blowing smoke like halos [application]

[antisaint]

help me if you can; it's just that this is not the way i'm wired. so could you please help me understand why you're giving in to all these reckless dark desires? you disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time. what's your rush now? everyone will have his day to die.

Your name/crazy internet handle/whatever: Jeri
Personal journal: wonderlawn
Email: wonderlawn at gmail dot com
AIM: ohdrownedworld
Characters in Taxon (if applicable): saintsanguine (Stefan Salvatore).

Character name: John Constantine
Genre (TV/books/etc): Film
Fandom: Constantine I mean Keanustine --No I mean Constantine, sorry.

Canon point: Post-canon, shortly following the events of the film.

Why this Character and Canon point?: Addressing the latter half first on the grounds that it's shorter, my goal as a player is always forward momentum; if a character isn't developing, then I struggle with playing them at all, as I feel like it's ultimately a waste of time. As such, John post-canon has just started to access the possibility of working methods for like ....anything, ever, that aren't 100% self-destructive. In Taxon I'd like to continue that process via delicious interaction, because relationships are often the most active impetus for encouraging (or ...forcing!) change in the self.

Which also does much to account for "why this character" as well; I am a huge fan of The Fuck Up as an archetype, because they have most of the aforementioned development to do! Flaws are great, as long as they're manageable, and John Constantine is a chainsmoking pile of them. Further, I'd like to add to my cast list someone who will, for instance, probably die if you stab him; human weaknesses and limitations offer many different possibilities than regenerating supernaturals. Although I love those too...obviously.

Lastly, I personally derive a great deal of pleasure from deadpan observational humor, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say somewhere out there are other people who agree with me. With Constantine around, everyone can be the benefit of such little gems as "Well, at least it's nice out," upon being doused with pouring rain.

I encourage people to slap him; he seems to get that a lot.

Programmed Possession: His apartment, which basically looks like someone's giant condemned attic garret, and should have been firebombed and put out of its fluorescent-lit misery before it got to quite this state of disrepair (i.e. before John moved in). It cost a scrillion dollars a month in rent, because in L.A. you can easily pay that hefty (and ...imaginary) sum for a head of lettuce.

Owing to how it is a repository for an insane amount of arcane crap and owned by a smoker it's kind of an enormous fire hazard, but it also has very nice windows! They are the sort that would doubtless afford a stunning panoramic vista if he didn't keep them shuttered all the time. Some of his furniture is inexplicably on the nice and vintage side (antique sales, is what I posit; where he both scours for relics and ruins lives) and he seems to enjoy both the color green and speakers as tall as a five year old.

Abilities/Weaknesses: My god, it's a regular squishy human! Yes, indeed, if you prick him, John Constantine will bleed concurrently with some casual remark regarding how prick jokes in that context are sadly played out these days.

...my point is that he has all the weaknesses of a garden variety human bean, plus some additional limitations owing to long-term smoking and general poor health. He works out despite the screaming protests of his lungs, because uh, demons and shit are scary, so at least despite the abhorrent internal wreckage he can thwack them with a two-by-four if necessary. However, running for sustained periods of time? Not on your life, coughchokewheeze.

In Constantine's mythos supernatural forces exist just outside of everyday reality: the "world behind the world," if you will. Most people go about their lives unaware of this ...particularly hideous fact, which seems mostly to involve a wager between God and the Devil regarding who can acquire the highest volume of tasty souls with no direct contact, only influence. Thus angels and demons walk the earth without actually being present on it; rather they use humans as, uh, finger puppets. (This is the actual canonical term.) So is it an ability or a weakness to know the truth of this? To have been born, not knowing why, seeing angelic and demonic visages for what they are and knowing they can see you too?

Well...John thinks it sucks eggs, personally. But this changes nothing; he can see through the flesh wrapper, which extends in the source material to also seeing ghosts, particularly the really pissed off ones. Because he specializes in 'really pissed off,' both being and causing it, kind of like it's an ability on its own.

More mundane abilities include: a talent for bartering and favors, good aim, an enormous capacity for liquor, and very basic medical skills. Also, a vast and varied collection of religious and occult trappings and knowledges (such as the Bible): just the usual resume of a freelance exorcist. In practical terms John is what you might call a witch, but the only intrinsic 'power' he has is the ability to see the supernatural - to do anything else he needs tools, books, etc. Among the previously mentioned are a pair of tattoos which (along with pretty significant expenditure of willpower and energy - all the things he does come with a cost) apparently provide him the platform to summon angelic and demonic beings. Spoiler: they hate it when he does that.

In Taxon I'd love it if he could use them to summon characters, you know, for hilarity. And with mod approval, of course! I would do a mini-permissions-meme type deal to see who would be down for that, but if not I am not fussed, they'll just look cool. :]

Psychology/Personality: Canonically, this gentleman introduces himself (you know, to demons, as he meets them a lot) as "John Constantine, asshole." Can that clever double meaning suffice for this entire section? No? Well then:

To generalize broadly, most people in the 21st century who consider themselves religious do not have direct evidence of the divine; this is why the whole ...faith thing. John has more evidence of it than anyone could possibly ever want, and as a result he's crossed directly over faith when regarding all things otherwordly into the kind of cynicism that would do an atheist proud. He feels enormously screwed over by his heavenly father figure (see "God is a kid with an ant farm," @ canon dialogue), and reacts to all the world accordingly. Some of this he comes by honestly; the world in which he operates is not a pleasant one, and he's not allowed the luxury of living with the impression that that's not the case. Canonically the ability to see things as they are happens to the faithful; either they try to convince others of what they can see and everyone thinks they're crazy, or they cope with it as best they can and destroy themselves in the process. So on a lot of levels this functions as self-defense; if he contends that God is a bored preadolescent, then His silence and abandonment - being tasked with knowledge no child could handle and then being inevitably damned when he couldn't handle it - won't hurt. Not that he ever thinks of it that way, not even in his occasionally vulnerable moments, but there it is. Cynicism manifests most sharply in the closet idealist; even after twenty years underneath the bland conjecture that God simply doesn't care he still desperately wants an explanation. Gabriel tells him he can't believe because he knows, but he did believe, once, so there was probably a time when he would even have accepted that.

More generally - but relatedly - everyone he loves keeps dying, so ...keep everyone at arm's length with quips and jerkery, and A) he won't get hurt and B) no one will get near him, because then they're doomed. He's got a droll, dry sense of humor, and almost always chooses to exercise it when keeping his mouth shut would be the better option. This is pretty typical of his behavior overall; for someone who knows - and is terrified of - exactly what's going to happen to him when he dies, he has an astonishing propensity for self-destructive behavior. Smoking, drinking, hooking up with half-demons (because we can't have nice things, but we don't really want to be alone with ourselves either)...if it's bad for him he's probably doing it. Right now. It doesn't help that he forms habits like other people say, obsessively collect ceramic cats; all of these are things he should probably be being treated for, but he had quite enough of the psychiatric industry as a teenager, thank you so much. And ultimately he doesn't really believe that he deserves help, because he's not a good person.

This is subjective, of course, but for one thing he knows he's damned, and that has a way of leaking into a person's self-perception. He fluctuates between self-interest (trying to buy his way back into heaven, let's say) and self-sacrifice - he's capable of forming strong attachments, much as he tries not to, and occasionally he'll do things for those people that might be considered selfless, but until recently the angle he could work as a result has almost always been in the back of his mind. Giving up his life - and his soul, effectively - for Angela and her sister (as will be further discussed in the history section) was his first true act of selflessness in a long time. So the question becomes philosophical: if a person does 'good' things, how much does his motivation matter? John contends his motivation ought to be immaterial, at least on the surface, but it doesn't work that way.

On the other hand, there's a kind of ....horrific, icky freedom in this sort of awareness; when you know what's waiting for you in the afterlife - and you've been there - what's left to possibly scare you on Earth? Nothing, that's what. He can take insane risks and dare the kind of Hail Mary (haha) plans that would proooobably crash and burn if they lacked even a modicum less confidence, but really, what's the worst that could happen to him? He could die? ...right. Yeah. Further he's both used to and prefers working alone; when there's someone else involved he has to look out for them (because unfortunately he can't actually turn off caring about other people like there's a lightswitch involved), and that tends to be expressed by never revealing the more salient points of his grand plans and insisting they stay in the car. This almost never works, but it doesn't stop him from trying. As previously mentioned despite his best efforts there have been a number of people in his life who have meant very much to him, and those people haaaave a tendency to die; most folks cannot get mixed up in the big scary mess that is John Constantine's life and come out okay. A massive guilty conscience goes along with this, often helped (h...elped) by literal ghostly visitations, just in case he was going to like, try to move on or anything.

History: John Constantine was born in to two very normal parents who were understandably kind of unhappy when their young son began around the age of six to descend into giant screaming fits on a regular basis, insistent that he could see 'monsters,' often in very public places and at various influential people. (One of his father's business partners, for example, or the local parish priest.) They tried their best to fix the situation; as good members of the religious community they sought the help of the church, and then eventually various psychiatric institutions. John was in and out of hospitals and clinics and sanctuaries for virtually his entire childhood and on into adolescence, and none of it helped. In fact, it made it markedly worse: at the age of fifteen, after a priest at yet another clinic decided his problem was that he was possessed and subsequently performed an exorcism, he decided enough was just ...enough. Whether he was crazy or just cursed, he was never going to go through anything like that again.

So when he came home he told his parents he was much better, thank you, and then he went into his bedroom and slit his wrists.

Officially he was dead for two minutes before being revived in the ambulance, but as he tells it himself, two minutes in Hell is a lifetime. (Hell, notably, looked exactly like Los Angeles; a specific tenet of this mythos is that Heaven and Hell look exactly like a person's own environments except for their general cast; Hell is a constantly melting nuclear wasteland, Heaven a soft-focus cloudscape of peaceful blue.) Once released from yet another hospital, the first thing he did was run away from home. He hasn't spoken to his parents since, and sometimes he regrets that - but John Constantine's list of regrets is long and extensive and that's not as near the top as it maybe should be. His parents were ultimately good people and they wanted what was best for him, but he couldn't, after that point, trust them to know what that was.

He was essentially homeless for a number of years, and between a lot of petty theft, odd jobs, and hiding from the cops, he started talking to anyone who would listen about the things he could see. Having somewhat unarguable evidence that suicides were very definitely damned (and to a very literal Hell!) - he'd begun forming a plan: he would turn the vision that had been so unbearable he'd ended his life over it and make it a marketable skill. The demons he saw weren't invulnerable, and if he could figure out how to kill them, then surely he'd be making the world a better place, and if he just took out enough of them, then maybe he could buy his way back into Heaven.

It didn't work that way, of course, as he learned eventually through regular contact with angelic beings as well as demonic ones (most notably Gabriel - yes, that Gabriel), but what else could he do? He had no better ideas, and as often happens with perseverance and practice, by the time he was twenty he was a pretty fearsome enemy of all things Hell-related. The downside of that was that he was still damned, which made the possibility of eternity "like going to a prison where half the inmates were put there by you." Not awesome.

As he became more proficient at the ....uh, otherworldly arts, his personal life became more and more a twisted smoldering trainwreck; people who got involved and stayed involved with him died, frequently and messily, and sometimes their ghosts would visit John just to remind him of that fact. (Mostly there was a girl, because there's always a girl, and he really loved her but it doesn't stop him from wishing they'd never met if it would mean she'd just go away.)

The casual contacts he formed were more reliable; he did, and continues to, save a lot of lives/souls throughout the course of his endeavors (at the high point of this in his mid to late twenties, he was "John Constantine, the John Constantine), so those people could be counted on for favors, information and the like in a pinch. Favors became a more significant currency than money; money was just what he needed to live, it was always getting better and more efficient, becoming more knowledgeable and pulling off increasingly more insane feats of exorcistic badassery that would keep him alive long enough to get himself back into God's good graces.

But this kind of lifestyle is impossible to maintain; as he neared his mid-thirties he simply started to slow down--his ever more self-destructive habits were taking their toll - and then they finally caught up with him. At the age of 35 he was diagnosed with an aggressive, virulent strain of lung cancer. It wasn't - or shouldn't have been - unexpected, he'd been smoking a pack and a half a day for the last twenty years, but it struck him as utterly, absolutely unfair. "The things I've beaten - things most people have never even heard of, and now I'm gonna be done in by this?"

The reading of his rapidly approaching expiration date came concurrent with an unusual, unsettling occurrence in the spiritual world: during what should have been a relatively routine exorcism he'd become convinced that the demon possessing an adolescent girl was trying to break through to this plane, which was never supposed to happen. In the Constantine universe the warring spiritual forces behind the every day world are kept at bay by an unofficial deal called, appropriately, The Balance: demons stay in hell, and angels in heaven. Only "half-breeds" - half one or the other, presumably - can be present in the mortal world and thus curry favor in the direction of either entity. He asked an old friend - a psychic priest named Hennessey, who protected himself from demons with a magic talisman and coped by drinking a lot - to keep his ear to the ground, so to speak, which would have genuinely hideous consequences later. Because ...that's what happens to John Constantine's old friends.

But cancer was still a much uh, more immediate issue, and so before doing much investigating beyond this point he made a visit to Gabriel (still that Gabriel) to see about getting "an extension" - essentially a longer lease on life, apparently something he'd been able to do before. This time there would be no such mitigation, though; Gabriel told him "you're going to die young because you've smoked thirty cigarettes a day since you were fifteen, and you're gonna go to hell because of the life you took," - his own.

On the way out of that ...heartening encounter he bumped almost literally into Angela Dodson, a Los Angeles police detective there to see her local priest about her twin sister's funeral. Isabel had jumped to her death from the roof of the mental hospital where she was currently admitted, and Angela desperately wanted her devout sibling to have a Catholic funeral. Because the bishop had ruled the death a suicide, this wasn't granted, and as such it was basically the best time possible to run into John, in a phenomenal mood himself. Both parties left expecting to leave the unhappy encounter behind, and gladly (...especially on Angela's part, one imagines) but later that night as she watched the security feed of her sister's death, she became aware that before she'd jumped, Isabel had said one word: "Constantine."

After looking him up in the LAPD files and discovering his arrest record (a suspicious, possibly occult-related death in which there'd been insufficient evidence to prosecute), she went to John's apartment and asked for his help: she didn't believe her sister had committed suicide and wanted to prove it. He was his normal effulgent self, and she left, angry and hurt. Again, this probably would have been the end of their association had John's ability to sense the presence of demonic forces not made him aware there was a giant mass of them approaching, and they weren't after him. He followed Angela down the street, reached her moments before the entire block was engulfed in darkness, and was able to protect them both by obliterating said mass with holy fire. Then he casually lit a cigarette while Angela reacted more sanely by throwing up. ("Don't worry; it happens to everyone the first time. It's the sulfur.")

So he agreed to help her, such as his help was. Their next step - or John's next step, rather - was to see if Isabel really had committed suicide, and the quickest way to do that was, simply, to go to Hell. This is ...less complicated than it sounds, mostly a ritual involving water ("it's a universal conduit; lubricates the transition from one plane to another - now ask me if there's water in Hell") and Angela's cat, cats being half in and half out of one world at all times anyway. If you have a cat and you've ever thought it is hellspawn, well...you're right.

P.S. There's no water in Hell.

John traversed the melting, screaming landscape as fast as he could; demons will pick up on the presence of something that doesn't belong there - or does, but not yet - very quickly, and by the time he located Isabel he had just enough time to retrieve evidence (her hospital bracelet) of her presence before they could catch him. The ritual left him exhausted and shaky, so he and Angela went to what appears to be the most amazing all night breakfast street vendor in the world for The Pancakes of Our Story So Far. Angela revealed that her sister had been in and out of institutions since the time she was ten, and John shared a similar story. Isabel had been gifted, psychically, and Angela once too, but she'd denied her abilities to the point where they had become dormant.

At the same time Hennessey, keeping his word to John, had been consulting current events and discovered the residue of occult activity surrounding Isabel's death. Upon visiting her body in the morgue he found a strange symbol burned into her wrist, and was suddenly beset by a chorus of demonic whispers. Without his protective talisman the only thing that could block out the voices was alcohol (because that's ....great, universe and God) and so he fled into a nearby convenience store, reaching for and emptying bottles - except that they were all empty, or they were full, but not a single drop would come out - or so he thought. It was rather an elaborate hallucination brought on by Balthazar, a powerful (and extremely skeezy) half-demon who, of course, had a history with John Constantine. Hennessey drowned himself in alcohol in under a minute, and John was left to wonder why yet another of his friends had died. Prior to his death Hennessey had cut the symbol he'd found into his palm; at the crime scene (thanks to Angela getting him in) John discovered this and continued to investigate.

This took them to Isabel's hospital room, where Angela found a message left behind on the window in ~secret twin code: Corinthians 17:1, the source of which would have been reasonably obvious except that there is no 17th chapter in Corinthians.

...except in the Bible in Hell.

They have Bibles in Hell, by the way. "It paints a different view of Revelations...though if you ask me, fire is fire."

John called on another old friend - his landlord Beeman - who had a copy of the uh, Hell Bible, which is just as gross looking as you might imagine, and learned ("oh, this certainly is not good") that the 17th chapter of Corinthians referred to Mammon, the son of the Devil. Mammon, who was to all accounts much worse than his daddy, could cross over into the mortal plane - but only with the help of God and after possessing a very powerful psychic.

As he was trying to impart the rest of the text, all the machinery behind the bowling lanes began to go haywire, and he knew something was coming for him - he told John "you may not have much faith, but that doesn't mean we don't have faith in you," and then hung up. Angela drove herself and Constantine as fast as they could go to the bowling alley, but they arrived only to find his body covered in bees - I'm sorry, it's actually really sad and John kiiiind of flips out, but covered in bees never doesn't sound funny.

ANYWAY. Angela decided that she needed to see what her sister had seen - the sister who, if you'll recall, had jumped off a building rather than be possessed by Mammon - and so convinced John to reawaken her latent psychic abilities. This took them through yet another water ritual, except that this one involved essentially drowning her and made John's bathtub explode. Fun!

Now able to see the world behind the world in great detail - greater than John, it is to be noted - Angela immediately saw who was responsible for what had happened to Beeman (and thus Hennessey), whereupon John assembled the Superextraholy Killamahdemon Crossfire Deluxe Kit for the DIYer (....a large gun) and strode off with the intent to shoot Balthazar in the face.

Naturally, he told Angela to wait in the car.

That worked really well (it didn't), but before she could get up there John had time to A) get from Balthazar the details of how Mammon planned to cross over (the 'help of God' meant the Spear of Destiny; the spear which pierced the side of Jesus on the cross and would therefore still have his blood on it) B) basically bless him to death. This involved punching with holy brass knuckles (I want those) and performing last rites, which as a demon Balthazar did not appreciate in the slightest what with it evoking the possibility of his going to heaven and all.

But then of course it was actually really elaborate soul-trolling coercion, because you have to ask for absolution to be forgiven. Either way this was the moment at which Angela appeared, and it became ...really, really obvious who the 'powerful psychic' of Mammon's intentions was as she was uh, sucked through several buildings across town to the hospital where her sister had died.

John, of course, didn't know where she was, so in order to find her - and the Spear, and all the other horrific bullshit that was going on - he needed a more powerful ritual than just tap water and a cat. He went to Papa Midite, a extremely badass former witchdoctor who now ran a club that catered to half-breeds, and was ostensibly neutral territory. Via a lot of yelling and the ruination of John's $200 shirt he convinced Midnite that the Balance was about to be severely violated, and as such he needed to use The Chair - which, by the way, is the electric chair from SingSing, because I guess when you need the power of a lot of souls, you don't fuck around. Via more water aaaand, uh, electrocution (yes, really), John tracked the poor bastard who had been possessed into carrying the spear from where it was buried, and who was also now severely dead, leaving the spear in the hands of about a scrillion half-demons waiting at the hospital's therapeutic pools (THERE'S A LOT OF WATER) for Mammon to emerge.

With the help of Midnite and his (John's) apprentice slash driver slash Robin analog Chas, he equipped himself with holy relic bullets and coatflapped into the night to prevent the possibility of, you know, Hell on Earth in a very literal sense. Once at the hospital it was Chas's job to go forth and bless the sprinkler system, which John then unleashed on the aforementioned scrillion waiting half-demons before shooting all of them with his helpful assistant's support. They found Angela unconscious, floating in the pool before suddenly becoming horrifically imbued with the essence of Mammon, but through their combined efforts were able to exorcise the spirit.

This, sadly, was not before Mammon smashed Chas into the walls and ceiling about a thousand times and he died of severe concussive injuries, because what would this story be if Constantine couldn't swing his arms without hitting a dead friend? With the last of his physical and mental energy, John used his tattoos to summon the entity behind all of this, who turned out to be (surprise!) Gabriel. The angel's contention was that mankind in the throes of greatest suffering was at its noblest, and therefore Mammon's inevitable reign of !@#$%^%$@#$^AAAAAAAAA would make the human race once more worthy of God's love.

John responded with the least flippant thing he'd said since ...birth, possibly ("Gabriel. You're insane,") and Gabriel reacted to that by gently blowing on his face, thus hurling him across several rooms and into a set of glass doors. As the angel drifted peacefully toward Angela to reinstate the horrific birthing process, John, figuring that as per usual God didn't seem to be listening, went the other direction in a last-ditch bid for help. On the working theory he'd been told several times by various demons he slit his wrists - again - with a piece of broken glass, Lucifer having declared the soul of John Constantine was the only one he personally would appear on Earth to collect.

And it worked! Lucifer appeared, white-suited and horrifyingly greasy, taunted John for a while about not being able to work his Zippo, and was summarily alerted to the somewhat premature Apocalypse being deployed in the next room. Thoroughly irritated at the attempted ruination of what...ever it was he had in mind for the end of days, he tossed Mammon wriggling back into Hell, at which time God apparently returned from whatever was preoccupying His divine attention and deangeled Gabriel with a quickness.

So that was resolved, but now the Devil had to contend with the even more irritating factor of owing Constantine a favor. He assumed that would be an extension, but instead John wanted Isabel's soul to be released to heaven. This done, Lucifer began merrily dragging our fallen hero across the floor, when the floor summarily surged up and refused to allow him to move: John Constantine's final act of pure self-sacrifice was finally enough to get him into heaven, and the gates of Pearly L.A. opened in front of them as its newest angel flashed a particularly choice gesture at the Devil.

As you do. And like hell (haha) he was having any of that, so instead of allowing John to be taken into the bosom of God and whatnot he healed the slashes on his wrists and sucked the cancer out of his lungs - like, with his fingers, and it was exactly as pleasant as it sounds: John would live, the Devil banking that this would give him the chance to prove that his soul truly belonged in Hell.

How that works out remains to be seen; in the aftermath John gave the Spear to Angela and told her to hide it where no one could find it (not even him), and is shown popping a piece of nicotine gum rather than his customary cigarette. But it's probably going to be really, really hard to stay on that particular wagon in Taxon.

Arrival Post (Third Person)

If you get right down to it, there are two ways John Constantine spends his day: either in immediate peril or out of it. (Although arguably there's also having just gotten out, and about to get into, but split that many hairs and we'll be here all day.) His appearance in the entrance chamber seems to indicate the former, both of which have their pros and cons. In immediate peril (he was) means now he's suddenly not, anymore, or at least not in the same way, but out of it - well, those moments are few and far enough in between that he likes to keep them for himself, thank you.

This moment: not shaping up to be one of those. The prelude to this entrance is a rush of wings and a strange, inhuman clicking; the air ripples and warps and snaps back into place, leaving a tall, lanky man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired and dark-clothed, with the kind of pallor that actually takes some work to maintain in, for instance, southern California.

Maybe he's a vampire - just kidding. The dying implosion of air stirs a black coat open with the sleeves rolled up, the ornate tattoos on the backs of his forearms somehow alive like the oscillation of wind across water. "--to the light, I command th--what the fuck."

His arms drop; he staggers, collects himself as one hand goes to worry at his mouth. The rest of his face stays impassive, although his breathing hitches and the arm at his side trembles all the way down to the fingertips. More than the usual 'aaaaaaaa where am I' related shock is simple physical exhaustion, whatever it was he was doing husked him out, left him - well. Left him what, exactly?

"Goddamn," he murmurs, half to himself, half to - none of your damn business, that's who. "I really am getting old." A simple summoning, how do you fuck that up? Unless - he's not thinking about it, patting his pockets restlessly instead, and noticing the bracelet for the first time. "....Jesus."

The pocket search becomes more frantic. "Didn't just botch a summoning then, unless I hit the jewelry district on the way out." His expression flickers but doesn't crack as he finds not exactly what he was looking for in one pocket, but a woefully acceptable alternative. This turns out to be chewing gum, which he pops into his mouth like it's personally offended him.

The alternative he's not voicing is that he's dead, of course - summoning can kill a person, this wouldn't even be the first time. And there's no reason Hell shouldn't have an antechamber; it's been twenty years since he was ....admitted there, if you will. He shakes his shoulders out, fixes his shirt and coat sleeves, then moves to investigate the tablet, circling it like it might spring, but not picking it up yet. "At least the decor is nice. Very proto-scifi, I like it."

John Constantine: nerd. --not really. But nerd is still preferable to dead, frankly.

Additional Third Person Sample:

"Mr. Constantine."

John doesn't open his eyes; in a church, as he is, head down and eyes closed he might look like he's praying.

He isn't.

"Mr. Constantine, sir."

He lifts his head, finally, a face all angled planes shaded by black hair like spilling shadows, pale, deep set eyes expectant. Gabriel's attendant swallows. "Mr. Constantine, sir, you can't smoke in here."

The cigarette held loosely in one long hand gets an almost dismissive glance, like he'd forgotten he was holding it. They're a prop like everything else: the expensive shirts, the coat sleeves rolled up rather than removed, the tattoos and habitually expressionless mouth - tools are just props with weight behind them. He says nothing, but with a flick of his wrist the offending cigarette is extinguished - right into a nearby holy water fount, where it dies with a withering hiss.

"Oh--sir--"

"What's a little smoke between friends?" His mouth quirks but his eyes don't change; the Angel Gabriel and John Constantine are not friends, and no one here is pretending that they are.

Slack-jawed in the kind of horror now that's only not mute because his mouth worked faster than his brain, this young man chosen for his calm and his benevolence steps back, almost a stumble, to let John out of the pew.

"Tell Gabriel I'll see him later."

His steps are lean and quick, strides long enough to echo a run. The way this habitual audience-seeker (although he doesn't seek as much as he seems to demand) exits a church is always running, like there's something there (or isn't) he can't bear the weight of. Maybe it's the cross.

Most days, the boy chosen to guard an angel really likes his job. Today is not one of them.