Daniel Gallo

From Gothpoodle

Goth Kid

Daniel is a 13-year-old kid attending the Urban School in the Haight. He is undergoing a rebellious period as a goth and a Satanist, inspired by a journal and books of his grandfather's discovered when the family moved them out of storage and into their new house in Cole Valley (Bryce Kern's old house, coincidentally). Daniel has Unseen Sense, which has helped him discover the really useful stuff among his grandfather's things and find the verge on Buena Vista hill. He was taken by Liberal Anxiety to the Bad House, where he is being kept prisoner as a convenient fetter and bargaining chip.

Friends

• Samantha Soo - Daniel's sort-of girlfriend, a straight-laced kid who is attracted to Daniel's bad boy image. She has no actual interest in the occult, being more interested in becoming a computer programmer. She fled the scene when they crossed the verge and was found and possessed by Illicit Sex, who forced her to copulate with a dog-spirit. She is currently catatonic. Her father's name is Henry and he's a computer programmer. His wife, Lynn, is a housewife. They have three other children, all younger.
• Justin Park - Daniel's best friend. Korean-American. Father is a retired general and mother is an interior designer. He has three older sisters. Obsessed with the occult, reads a lot, fights with his father about his interests. He was given to the Beshilu of the Underhill Nest and fell into the hands of Phillip Hellstrom, who used him to make a Skinner Mask to get close to the pack.
• Zachary Rossi - Zachary's parents are divorced. His father is a professional chef and lives in North Beach. His mother lives in the Haight and runs a catering business. He receives very little supervision and hangs out with Daniel because he is interesting and likes to break rules. He is intrigued by the occult, but doesn't have a full-fledged interest yet. He was found with SUV, who had orders to hand him over to Decent People when the latter came for him, but an argument between him and Mugger led to violence and discoporation.
• Maria Castanos - Zachary's girlfriend, menstrating. Her father is a successful defense lawyer and her mother is a teacher, so she and her two brothers (one older, one younger) are latchkey kids. She hangs out with her friends after school and has just started having sex with Zachary. She isn't on the pill and is terrified of getting pregnant. She was given over to Evisceration to be killed and left at the Wave Organ.

Background

Gregory Gallo was an heir to the E&J Gallo Winery fortune (Ernest being his grandfather), bright with a promising future, until he came to San Francisco to attend school in 1966 and immediately got caught up with the hippies and the newly formed Church of Satan. He had always had a fascination with the supernatural (Unseen Sense) and took magic very seriously. He dropped out of school and instead lived off of his trust fund to pursue sex, drugs, and magic. Within a year, he had a son by casual acquaintance Cheryl Davis (who was sixteen at the time and a runaway) and his family was threatening to cut him off if he didn't shape up, so he went back to school and moved in with Cheryl, whom he married in a Church of Satan ceremony but never legally wed. His family allowance restored, he threw lavish parties for his occult friends which included a lot of sex, drugs, and magic, must like before. In 1972, he got a degree in anthropology from USF. He was very distant from his son and Cheryl encouraged this after a particularly unsettling event (during which she was coerced into having sex with a number of her husband's male friends as part of a sex ritual) started to push her back towards religion. In 1975, Gregory was thrown out of the Church of Satan during LeVay's reorganization and tried (and failed) to get his friends to join him in creation of a new one. He retreated from his increasingly hostile family and his adopted subculture and became a recluse, spending all of his time on occult studies and growing increasingly adept. In 1978, he finished his doctoral thesis on the resurgence of magical thinking in the modern world and began to teach part-time, mostly to fuel his own ego and rant about the politically infused occult subculture. When the Satanic Panic of the 80s began, he wrote a scathing article about the Church of Satan, depicting it as a bunch of innocuous losers playing ego games, incapable of the sort of malicious and violent actions being attributed to them. By the time of his disappearance in 1983, he had been separated from his wife for four years and hadn't seen his son in two. His disappearance was due to his exploration of verges. He stepped into the Shadow and was killed before he was able to escape.

James Gallo, his son, ran away from home with his girlfriend Patricia shortly after his father went missing. The two lived with Summer in the commune for a month before their parents tracked them time, by which time Patricia was pregnant with Daniel. The two were pressured into marriage by their conservative parents but received a lot of support as they attended college as new parents. James grew a lot of character during this period and became an investment banker, working hard to support his family as they struggled through the rest of the decade. When his mother died in 1991 of breast cancer, James took the sizable inheritance and made a number of shrewd investments in Internet startups that left the family very well-off. They enrolled Daniel in the Urban School last year and moved into Cole Valley this summer. In the course of the move, they moved the possessions of James' parents from storage into the attic of the new house, where Daniel discovered journals, notebooks, and other material belonging to his grandfather, who had always been a figure of mystery due to his father's unwillingness to speak of him and his disappearance.