Alencar, Dante R.

by **Dante Alencar** Tue May 14, 2013 5:08 am

DOSSIER: RITUALIST

Alencar, Dante R. 50left

”Fly free, so far from here, this life you know will end.”

BASIC DETAILS

NAME:
Dante Raul Alencar
Kurdai, Prince of Serpents

AGE:
Dante himself is 28, whereas Kurdai is around 250,000 years old

GENDER:
Male

NATIONALITY:
Brazilian

BIRTHPLACE:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

BIRTHDATE:
June 2nd, 1983

PICTURE:

Dante:

Kurdai:

*********

PERSONAL DETAILS

DESCRIPTION:
The olive-brushed skin of the Brazilian is not one to be so typically ignored, but Dante's bleached white hair is a poignant, outspoken statement and a poster symbol of the modern "rebellion" he leads against his country's oppressive government. Typically the man stands at dead on six feet, with steely grey eyes and an impressive build all things considered. His hair, of the purest white, already a political protest simply in appearance, turns heads just from the colour, but is usually either spiked up (as seen in the avatar) or falling flat around his fringe. White's a colour of purity and righteousness to Dante; and that's what he wants to display in full, in his body as well as the Liberation movement.

Typically, Dante can be found wearing any manner of suits, usually black jacket, orange shirt, and black tie, which is usually just asking to get robbed when walking through the Rio favelas. Again, whilst many people accuse this of being hypocrisy, this is to make a statement about localisation of poverty, and reminding his people that a suit doesn't always carry evil connotations of the corrupt world above, and reminding the higher-ups that the favelas are not a place of inherent evil. The suit-clad messiah walks amongst people in rags. Also, for business meetings, it tends to help.

Dante's frame is slender but formidable, and he can throw a punch, but most of his strength is derived from the Demon that, whilst on Earth, dwells within him at his very core. Kurdai. As is to be expected of an outspoken political leader as he, Dante loves to talk; and his voice is smooth and well-sculpted to reflect this, naturally, as a way to rally people. The younger Alencar sibling is fully aware of this; and as such, the Demonic tones further accent his already-charismatic and melodious voice.

Finally, Dante walks with a self-righteous and justified bounce in his step; not overly arrogant, but just knowledgeable - knowledgeable that he is right. It's easy to see that this is a man who has seen a lot, and see that this is a man who knows how to lead and controls people. His face is not weathered; but his expression within holds it all. The aura he gives off - even in silence - is a collected one of control and tactical, plotting intelligence, and it makes people realise and recognise that Dante is a titan in the battlefield, the boardroom, the courtroom, and underground. A man of many talents indeed.

Kurdai, on the other hand, as can seen above, when in his "pure" form, appears, from the waist up, to be a green-scaled humanoid snake. However, from the waist below, his body dissolves into nine separate tails, each of which contain organic and tapered bladed appendages. When he walks, he does so utilising his hands on wet or smooth terrain, but in most places, he can slither along freely without the use of his hands.

The tails themselves serve as prehensile limbs, meaning he can use them to grasp onto things within his reach and to an extent attack; they can fold together for greater streamlined speeds when traveling. Kurdai typically moves along his belly, and is about nine feet long, his tails making up for four of that, but when he stands on them, he's around the same height as Dante, though this stance is apparently fiercely uncomfortable.

PERSONALITY:
Terrorist. Criminal. Brother. Son. Freedom fighter. Liberator. Murderer. Saviour.

These are all things that Dante Alencar has been called. All of them are right. And yet all of them are wrong.

Dante's ideals first and foremost lie in the theology of what is just. He is a strong moral believer; and though this may not be initially apparent from his actions, it's very true that he holds morals in high regard. However, though he always strives to achieve the right action, he is hopelessly utilitarian, actually to the point that it becomes almost dubious, and, for him, the ends - the overarching ends of liberating Rio de Janeiro - always justify the means, be they murder, torture, or other less-than-righteous actions.

Having been brought up in the favelas of Rio and having had a less-than-ideal childhood, and, indeed, young adult life, firsthand Dante has experienced the corruption of his city, and, beyond that, his country. And this has made him deadly bitter in both word and action, and this much is visible from wherever you are standing.

In an attempt to rally the people of Liberation and the people he seeks to care about, Dante is often a very confident public speaker. He will talk for hours on end and people will never seem to tire of his words of the meaning behind them, believing them to be true, and knowing that he believes what he says with every iota of his being. Truly? He cares for his people. And he wants them to trust him and believe him, so they can in turn be liberated. The Brazilian may often be found talking to "himself" in deep, spiraling monologues.

All in all, objectively, Dante's moral compass is screwed on tight for unrelated issues. If he sees an old woman fall over in the street, he will help her up without flinching and without a smile, but that's on the surface, that's unrelated. That's one level of morals. As one goes deeper into his personality, the digging often churns up something completely different about an enigmatic man: he will stop at nothing to achieve this so-called ideology of justice and righteousness, to equalise the poverty striking Brazil.

Dante is smart. He's not book smart; but he is learned, and he knows people. He knows the favelas, he knows the street, he knows his contacts, and he knows the way to a man's heart, and to a Demon's soul. He tricked Kurdai into bonding with him, and out of respect for his vast common sense and tactical intelligence, the Prince of Serpents has laid down and bowed his head to revolutionary and visionary Dante Alencar, the man who calls himself the voice of the people and the messiah of the common good.

Beyond all this, Dante is brave. He is not foolish, but he is courageous. He will not march into battle unarmed and fearlessly, and if the opportunity comes, he will retreat so he can fight again another day. But when the obligation comes for him to rise above and beyond the regular call of duty, he will do so without even flinching. His courage is not to be debated, especially not with him personally, and it is something that he grows very defensive about.

At the bottom of his heart, Dante can be said to hold one virtue above all else: freedom. The people of Rio de Janeiro's favelas - the masses - are not free. They are oppressed. Desperately so. And this is what Dante Alencar seeks to remedy: for oppression, imprisonment, restriction, limitation of such a wondrous people truly does sicken him to the very core. And to sicken Dante is to infuriate him. And a furious Dante is a retributive Dante. A retributive Dante... is not a man that anyone wishes to be dealing with.

Someone once asked one of Dante's greatest enemies (late enemies, that is) of the best way to strike at him and damage him. For to kill Dante Alencar himself would simply prompt an uprising, and cause the people to become so unruly that the city would be torn by war. And the enemy replied saying that "to hurt Alencar, hurt his people". This is perfectly true. To infuriate him best and ensure that he will lash out, strike at the people, the civilians, the non-combatants within the favelas, if you're able to, both of mind and of body; for Dante and Liberation will defend them with all their heart and fortitude, and even if they're unable to, they will lash back with such fury that you'll wish you never kicked the fucking hornet's nest.

One of the most enigmatic things about Dante is his nature as a Ritualist. And his bond with Kurdai is undoubtedly a deep and complex one. The Prince of Serpents is not easily subdued, but he and Kurdai work now on a tentative partnership, and have so for the best part of a decade, Dante summoning Kurdai first when he was nineteen. However, that said, Kurdai respects Dante, and that much is mutual. The pair of them are friends; and they respect each others' wishes. There is a high level of trust, but each knows that given the others' weakness, it would be exploited. There is not a battle waging between them, but each must be wary to ensure the other does not take over completely. There is a shaky compromise that, for now, functions; and Kurdai is very occasionally given complete control.

On the bottom line, at the very basest point of it all, Dante Alencar is just enigmatic. Truly no-one knows what goes on within his mind - even to his demon partner, he is a complete mystery, and Kurdai spends most of his time residing in the freedom fighter's mind as a pseudo-conscience - serving as an illegitimate, immoral, and serpentine one, but a pseudo-conscience all the same. The Demon on his shoulder.

DEMON PERSONALITY:
Kurdai is a flagship example of a serpentine Demon as one would expect. He is at the simplest level a master of cunning and trickery and is highly intelligent. However, as an odd change of circumstances, considering that the possession is actually majorly mutual between he and Dante, Kurdai admits a level of humility in that he is not calling the shots. It is in this that he somehow sees a sense of twisted camaraderie with his "shell", or, more appropriately, "partner", a man who has the tactical ability and intelligence to match and mirror his.

Kurdai's base requirement for bonding with Dante is simply that he's really quite bored and wants to experience a more mutual and symbiotic possession. After searching for thousands of years, he finally found someone who he's made a deal with that's actually beneficial on both sides - Kurdai devotes himself by extension of Dante to the cause of Liberation, but do not mistake this for genuine compassion, it is only for that in the end it is his own egotistic means. The camaraderie and brotherhood he feels for Dante are simulated, and both of them know it.

Kurdai loves seeing schemes and gambits come to fruition, and he loves to plan and construct strategems. He is a Demon of intellect and higher pleasure, but at the same time appreciates the finer simple things in life, and it should not be debated that his morals are at best questionable, but as a voice in Dante's head Kurdai seems to be laid-back until things concern his longevity or the nature of their "partnership". He quite enjoys the relationship's current stage, finding it comfortable, and though he accepts that it will at some point inevitably terminate, it is as of yet uncertain when, where, or how he will let that happen, and whether he'll go quietly or not.

Kurdai has issues with Dante and their symbiotic bonding which are in the long run going to become potentially problematic, but at this point in time, their relationship serves as being overall incredibly beneficial for one another, and he is comfortable, and laid-back as is, and will help out the good leader of Liberation to almost any extent required as part of their tentative 'friendship'. It's as of yet uncertain whether he's playing a longer game or not.

HISTORY:
The Alencar brothers never knew their father.

The assurance from their mother came that in spite of the fact that neither of them ever remembered his presence, they were sired from the same host, who seemed to visit for days, sometimes only even hours, drink, bed their mother, and then just leave. After Gabriel came around things got a little more complex, but then when she announced her pregnancy with his younger brother four years later, and popped him out at a solid nine months further down the line, the mysterious Alencar father seemingly never appearing again.

The childhood of the Alencar brothers is a spotty and traumatised one. They grew up together in the crime-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro. An existence in the most famous Latin American slums in common knowledge is essentially a curse from your birthright. Hardly anyone from the favelas ever leave, and fewer still manage to achieve anything higher beyond the lowest tier of existence in the city proper. Illness. Disease. Crime. Hatred. Poverty. Five things that strike these makeshift shanties on a regular basis.

For the first ten years of his life, Dante bore witness to fights, thefts, murders, and with a mother who was at best a single shaky pillar of support and at worst a thirty-something woman with an aged face and the sentiments of a sixteen year old girl, hopelessly addicted to cocaine, this wasn't the ideal family environment. She beat her sons until they became large enough to defend themselves out of frustration for her fate; she had too been born into the favela, and condemned her progeny into the same cycle. A sad tale, but yet the only one she knew. And though Dante remembers little of his first years on this earth, one thing he knows of his mother stands to reason above all else.

She was at her most distressed when either he or his brother mentioned their father.

In the beginning, when the whole world was out to get them, Gabriel was the only shield for Dante; and when mother Fabiana overdosed and laid in the back on her bed rotting and motionless, it was three days before someone came and took her body away. But there was no-one then to look after Gabriel and Dante. The former was maybe fourteen, his brother coming onto nine. Their existence simply looked bleaker and bleaker. No parents. No family. But instead just each other.

And miraculously, somehow, for the next four years, they survived.

Things didn't quite get better for Dante and Gabriel, but from what the latter shakily knew of morals he tried to at the very least guide his brother onto a path which would allow him to survive. And anxiously from the sidelines the pair watched in their meagre shelter of corrugated iron and sopping wet rotten balsa wood as time and time again gang wars unfolded themselves, the sharp ambience of crackling automatic weapons a background rhythm for the pair's life. Slowly they became desensitised.

But the pair grew and in a dog-eat-dog world somehow, whilst they didn't prosper, and though hatefilled and embittered, things began to look up. They had managed not to piss anyone off and keep more or less to themselves. But a few days after Gabriel turned eighteen, an army drafting platoon shot around the favela whilst Dante was out playing football, and took him onboard with little resistance. It was three years til the turn of the next millennium, and Brazil wanted to bolster its army. Free room, free board, money... it was an opportunity Gabriel couldn't pass up and one he wasn't sure he'd get again. So he left behind Dante and he joined the army.

This is where the story of the brothers splits into two separate paths.

Dante returned that day from playing football to an empty house with no older brother to be found. He checked every room. Then every cupboard. Then every adjacent and nearby house. Then he ran down the streets. He repeated this day in day out for weeks screaming nothing intelligible bar one word: his brother's name. The sector of the favela was filled with a single shrill chant, day-in, day-out. "GABRIEL! GABRIEL! GABRIEL!"

With a dead mother and growing up in a gang war hotzone where it was a good weekend if someone wasn't brutally maimed or murdered on your street, Dante quickly became embittered. Now his brother had left him. And as the weeks past, it was one day that he had curled himself up into a ball in that horrific shanty they'd called a home, and he pulled himself upwards, tan skin tainted with streaky red tear marks, and he stepped out into the twilight scene, looking out onto a rare sight. Rain. Thumping in great drops against the roof of his "home", pattering against the mudwashed floor.

And there he sat, hair streaked with water and grit as he stopped crying. For Dante Alencar, barely twelve or thirteen, was then just empty. The tears had come and they had gone, but they were finished. His father had left him before he was born. His mother had taken an easier way out. His brother had disappeared without a trace and left him. This entire place was a dedication to the downtrodden, to the unlucky, to the people left behind. And whilst he had been born here, he hadn't truly had a birthright to the empathies of the favela til he had nothing left. And it was in that moment, still barely a child, that Dante, though he didn't realise it at the time, simply let go, and took that fear for what was to come, that sorrow for the loss of his family, that desolate emptiness... and rolled it all into one great emotional conglomerate.

And in that it became rage.

It took years, and though he fell in with gangs and months later fell out with them, Dante embarked then on a journey to harden first his body and then his mind as he saw things which would break lesser men. This rage was at first not directed, but as the people of the favela stood together on the eve of the new millennium and watched as high above the statue of Christ the Redeemer fireworks exploded. There, as others cried and laughed, he didn't cheer, he simply stood stalwart and cursed the people who were letting them off. Dante Alencar, sixteen and bearing witness to the first real target for his anger he could assume. Bigger than him. Bigger than his missing brother. Bigger than all the gangs and anything.

And in that empathy he'd once found he crafted something else. He crafted a hatred for the echelons above who ignored the ugly furrowed truth that were the favelas. He forged a bitterness towards those who called and branded themselves better than the impoverished, the rejected, the downtrodden, when all of them, given the chance, could be so much better. The world above was riddled with corruption, decadence, and ignorance. And that, Dante Alencar realised, was what he truly felt rage for.

That was when the movement began. Twelve long years ago, on New Year's Day, the year 2000. These were the founding moments and sentiments of what is now known as Liberation. Liberation, which casts aside any former affiliations within the favela and looks higher to the causes and effects. Liberation, branded by some an organisation which directly advocates attacks of terror within the higher Brazilian strata of society. Liberation... a movement which seeks for above all else, one thing. Equality.

It was in this that he sought out and then found Kurdai. The spiritual connection made the process of symbiosis almost flawless, the bonding and connection mutually beneficial for both parties. For Kurdai too, the Prince of Serpents, sought out a liberation for his kin in a way. A liberation for himself, and though far more physical in a sense, the snake Demon was simply testament to another group downtrodden by the first world, the truth of a Hell, Inferis, kept suppressed by a first world above who seeks to control it for its own selfish and greedy ways. Kurdai is a utilitarian means to an end, but in that he has become Dante's comrade, through and through.

Liberation's prowess did not come without resistance. Many of the favela-based cartels had higher backing above which meant they fed from this corruption that Dante declared his hatred and his campaign against. And they could not fight a war without symbols; and sometimes these symbols had to be destruction. Attacks aimed at crushing and scrambling the infrastructure of Rio de Janeiro, of Brazil, of South America, of the first corrupt world above had Liberation infamously and notoriously branded as terrorists. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighters, and though he now travels, the enigmatic leader of Liberation, Dante Alencar, will help all and any forsaken and left behind that come to him from empathy and understanding.

For once, he was them, and in a manner, he still is. Left behind. No-one else to turn to. Demon summoner, rebellion leader, revolutionary, visionary... but above all else, Dante Alencar insists he is one thing: human, just like you and me. The only thing that sets him apart from all of us is his aim, and the fact that he will stop at nothing to achieve it, that his determination knows no bounds. He works. He toils. He puts his back, his sweat, his blood, his everything into one overarching goal.

The greater good.

*********

FACTION:
Whilst not out-and-out official, Dante considers himself to be the self-proclaimed "messiah of the people", concerning Rio de Janeiro's sweeping favelas, for an underground movement known colloquially as "Liberation".

SKILLS:
[ MESSIAH OF THE 99% ] - Excellent public speaker.
[ TRIGGER MAN ] - Not too shabby a marksman.
[ GUERRILLA MASTERMIND ] - Tactical and intelligent.
[ SOUL-WARMING ] - Inspirational to so much as be around.
[ STREET SMART ] - Knows how to survive in the favelas, having his contacts and knowing how to keep his head down.
[ MEAN LEFT HOOK ] - Formidable boxer. It's a hobby, but still helps.
[ PRESSURE AND ELEVATION ] - Adept at first-aid.

DEMON SKILLS:
[ SNAKE CHARMER ] - Highly persuasive when Kurdai assumes some control or helps.
[ ULTRA NUMB ] - Naturally resilient when morphed and his Demonic possession grants him something of a numbness towards minor pains.
[ TALK IS CHEAP ] - Becomes rather intimidating when his voice carries an extra, hissing weight.

WEAKNESSES:
[ INNER FLAME ] - His passion, whilst not often, very occasionally does end up taking precedence over cool and level-headed tactics. As is to be expected, the results of this can range from detrimental to outright catastrophic.
[ TALKATIVE ] - Can sometimes talk far too much and gets too engrossed in monologues or the metaphysical.
[ KNOW YOUR PEOPLE ] - His love for the people of Rio de Janeiro and the favelas, the common people, outweighs anything else and can be easily manipulated.
[ NOTORIOUS ] - Not a very liked individual and is infact wanted - unofficially, but still - by large amounts of government groups in Rio.
[ SORE THUMB ] - Often finds it impossible to blend in with a crowd due to his poignant nature as an individual.

COLOURS:
> Dante fluently speaks Portuguese (lightskyblue), his native tongue, English (slategray) and Demon (firebrick).
> Kurdai, on the other hand, speaks only Demon (crimson). When he speaks, he does so with literary emphasis upon "s" sounds in words.

TRIVIA:

> May sort of have a minor God complex but as of yet this diagnosis is at best uncertain.
> Highly intelligent but self-educated. Naturally apparently a genetic fast learner.
> Demonic possession has further bolstered his intelligence.

*********

USER DETAILS

ALIAS:
Ross

OTHER CHARACTERS:
Lazarus Carter, Lucifer, Damon T. Ruger, and Bastian van Staade.

ROLEPLAY HISTORY:
7 years this summer.

FACECLAIM: