Fly by night

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT TO THE EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMUS, OKAY. It’s a little hard to tell, but in this scene, Aguilar is holding his blade to Cal’s throat. In the novel, it actually expands on this scene:

There was a flicker in the glass. Had another guard entered the room? No, not a guard, they did not move with such feline grace. He turned and his eyes widened. The figure’s face was hidden by a hood. The head lifted - and Cal gazed into a face that was both intimately familiar and unspeakably alien: his own. A killer’s blue eyes gazed at Cal, and then narrowed. He stepped forward, slowly, then quickening his pace as he snapped his arms down, releasing the twin blades, and sprang. The blade was pressed to his throat. Aguilar drew it back and the cold-hot, thrillingly painful slice opened Cal’s throat. He doubled over, coughing up blood, his hand to his gashed- -whole…?- -throat. Nothing. No blood. It wasn’t real. Just his mind, playing tricks.

This is literally after Cal’s been in the Animus once. He isn’t just hallucinating Aguilar, he’s actually feeling as if Aguilar is real enough that he can feel his blade cut his throat. Cal thinks he’s bleeding out because of how real it is, and it’s only the physical sensation of feeling that his neck is fine that reminds him he isn’t dying. No blood, no sliced open throat, nothing. Just the aftermath of his mind being fucked with.

It just proves how powerful Sofia’s Animus really is, and I think it lies in taking it from a chair to applying physical movement to it, as her theory about the whole thing postulates. She believes that physically living through the memories, going along with the motions, creates a stronger bond between the Subject and their ancestor, which will allow for clearer, sharper, and better synchronizations. And, considering her research and that she knows how to help heal the bleeding effect, I imagine she believes a smoother transition between the present and the memories will also help rehabilitate the Subject after it all. 

(It is specifically stated, at least in the novel, that if Cal had been able to go into and come out of the Animus on her schedule and not her father’s, she could have helped him get rid of the bleeding effect before it became permanent; but with the way her father forces Cal into the Animus three times in less than three days, and Cal’s only breaks in-between are of him sleeping, being paralyzed, and then meeting his father again? The guy’s not really given much time to heal mentally or emotionally, and, in some cases, physically.)

Send me a face claim and I will use that face claim to make an NPC in my muse’s life, as well as talk about their relationship, connection, and feelings towards my muse - @diebythecreed

Diego Luna

Sebastián Astrada, born 1982, became one of the few people Cal would come to consider a friend. He was born and raised in San Diego, making frequent trips across the border into Mexico with his parents and younger sister (Flor), a monthly trip that he grew to look forward to. Family dinners were always done at least once a week, usually on the weekend when the children weren’t swarmed with homework and eating over a pile of math equations or historical dates, and it was always something traditional. He enjoyed his veggies, loves peppers, and secretly enjoys the bastardized tacos Jack In the Box carries - he can’t explain why, but there’s something about them he just can’t get enough of. He’s a pretty damn good singer, shamelessly loves singing loud to obnoxious pop songs (stop him from singing Carly Rae Jepsen, even as an adult, I dare you to try), and he’s got enough personality to have a stage presence, though he’s got stage fright and feels too shy to ever pursue it as a career.

His family became Cal’s third foster family, and possibly one of the only ones whose lives Cal didn’t want to make hell. They tried to teach him to cook (he wasn’t very good at spices, always made things too bland or too potent), helped him with his homework (which he never cared about), took him to the beach for the first time (and several more to follow), and generally tried to be very caring. It was more patience than Cal had been shown before, and he was with them for three years, until he was thirteen, before he made too much trouble in school, knocked a kid out for a stupid reason that he couldn’t quite explain later down the road, and ran away from home.

He and Sebastián had grown to be something akin to actual brothers. They shared a love of singing to overplayed songs, or those ones that just really pull at your gut (in his teenage years, Cal found a lot of his foundation in Guns N Roses, Skid Row, and Metallica, bands he holds onto even as an adult), but also cheesy, dumb love songs they’d jokingly sing at each other. They liked to climb out of the window (because the doors were always locked firmly, and their parents could hear the floorboards creak if they tried to go out the back door) and run out to the field down the street and just sort of exist. Kick around a soccer ball, talk, sing dumb songs, laze in the grass, until it was late enough that they should get home and attempt sleep before school in the morning.

Sebastián is one person Cal misses the most, and always considers the closest person he has to a brother (and he often thinks about Flor, thinks would be the kind of brother to have taken her boyfriends for a drink, but punch them if they hurt her). For years, he thought he’d never see him again, but they’d sporadically find each other’s numbers or addresses orSebastián would figure out which prison Cal was in this time, and send him letter. Shortly before going to prison, after Cal had worked the years of drug abuse out of system, they made contact again. Sebastián never came to see him in prison that time, but then again, Cal didn’t feel himself worth visiting anyway. Thought maybeSebastián was better off without him around. Still, even after talking again, they clicked so easily, it would’ve been natural to just pick up where they left off.

From any of the games, books, short films, comics, anything Assassin’s Creed is welcome.

Genderbents and OCs also welcome.

He also hadn’t intended to be found, but when the police narrowed him down with fingerprints and blood samples and Cal really shouldn’t have spat on the body when he was done, he didn’t resist arrest. He didn’t regret what he had done. There was no sorrow in anyone’s eyes when that man’s body was left crumpled on the ground, eyes gouged and body broken, bent at odd angles that looked more painful than a dead body could feel. He had deserved to die, and slowly, painfully, for all the harm he’d caused. Unfortunately, Cal hadn’t perfected the art of a slow torture, and within the half hour, the man had gone from a living, breathing incarnation of greed, to as dead as Cal could get him without battering his face into the concrete.

No, he didn’t regret what he had done. He only regretted being caught.

The trial had dragged on even though he had openly admitted his guilt. He was a criminal, after all, living on the fringes of society, barely scraping by. Murder was his biggest crime, but once he’d been added to the database, suddenly he could be linked to several counts of petty theft, grand theft auto, breaking and entering, identity fraud, among other smaller crimes. No one asked his reasons, and he didn’t offer any up. No one would have listened, anyway, and he didn’t care. He’d denied a lawyer, though someone still showed up to try and use him as an example of how society’s treatment of misguided youth - he scoffed loudly at that, as if anyone here could understand his childhood - adds to violent behavior and drives people to become criminals to survive, but he wasn’t here to be a test subject for some social experiment.

In the end, he had killed a man, and whether or not that man deserved death or something worse, the fact remained that Cal had committed murder. And what would a justice system be if it didn’t punish those who broke the rules.

And though he had accepted it all - his guilt, the trial, going to prison - somehow he hadn’t anticipated the death sentence. He’d seen people who got away with less time for harsher crimes - multiple killings, rape, mutilation, desecration of the dead - but considering his social standing and all the many crimes to his name now, they drove in harder to get him the death sentence. He didn’t expect it, was actually caught off guard when they announced he would be killed via lethal injection; hell, he even wanted to fight it. If the pimp he’d killed had ended up in prison, Cal knew he wouldn’t have gotten this sentence. The legal system was corrupt and favored those with sway. Something Cal didn’t have. There was something that didn’t feel right, but as with every other part of this trial, he faced it without question.