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Andante de la Rocha

Andante de la Rocha is a current loner.

History

• Dante lived with his parents, two sisters, and half-brother in a New York forest as a pup.
• When he and his littermates were around 5 months old, Dante and his sister Viola wandered into the territory of a small pack of rogues and were attacked.
• Their mother Sonatina found them and fought the three attacking wolves in defence of her children, but sadly lost her life.
• Dante and Viola managed to escape while their mother distracted them. Dante managed to escape with only a few scratches, but Viola sustained much harsher wounds to her head.
• Lance was devastated at the loss of his mate and irrationally blamed the two pups for her death.
• Dante and his sister were treated harshly by their father for a few weeks, often neglected. Their sister Aria, who looked strikingly like their mother, was given all of Lance's love and attention.
• Andante started to become quiet and withdrawn after the incident. For Viola, the combination of her head wound and the detrimental treatment from her father seemed to stunt her mental growth. She became increasingly dependent on her siblings and began to develop a slight paranoia.
• Despite the separate and dramatically different treatment they received, the three pups remained close. Aria took no cues from her father’s behavior, and instead seemed to spend as much time with her siblings as she could.
• One day, nearly a month after their mother's death, Lance takes his children on a lengthy journey to the city.
• The small family remains there for a few days. The pups begin to notice that their father was behaving strangely. He was quicker to anger than usual and appeared almost jumpy.
• One afternoon, Andante is looking after his sister after she fights off a small bout of paranoia while Aria and Tacet play together outside the small shop they had settled in.
• Their father enters the room in his optime form, a sight the siblings had never seen before. His breath reeks strongly of unfamiliar alcohol.
• Lance tells the pair that their mother’s death is their fault, and that now they have to be left behind in the city as punishment. Dante freaks out as his father tries to leave and leaps at him. Lance becomes enraged and grabs an old baseball bat and bludgeons him over the head, effectively knocking him out.
• Their father grabs Aria and proceeds to leave the city with her. Tacet follows his father.
• Andante wakes up the next day with an aching head to discover that his father was true to his words. He frantically runs off to search for his missing family, but Lance was thorough enough to hide their trail with the river on the city’s outskirts.
• Andante returns to the shop to Viola and the panic settles in. The stress forces him to shift a month early, and he fears that he has become a monster like his father.
• Dante holds onto the bat, afraid that his father may return and attack them again.
• The pair scrape by for a week on their own.
• While searching for food within the city, Andante is discovered by a small community of Luperci living in the city. They take in the siblings for a short time, educating them about their ability to shift and showing them simple survival tricks.
• Andante, tired of seeing the looks of pity and condescension on the city wolves’ features, takes Viola and moves into a deserted part of the city
• A few of the city wolves, primarily their concerned healer, visit the pair of siblings every so often to check up on them. Dante takes the lessons and supplies they offer in stride, and turns down each offer to return to their small community. The boy has no trust to give to anyone aside from his sister, and prefers to live alone with her in their small apartment.
• Viola’s mental state only seems to deteriorate further, and she becomes almost completely dependent on her brother. The stress of taking care of his sister begins to take its toll on Dante.
• Dante first loses control when he is nearly a year old. Viola’s needy and controlling pleas finally push him to the edge.
• He screams at her, begs her for a single moment of peace. She continues to cry out for attention.
• Andante snaps and begins to attack his sister with the very same bat his father used against him months ago.
• When the boy regains his senses, he discovers the broken and bloody form of his sister. Regret and guilt assault him lightning fast. He howls mournfully into the night, an instinctive cry for help, before bolting from the scene.
• The hybrid boy spends the next few months traveling from city to city, determined to put as much distance between him at that tragic city.
• He arrives in Halifax in October and decides to settle down there for the winter.

Personality

Andante isn’t the friendliest creature out there. He generally mistrusts other people and, for the most part, would prefer to avoid them all if possible. Friendly and outgoing types annoy the hell out of him and he usually either ignores them completely or makes a game out of ticking them off. For him to push past his usual anti-social tendencies, Dante would have to find something particularly striking about a stranger to capture his attention. As his social skills aren’t very polished, Dante has the tendency to state his thoughts rather bluntly and move right to the point. He cares little for the feelings of others and won’t think twice about hurting the feelings of another or offending them in any way.

Dante likes to pretend that he doesn’t have any emotional states beyond ‘pleased’ and ‘displeased,’ but he runs through the range of them like any other. The most volatile of these states is his anger, which is always potent and unforgiving. The hybrid boy easily looses control of himself when angry, and he often launches into a berserker attack if pushed far enough. At that point his fighting skills are almost nonexistent and he depends solely on using brute force to take down the source of his fury. He has a subconscious fear of being pulled into this state of mind, but his love of getting into scuffles makes this nearly unavoidable.

He has a general disdain for all canines who choose to remain in their original forms. Dante believes that Luperci are superior to their unshifting brethren, and will not hesitate to let them know this. He strongly considers Luperci to be the next step in evolution for canines and thinks that those who do not take advantage of the gifts bestowed upon them to be ungrateful. Because of this, Dante never shifts out of his two-legged form, though that may have originally been attributed to the fact that he never learned to properly shift. The hybrid boy has never gone back to his lupus form after prematurely shifting for the first time.

Relationships

Family

• Mother – Sonatina de la Rocha
• Father – Lance Cadence
• Sisters - Aria de la Rocha, Viola de la Rocha
• Half-brother – Tacet Cadence

Appearance

Dante is always seen in his Luperci form, without exception. He prefers to wear human clothing, usually donning a pair of earthy green camouflage-patterned pants cut off at the knees and an open denim jacket. His fur ranges from creamy off-whites to darker browns, with the lighter colors concentrated on his face and belly. He has a splash of dark brown on his muzzle that fades quickly to match the rest of his fur. Dante’s mane borrows that dark brown as well, cascading down to his shoulders usually. He’s quite a bit shorter than average and has a build takes its form more from his dog genes than his wolf ones, but that doesn’t stop him from getting in someone else’s face when the opportunity presents itself. His eyes are a deep purple, inherited from his mother.

Accessories include five piercings in each ear, comprised of a mixture of loops, studs, and one barbell in his left ear. He also wears a black leather collar with a bone shaped tag with the word ‘Andy’ engraved and repeatedly scratched out. Andante normally carries a small hunting knife in the belt of his shorts as well as an old aluminum baseball bat.