Alex Rivers

Description

Mask: He appears as a young, very fit and handsome Asian man in his mid 20's with a slender but muscular build (about 5'10" and 155 lbs.). He has light brown skin, dark brown eyes and black hair.

Mien: Normally unchanged except for coloring. His skin is now light green and his hair is a very dark green verging on black. His eyes are a striking yellow orange color, deepening to blood red at the center of the iris. He can extrude thorns from his flesh to use as simple weapons or tools. When threatened he can change his appearance further. His skin darkens and takes on a tough, woody texture, with thorns covering his entire body. His hair is replaced by leaves, with a few buds showing.

Mantle (Summer 1): A sense of heat and humidity, like a muggy summer day... or the desert after a rare rainstorm.

Background

BEFORE

Alex Rios grew up in a blue-collar Mexican-American family in Austin, Texas. His father was an electrician and his brothers (and most of their friends) were accomplished high school athletes who themselves looked forward to careers in the trades or perhaps the military. Alex lacked the mean streak for football or the hand-eye coordination for baseball or basketball so he struggled at swimming and track. He had to play a sport, his father insisted. For toughness and character and all that.

But Alex was no jock. He was nerdy, shy and not terribly attractive. He did not fit into the macho culture of his neighborhood or high school. And there was one secret he didn't dare share with anyone... College was a relief. His smarts and just enough work earned him a scholarship to the University of Texas, where he pursued a degree in journalism. After a couple of small town jobs, he ended up back in Austin, working for the American Statesman.

Alex spent nearly 20 years working as a reporter on the city beat. He built a career and earned some awards (although he could never quite muster the drive and ambition to pursue jobs in bigger markets). He came out, weathered the following few years of stormy relations until his family came around, and he found a long-term partner. Everything was going well. Until it wasn't...

Alex ended up a victim of the print journalism crisis of the early 2000's. He managed to hang on longer than many others, but he was finally laid off in early 2011. Suddenly he found himself over 40, getting slower and fatter and suddenly without a career... A stereotypical midlife crisis ensued. His relationship was on the rocks, and he found himself spending far too much time in bars, drinking alone...

On one such night he was approached by a young Asian man. A young, hot Asian man. It was soon obvious that the guy was trying to pick him up. He had no idea what such an attractive person could have seen in him. There had to be a catch. But he suddenly realized that he was tired, lonely and out of damns to give. And damn, was this guy hot... Maybe it was the whiskey talking. Or as it turned out, maybe it was Something Else. The last thing Alex remembered was the young man asking him as they left the bar, "Would you like to be as beautiful as me?" "Yes." The stranger smiled, and suddenly his skin appeared to glow green in the light of the streetlamps and...

DURING

Alex was reported missing a day later, but the authorities lost track of him after he was seen getting into a car with a "young Asian male." The case went cold, until two years later, when a hunter in the Hill Country found a skeleton with a young rose bush growing through its ribcage. Investigators later determined that the plant had grown from a sharpened rose stem that had been driven into the victim's heart. DNA evidence revealed that the victim was Alex Rios. This murder was one of nearly a dozen killings over the past 10 years in Texas and the Gulf South attributed to a serial killer, who would eventually be known in the press as "the Gardener." The killer remains at large, although there have been no new murders for over a year...

Aside from fleeting images in dreams and nightmares, Alex has no real memories of what happened during the next three years. Three years of Earth time at least... it was actually much longer Over There. The young stranger did keep his promise. Alex became as beautiful as him. He was now a Gulbadanzadeh, or "Child of the Rose Bodied One," made into one of the Master's sprouts after a limb from the Keeper was grafted into him. The catch was that he became a mindless slave, one of the gorgeous but deadly carnivorous flowers in the Master's Nursery... one of the monsters that guarded His estate and feasted on His enemies... or on anyone foolish enough to disappoint Him or pitiful enough to amuse Him. Considering the horrors that took place in that savage Garden, the loss of sentience was a blessing...

The Master's estate was located near the border of the Hedge. As he fought to gain control of the Thorns and dictate the terms of trade in and across the Hedge, the Master made many enemies. Finally, those enemies joined forces and attacked... The Master was forced to flee his estate. The manor house was razed and the Nursery was burned out and chopped down. Eventually the border shifted and the Hedge reclaimed the ruins... and after a long silence the stump that had once been Gul-e-Khuni Javan ("the Young Bloody Rose"), and before that had been Alex Rios, sprouted again...

AFTER

Alex woke up with a hell of a hangover. The last thing he remembered was the bar. And that guy... But he wasn't in his condo, or even in some strange apartment or hotel room. No, he was not nearly that lucky. He was in the wreckage of some kind of Arabian Nights palace... surrounded by a field of withered stumps and many, many bones... all of which looked like they had somehow been dropped into the middle of the Amazon rain forest? And he was naked... and too skinny... and somebody had painted him green? But no time to worry about that. Something was moving in the trees on the other side of the courtyard. Something big...

It likely would not have ended well for Alex, but he was discovered and rescued by a pair of Changeling explorers who made their living hunting and foraging in the Hedge. The couple brought him back to their home in the Sierras of northern California. For the next year they taught him the basics of tinkering, first aid, woodcraft and fighting. In his new body he seemed to have a natural aptitude for the latter two... Most importantly they taught him the rules of Changeling life and customs.

When Alex came into his mantle, the O'Briens decided it was time for him to re-enter the world and enter wider Changeling society. At first he was surprised to feel the call to Summer. He'd never been a jock, never been a fighter. But he could not deny what his new body had been made to do. And if Summer was all about anger... he was very angry. Angry with everyone who had taken his old life from him, a life that he had never realized was so precious until it was gone. He was angry with the faceless Master. He was angry with all of the Fae and their world and its creatures. And, of course, he was angry with himself...

The O'Briens used their connections to get Alex the basics of a new identity and information about Sacramento and its Freehold. He kept it simple and chose the name "Alex Rivers." It might be an obvious connection, but given the circumstances it was one very unlikely to be made by anyone. According to his new biography he was adopted as infant from Afghanistan by a white American couple... as he obviously had no experience of growing up in any Asian culture. Speaking of which, he had few clues about his abductor. In his current form Alex looks very much like that stranger. He could have been, if not an identical twin, at least a brother or cousin... The man had called himself "Gulbadan." That was actually a Persian name meaning "Rose Bodied" or, more generally, "Flower Bodied." It was more commonly a woman's name, and the most famous person with that name was a Central Asian Turkish noblewoman who had been the sister of one of the first Mughal emperors. That, along with the stranger's odd accent (sounding more Middle Eastern than Chinese or East Asian), suggested that he came from Central Asia... or perhaps from a mythical version of that place. When a Wizened Oracle friend of the O'Briens tested a drop of his blood in a more mystical version of those DNA ancestry tests, the answer had come back "Rosa Persica" and "Hazara." A check of Wikipedia showed that the former is a species of wild desert rose native to Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and the latter is a Persian-speaking ethnic group in Afghanistan who are supposedly the descendants of Mongol invaders. That along with the news accounts of his disappearance and murder and a few vaguely remembered nightmares, are the only leads he has on what really happened to him and why...