***<br/><strong>Name:</strong>Reginald Barker<br/><strong>Character Type:</strong>Initiate<br/><strong>Appearance:</strong>(http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn301/robsanderson001/Jason%20Whitfield/JasonWhitfield14-1.jpg)<br/><strong>Age:</strong>19<br/><strong>Sex:</strong>Male<br/><strong>Sexual Preferences:</strong>Bisexual<br/><br/><strong>Skills:</strong><br/>Contacts -- Reginald may not be great shakes at much, but he's got<em>a lot</em>of friends on the internet, and some of them really know their shit. If something weird's going down, he can usually get in touch with someone more in the know and get some 411 PDQ.<br/><br/>Danger Sense -- Reginald has an extremely well-honed sense of impending danger, mostly thanks to an abusive home life and plenty of practice avoiding the usual school bullies. As a result, he's not exactly Lionheart, but he makes up for it by knowing how to rabbit with the best of them. If there's a hiding spot or a quick exit anywhere nearby, it's a sure bet Reginald can find it, and in a hurry.<br/><br/><em>Book of Sorrows</em>-- During one of his weekly library crawls, Reginald discovered this book tucked away in the Suspense and Horror Fiction sections he usually haunted, almost as though it were left there just for him. He'd never seen it before, and when he showed it to the librarian on duty, the old woman informed him there was no such book in their files and told him to stop wasting her time. Reg took the book home and began rifling through it, and discovered it was filled with arcane spells and incantations. At first, Reginald wrote it off as some hokey old hoax and shelved it with his comics and back-issues of<span class="bbc_u">Phantasmagoria</span>. But every night since he discovered it, he's felt a strange tingle in the back of his head, as though that book is calling out to him. As if it wants him to read it...<br/><br/><strong>Occupation:</strong>Reggy scored a part-time job as an usher / concession-stand worker at Cobb's Theater, often as the only member of a skeleton crew. The pay sucks, but it's  enough to at least let him pretend to a little self-sufficiency, and it keeps him out of the house.<br/><br/><strong>Backstory:</strong>Reginald was born in Cape Merrin, and according to his mother it's where he'll die. After an unremarkable grade- and high school career, Reggy tried to move out and escape her domineering control, but luck (fate, destiny, whatever the hell you'd wanna call it) just wasn't on his side. Every job he tried fell through, his first apartment was flooded when his upstairs neighbors busted their water main, and his second turned out to be under seige by militaristic rodents. In the end, he was forced to call it quits and move back home, much to his despair.<br/><br/>When he was younger, Reginald had a great relationship with his father. A good man, Sebastian Barker was, kind and patient, and little Reginald thought he hung the moon. The darkest day of Reggy's life was the day they laid him in the ground, a cold and rainy September morning when he was only seven. That was also the day he realized he lived with a genuine, honest-to-God monster. His mother never missed an opportunity to harangue him, and she used every weapon in her considerable arsenal. Oh, she never laid a hand on him, though; her methods were much crueler, and left far worse scars. Every day she offered her son a new lesson on how pathetic, how worthless, how insignificant he was, and ever night she reminded him how much she wished he'd never been born.<br/><br/>That he even made it<em>to</em>puberty, much less through it, was a miracle. Reginald eventually realized his imagination was his only real escape, that the only place he would ever be safe was his own mind, and he lost himself in books, in movies, in journaling. When he was fifteen he discovered the internet, a wonderous place filled with like-minded people who really listened to what he had to say. Through a few chat and email acquaintances he discovered sites that dealt with the bizarre, the unexplained, and the occult, and he's been fascinated ever since. Even though he's a bit of a skeptic at heart, Reginald truly wants to believe, but how can he? Nothing cool or interesting ever happens in Cape Merrin...