Malachy Lynch
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Malachy is a travelling dealmaker who will solve your problems - for a price. He dresses like a well-off man and has a rather large, rather hulking manservant named Stanz.

Info

Full Name: Malachy Lynch
Age: 28
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown

Status: Alive
Occupation: Dealmaker
Origin: Dublin, Ireland
Allegiance: Independent

First Seen: A Balancing Act
Last Seen: None

Description:
In times like these, it's easy to tell a well-off man from one who has come on hard times. Malachy is certainly in the category of well-off, if his clothing, grooming and carriage is to be believed. He is not especially tall at 5'8". He's lean in the ways attributed to nature rather than malnutrition. His nails are neatly manicured, and his dark hair is habitually combed neatly and slicked to the sides. He's something of a babyface. He's one of those men who seems perpetually stuck in time. His eyes are dark and expressive, capable of looks of gentle innocence and unpredictable and sudden rage. The unpredictable nature of his facial expressions hints at the changeability of the man beneath.

His suits look expensive, well-kept and classic. There is nothing extreme about anything, either towards new fashion or old. It's a neutral sort of class, with neat jackets, tailored slacks and sturdy shoes. The material shows very few signs of wear, which suggests money to burn on clothing, a complete lack of work that would wear those clothes out, or some kind of magical intervention - or all of the above.

Family:

  • Aiofe Lynch, younger sister
  • Ciaran Lynch, father
  • Anna Lynch, mother (deceased)

Portrayed by: Andrew Scott


History

Malachy Lynch was born just outside of Dublin, in an area that was a suburb before the world went to hell. His family were stubborn holdouts who refused for a very long time to move away from the city's ruins. It was only when Malachy was seven that the family moved to a small settlement that had grown up on the lands surrounding the Hill of Tara. It was a pilgrimage, brought on by the sickness of Malachy's younger sister, Aoife. The doctors had more or less ruled out any kind of mundane intervention, so the Lynch family moved to Tara to seek the healing powers of a group of mage monks who lived nearby.

The healers would not even consider helping Aoife until the Lynch family pledged themselves to the Tara settlement and their goal of reestablishing the clans and naming new Kings of Ireland based on the ancient ways that only existed in fragmentary texts. They saw the ruin of the world as a call to adopt the most ancient ways they could find. It really was a fringe group with little political weight, but the monks' power went a long way to convince desperate families to pledge. So it was that the Lynches became pledged to the fledgling Kingdom of Tara. True to their word, Aoife was helped, though not healed entirely. Malachy's father grew bitter and resentful of both the Tara healers and Aoife for getting ill and requiring their pledge. So when Malachy started getting ill too, his anger grew.

Malachy had always been a quiet, withdrawn child with an inner life far richer than the outer one. He was watchful, contemplative and unassuming. His sickness came on suddenly. There had been a large polecat that was often spotted outside his window. Despite the knowledge of mages, his parents refused to believe he might be one. They didn't want that trouble, so they denied it. That denial nearly cost Malachy his life. It was the monks who saved him, because they realized what he was. The young boy, only eight at the time, needed to feed on the life energy of other people in order to survive.
It took months for Malachy to learn how to feed on people without causing them too much harm. He was treated with fear by most of the Tara villagers, but the monks were more sympathetic. He was called everything from a vampire to an incubus, to some other kind of unholy demon. When a child is treated that way, well, he's bound to start believing some of it. In a fit of childhood foolishness, Malachy fed as deeply as he could from a boy who had been bullying him. He stopped short of killing him, but the boy was unconscious for nearly a month.

After that, the villagers lost all trust in him. Malachy's own family began to fear him. He spent more and more time with the monks -monks who were far from holy or altruistic. Monks who weren't really monks at all, in fact, but mages who did not hesitate to use their abilities to gain power and influence. These were the men the impressionable young man learned from. He might have stayed with them, but for his need to feed. The town quickly banded against him and refused to let him feed from them. The monks' population was too small to sustain him, as each person needed a week or more between being fed upon to do so safely. Later in life, he would learn how to feed less frequently. But through puberty, his body demanded more energy. At fourteen, he struck out on his own.

It was with the guidance of his familiar - the creature he knew best as a polecat named Bricne, that allowed him to discover there was more to his ability than simple feeding. He discovered he could change the energy once inside him, and give it back to the person he fed from, granting them one-use magical abilities. He now had a way to survive - something to bargain with.

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His bodyguard, Stanz.

Over the next ten years, Malachy became highly adept at wielding his magic and weaving deals. He started off barely scraping by, but ended up being fairly well-off. He moved frequently and tried to stick to bigger settlements. The smaller ones would sometimes band against him, either out of suspicion or because they believed he was exploiting them. And, well, he was. He found a certain amount of joy in making rough deals, especially if he didn't like the person he was dealing with.

The blessing of Malachy's power was that it brought him creature comforts and wealth that most people only dreamed of. He would minimize the negative consequences of his deals in exchange for money and goods. He would even occasionally forgo negative consequences for the client at all (and took on harm himself, though not as extreme as it would have been for his client) if the money was good enough. The curse of his power was that he could never stay anywhere for too long. People would either get greedy and try to exploit him, or they would band against him and drive him out of town. He found one or two places where he stayed longer, but he inevitably moved on to greener pastures.

Now Malachy Lynch has come to Dornie, and he's come ready to deal. He's arrived with a manservant named Stanz in tow. Stanz doesn't say much, but he's big and bulky enough to stave off physical intimidation. If prompted, Stanz will mumble something about a deal that keeps him bound to Malachy.


Personality

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Malachy Lynch is an arrogant, petty man in a lot of ways. He's got something of a persecution complex and is someone who was bullied and picked on pretty much his whole life. He has the habit of striking out at people before they have a chance to strike at him, whether that be through making a bum deal in magical transactions, barbed words, or, on occasion, an actual fist to the face. He has erratic, whimsical moods. He can be generous to his clients one minute, even sympathetic, and then especially and needlessly cruel the next.

He is not without some empathy. He admires people with courage and conviction. His power has meant he sees human greed and desperation more than anything else. The fear he was treated with as a child has also shaped him. Still, he's not all bad. He could simply roam the countryside, feeding off unwilling victims. Instead, he chose a way that would let him live in normal society - if only for a time. He does spend his life helping people. True, by doing that he helps himself. However, some of the deeds in the past could almost be called heroic, and it's not as if he can choose to grant the favours without a cost. He would very soon die if he took on the price himself.

In short, Malachy is a man very firmly in the gray area - at least for now. He has the potential to be more altruistic, or to turn into an evil and sadistic man.


Magic

Malachy has the ability to ingest the life energy of other people (or other living things, though human energy sustains him the best.) In fact, he needs to do this in order to survive. If he doesn't feed from someone at least once every two weeks, he will begin to grow weak and sickly, though it will take some time for him to die. He can also feed off crops and animals, though it takes acres of crops and say, two large cows to sustain him the same as feeding off a human to the point where they'd feel weak for five or six days. For the longest time, all he did was simply ingest energy to sustain himself. But with practice and guidance from his familiar, he learned he could do more.

Malachy can charge the energy as he ingests it. He transforms it within himself into a one-use spell. The magic is then given back to the original target, and they can activate the spell. It comes with a positive and a negative effect. An example would be healing an ill person. If a man wanted to heal his sick daughter, Malachy would feed off the man, give him back the energy, then the man would lay his hands on the daughter and she would be healed. The spell also exacts a price. The man might develop a terrible infection on his arm that would cause it to be amputated. Or, acres of his crops would be blighted and die. The cost is usually slightly more (subjectively) than the positive effect. He is capable of sparing his "clients" the price, but that takes a physical toll on him (usually long bouts of exhaustion) so he is usually not keen on doing that. He has been known to minimize the negative effect in exchange for some kind of monetary compensation.

Something happens during this exchange that sustains Malachy almost as well as straight feeding (though he has to do two deals to get the same energy as one feeding.) It sustains him more if he makes the negative effect significantly greater than the positive one. He cannot cause someone to die outright, or afflict them with something fatal. He also cannot raise the dead. Since Malachy can't kill, a person cannot pay a price high enough to resurrect the dead.

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Malachy can be cruel. True, he needs to sustain himself - but most of the time, he could be kinder about it. In fact, he seems to get a sort of sick pleasure out of making the cost high (and sometimes ironic.) It all depends on if the person approaches him with respect, if they threaten him, or if their request is particularly selfish. The above scenario with the man with the sick daughter happened in a small village in England. Although the man lost his arm, he was deeply grateful to Malachy and found it to be a fair deal. In another instance, an arrogant young son of a well-off farmer came to him to get a girl to fall in love with him. The young man threw his weight around and threatened Malachy. So Mal did the spell and the beautiful young woman fell in love with him. But the young son soon found that women no longer interested him at all. The "negativity" of a spell's effect is subjective and dependent on the subject. For instance, losing material goods might not be such a big deal to someone who has learned to live without, but it might cause real pain to someone who is greedy and covetous. It's a balancing of karmic scales, based on the pain or pleasure of the person who activates the spell.

Malachy cannot undo his own spells. Other mages have the potential to, but with negative consequences both for the client and for Malachy himself. In fact, it's also dangerous for the person trying to undo it. It's like trying to untie a taut plastic band. When it's released, the ends snap out in sometimes uncontrollable fashion, unleashing both positive and negative energy as it resets. It's a messy business - something that Mal makes clear before he makes a deal. There are no take-backs.

There are usually two ways that Malachy will approach a deal. He will offer the client the option to let him choose the negative effect, or have the negative effect dictated to him. The second will always be harsher than the first. This is not a necessity of his spellworking, but rather a strategy to get his clients to respect both him and his magic. He likes to be the one with the advantage and doesn't like to be dictated to. There are also two ways he can perform the spell. One is to pull the energy from the mouth from a few inches away. This takes longer, but is far gentler on the client. The other is to pull it from the solar plexus. This is far faster and painful for the client. Which method he uses depends on the client and his own whimsy. Both are equally effective.

Things Malachy can do: save or blight crops, heal, influence people and decisions (to love, to change their mind on a subject), repair broken objects, find knowledge or locate a person/thing, bestow/remove a talent or a hindrance, remove or restore senses. What he cannot do is call anything into existence. He cannot make things appear out of thin air. The object or person can be seen as having an energy spectrum, and Malachy is able to slide the scale one way or another, into the negative or the positive. Each person's sphere of things connected to them metaphysically makes up the pool from which Malachy can draw from. Family members, worldly possessions, cherished objects - all of these things connect to a person or persons. This is the collateral. If new energy flows into that pool, something else must be displaced.

Malachy is unable to work this magic without first passing it through someone else. He cannot - or rather, he has not learned how to give himself something or remove it. He's a conduit only, though technically, a client could ask for something involving him. It remains to be seen how the energies might interact in a case like that.