Morton, Maxine Animal

[Max Morton]

You got the looks, but I have the brains

FULL NAME Maxine Animal Morton
NICKNAMES Max, Animal
AGE 31
GENDER Female
SEXUALITY Bisexual
STATUS Single
MEMBERGROUP Werebeast
SHIFT FORM Hyena
SPECIAL POWER N/A
GRADE N/A
OCCUPATION Multiple jobs. Works alternatingly as a book trader/collector, concert violinist, amateur cryptozoologist, and a couple other odd jobs. Owns a large company, Morton Enterprises, which mostly deals in high tech electronics and advances in medical equipment. Max spends little time actually running the company; she mostly hires other people to oversee it. Her only role in the company is directing its profits to numerous charities, but she gets regular reports about its various going-ons.

Max's primary job is as an anonymous therapist for troubled supernatural beings, especially werebeasts such as herself. She places ads around town that link to a website where supernaturals can create an account and, after answering a series of questions to determine if they are a real were/vampire/what have you, can chat with her using an alias. She helps them to resolve their problems and find peace with their life/abilities via meditation and self-study.

Can you see me now?

HAIR COLOUR Long, dirty-blonde/brown, not especially well-cared for, wavy, stringy
SCARS Circular scar on her upper left calf from being bitten by the werebeast as an infant.
TATTOOS N/A
PIERCINGS N/A
PLAY-BY No specific person
EYE COLOR Hazel
HEIGHT Very tall; about 5' 11"
WEIGHT 125-130, changes from day to day
DISTINGUISHING MARKS Nothing very interesting or spectacular; the usual array of little scars and the occasional freckle.

Care to give me a reason why you hate me?

LIKES
1. Good smells; scented oil, scented candles, herbal tea
2. Items that remind her of places that she's been; incense, jungle-cat furs, exotic perfumes, foreign food, traditional cultural garb
3. Books; she keeps an extensive library in her home
4. The freedom of taking and embracing animal form
5. Meeting kindred spirits
6. Things that remind her of her parents; a certain locket, a certain song, etc
7. Meditation
8. Violin music

DISLIKES
1. Loud and abrasive atmospheres; nightclubs, concerts, the streets
2. Skeptics; people who can see no further than the end of their nose, those who are close-minded
3. Lack of color and sensation
4. Pain in others, abuse of the innocent
5. Dwelling on the death of her parents
6. When she loses contact with a patient, or when one commits suicide
7. Feeling helpless to assist another person
8. Alcohol, smoking, other related bad habits

FEARS
1. Loss of self, disassociation with the world
2. Losing a patient

SECRETS
1. Her transformation.

PERSONALITY
At first glance, Max is a cool and dispassionate person, with a semi-permanent Mona Lisa smile and a bittersweet view of life. But her apparent apathy is nothing but a mask for the deep passion she holds for the world and everything in it. She is easily fascinated, constantly seduced and absorbed by the variety of life in the universe. She is delighted by fact and figment, fantasy and reality.

Although not an excessively extroverted person, Max is fascinated with other people and their unique traits. She prefers quiet and introspective conversations over tea to grinding on nameless strangers in bars. At heart, she is a true romantic, and is never interested in sex unless an emotional or spiritual connection arises with the person in question. Honesty is attractive to her, although she could easily become obsessed with unraveling a more private and convoluted mind.

Because Max was raised with her hyena transformation, she is undisturbed by it. The change feels as natural to her as breathing. When meeting other weres, she has always been troubled by how dissonant they were with their shifted shape, and how much of a hardship it has been for them. She firmly believes that this is the result of the great stigma against weres of all sorts and that something needs to be done about the problem. One of her ambitions is to bring weres out into the public eye, as a minority to be sympathized with as opposed to victimized, and eliminate the prejudice surrounding them. She has served as therapist to other weres with mixed success.

Max is compassionate and self-assured, confident in her charity and in offering what she has to strangers. She will always take a chance on another human being, believing at heart that everyone has a desire to understand themselves and become at peace with the world.

As a social figure, however, she is difficult to get to know. She makes few friends because she spends little of her time in the open. Often she gets to know someone out of necessity, or on a professional basis, before they become a part of her life in a more companionable role.

Mother, looking at me, tell me what do you see?

MOTHER Kate Ether Morton
FATHER Thomas Gauge Morton
SIBLINGS n/a
ORIGIN Born in Beijing, China, raised in miscellaneous South African towns.
HISTORY
Max's parents were world-travelers; her mother was an anthropologist, her father an ex-preacher searching the world for a new kind of spirituality and a part time cryptozoologist. Together they searched the world for ancient and unsullied cultures, religions, and secrets of both. They spent most of her toddlerhood in China but moved to South Africa when she was three. While they were there, her father shifted them from town to town searching for some sort of proof of the 'Were-hyena' he had read about. Eventually he found proof, but not the kind he would have liked.

While they were in a rural town, seeking to reach the root of stories about a local werebeast, they found that proof. What seemed to be an oddly shaped and unusually aggressive hyena came after them in the middle of the night and attacked, tearing at Kate as she attempted to protect her child. Maxine was bitten on the leg and Kate maimed. While Max's mother died of her injuries, Max survived, although she would always limp on her left leg. And there were more severe consequences. From that point on, she became a hyena on every full moon, and gained the ability to shift shape at will.

Although her father had been looking for this kind of proof, he couldn't bear the idea of making his daughter an object of speculation in the scientific world, nor give her up to be experimented and tested upon. So he kept her changes a secret. Every full moon, he locked her up in a specially secured room, whre she could harm no one. It took her a while to control the more voluntary changes. Because she was a child, her shifted form was a pup as opposed to a fully adult hyena, and therefore she wasn't very dangerous, but she delighted in changing form willy nilly. She spent most of those early years in a constant state of change. Regular school was not an option for her, and so Max was homeschooled from a very early age.

Eventually Max learned to control the voluntary shifts. She began to spend more and more time in human form, eating up extensive lessons and books on everything from botany to philosophy to complex mathematics. When she was a teenager, and enough in control of her changes to travel, she accompanied her father on his continued expeditions to various countries. She encountered a number of magical creatures and explored certain branches of spirituality that most people never hear of. By the time she was a legal adult, she was more mature than most retirees, and well-educated on virtually every subject.

But even years of study and experience did not prepare her for when her father died. Despite the dangers of his lifestyle, what finally took him away was liver failure, after years coping with his wife's death with alcohol. Max had never been fully aware of his problem or his guilt over Kate's death and her transformation. From that point on, she refused to touch alcohol, and was wracked with guilt for never realizing her father's pain, or telling him that she never held her metamorphasis against him. Shortly afterwards, she moved to the United States, and took over her father's estate. Since that point, she has had one main goal: to learn more about the supernatural world in order to discover more about herself, to help others, and perhaps to contact her father and forgive him in person.

And at last, we meet, friend.

ALIAS Addy/Adam
AGE 17
OTHER CHARACTERS N/A
RULE PHRASE will they be able to see me now?
WHERE CAN WE CONTACT YOU? email is [e-mail]
WHERE DID YOU FIND US? Wild Spirits, admin invite

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[Jessie Lucien]

Accepted

Very beautifully done. Should be an interesting character to play.

[Max Morton]

Thanks. Lemme know if/when you wanna post with her.

[Jessie Lucien]

Don't worry about that. I'm deffinately going to want to post with her. Same goes for all members' characters that I can.