Name: Skulk
Codename: The Cutthroat Corpse, The Mist Meadow Skulk, Dead Reckoning
Age: Unknown (Potentially thousands of years old)
Date of Birth: N/A
Height: 6ft
Weight: 225lbs
Hair Color: N/A
Eye Color: Glowing blueish green
Place of Origin: Caledonia
Nationality/Race: Celtic
Classification/Origin of Powers: Ghost/Undead
Status: Restless Spirit
Occupation: Trainer, Bodyguard, Assassin, Pirate, Cook
Personality Profile: Curt, matter-of-fact, and often brutally honest in his assessments, the ghost has been around too long to have patience for the foolishness of mortals. The mistakes he sees others make over and over throughout the centuries is an annoyance to him, but he has since given up trying to voice caution. Advice is offered rarely and usually only to those who seek it. For his part, the spirit has resigned himself to his cursed fate, and long ago abandoned all hope of escape. His one solace is the ever changing world and the endless creativity of mortals.
Physical Description:
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General Power Information: Ghostly Apparition and full body Manifestation
Ability One: (Divided into three functions)
Deadlands Run (Reconstitution): If his corporeal form is destroyed in the living world, the spirit will be ejected to the Deadlands, a spectral realm between the land of the living and the afterlife proper. There his form will need to coalesce before he regains his consciousness and is able to move around. This process can take a day or more depending on the severity of its dispersion (how thoroughly he was destroyed) in the mortal realm. While in the Deadlands the ghost cannot interact with the physical world. He cannot be seen or heard there (with special exceptions), and while he may be able to see mortals' ghostly outlines on the other side if he's close enough (within 10 feet), he can't hear or touch them while he exists in that etherial realm. Once fully reformed in that dimension the spirit will immediately need to make his way back to the dagger which he is tethered to. If the dagger was moved before he could fully reconstitute, he must journey to where the dagger is, no matter how far. This can take a significant amount of time if the holder of the dagger keeps moving and never backtracks. In the end the spirit will inevitably get to the blade again, as the tether will not allow for him to resist or stay away. It will shine for him as a becon in the Deadlands, and has been used before as a clever way to circumvent a enemy's defenses. By planting the item on a foe and allowing them to return to their home, the ghost will eventually reach its dagger and manifest inside the target's perimeter walls.
Manifestation (Physical Form): Cursed to be forever bound to an old dagger, the spirit is tethered to the physical and can barrow from that physicality to gain a solid(ish) form. In terms of durability this body is no more substantial than the corpse it resembles, tough for a human in terms of muscle and sinew, but not necessarily superhuman. Its advantage lies in the fact that the body is already dead, so it can endure catastrophic damage and still maintain functionality. It is etheric at its base level and so even broken bones and gaping wounds aren't enough to compromise the body's general outline, even if physically it should be structurally impossible. All told the corpse body can lose 60% body mass before the spirit is finally dispersed. The exception to this rule is severing or destroying the head, which is somehow by metaphysics still a killing blow. In terms of strength, speed, and dexterity, the body is actually superhuman, well within super soldier territory, but only due to the fact that the corpse-like form can be pushed beyond mortal limits without any sort of concern for personal safety. Other notable details are the basic immunities which come from being undead, including immunity to poison, toxic gas, drugs, drowning or hard vacuum and radiation exposure.
Ethereal Weapons (Ghost Swords): Acquired from hundreds of battles over thousands of years, these various swords, knives, and throwing daggers are all technically not 'real'. They are manifestations, echoes of their former owner's final battle, and an enduring habit from the ghost's mortal days of taking a trophy from every kill. From a practical standpoint these blades are not any more solid or resilient than their real world counterparts, able to hack, slash and stab just as a steel blade would. They will also bend, break, or shatter just as a mundane blade would. The primary differences between these and regular weapons are that they work on incorporeal enties, the spirit will always have another weapon manifested and ready to use from his extensive collection, and they don't seem to have any weight while still having the same amount of raw force. Every time the spirit reconstitutes, his weapon supply is restored. Note that all of these weapons are melee implements of one kind or another. Though he has killed opponents who were armed with guns, an etheric gun is mostly useless without spectral ammo to load it with, and he lacks the ability to create this ammunition.
Ability Two:
Ghost Walk (Wall Running and Spectral Mass): Though he can have a physical form, he is not entirely bound to natural laws. The spirit can run on walls or ceilings as if they were the floor, and can jump between them freely at will. He can also accomplish other surreal feats such as balancing on the flat of an enemy's outstretched blade, walking on water or thin ice, or standing on a pressure plate without triggering it. While doing these things he, impossibly, still maintains his striking power, balance, and momentum, able to block and parry blows from the ceiling with the same leverage as if he were anchored there by gravity.
Ability Three:
Soul Snare (Spirit grip): The ghost is able to reach inside an opponent and pull at their soul. Since the opponent is presumably alive, the soul cannot be pulled completely free of the body, but the process of having one's soul grabed and pulled halfway out is *extremely* painful and disorienting. This attack is never lethal, but it can bypass most defenses, phasing through armor and flesh equally. As a flipside, this ability can be used to reliably fight hostile spirits and other incorporeal enties. For nonhuman opponents, the Soul Snare has only limited use. It works on most animals and beasts, but with great difficulty (and he tends to like animals so he wouldn't choose to anyway). With robots it often has nothing to grab onto, or in some surprising cases it does have a soul to grab onto, but the robot suffers no adverse effects and can retaliate freely.
Drawbacks & Weaknesses:
Necromancy: Being a ghost, the spirit is vulnerable to certain magics. While he is still tethered to the dagger and cannot be fully banished, he can be stopped, weakened, or trapped by a variety of spells, hexes, magic circles, and other things which ward or harm the undead. The exception is control. Only the owner of the dagger may order him, and this curse supersedes any other magical attempt to bind him to one's service.
Cursed Thrall: The spirit is bound to an old dagger. The owner of this dagger can order the spirit to do a variety of tasks, from killing to simply offering insight. The owner can even order the spirit to disperse and only return at a specified time. While the spirit doesn't have to like the orders he is given, he will suffer immense pain for five minutes if he refuses. He can refuse two orders and experience a greater effect each time, but a third refusal causes him to be violently dispersed and ejected from the mortal plane, where he will then need to reconstitute himself in the Deadlands and come back to the dagger to manifest once more. The spirit has to be within 10 feet of the dagger to manifest physically. In his physical form, the spirit cannot move further than 100 feet from the dagger. If he is somehow kicked outside of the dagger's radius, or the dagger itself is moved, the corpse body to begin to break down and decompose into an ectoplasmic sludge over the course of about two minutes. If he fails to make it back into the dagger's field before completely falling apart, he will disperse and end up in the Deadlands. If he makes it back to the dagger before this happens then he will quickly reconstitute back to his regular physical self. Ownership of the dagger (and therefore control over the ghost) is determined by verbal agreement and acceptance. Anyone can accept the dagger without knowing of its true nature, but it must always be a gift and recognized as such. Ownership can last until death, at which point ownership goes who whoever finds the dagger next. If the dagger is thrown away or discarded, it will still be technically owned by that person until they die, at which point it must be found in order to be owned again. Only when the dagger belongs to someone can the spirit manifest in the physical world. If the dagger is ever completely destroyed, the spirit's tether will be gone and he will be immediately destroyed and thrown into the afterlife permanently.
Skills:
Blademaster and Assassin: The spirit is a master with nearly every blade and melee killing implement there is. His skills have been honed over thousands of years of combat and assassination.
Trainer: Those thousands of years also mean he has a wealth of experience to teach and his ability to die and come back lets him be a unique sparring partner.
Non-Physical Skills: Having been around for so long, there's an array of languages, skills, and obscure historical knowledge which the spirit has access to. He has been a pirate, a legionare, a bodyguard, a hunter, a thief, and cook, among other things.
Background:
Not much is known for certain about the ghost, nor the dagger it's bound to. An inscription on the blade has faded with time, but is rumored to have contained the spirit's original name. The ghost himself doesn't remember his name or much of his origins, though whether this is because of the conditions of the curse which was placed on him, a side effect of the inscription being worn away, or simply forgotten memory, is unknown.
Several legends are attributed to the dagger. One is a tale of "The Mist Meadow Skulk" which haunted the Scottish lowlands at dusk and dawn, slitting the throat of anyone who wondered off the beaten path. Another story portrays the spirit as a corsair of the spanish main, doomed to endlessly plunder merchant ships for gold and spice in order to pay for his mutiny against his captain. One legend says the spirit was a thief who managed to cheat in a wager with Death, and was trapped between worlds as punishment. The oldest manuscript found with any mention of the ghost tells of a king who ordered an assassin to bring him the head of Oberon, Lord of the Fae Lands. The assassin is said to have made it all the way to Oberon's throne room before being captured and imprisoned within the very weapon he would have used to murder his target. All of these stories have inconsistencies, but the descriptions of both the ghost and the dagger remain the sole commonalities.
Whatever his origins, the ghost, lately referred to as "Skulk" or "The Cutthroat Corpse" has been a regular occurrence off and on throughout history, the dagger being passed from owner to owner, forcing the ghost to follow.
The most recent holder of the knife is a young blind girl in Salem with the curious ability to see and interact with ghosts. Over the last five years Skulk has trained and looked after her as she lived on the street avoiding the mob. The spirit sees the heart of a survivor in the girl, and recognizes greatness unfairly stifled by cruel circumstance and malicious actors. In spite of everything, even with thousands of years of detachment from humanity, Skulk has grown fond of her, though he may not readily admit it.
Criminal Record: N/A
Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
The Deadlands are not visible to most mortals except those gifted with extra sensory abilities, psychic mediums, or those having a near death experience. This sublayer of reality mirrors the real world except as a dumping ground for entropy. Cars on the street are run down where those same vehicles might be perfectly running in the real world. Buildings are dilapidated and crumbling while their living world versions are completely fine. The deadlands are just as the name describes, a place of decomposition and ending. Humans move through this strange world as ghostly apparitions, a bleed through image of their living counterparts carrying on with their daily lives.
Hobbies: Movies, sailing, books, audio books, boardgames, learning new phrases, sparring, training others.
As Skulk lacks most mortal sensations, he also has no sense of smell or taste, but he can remember what these experiences were like. As a result, Skulk was a perhaps unsettling fixation on watching people eat, sometimes asking them to describe the taste so he can imagine it. This behavior isn't compulsory, and he can stop or leave if asked.
Skulk also takes in all kinds of media. Without the biological ability or desire to sleep, the ghost has time to try and catch up on whatever era of pop culture he is active in, and while mortals seem silly to him now after so much time, their endless creativity never fails to amuse and captivate. Don't disturb the corpse while he's watching his soaps!!
Though he wasn't always a pirate, his days as a corsair left an indelible mark on his personality, as noted by his accent and lingo. If brought to any kind of shipyard or marina, the spirit will become excited and eager to take to the seas once more, shouting orders and manning the helm, even if the boat in question is little more than a raft. In whatever capacity Skulk can feel anything at all, being a pirate again is one of the few things that makes him feel alive.