Zahari Shaw

Zahari Julius Shaw
Face Claim: Matthew Daddario
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Age: Twenty (July 2nd)
Gender: Male
Orientation: Bisexual
Position: University Student - Biology / Lab Research Assistant
Godly Inheritance: Artemis - Moon Child 

Power(s): 

Tracking Abilities:
Hide and seek was never a game that Zahari was good at. He might've been one of the best at hiding but there was something about the seeking part that he would beat everyone at. He'd just know where they were hiding and their exact route on how to get to the hiding place. This wasn't limited to just his friends or family though, he could track anything if he thought about it hard enough. This has come in handy plenty of times for Zahari and he honestly does not know when he became so good at tracking things down, or whether or not it was just innate for him.  
 

The ability to track first occurred when his adoptive mother lost a ring, for some bizzare reason the simple gold band was important to her. They had been out on a hike and had travelled through a forest and the ring must have been lost while on their walk. At the age of fifteen, it was like something had flicked on in his brain as soon as he thought of the routes they had taken on their walk. It was like a series of colours, scents and wind changes outlined a path for Zahari to follow. It was only fourty-five minutes into their walk, with 'Hari dragging people along, that he stopped suddenly on one of the forest paths. His colours and the like had stopped, and there just below a small rock, was the gold band. 

His family had nervously laughed it off as a fluke and teased Zahari as to why he couldn't have bought them back sooner to the site if he had actually known all along where the ring had been dropped. Zahari, for one, had not listened to their words. He had, had the strangest sensation that he was being watched. As though something had awoken and something was watching.

Enhanced Dexterity:

That game...the small cube thing. The Rubiks cube. Zahari had made quick work of so many of them whenever he was given one or came across any of them. This, again, had not happened properly until he had turned fifteen when the weird occurrence of the ring had happened in the forest. But since that time, Zahari had felt like he had been changing. Not only could he find things in just thinking about it, but now he was finding that certain things were becoming much easier. He had always been an athletic guy but as soon as he turned fifteen, something about the ability to throw and catch, being able to track exactly where a ball or any other item from a sport would land, it all started to tie into one. The quips would come out smarter and he would be faced with abrubt responses for suddenly "coming out with too smart of an answer". It got him in trouble and he often was thought of as cheating. Not exactly a good reputation to have. It wasn't cheating, it wasn't luck. It was pure instinct. 

Hunting Prowess:

Zahari didn't pick up a bow and arrow until he started at the school. It was a feeling of complete restlessness as though he needed to be active somehow. His hands couldn't stop twitching and the headaches from the burn of having nothing to do, no scent to track, complete and utter boredom. He hadn't tried archery before he had arrived and as soon as he had picked up the bow, it had felt natural. His ability to track and the stable anchor of the bow as he pulled and released was soothing and from that time and onwards, he could never miss a target. Not unless of course another of those with powers used their own to throw him off. And these were often challenges he would accept. Being idle never suited Zahari and once the powers had emerged, it was often idleness that would give him much more pain. In not being able to shoot or anything else, the boredom would crumble him from inside.

Nothin' to do with heightened scenes at all, I think? I just related a small separate otherwise tidbit to how he could zone in and lock onto things with his tracking.  


Limitations:
It is able for Zahari to overdo himself when it comes to his powers. In their overuse, they render him all but powerless. His tracking abilities can stop him in his tracks if he loses focus of what he's looking for or if someone interrupts him. He can also over-track and become obsessed with whatever he's looking for as once becoming obsessed it takes complete exhaustion, dehydration or an injury given to him by another to make him actually stop. As soon as he pushes himself to the absolute limit, his power levels deplete and his others are rendered useless, almost absent until he rests.

This is the same for his other two powers, of which are weaker than his first and main ability. There is a catch with his arrogance as he uses his powers. Zahari often becomes overconfident and is confident in using his abilities for almost anything, which of course creates a natural sluggishness when he slows down, and as such..the limitation here is that he's absolutely useless at anything that requires him to move away from his powers. In playing sports, he has to actually work on natural prowess and do extra work. It takes him a lot of focus to react normally and be on par with others. Although he does enjoy sports and doing things on the same level as others around him and not using his powers (unless he wants to sleep for a long time), his frustration at doing it can often be seen. This makes him fairly curt with some and he can be unlikable in his arrogance.  




Side-Effects:
Zahari's powers combined would always leave him with a lack of energy, the ability to sleep for hours upon hours on end and a hunger that would be near insatiable. The tiredness and the hunger turns his mood sour, and from constant concentration and leaning towards over-use of his tracking abilities, he has horrendous migraines. These migraines have more than once rendered him blind in one eye until they pass and they happen almost weekly, sometimes twice a week if he overexerts himself. Slowly but surely, Zahari is gaining more grip on his ability but the side-effects are happening more often than not due to his own misuse. 

Height: 6ft 3.
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Hazel/Brown. 

Physical Description: Out of instinct, Zahari wears anything in a dark colour that allows him to move almost silently. He also has a slight scar running through one of his eyebrows from a small brawl with one of his siblings when he was younger. He has an athletic build to a degree as he always remains active when possible. 

Personality:
Zahari Shaw can be seen as a show-off, curt and sometimes unkind to those around him. He has always been aloof and this even stretched to his family and friends. Zahari determines people's worth on how well they do at things, at sports, at actually living life and if they can't handle physically stresses properly, he usually turns his head and finds company elsewhere. As a result of this, Zahari can be seen as proud but in doing this it renders him rather anti-social and quite often in need or friends, not acquaintances. Growing up as the 'adopted-kid', he has legitimate trust issues when it comes to people befriending him and he usually wants to try and find out everything about a person before he gets to know them. Zahari loves confrontation and, in other terms, enjoys the thrill of the hunt when it comes to fighting. In a strange and bizzare way, Zahari feels that fighting allows him to show his own worth. Not simply because in truth, once his two younger siblings had been born, it had been difficult to win the attention of his parents. While they may have felt like they needed to adopt him and bring him home from the hospital, it didn't mean that they had to divide all of their attention to him and him alone. They had also felt in their hearts that there was another reason why the boy had to be there and why he almost had to grow up protected. 

The endless need to control Zahari's whereabouts was what drove Zahari towards almost-reckless now and this is one of his greatest limitations. It takes a lot of thought for Zahari to realise what he's doing and how much damage he has caused, and this can be linked back to the endless concentration from his powers. It's almost like once he catches a scent, maybe a scent of mischief or a scent to actually hurt someone else once confrontation has been decided, it's difficult to make him stop. Zahari loves to show off and away from the other 'stuff', he has been known to flirt quite a lot and try and win people over that way. But he also fears rejection, it is something that he keeps to himself and he innately knows that the way he acts at times does not aid this, but rejection is one of his greatest fears. He found a new home within the school that he felt like he didn't have when he lived with his adoptive parents and siblings, he fears that in being rejected he would lose the one place he had felt safe. The entirety of the community feels like home to him now.

Five (or more) Likes: Hunting, forests, problem-solving, running, the scent of confrontation (it's a bit sweet-sour), the feeling of the hunt, nights that hold a full moon, moonlight.

Five (or more) Dislikes: Zahari hates, hates, hates being confined. It sends his mind into an overload and it makes him frustrated and cagey (claustrophobic), he also hates eating processed food and would rather eat freshly prepared food, he despises suck ups and would rather befriend somebody who can be of use to him and himself be of use to themselves (to an extent), the occasional nightmare from the time he almost died after his powers manifested the first time, having his powers simmer away after he had used them too much, the tiredness and the migraines after misuse. 

Secret(s): Nobody knows that sometimes Zahari has problems rooting and controlling his hunting prowess. He often has a desire to shoot at or hunt anything or anybody that runs. It takes a while to shake this of, and the only way to see that he's struggling here is when the weapon (usually a bow) that he is holding has a tremor from Zahari's own brief stress.

Parents: (Adoptive) George Shaw, Jenna Shaw 
Siblings: Carla Shaw - Non-Godly, Christina Shaw - Non-Godly
Worthy Mentions: N/A

Childhood: It is known that Zahari was adopted and for some reason his adoptive parents felt almost drawn to him when they saw him in the hospital. No body knew exactly where the child had come from but when the nurses thought too hard or when they slept at night, all they saw in their heads was a blurred almost vision of a beautiful woman laying a dark haired baby into one of the nursery cribs and leaving. None of the nurses have every shared this vision-dream with their other workers, as it was weird and things like that didn't happen. The Shaw parents only saw Zahari and felt that he had been 'born' just for them and with no records on how he ended up there, they had to adopt him.

Of course, the Shaws later had two of their own children. The two younger Shaws, twins, were born four years after their parents had adopted Zahari. Where the name Zahari came from, nobody knew. With the twins called Christina and Carla, the name Zahari stuck out like a sore thumb. As did the child's looks as he grew up until now, dark, tall and a gaze that could shock systems. Of course, people put this down to him being adopted. But the name? Zahari? Jenna Shaw only said that the name had come to her in a dream and she loved the name. George Shaw could have sworn that he had tried to object to the name, but it had felt lie his tongue had become rooted to his mouth. The boy was to be called Zahari. And Zahari was who he became.

Adolescence: As his powers manifested just after he turned fifteen, the confusion that followed hurt and scared Zahari. All of a sudden after the manifestation in the forest of his tracking ability and then the enhanced dexterity, followed by the hunting prowess, the feeling of being watched never dropped from Zahari's focus. Everywhere he turned, he could latch onto being hunted himself and this was a frightening thing for the teenager. Could he trust his parents? Could he trust his neighbours? It turns out that the old lady across the road was the one monstrous creature that had started to latch onto Zahari's manifesting abilities and the scent of a moon-child of Artemis that he carried. Zahari had grown up around the old lady and then suddenly within a day, she was tearing at the walls, trying to rip the door down with all of her sudden strength and the growls and snarls aimed at him had forced his abilities into focus. Zahari had known that he had to survive or he would die a painful death. His sight on the old lady had changed and instead he saw a creature that wanted him. Had caught whiff of what he had become, or had finally became, rather, and wanted him. 

By the time the creature had crashed down the door, Zahari had vaulted himself from his bedroom window, breaking his wrist in the fall and could only concentrate on one thing: he had to run. The adrenalin masked the pain of his arm as he took off at a sprint, with somehow the night still remaining still, warm and sticky from the summer heat, with a creature snarling as it began to follow suit in the chase. His chase for freedom, and her chase for blood. Zahari can never say for sure when it happened but at some point in the chase when the creature had caught up and slashed at his legs, tripping him and rendering him immobile, the fifteen year old had caught sight of a few figures. They were...different...to who he had grown up seeing. Just as they launched themselves at the creature, who had given an almighty shriek as she was slaughtered, Zahari had passed out. 

It's from that day that Zahari was taken from his human neighbourhood, as his demi-god powers had manifested and he had become one of the hunted. It was upon waking up in the infirmary, that his confusion became urgency and he desperately tried to escape where he was. It was the calming effect of something else in there that calmed down the teenager and all was explained to him as well as his heritage as a son of Artemis. At first the boy could have hardly believed it, putting everything up to some elaborate prank..but as he recalled the creature that had tried to kill him, he knew that what he had been told was true. He had a whole world to figure out and get into, and it didn't take long until he was enrolled into the high school and so on. He had a whole new existence to learn about.

Adulthood: Now at twenty-years old, Zahari is a Junior in the Olympus Falls University and has become well accustomed to the rituals and the ongoing life in where he lives. He remains an email only connection with his adoptive-parents, but that life has become more or less a distant memory for Zahari. From his time in the high school to college, Zahari has had a few friends but most of them can only really be classed as acquaintances. He plays on the lacrosse team and it only seemed natural that he would also excel in archery, with a natural talent for using a bow, which can either be attributed to his status as a son of Artemis, or from his hunting prowess and dexterity. Both of which he enjoys a lot. He sometimes takes part in track alongside this, but it is archery and lacrosse which usually hold his focus. 

Zahari rarely travels away from Olympus Falls and mainly focuses on his sports and his degree, which is Biology. While this degree may have seemed out of sorts for Zahari, his ability to be ever so careful with his hands from his dexterity and his ability to track has helped him many times as a part time research assistant alongside his degree. His tracking ability in this way has helped him isolate specific areas in his degree research, and he has a keen interest in genetics. Especially those of the demi-gods. Everything about this area of science. He only struggles with this when he had become fatigued from over-using his powers, and as such his ability to perform efficiently suffers at times.

Sample: 

Username: Lewis.

Age Group: Mid-twenties.

Experience: I started when I was sixteen years old. So almost ten years of experience.

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