history

CHARACTER HISTORY
Generations ago, the Healy and Price families were members of the Covenant of St. George, monster hunters with a religious zeal to exterminate all "unnatural and ungodly" creatures. What qualified any creature, be they animal or a sentient being, is supposedly based on a list of the creatures found on Noah's Ark. Where they got Noah's shipping manifest is anyone's guess.

The Covenant were single-handedly responsible for the extinction of many cryptid species, and did some significant damage to the ecosystem of Australia shortly after the continent was colonized.

Alex's great-great grandfather was a librarian and researcher for the Covenant, who while reading the works of physician John Snow, made a terrible connection. The 1854 Cholera epidemic of Paris coincided entirely with the Covenant's purging of the last of France's unicorns, who naturally purify water tables. The Covenant was at least partially responsible for the deaths of over 600 human beings, and all to wipe out a handful of animals that might have been dangerous if humans encountered them.

The family broke away from the Covenant and fled to the US, at first taking root in Buckley Township, Michigan, and, later, a survivalist compound somewhere outside of Portland, Oregon with their colony of talking mice who worship the family as gods.

Over the course of four generations, the Healys, and later the Prices (after Thomas Price also defected from the Covenant to marry Alice Healy, Alex's grandmother) went from being hunters of cryptids to established cryptozoologists with a keen focus on ecology and conservation.

By the time Alex and his two younger sisters came around, there was a vast support network in not only his parents, but adopted and surrogate family members, both human and cryptid, countless people who owe the family favors (and even the occasional blood debt) and a big, mostly-safe survivalist compound to grow up on.

His childhood wasn't an easy one, but it was a happy one. Knowing that the Covenant of St. George would always be a threat to the family, the Prices raised their children to survive above all, with lessons in everything from martial arts, firearms, and extreme survival techniques. By the time he was a preteen, Alex could navigate his way home by memorizing the directions of the random turns taken while he was stuffed in a trunk and left alone. By the time he was in college, he was technically a pretty genuine badass- but he hid himself in tweed and glasses and kept himself away from the public eye for the sake of his family's safety.

A studious child, equally content to spend time outdoors or indoors, with the specimens he constantly brought inside with him, the family's colony of Aeslin mice gave him the title of "The God of Scales and Silence." It has remained a fitting moniker for him as he's grown, as his love of and fascination with reptiles that lead to a career in the life sciences. He earned a doctorate in veterinary sciences, specializing in herpetology. All of his degrees were earned under false identities, but the work was all his, and it lead him to a nice, "safe" dayjob at the Columbus Zoo reptile house where he secretly breeds endangered cryptid animals and assists the local reptilian sentient cryptid population as best he can.


It was under the name of Dr. Alexander Preston that he met Shelby Tanner, an Australian zoologist working with him at the zoo.

In a series of wonderful coincidences and terrible things happening around them, Alex and Shelby were forced to face the fact that their relationship was based entirely on lies when they discovered the truth about each other. Shelby, it turned out, was a member of the Thirty-Six Society, a group of Australian ecologists founded after the Covenant-aided extinction of the Thylacine.

With the truth out in the open, the two were able to fall deeply in love in between petrifaction-based murders and an outbreak of lycanthropy in Australia.


NOTE: For the sake of shipping memes, Alex will uuuusually default to not knowing his canon love interest. I do sometimes try my hand at NPCing her for gen though because they're adorable together.


 

personality

Alex is an introverted man, more comfortable in the research lab or in the field than he is being the center of attention. He's obviously an animal lover, even if his beloved animals of choice tend to be on the stranger side, (and when they do exist according to science). He devotes both parts of his life- day job and cryptozoology- to ecology and conservation, as well as mostly being in the company of animals.
He's a stoic, even-tempered man, but don't mistake that for meek. Like most Prices, he has an unquestionable devotion to his family ("family first, the cryptid community second, everyone else after that") and is willing to kill to protect them or himself (both of which happen in canon at different points).

Also like most of his family, he's excessively cautious about security. He lives and works under the assumed name of Alexander Preston, with only family members and some local cryptids in on who he really is. The threat of the Covenant finding him, and through him, his family is a lifelong fear that has lead to some very complicated feelings about his double-life.

He's prone to living up to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, getting lost in intense thought or study and losing track of time. 

Like all of his family, he has a low tolerance for intolerance that borders on righteous indignation that has convinced a lot of people  that he's a self-important prick that holds the world to a standard of fairness it can never live up to. They might not be entirely wrong.

Letting people close is difficult. Going from identity to identity in his academic career often has him thinking of the mundanities of everyday life like jobs, friends and dating as afterthoughts, things to be kept up for the sake of appearances.

He learned early on that friendship made in the "real" world doesn't survive contact with the family business. Science and nature were constants that never let him down the way people who weren't family did. 

Unsurprisingly for a man charged with more or less running a small portion of a zoo, he's a caretaker by nature. A classic eldest child, he feels responsibility about any life that comes in to his care, even if it's something that would be all too happy to make a meal of him if given the chance.  

 

abilities

ABILITY: DESCRIPTION

Weapons + Combat: Guns, guns and more guns. And then as many knives as he can have just in case. While he specializes and stays most in-practice with his marksmanship, he's also a trained fencer and saber fighter (thanks, college fencing team and historical re-enactment societies).
Years of lessons in different unarmed martial arts styles has made him a capable hand-to-hand fighter if he has to be, but if he's ever unarmed, it's not by his choice.

SURVIVAL: A Price upbringing means you can survive just about anything that's possible to survive. Whether it's in the wilderness, escaping captivity or a plan to cut and run if his current ID gets burned- there's a well-practiced plan for just about anything.
 

SCIENCE: Alex has a doctorate in Veterinary Sciences specializing in herpetology, with a well above average understanding of cryptid biology (the things he's learned in the field could get him so many published papers, if the animals he studied existed according to mainstream science). His understanding of physiology makes him a half-decent emergency medic, especially for those with scales instead of skin.