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[trestle]

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Name: Will

Age: 40+

Contact: mythotica#0741 or mythotica

Character(s) in game: none

Permissions: here

→ CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Pope Creek

Age: Appears late 20s, closer to 100.

Canon: original based on cryptid folklore

Canon point: n/a

History:

Cw: animal harm, sacrifice, attack on a child. based on legends of a cryptid in Kentucky

The first sightings of the monster known as the “Goat-Man” started in the city of Louisville around the late 1960s. A ghost story told around campfires and on late night walks through the area, the story told of a beast that was part man and part goat that stalked a trestle of the Norfolk Southern Railway. Some say he’s like a troll under a bridge, watching and waiting from the shadows. Some have died, chased along the tracks by a being with glowing eyes and an axe, or was it a baseball bat? Maybe he wasn’t chasing at all and it’s just his voice, calling out in the dim and the fog.

The truth is that most have no clue the truth about the monster of the Pope Lick Creek Trestle. Even though some have lived through his attacks. They’ve even seen the beast and described it, but in the end, it’s just a legend, a story to tell to scare friends. Or is it?

Some of those stories talk of a circus freak who abandoned a train car as it went over the trestle. Falling from that height he was disformed and turned feral. It’s a classic story told time and again but it’s nothing close to what happened.

The boy had been the youngest of nine children. Hopefully the last according to his mother. A woman with too much to do and too exhausted to worry about the child too much. As he grew, he developed an affinity for the goats on the farm and his mother was glad to leave him to spend hours and even days in the fields tending to them. He took care of himself, gave all his love to the goats and that was life. He learned to read from his sisters and stole every book he could get his hands on to read while he lay among the clover beneath the sun.

Until his goats began to disappear. One after another, they vanished from the field. Barely a lad of ten, he set out to discover the truth of what had happened to his beloved goats. Watching as a neighbor snatched up another of the goats, he followed the man… and learned a horrifying secret.

He found him in the middle of a star painted on the ground, candles lit in the dead grass that could easily send so much of his dead farmland up in smoke, and he had the goat tethered there in the middle of the circle. Before the boy could react, a knife flashed through the candlelight and the goat was dying.

He was barely ten, and the man was old and grizzled but the boy launched himself at him anyway. He swung little fists and kicked out as hard as he could, but he soon found himself on the run, cuts on his arms, and crying out for help with a sound that was much like the bleating of his beloved goats.

His feet pounded over hard dirt and then skipped along the boards of the train tracks. He’d run just where the man wanted him, already wondering if the ancient being he called on would be more willing to grant him what he asked for if he offered him the boy.

The knife flashed through the air, cutting into his shoulder. The boy toppled, falling headlong from the train trestle and, as he did, he called out for help. His blood spilt, a sacrifice made, and his wish granted as a train whistle cut through the air and even as the man ran for the other side, he was caught by the train and crushed beneath the steel and steam of the train.

The boy crashed into the ground and the world went black.

He came to changed and different, his wish for help granted by the same dark being that the farmer had been communing with. His face now elongated with a wet nose and wide set circular eyes. Horns curved from his skull and hooves touched the ground where his feet should be. His muscles were tight and compact, with shaggy hair along his neck and shoulders.

It was a monstrous shifting that not only changed a boy and had taken a man’s life, but had also brought on a flooding that nearly took out the city the trestle ran through and destroyed farms for miles around the river. People and belongings were scattered and farms had to be rebuilt and, in the process, they explored areas they hadn’t before. People expanded out, moving further from the river and respecting the creeks that flowed through the lands. And that is where the legends began.

Sightings of a strange and massive creature became legend and legends led to visitors. The boy found a need to hide, to learn to camouflage himself as he hid in the muddy holes around the creek and under the gnarled roots of trees. Yet as he grew, these hiding places became harder and harder to crawl into and one day, when hunters came through, he panicked and wished all they saw was the now coltish teenager he should have been.

And they did.

Suddenly there was less fur and his horns felt painful as they seemed to slide back into his skull. His legs felt misshapen but when the men saw him, they asked what he was doing out there like that. Confused and uncertain, he pointed down the road and even as he held his breath, they walked away with laughter and talk of boys and trains.

It was the first time he had shapeshifted from his new form, but he had nothing but desperate need and time so he practiced every day. Practiced drawing his horns in and twisting his legs so his knees faced forward. He practiced how to talk, his voice low and echoing around the trestle so that it resembled many voices, or just one that was younger than his own. He learned to pretend at being human but, in the end, he could fake it. But that was all it was. Pretending.

He wasn’t human and hadn’t been for many decides the first time someone came down to the trestle looking for him. Not looking for a lost boy but looking for a man with a goat’s head and twisted legs who was known to haunt the trestle. They were scared when they heard him. He was angry they came out there when no one had been there for the child he had been. Both went over the side but one hung on. A legend began.

Nearly a hundred years later the legend still exists. The difference is that the Pope Lick Trestle monster is rarely seen. Some think they’ve heard it. Others talk of a soft voice late in the night that calls for them up on the trestle. Maybe it’s imagination or maybe it’s real. Either way there’s a man by the name of Pope that often lounges across the base of the train posts, looking amused with himself and chatting with those that come through. Especially at dawn and dusk. Maybe he has some answers.

He doesn’t stray far from the trestle most days, unsure of the magic that brought him into being but seeking to warn others off from the trestle. Or maybe he just means to throw them off. In the end, the results is often the same.

Personality:

• Charming: Years of watching mankind and how they interact and needing a means of luring others in, Pope has learned the art of charm to the point that, mostly, he’s not even faking it anymore. He likes interacting with others, friendly and curious about people to the point of being invasive but it’s always done with a smile and dimples and the soft rolling sound of an accent he’s worked hard to cultivate and keep over the years. The result is a man who comes off like an open booking, seeking to get to know those who cross his path. Easy with a bright smile, truly and genuinely open to getting to know others, though that charm is superficial at best. Charm is a weapon he wields. He’s just learned to do it so well that it often leaves him eager to please, needing to draw others in, no matter the form or reason.
• Emotionally Unstable: A mixture of an emotionally stunted childhood and the cause of his transformation and changes, Pope is deeply emotionally unstable, despite mostly being unaware of this himself due to his lack of socialization around people for a deep and meaningful relationship. He can suffer from bouts of anger and madness brought on by the deep seated trauma of his murder that often lead to a need to let out his emotions in volatile and aggressive ways. His moods can run the gamut, shifting in days or even hours with the right stimuli, leaving him often lost to his emotions rather than to logic, swinging from violent to needy for human interaction at a moment’s notice.
• Sensation Seeking: In a constant struggle to try and feel things as others do, as he should as the person he sometimes pretends to be, Pope finds himself constantly on a hunt for new sensations. Not only in driving others through fear and madness, but experiencing things physically, mentally, and emotionally. It’s a constant need that often plays into his emotions, causing spirals of neediness as he seeks out others, as well as a desire for the same sort of emotions he desires to cause in others; fear, terror, panic.
• Cruel: Often hidden by the charm and attention seeking that makes up a large part of Pope’s personality, beneath it all he is a being born from cruelty and he can’t help his desires when it comes to others. A bit to give into the being that brought him back from the dead and in part to the nature of the beast he’s become, Pope finds himself craving things from others no one ever wants to give up. Pain and fear and blood. Oftentimes it manifests in the psychological which is what he’s literally a legend for. Haunting noises to draw people out. Manifesting in his true form to see how the mind, and the fight or flight response, handles it. But it’s not always about scaring people literally to death. Sometimes he has to help them along physically, and he’s neither quick nor neat about it.
• Machiavellian: All of what he is, how he has learned to be, is a result not only of the trauma of his life, but the nature of a beast designed by something inhuman and inhumane. Years of only having himself to communicate with, before and after his death, have helped him become a man who believes he is smarter than others, more suited to be in control, and who uses all he has to do just that. Wicked jokes and elaborate ideas on how to use others for his needs has cultivated a man who is manipulative as he is charming. Fear only works if you know just how to use it to your advantage, and he has spent decades mastering the art of using others, of twisting them, of doing what he can, to get what he craves. Fear and terror and panic and, yes, sometimes death.

Suitability: Pope has spent nearly a century in the same town, not straying far from the trestle where he died. In truth, he thought there was no way for him to leave, having experienced darkness and pain when he’s tried decades ago. Finding himself in a place where he’s being watched but out of that small place? He’ll go along and see what it’s like but will assume the same since he knows there’s an agency and others involved. That said, he’ll genuinely be curious about playing around and seeing what happens. Between his own curious nature, and the desire to experience new things, he’ll not see a reason at first to just take off and see what he can find. Explore the world, look into weird things, and maybe get to torment some people along the way? Sure, sign him up.

Powers/Abilities:

• Shapeshifting: Requires feeding. Shifting for Pope is a conscious thing as it suits him, allowing him to go between his human form that he’s evolved and his natural goat-man form. It normally takes a lot of willpower and energy and why he often stays in one form or the other for lengths of time. This shapeshifting in game will require entity feeding to be able to shift back and forth and his “default” form for protection and safety will be his human form. There is no partial shifting for him. He’s either human or goat-man with nothing in between. Due to the mechanics of the game, his default start setting will be set to human, and therefor will have to feed to shift to Goat-Man form as well as back to it.
• Hypnotic voice: Requires feeding. Through force of will, Pope can bring a hypnotic quality to his voice. It allows him to mimic things like a baby's cries and sobs for help, or can be used for any words such as calling to another. The sound of his voice in this way will draw people in, leaving them in a mild hypnotic state. It can leave them suggestible as well as unaware of their surroundings. The hypnosis does wear off after a few minutes, though it can be just enough to leave them vulnerable and unaware for other attacks. Or, as he did back home, just long enough for them not to notice a train coming.
• Strength and durability: Does not require feeding. Even in his human form, Pope has the strength and durability of his true self. Therefore his weight is heavier than it should be, his mass denser. He can run further than most but he’s not fast, climb like he’s made for it, and has strength about double that of a human body builder of the same size.
• Enhanced senses: Does not require feeding. All of his senses are on par with a natural goat. Due to his rectangular pupils, his eyesight is sharper than humans, as well as offering him a wider bit of peripheral vision as well as binocular vision and enhanced night vision. He also has an enhanced sense of smell and taste that allows him to pick up prey as well as worrying about things such as poisons left for him in his natural habitat.

Entity Affinity: The Hunt. Pope spends his days luring people out, trapping them, and then herding them over a trestle to trap them between himself and a train. He takes great delight in what he does, finding it a fun game. Even if they “win” and don’t die one way or another. In game he will gladly continue to feed the Hunt because it’s something he enjoys too much to give up.

Inventory: Standard fare here. The clothes on his back: jeans, shirt, jacket, boots. Dark sunglasses. No identification. No money.

Samples: tdm samples