“Boy, I’m giving this ‘pacifism’ thing a real, hard try, but you are sorely testing my resolve.”
NAME
Malcolm Kincaid
ALIAS
Malevolent Mal Johnson, Kingmaker
GENDER
Male
SKILLS
Point this end at the thing you want to die: Mal’s lived the kind of life were a man gets himself very familiar with firearms, or he gets himself killed. Over the years he’s picked up a few fancy tricks, though it’s worth pointing out that he is far from a quickdraw artist, or sharpshooter supreme. His preference in violence has always been of the ‘up close and personal’ variety, and this shows in his less than stellar skills when it comes to handling a gun.
Built to last, with the scars to prove it: Simply put, there ain’t no way that Mal is ever being mistaken for anything other than a violent bruiser. He stands at a respectable 6’3”, with a breadth of shoulders that just can’t be supplied by reading books, hands the size of shovels, and boasting neck muscles that a prize-winning bull could be proud of. Moreover, it’s more than obvious to the casual observer that he’s weathered more than his fair of storms in the past. His nose is a broken mess, his face bears the kind of scarring one would expect to find on a butcher’s chopping block, and somewhere along the line his right ear has been almost completely removed, leaving little more than a nub of gristle in its place. It ain’t the kind of face that has an easy time making friends, but it is the type that declares to all who lay eyes upon it ‘don’t fuck with this guy’, with remarkable aplomb.
“Fuck Queensberry, you’re playing by my rules now.”: Much of Mal’s late adolescence and early adulthood was spent in the underground fighting rings of New Rojas. Being strong, tough, fast and vicious, it didn’t take him long to claw his way to the top of the fighter’s food chain. After that he spent years as Robert Prince’s favourite muscle, bodyguard, enforcer and leg breaker, roles he took to with an apparent grim gusto. Over the years he’s proven himself to have a real talent for violence, one that, until only recently, he’s had no issues with displaying. When Mal fights, it ain’t pretty. But it sure is effective.
Not as stupid as he looks: You know that old dichotomy about being ‘street smart, not book smart’. Well Mal is most certainly the former rather than the latter. He doesn’t know his letters, would look at you blankly if you asked him to calculate seven times seven, and has no idea what gravity is beyond it being the thing that keeps him falling off into the sky, but the man doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to criminal scams or rackets, having been a’part of so many. Of special note is his ability to read people, and accurately identify their current emotions, and even their intentions, through facial and body cues. When you’ve spent the last ten years bodyguarding a fella who half a city want dead, you learn to tell when a stranger’s frown means he’s packing heat and means to offload a couple rounds into your boss’s chest, or if he’s just sulking cause he’d been caught cheating with the nanny by his missus that morning. It ain’t an exact art, and he’s far from infallible in his estimations, but he’s been right more often than he’s been wrong.
PERSONALITY
Based on his ill-reputation and brutish appearance, many would figure Malcolm Kincaid to be little more than that in personality: a brute. In some ways that is a very fair and accurate assumption. In others, it is most unkind. For example, it is true that Mal enjoys a good fight. However, it is not the violence itself that he enjoys, but rather the occasion to test himself against another able-bodied opponent, the chance to strive for victory, the prospect of displaying his physical superiority, not just to his foe but to himself. He feels this is a far more valorous reason to enjoy fighting than simply for a love of carnage, but he has never corrected those who view him as bloodhungry, for no other reason than those misconceptions fed into his already impressively dark reputation. Simply put, folk’s initial impressions about Mal are oftentimes correct, but usually for all the wrong reasons, and he merely chose to let them continue misbelieving.
Also, contrary to popular opinion, he does, in fact, have a heart. He does feel for the innocent families he has destroyed, or the poor and needy that he has put the squeeze on to wring out those last few coins they owed Robert Prince, the people he’s hurt and the crimes he’s committed. It’s just that his upbringing had taught him that the strong do what they must to remain strong, and the weak suffer what they have to, and him taking pity on all those who cry ‘please not me’ ain’t gonna change nothing for no one. Nothing in life is easy, so the quicker you harden yourself to it, the better.
In keeping with this, his moral compass is more than a little skewed. The complete ins and outs of Mal’s own code is mostly a mystery, even to him, subject to the whims of his own moods and needs at the time, though there are two special constants: A man never harms a child, and nor does he force himself upon a woman. Those where the two lessons that Violet Kincaid instilled into him, and those are the two lines he said he would never cross. Everything else, well that’s fair game. If a man’s strong enough to do a thing, well then he can do it, though only if another man ain’t strong enough to stop him.
… Or at least those are the justifications that he has been using for so long. Now, since setting out on a path to betterment, he ain’t so sure that those reasons hold that much water anymore. It might just be age – he’s only 36, but damn if he doesn’t feel older – but that conscience seems like it’s getting heavier and heavier every damned day.
HISTORY
Who were Malcolm Kincaid’s parents? Well, truth is he doesn’t rightly know. They were both long gone before he was even able to walk. He ended up being raised by his grandmother, a tough old bitch named Violet Kincaid. Violet had claimed on numerous occasions to have lived through the cataclysm that had destroyed the Old World, though whether that was true or not, Mal wasn’t sure. What he did know was that Violet was prone to telling some damn unbelievable stories about the time before, about a world that had been infected with rot and sickness, populated by weak men and degenerates, which deserved nothing better than to be burned clean. Violet was of a mind that this new world was better, where the strong could lay claim to whatever they could hold onto, and the meek made themselves content with that which they deserved: nothing. She imparted these beliefs onto young Malcolm, and encouraged him to become the kind of man who wouldn’t inherit a place in this new land, but would actively carve himself off a piece.
In Violet’s defence, Mal may have taken her lessons about ‘strength’ a touch too literal, and decided what made that mark of a great man was how girth his arms were, how hard his fists, how much a beating he could take and keep getting up to hand one back. Or maybe that was exactly what the old boot had meant. By the time Mal was old enough to think to ask for clarification, she had already passed, victim to old age. Another relic of the Old Times, lost to history some said. Though not many. She didn’t have many friends, and those she did have weren’t the types to waste time on poetry. It didn’t matter anyway, Malcolm wasn’t concerned with what he had lost. He was more interested in what he could gain. With the eagerness of a twelve-year-old who figured he had figured out the secret to success, he left Violet’s small steading in the Jefferson farmlands to make his way to New Rojas, there were he would make his fortune.
It didn’t take him long to get involved with the fighting rings the city was infamous for, falling in with fight promoter and trainer Joseph ‘Big Murph’ Murphy, who took one look at the strapping farm lad and decided that there was more than a touch of untapped potential there. For the next four years Mal was trained in the art of pugilism, before Big Murph finally decided that the young man was ready for a taste of the action. Mal got hammered something awful in his first proper fight, though earned respect with the meagre crowds for his willingness to take a punch if it meant he got to hand some hurt of his own back out, earning himself the byname ‘Malevolent Mal’ for the mile-wide mean streak that he seemed to have.
That first fight was just the beginning though, igniting in Mal a passion to show everyone just how tough he could be. In his mind if the secret to success in life was being strong, then surely it could only swing in your favour if everyone knew you were the strongest one going. He took every match he could, sometimes fighting three nights a week, making a Big Murph a pretty penny while also catching the eyes of several notable city gang bosses. The fighting circuit had long been a talent pool for the local criminal elements to recruit their muscle, and so by the time Mal became the underground fist-fighting champion of New Rojas at age twenty-three, he was a damn hot commodity. Of all the offers of employment that came his way, it was the one from up and coming gang boss Robert Prince which caught his attention.
Prince, ostensibly a young landowner and philanthropist from a moderately wealthy family, was, and still is, a hugely ambitious loan shark and property tycoon who had concluded that a man could make more money in a month from illegal means than he could in a year from legal ones. His raw cunning, business acumen, and cut throat ruthlessness had allowed him to carve quite the criminal empire in New Rojas, though his rapid ascent had attracted numerous powerful rivals. Knowing that he couldn’t continue to grow without some muscle to back up his brains, he reached out to Mal. The young Kincaid was entranced with the charismatic Prince, drawn to his similar philosophy that ‘the strong do as they must, the weak suffer what they have to’. More than that, he was attracted by the opportunity to hitch his wagon to Prince’s when he was beset on all sides by enemies and obstacles, by the potential respect and glory that would be his when he had helped Robert conquer them all.
Together the two young men fought to secure their place in the criminal society of New Rojas, Mal quickly becoming Robert’s iron fist, earning himself a hard-won reputation for savagery and brutality against all those who would cross his boss and friend. Ironically his stature is in some ways greater than Roberts, as Prince spent many thousands of dollars in PR campaigns to keep up his façade as a well-meaning man of the people, only interested in the betterment of New Rojas. Mal seemed so integral to Robert’s rise in power that it became a common joke that he was the ‘Kingmaker’ who would give Prince the throne of New Rojas. Not a very funny joke, right enough, but a joke nonetheless.
Things seemed good for a long time, until Robert ordered Mal to kill a woman, a young singer named Brenda Green that Prince had been sleeping with behind his wife’s back. While Mal had some misgivings about killing a woman, he complied, reasoning that the Green’s choices had led to this, not his. However after the deed was done Mal discovered that Brenda had been pregnant with Prince’s child, and that was why Robert had him kill her, as if it was discovered that he had fathered a bastard out of wedlock it could destroy his reputation. Mal was infuriated. He didn’t kill children, that was one of his only two rules, and Prince knew that. He stormed towards his old friend’s house, intent on having a reckoning with him. However upon arriving he was attacked by Prince and several of his other men, and in the resulting shoot out Mal accidentally killed Prince’s wife. In the confusion he fled, knowing that even he would have little chance standing against his former-friend in his own city, not with all the many and influence at Prince’s fingertips.
After some soul searching, and a long month sequestered in a rural church, Mal has decided that a life of violence has brought him nothing but pain and misery, and perhaps the path of pacifism may bring him something of substance. He’s not sure he believes that really, but he’ll try anything once, and it’s not as if he has much else to lose. With nowhere else to go, he has trekked a long way to Blackfinger hoping to make himself a new start.
Why Blackfinger? Well he’s hoping it’s far enough away from New Rojas that no one recognises him for that two-thousand-dollar bounty that the city has on his head for the murders of Brenda Green, Michelle Prince, and near countless other. If not?
INVENTORY
Triple barrelled shotgun: As mentioned above, Mal ain’t no legendary gunslinger. He prefers to get in close and hurt the other guy bad before they can do the same to him. The shotgun suits that preference down to the ground, and the wide spread goes some way to making up for his deficits in the ‘aiming’ department too. Win-win.
.45 long barrelled single action colt: Even a poor gunman needs to have some kinda iron hanging off his hip, even if it’s just to flash and rattle when he’s trying to look tough.
Hatchet: A mean little hatchet with a wicked sharp blade. Mal far prefers this little beauty to any paltry knife. To his mind it’s far more versatile – for both legal and illegal needs – and almost as easy to conceal. Besides, he’s found that nothing says ‘you been talking when you shoulda been listening’ quite like a hatchet to the face.
Cigar pouch with three cigars: When a hounds done good you give it a treat, right? Robert Prince used to give Mal all kinds of treats. Money, drink, women. All that’s gone now. All except these three last smokes. Mal tells himself he’s saving them for a special occasion, as they’re just too good to be wasting, and he’s unlike to ever get his mitts on their calibre again. Just what that special occasion is, well he doesn’t rightly know. He reckons he’ll recognise it when he sees it.
REASON FOR VISITING
Mal ain’t so much visiting as he is looking for a place to put down roots, a special somewhere where he can make a real try at being that ‘better man’ that the priest told him he could become. Blackfinger seems as good a place as any, and is hopefully far enough away from New Rojas for him to be safe from the long reach of Robert Prince.
RELATIONS
Mal’s mule. He calls her horse. It’s a complicated relationship they have.
Everyone else Mal ever knew he left behind in New Rojas. He’s hoping they’ll stay there.
Sorry if the history seems a little rushed. Closed the CS on Sunday night and must not have saved it, so I had to do it all from scratch again, and as the history is always my least favorite part of any CS, it suffered the most. Still, we got there in the end. If anything needs changing/clarification, please let me know.
So there's been some questions on currency in the world. I'm gonna add this to the world info stuff too, but here's the gist on money in the rp:
There's a standardized metal currency used in trade between the nations. Coppers and silvers; which represent pennies and dollars. Since there's so much scarcity, 12 coppers could buy you a nice meal, and five silvers might buy you a standard gun. Gold is also a valuable currency, with coins being worth a lot of silvers; and a gold bar being an extremely precious resource.
“Surviving a night is one thing. Living to eat a Turkish Delight is another matter entirely.”
NAME
Ernest Helmer
ALIAS
The Candyman | Candyman | Mr. Sweets | "Mr. Strubbles"
GENDER
Male
SKILLS
Confectioner : Anyone could cook, given enough time, food, and mistakes, but making sweets is another matter entirely. There are sugars and flavors of a very specific type, and the resources for those are scarce and expensive. Not all farmers know how to take care of cane without inviting pests, and not nearly enough so-called "cooks" can bring a good desert to the table. Even less can spell the difference between a taffy and a toffee, and still less can be damned to taste the difference. That leaves a lot of disgruntled little children and pouty old farts hungry for something more out of life. Compared to most of the world, that makes Ernest an earnest, bona-fide confectioner and connoisseur of candy; so long as he doesn't have to worry too much about any competitors stealing his craft, he'll continue his hell-bent journey to bring back the Old World's centuries-old recipes, one cavity at a time.
Concrete Navigator : Of course, in order to find such recipes, one needs to look over every nook and cranny possible, especially within the Old World cities. Ernest's Old Glory heritage comes well into play here; he can eyeball the lifespan of a building, scale a skyscraper, or even wade through the bottom of an overfilled tunnel, if it comes to it. It's been years since he's left Old Glory, and Time has a habit of taking the best of his tricks. It would be no exaggeration to say that Ernest is far past his heyday in both the lateral and longitudinal respect, though he's got plenty of patience to make up for it.
(Culinary) Chemist : Ernest's ability to take note of a variety of materials stems heavily from his saccharine pursuit. As he isn't very literate, Ernest often has asked medicine-men and other people of science to describe to him the ingredients of various cook-books that he finds. In return, many of these intellects get back a once-in-a-lifetime taste. As long as someone can read out the name of an ingredient, Ernest may be able to list a few basic characteristics of a few elements, alloys, and ingredients...albeit a touch simplistically.
PERSONALITY
Contrary to popular belief, being old does not equate to wittiness nor wisdom; Ernest, as his namesake implies, is a very earnest man when he goes about any business of any sort. It's a sort of fault that betrays both former confidants' and presumptuous associates' trade secrets to the world, but the very same fault has often protected him from situations that would otherwise spell out for many others certain doom.
Take, for example, the one time he made the mistake of entering Jefferson using an Old World gun as a cane. Appraisers, scrappers, and thugs alike were quick to take his gun and break his leg, but when pressed to give up more than what he could bear to part with, he imparted to them the recipe for butterscotch candy.
Jefferson now has a thriving butterscotch business that bosses and the bourgeoisie, both over and under the table, can all enjoy. While the gangs won't acknowledge his contribution to their quality of life, Ernest does have the comfort of being treated like any other Jeffersonian. That's all Ernest could ever care for, aside from pursuing his dream to become a confectioner.
HISTORY
If Ernest were to be born anywhere but Old Glory, he might have been a man of science or art living happily in his own private establishment. He might have had a rough relationship with a more pragmatic girl that would once have been a dreamer like he was. There might be a bastard girl between them, either adopted or abandoned by one or the other parent, that would grow up to be as tough as nails on the outside and oh-so tender on the inside. That bastard girl might have succeeded his business and would be traveling the world with her significant other while her estranged parents would spend their twilight years finding themselves for the umpteenth time and die in happiness.
But Ernest wasn't born in anywhere but Old Glory; that much could be apparent to even the locals of the Old Cities themselves. Eyes keen for details and patterns gnawed on old, crumbling artifacts for practice, and in those early years, Ernest became something of a environmentalist. Whereas most scrappers would be watching the Old World's monuments as places for ambushing, Ernest was busy getting high off of just the sight of a wonderfully irradiated plant or sinkhole-turned pool. When treading through particularly overgrown stretches of wilderness, Ernest made it a point to follow the most clear path to avoid cutting the plants. His mother, a single Scrapper that had found him in the remains of an obliterated caravan, couldn't afford the time to care about the eccentricities of her son. She raised him as best as she could by teaching him the basic necessities of survival, all her little technological tricks and novelties included. It wasn't often that a Scrapper could be worth killing, as they were often broke from having no money or already spending all of it. For this lack of resources, Scrappers often had to be as resourceful as whatever they might have on hand.
That's how life was : constant migration, constant searching, constant refurbishing.
Then his mother's hair started falling off. It right after she got out of a seemingly clean pool of water. Neither were sure what was in the pool exactly, but everything simply became worse. The woman began to show stress lines and signs of fatigue, despite resting well over eight hours a day with plenty of food to burn through. Then her irises began to change color, and her skin took on different blotches of tan, olive, red, black, and so on and so forth. Something in that pool had changed her irreparably, and so Ernest was chased away with a few poorly-aimed shots from his very own mother. She didn't want the kid seeing her die so horrible a death.
Needless to say, he returned a few days to find her bleached-white skeleton sitting exactly as he had left her. It was then that Ernest inherited all of his "mother" 's possessions and found a cookbook. He was illiterate, though, so he went off back to town and began to sell one memory at a time to learn how to use said cookbook.
The only thing he couldn't let go of was her two guns and the cookbook; one of them (what people in the Old World would call an SKS) was stolen, so he's kept the one other gun close to his body and even closer to his heart. His first recipe was Turkish Delights; it was attempted only by a few since the War passed, but as Ernest had quite the excess of money, he could afford to fail again and again.
Two years later, at 17, Ernest finally mastered the Turkish Delight. It was no exaggeration to say that he exhausted what little of Old Glory's cane supply was available. In search of the same ingredients and more to continue experimenting, Ernest walked off to the West to lose himself in the culinary arts and the world at large.
He's never looked back for 44 years, marking him at the ripe old age of 61.
INVENTORY
An Old-World Revolver called "Rhino"; empty and unusable since he was last shot at, but still makes for a good threat and a good work of reference for any aspiring gunsmith.
A large backpack, containing :
"Cookbook for Confectioner's : An Easy How-To"
Steel Spatula
Other utensils
Cooking Pot
Grappling Hook
Rope and Anchors
A listless amount of pouches for ingredients
REASON FOR VISITING
"I heard cane grows well in the water; maybe I can start a farm here..."
RELATIONS
He is survived by one Joe Tuckett, who shares the "Mr. Strubbles" title for being one of two Old Glory confectioners.
And that should finish off all the character apps for now. Unless people start dropping, this RP is now officially full up! Now begins the postmageddon i'm hoping for!
As many of my coworkers like to exclaim: it's Friday! If folks are having trouble coming up with intros, or feel that there's still questions about the world they need to know: feel free to shoot me a pm! I'm always checking this thing and I'm more than happy to help you get on that RP trail!
hey trailblazers, sorry for the radio silence for the past few days. Went across my state (6 hour drive one way) for a job interview; so that took 2 days out of my life. Just got home. I'll look into posting if people are still struggling on stuff to do. Hope everyone's doing alright!
I know it's been a busy few weeks (hence why I haven't been too fussy about how slow the RP is moving; I know it's Finals, i've been on a job hunt, Gowi's had stuff on his side, etc.)
That being said, i'll start moving this RP soon so we can get some forward momentum. It could mean leaving folks behind if they don't pop in and intro, so you guys who haven't made your grand entrances yet (@Verdaux, @BlackSam3091 and @DeadBeatWalking) try and get your entrances done by this weekend. I'm not gonna do anything too drastic yet while we're all getting our characters situated and figured out this early, but I know that the RP is moving slower than a rowboat through molasses.
I'll try and get another post out soon as well; and have stuff occurring through different parts of town--hopefully driving some of these characters together.