Mat Salazar

Name: Matías Salazar

Nicknames: Mat

Age: 18

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Straight

Personality: Although hardened and admittedly somewhat scary, Mat’s a genuinely kind and compassionate person, willing to give comfort or shelter to just about anyone, and he’s always at his strongest when he’s fighting for his friends and family. He usually seems vaguely amused by everything; however, this is mostly an affectation to try and offset the creepiness of being a child of the Underworld. Opinions vary on whether it works.

Looks: Mat is 5’10, with black, stringy hair falling past his shoulders, dark eyes, and a perpetual hint of unshaven scruff. He usually wears ripped jeans and a tight black hoodie over his slender but muscular frame, sometimes adding a black leather jacket in colder weather. Aside from his slightly broader nose and darker skin, he looks disturbingly like a younger, more punk version of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco—unsurprisingly, since the two would be half-brothers on the godly side.

Divine Parent: Hades

Powers: Mat possesses the usual minor abilities of a child of Hades—an ability to sense spirits, communicate with the dead, and determine when someone is close to death, as well as a tendency to radiate an aura of darkness and cold when angry. He also has the less common, somewhat-related abilities of shadow travel and walking in others’ dreams. His most unique and powerful ability, however, is his mal de ojo, the Evil Eye. Mat has the ability to curse anything in his direct line of sight. In living things, this usually manifests as illness or, in extreme cases, immediate death, while inanimate objects break down, sometimes permanently. While he can use this ability intentionally, it happens automatically whenever he feels negative emotion towards something. As a result, Mat constantly wears a pair of mirrored aviator shades to break his line of sight so he doesn’t accidentally curse things every time he gets annoyed.

Backstory: A native of Hollywood—not the shiny, glittery Hollywood they sell on the postcards, but the Hollywood that trails only three places between Compton in a rating of Los Angeles’s worst neighborhoods, the Hollywood that sees more rape and homicide in a month than some of the city’s “worst” neighborhoods see in three—Mat had already borne witness to his share of death long before he learned his father’s true identity.

Mat’s proximity to the entrance to the Underworld masked his own similar scent, protecting him from monsters. He was, however, unable to avoid more mundane dangers so easily. Mat managed to stay out of a gang himself, but his older, mortal half-brother, Santiago, was an active member of the gang known as the Magician Club, so called because they made people disappear. When Mat was fifteen, Santiago was killed in a scuffle with the White Fence gang, and the death triggered his powers as a son of Hades. Not knowing what he was, Mat reached for the only obvious conclusion provided by the day-to-day rhythms of Hollywood life and culture: clearly, he was a mutant, cursed with incredible, uncanny powers. Under such circumstances there was only one thing to. Thus Mat began his short-lived career as Hollywood’s only real-life superhero.

Dressed in a costume consisting of a black hoodie and sunglasses, Mat launched himself into a war against the street gangs of Hollywood. TMC, White Fences, or the 18th Street Gang, it didn’t matter. And, incredibly, it seemed to be working. The police began to take note as more and more wanted gangsters simply appeared outside the precinct door with wild tales of an assailant who literally melted into the night. Meanwhile, the gangsters of Hollywood were plagued with illness and bizarre nightmares, and it was only a short time before they superstitiously connected the curses and the bad dreams with the mysterious opponent in the night, there one minute and gone the next. Some of them whispered that it was the Devil himself, come up from Hell to collect his debt early. The police tried to keep the rumors quiet, but there was no stopping it: the press gobbled it up. As the Hollywood Devil, Mat was in the magazines, the tabloids, and on the front page of the LA Times. But just as the gangs began to break before Mat’s onslaught, a new opponent reared her head. Sensing a demigod behind the fantastic tales, Sybaris came to Hollywood.

During the course of his Tenth Labor, the hero Heracles mated with a Scythian dracaena—it’s best not to imagine how. In time, the monster bore him three sons—and a daughter, as monstrous as she herself was, the she-dragon Sybaris, scourge of Delphi, a queen among dracaenae. Returned from death, she was clever, she was hungry, and she was coming for the unsuspecting son of Hades.

In a desperate final move, the gangs of Hollywood came together to set a trap for their so-called Devil. Mat, however, learned of the plan and tipped off the police, sending them in for a massive raid on all the gangs. He himself stayed nearby in the shadows, ready to attack should it be necessary to turn the tide. That was when Sybaris struck. As the police battled the gangs on the streets below, Mat desperately fought Sybaris across the rooftops. He finally defeated her by jumping with her off of the Capitol Records Building and traveling through his own shadow at the bottom to land safely. Shortly after, he was tracked down by a satyr from Camp Half-Blood, who had been dispatched to investigate the suspicious media reports.

At camp, Mat, now 16, learned the true nature of his powers and was claimed by his father, who gave him his sword, Crocea Mors, as a gift. Mat’s next adventure came when he was 17, when he was given the quest to defeat the Teumassian Fox. Unlike Amphitryon, the monster’s original opponent, however, Mat had no inescapable hound to set against the uncatchable Fox. Mat spent a full month fruitlessly chasing after the Fox before calling for help from Del Byron, a girl he’d met back at camp. She provided him with an obvious solution: the Fox was destined never to be caught, which was not the same as being destined never to be destroyed. Several land mines filled with Celestial bronze shrapnel later, Mat was left with one very dead fox and one massive favor owed to the demigods of Hephaestus Cabin. Since completing this quest, Mat has spent most of his time at camp, though he occasionally returns to LA to visit his mother.

Strengths:

• Like most children of Hades, Mat’s one spooky dude. He absolutely knows how to use that to his advantage.
  
• Mat’s childhood showed him some of the worst humanity has to offer, and his teenage years took care of the rest. Even Tartarus itself would be hard pressed to elicit a reaction from him.
  
• He’s kinda really hot, in a Draco in Leather Pants sort of way, with the added advantage of actually not being a huge jackass.
  
• Mat has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and his judgement in that regard is usually pretty good.
  

Weaknesses:

• Like most children of Hades, Mat’s one spooky dude. This can make it difficult to make friends or get others to trust him.
  
• Mat is insecure about his background and sometimes feels uncomfortable around higher income campers, especially if they’re white.
  
• Mat’s fatal flaw is Relentlessness; once he begins something, he’s as impossible to stop as death itself, whatever the cost.
  
• Ironically enough, Mat really, really loves devil’s food cake, which can usually be used to bribe him into favors.
  

Weapon: Mat wields not just an Imperial gold gladius, but the Imperial gold gladius: Crocea Mors, AKA Yellow Death, the stupidly lethal blade of Julius Caesar himself.

Other: Mat is bilingual, speaking Spanish and English. However, he avoids using the latter where he could be overheard by others.

Mat severely dislikes the “oracle” Diddy J for the way he uses his own idea of “gangsta” culture as an accessory.