Zebediah Buck

[IamLEAM1983]

Name: Zebediah Buck
Age: 225 years old
Gender: male
Species: lich

Strengths: an accomplished researcher of the arcane, Zeb's focus is sharply devoted to necromancy and the pursuit of life beyond death. Although not a traveller by and large, the Buck family's esteemed connections with British and Dutch trade representatives has allowed him to solicit the purchase of many an old and dusty tome, and of several grimoires most conservative practitioners would consider to be blatantly demonic in nature.

However, the nature of his focus is largely considered by all to be rather fortunate, as sad as it truly is. Infernalism isn't in his cards, it has never been and never will it be. The restoration of life – or of some semblance of life that allows for interaction and the renewal of lost family bonds – is what is of chief interest to him. Because of that, he's always seemed remarkably disinterested in the kind of deceptively attractive proposals of other natures. This goes to the point that the two or three demons he regularly summons for information have stopped in their attempts to seduce or cajole him; as they know quite well he's not the one who's going to do them the pleasure of breaking the circle they're trapped in while in the mortal plane.

Because of that, local folklore and media likes to portray the youngest of the two preternaturally preserved Buck patriarchs as being some sort of dark, eldritch sorceror from the Age of Steam. “Old Zeb” unfortunately doesn't take to his smoking jacket and monogrammed slippers to look like some kind of respectable-if-idle Victorian wizard – it's largely a sign that he quite frankly has stopped giving a damn quite a while ago. The Bantam and Midget teams using a cartoony and grinning likeness of him as a mascot of sorts would honestly be disappointed, if they knew. He's nowhere near being the flamboyant, friendly and yet graven local boogieman kids keep hoping he is around Halloween.

Like all undead of his stripe, however, Zebediah is a walking arcane capacitor. Via is drawn to him in a constant manner, which means that he technically has access to a never-ending supply of mojo to use in his incessant quest to cheat death a second time.
Weaknesses: the sad part is, Zeb has no real arcane talent. If you spot him outside, in the back yard of the family mansion, it's largely because he needs to ground excess arcane potential into the ground. Otherwise, serious consequences might occur. The very fact that he needs to do that is indication enough that he doesn't really think to ply his nature's, well, natural inclination towards spell-making. When he does, it's usually because he's smelled a theoretical scent of sorts somewhere in his desiccated pages and mouldy old tomes, and has latched onto the more fickle of mistresses – it being hope – once again. If anything gives him the slightest inkling of a chance to reincarnate his wife Evangeline and their youngest son Nicolas, he'll blaze through the associated pages like a madman and briefly show the kind of motivation you only really see in those who've turned absolutely desperate.

Considering, if you were to come to him with requests of an Elemental or Scribing-based nature, he'd be liable to sluggishly apologize and ignore you with the kind of contempt you'd find in people absolutely convinced with the superiority of their pursuits. He's a terrific researcher, motivation is honestly what he lacks the most. That's locked his kind's normally natural flexibility behind self-imposed bars.

Expect basic physical self-defence out of him, and not pyrotechnics being used to defend his loved ones. If you're looking for arcane proficiency, oddly enough, you're better off turning to a non-researcher, like Silas Robertson.

Otherwise, being a lich, he's subjected to the same overall weaknesses. Hit him often enough with practically anything and you'll exhaust his supply of sustaining energy. Once that's gone and he's dormant, you have a small time window to take a sledgehammer to the bleached, white bones and forcefully free the poor old man from his self-imposed torment

Appearance: at five feet eight, Tubalcain Buck's youngest son had aspirations of being a fairly tall Victorian gentleman. Nowadays, though, you'll find that he's naturally closer to the statistical average; especially now that Karthians and the occasional Wisp have thrown the overall height statistics for Rhode Island's populace a little out of whack. This isn't to say his physique isn't striking, however.

Possessed of a fine bone structure, Zeb shows all the marks of having been a man in the later years of his prime. With a square if delicate jaw and slightly protruding cheekbones, his gaze usually appeared to be sunken. Old oil paintings, such as the one that dominates the Buck Mansion's main foyer, shows that he used to have soft brown eyes. That portrait, painted only a month before his transition into undeath, already suggests a fittingly bony and Caucasoid nature, fine features and an aquiline nose further accentuated by undeserved privations he endured in the name of his sacrosanct research. With a crown of unevenly trimmed white hair and an added tuft of it at the very tip of his crown, just above his forehead, he already displayed the looks of a well-off gentleman silently gliding away into perdition. Add to that a “doorknob” goatee with flaring edges on either side of the chin and mustache, and you get a snapshot of turn-of-the-twentieth-century elderly elegance.

All of that, of course, is reduced to a blue-white and fairly ghostlike suggestion, only occasionally visible if you squint through the sparse arcane fumes that constantly rise from the neck of his shirt and from within his eye sockets. Stronger emotions and certain tones of light can drastically underline the ghostly imprint of the man he used to be; but most people only ever see a grinning skeleton whose bony gumline is rendered pliable enough by via's influence to suggest maudlin pouts, quiet aches or contemptuous annoyance.

Considering his lack of what you'd consider a serious and productive driving force, he doesn't tend to put on the Ritz, by 2025's standards. There's a definite sense of old-timey poshness to him, with his black silk pajama pants, monogrammed red velvet slippers, rumpled white shirt, black waistcoat, red cravat and, on top, the requisite dark crimson smoking jacket with velvet facings. He doesn't really notice it, but this is actually a fairly savvy approximation of the kind of hardware a dedicated mage wanting to ignore all potential distractions would choose. The successive layers keep him warm in the fairly frisky heights of his elected tower, the ample sleeves and pockets offer storage space for all sorts of little trinkets his tests and experiments might require, and the idea of wearing only slippers on his feet means he's only one or two gestures away from neutralizing any potentially unwanted flare-ups of arcane power.
Behaviour: as if the above cues weren't obvious enough, Zeb is not a happy camper. Being part of the infamous Buck family counts for it, of course – as no true Buck is without his or her own experienced sorrows and tragedies – but being rendered immortal by your own hand after trying to reclaim your wife and son from the family curse has a way of turning anyone into an emotional wreck.

Like any Buck, Zebediah carries with him a ball-and-chain of regret, misery, unfulfilled desires and missed opportunities that cost the entire clan all too much. How does your self-confidence develop when you've grown up hearing from Father and Grandfather alike that your family name can't bring anything good? The answer is it doesn't fare too good. The only way for him to avoid turning into a perpetual perpetrator of various botched suicides is to just plain give up.

That is precisely what he did.

Essentially giving up on life, Zeb has turned into the kind of self-pitying and utterly self-absorbed dandy that would rather cultivate the borderline mystical qualities of his now-historical tribulations than own up to the possibility that there still might be hope, two hundred years down the line. Sadly for him, there's a difference between not trying and thinking offering himself to the Centennial Tree's guardian so she can suck him dry would be a keen way to burn through a lazy Sunday. He's given up on life but honestly, somewhere deep down, life hasn't quite given up on him.

The resulting circumstances can be summed-up with Time. Oodles and oodles of Time to spend watching the countless mortal heads scurry about downtown the way cows stare at trains because there's nothing else to watch. There's that, a kind of lethargic quasi-interest in the outside world, cigars, wine – and copious amounts of philandering.

Sometimes – just sometimes – you'll land the right comment at the right time and get a glimpse at the man he used to be, before tragedy struck the Bucks the way the tide beats at Hope's concrete-lined cliffs. He doesn't hate most people – acting like everyone annoys him is just easier on the long run. He values the input of other people – acknowledging it is simply too much effort. Whereas his brother Eliphas at least tries to keep the family affairs in shape along with his descendant, Madeline, Zebediah tends to booze days away when he's not working, in the kind of effortless, borderline graceful display of complete and utter drunkenness that the idle and wealthy can afford with a few excess bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild 1995.

His excuse, of course, is that he's the family “intellectual”. He's not half-wrong, but he's not entirely right, either.

There's definitely a kind of weird grace at play, as though the Bucks were cursed to look their absolute best when they've hit rock bottom. Catch him while he's well and truly zonked out, about an hour before he turns into a snoring heap of bones in the nearest chair or recliner – and that Flowers of Evil-ish dignified suffering breaks away, revealing that he sometimes needs to have fun in a rather desperate and undignified way – probably so his internal mood meter's arrow doesn't break off past the Red-and-Flashing “Danger” zone...

The sad part is you just know the Capital-R-Real Zebediah Buck is hidden somewhere at the crossroads between the happy drunk who feels like playing Mad Libs with his necromancy grimoires at the risk of causing another one of the city's signature zombie nights and the modern-day Bleeding Heart Romantic who cherishes the overall shittiness of his existence the way actually balanced people would their happy memories or the last camping trip they took

Goals: ultimately, to reunite with Evangeline and Nicholas in flesh and blood. He considers ending the family curse as being an idle fancy, seeing as they've all lost trace of the shaman who's responsible centuries ago. If you told him there's a way he and his might be able to start living without expecting a bicentennial catastrophe, he'd either give you his best sneer (if sober) or start laughing his nonexistent guts out (if drunk).

As for making an honest mage out of himself? Please. Fireballs and astral voyages... Balderdash; a Buck has no time to waste in idle fancies that don't pertain to the clan's affinity with calamitous happenings!

If his checklist were to finally be cleared, however, and if his conscience were soothed without the use of alcohol, he'd realize he needs something to pass the time or spend the next two hundred years torturing himself with the best cigars and undeserved spirits... What torture, honestly!

Then, maybe poking with other arcane textbooks might be interesting. He almost forgets magic isn't all about corpses and putrefaction, sometimes...

History: born in 1800, Zebediah is part of what you could consider the second generation of the “British-American” Bucks, after Nicholas II and Tubalcain Buck. Prior to this, as one goes back to the foundation of the colony, the family's Flemish roots begin to be visible.

Like any member of this odd little clan, Zeb was introduced to tragedy at a fairly young age with the tragic and pointless death of his parents, and taught to consider heartbreak or loss as being fairly standard happenings in your average existence. Considering that the family motto is Latin for And yet, we suffer, this should clue you in as to the fairly unorthodox climate in which Zeb was born. While Hope was developing and slowly rising to the stage of a late English Colonial acquisition – something that left many on the core settlement of Green Island feeling prosperous and decidedly positive – the family was usually more interested in maintaining its funereal traditions and sombre poise. They were still leaders, however, curse or no curse, and the Bucks still held controlling interests in several of the businesses across Green and Pickman Sound, along with the small fishery on Lake Island.

However, being the youngest of two sons, Zeb didn't really have that much of a prayer of being considered a patriarch as equal in power as his brother Eliphas. Eli, a much stockier fellow who seemed to endure the family's misfortunes the way a rock handles erosion by strong winds, was largely the one who balanced checkbooks and saw to it that the family's financial acumen remained a clear and present asset instead of another forlorn memory.

Surrounded by specially hired headmistresses and educators, it seemed as though the elder brother had designs to shape his still-childish sibling into something of the family's public face. While little Zeb never set foot in any of the county's brick-and-mortar educational establishments, the family spared no expense in gifting him with every scrap of philosophy, art, culture and refinement they could muster. Eliphas, with his... peculiar afflictions, wasn't suited for regular appearances in public. Someone needed to compensate, in order to prevent other covetous clans from stepping up and wresting the city's legitimate businesses from them.

Years passed, with Zeb being fashioned into what we'd call a PR representative, nowadays. He was essentially paid to cruise Green and the Sound, and to occasionally stop by Lake Island just to see how things went. This involved speaking with the locals, putting in a good figure with the notables and, as the local bigwigs have always felt obligated to do – pay a few dues to the Centennial Tree and Sophia.

For a while, it seemed he'd become another one of those idly rich sorts who spend their copious amounts of free time working through fairly esoteric pursuits. He'd always had an interest in the occult, but purely in an observer's fashion. Nature hadn't seen it fit to gift the Buck line with a dedicated mage in centuries, and Zebediah didn't seem to be the sort who'd challenge that trend. From his thirties on to his late fifties, his life was essentially separated between keeping the family properties in line on the social standpoint, and wasting days and nights away in Buck Mansion's rear tower, which he'd converted into his personal library.

In his fifty-second year, however, Governor Philip Allen introduced him to Evangeline Keyes, a doe-faced young widower of some twenty-seven years. He was instantly smitten, and began to move Heaven and Earth in his attempts to spend time with her, this including a temporary relocation to Portland that lasted two years. Those twenty-four months saw him throw the Buck family's woes out the window and bring a young boy into the world, whom he had christened as Nicholas Alfred Buck.

By 1854, the little family was back in Rhode Island, following Eliphas' insistent demands that they return home. A single Buck couldn't shoulder a struggling financial empire, especially not one who was known to lose his temper in fairly destructive ways, if pushed too far on some nights.

For a while, the trio brought some joy into the perpetually darkened halls of the manor house. Records remaining from that period indicate that while he was aging, Zeb was as loving and as attentive a father as the period's social mores dictated. He didn't play much with his son, nor did he lavish him with outright affection, but he did his very best to prepare another young mind for the task of keeping the family name afloat. By the standards of that period, that was role-model stuff, indeed. Private records showed that behind the Alpha Male poise, he was deeply enamored of that little life he'd brought into the world. If he'd lived in a later decade, you probably would've seen him crawling about on all fours with his toddler, driving his five year-old to school and showing the kind of interest in his own hobbies that we've come to expect as being normal.

In 1862, however, tragedy struck. Buck Island had always been known for its fairly Gothic marshlands, covered with half-sunken tombstones and with serene little paths of white stones indicating a very narrow safe passage between weeping willows and patches of ground having more in common with quicksand than average soil. Aged ten, young Nicholas was being introduced to the family's infamous and illustrious lineage by his mother, when a firefly and the song of a group of toads caught his attention. The ground beyond the white stones looking safe to his untrained eye, he took a few steps forward...

With Eliphas locked in the basement for the night and Zeb up in his tower, the surrounding trees swallowed the mother and child's calls for help. By the time the foggy nighttime sky cleared and the aging father heard them, it was too late. Nicholas was lost to the marshlands and Evvie was pulled out in extremis. She never did recover, however, having always suffered from fragile lungs. Sludgy water spread infection throughout her respiratory system, and she died of pneumonia two weeks later.

As could be expected of Eliphas, his confidence in the family motto allowed him to bow his head, shed a few polite tears and then buckle down and go back to work. Zebediah was much more sensitive, however, and had tasted of genuine happiness before. The family scholar was devastated. Legend has it that the only Buck to have wept as much as Zeb would be the first Buck, the very first recipient of the family's curse. Fairly grandiose tales some grandparents like to pull out of the mothballs on Halloween involve Old Zeb spending years howling his sorrow at the moon every single night.

The truth is, while observing the Victorian traditions of year-long funereal wear, Zeb only spent two weeks paralyzed with heartbreak. On a fittingly dark and stormy night, after one too many drinks to try and calm his nerves, he landed on the idea that would change the course of his life.

Again, some say he rushed up to his tower and never came down until it happened. This time, the hearsays wouldn't be far from the truth. Zeb literally melted over the next year, running on coffee fumes and the erratic energies self-imposed drunkenness can give, or rechannelling hangovers into purposeful energies. The wordly family representative was gone, replaced by someone who was growing obsessed with the Sciences, the Art, and specifically how to use either or both of them to reverse the ultimate outcome of life. Shelley's Frankenstein became more a source of epistemology-related inspiration to him than a simple tale of fiction, and he began to twist and weave the family's maintained good ties to the Old Country to have rare, old and sometimes forbidden books shipped to him by any means necessary. Some were purchased, some were stolen, some books ended up with the blood of innocents on their pages – not of this mattered to him. It didn't even matter to him that he was starting to sound like John Cleese stuck with a sore throat. He worked until he collapsed where he stood, usually, then woke up, shoveled food in his mouth and worked some more.

In 1865, the family's reputation for having an affinity for the bizarre and the morbid was in full swing. Something of a forerunner of the spiritualism craze that would shake Great Britain, Zeb pioneered all sorts of fairly odd arcane gewgaws and knicknacks he never could assemble in a working order, not being a mage. He consulted several, however, to the point where he became something of the Eastern seaboard's most known mundane collaborator in arcane sciences. His draft books are filled to the brim with spirit camera designs, modified wax cylinder players intended to pick up on ethereal voices. More than anything, however, his meeting with a shyster calling herself Madame Zara would be of pivotal importance.

Madame Zara was born Eugenia Phyllis, yet another case of poverty-stricken second-generation Irish immigrants who'd stumbled on spiritualism as a money-making gig. She'd worked on all the tricks and Zeb certainly looked feverish and expectant enough to not know any better. Clad in the requisite pseudo-Arabian tunics and tiaras the period tended to demand of its witchy sorts, she expected this would be another easy two hundred dollars. What she didn't expect was for Evangeline to respond to her blatantly fake “summons” and take her over completely.

Zeb was overjoyed, but this wasn't the Evvie he'd loved. She was hard. Harsh, even. Demanding, asking that he keep silent while she detailed exactly which books to look for, which formulas to prepare, and how mages went about tapping into ley lines. Little Nicholas looked hardly better at all, appearing as a vacant-eyed shade with no other word than “Papa” on his lips.

In May of 1865, the stage was set. What Zeb assumed to be an incarnation ritual was just about ready. Preparation had left him feeling about a tenth of the sort of sensitivity to magical forces even your weakest of mages experienced, but he misunderstood that to be a sign of deep, slumbering power. It didn't help that Evvie and little Nick's ghosts never did leave him, gradually appearing as wandering, clearly restless spirits around the mansion's premises.

He eventually made the mistake of confusing one of the earliest instincts a mage in training develops – the sense of when something will absolutely go wrong – for a sign that he was mentally prepared. Jittery and nervous, he climbed up to his tower, prepared the circle and reached for Buck Island's impressive store of arcane energies.

He was in control for maybe five, six seconds. Then his fingernails cracked, pain, blood and blue-white light welling forth. Before long, his mind lost all semblance of focus on the spell he'd wanted to work on. All he remembers is Evvie appearing before him, her features distorted with an inhuman level of rage, howling her anger at him and showering him with insults for even daring to fail. Blue-white fire consumed him.

When he woke up, Eliphas was standing over him. He was in bed, and half of his face was gone. The half that was left was swelling, decaying a little bit more with each passing minute and spreading an awful stink.

He'd failed. He'd failed and been transformed into something he considered to be monstrous, as a punishment. A few days passed, until his maudlin demands to be chained up in a coffin and dropped in the marshlands almost pushed Eliphas over the edge. Not caring how traumatic this would be for Green Island's resident surgeon, he dragged his brother into town and paid the physician a small fortune for him to essentially flay the still-maturing lich down to the bones. There'd finally be an end to the soiled bed sheets and clothes, at least.

By the sixteenth of May, Zebediah Buck had been stripped of his flesh and slowly, steadily boiled. Instead of growing soft, his bones turned chalk-white and seemed to resonate a little more with stored arcane power. Eliphas showed that he did have some of his own arcane knowledge to show, thanks to this, and at least allowed his brother to recover some semblance of nobility. A clean skeleton would be notably less traumatic for most people than a decaying corpse. The family had standards to maintain, after all.

The passing of time would turn Zeb's weeping into moments of funereal thoughtfulness and his regret into rampant negativism. His fear and love for Evvie and Nicholas would take the back seat while he'd grow to consider their shades to be passive and permanent fixtures in the residence. The habit of drinking to keep the deeper stretches of the doldrums away would turn into a refined take on alcoholism, and the ever-increasing development of technology along with the torrent of new faces for each new era would endure he'd eventually feel utterly disconnected from Hope and its characterizing issues.

By 2025, Zeb has turned into an utterly careless jerk who tends to consider basic antagonism as a valid social skill, largely because he values that everything he did care for is dead and gone. If it isn't, it's grown fangs or has the gall to also have turned into a lich and to sprout a decent command over via while he's spent decades trying to achieve some of that with little success. His wife's howling anger feels like background noise on some nights, and his very own son has turned into the sort of thing you'd regard with passive disinterest – like someone else's annoying pet.

On the very rare occasion he does leave the mansion's grounds – usually because Madeline is dragging him out by his jacket's lapels and ordering him to socialize a little – he tends to end up nipping from his flask in the middle of the public library's restricted Arcane Theory section, or to loiter around with a fat wad of cash to burn. Specialized libraries, brothels, bordellos and legitimate gentlemen's clubs are part of his usual haunts, along with the city's smattering of galleries. Status and continued influence are the only things keeping him from having a criminal record consisting of a slew of mild offences. Crashing up-scale parties or swallowing flies on park benches like some kind of luxury hobo are some of the more common things you'll find him doing, downtown.

Considering, he doesn't have that many friends or contacts outside of the family. Few people know him as more than one of the town's eternal fixtures, and most locals are deluded into thinking they know him because of kid-friendly public television Flanderizations of the Buck clan's influential past. Children tend to poke him or stare at him until they can take a moment to ask for some kind of trick, at which point Zeb tends to pretend to fall apart in order to terrify the little brats into leaving him alone.