Bleakjack

Background   Jack Price grew up “that gloomy kid” long before anyone knew why. He wasn’t abused, wasn’t destitute, wasn’t lacking in looks or brains. He was just… heavy. Heavy to be around. Heavy to sit beside on the bus. Heavy in group photos where everyone’s smiling and he looks like someone already at the wake.   He gravitated to goth culture early—black clothes, funeral lyrics, horror novels, vampire fiction. It fit. It gave him a language for what he felt. But even among outcasts, Jack was different.   His jokes were always gallows humor. His presence always dimmed the room—subtly, inexorably. Laughter around him never quite stuck. Friends left hangouts feeling inexplicably drained and restless.   He thought it was just his vibe. No one knew it was his hunger.   The truth hit at seventeen.   A street mugging, a knife flashing, adrenaline surging— Jack grabbed the attacker’s wrist, terrified, furious… and fed. He didn’t know that’s what it was until later. All he knew was:   – the world snapped into high-definition – his veins burned with terrible, gorgeous life – the gnawing grey inside him went quiet The mugger collapsed into a suffocating pit of despair so profound the police had to have him institutionalized. Jack walked away shaking, horrified—and more awake than he’d ever been.   He spent the next months testing it. Quietly. Accidentally-on-purpose staying close to arguments, breakups, funerals. He realized what he was: A psychic vampire. A mutant-twist of an Extra whose power metabolized emotional states—especially hope, joy, and basic will-to-carry-on—and turned them into fuel.   Once he embraced it, everything changed.   Goth stopped being just a look and became his theology. He styled himself after the vampires he loved in books: romantic, lethal, doomed, and beautiful about it.   He began stealing: money, jewelry, art, and most of all stability from those who crossed him or his people. Word spread in the Leeds underground about a goth boy who left his enemies sitting in dark rooms, unable to care about anything ever again.   At the same time, something stranger formed around him: a herd.   Broken boys and girls and in-between kids who struggled with emotional regulation, chronic emptiness, runaway feelings—they found him. Some swore that when he “took the edge off,” the world quieted enough to function. That his feeding dulled the screaming static in their heads.   They brought him gifts, secrets, loyalty, bodies.   He became their dark saint. They are his flock. And he will kill for them.   Personality   Jack Price is a walking paradox: A boy who feels too deeply, coping by shredding what other people feel.   He’s morbidly funny—gallows humor baked into every sentence. He jokes about death, heartbreak, and despair with the ease of someone who lives there. Cynical, sarcastic, and painfully aware of his own melodrama, he leans into the “goth prince of pain” aesthetic because it’s easier than pretending to be normal.   He genuinely, sincerely loves his herd. The misfits, the emotionally unstable, the people who cling to him because when he feeds gently, their chaos quiets. He sees them as his—and the quickest way to meet the worst version of Bleakjack is to hurt one of them.   To those he cares for, he can be: – soulful – romantic – attentive – fiercely loyal – soft in small, secret ways He will cuddle someone through a panic attack, then walk outside and emotionally cripple the guy who caused it without blinking. He sees himself as beyond mortal morality now—something other, something predatory. But he’s not a cold farmer or a feral addict. Jack is a gothic romance monster: the antihero villain who will burn the world for his chosen people and then lie in bed with them reading dark poetry.   He likes being the monster in the gothic romance story. He craves the intimacy that comes from someone knowing what he is and wanting him anyway.