![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
THE MAN.
Born Jang Hanseok. Henry Jang for the half of his life spent in America. Jang Joonwoo during his time as a legal intern in South Korea. Something illusory, shapeless.
Diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder at sixteen years old and shipped off to the United States to get him out of the public eye following the murders of four classmates, Hanseok occupies the furthest extreme of the ASPD spectrum. As of two years ago he's back in Korea and has publicly stepped up as the real CEO of Babel Group, a corrupt pharmaceuticals and chemical manufacturing company. Charismatic when he wants to be, superb at imitating things neurotypical people feel that he simply can'tācompassion, empathy, remorse, guiltāand willing to kill whoever he needs to kill without hesitation. Someone who delights in violence and gore, who needs to have control over everything all the time. If he doesn't, he falls to pieces. A thirty-year-old man who still struggles with regulating his intense emotions and violent urges; prone to angry, destructive outbursts when upset and over the top laughter and physical affection when he's happy. A shapeshifter, someone who sees who he needs to be in any given situation and adjusts his efforts accordingly, always controlling just how much of his true self he allows to seep through the cracks.
Despite all of this, he has, in his own words, "human emotion". He hurts when any other person would hurt, he craves attention and company. He has a need for affection, approval, and will go to extremes to feel seen. Hanseok's drawn to small reflections of himself in others: he enjoys the presence of other violent, callous people because he can identify with them. Love for him happens as an all-consuming fixation; though he cannot empathize with a partner, he can feel distress that one of the handful of people he likes is unhappy; he describes himself as capable of love. His experience as someone with ASPD in a largely neurotypical society is, with the exception of encountering people with similar tendencies, a profoundly solitary one: even if he doesn't see himself as having any problemsāand instead believes himself superior to most other peopleāhe's self-aware enough to recognize that he's different, that there are experiences other people have that will always be out of his reach. He wants to be comforted when he's hurt; he can't maintain the relationships needed for someone to willingly do so. He wants someone to willingly spend time with him; he can't control his outbursts and violent urges long enough for any company to feel at ease in the presence of his true self. He was built with just enough humanity to share the emotions and needs of his counterparts without the capacity to behave in such a way that they can ever be consistently met.
THE MONSTER.
Hanseokās monster form is an old evil spirit, a manifestation of the idea of evil that has existed since the start of humanity. It is an it, not a he, she, or themāthe spirit is something very primitive and ancient, what elemental iron is to a steel vehicle. It lacks the higher thought processes that something like a siren or werewolf might have; its mind is closer to an animalās than a humanās. It can reason, but it has no feelings; it is clever, but it cannot communicate and forms no attachments. Most of its conscious experience is an ongoing state of primal want and thirst.
The spirit seeks violence and human blood, convinced that doing so will make it feel. However, it is doomed to forever walk the earth unsatisfied, because it was ābuiltā incapable of the very feelings it seeks.
The spirit manifests as a noncorporeal void that absorbs all light, most often shaping itself into the general image of a coyote with glowing white eyes. Its consistency is smokelike, or like ink in water, bleeding at the edges as though continually dissolving into its environment. Because it has no physical form it cannot be attacked; it can touch but cannot be touched; it can affect its environment but is impervious to rain, wind, et cetera because it is not a part of the landscape but a hole in the landscape in the shape of an object.
The spirit usually possesses the bodies of people and intelligent animals and uses them to make its kills; people prone to greed, callousness, or anhedonia are particularly at risk. If a person is possessed or āpuppetedā by the spirit, they form an empathic bond with it and experience the fleeting euphoria Hanseok gets when he commits a murder: the feeling the spirit is chasing. None of it drips down to the spirit itself, like rain opposite a window from a dried-out houseplant, so it continues to its streak of violence indefinitely.
It does not, however, strictly need to possess a body to go about its bidding. In its coyote form it can attack like any other dog, killing or mutilating its victims not through magic but through physical trauma, usually blood loss from its bites; despite existing as a void, its teeth are very real and very sharp. It could theoretically shape itself into any number of other things to very its attacks into something like slashing with talons or crushing with large jaws, but that has yet to be necessary, so it has not yet deviated from its usual shape.
The spirit cannot be fought with physical means, only magical ones. It can, however, be warded off with talismans made from human hair taken from the scalp of people Hanseok himself unconsciously perceives as truly āoff limitsā for killing, of which only a few are likely to occur in one lifetime.
In its coyote form, the evil spirit cannot sexually engage to break the curse; it can only do so in its least concrete form, in which it is a nebulous, shapeless shadow. It can shape parts of its essence into hands for short periods of time, but most of its intimate contact takes the shape of possession-like encounters such as that depicted in the famous Rennaissance sculpture āThe Ecstasy of Saint Teresaā.
In the earliest stages of the curse Hanseok begins to lose his physical needs: thirst, hunger, fatigue. His body begins to leave the physical plane, starting with his fingertips darkening and growing steadily wispier and blacker until they move like smoke rising from candles. His eartips act much the same, elongating until human ears are replaced with much larger, upright canid ones. Once physical transformations begin, his hearing and smell improve and the distance of the furthest edge of his field of vision begins to recede. His eyes take on a faint glow.
Only in the last parts of the pre-transformation curse do his thoughts begin to grow more primal. What little impulse control he had to begin with begins to decay and he acts on virtually every violent thought he has. In the last few days before he transforms entirely, his thoughts are consumed almost exclusively with violent urges as his brain turns itself over to the monster's extreme amplification of his own constant need for more.
