William Spector

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IamLEAM1983
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William Spector

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Name: William Spector
Age: current shell is 47, consciousness is thousands of years old
Gender: male
Species: Wyldfae, Wisp

Strengths: initially conceived as the male reproducive element for a breed of hunter-killer Wyldfae, Spector has access to all the expected cunning and ruthlessness of an alpha predator, while Oberon's fairly recent influence has subsumed these lethal tendencies under a healthy dose of basic morals and societal considerations. This results in Spector being more than a wolf in sheep's clothing, and more akin to a securely tamed predator. Sapience being an obvious advantage in this situation, the likelihood of Old Man Winter's Oath and his process of reformation failing is reassuringly low, if not nonexistent.

In practice, this means Spector has the means to investigate, track and kill any targets he is mandated to pursue as well as those his own line of duty puts in his way; while also being able to operate in a reasonably social manner. This results in a new behavioural pattern for those Wisps that have followed him. You could consider his most direct brood to be a safely tamed variation on the greater subspecies. Via and further efforts by the Fae are both being expended to eventually result in the emergence of a new female Wisp, essentially a second Queen that would be more closely in line with the needs and expectations of Titania and Oberon's courts.

Normally, the consciousness of a White King is the product of a psychic process that is still poorly understood, but which is known to occur in the Queen's own mind. Essentially creating something resembling a classic Wanderer's sustained soul, the current Queen is free to somehow recall this mental seed, regardless of the distance between herself and her recently slain mate, and to bestow it upon a drone of her choosing. This results in a form of indirect immortality. While Spector is still quite vulnerable to all the usual banes and foibles of the Fae, his current consciousness is the product of a waking mind that's thousands of years old. This, interestingly, is now a sizable tactical advantage that's in Oberon's hands, and not Mab's.

It'd be fair to consider him as the definitive Wisp, a culmination of centuries of mental refinement and of the White Queen's choosing of her best drone in recent memory. Unfortunately for her, her best psychic seed and body have now fallen to what we'd consider to be the good guys. She's created another seed and selected another body, but the new, official White King currently pales in comparison to the physical and intellectual capacities Oberon has stolen for Warmest Winter and, technically, Brightest Summer as well.

Spector's chief advantage rests in how he is able to remain entirely undetectable to the naked eye, if need be. While classical veils are things he routinely applies to himself – obviously in order to appear human – he can render himself entirely invisible and inaudible. This, on the other hand, plays havoc on standard video-based consumer electronics, regardless of how well 2025's technology copes with practitioners. Years after the “Slender Man” ARGs have ended, he still is able to destroy HD camcorders or head-mounted cameras by sending a bit of focus in their general direction.

Previous to receiving the Warmth of the Hearth from Oberon, Spector used to be able to exert his peculiar form of invisibility in conjunction to terror-inducing psychic prods on chosen subjects, and over long periods of time. His victims, typically terrorized into helplessness and total subservience, typically became known to the Fae as pawns of the White King. Sometimes, the effect would be so strong as to culminate into severe psychological damage. He would essentially force select individuals into abject slavery – in a means that isn't without recalling the roughly similar effects of some forms of exposure to the Black Speech.

Today, this tends to be twisted around in ways that aren't much more comforting, but which still are used for good. Even without his ability to scar others with prolonged naked fear, he stands as a worryingly effective investigator and interrogator. If someone isn't talking, all he has to do is inject a few minutes' worth of sheer, naked terror into the subject's consciousness. While this has been compared to torture by some, Spector never actively harms those people he's forced into handling harshly.

Pair his invisibility and fear-inducing mental tricks together, and you obtain a fairly explosive cocktail that's the obvious hallmark of a predator whose normal M.O. is characterized by sadistic playfulness. Even today, if someone honestly deserves a few hours of abject suffering because of some equally abject crime, he tends to supplement due process with a very unofficial and unauthorized game of cat-and-mouse.

It's little wonder, then, how he stands as one of the rare instances of authority that's able to scare Oberon's occasionally treacherous or self-serving subjects into obedience. Nobody wants the Archduke's attention – at least outside of formal events or casual meetings.

Otherwise, his arachnid nature imparts him with a frightening level of agility, while his segmented bones and extremely developed interstitial muscles give him the ability to withstand impacts that would crush lesser beings. He can be hurt – just don't expect him to bruise easily or for your classic arm-breaking holds and twists to work with purely mundane levels of torque.

The Warmth of the Hearth has also altered his feeding habits. Previously, you would've had to journey to abandoned urban locales or the thickest points in the world's forests to find torn and curiously dessicated corpses of individuals standing somewhere between ten to twenty-five years of age. The same still applies, but the age groups have become more consistent with the statistical average age for repeat offenders and career criminals – especially those originating from Faerie. Nobody's ever been lucky (or unlucky) enough to watch Spector or one of his drones feed, but he's been seen drinking various beverages and participating in casual meals as easily as anyone else, despite his total absence of a face or any recognizable oral orifices. He brings the food and drink to where you'd expect a mouth to wait – and it simply phases through his unbroken skin, emerging with a ragged bite mark that suggests the existence of barbed teeth somewhere beyond that faceless mein.

Professionally speaking, Spector benefits from his being Archduke for all of Faerie, as well as being known as one of the CIA's top instructors. You could consider him as the director for all security measures and Secret Service endeavours related to Faerie, as well as a mentor for a sizable number of plain-jane US Government officials.
Weaknesses: like all Fae, William is susceptible to becoming affected by concentrated exposures to metallic iron. Dietary analyses have confirmed that he handles iron as nutritional element as well as any other Fae and living organism. Swords and bullets made out of “cold” iron – the Fae term used to refer to unusually pure blades and ordnance – break past all of his defenses as if they weren't even there. High-iron content bullets wouldn't be worth squat against anything other than Fae and for all of his strength, Spector can be dangerously infected by this metal, this foreign agent reaching past his body's defenses and poisoning his very soul.

It doesn't help that once you've gone past his strength, resilience and speed, you find yourself with a skinny guy who doesn't have much in the way of flesh or recognizable muscles to soak up blows. When the former White King hurts, he hurts pretty badly – sometimes to the point where the considerate and analytical mind supplied to him by Oberon will recoil, leaving him acting like any wounded predator. No matter how much you'd be willing to help him, odds are he'd tear your face off without being conscious of it.

As said above, Spector being captured and sworn in by Oberon himself is a pretty serious event, akin to capturing a rival nation's mass-destruction ordnance and pointing it in its way. While Spector is quite capable on his own, as a Wisps, he ideally needs the support of a Queen. He's lost the backing he once had from his mother and mate, and is therefore currently unable to produce more drones. Arcane research on the means to create a second White Queen and to essentially turn Mab's own arcane technology against her is currently underway, but the implications that have been uncovered are unsettling, to say the least. Mab's kept the origins of the Wisps under wraps like any self-conscious tactician should, but what has been glimpsed at has led some Fae to believe that Spector should be allowed to finish his current lifetime and then be left to die honorably, as a servant and loyal subject of Warmest Winter.

Like any representative of an endangered species, Spector would very much like to reproduce. Owing to the values he's received from Oberon, however, insemination feels wrong. This goes without mentioning that he's well aware of the trying nature of being a Queen to someone and something like him. His previous mate having not been much more than a birthing machine on eight legs, he's not too keen on the idea of proposing this kind of existence to any woman.

As it stands, Bill's only option is to find a means to tap into the Centennial Tree or any other Nexus – with the consent of its guarding entity – to see if there wouldn't be a way for him to use custom spellmaking as a means to alter the biological imperatives of his species. Instead of giving birth to hundreds of initially uncontrollable miniature arachnids, maybe there'd be a way for Spector to essentially join the rest of mammalia and foster the normal growth of one child.

Finally, like any mantle, the Warmth of the Hearth is something that can be taken away from Bill. This is one of the few things that succeed in honestly terrifying him, as he honestly does not want to know what he'd do if Old Man Winter was tricked into removing his blessing while he, the Wisp, would be out in a public space...

As far as he knows, the result wouldn't be pretty.

Appearance: at almost eight feet tall and weighing barely more than a hundred pounds, Bill's true appearance challenges every single aspect of traditionally viable human proportions. His chest is narrow and a bit concave, his limbs are just sufficiently out of proportion as to inspire fear and a vague sense of disgust in most people who see him for the first time, and his total number of limbs tends to wildly vary between the humanoid standard of four and more insectile numbers such as six or eight. As all the grainy photographs dating back to before his being sworn in can attest, he is entirely faceless, with deeper creases to be found in the skin where the eyes and mouth would normally be found. His brow ridges and unseen mouth usually appear to move behind that pale, whitish skin; emoting as well as any other fully-formed organs. Oddly enough, the fact that his mouth is entirely covered doesn't seem to hamper his speaking abilities, to the point where he doesn't sound even remotely muffled.

On most occasions, his pale frame is found clad in a simple black suit, with only his white shirt and red tie adding some colour. On occasion, his investigative or bodyguard-related duties see him adding a pair of useless sunglasses to the mix, along with a wired earpiece connected to a usually unseen device that's tucked away in one of his inner jacket pockets – presumably a radio. If you were to hack his frequency or otherwise manage to convince him to let you take a listen, you wouldn't hear much more than an odd sequence of chitters and clicks. As far as anyone knows, this is how he keeps track on the constant flow of information being generated by his lesser brethren. Drones aren't exactly there yet in terms of sentience, but they've been noted for their highly observant nature and their primordial roles as advance scouts and front-line hunting units. In the modern age, the meagre hundred drones Spector's been able to muscle into following him into defection are scattered across the globe and charged with keeping an eye on various persons of interest to Terran or Faerie governance.

Drones tend to be a bit skittish and nervous in their movements, even recognizably spiderlike. Not so for the former White King, who retains the properties of his former Queen's blessing thanks to Oberon. As such, Spector can act in a very bug-like fashion if his hunting or stalking activities call for it – complete with unsettling head tilts that look like a cat playing with its prey. Generally, however, the insectile elasticity he shows tends to be tempered by a curiously human attitude, stance and general temperament. He tends to give the sense that he's very much a man who's in charge, and that this authority gives him the right to be a bit more casual in his day-to-day pursuits. His long and fluid legs will eat up the sidewalk even if he walks as a pace that would be leisurely in a human, his hands usually tied behind his back and his blank face turning about like someone who's enjoying a pleasant stroll and taking in the sights. Stare a little and you might find a contented smile behind the unbroken skin.

Considering his proportions, he does quite a few things with his body which would appear unsettling for most people, but that remain entirely casual in their purpose. If he wants to keep pace with a resident of the mortal plane, he'll wait for them to have a few good paces on him, and then start walking. He'll simply bend his supple spine forward and sometimes even a little to the side, so that his head is what's actually keeping pace with his fellow walker. He naturally tends to hover around the tallest areas of your average mundane residence and rarely asks for permission to help, if he sees the owners start to look for pots and pans they've placed in high and hard-to-reach locations. He'll simply reach out and take hold of whatever's needed.

Otherwise, his body makes it hard for him to sit primly or properly in any standard chair. As limp as he can allow himself to be, he rarely seems to experience discomfort as a result, however. Seeing him sprawled every which way in a chair or couch that's too small for him is fairly common, his peculiarly relaxed limbs suggesting sleepiness, when he's completely alert more often than not. Don't be surprised to find him sprawled upside down in a chair, for instance. He's not one to mind terribly if he rumples his suit, and would rather be comfortable if a serious discussion is required, no matter how ludicrous the final posture he might take might look.
Behaviour: as any close ally or observer of the Fae could tell you, King Oberon stands as the prime representative of what the Fae themselves have taken to calling Warmest Winter. That is, the slice of the Winter Fae that's generally made up of bon vivants, honorable scoundrels or frosty, yet dependable subjects. They don't so much represent the unforgiving and cruel nature of Winter in its rawest form as the kind of raw, bright life you could expect to find in stone manses and near roaring fireplaces. They're the Fae with the rambunctious hunting stories and tavern brawls to recant, the lovable idiots who launch into eating or drinking contests to pass away cruel blizzards outside – the guys and gals who live hard, play hard, love hard and keep screaming that the rest of Faerie needs to keep up, while Mab and Morgana's contingents are customarily told to go die in a ditch in the most humorously hateful and colourful ways possible.

This, metaphorically, is the Hearth, the source of Warmest Winter's power. If Oberon stands as the inspiration for several figures, from Odin to the Yule King and Santa Claus, he's able to impart the characteristics of his charge to anyone he deems worthy or simply in need of a serious amount of loosening-up. Essentially, Old Man Winter's layered copious doses of consideration, higher intellectual propensities, an appreciation for the finer, yet simpler things in life and occasionally bubbly people skills onto the natural inclinations of what you could justifiably call a supernatural attack dog. Spector is the wolf who's decided to go vegan after a tremendous eye-opener, a born-again eldritch predator who, underneath the stern professionalism he keeps going, now has a “personal relationship” not with any deity, but with life in general. He loves his job and adores the occasional hunt for a deserving asshole, but lazy Sunday mornings are even better and being able to drop his G-Man persona every once in a while is something he tends to welcome with a quiet sigh of relief you'll see rippling across his entire body.

The truth is, Oberon's mantle and imposed joie de vivre are making it so he can't help himself but to bite into even the shittiest of days. Being justifiably exasperated by an investigation gone awry seems to be loads more interesting to him than the most involved of hunts with a few drones taking point. The very same things he used to do with vicious abandon are now things he does grudgingly, to the point where waiting for the right drone to chitter in an update from Europe is enough to make him doze off. There's still the occasional kill that combines all the right factors to make him forget his human composure, but the Warmth of the Hearth seems to still be in the process of altering his mindset so these motherlodes are kept at a blessedly rare occurence.

More often than not, this quirky happiness of his is kept under close wraps. It doesn't do for a government official to suddenly slam a fist on the table in victory, after hearing that your favourite baseball team made it to the finals. A suit isn't expected to be able to take an honestly interested stroll through a local museum or art gallery. The grins his human veil seems tailored to dish out are things that have to be handled carefully. Emotional attachment needs to be managed, as Bill can't allow himself to genuinely care for every single case he handles, or he'd go nuts with concern. Close collaborators and friends might get occasional peeks at what's waiting past the Quantico-mandated frost, preserved like a set of dirty little secrets; but most of everyone else is likely to know him as just another spook in a suit, albeit one of the spooks that appears to be in charge.

When you pair his native tracking skills and his more recent human levels of empathy, you end up with a highly involved and focused sleuth that tends to slowly amble his way through crime scenes, his freakingly long legs enabling him to dance around police tape and lean into cordoned-off sections without disturbing the slightest fingerprint. His ties to Mab make him particularly sensitive to violent deaths and disturbing imagery, and it doesn't take much to understand that what made him a fairly disturbing sight that had enough time to turn into an Internet meme before being muzzled adequately is also what gives him fairly creepy levels of insight into the mind of the diseased and the morally corrupt. He has a very easy time thinking like the fairy tale villain he used to be, only now he does that in order to better retrace the evolution of a crime that needs to be unfolded. There's a quiet sense of relish that's associated to this activity – as Spector clearly loves being free to not only trust his instincts, but also his waking mind and deductive skills.

In short, Spector is a guy who loves being clever, but who doesn't quite present his intelligence in a way you could construe as being pedantic. Owing to his recent background as an instructor, he's much more fond of egging his fellow investigators on and of withholding what he thinks might be crucial evidence not out of some kind of sadistic amusement – although he does enjoy watching someone else's mental wheels turning – but because he genuinely believes that your average brain-noodle is something that needs to be flexed, especially when you're only starting to figure out how to think and talk Standard North American Scumbag.

Still, this works both ways. His naturally darker tendencies gave a few shadowy corners to the Hearth's lifelike glow, which has averaged out his displays of mirth and overall enjoyment. Most partying Fae from the more socially acceptable ends of Winter tend to be fairly rambunctious, but the Archduke stands apart from them in that he stands as a curiously reserved individual. In mortal circles, he becomes part of the statistical emotional average. He's not too demonstrative, not too frosty, but certainly not clownish either. Compared to other Winter folk, however, he can seem either socially dead or ignorant of social graces in general, or outright alien. His human average feels oddly weak, when compared to Oberon's collection of party animals and tavern brawl enthusiasts.

Of course, this is precisely what smooths out the monstrous qualities of his true self and makes him relatable for most folks – provided you're ready to keep your mouth shut about what he actually looks like, and provided you're okay with a fairly creepy figure hovering around, putting up a very brave game face in its attempts to act completely casual. After a while, the odd gait and flowing proportions and number of limbs tend to fade into the background, and all you'll see or hear is another middle-aged Fed trying desperately to get his five minutes of down time in with a bologna sandwich and small talk about the Mets or the Bulls.

His one problem is that the advent of augmentation technologies has forced him to warn users of ocular implants who are authorized to know of his true form that being exposed to it could strain their hardware over time and lead to slow-burning injuries.
Goals: to protect Warmest Winter and Brightest Summer at all costs, as well as all attending realms he may reach, within reason. Occasionally, to serve as the security director and personal bodyguard to Faerie's royal couple. He's the guy who plans out itineraries and rents hotel rooms, the one man who makes sure that his guard detail is not only armed, but trained and properly briefed, even in the case of milquetoast protocolar meetings.

As a CIA instructor, he has to review case files and general progress reports from most, if not all of the newly-minted agents he's associated with. The agency has several other instructors, and Spector is very much like them in that it's his job to make sure that first-timers do their job properly.

If involved as an investigator in his own right, then he'll focus on his immediate goals with all the observant qualities you could expect from a predator that's had thousands of years to perfect the art of tracking specific individuals down.

On a more personal note, he loves finding handy excuses not to attend non-crucial protocol meet-and-greets with the who's-who of Faerie... Some of these meetings are social nails on a metaphorical chalkboard to him, and others leave him an excuse to sprawl himself in his high-backed chair in as disjointed a manner as he can, with the perfect excuse that you couldn't tell if he's nodding off in the middle of a too-long six-course dinner or not.

He generally hates pomp and circumstance when it applies to himself. His natural tendencies and the Hearth melding together into a very down-to-earth persona, he prefers a simple handshake and a quick goodbye than long-winded award ceremonies or pompous reaffirmations of what barely feels like a geas anymore. Some Fae are born to complain that their bonds feel like indentured slavery, while the former White King's forced debt towards Oberon barely feels like something he'd want to be rid of. It's a leash, yes – but a leash made up of passion, dedication and generally happy thoughts. Who'd say no to that?

History: going back as far as anything Mab has ever been willing to divulge, the Wisps have been part of the Wyldfae. As far as anyone knows, the Wisps are Wyldfae. Not of the higher Sidhe, considered born of the parallel reality to our own which is Faerie and yet equal to the former Dragonborn – entirely Wyldfae in their essential culture and design. Mab ruling over things cold, dark and dead, however, one could maybe suspect that there's more to these mind-rending spider fellas than public history would assume... Unfortunately, this would be a correct assumption.

Mab's meddling in the security measures protecting Faerie for her own selfish and obscure means is something that isn't exactly recent. While the humanoids the dragons had created were still reeling from the shock of the cataclysm that destroyed their homes in the mortal plane, Mab had already formulated a risky plan. Having lost friends and family to what she perceived to be the whims of a careless or cruel creating entity, she sought to take matters into her own hands. The only authorities who could rival God in magnitude were also those who stood to gain the most from seeing His seat vacated, at least in her view of things.

Seclusion, insane dedication and the amounts of time only agelessness could afford were all needed for Mab to wrest power and guidance from Amaxi the Many-Armed, in the form of whispered plans for a race of fierce beings that had not seen the light of day yet. A man and woman were needed, both of a sufficiently corrupt, diseased or insane extract. Egypt was erecting its first simple mausoleums and ancient Babylon was still fine-tuning the shape and form of its writing system that Mab reputedly found her own Adam and Eve, a couple whose misdeeds and identity have both been forgotten throughout the passage of time. They became the first White King and Queen and gave birth to the first Wisps. No record exists of their place of marriage both to one another and to Mab, or of whether or not they existed as Fae prior to being altered. Conjecture alone is what allows most Wyldfae specialists and anthropologists to assume that the forests of Stone Age Germany stand as these tall and gaunt beings' equivalent to Mankind's own cradle, the heart of Africa.

As per the old dispositions put forth by the Gods That Were and applied by Mab, the Queen would die and be reborn whole and fresh, an entirely new individual. The White King carried both crowns, being responsible for the tracking and indoctrination of subsequent White Queens. He, on the other hand, was to exist as a singular individual throughout time, merely switching vessels if his supporting drone ever grew to be fatally wounded. So it would be throughout the centuries, the pallid “Tree Men” spreading across Europe, Asia and Africa. The King and Queen changed bodies, their central nest followed in their travels, and these faceless beings came to leave a notable mark in the stories and legends of several peoples. Central Africa gives us the myth of Anansi the giant spider, while Japan owes them the embryonic versions of the stories that would culminate in the Sengoku era as the archetype of the Obake-mono. Germany would gain stories of pale riders haunting the Black Forest, while Britain and the surrounding isles would only be touched by stories of the Wisps in a cursory manner. Every once in a great while, you'd hear about obscure, folksy beings that fit the general description of a Wisp, like the Clutchbone, along with vague rumours amongst modern Fae concerning the fact that “Indrid Cold” may have been a clumsy pseudonym constructed by a drone.

These arachnid Fae also spread to the Americas as they were discovered, soon imparting the forests of much of the East Coast with their own tales of white horrors stalking innocents through the trees. In Rhode Island, the Wampanoag would maintain a surface-level awareness of these critters and grudgingly allow some of their supposedly civilized numbers to conflate the average Wisp with the figure of the Wendigo. It wasn't accurate and those few Fae native to the New World objected, but it served an adequate purpose. All that mattered was keeping everyone, native and colonist alike, away from these creatures.

Over a century ago, Spector's nameless predecessor was the first White King to be born to a North American colony. Unfortunately, the Roaring Twenties and their strong urban expansionism made it difficult for any clutch of Wisps to remain anonymous in the New World. More than ever before, the White King had to specialize in ways in which his family would remain unseen.

The only method that did result in some success was psychological terror. Assaulting hikers and surveyors and tearing their corpses apart in the uppermost branches seemed to do the trick. For a while, forested corners of New England and New Hampshire were cut off from public access. As arcane studies and relations with Faerie were in a slump, few people were able to ascertain the nature of these grisly killers who so badly desired to be left alone. Not that Summer didn't recognize the signs, however.

Already established in Hope for some time now, Eirean was called upon in order to see if her connections in mortal society didn't contain some enlightened individuals who happened to be proficient with keeping their mouths shut and handling a gun. Summer's efforts to coordinate a plan of action went so far as to stage a rather unique gathering; a meeting of the East Coast's dryads in Chicago. The year was 1927, and everyone, from Sophia to Old Jack to some naiads and bog spirits from everyone between Burlington and Miami, agreed to enlighten the attending Viscounts on the procedure that was to be followed.

Complex veils were assembled and the following months saw fully authorized Wild Hunts crisscross the East, usually concealed in the form of travelling tourist convoys. Like Federal agents in disguise, Titania's American subjects shook Heaven and Earth in their attempt to drive out the Wisps and force them to open negotiations. Exit strategies involving a plot of land that was to be given to them in the corner of a dark and dank Louisiana swamp were proposed, but assuming that the White King would be willing to parley was foolish. He'd been born and bred to stalk and kill. Words were for the weak. If anything, he saw the generally treacherous grounds of a partially dried bayou as a perfect opportunity for an ambush.

In August of 1928, the White King bade his drones lay down their literal arms and their claws. He surrendered to Titania's expeditionary force and he and the White Queen were escorted to Louisiana. While Oberon was happy to start belting hurrahs, Titania and her men felt the need to remain cautious. That restraint is perhaps the only thing that prevented the sneak attack that followed from turning into a bloodbath.

Summer lost over forty men in the conflict that suddenly exploded, while Oberon's support force suffered only a handful of casualties. In the end, the White Queen and King were both mortally injured. It took everything she had in order to reclaim her husband and son's mantle for herself, and to bestow it on a fleeing and wounded drone.

If one thing shifts from breeding entity to entity, it's the subject's personality. The drone's hazy mind was submerged by incredible amounts of rage, sorrow and hatred. Its accession to sentience was a painful and difficult process, the agony of an ungrateful previous death making the emergence of words and general cunning an absolute slog. Where he'd previously simply been motivated by survival, his new instance was now driven by a searing need for vengeance.

First things first, however. The Queen had to be replaced.
Finding a woman with the right criteria for the peculiar crown he had to offer had never been an easy task. It took a special kind of callousness, cruelty and general licentiousness for it to stick. It took a particular kind of moral decay, something that wasn't easily found in the early thirties. If anything, the King assumed he could find what he needed in and around Chicago. Gangsters ran the show, prostitution rackets paid well, and girls were generally kept on short leashes made up of threats, drug addiction and empty promises. There had to be someone out there who'd look to his veiled self as an adequate means of escape.

Fast-forward a few years and a young, disillusioned watering hole waitress by the name of Elisabeth Davis found her apparent match in William White, the disguised White King who posed as a Federal agent. White fed her as well as her questionable proclivities, pushing her vices forward under the cover of apparent adoration. After spoiling the fruit long enough and after making a murderess out of her, he tore her mind open and revealed himself. Her response was suitably insane and self-destructive.

Davis disappeared in 1932, along with all traces of Agent Bill White. The White Queen had been restored, and the King returned to his primary duties involving the expansion of his brood. In the end, however, he'd live to pass his violent nature and searing dislike of all other Fae to his successor – and to succumb as the brood's innate laws took hold. If the King took ill or grew feeble, then the strongest drone naturally emerged as the one who would've been able to kill and eat him.

Bill White's intense hatred of the Fae quickly became a hallmark of the North American broods. European nests typically displayed aloofness or, in the worst of cases, Mab's cruel contempt for anything that wasn't of Darkest Winter. The Slender Yanks, however, went all-out in their persistent efforts to cause misery to those who had murdered one of their Queens. The drone who would go on to become William Spector was born in 1978 and became known for his unusually crafty means of inciting fear in innocents. There were Super 8 handhelds and cameras to “play” with, now, and the newest King took a rather sick amount of pleasure in being the precursor of the modern-day practice of photobombing. It took some effort and some complex instructions to relay across the hive mind and individual awarenesses, but tall and faceless beings began to grace the distant backgrounds of innocent pictures, only rarely showing up as a more distinct blur. Threatening shots involving small troupes of drones silently leading captured hikers and children away were leaked to Summer and Winter's offices alike, capitalizing on the fact that the Battle of Hope had recently put the nation on high alert.

These threats made most of everyone in Faerie and the post-Vienna Accords nervous, as the Wisps had never displayed the motivation or intellectual ability to put together any sort of long-term plan. If they attacked, it wasn't to force kids and outdoors enthusiasts into posing next to another drone, their faces slack with terror. Usually, their M.O. was absolutely practical. They killed to feed, and only to feed. This, however, was different. The so-called experts on Wisps couldn't come to a consensus: had these powers of deliberation always been there, brood-wide, hidden behind ancestrally simple needs, or had the Louisiana incident awakened something else in them, reminded them of their ties to Darkest Winter?

As Mab is sometimes said to hold grudges for thousands of years, it stands to reason that this difficult temper of hers was passed on to her creations. It was also proposed that they harbored active hatred towards the remainder of Faerie and the world alike – which would especially be true of those who had lost their forbears in the Louisiana attack.This meant that for all of their callous and cruel behaviour towards other species, the Wisps shared a strong sense of community. Perhaps this is a mark of Mab's influence being comparatively less alien than Amaxi's, but the White King clearly still mourned those who had died in the twenties.

By the eighties, Summer's community was back to square one. There was another White King to take care of, another Queen, and the associated dangers of killing them. Doing so would spread an even greater sense of enmity and justification amongst the Wisps, and Titania was powerless to intervene. The domain of Mab's creation being too remote from her own, she had to call upon her husband for assistance.

Once again, the White King was captured. This one was crafty, however, surprisingly urbane and more than willing to enslave and recruit mortals to his cause. What had been a simple chase across the Eastern countryside and its forests turned into an active investigation. The FBI was tapped, along with several local police precincts. This was one of the newfoud benefits of the Accords, in that the mundanes could be allowed to pitch their own expertise in, when faced with any and all created pawns and slaves. Cornered in a New Jersey park, he was brought back to Hope, where Eirean's Greenvale Hotel served as courtroom for Oberon and Titania.

The gaunt and faceless being did everything in his power to undermine the audiences that would follow. Most of the Greenvale's senior staff remembers how the ballroom remained off-limits to all but a select few, and of how the pallid gentleman's snarled words were clear enough for all to hear, even through closed doors. The White King, apparently the only truly sentient mind in his entire species, discredited the trial and all proceedings that had led to it. He served Mab, he defiantly claimed, and this jury had no power over him. This lasted for days, Percival's blithely calm delivery and Titania's curt addendums only stopping when a howl of rage from the incriminated being shook the room's walls.

Deliberations soon took place, with Oberon initially holding Mab's dog under a sleeping oath. As they couldn't kill the offending Fae and risk giving Mab the chance of simply restoring the King's mantle to activity through a new drone, Oberon opted to use a technique he'd developed after hearing of Anastasius Romanov's former ability to consume the minds of others. He did the exact opposite, first forcing the White King into hand-to-hand combat. Once he was exhausted, Oberon was free to place his direct bloodline's defining characteristics as an additional layer, right on top of the creature's original psyche. The Warmth of the Hearth bonded with its polar opposite from Darkest Winter, leaving the Greenvale's assembly with a shocked and disoriented creature – albeit a harmless one. Elsewhere, most of the White King's drones died as their supporting mental yoke was removed, while a few lucky individuals survived, turning into largely aimless meat puppets.

Immediate reformation took only an instant, but education was another matter entirely. Mab's hound had only learned to affect the appearance of civility, or how to blend in on a very short-term basis. Anything more involved, such as leading a productive life without being entirely beholden to the brood's survival, was something else. Years would be required before his surprisingly agile mind caught up with the social skills and general abilities of average adults, and Summer's sobering influence in the face of Winter's exhuberance allowed him to temper his newfound emotional displays. Those years were largely passed in London, and stretched from 1983 to 1992. By then, the nameless leader of the former American brood had chosen a name for himself as well as a career. He'd been taught not to expect any favors, and told that preparing on the West Coast might have been more appropriate.

From 1992 to 2001, William Spector impressed America's Fae (and America as a whole) by sticking very closely to his planned goals as a productive member of society. He constantly wore the veil of a fiftysomething gaunt and greying Caucasian male to prevent others from feeling too intimidated, and stuck to plainly normal occupations outside of his determined rise through San Francisco's police department. His years on the beat still carried his species' natural inclination towards stealth and observation, to the point where he found himself with a job offer from the CIA. His past notwithstanding, his natural abilities made him perfect agent material. He, unsurprisingly, agreed.

More years passed. By 2015, he was no longer conducting investigations personally, but instead oversaw a group of several agents working on a variety of cases. His final promotion, which came in 2018, was largely a lateral swap. The pay grade remained the same, but he'd enjoyed egging his team on far too much to miss the chance to see new operatives being trained outright, and thanks to his own methods.

Past that point, few people remembered the roaring, snarling and aggressive arachnid being that had been kept in manacles and chains of pure iron at the Greenvale. The White King had worn rumpled suits in order to appear roughly natural from afar, while William Spector cared for his image and poise, Oberon's influence allowing him to react to his own misdeeds in a pleasantly balanced fashion. All the same, the CIA's top instructor didn't garner his fame out of congeniality or a sympathetic outlook. In the middle of an investigation, you could still see smidgens of the old predator, kept on a tight leash and made to be supremely interested in sniffing out this or that forensic trail. He still sometimes chafed against the purportedly excessive nobility of some Summer folk, but also grated against the sometimes homicidal tempers some fairly contentious Winter lots could have. Considering, his base notoriety extended not so much amongst either Courts, but with mundanes. People came to know William
Spector far more than they'd known about Der Grossmann or the Clutchbone.

By 2020, Spector's contributions to Fae politics could no longer be swept under the rug. This White King had been Oberon's juciest catch and recruit in centuries, and intelligence officials for the US had very little else but praise for the supernatural intel and insider knowledge the former boogieman delivered. After shaking the hands of three US Presidents in his true form, there was really one remaining avenue for him to consider. Being made Archduke didn't really change much to his other duties, except for the occasional week in the year he finds himself forced to spend in London, in order to assemble and brief a team regarding whatever high-profile social function could be disrupted by anything from his “oldest of friends” to your usual pack of hate-mongering religious terrorists.

Today, the Archduke combines a few pied-à-terres, such as a flat in Quantico, a small apartment in Langley, Virginia, as well as a recently-built residence in Sheffield's Renton district. The first two residences are spartanly furnished drop-off points for professional inquiries, while the Renton bungalow is maybe a few coats of dust and misplaced items short of being an actual lived-in residence. London's joint Fae administration covers all expenses for a flat near Downing Street, which is also seldom used.
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