Dietrich Strauss

Dietrich Strauss is a Diviner and member of Criminal Flight.
== Appearances ==
* Flurutus: Major Character
== Personality ==
Dietrich's primary goal in life is to be left to his own devices and blend into a wall. He keeps a stern, albeit polite demeanor; he is always civil, but nothing more or less. It's even said he has no sense of humor (he does, it's usually just very dark and morbid humor). This demeanor that tends to give people the 
impression he is also grumpy about something. This is an impression he makes no attempt to change. He avoids making bonds with others, rather preferring to speak to the spirits of the dead rather than any living person. However, despite this, Dietrich actually secretly does crave interaction with living people. He's likely unaware of it. The truth is, he fears close connections, because most everyone he's ever made a close connection to has either died or betrayed him, thus making him wary of people and afraid of how things could go wrong. A part of him also feels undeserving to any sort of connection, due to some deep stemmed self-loathing he's had since he was a child. All outward appearances and inward fears aside, Dietrich loves children. While he may not drop his grumpy facade, he will go out of his way to help a child in need. 
He is also surprisingly domestic, enjoying such hobbies as cooking, cleaning, and sewing. He is highly orderly, and every bit of every one of his workspaces is pristine and in its proper place. However, when he gets nervous or flustered, he will actually intentionally break something or disrupt his orderly domain so that he may clean it, or he will go on mass baking sprees, perhaps even spend a whole night sewing a complete outfit in the latest fashions (he mostly works with females clothing, despite the fact that he really doesn't really interact with any). He is also deathly afraid of touch. Male or female, skin to skin contact is a no-no to him. He causes him to freeze up or go into a panic, and he may end up scrubbing the "afflicted' part of his body raw. This not due to a fear of other people touching him or a transferal of germs or any such thing, but rather a reaction fueled by the self-loathing mentioned earlier. As such, he has no problems handling corpses (though in all honestly, he prefers not too - highly unsanitary).
Dietrich is also mentally imbalanced, thanks to the conflicting natures of his mixed heritage. For example, if he feels he has been wronged in some way, he will do everything within his power to see that he repays the person back. He cannot rest until this is done, and will go the great lengths to make sure it is painful and unnecessarily cruel. His sense of propriety and politeness at all times also stems from his Sidhe roots rather than his own free will, as he feels compelled to be polite rather than simply choosing to be polite. When others act impolite, he finds himself rather appalled, not understanding how they can act in such a way. And while he has proven that he is capable of lying, more often than not he prefers to be brutally honest. However, if he's brutally honest with you, that usually means he does like you - or at the very least tolerates your presence. He only uses Sidhe wordplay when he particularly dislikes a person and may even become a bit rude, himself.
Anger is something with which Dietrich's main mental problems lie. It is hard to get Dietrich angry, but when he does, his personality does a complete 180. He uses coarse language and wishes to kill/destroy whatever it was that upset him so. This one track mind of search and destroy stems from the wonderful mesh of human emotion combined with the Sidhe sense of retribution, making him an absolute force to be reckoned
 with when angry. He gets so upset, that he makes no care to even shield his own body or protect himself.
== Known Attacks/Abilities ==
* Reanimation: It's what necromancers do; they reanimate corpses. Like Elias, fresher corpses are stronger but harder to maintain, and older corpses last longer but are weaker.
* Summon: A power that blurs the line between proper void akehura and necromancy; a specific method of summoning spirits, monsters, and demons from the "other side" using a small pocket mirror he carries around. Don't let the size fool you, big things can come out of that small package. He can also use the same methodology to summon a couple of Sidhe ancestors. He uses this mostly his research and only on spirits, as he rather hates dealing with the other two and especially hates dealing with his relatives.
* Spirit Flames: A combination of spirit and necromancy that utilizes the energy left over from the spirits of the dead to form an otherworldy fire of varying color (color depends on the spirit). The flame, while capable of burning, also can drain life. At its weakest (usually the contribution of one spirit), the flame can give light burns and perhaps cut off a few minutes of a person's total lifespan. At its strongest, its essentially literal hellfire (a contribution of many, many spirits over a large area). 
* Spiritual Dissection: Dietrich can physically touch a spirit and damage it; cut it, maim it, burn it, and so on. Due to the hands on nature of this, Dietrich must be in close proximity to the target and be relatively sneaky about it. However, this is not a purely destructive attack. Just as Dietrich can destroy, he can also repair spiritual damage to some degree. The fresher the damage, the easier to repair. Whether used in offense or spiritual healing, however, this ability can also make Dietrich's own spirit vulnerable.
* Deadly Touch: Charging up his void akehura, his touch becomes deadly. Literally. His touch will induce necrosis, which will begin to spread at a natural pace from the afflicted area. This is not a one time-thing; should Dietrich get another opening, he can cause a second affliction somewhere else. However, seeing as Dietrich absolutely abhors skin to skin contact, this is a last resort move.
== Background ==
To understand Dietrich Strauss, you need to understand his parents. His mother was a Seelie half-Sidhe woman who was forcefully married to what can be regarded as an illegitimate Unseelie half-Sidhe prince. Obviously, this already bodes ill for a happy childhood. Because he didn't have one. Dietrich was the second son of a rape, the first being his older brother Dietfried. The elder always protected the younger from an abusive father, though both sons regretted being too small to help their mother. However, their mother only had their best interests at heart, and sent them to train with a master of magic (this was before the term akehura had been coined). They received letters regularly from their mother, who still suffered under their father's grip; but as the years passed, it seemed that the man had become more docile and their mother had even grown to love their father. At this point, the boys would even occasionally go back to see their parents, finding their mother's words to be true.
Up until their mother died giving birth to a stillborn sister. At this point, their father had returned to his abusive demeanor, and the brothers decided that going to visit him was unsafe. Around this time, Dietrich's brother also began to study his magic by himself, leaving the younger brother alone. Dietrich was a teen of about fifteen when he decided to check in on his father, only to have the worst experience that would define the rest of his life. His brother had saved him, but the hatred for his father could never leave Dietrich, and it was then and there that the boy decided that no matter what path he took in his life, he could never become his father. Any sex drive Dietrich had was killed off through self-mutilation, he outright rejected any semblance of his Sidhe heritage (he has no love for his mother's side either, as they were never around to help), and trained himself to keep his cool at all times. But Dietrich's horrible luck hadn't run out. His brother, who had been training himself in necromancy in secret, died in a botched up attempt to summon a demon.
Effectively alone in the world, Dietrich took up necromancy himself - if only because it was the last remaining thing he had left to remind him of his family. He also happened to excel at it, growing morbid interests in all facets of it. The years that followed are somewhat of a haze to Dietrich - which is why he has trouble placing an exact age on himself. He performed many experimental processes, likely assisted in bringing out what would come to be known as Dark Guilds, and was the scourge of every town he passed. It's clear to Dietrich now he was completely loony during these years. The only thing he recalls vividly from these years is that he had an apprentice who he came to love dearly as the sister he never was able to meet. Unfortunately, the apprentice would betray him. And he killed her with his bare hands, no magic necessary. Even though today he has a more stable mental state, any reminder of the girl will immediately send him into a tirade of cusses and nasty names.
When the haze began to clear and he found himself more or less... at peace with his life and what he'd been doing, he had already made a gracious number of enemies. Deciding that he'd had enough of being a wandering maniac, he would settle down in a town, even adopt a daughter to call his own. But again, Dietrich's luck was not very good. One of his enemies had taken his daughter, and he would go after her. When Dietrich came back to his home, however, he came back alone and very much broken. It was then he came to the conclusion that he simply wasn't allowed to be happy, so he'd have to settle for content. He found his contentment in his research, which specialized in finding out how the soul and body were linked - what made a person, their brain or their soul? What was the nature of ghosts? Imprints of a dead person's living self or their actual spirit unable to find peace? Again, he found himself experimenting in all sorts of things, though this time around he was a bit more... ethical about it. Well, as ethical as necromancy can be anyways.
Nowadays, Dietrich has found a form of contentment in Criminal Flight. His loyalty to the guild is shaky at best, only having joined because it was a neutral. After all, no real self-respecting guild would let a necromancer conduct his experiments, and Dietrich certainly doesn't have the means to fund his own research. Since Criminal Flight is truly neutral, it allows him access to various resources that he would be unable to obtain had he been in any other guild. But so long as he's able to continue his research, he's as close to happy as he feels he'll ever get. Due to all his years of experience and his mastery over his craft, he is likely akin to a Master, though in truth he has very little interest in applying to officially become one.
== Trivia ==
* Dietrich has a "dog." It's not really a dog so much as it is a creature that constantly escapes through his pocket mirror with a very vague resemblance to a dog. It is incredibly ugly and foul tempered, which has led him to name it "Krampus." For the most part, he leaves it up to its own designs since it has proven relatively harmless.
* Due to his lost time, Dietrich has guessed his own age as 98. This is terribly wrong, as he is actually 268.
Category:Characters
Category:Male
Category:Diviner
Category:Criminal Flight members
Category:Rei the Wannabe Wizard
Category:Sidhe