Name: Alexis Righte
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Appearance:
Alexis is around 175 cm tall, with a fairly fit physique derived from various training routines, though semi-frequent vigilante action certainly doesn't hinder this. Scars cross his body at various points, one of the few indicators of his lifestyle as a vigilante.
Bio: Alexis, like many modern moguls, was not born into money; his parents were upper-middle class characters, but he himself was not strictly any more privileged than average so far as cash was concerned. Unlike many modern moguls, however, Alexis' life took a turn for the worse at the age of seven, when not only did a criminal come along and kill his parents, but he himself was severely wounded by a couple of bullets, requiring serious medical attention and months of physical therapy, and slapping on him a doctor's bill that was only just paid off by the assets his parents had left behind. After all was said and done, Alexis was left a broken and broke orphan.
Evidently, Alexis would hardly have come out of that sort of situation well under normal circumstances anyway. However, he was also diagnosed with psychopathy, now called antisocial personality disorder, yet this somehow went untreated by the doctors of the time, and combined with his being forced into a foster home, then forced out of the same home at just eighteen, he grew up much the worse for it. He saw examples of cruelty everywhere he looked, and soon began to realise how utterly disgusting many people could be given the chance. Sick of how America had developed in light of the Cold War's actions, he moved to a newly-forming city called Ankora, seemingly a new hope for the man, where he could start up a business with a fresh idea he'd had in a fresh location, ideally unmarred by criminal activity.
He was sorely mistaken about how fresh the city would be. Even as he began the business which would become Righte Industries Inc., there were hints that Ankora would collapse into the same myopia that the rest of the US had become, even in spite of the recent rise of vigilantism keeping down criminals. Sure enough, that state of affairs progressed to the point of vigilantes being feared by the populace, and ultimately outlawed by the Vigilance Accord, directly resulting (at least in Alexis' mind) in Ankora's final fall into depravity. This triggered some chord of discontent in Alexis - if criminals were all but allowed to kill, rape, steal, with little response from police forces, why shouldn't the vigilantes be granted legality if their attacks were directed only at those who broke the law?
A couple of years passed. Alexis' company continued growing, now extending into a great many fields and expanding beyond its headquarters in Ankora, and Alexis finally entered the realms of the upper class. With this money, he began to perform research into certain things, ostensibly for medical and civilian benefits - powered exoskeletons, stronger materials, how to attach hard objects to softer surfaces without risk of weakening the soft surface...
In late 2010, the first reports came in throughout Ankora of people, seemingly caught in the midst of criminal acts evidence and all, who had been shot, impaled, disemboweled, and otherwise violently murdered. Nobody was quite sure who had done these things, but every so often, people would report glimpses of somebody in red wandering the streets, and police reports would mention untraceable bullets lodged in victims or gashes in surfaces where somebody had been held up against a wall and sliced clean in half. It was not until somebody caught on video one of Alexis' murders- a man had begged and pleaded that his crimes were to support his family, to which Alexis had stated that he had had many other options which wouldn't have led to his death, right before stabbing him clean through the chest cavity- that his vigilante persona finally acquired a name - The Red Claw.
Personality: Alexis is what most people would call a psychopath - or, to be more medically accurate, a person with antisocial personality disorder, meaning he lacks empathy and sees others as tools to be used as he sees fit. Though he can handily read others and pretend to be as nice a guy as anybody has ever met, his true self is rather distanced from the realities of social interaction, and he will typically take the time where he can to examine a person's interactions with others before coming to talk to them himself, having developed in his head the right sort of facade to get into their good books and impress them.
This lack of empathy is not so bad on its own, given that there are many ASPD cases who have not become violent murderers; however, in Alexis' case, he has come to the conclusion that most people will gladly violate both the law and the general consensus of what "good morality" is when given the chance, and moreover that those who perform evil and unlawful acts are more likely to continue committing such acts in the future, and likely escalate to worse crimes over time where they can, such that the only real way to ensure they never do these things again is to end their lives when caught. He therefore sees his own blatantly monstrous acts not as evil or unlawful, but simply an assertion of this conclusion to its fullest extent - those who kill must be killed; those who rape must be killed; those who steal will likely kill in the future, and must be killed; those who perform immoral but technically legal corporate activities will likely escalate to outright illegal activities in the future, and must be killed; and so on.
Vigilante Name: The Red Claw
Costume: Alexis wears a skintight black spandex and rubber full-body suit which, through the wonders of modern technology such as braided pneumatic actuators incorporated between layers, amplifies his striking and lifting force when needed without being so large and clunky as many powered exoskeletons are. Attached over the spandex, he wears a series of thick tank-grade titanium plates, complete with voice-modulating titanium helmet utilising black bulletproof glass as a visor, having been stained red with dried-on blood which he has not bothered washing off, providing one half of his vigilante name, as well as granting substantial protection from most forms of assault and increasing his apparent weight by a few dozen kilograms. The centerpieces of his costume, however, are the two rounded, armoured gauntlets he wears, each oversized such that their top sides pass beyond the ends of his fingers and elbows; their features are described below. He is looking into ways this setup could feasibly be improved upon, however.
Abilities/Skills: Alexis' physical strength, speed and agility are above average under normal circumstances, similar to what you might expect of a consummate athlete or many vigilantes. His spatial reasoning and prediction, by contrast, are second to none, giving him the accuracy to impale a fly with a needle if he so desires, and to dodge attacks or predict gunfire paths like it's going out of fashion. On top of this, he is smart and charming enough to run a rather successful company, possesses more than enough social awareness to put up facades of any given personality when he cares to, and is well-trained in various forms of fist fighting, namely boxing in modern, Russian, and bare knuckle variants, plus various forms of street fighting techniques which include grapples and body locks in the situations where his usual fighting style is insufficient.
Equipment: Alexis generally uses very little equipment other than his suit and his gauntlets. Each gauntlet incorporates what is essentially a stripped-down FN MAG medium machine gun firing with a certain specific hand gesture, drawing ammunition from a coiled disintegrating M13 linked belt holding custom 7.62x51mm NATO rifle cartridges with no identifying marks to indicate who has sourced the ammunition - custom-created by an automated manufacturing line as a perk of his company's long reach, as a matter of fact, and well-hidden to ensure evidence does not leak. However, he is most well known for the 30cm long, very sharp titanium blades contained in the gauntlets, three emerging from the front and one from the back behind the elbow, granting the second half of his title as a vigilante - these are contained within the gauntlets as standard, and can be released (forcibly enough to puncture several inches of oak wood, at that) and withdrawn with various hand gestures, generally being released on the front of just one hand to end a criminal's life. That said, the gauntlets themselves are easily hard and heavy enough to block most attacks, or to break bones and buckle metal sheets with a strike, in fact remaining manageable in terms of encumbrance only due to the efforts of the strength-boosting suit under the armour (and indeed, his speed and agility would also both be rather reduced by the titanium plating alone were he not wearing the suit as well); rarely are they used specifically in a maul-like fashion, however, as the lethal nature of Alexis' vigilantism generally encourages either shooting targets from a distance, or impaling them on his claws up close whilst using the suit's enhanced strength to help pierce whatever protection they utilise, with armour destruction via buckling or shattering being a comparatively rare benefit.
Alignment: Lawful Evil - He sure as hell isn't good, but he's extremely adherent to his own standards when it comes to taking out criminals. That is to say, all of them, at every opportunity he can manage. In this regard, he believes he is upholding the law by negating unlawful activity, regardless of his own flagrant disregard of the legal system.
Reputation: To many people, the Red Claw is more of a horror story than a reality, something to be described in exaggerations to Ankora's children to keep them on the straight and narrow. If only the mutilated bodies that keep turning up every few nights did not prove otherwise. Even then, there are a small subset of people who see his permanent solution to the problems of crime as a blessing of sorts, and for the most part, his existence has reduced criminal activity to some extent, meaning that those who do not commit such crimes are overall pseudo-tolerant of his existence, just so long as he doesn't personally affect them in some way.
Accord Compliance: Signing up with the government would just hold him back. He kills who he needs to, as soon as he can.