him to put himself in another person's shoes and feel the pain they're feeling.
Cassel is pathologically attached to his own behavior patterns, and especially doesn't want to relinquish the thrill of the con. For example, he dismisses aloud Mina's desire to go after "the big con" while subconsciously agreeing with her 100%. Lying and fooling people, hoisting them on their own petard, is as much a thrill to Cassel as it is to Shandra and Barron; he's just less honest about that fact. He talks a big game about wanting to be normal, and he does want to be perceived as normal, but if normality comes at the price of running cons, he's going to find a sly way to sabotage himself. To him, the con is a way to do his family proud, prove his intelligence, and prove his value, and he's unable or unwilling to come up with a creative substitute for that that would allow him to live a civilian life.
Not that it would have worked anyway; is attempt to be normal at Wallingford was a colossal failure because Cassel is not as smooth an operator as he thinks he is. People are constantly remarking on how dangerous Cassel has always seemed, how they were afraid to set him off; his roommate Sam compared him to a tiger pretending to be a housecat at one point, something dangerous trying to wrap itself in an unconvincingly innocent skin. His family can read him even more easily, because he's never seemed normal to them and never tried to seem normal around them. He clings to a world where "worker kids have to play cops or robbers" underneath his attempt at normalcy, and that's what ultimately undermines it. People can tell he doesn't 100% buy into his act, so they don't either.
Cassel's also a coward, which is a true Sharpe family trait. Because they're workers, they as a family have never had to own up to anything or face up to any consequences, Shandra and Barron being the best example of this. Cassel talks to talk about guilt and owning up to his mistakes, but when push comes to shove he runs from the consequences every time, most notably at the end of Black Heart, when he literally runs away from all of his problems and into Lila's arms. Instead of facing up to his mistakes and his flaws, he oversimplifies the world into a false paradigm of good and bad. When he does bad things, he dismisses it and says that he's an irredeemable "bad guy" instead of facing up to the fact that he's basically a dick and working on his own malfunctions.
Cassel's biggest hang-up is on Lila Zacharov. He claims to have been in love with her since they were thirteen, but let's think about this logically for a second. Cassel knew Lila for a few months when they were thirteen. He probably did have a crush on her, maybe something more, but she was always an unattainable ideal to him, the spoiled, haughty princess of the mob family that Cassel's family worked for. She would never be his, not really, and that seems to have been part of the appeal. Then he thought he murdered her and pined after her for three years, even fantasizing about her when he thought she was dead. By the time Lila - the real Lila, not the idealized Lila or the dead Lila or the Lila as Cassel had preserved her - came back, she was an entirely different person than she was at 13, but Cassel was still in love with Lila-the-13-year-old. This Lila was vengeful, even crueller than before, and frankly a little insane from being locked in a cage as a cat for three years. Hell, she had tried to kill him. But Cassel never allows himself to acknowledge that she's not the girl he used to love. Instead he chooses to interpret her actions in a way that will allow him to romanticize her and preserve that idealized tragic love affair that he's so intent on. Her feelings hardly come into play for the majority of their interactions. Even when she's been worked by Shandra, the tragedy is his tragedy and not hers; he's been robbed of his true love, he's the one in danger of doing something bad rather than her being in danger of him doing something bad to her, and when he's had enough of "resisting" her he labels her as an irresistable femme fatale and very nearly rapes her under the influence of his mother's emotion work. But it doesn't matter, because she's dangerous, seductive Lila and therefore he doesn't have to take responsibility for his own actions.
The bottom line is that Cassel is a danger to Lila just as much as she's a danger to him. He goes so far as labeling her his "death instinct;" he wants her because she's exhilarating and at least used to be a door to the criminal underworld he wanted to be a part of. He built her up to superhuman perfection in his head and convinced himself (probably accurately) that he could never have her. Instead he possesses her in other ways, by rewriting her in his head to be the femme fatale for his narrative anti-hero. And by stalking her. Can't forget that one.
Beyond all this, though, Cassel is in a lot of ways a typical teenager: broody, mopey, moody, and overly dramatic. He's blatantly cruel, sardonic, and vindictive, especially when frightened or threatened as a means of self-defense. He uses taunts and sarcasm as coping mechanisms for negative feelings, especially fear, and also as a means of relating to his peers. Finally, Cassel is angry, every minute of every day. His feelings of persecution, justified as they may have been in the beginning, are off-the-charts paranoid by now. He thinks everyone is out to wrong him, and he is royally pissed about it 25/8.
Barge Reactions: Frankly, Cassel's biggest adjustment is going to be getting used to all these people walking around with naked hands. He's used enough to a motley, oft-sociopathic cast of characters in his life, so he'll definitely take the piss out of a lot of people from the get-go but he won't be that surprised. He will be annoyed with the fact that he's in space prison without a trial, because he's the most persecuted kid in the universe, Jesus, and even his mom got a trial even though she was super guilty.
The idea of having one person looking after him with his well-being at heart is going to make him laugh, frankly. He doesn't believe anybody gives a shit and will take a lot of convincing on that front. Otherwise, he's going to be just as rude to everyone equally. Floods, breaches, and so on will piss him off, but he'll just attribute it to ~getting what he deserves~ in all likelihood. In other words, he's gonna be half-pity party, half-troll until and unless his warden starts making serious progress.
Path to Redemption: Cassel's big, big issue is trust. He doesn't trust anyone completely, not even his best friend, and he doesn't trust most people at all. His inherent assumption is that everyone is lying to him and out to con him, which stems mostly from the fact that he grew up in a family where . . . everyone lied to him and conned him. His Warden's biggest task - and, frankly, the biggest task of anyone who wants to try to get close to him - is to get past the protective wall of sarcasm and cruelty that he erects and gain his true trust. This will scare the crap out of him at first, and he'll probably backslide a little after he realizes that he actually fully trusts somebody, but that's the only way to get him moving forward.
He also needs to be shaken out of his good versus bad worldview. Because he grew up in a family of criminals who pitted themselves against the laws that forbade the use of their powers and the non-workers who supported those laws, Cassel has always categorized his family and other crime families as "bad" and other people as "good". In Black Heart he has a millisecond where he realizes that this is way, way oversimplified, but at the canon point I'm pulling him from he's still wrapped up in his confused self-loathing over being a "bad person".
His friends back home will be mixed bags in terms of motivating him to reform. Lila, his love interest, is so deeply entrenched in the world of organized crime that what Cassel classifies as redemption will only take him farther away from her. Wardens will have to beat into Cassel's head that, again, the world isn't as simple as he acts like it is and that he can be "good" without distancing himself from the people he cares about. The people whose memories are most likely to be motivation for changing the way he thinks about the world are his roommate and friend, Sam, and his grandfather.
History:
In the world of Curse Workers, magic has existed since the dawn of human civilization. Magic workers have been known throughout the ages as theurgists, dab hands, workers, hyperbathygammic (HBG) individuals - or colloquially, people with heebeegeebies. "Work," as these skills are most commonly called, is genetic rather than learned and comes in seven varieties: dream work, physical work, memory work, luck work, death work, emotion work, and the rarest, transformation work. It's only since the beginning of the 20th century that non-workers have attempted to legislate and control workers, an attempt that has largely failed. Anti-worker laws went into effect at the same time that Prohibition was written into law, and while Prohibition was eventually lifted, curse work was decriminalized. In fact, workers were put into work camps during the 1930s, and it was during those years that the worker crime families came into being - and that the worker family mentality came into being. Watch out for the family, take care of the family, screw the other guy. Everything that would later define the Zacharovs and the Sharpes began in those camps.
The Sharpes and Singers served the Zacharov family for decades, from the time Desi Singer, Cassel's grandfather, started bodyguarding for the man who would become the head of the Zacharov family and Lila Zacharov's father. His daughter, Shandra Singer, married into the Sharpe family and had three sons, Philip, Barron, and Cassel. To Shandra, family was everything, and she ordered her sons to only rely on and trust each other, the family; she enforced these lessons with her emotion work, which forced the boys to feel overwhelming love for each other to the point that they collapsed in hysterical tears. Shandra used her emotion work to manipulate her sons and reinforce lessons throughout their childhood, which in combination with her growing tendency to collecting and eventually hoarding, the family's criminal instincts, and their connection to the Zacharovs made for a very unsafe environment for children.
Cassel was seven years old when he broke and entered for the the first time, on his mother's command. By this time he had been convinced by his family (and memory-wiped to reinforce the idea) that he was the only non-worker in a family of skilled workers when in fact he was the very rarest, a transformation worker. When Shandra insisted that Cassel could be useful to the family by stealing a certain item from a certain house, he did it enthusiastically. However, he also showed a taste for theft himself, pocketing a small cat figurine that wouldn't benefit the family in any way. Cassel had a great desire to be of use to the family, especially his eldest brother Philip, and saw in his worker brother Barron a rival for Philip's attention.
When Cassel was nine, he met Lila Zacharov, Zacharov's daughter and the direct heir to the Zacharov family name. She went away to school until she was 13, and when she came back Cassel fell madly in love with her in the absolute way that 13-year-olds fall in love. Unfortunately, despite the close and tense connection he and Lila shared, Lila started dating his brother Barron, which only intensified his rivalry with Barron.
During this time Cassel's family was conspiring to keep him in the dark about his transformation work. Philip and Lila's cousin Anton, who had aspirations to take over the Zacharov family, had started using Cassel to "remove" (generally assassinate) problematic family members or enemies of the family. Barron wormed his way into the proceedings and wiped Cassel's memory at the end of every job, planting the memory that he, Barron, was a luck worker as a safety. Lila got in the way of one of these jobs, but Cassel refused to kill her, instead turning her into a cat and telling her to run, though she didn't get far before Barron caught her and put her in a cage for the next three years. Barron gave Cassel the memory of killing her and laughing about it, and Cassel wrestled with the memory of killing Lila for the next three years, through the death of his father in a car accident.
Fast-forward to awkward seventeen-year-old Cassel trying to fit in at Wallingford Preparatory School, a swag boarding school for rich kids, with his mom in jail for carelessly grifting a guy who could put two and two together, his brother Philip in a loveless, compelled marriage, and Barron allegedly in law school. Compulsory hyperbathygammic (HBG/worker) testing laws were being pushed through by conservatives, though no one thought the results would truly stay private; this effort was spearheaded by New Jersey Governor Patton. And Cassel had started sleepwalking.
Even when transformed, a worker is still a worker. Turns out that the sleepwalking was all Lilacat's fault; she'd escaped the little cage Barron had been keeping her in for ~3 years and was trying to kill Cassel by making him sleepwalk off the Wallingford roof. Cassel woke up in time not to fall off the roof, but the Wallingford administration kicked him out of school because they thought he had been worked, along with a decent dose of anti-worker prejudice. Cassel went to stay with Philip, who was having trouble with his wife, Maura, and didn't want to keep him; Barron didn't want to take him in, either, so Cassel went to stay with his grandad at his mother's old house. They started cleaning out his mother's hoard, his grandad attempting to normalize the situation a little bit.
There were a bunch of feral cats hanging around the garbage house, one of which was white with one green eye and one blue. (Lila. Obviously.) Cassel started feeding them and taking care of the white cat in particular while he tried to con his way back into school. When he tried to get in touch with Barron, he found that his brother had dropped out of law school in order to help Shandra with her case and tracked Barron down to his squalid new apartment. There he found the cage Lila had been kept in and Barron's memory journals (which also served as proof that Barron was a memory worker and not a luck worker as Cassel had been worked to believe, since Barron's memory loss was a direct result of memory work blowback).
After this, faint memories of previous blowback started coming back, and Cassel went to visit a nearby worker mall to get memory charms. He cut them into the skin of his calf to protect himself from memory work. Lilacat was taken to a shelter; Cassel thought Philip was responsible and wanted to exact VENGEANCE!! However, he had to con Lila out of the shelter first, which he did with the help of his classmates, Sam (his roommate) and Daneca (his badass pro-worker rights not-friend). After this, Daneca managed to browbeat Cassel into meeting her mother, Mrs. Wasserman, a pro-worker lawyer and advocate. She tried to convince him to use his unique experience to work against crime families, with absolutely no success.
That night, the Sharpes had a seriously eventful dinner party. Cassel yelled at his mom over the phone and accused her of keeping secrets from him, confronted Barron about his memory loss, and got cornered by Philip, who asked him about his erratic behavior, to which Cassel was an evasive smart-ass. Philip also drugged his grandad for the purposes of coming to the garbage house later that night with Barron to plan another assassination with no interference. When Philip and Barron took Cassel to Anton, Cassel finally realized that Barron was the memory worker and he, Cassel, was the transformation worker. Anton, Philip, and Barron plotted the assassination of Zacharov, but when Cassel got caught by guards and accidentally killed them with transformation work, Anton demanded that Philip and Barron help him beat Cassel up to teach him a lesson and prove their loyalty.
Now that Cassel semi-knew how to use his transformation work, he transformed Lila back to human form. She told him what she knew about his time as a memory-wiped assassin!! for Anton, Barron, and Philip, her own transformation, and how she tried to kill him by sleepwalking him off a roof. After these revelations and a crazy amount of sexual tension, Cassel, Lila, Daneca, and Sam came up with con to take down Philip, Anton, and Barron. Lila and Cassel had a fun and fraught meeting with Zacharov. Cassel snuck into Barron's apartment and rewrote all of his journals so it seemed like Barron was on Cassel's side all along; that way Barron would double-cross Philip and Anton in their plot to kill Zacharov. This went down about as well as could be expected, minus the part where Anton tried to kill Cassel in a fit of rage. Fortunately, Grandad killed Anton with his death work and everyone went home happy, except for the part where Zacharov kept Barron and Philip in his employ in exchange for their lives and Shandra got out of prison and worked Lila to love Cassel. Spoiler: Cassel was pissed. Still, she was his mom, so Cassel spent the summer with Shandra, conning marks to pay bills. It was in part a way to get away from Lila, but she showed up as a student at Wallingford in the fall anyway in order to be close to him.
It had gotten out by now that Cassel was a worker and a valuable commodity. Two federal agents, Jones and Hunt, tried to forcefully recruit Cassel to be a part of a government division called the Licensed Minority Division using workers, especially worker kids, to fight worker crime families. First and foremost, though, they took him to their Trenton office, told him Philip had turned informant and been killed, and got his help tracking down Philip's killer.
On the Wallingford front, Cassel pretended to be Lila's fake boyfriend to make her feel better about being forcibly in love with him (this made sense to him somehow). A videotape of Daneca's pro-worker HEX club ended up on the internet and led to their teacher sponsor's resignation, but Daneca, Sam, Lila, and Cassel went to an anti-Patton protest anyway. After the police in attendance started a riot, they all got arrested and Cassel had to promise information to Jones and Hunt ASAP in order to get them out. Unfortunately, Cassel believed his mother may have killed Philip for being a snitch, and there was evidence that Lila was at Philip's apartment, also known as the crime scene.
After the riot situation, it came out that Daneca was an emotion worker and had been embroidering the truth a little as far as her status as a worker. Sam stopped talking to her because teenagers, and in an unusual effort to be honest Cassel told Sam directly that he was a transformation worker. Less happily, Barron found out by looking back in his journals that nope, that recent handwriting in his journals was in no way his own, and confronted Cassel, demanding that he join him in swearing allegiance to the Brennan family as a brotherly team of assassins or Barron would tell the feds that Cassel killed several of the murder victims they were investigating. Which was true. Whoops, Cassel. And in a remarkably poor life decision, Cassel kissed Lila, who was still cursed.
Then his brain started working again, and Cassel realized that Philip's ex-wife Maura killed Philip because he was trying to get her to join him in witness protection and she felt she could never escape his manipulative douchebaggery. Sam and Lila helped Cassel frame someone else for Philip's murder, enabling Cassel to get immunity from the government for his previous crimes and out himself as a transformation worker and former assassin. Lila got pissed at him for taking bets about her having slept with some other asshole at Wallingford, which made Cassel think that the curse had ended. He knew he'd never be sure, though, so in another fit of poor decision-making he asked Daneca to work Lila not to care about him. Then he told her that he loved her in preparation for when her memory would theoretically be erased, because that totally made sense.
Then, because he's awesome, Cassel wore a wire to incriminate Barron and force him into joining the Licensed Minority Division instead of joining the Brennans. After confronting Maura, Cassel found out that Shandra worked Patton to remove his support from the anti-worker Proposition 2, but Cassel knew she'd be caught. Then Lila figured out Daneca was trying to work her and made her confess what Cassel told her to do, realized Cassel was a jackass and thought he had been stringing her along the whole time she was cursed, got her Zacharov necklace (the chain of scars on the neck that marked her as an official member of the Zacharov family), and told Cassel to basically fuck off and die. Ha.
The Licensed Minority Division wanted Cassel to finish high school before they took him in for full-time training, so Barron got a head start on training. On one afternoon of what Cassel called an unauthorized stakeout and Barron correctly called stalking Lila, Cassel saw Lila talking to a death worker assassin named Gage. After he cornered Gage in an alley, the assassin told Cassel that he'd killed a guy who'd botched a job for Zacharov, then ran, leaving Cassel with his gun. Cassel hid it in his and Sam's room back at Wallingford.
Zacharov, meanwhile, had imprisoned Shandra in a classy penthouse, and Lila took Cassel to see her on her father's orders. Shandra told Cassel that she stole and switched out the Resurrection Diamond that allegedly made Zacharov unkillable; the one that Zacharov had been wearing for years was a fake. That was why Zacharov had had her work Patton and imprisoned her afterwards. Zacharov now wanted Cassel to find the real Resurrection Diamond in exchange for his mother's freedom.
At Wallingford, Cassel was approached by a girl named Mina who claimed that she was being blackmailed. It was clear she was trying to con Cassel for some reason, but it wasn't until Cassel carried out the fake blackmail scenario she'd concocted that he found out she was actually trying to blackmail somebody else. She was physically working Dean Wharton of Wallingford who had Alzheimer's, which was of course illegal; he was paying her, but she wanted one big pay-off so that she could stop doing it, since the blowback was hurting her. Cassel told her to screw off, but Sam, angry and feeling powerless in Cassel's wake and since Daneca had broken up with him, went and confronted Wharton with Gage's gun and ended up getting shot himself. Cassel called in a mob doctor and covered everything up, but Sam was still severely hurt.
In the meantime, Cassel told Barron about Zacharov and Shandra. Barron semi-apologized to him about memory working him/making him an assassin/being a dick, and Cassel accepted his apology before they went to talk to the man who faked the Resurrection Diamond for Shandra. However, they found out that there were two fake diamonds, one given to Zacharov by Shandra and one given to Shandra by their father, who was in on the scheme but double-crossed Shandra to teach her a lesson for cheating on him with Zacharov. Or possibly just to be an ass. On the way back to Wallingford from this excursion, Cassel found out that Barron was dating Daneca and spent the rest of the book trying to break them up in whatever stupid way he could think of, culminating in ripping up Barron's reminder picture of her that said "This is Daneca Wasserman; you love her" on the back of it. Classy.
Lila left Wallingford to work with her father full-time right around the time Cassel was instructed by Agent Yulikova at the Licensed Minority Division to take part in a mission to remove Patton from office (by turning him into an animal and squirreling him away somewhere, which Cassel was not a fan of). Cassel felt he had no choice but to take part in this mission, especially since an emotionally-worked Patton had tried to have his mother killed. Cassel thought that Yulikova was trying to set him up to take the fall for Patton's transformation, which Barron confirmed along with the fact that the government would basically be able to use Cassel any way they wanted once he got arrested for working and his civil liberties were taken away. Ultimately, Cassel transformed himself instead of Patton while Barron kidnapped the real Patton; Cassel made a speech as Patton confessing to all of the governor's crimes. Then Agent Jones pretended to arrest him, but really took him to Zacharov and Lila as Patton to be executed for Patton's crimes. Fortunately, Lila and Zacharov were a lot smarter than Cassel, knew it was him, and shot Jones instead. Because Cassel destroyed Patton's reputation, Zacharov let Shandra go. However, since Lila was the one who shot Jones, she had to skip town for a while, and Cassel decided to go with her and be her awesome mob groupie. The end.
. . . OR IS IT.
Sample Journal Entry:
[ Voice today, and Cassel's all contemplation. Still, you can hear the springs on his shitty cot bouncing slightly as he jogs the foot he's got resting on his knee. ]
I'm taking a poll. That's a good thing to keep me occupied and out of trouble, right? Poll is as follows: anybody here ever heard of a commissary?
I know some stuff about prisons, and decent prisons have a commissary so you can buy - whatever. Cigarettes, copies of the Bible, matryoshkas if that's your thing. Paper, charcoal, things to occupy yourself so you don't "accidentally" stab your cellmate.
What do we have here? I'm pretty sure what we have here is "do work because I said so and because being good is its own deeply personal reward," but, uh. Pretty sure everybody here's learned that that doesn't work.
Somebody set up a token system. Let's do it. I'll scrub dishes for matryoshkas any day.
{And also this.}
Sample RP:
Shit. So, the ship was like Wallingford for criminals. The state of New Jersey would be thrilled with the 1:1 ratio of guards - wardens, whatever - to inmates. Maybe when Cassel got home he'd write a letter to whoever the new governor was gonna be and suggest he set up something like this multiversal prison ship he visited one time.
That made Cassel laugh a little into his Cheerios as he watched everybody walking by, arguing, ignoring each other, and so on. Both the idea of talking to any governors ever again, because fuck politicians, and the idea that he'd ever get "redeemed" and go home. He might as well settle in here, because he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, not if standards here were like standards at home.
Don't be a dick. Don't kill anybody. Don't sell out your family. Don't kiss girls who are bad news. Oops, oops, oops, quadruple-oops.
Cassel wished Lila was here, but he also didn't. She could handle herself, here or at home, but there was something about being here that was embarrassing. He'd gotten caught. Not by the cops or the feds or Zacharov, but by some space traveler who apparently thought he was judge and jury of everywhere that had ever been or ever would be. Plus, she'd laugh at his room. Like Wallingford had been so good to them.
He toyed with the idea of flicking his Cheerios at the girl a table down, but let the idea drop. He didn't need to start trouble just yet. Trouble came to him, anyway, not the other way around. He guessed he'd just treat it like a vacation for now. There was no way in hell he was going to take it seriously.