Intro

The society he has grown up in cares for human advancement more than anything else. Their technology is advanced and the average human's biology is top notch. They have gained very high standards for genetics due to the fact that they have been selectively breeding for hundreds of years. The society of the world Platun believes in eugenics.

People in this society have a chronic arrogance and refuse to perform certain jobs or tasks. Therefore they created slaves, known as “pets”; Synthetically created humans with DNA spliced with animals to create decorative servants for the humans to control and gawk at. Platun has some magic influence, but it has become very weak. And the gods of this world are more like spirits or archfey.

On the very top of this ladder is the Elite. They’re a category of humans who are blessed with divine blood from one of the gods (aasimar). They are easily identified by having pale eyes, as well as being able to display their divine powers through making their eyes or skin glow. Different mega cities were had their own flavor of Elite, but Laucian was born in the golden city of Aureapolis. There the Elite are blessed by the Goddess simply named “Life” whose avatar is a giant glowing spider. Her body is symbolised as the sun itself, and her spread out legs are the sun rays.

0+ Childhood

On their third attempt, the Vancy family gave birth to Laucian on the first day of the new year as planned. He was to grow up being an only child and the Vance family were already planning out his life in detail. It was important to the family that he would grow up to take over the family business. A military technology and weapons manufacturing business. The one who had the biggest demands on Laucian’s upbringing was his grandfather, Olivier Vance.

At 3 years old, he was given his own pet. His family raised a species of pets named archangels, like one would have a dog kennel. Due to his species, Laucian named his pet “Archie”... Though his parents gave it the official name Archanion seeing they didn’t like Laucian’s choice of name.

Due to how strict Elites in general are with their children's upbringing and when and how they are allowed to interact, Laucian spent most of his free time playing with Archie and the other archangels. While the pets were definitely servants of sorts, they had a quite good relationship with him. The relationship the pets had with the Vance family was like servants in a castle, with the Vance’s being the royal family. And little bright and blue eyed Laucian was the young prince who didn’t mind playing with anyone. In fact, he preferred to spend time with the pets since they weren’t strict with him.

During this time, he was also introduced to and betrothed to Baelitae. A girl from another elite family only a year older than him. She didn’t seem to mind him much as they were young kids, but also didn’t have much interest in him either.

When he was 8, his parents took in an infant archangel that they had been quite excited about. It was not completely unusual for the parents to help care for the youngest archangel pets, but they seemed to spend a lot of time with this one. His name became Florentine.

10+ Teenage Years

Times got rougher in his teenage years. Hormones, schooling, pressure, it all escalated and his free time diminished quite a bit.

When he was about 14, he would spend all of his free time with Archie. They would often go out into the land the Vance owned and be in the forest, or climb the mountain, or even swim into a small secret cove where the lake and the mountain met. Away from the eyes of others, they could be more free to be themselves and were quite intimate.

It wouldn’t take too long before Olivier the senior caught on, and went to put a stop to their friendship before risking that it would turn into something more. Archie was sent away. Never to be seen again. Laucian was distraught… but barely had time to process his emotions before he was taken to a facility where he had witnessed his cousin go through conversion therapy. The mere threat of it was enough to make Laucian fear attraction to men, and this was encouraged further by Olivier over the years.

Much to Laucian’s contempt, Florentine continued to stay within the Vance mansion rather than being taken to the kennels when he was old enough. His parents were a lot softer and sweeter with Florentine, letting him get away with things Laucian would never, and letting him use casual language like “Ma & Pa” to refer to them. This caused Laucian to grow extremely jealous of him. His parents would dismiss any accusation of unequal treatment, simply stating that Florentine is a pet and cannot be upheld to the same standards as Laucian. Thus this is “fine” and Laucian should “stop being so childish”.

With the loss of his best friend and his pseudo-brother getting better treatment, as well as teenage hormones acting up, caused Laucian to become rather unpredictable and emotional. His father would act with neglect and passive aggressiveness, while his mother would cause him physical harm to stop the unwanted behaviour. At one point, Laucian snapped and acted out violently in turn, harming his mother as well as property. His mother Quelenna never acted out physically on him again for the fear of getting injured. This caused Laucian to redirect his emotions and frustrations to anger and violence as a self defence mechanism.

Baelitae became more difficult to interact with, as it was dawning on both of them that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. She absolutely hated the thought and would give any excuse not to see him, as she would “see him plenty when they’re married later”.

Despite what Olivier the senior had done to Laucian in the past, and the act he had basically dictated the teenager's entire life, the two became rather close. Olivier would spend a lot more time with Laucian than his father would, mostly because Olivier saw his son as a willing failure and saw his grandson as a new and more moldable hope. Laucian would never relax around his grandfather, but he could feel their time together be fulfilling.

At 19 years of age, Laucian learned that Olivier Vance the senior died due to mysterious circumstances. It became world wide news and there was a lot of tension in the family now that Olivier Vance the junior would have to take over.

20+ Early Adulthood

The first half of his twenties were rather smooth. He managed to get into an elite friend circle, and thus didn’t only have pets to interact with. His father was working most of the time. His grandfather wasn’t there to dictate his every breath. He was mostly left to his own devices and he was thriving.

At 23 he couldn’t stand Florentine anymore and started acting out his jealousy on him. He would most of all bruise the angel's wings for it was almost impossible to see the damage through the feathers. A year later, Florentine fled. This put the biggest dent between Laucian and his parents.

Laucian’s life plans had dictated that he was going to get married at 25, and his father had made sure that this meant that he would become the new owner of the company as well. On the day of the new year, Laucian’s life changed. He was now a married man who had to take over a huge company with very little training or idea of what that actually meant. Long days and nights were spent at work, trying to familiarize himself with everything that had to be done. Most that he knew, he had learned from his grandfather as his father had been rather apathetic and neglectful. Quickly, this man started to become a workaholic.

As a married man and the new leader of the house of Vance, he is also expected to pass on their legacy to a new generation. Laucian had been quite busy running the company, and Baelitae’s contempt for her situation didn’t draw them any closer. They were pressured into making children both from the Vance’s and her family. They were both rather reluctant, and in the end it ended up as a bad experience for both. It further destroyed Laucian inside as Baelitae would guilt trip him into believing that he had forced the encounter on her.

Despite it all, they managed to get pregnant and Laucian was actually rather positive about the prospect of having a child. The longer he sat with the idea, the more he saw the physical changes in his wife and the reality of becoming a father became more concrete, the more excited he became.

The joy wouldn’t last for long. Baelitae’s mental health had taken a turn for the worse and she had become all the more distant and passive agressive. Even taken to drinking alcohol which caused an immense amount of anger in Laucian.

One faithful evening she decided she wanted to leave, and she did. She left and returned to her own family, and shortly filed for a divorce. To Laucian this came out of the blue and he pleaded to her to come back, or at the very least give him some custody of his newborn child. She wouldn’t have any of it. Using Laucian’s aggression as a lever, she managed to divorse and get full custody fine.

Baelitae disappeared out of his life without trace, and he wouldn’t even know the name of his child.

The Vance family saw this as an embarrassing loss, and a failure on Laucian’s part; Both as a Vance and as a man. They tried to dismiss it with a handwave, saying there’s more women out there… But Laucian was becoming consumed with grief. As an attempt to cope, Laucian gave his child a birthday, the fifth day of the seventh month. During this day he would take a day off of work, celebrating his child's birthday and talk about the things they would’ve done together up to this point. This became a yearly tradition.

When he married and inherited the company, he also inherited the mansion and the pets. One of the pets was Ben, who had been the family’s butler since before Laucian was born. The Vance family had definitely rubbed off their worldview and arrogance on Ben. Seeing that most of the time it was only Ben and Laucian in the mansion, Ben had to see Laucian be miserable and emotional after the divorce. Unfortunately he thought it to be a good idea to take the opportunity to tell Laucian to “man up”. Laucian snapped, more violently than he had ever done before, and killed Ben with his bare hands.

The mansion fell silent.

30+ Thirties

A rather long part of his life, with very little information to talk about.

In his 30s he had a lot of energy and was very much focused on his job. Without a family of his own, and wanting to distance himself from the house of Vance, all of his time became work, work, work. Sometimes not even returning home for days on end. Even friendships had been severed and he only kept superficial friends that he could see during his work hours.

But, now that Ben was dead, he needed someone else to care for the mansion back home. Thus he goes to purchase a new pet, a pretty maid that had been trained for 10 years to serve an elite family, Mei-Dee. She was a bit reserved at first as she got acclimated to her new home, and Laucian’s bitterness was tough in the beginning, but soon enough she did very well with her duties.

Unlike the archangels, she remained professional with him which was a very welcome change. Laucian felt like he could relax and leave her to her own devices. Soon enough he gave her a golden collar; A subscription service and symbol that she is allowed almost anywhere in Aureapolis without the need for a master.

Laucian tried to get back into dating in his later 30s, but it rarely went anywhere. There was one woman in particular though he got really close with and was very serious about dating. Though, one day he learns that she had been lying about being single, and that she was very much cheating on her husband. Laucian was heartbroken and disgusted, and ended contact on the spot.

40+ Midlife crisis

Eventually, the weight of his workload, his family's demands and most of all his loneliness all came crashing down on him at once. Overworked and underappreciated. For a very long time he would go to work absolutely fatigued, and come home with negative energy. After finally giving into his family once more, he got to see a doctor who diagnosed him with burnout.

For a little while, the Vance house gave him space, but not nearly as much as he needed. They came to him constantly with questions on how to work the company and he ended up basically working from home. At some point he completely cut all communication and he entered a stage where he could barely get out of bed at all.

This went on for quite some time, and after months of “patience” from his family, they started asking when he was going to get back to work, and belittling him for “feeling sorry for himself”.

As he felt all the more useless and unwanted by the day, he started to resort to alcoholism to numb his emotions. Hygiene and health was not on the agenda at all, making him rough, unwashed and malnourished.

Mei-Dee had had enough. She knew Laucian was trapped in a downward spiral, and everything he neglected to do only made sure he was kept in there. Slowly but surely, she made small gestures to make him feel better, such as; Cleaning and combing his hair, grooming his face, making sure he got dressed, helped him to at least one warm and healthy meal a day, and most importantly sat down and spent time with him. Part of him wanted to dismiss it all as her being his pet and doing her job, but during this time it meant the world to him.

It took a long time, but with Mei-Dee’s help and with the distance from his family, he managed to once again stand on his own.

Though, as soon as he returned to work he could feel the stinging and claustrophobic grasp of the burnout again. He couldn’t go back there.

In the past, he had expressed a desire to join the Crimson Order, a military unit whose sole purpose was to fight demonic entities. At least there he could do some actual good for the people of this world. Mei-Dee knew it was a dangerous occupation, but she convinced him to join the order. It seemed better if Laucian died fighting for something he believed in, rather than waste away being a puppet of his family.

Now, Laucian had a lot of theoretical knowledge about military and service, but no actual hands-on experience. It was also rather difficult for him to get acclimated, not only because he was in his 40s, but because he was THE Laucian Vance. The order first thought it was some odd joke or weird threat… But Laucian carried on his duties, no matter how much people stared, glared, whispered or insulted.

50+ A new life

Being stubborn and dedicated were two golden traits that allowed Laucian to quickly improve with his tasks. His workaholic nature was spent learning and perfecting his use with weapons, and his dedication to being in peak condition for combat made him work hard on building strength and stamina. The latter also came rather easy for him, being one of the Elite.

He got promoted to staff sergeant, and didn’t exactly want a much higher position than that. Whenever he wasn’t out on the field, his job was to train new recruits. A place that suited him fine. He knew he was going to die on the field, and he was content with it. There also wasn’t really any care what his family thought about his new occupation.

Laucian carried out his duties rather effectively for years… Only interrupted one late evening when he was patrolling an old abandoned mall.

An envelope with his name on it fell at his feet.