The Freak

Synopsis
Malkavian hardcore professional wrestler. The Freak is a tall, thickly built bear of a man. Intense dark eyes peer out from under long tangled brown hair. His bearded chin is strong, as are his heavily scarred arms.

Important Character Information

 * He is the Malkavian Speaker on Baron Temple’s Council.
 * His Malkavian Derangement takes a form that mirrors his career in professional wrestling. His perception of life is a confusing blend of fact and fiction, as if all of reality is a part of “the business”.
 * He is also known to hallucinate a spectral crowd around him, cheering him on and making him think that he is in a wrestling match, when in fact it’s more than likely a very inappropriate time for a brawl.
 * He has a cult of personality that practically worships him. This group is a strange mix of wrestlers, wrestling fans, homeless people, strippers, former abuse victims, and the occasional weirder members. They refer to themselves as the Fellowship of the Lost and Forgotten.
 * The Freak and his cult are firmly entrenched at Big Ed’s Nudy Bar.
 * While far from being a proper occultist, the Freak has done a lot of research over the years on ghosts. In fact, he is often known to carry a tomahawk that is able to hurt ghosts somehow.
 * The Freak considers himself a follower of the Norse god Odin. At first glance this seems odd because Freak is not known for wisdom, but many other aspects line up. Both Freak and Odin are wanderers. Both are known for sacrificing their bodies to meet their goals. And finally, what is pro wrestling if not a blend of poetry and war (two other Odinic aspects).
 * His faith in Asatru and his experience with his sire have left the Freak rather biased against the Christian faith. He quietly ignores it in those that he already respects, but he has been known to mock or even react with anger if there is no friendship to stop him from doing so.

Important Relationships

 * John St. Peter (PC) - A fellow Iowan displaced in the Valley, and possibly Freak's oldest friend among the Kindred. JSP is a Toreador master of the art of BDSM. He is technically a member of the Camarilla, but Freak believes that JSP is an anarch at heart.
 * Luc Rovero (PC) - A young Italian kindred that Freak and Big Ed have hired to cook for the bar staff and the Cult of the Lost and Forgotten.
 * Artimes (PC) - This new to the Valley Kindred has quickly become a close alley She is a mere couple of years older that Freak and is from Chicago. This closeness in both age and geography has created something of a bond between them both.
 * Bazza (PC) - Another of the younger Malkavians that the Freak has taken a liking to. Bazza is a comspiracy theory nut, and a computer guy, both things that the Freak appreciates. Most important of all though, bazza is a dedicated enemy of Pentax, an evil organization that Freak has been opposing since he first came to the Valley.
 * Yasmin Teodra (PC) - A young kindred and fellow Malkavian that the Freak has taken under his wing and hired to work as a researcher into Golconda lore.
 * “God” (Sire) - A deranged Sabbat that thought that he was the Christian God. He Embraced the Freak to be his Dark Messiah. God was immediately thereafter killed by a house fire caused by the suicidal Freak.
 * Lizzy Bean (Childe) - The owner of the housefire that God died in. She saved the Freak from his attempted suicide and was in turn Embraced. She was highly human despite it all, and eventually she left the Freak, fearing his violent nature.
 * Big Ed (Ghoul) - An old west bartender that the Freak ghouled very early in his unlife. Big Ed has been with him ever since. Ed is something of a financial genius, using the passing century plus to create multiple business opportunities. Most these are in bars, professional wrestling, and the adult entertainment industry.
 * ”Mystery” (Touchstone) - One of Big Ed’s most prominent strippers, Mystery is also a highly athletic professional wrestler. She is a blond haired, blue eyed girl-next-door type. Back in Iowa, Freak saved her from abusive parents that did not support her bisexuality. To Freak, she represents his need to protect the innocent.
 * ”Witchcraft” Dani Tanaquil (Touchstone) - Another of Big Ed’s strippers. This tall and willowy goth beauty is Mystery’s partner both in the wrestling ring and in real life. She is soft spoken and kind, but she marches to the beat of her own drum. She makes her own decisions and as a self-proclaimed witch she decides her own fate. Because of this, she represents to Freak the concept that “nobody will control me.”
 * ”Big” John Cooper (Touchstone) - This massively massive man is a gentle, well educated giant. Standing at well over seven feet and five-hundred pounds, John Cooper is often seen as the top dog at Big Ed’s Wrestling. He doesn’t just hang around the Nudy Bar like the rest. He has another job as a college history professor. As a younger man, he was very nearly killed by a gang of white supremists who did not appreciate an intelligent black man. In self defense a John killed two of his attackers before they fled. He had his day in court and was eventually found innocent. To Freak, he represents the concept of only killing the guilty.
 * Freddie and Winston (mentors) - These two mysterious nomads started the Freak on his path to Golconda.
 * Theo Bell (past obsession) - When Theo Bell explosively left the Camarilla and joined the Anarchs, the news of it caused the Freak to do the same. Supposedly, Freak stalked Bell all over the country until he was decisively told to go away.

Backstory
David Ross Griswold, known later in life as Horace the Freak, was born in rural Iowa in 1840. His mother died in childbirth, a fact that his father blamed him for.

His childhood was unremarkable, farm drudgery and abuse from his drunken, grieving father.

Seeking to escape this abuse, the Freak joined the Union army when the civil war broke out. Due to his brutal upbringing, he rather identified with the slaves that the south oppressed and he started to fixate on the concept of freedom. For them. For himself. For everyone.

Between battles, soldiers would settle scores, pass the time, or even gamble on wrestling matches. While the future Freak was not a natural athlete, his upbringing had forged him into a pretty good wrestler.

After the war, the Freak continued to serve in the army, contributing to the atrocities that the government committed upon the Native Americans. After one particular brutal massacre, he resigned.

Floating around the country, the Freak fell into the carnival circuits as a wrestler. This was the birth of what we call “professional wrestling”, and the Freak would follow its course all the way up to the modern day.

Traveling around, playing this sadistic and brutal villain role, the Freak caught the eye of a vampire.

Part of a Sabbat pack, the Freak’s Sire went by the name “God”. He was so obsessed and terrified of his elders and of Caine that his deluded mind convinced him that he WAS God. And in the character that the Freak played, God had found his perfect Dark Mesiah. The False God Embraced the Freak in his rented rooms at a house.

Freak came into Unlife in a suicidal Frenzy. He had always had deep resentment towards the predominant Christian faith, blaming God for his mother’s death, for his fathers abuse, for slavery, for how the Native Americans were treated....everything. So to see God personified as a bloodsucking monster attacking him, well, the Freak came out fighting. In the fight, a candle was knocked over, setting a curtain afire. Soon the fire spread throughout the building.

In the burning building, the Freak beat the False God to death, or so he believes. Weakened, the Freak chose to end it all and laid down for the flames to come. Fate had other ideas, and he was saved by the owner of the house, a woman named Elizabeth Bean.

In rescuing Freak, Ms. Bean was fatally injured. Freak “saved” her by giving her the Embrace.

The rest of the 19th and most of the 20th century pass by with Freak and Lizzy Bean traveling the country, along with their ghoul, an old western bartender with a knack for finances. His name was Edward Scott, but in later years he’d come to be known as Big Ed. Together, these three would follow the course of professional wrestling history.

Knowing that the False God was a member of the Sabbat, the Freak opposed them wherever he could, even going so far as joining the Camarilla simple because it opposed Sabbat.

The Freak was a horrible fit for the Camarilla, but when he settled down for a time he actually served as a Primogen in a couple of smaller Domains; namely Grand Rapids and Des Moines. As a prank once he even declared himself the Prince of the extremely tiny Iowa Town in which he was born; Macksburg. Having no vampire population however he grew quickly bored and moved on.

In the 1990’s, the Cold War with the Sabbat turned hot, and the Freak was a part of several violent clashes. While he has never been the warrior that he thinks he is, he had powerful Gangrel friends and he helped do some real damage.

There were two crushing turning points in the wars of the 90’s that changed the Freak forever.

First, Lizzy Bean left the Freak. She was tired of the brutality of her Sire, and when he had captured a Sabbat Ghoul and was torturing it for information, Lizzy rescued the ghoul and fled, never to be seen again.

Second, towards the end of the 90’s, the Freak met a Lasombra named Alexander Ross. Alexander was Embraced in Chicago as part of a mass embrace; shock troops for an attack on the Freak’s Des Moines home.

The Freak nearly died in the attack, overwhelmed by numbers. Unknown to anyone however, Alexander was Unbondable, and so he was under his own control and hiding his time. During the assault on the Malkavian wrestler, Alexander used the chaos to attack and diablorize his Sire. This unexpected event led to the Freak’s victory that night.

Seeing in Alexander something of himself, the Freak started to realize that some individuals within the Sabbat might actually be good. It took a couple more decades, but the Freak stopped using such broad brushstrokes his worldview. He started to adapt to seeing his enemies as individuals that might actually be able to be reasoned with instead of exterminated.

He mourned the loss of Lizzy as well, wanting desperately to become a better person so that if he ever finds her, he won’t scare her away again.

In 2012 when the Freak heard that Theo Bell had violently left the Camarilla, the Freak was intrigued. When he heard why—that the Camarilla had unwittingly created the Second Inquisition by trying to send hunters after Sabbat and Anarchs—the Freak left the Cam as well.

For a time he traveled, trying to find Theo Bell and join up with him. These efforts failed though, and so a disheartened Freak returned to Des Moines for a few years. Life in such a small domain was more or less the same. He even still hung out with friends within the Camarilla, most notably the Toreador John St. Peter.

Then he heard of Baby B’s Anarch Rally. He heard of Victor Temple. He grew obsessed with them as he had Theo Bell years previous. He knew in his bones that these people could teach him to be a better Anarch. That these people knew how to live free.

So the Freak moved to LA, a move that has brought about much growth in him. He found a sense of peace within himself, moving into more of a protector than an aggressor. He revisited the site of the Native American massacre that caused him to leave the military. There he met with the ghosts of those that he had sinned against and he helped them defeat a powerful evil.

Soon after the Freak met Freddie and Winston, two kindred that would set him on a path towards Golconda. The Freak does not seek redemption however, he seeks the balance between Man and Beast. With more training from a blind Malkavian named Leo and some time alone, the Freak has made some progress. in a very small way, he has clamped down upon the Beast’s need for blood. He keeps this skill in reserve for emergencies.