Shenk The Demon Jester

Shenk's mother had been homeless and living on the streets for years before she found herself at the mercy of several gangsters. She could do nothing as they tortured and raped her until she was near death. The thugs left her to die in the streets only by the mercy of a lone man walking down the wrong alleyway at the right time did she survive. The man took care of her wounds but could not repair her broken spirit. This is exactly what he wanted. He helped Shenk's mother into his car and as she slept in the backseat he drove her to a specialized building for the criminally insane. He approached the staff with a suitcase full of cash, they were to keep the woman he had brought to them in their custody for 5 years, then she could be released. The staff members agreed and took the woman into their care as though she was any other inmate. To their surprise they found that she was in fact with child. Believing that the man who had left the woman in their care was the father and he said he would return in time they expected that he would be expecting the child when he returned. Shenk's mother on the other hand had other plans, she tried as hard as she could to escape her captors, but to no avail. Time after time she was put back in her cell until she lost all hope of escape. It wasn't until the baby in her stomach started kicking that she realized why they were keeping her there. In order to stop her from clawing at herself in an attempt to give herself an abortion, the medical staff had to place her in a specialized straight jacket and force feed her meals to her in order to keep her alive till it was time that the baby came. Under the dark cover of night only erupted by the occasional boom of thunder a midst the clouds in the sky that night, the child that would become Shenk entered this world. When asked what his name would be, his mother only screamed in agony "Morte Homme Marchante" and so the child was given the name Morte Hommarcharte, for he was a dead man walking in the eyes of his own mother.


Unlike his mother, Morte was given free reign over the asylum, he could travel from section to section coming and going as he pleased....as long he was under the watchful eye of one of the medical staff. Morte's favourite thing to do was to walk by the cells of other inmates and listen to their ramblings, while some inmates minds were beyond comprehensible sentences this only made the young child laugh at their silliness, causing the inmates to lose their minds even more. The inmates who's minds were not entirely lost were what intrigued Morte the most. They would talk to him, tell him things that they had done, but Morte was not afraid of these people, they were the closest thing he had to a family besides the medical staff. When Morte was 4 he took all of his favourite toys and snuck into one of the cushioned rooms. For hours he spent playing with his little jack in the boxes while the staff searched for him. Eventually he just stopped playing with the Jack in the box and just started into it's face. The little toy laughed and laughed, and as he looked into the eyes of the box, for the first time in his life, Morte laughed, and laughed....and didn't stop laughing. The amount of noise he created brought the attention of a member of the medical staff to him. As the staff member went to pick him up and bring him back to his room Morte did something unexpected. He placed both of his hands at the side of the staff members face and looked into his eyes and smiled sweetly....but then proceeded to shove both of his thumbs into the staff member's eye sockets and then continued to laugh and the man screamed in agony as he fell to the floor. Morte giggled as the man flailed in writing pain on the floor of the room, he slowly left the room and slammed the door on him, locking it behind. He turned around to face three more members of the asylum staff. They told him it was time to go...his "father" had come to collect him. Not caring about the man left in the room he followed the staff to the entrance. As he finally left the asylum he was greeted by the man who had come to take him away from this shit hole. What Morte didn't know, was that he was about to be brought from a shit hole...to a hellhole.


Morte wasn't surprised when he learned that the man who had collected him from the asylum wasn't his father, what did surprise him was that he was told the truth behind his birth. That the man had watched the street thugs rape his mother, as he had done with countless women before his mother. Children born of whores to become killers, trained by a clan of assassins. The clan raised him far better than any members of the asylum staff, they taught him to kill a man in ways he hadn't even thought imaginable, he learned to use poison to hinder and kill people using deadly toxins. While Morte was raised and trained in the same way as the other children, his attitude towards his training was far different. Some children cried, some were filled with anger, but Morte...he loved every second of it, the knowledge of death, the training of how to kill a man. He had already killed one man, but he yearned for the feeling of a corpse in his hands again but not just by killing a person but my making that individual feel the pure sensation of terror before death. By using a multitude of toxins that the assassination clan had gather he created a concoction that caused hallucinations of a terrifying nature, Shenk couldn't have been happier with the outcome of his experiment especially when he chose to test it... on other members of the clan. Shenk would sneak it into different members meals and simply burst out laughter as they screamed in terror at the visions that they saw. The senior members of the clan saw no real harm in Shenk's horrific troublmaking, that is until he overdosed a young child on the serum. The poor boy died screaming until his vocal cords actually ripped apart and blood spewed from inside his throat. At this transgression Shenk was excommunicated from the clan for his gratuitous methods. But Shenk no longer needed the clan, he left happily laughing as his previous brothers in arms placed a bag over his head and loaded him onto a truck. He kept laughing for days as they transported him from their unknown location. The clan should have kept him locked up in their hideout, or killed him where he stood, because now he was a man of terror, free upon to the world.

By using both technological and magical properties Shenk conjures an copy of himself with skills comparable to Shenk himself. The copy is not armed with smoke pellets or Jack in the boxes (See below) but does wield the same poison tipped blades as Shenk. While not as skillful as Shenk the copy does have one little suprise. If it is struck by a serious wound (such as a missing limb or a blade through the chest) the copy explodes sending thirty tiny poison soaked blades flying towards attackers.

Clone's Power Grid:
STR: 3
SPD: 4
END: 3
INT: 2
EP: 2
FS: 4

After channeling his demonic magic for a short time (1 post) Shenk transforms, sacrificing speed and intelligence for brute strength. He transforms into a giant 4 armed monster. While in this form he loses his capabilities to use his smoke pellets and Jack in the boxes, but instead his body has it's own built in arsenal of weaponry. When Shenk's demon form swings its claw arms large spikes shoot out of it's arms. It's tail can be disconnected and will begin tunneling into the ground until it finds its way directly below it's target. Then the tail tip will expand shooting the tail spikes upwards from underground. Finally Shenk's giant mouth secretes an acidic saliva that can melt through rock, and as it dissolves the gas that is produced has similar properties to the fear gas released by the Jack in the Boxes, yet not quite as potent.

Demon Form Power Grid:
STR: 5
SPD: 2
END: 5
INT: 2
EP: 4
FS: 4

These shanks are coated with a potent poison created by Shenk himself to confuse/hinder his opponents while he readies for their demise. The poison causes a rigor-mortise like feeling in the legs making them extremely difficult to move. As well as causes the victims head to feel dizzy and their vision clouded.

These technological terrors are an invention of Shenk's own design. The heads of the clowns within the Jack in the boxes are filled with a gas that causes the victim to have horrifying hallucinations (think on the level of the fear gas used by Scarecrow from batman). While the duration of the hallucinations is not very long. The level of fear experienced is dependent on what kind of fears the victim has already experienced. A person with severe claustrophobia may feel that the walls have closed in on them to the point where they feel there isn't even room to breath in. The boxes are not released by a crank as ordinary jack in the boxes are, but instead are triggered by proximity detonators.

Being a master of assassination Shenk has learned that the best way to kill a person, is to not be seen at all. Shenk has at his disposal a large variety of smoke bombs, now ordinary smoke bombs would simply release smoke to cloud the vision of a person's chasers. Shenk's smoke pellets release colored gases that when they combine with each other, end up creating a dark outline of Shenk within the gas, making it seem as though he is still standing in the exact same place he was before (much like an afterimage).