Character Name: "Black" Angus McAfee (pronounced MAC-a-fee)
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Group: A Bar (which he owns...I am considering one of the current clubs being mentioned recently or a rival club to Lorne's new place...possibly the bar where Adam works...this is flexible.
Position: He owns or is a major owner of the bar.
Description: Angus is a huge barrel of a man with thick mucsles borne of slinging kegs of beer and cases of liquor. Hi has a big bushy red mustache and a shock of red hair that practically stands straight up from his head. He has teeth that while not crooked are gapped and somewhat yellowed from the coffee he drinks and the cigarettes that he chain smokes. His green eyes are clear and bright (beneath his wild red eyebrows) and his stare has been known to stop even brave men in their tracks.
Personality: Angus realizes that the role of bartender is something akin to the ancient role of 'local witch' - a confidant with a little dose of something to aid you. Within Slainte hangs a familiar sign - a wind battered wooden sign with a faded painting of an iron cauldron that had once belonged to his mother back in Scotland nearly 600 years ago. He does a small trade in potions, elixirs, brews, special protective charms and the occasional alchemical transformation, but his major trade comes from his fabulous scientific mixology. He can turn water into the finest wine. He can turn wine into the richest blood. He can create holy water by the gallon and he makes the best margaritas this side of the Mexican border. Angus has picked up assorted things over his lifetime that he held in previous lives - books, paintings, letters and such, but he has re-acquired them each time, not passed them from life to life. So many things have passed through his hands in his many lives (nearly 20 identities over 585 years with an average life of 30 years each!!) he has a good chance of - if he didn't own it - at least knowing something about it. While Angus is willing to share the fruits of his knowledge - he is very reluctant to share his true knowledge with anyone. He does not talk of apprentices, pupils, student or adepts. He does not trade alchemical, potion or brew recipes with anyone (although chemistry is another story). He will not collaborate on brewing or spells (although he is certainly willing to manufacture needed ingredients - he just wont participate in rituals or spells). And he never never never talks about his failures with anyone. And there have been mistakes.
Powers: None. No really, Angus has no magical or Psychic abilities. What he has is knowledge - the kind of knowledge that comes neither cheap nor easy. His greatest secret - that of eternal youth cost the life of his mother. His second secret - that of the Philospher's stone - has also cost him dearly on two occasions.
Played by Robbie Coltrane
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History
Angus was born in 1431 in Scotland. There he learned secrets of potion brewing and the arts of the stolen fey magic from his mother, the local witch. Among the secrets that she taught her boy was the secret of eternal life - The Eternity Process.
By the 1500's however, it became impossible to keep the secret of their extended life in the tiny village. She sacrificed herself to being burned at the stake rather than see her boy be tortured or killed. Angus did not let her die in vain and he fled to Ireland where he changed his name to Brian McAngus.
In Ireland he recreated his identity as an alchemist and later, as his reputation grew, he came to attention of Queen Elizabeth. He assumed the identity of John Dee and moved to London where he served as the Royal Chemyst. Later, he migrated to Italy as Benedetto Castielli and studied under Galileo and Copernicus.
In the mid 1600's he returned to England as a Natural Philosopher named Robert Boyle. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1670 and traveled around Europe, sharing learning with the greatest minds of the age.
As his reputation grew he had to exchange identities several times becoming (eventually) Johann Barchusen in Germany where he plied his trade as a metallurgist. But soon pressures in Europe became too unwieldy and he slipped onto a boat headed to the new World. He Landed in Philadelphia in 1714 under then Name Thomas Denham.
Fresh off the boat, he befriended a young Benjamin Franklin with whom he formed a long friendship. Franklin knew his true nature and helped him switch to his next role as Isaac Greenwood, the first science teacher at the newly formed Harvard University.
By 1740's too many questions were beginning to arise and so Angus fled to France where he 'hid' behind the outrageous excesses of the French Courts as Le Compte the St. Germain. It was his very outrageous behavior that allowed him to make his greatest discoveries in his crafts as nobody took his claims seriously and generally ignored his eccentric habits as grandstanding and attention-seeking.
By the time if the revolution it was clear that it was time to move on, and Angus longed to return to the hills of Scotland. There, he started once again as the industrialist Charles Tennant. On the eve of his renewal, something went wrong, and he discovered that his Philosopher’s Stone had not properly renewed on his last Eternity treatment. Over the past 40 years his stone had gradually disintegrated.
Knowing he would need to recreate himself soon, he traveled to America and bought a farm in California on which to quietly experiment. Adopting the identity of Johan Sutter he bought a farm and began to recreate a stone. He had soon exhausted himself both mentally and physically, but did recreate his stone. Then he discovered gold on his property. In experimenting on the 'pure' gold of the region he found it bore only chemical similarities to the European and South American gold...but it had something more. Something he sought to extract. But the infinitesimal amount of this ‘spirit gold’ wasn’t enough to give him the answers. He 'casually' let slip the strength of his find and the chaos of the ensuing Gold Rush allowed him to renew again and pursue the next Golden strike - Australia.
In the Southern Hemisphere as Peter Laler, he found the answers to his quest. There was something in the gold that permeated it...made it vital to the Earth and that disappeared once it was extracted. This 'spirit-gold' as he called it had invaluable impact on the Great Work for here was proof of a link between spirit and matter.
He used this spirit gold to begin distilling an extract he hoped would be to inanimate matter what the transforming powder (philosopher's stone) was to living matter. Something that would allow him to create indelible matter - matter that was impervious to entropy.
The need for a quiet place to begin the distillation lead him back to the United States in Waco Texas where he laid low as an unassuming pharmacist named Charles Alderton until he accidentally created an elixir that became so popular that he was forced to create a company to sell it and hire people to market or else he would be forced to abandon his progress and begin anew.
Eventually he did abandon his work, but only because of a greater threat, that of war. In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Angus, an astute observer knew what would happen as surely as if he added sulfuric acid to sugar (a lot of heat and a scorched mess). Quickly packing things in and moving to England he enlisted in the British Army as Hugh Dowding. A chance encounter with a pilot, and Angus learned to fly. He was soon flying missions over France as an officer in the RAF.
After the war as a decorated hero, Angus prepared to perform the Eternity Process as he had done so many times before. However, a trace of chemicals from the battlefields that had permeated his body and caused the process to go horribly wrong. Angus’s Philosopher’s Stone was destroyed and he failed to renew. To make matters worse, he began to age perceptibly and many of his earliest memories began to fade (including his original name).
Angus struggled to recreate his stone but again and again he was foiled by the residue of war. He realized he would need to purify his essence in order to finally perform the needed transformation to recreate the stone. He began to travel throughout Europe and Asia in order to find the ingredients he would need to complete his process. Along the way he saw what was happening in Germany and Russia and realized the he would not be able to complete his quest before another war would burn across Europe.
In his role as a Colonel of the RAF, Angus begins to prepare for war years before anyone feels it is necessary. He set aside his personal quest in order to prepare to defend the shores of Britain once again. As he had predicted war again approached. Using a carefully conservative strategy of defense of the home shores, he buys time for the war to attract the attention of the Americans who soon give them the resources needed to carry the war into an aggressive assault against the Nazi threat.
By the end of the war, Angus (now Lord Dowding) was tired, old and reaching for straws. He attempted to use his spirit gold to bargain for the needed ingredients for his stone to no avail. By the time he was finally able to acquire the final elements he was old, rapidly losing his mental acuity and widely disgraced as a crackpot and mystic. He traveled to south America following a rumor of Solomnic Gold to Venezuela. There he was able to extract some of the genuine essence from a tiny sample of the gold that King Solomon, the greatest Alchemist who ever lived had secreted around the world and recreate his stone. In 1970 on an alchemical pyre, Dowding was consumed and from it arose Benito Reyes his new identity.
As Reyes, he was determined to not fall into the trap of identity that had held him for nearly 60 years. He began to research ways to store essential essence as Solomon had in precious metals. Along the way he re-discovered the theory of ‘indelible matter’ he had studied nearly 100 years before and in it he found part of his key.
The essence which he had extracted from the Solomnic Gold was the ‘indelible’ part of the gold. Gold, he knew, had a unique structure within the universe. Its crystalline structure was only formed spontaneously from the superheated cores of stars as they exploded in death. It carried the energy of life and death within it. So by purifying the gold and extracting the ‘death’ from it, it would became a source of life – and eternal.
But it was all theory. He needed to travel back to the source of his great discovery and see if he could recreate the spirit gold and find the key to permanent life and not just renewed life. Coming to California again was a bit of a shock after Venezuela. Although he was very familiar with the technology of the age, the culture was so at odds with what he had remembered of Los Angeles of the Gold Rush that he could scarcely believe it.
He soon realized the he would need to build a fortune in order to pursue the pure gold he had had such easy access to before, he started with a single restaurant in 2010 – Slainte. And while he owns bits of several other places, this one is special to him. He has already begun part of his research and is certain that within another 6-7 years he will have the keys he needs to try to re-create his spirit gold experiments of the 1850s.
Secrets
Angus has taught pupils in the past who have turned his dark arts against humanity. His only living pupil is Doctor Bloodmoney. Fortunately he never revealed the secret to living forever, but Bloodmoney was an apt pupil whose knowledge of Alchemical process was that of a prodigy. He quickly seized on certain fundamental processes and began to experiment. He nearly perfected the Eternity process with Adam Young.
Angus beleives that he had a part to play in the many plagues that crossed Europe. He thinks he may have inadvertedly changed something in teh blood chemistry of certain rodents that made them less resistant to the virus and allowed it to incubate to dangerous levels within the fleas that transmitted the disease. This happened becasue of an attempt to lure rats from a city where they were infesting the town. once that had been accomplished, the town refused to pay so he lured them back. (You may recognise the story of the Pied Piper in this tale). The lure was a phermonic based chemical that casued the rats to breed indescriminantly casing weaknesses in the genetic lines that may have added to the plague's increase. He only figured this out about 200 years ago and has been punishing himself ever since
Angus has created life once. He created a woman from non-living materials. The two of them were very happy from about 1750 to around 1780 in France but she left him becasue she was unwilling to jettison the life she had to take up a new one. He knows that he should have destroyed her becase within her are the secrets of life itself. He lives in dread of the day that she is discovered. But in his heart he knows that he loves her too much to ever end her existence
Items
Angus has lived a long time, but the constant need to re-create himself has meant he has had to periodically jettison everythng he owns in order to start over. Therefore, he has won and lost several fortunes over the years. This has made him very non-material. Money means little to him as long as he can meet his needs. He feels no need to hoard or accumulate wealth beyond what he needs to make the rent.
He does, however have a very few items that are irreplaceable:
His cauldren: It was his mother's cauldren before him and her great grandmother's before her. It is iron with a copper lining and has been repaired a great many times. It holds slightly more than 2 gallons of fluid but a typical 'rendering' of a potion will net a little over 2 quarts as most of the resulting brew will be unsuitable.
His Philosoher's Stone: This ancient secret of alchemy is not a literal stone as much as it is a substance that is used in the processing of alchemical transformations. If performed correctly the stone is consumed by the process and then reformed anew as a by-product each time. An Alchemical transofrmation is a dangerous and somewhat unpredicatable act and Philosopher's stones are extraordinarily difficult to craft and nearly impossible to do with any certainty of success. As this is Angus' third stone in his extended lifetime he isn't going to risk it on some minor transformation unless it is completely neccesary. (in other words simple lead->gold would be a waste)
His mother's sign This sign has been sold and repurchased many many times over the years. Each time Angus is about to change his life he sells the sign. A few weeks later a new stranger appears and buys it again. He does this for seveal reasons: 1) It creates a record of who he has been and when...the sign's history is well documented and it is a genuine historical artifact with a long and well-documented history - a history that happens to correspond to Angus'. 2) It establishes a chain of individuals that are distinct from each other. 3) It is sort of a ritual - a final act of eliminating the old self.