Welcome

HOLY BACKGROUNDS, BATMAN. i am so very done with this picture. happy with it, though.

Anyway, I promised Hakim's backstory, so here you go:
This is not Hakim. Well, sort of. Not technically. Hakim Abbasi was born in America, but into an intensely isolated religious community, one of those little human islands that springs up in big cities. (I haven't nailed down his exact national origin yet. Middle Eastern. Muslim.) And this was all just fine, until Suriel got involved.

Suriel, according to myth, was among this group of angels that got themselves in trouble for coming to earth and
a) gettin' it on with mortal women
b) teaching mortals various secrets that they weren't supposed to know. Think Prometheus. Suriel was the one who taught man about the phases of the moon. He, and the rest of the group, eventually get banished to the "valleys of the earth" for spilling the beans. Of course, that doesn't mean he just stayed there.

(this is the point where it stops being actual mythos and becomes 'stuff I came up with'.)

To keep himself entertained, and as a way of giving the metaphorical finger to God and company, Suriel started taking one human body after another, using them as vehicles to spread knowledge and educate people about all those things they weren't supposed to be learning about. He's probably been doing this for centuries, by the time we get to the modern era. Granted, this has been known to get the human forms killed (he's been persecuted for heresy many times), but hell, what does he care? He just moves on to a new one.

He got Hakim when he was a teenager, so he's been in this particular form for maybe 20 years now. He runs an occult bookstore, Half Moon Books and Artifacts, in New York City, and will teach magic and the forbidden things he knows to anyone who's curious enough.

wow that was long