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Entry tags:
Riverview [ history / setting. ]
● (canon) background:
● (original) world:
Everyone has a Reaper assigned to them at birth. This supernatural creature watches and waits until the time comes that someone is to die. They arrive to remove the soul from the body, providing it the chance to pass on to the afterlife. However, this can only happen when the body is dead. If someone fails to die at the time allotted by Destiny, an Enforcer is sent in. Enforcers are spirits of humans with a special ability who have yet to pass on for whatever unfinished business they still have. They are capable of connecting with Reapers to locate errant charges and tasked with killing the humans so that they can be culled and the cycle maintained. After a soul is culled, they are allowed to visit a loved one to say a last goodbye. When a Reaper's duty is done, they are reassigned and the cycle begins anew.
In the modern day, there are a subset of people who can become Enforcers in the afterlife. These people possess what is called the Deathsight, which is a power they cannot control or turn off. They see a countdown to person's destined time of death around their neck. It is said that they've all descended from the same single ancestor, although no scientific study has been done to prove it as most people are filled with common sense. More recent times have seen many Deathsights using their abilities for personal gain, whether to extort those who will die soon or otherwise warn people to run from their Reaper in exchange for monetary rewards. Although ghosts are a known quantity in the world when recently-deceased are able to say goodbye, no other supernatural forces have or will be confirmed. Even Deathsights are just folklore and hearsay to the common populace.
Otherwise, the world is pretty much like our own. Ignore that there is a man more or less untouched by time that no one can seem to explain. His actual purpose won't be relevant for another few centuries to come, although it does seem a certain group has interest in replicating him.
However, there exist facets of the universe that Cain does not (and probably never will) know. This is incredibly meta stuff that is more to explain how the brothers have come to be than what will happen to them. Remus and Romulus are the twin sons of Death and Destiny, the two beings in charge of life and death; their existence is the anchor for the world's existence. Although they are human and live in a linear fashion, their soul exists outside of time much as Destiny does. When both of them die, humanity is ended and the world is started over from the beginning in an attempt to reach maximum potential of all creation. Since they're human, one of them must die to render their soul immortal; the body of the living brother follows suit until time has run out as Destiny predicted for their current attempt, wherein the living brother will be culled by his Reaper and the world started anew.
Enforcers are the spirits of people who had Deathsight in life and were recruited into serving a greater cause in the afterlife. By becoming an Enforcer, they are given access to death magic (the world's only true form of magic) in order to help them perform their job: aiding the Reapers. Where it used to be a very wide and open job description, about two millennia ago the Enforcers started to organize much more efficiently by forming branches of their operation: dealing with wandering, non-Enforcer spirits, killing people who have outlasted their clock, recruiting other potential-Enforcers and gauging suitability while they still live, and punishing the living who would use their Deathsight to tip the balance of life and death for personal gain.
Reapers themselves, while content to let Enforcers mostly govern themselves, are the top brass in the Enforcer organization. They aren't a chatty bunch, but often are seen by Enforcers as grandfatherly figures who have the utmost authority. It is the Reapers who actually cull the souls of the dead and move them into the afterlife; barring one very traumatic and painful method, Reapers are incapable of killing humans. This is why they employ Enforcers to take care of the mortal side of their business for them.
Deathsight itself is rather self-explanatory. It is the ability to see when someone is destined to die. If anyone were to live past this time due to unforeseen acts of nature or the aid of someone with Deathsight, it could throw things into immeasurable chaos similar to the butterfly theory in time travel. Just one person living when they should have died could set forth catastrophic ripple effects capable of killing people too early or setting back their deaths. Cain himself takes horrendous exception to the people who use their power selfishly because of his own personal circumstances: if he could have one more chance to keep Remus alive, he would do anything he could to change that fate. However, he let the chance go by in order to preserve a balance he understood on such an instinctual level, whereas the people of today try to subvert such a natural law on a regular basis. If Cain couldn't do it, no one else has the damn right to even try. He has no sympathy for anyone who twists death's rules or can't accept their end with grace or bravery even if they knew it was coming.
Humans •
- Just like any other regular people.
- Every living human has a Reaper living in their shadow, waiting until their appointed time of death to be escorted to the afterlife.
- They get to say goodbye to loved ones before they go.
- Cannot see ghosts or other supernatural phenomena.
- Unless they are in some way genetically related to Cain and possess deathsight.
Deathsight •
- The ability to see supernatural phenomena. It allows users to see the time in which someone has left to live on a person's neck in golden numbers.
- They cannot see their own time. Times do not appear on artificially-captured images, such as photos or videos. Covering the neck covers the number.
- Although sometimes lost or ignored, the biggest rule is to never tell anyone about their remaining time. Those who do not obey are either hunted down and killed by Enforcers, or taken under their wings until they die and become Enforcers themselves.
Ghosts •
- Regular humans who have died. Somehow separated from their Reaper upon death or otherwise too distressed to go with them.
- Possess "death magic" which can be highly unstable without training.
- Tethered to the world of the living by some regret or powerful attachment. Must be worked with before a Reaper can force them to move on.
Enforcers •
- Any human who possessed deathsight in life. Any of these individuals would be genetically related to Cain in some manner or another.
- Upon death, Reapers take them into the fold with other Enforcers and teach them to control their death magic.
- Death magic does many different things, but only with age comes experience for things with more finesse and control. Most common skills learned early is the ability to temporarily manifest a physical form in order to touch objects or be perceived.
- Enforcers work in several ways: they hunt down those who escape their death timers; work with lost ghosts to help them move on; control information on sightings of Enforcers on the job from becoming more than just unconfirmed stories; help and guide others with deathsight into not abusing their powers.
- They tend to stay in service for an average of five hundred years. Those who like the job can petition to stay on for longer.
- Enforcers are under the thumb of Reapers, who act on the nebulous instructions received from "Death" and do not speak much more on the matter.
- They are magically incapable of noticing familial relation between Cain and Abel.
● tl;dr history
Born sometime in 8th century BC, Romulus and his twin Remus were originally from a settlement found in Eastern Europe. Since birth, both twins could see how much time someone had until they died; it wasn't until the raid on their homeland that they understood what it meant. Remus told Romulus that he had more time than could possibly be counted, many times over even newborn babes, and Remus assumed that his time was similar. Romulus was too scared to tell him that Remus' clock would only last to their twenty-fourth year. At a very young age, their homeland was ravaged by war and the twins were taken by the victors as part of the spoils. They were sold early on to Greek nobles for their exotic and rare nature as identical twins, where they were treated as property rather than people for the next three years. When they were near to nine years old, they were presented to an Etruscan family as part of a dowry for the family's daughter. As slaves without citizenship, they had no hope of purchasing their freedom. They were treated as proper slaves in their new home, commodities and tools rather than some kind of animals, but resented their position in the world and did not trust the new outlook on their position.
As the two grew, it did not escape the notice of their masters how impossible they were to separate from each other. That was strike one. Strike two was when they entered their late teens and inadvertently became some very blatant objects of lust to their master's daughters. They refused advances as often as possible. Desperation to be free from the degradation led them to plan something crazy: escape. It would take years to build their idea enough that both would be satisfied it would work, eventually leading to the idea of founding their own village where they could stay and be safe as citizens and leaders. No one could touch them there.
Remus' time continued to tick away. On the night of their escape, they took as much of their master's money as they could squirrel away and ran. With pure determination, they managed to lead their master along for near the entire night before they were caught by a pack of dogs. Remus volunteered to distract them and had Romulus go ahead with their loot to ensure it would not be taken. Distraction turned into sacrifice as the dogs rent Remus apart while Romulus watched from afar. Pure fear kept him from running in and suffering the same fate. He continued to run south, managing to shake the dogs and their captors after running nonstop for two days before he collapsed. He was taken in by a shepherd couple who thankfully did not know he was a slave on the run. With their aid and his stolen treasure, Romulus was able to put into action the plan he and Remus had worked so hard to achieve: Romulus founded Rome.
Despite the shock and trauma of losing his best friend and only family, Romulus buried himself in the work of maintaining an entire city (and later an empire). It became natural for Romulus to emulate his brother's active and protective personality, at first to cheer himself up and eventually becoming the King's natural bearing. Romulus was incredibly progressive for the time, allowing both free men and slaves to become citizens while also forming one of the first steps to organized democracy. After nearly forty years of rule, it was more than apparent that nothing was changing. Romulus had not aged at all and any injury he sustained was gone within seconds. His patricians were increasingly cagey and suspicious of his unaging nature and planned to have him removed in whatever way necessary. Romulus beat them to it, staging his own death for their benefit and absconding with as much of his personal wealth as he could manage.
He started over. North of Italy, he found a small village where the residents were destined for long lives and settled. He fell in love, had children. He still did not age. He left once again.
He started over. Over and over and over. Romulus had no place to call home, no place to settle himself down where he was not eventually met with suspicion, greed and hostile accusations of black dealings with creatures from hell. There was nothing he could do to explain it and no way to rid himself of the curse. For it was most definitely a curse to live forever where he failed to save his brother from his fate. Until about 300BC, anyway. Then he gained some new perspective on the matter.
Romulus witnessed a man cheat death. His timer had hit zero and still he stood among the living. It was obvious the man was on the run, equal parts terrified and elated, yet soon after a specter appeared with weapon in hand to right the wrong. A specter with Romulus' own face: Remus. The deed was done too quickly for a shocked Romulus to react and Remus was gone. Despite having years left in his current life before anyone would notice his lack of age, Romulus left once again. He suddenly had a point to his existence, some reason to push forward: he had to seek out more people who had cheated their deaths and see if the incident would repeat. He had to know why Remus had appeared. It did not take long for Romulus to realize he could induce it himself by helping someone change the course of their fate when their clock was about to run out.
It happened again. Romulus went to try and speak to his brother, but was stopped by an unnatural being in a black robe. It warned him away, saying that Abel had no memory of his living days, that Abel would surely blame his brother for leaving him to his death if he were reminded of their circumstances, that Abel was nothing more than a spirit with consciousness. That Abel was lost to Romulus forever. Guilt and shame crushed Romulus' heart, reminding him of all the doubts and self-recrimination that rightfully belonged to him. He did not deserve to reunite with Remus if his brother was in some other, better existence without his cheating, coward of a little brother trying to drag him back into the mud. The Reaper left Romulus with what it probably thought would be encouraging words, that Romulus should continue to live his life as he had been and let Abel sort himself out. It was a death sentence to the man who could never know death.
Determination led Romulus to keep tabs on Abel from afar. Even if he could never be together with his brother again, he would be damned if he did not at least make sure of his personal safety. It crushed him to see his brother as a blank slate, and it made him ill to consider mixing that with his own issues. In honor of who his brother had become, however, Romulus moved away from the name he had held onto and began going by Cain to finish the religious reference the Reapers had started. He had, after all, been the one to lead his brother to death and his current situation as an Enforcer. Life continued on for Cain where he could eke it out, learning as many languages and skills as necessary to fit in whatever community he happened to settle upon. More and more incidents of people cheating death occurred and Cain spotted more and more Enforcers there to fix it. As the idea of cheating death became more widespread, hushed whispers of a man who had yet to be taken by his Reaper, people became terrified of death. They began to do all sorts of crazy things to try and outlast their time. One time, this resulted in reanimated corpses and Cain put a quick end to those shenanigans once he caught wind.
While his life was far from boring and Cain had long since put his angsty days behind him, instead choosing to live life in the moment and take in everything only he had a chance to experience all at once, his days were more or less pretty normal. Sometimes he lived a lifetime on his own, while others he would find someone to love, get married, have children and eventually move on without them. Most recently, Benjamin Jacobs was married to Lisa Davinch in 1973 and had two children with her. As all of Cain's children were capable of seeing death timers as he was, they grew up resentful and scared of their father's immortality. For the sake of the kids, Benjamin and Lisa were legally divorced; emotionally, they remained together and still managed to fit some dates in when they could.
In 2012, Cain was abducted by an unknown organization who spent the next month poking and prodding at him until his use was apparently run dry. Unknown to him, the organization had planted a subliminal obedience command phrase in his head should they need to bring him back in or otherwise make Cain useful toward their ends: Hellhound, heel. They dropped him off in Nowhere, Alabama and let him work his way back home from there. Cain was obviously not going to stand for that and began investigating. Over the next two years, he dubbed the organization the Death Erasers: they had managed to somehow remove death clocks from small subject groups around the country and were working on refining the process. Cain had no further leads on where to locate them, but that would never stop him looking. They had made it personal.
Two years later, in early 2014, he was still no closer to any actual answers. The year previous, Cain had moved to Arizona to stay closer to Abel, who had settled down in Phoenix with an adopted daughter, Holly, and taken on the last name Fletcher due to internal Enforcer politics. Often Cain would find traces of the Death Erasers' operations and by the time he could investigate more thoroughly, they had moved on. In one such case, Cain followed a lead into a base that had only recently been abandoned and ran into something he couldn't have possibly anticipated: his brother, Abel. Having no recollection of his brother, Abel presumed Cain to be some sort of Death Eraser experiment and shot him on sight. Cain stood back up and explained in some very bare bones facts that they were brothers. He didn't have much choice after Abel had been so poorly confronted with Cain's existence. Thankfully, Abel retained most of his brotherly instinct despite his amnesia and came to reluctantly accept the fact when he couldn't deny the possibility. Cain's clock tied with his story made sense. With their awkward reunion out of the way, Cain decided to make the most of things and moved in to join forces with Abel in their investigation of the "Clockless". Another pair of twins, Angela and Robert Yates, were also living with Abel under his protection as they had been tricked into losing their clocks by the Death Erasers. It made them possible suspects to watch and victims to protect at the same time.
Only a few months after the brothers were learning to live with each other again did the Death Erasers make another move. They rigged Cain's car and took him to a nearby facility. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Cain got a message out to Abel and was rescued only a scant few hours later. After that particular fiasco, Cain began to experience blackouts where he would lose hours at a time thanks to the activation of the command phrase in his mind, only really becoming aware once he returned home from who-knew-where. As they became more often, he actually began to notice them and brought the matter to Abel, who started investigating the situation on his own. Holly's birthday came and interrupted their worries, with everyone taking a momentary break to celebrate her 14th birthday. However, the Death Erasers took advantage of their distraction and abducted both Cain and Abel right from the Fletcher family home using unknown technology to separate Abel from his spiritual powers and body. It was a week of bloody experiments before the brothers had an opportunity to escape, which they did, and the two of them used their ingenuity and smarts to roadtrip from Texas back to Arizona to inform the Enforcers what had happened. During which time, Abel learned of Cain's unwilling involvement as the "Test Zero" for the Death Erasers' current scheme of removing clocks and attempting to grant immortality, which kind of set a rift between them because Cain avoided thinking and speaking about the incident from two years ago in general due to an embedded order.
Some weeks after returning home from Texas, the blackouts started back up again.
- 8th century BC: Romulus and Remus were born in an Eastern European settlement. They had the utterly unique ability to read the time until a person's death on their neck. A raid on their village killed nearly everyone and saw them sold into slavery for being commodities. Due to their circumstances, they had no option to buy their own freedom and grew up rebellious. While still young, Romulus educated himself in secret with Remus keeping him safe, and the two planned for greatness.
Remus's clock was notably much shorter than even an average lifespan, and Romulus was told that his own was longer than anyone could hope to match. Remus, however, assumed his clock was the same length as his brother, and Romulus was too sick with worry over the implications to correct him.
The night they attempted to escape, the twins were beset by their master's dogs and Remus was killed. Romulus continued on reluctantly and eventually founded Rome by himself. His rule and leadership lasted about 40 years until he was noticed his own unaging nature, was conspired against, and fled. He moved from place to place as long as suspension of disbelief could allow, making families and friends until he moved on for his own safety. - Some centuries later, he encountered the spirit of Remus still within the world of the living and acting as an agent of the Reapers. Although he did not speak to Remus directly, he was informed that Remus had no memory of his life and now went by Abel as a cruel joke on the part of the Reapers. Romulus took up the moniker Cain to cement his place as Abel's killer.
- Repeat Cain's nomadic lifestyle ad nauseam for millennia. Live, learn, love, leave. Seriously, he does not break this pattern even if the content of those lives varied from place to time to people with which he lived.
- 2012: Fastforwarding a ton, Cain is abducted by persons unknown and experimented on for his immortality for about a month. In that time, these mysterious people embed a command phrase into him ("hellhound, heel") unbeknownst to him, and order him not to bring the incident up to anyone else. He thinks that's his own prerogative not to talk of it, but investigates these assholes anyway once they drop him off in Nowhere, Alabama.
- 2014: Following some leads that finally go somewhere, Cain incidentally meets up with Abel, gets shot by him, and then moves in to try and reconcile their relationship now that his existence is confirmed. Turns out those assholes from before have been removing peoples' death clocks, essentially making them ageless, and both Abel's people, the Enforcers, and Cain are after the same organization. They end up taking Cain (professional damsel) twice more, and the second time ends up netting them an Abel for their troubles, too. Through the ordeal, Cain's unwilling involvement in the dilemma is revealed and rips a rift through their already-strained relationship. Oops.
● (original) world:
Everyone has a Reaper assigned to them at birth. This supernatural creature watches and waits until the time comes that someone is to die. They arrive to remove the soul from the body, providing it the chance to pass on to the afterlife. However, this can only happen when the body is dead. If someone fails to die at the time allotted by Destiny, an Enforcer is sent in. Enforcers are spirits of humans with a special ability who have yet to pass on for whatever unfinished business they still have. They are capable of connecting with Reapers to locate errant charges and tasked with killing the humans so that they can be culled and the cycle maintained. After a soul is culled, they are allowed to visit a loved one to say a last goodbye. When a Reaper's duty is done, they are reassigned and the cycle begins anew.
In the modern day, there are a subset of people who can become Enforcers in the afterlife. These people possess what is called the Deathsight, which is a power they cannot control or turn off. They see a countdown to person's destined time of death around their neck. It is said that they've all descended from the same single ancestor, although no scientific study has been done to prove it as most people are filled with common sense. More recent times have seen many Deathsights using their abilities for personal gain, whether to extort those who will die soon or otherwise warn people to run from their Reaper in exchange for monetary rewards. Although ghosts are a known quantity in the world when recently-deceased are able to say goodbye, no other supernatural forces have or will be confirmed. Even Deathsights are just folklore and hearsay to the common populace.
Otherwise, the world is pretty much like our own. Ignore that there is a man more or less untouched by time that no one can seem to explain. His actual purpose won't be relevant for another few centuries to come, although it does seem a certain group has interest in replicating him.
However, there exist facets of the universe that Cain does not (and probably never will) know. This is incredibly meta stuff that is more to explain how the brothers have come to be than what will happen to them. Remus and Romulus are the twin sons of Death and Destiny, the two beings in charge of life and death; their existence is the anchor for the world's existence. Although they are human and live in a linear fashion, their soul exists outside of time much as Destiny does. When both of them die, humanity is ended and the world is started over from the beginning in an attempt to reach maximum potential of all creation. Since they're human, one of them must die to render their soul immortal; the body of the living brother follows suit until time has run out as Destiny predicted for their current attempt, wherein the living brother will be culled by his Reaper and the world started anew.
Enforcers are the spirits of people who had Deathsight in life and were recruited into serving a greater cause in the afterlife. By becoming an Enforcer, they are given access to death magic (the world's only true form of magic) in order to help them perform their job: aiding the Reapers. Where it used to be a very wide and open job description, about two millennia ago the Enforcers started to organize much more efficiently by forming branches of their operation: dealing with wandering, non-Enforcer spirits, killing people who have outlasted their clock, recruiting other potential-Enforcers and gauging suitability while they still live, and punishing the living who would use their Deathsight to tip the balance of life and death for personal gain.
Reapers themselves, while content to let Enforcers mostly govern themselves, are the top brass in the Enforcer organization. They aren't a chatty bunch, but often are seen by Enforcers as grandfatherly figures who have the utmost authority. It is the Reapers who actually cull the souls of the dead and move them into the afterlife; barring one very traumatic and painful method, Reapers are incapable of killing humans. This is why they employ Enforcers to take care of the mortal side of their business for them.
Deathsight itself is rather self-explanatory. It is the ability to see when someone is destined to die. If anyone were to live past this time due to unforeseen acts of nature or the aid of someone with Deathsight, it could throw things into immeasurable chaos similar to the butterfly theory in time travel. Just one person living when they should have died could set forth catastrophic ripple effects capable of killing people too early or setting back their deaths. Cain himself takes horrendous exception to the people who use their power selfishly because of his own personal circumstances: if he could have one more chance to keep Remus alive, he would do anything he could to change that fate. However, he let the chance go by in order to preserve a balance he understood on such an instinctual level, whereas the people of today try to subvert such a natural law on a regular basis. If Cain couldn't do it, no one else has the damn right to even try. He has no sympathy for anyone who twists death's rules or can't accept their end with grace or bravery even if they knew it was coming.
Humans •
- Just like any other regular people.
- Every living human has a Reaper living in their shadow, waiting until their appointed time of death to be escorted to the afterlife.
- They get to say goodbye to loved ones before they go.
- Cannot see ghosts or other supernatural phenomena.
- Unless they are in some way genetically related to Cain and possess deathsight.
Deathsight •
- The ability to see supernatural phenomena. It allows users to see the time in which someone has left to live on a person's neck in golden numbers.
- They cannot see their own time. Times do not appear on artificially-captured images, such as photos or videos. Covering the neck covers the number.
- Although sometimes lost or ignored, the biggest rule is to never tell anyone about their remaining time. Those who do not obey are either hunted down and killed by Enforcers, or taken under their wings until they die and become Enforcers themselves.
Ghosts •
- Regular humans who have died. Somehow separated from their Reaper upon death or otherwise too distressed to go with them.
- Possess "death magic" which can be highly unstable without training.
- Tethered to the world of the living by some regret or powerful attachment. Must be worked with before a Reaper can force them to move on.
Enforcers •
- Any human who possessed deathsight in life. Any of these individuals would be genetically related to Cain in some manner or another.
- Upon death, Reapers take them into the fold with other Enforcers and teach them to control their death magic.
- Death magic does many different things, but only with age comes experience for things with more finesse and control. Most common skills learned early is the ability to temporarily manifest a physical form in order to touch objects or be perceived.
- Enforcers work in several ways: they hunt down those who escape their death timers; work with lost ghosts to help them move on; control information on sightings of Enforcers on the job from becoming more than just unconfirmed stories; help and guide others with deathsight into not abusing their powers.
- They tend to stay in service for an average of five hundred years. Those who like the job can petition to stay on for longer.
- Enforcers are under the thumb of Reapers, who act on the nebulous instructions received from "Death" and do not speak much more on the matter.
- They are magically incapable of noticing familial relation between Cain and Abel.
● tl;dr history
Born sometime in 8th century BC, Romulus and his twin Remus were originally from a settlement found in Eastern Europe. Since birth, both twins could see how much time someone had until they died; it wasn't until the raid on their homeland that they understood what it meant. Remus told Romulus that he had more time than could possibly be counted, many times over even newborn babes, and Remus assumed that his time was similar. Romulus was too scared to tell him that Remus' clock would only last to their twenty-fourth year. At a very young age, their homeland was ravaged by war and the twins were taken by the victors as part of the spoils. They were sold early on to Greek nobles for their exotic and rare nature as identical twins, where they were treated as property rather than people for the next three years. When they were near to nine years old, they were presented to an Etruscan family as part of a dowry for the family's daughter. As slaves without citizenship, they had no hope of purchasing their freedom. They were treated as proper slaves in their new home, commodities and tools rather than some kind of animals, but resented their position in the world and did not trust the new outlook on their position.
As the two grew, it did not escape the notice of their masters how impossible they were to separate from each other. That was strike one. Strike two was when they entered their late teens and inadvertently became some very blatant objects of lust to their master's daughters. They refused advances as often as possible. Desperation to be free from the degradation led them to plan something crazy: escape. It would take years to build their idea enough that both would be satisfied it would work, eventually leading to the idea of founding their own village where they could stay and be safe as citizens and leaders. No one could touch them there.
Remus' time continued to tick away. On the night of their escape, they took as much of their master's money as they could squirrel away and ran. With pure determination, they managed to lead their master along for near the entire night before they were caught by a pack of dogs. Remus volunteered to distract them and had Romulus go ahead with their loot to ensure it would not be taken. Distraction turned into sacrifice as the dogs rent Remus apart while Romulus watched from afar. Pure fear kept him from running in and suffering the same fate. He continued to run south, managing to shake the dogs and their captors after running nonstop for two days before he collapsed. He was taken in by a shepherd couple who thankfully did not know he was a slave on the run. With their aid and his stolen treasure, Romulus was able to put into action the plan he and Remus had worked so hard to achieve: Romulus founded Rome.
Despite the shock and trauma of losing his best friend and only family, Romulus buried himself in the work of maintaining an entire city (and later an empire). It became natural for Romulus to emulate his brother's active and protective personality, at first to cheer himself up and eventually becoming the King's natural bearing. Romulus was incredibly progressive for the time, allowing both free men and slaves to become citizens while also forming one of the first steps to organized democracy. After nearly forty years of rule, it was more than apparent that nothing was changing. Romulus had not aged at all and any injury he sustained was gone within seconds. His patricians were increasingly cagey and suspicious of his unaging nature and planned to have him removed in whatever way necessary. Romulus beat them to it, staging his own death for their benefit and absconding with as much of his personal wealth as he could manage.
He started over. North of Italy, he found a small village where the residents were destined for long lives and settled. He fell in love, had children. He still did not age. He left once again.
He started over. Over and over and over. Romulus had no place to call home, no place to settle himself down where he was not eventually met with suspicion, greed and hostile accusations of black dealings with creatures from hell. There was nothing he could do to explain it and no way to rid himself of the curse. For it was most definitely a curse to live forever where he failed to save his brother from his fate. Until about 300BC, anyway. Then he gained some new perspective on the matter.
Romulus witnessed a man cheat death. His timer had hit zero and still he stood among the living. It was obvious the man was on the run, equal parts terrified and elated, yet soon after a specter appeared with weapon in hand to right the wrong. A specter with Romulus' own face: Remus. The deed was done too quickly for a shocked Romulus to react and Remus was gone. Despite having years left in his current life before anyone would notice his lack of age, Romulus left once again. He suddenly had a point to his existence, some reason to push forward: he had to seek out more people who had cheated their deaths and see if the incident would repeat. He had to know why Remus had appeared. It did not take long for Romulus to realize he could induce it himself by helping someone change the course of their fate when their clock was about to run out.
It happened again. Romulus went to try and speak to his brother, but was stopped by an unnatural being in a black robe. It warned him away, saying that Abel had no memory of his living days, that Abel would surely blame his brother for leaving him to his death if he were reminded of their circumstances, that Abel was nothing more than a spirit with consciousness. That Abel was lost to Romulus forever. Guilt and shame crushed Romulus' heart, reminding him of all the doubts and self-recrimination that rightfully belonged to him. He did not deserve to reunite with Remus if his brother was in some other, better existence without his cheating, coward of a little brother trying to drag him back into the mud. The Reaper left Romulus with what it probably thought would be encouraging words, that Romulus should continue to live his life as he had been and let Abel sort himself out. It was a death sentence to the man who could never know death.
Determination led Romulus to keep tabs on Abel from afar. Even if he could never be together with his brother again, he would be damned if he did not at least make sure of his personal safety. It crushed him to see his brother as a blank slate, and it made him ill to consider mixing that with his own issues. In honor of who his brother had become, however, Romulus moved away from the name he had held onto and began going by Cain to finish the religious reference the Reapers had started. He had, after all, been the one to lead his brother to death and his current situation as an Enforcer. Life continued on for Cain where he could eke it out, learning as many languages and skills as necessary to fit in whatever community he happened to settle upon. More and more incidents of people cheating death occurred and Cain spotted more and more Enforcers there to fix it. As the idea of cheating death became more widespread, hushed whispers of a man who had yet to be taken by his Reaper, people became terrified of death. They began to do all sorts of crazy things to try and outlast their time. One time, this resulted in reanimated corpses and Cain put a quick end to those shenanigans once he caught wind.
While his life was far from boring and Cain had long since put his angsty days behind him, instead choosing to live life in the moment and take in everything only he had a chance to experience all at once, his days were more or less pretty normal. Sometimes he lived a lifetime on his own, while others he would find someone to love, get married, have children and eventually move on without them. Most recently, Benjamin Jacobs was married to Lisa Davinch in 1973 and had two children with her. As all of Cain's children were capable of seeing death timers as he was, they grew up resentful and scared of their father's immortality. For the sake of the kids, Benjamin and Lisa were legally divorced; emotionally, they remained together and still managed to fit some dates in when they could.
In 2012, Cain was abducted by an unknown organization who spent the next month poking and prodding at him until his use was apparently run dry. Unknown to him, the organization had planted a subliminal obedience command phrase in his head should they need to bring him back in or otherwise make Cain useful toward their ends: Hellhound, heel. They dropped him off in Nowhere, Alabama and let him work his way back home from there. Cain was obviously not going to stand for that and began investigating. Over the next two years, he dubbed the organization the Death Erasers: they had managed to somehow remove death clocks from small subject groups around the country and were working on refining the process. Cain had no further leads on where to locate them, but that would never stop him looking. They had made it personal.
Two years later, in early 2014, he was still no closer to any actual answers. The year previous, Cain had moved to Arizona to stay closer to Abel, who had settled down in Phoenix with an adopted daughter, Holly, and taken on the last name Fletcher due to internal Enforcer politics. Often Cain would find traces of the Death Erasers' operations and by the time he could investigate more thoroughly, they had moved on. In one such case, Cain followed a lead into a base that had only recently been abandoned and ran into something he couldn't have possibly anticipated: his brother, Abel. Having no recollection of his brother, Abel presumed Cain to be some sort of Death Eraser experiment and shot him on sight. Cain stood back up and explained in some very bare bones facts that they were brothers. He didn't have much choice after Abel had been so poorly confronted with Cain's existence. Thankfully, Abel retained most of his brotherly instinct despite his amnesia and came to reluctantly accept the fact when he couldn't deny the possibility. Cain's clock tied with his story made sense. With their awkward reunion out of the way, Cain decided to make the most of things and moved in to join forces with Abel in their investigation of the "Clockless". Another pair of twins, Angela and Robert Yates, were also living with Abel under his protection as they had been tricked into losing their clocks by the Death Erasers. It made them possible suspects to watch and victims to protect at the same time.
Only a few months after the brothers were learning to live with each other again did the Death Erasers make another move. They rigged Cain's car and took him to a nearby facility. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Cain got a message out to Abel and was rescued only a scant few hours later. After that particular fiasco, Cain began to experience blackouts where he would lose hours at a time thanks to the activation of the command phrase in his mind, only really becoming aware once he returned home from who-knew-where. As they became more often, he actually began to notice them and brought the matter to Abel, who started investigating the situation on his own. Holly's birthday came and interrupted their worries, with everyone taking a momentary break to celebrate her 14th birthday. However, the Death Erasers took advantage of their distraction and abducted both Cain and Abel right from the Fletcher family home using unknown technology to separate Abel from his spiritual powers and body. It was a week of bloody experiments before the brothers had an opportunity to escape, which they did, and the two of them used their ingenuity and smarts to roadtrip from Texas back to Arizona to inform the Enforcers what had happened. During which time, Abel learned of Cain's unwilling involvement as the "Test Zero" for the Death Erasers' current scheme of removing clocks and attempting to grant immortality, which kind of set a rift between them because Cain avoided thinking and speaking about the incident from two years ago in general due to an embedded order.
Some weeks after returning home from Texas, the blackouts started back up again.