Name: James Farkas
Age: 34
Personality: James is a very charming yet extremely angry man prone to impatient and aggressive remarks and occasionally acts of not completely justified violence. He is indiscriminately honest and almost never bites his tongue. He thinks of the world in very gray terms morally and thinks nothing of the contradiction in him often wanting to help people but also being an extremely gifted and frequent killer. He is loyal to those he cares about and is almost always a man of his word, whether those words be spoken with good or bad intent.
For better or worse James is a man who lives by a code. He definitely doesn’t kill children. As a matter of fact he would likely execute anybody who asked him to. He doesn’t kill people who aren’t a danger to him or others, though that doesn’t guarantee he won’t punch them. Lying for him is extremely rare and he generally takes other people at their word unless he has a bad gut feeling about them. Killing in self defense barely rates as a kill for him. Once someone is attempting to take his or someone else's life all bets are off. Generally he does his best to protect the innocent and kill only those guilty of reprehensible crimes.
Faction: Followers of the Apocalypse
Strength: 5
Perception: 8
Endurance: 5
Charisma: 6
Intelligence: 6
Agility: 9
Luck: 6
Backstory: James spent most of his childhood in the Boneyard further back west, his father a doctor in the Followers of the Apocalypse and his mother a hired gun paid to protect him and others whilst out on their expeditions. Of course the two soon grew close and not too long after James and his twin sister Julie were born. Due to his parents both having relatively well paid jobs James probably grew up more comfortably than most in the post-apocalyptic world despite having to live in a place such as the Boneyard.
He was a talented kid, taking to shooting and repairing firearms quickly due to an infatuation with Westerns. He both read and listened to Western holotapes a lot as a child, daydreaming about one day being the quickest gun in the wastes. Because of his and his moms shared interests he grew closer to her than he did his father. She taught him how to shoot and maintain all manner of rifles and pistols from the time he was eight years old. It was pretty much expected from then on that he would follow his mother's footsteps and Julie would follow their fathers.
Due to his relatively comfortable life, his confidence and a little later on his blooming good looks James ended up getting into his fair share of fist fights as a kid. The other young and much poorer inhabitants of the city were understandably bitter about his good fortune and found ways to insult and attack him for it. They still quite regularly had to deal with raider gangs, super mutants and radiation poisoning whereas he and his for the most part did not, although as Followers they were doing what they could to help those who did. These fights eventually lead to James being rather proficient with his fists.
Around the age of 15 was when he and his sister first started venturing out on safer and not too distant expeditions with their parents and several other volunteers. They would travel to remote settlements and if needed teach them how to better survive in various ways. They would teach how to better farm, how to make certain medicines or simply help settlers in any way they could. It was on one of these expeditions when James was 16 that he saw one of his father's friends get blasted in the chest by a paranoid and jumpy settler. They were in a very small settlement, nothing more than four or five wooden huts really. They had been to this particular place less than a year before and were just making a pit stop on the way to another town. They were doing what they usually did upon arrival to an already known location and knocking on the homes to announce themselves and offer help to anyone in need but before this poor man even got to this one huts door it violently swung open and the inhabitant fired out with his double barrel, buckshot tearing into his victim's chest.
James barely thought before he reacted, mostly running on muscle memory. He tore his handgun from its holster and emptied half a clip at the doorway before the man with the scatter-gun had a chance to reload. Only three of the rounds actually hit the man but it was enough. James had taken his first life in the blink of an eye. What happened after that was a bit of a blur but he remembered his father being furious. They had come to help and instead were left with two people dead before they even got to their destination. His mom of course understood. In the moment he hadn’t really had a choice at all. It was freeze or react and she had trained him to react in just the way he had. Sometimes it really was the only option on the table.
It was also a notable event in shaping James mind. That day distanced him from the Followers philosophy a little. He thought about the people his parents helped back in the Boneyard and how they still treated he and his sister with nothing but hostility and he thought about how the man he had killed blew someone who was there to try and help him away without taking a second to think. That day he began debating whether people really deserved or wanted help at all, a debate he would likely never conclude.
Several years later he’d been on dozens of expeditions, quite a few of them without his parents as they were now getting on in age. His sister was studying medicine at the Angels Boneyard Medical University. He for the most part had continued to act as a hired gun simply out of loyalty to his parents and their faction. He’d grown tired of it though, tired of helping the same old settlements who never really appreciated the kind of danger he and his loved ones put themselves in to try and help them. He had become more of a mercenary than anything, often asking whether the settlements needed any small raider bands killed in return for some caps. Some Followers disapproved, thinking it the antithesis of what they stood for, others accepted it as just another way of helping the downtrodden out in their violent world.
Mercenary work for remote settlements was obviously never very profitable however so James sought out a profession that was both far better paying and still allowed him to do what he was good at without hurting decent folk. Bounty hunting. Given a camera and a description James sought out certain outlaws and killed them. Some, such as rapists, slavers and mass murderers he killed without warning or mercy. Others, such as those who had committed crimes he deemed too morally gray to make a snap judgement on he spoke to first, occasionally letting them go free and alive. He helped more than one woman and child who had killed abusive husbands or fathers get out of NCR territory unharmed. He did this for over a decade, travelling far and wide. He became quite famous on the west coast as a bounty hunter, gunslinger and general killer.
Eventually though his parents summoned him back home to the Boneyard. They had a favor to ask of him, one he could never in good conscience refuse. His sister was going to Nevada, leading the Followers in their efforts to help the populace there. They wanted him to go with her, to protect her. They didn’t fully trust the NCR. He loved his sister and couldn’t let his parents down, especially knowing they would do anything to go with her themselves but simply couldn’t handle the journey physically. So he travelled to Nevada as his sisters right hand, so to speak.
Weapons: Marlin 1894 (On a Sling), a 45. Glock 21 (Hip Holster) and a .380 Glock 42 (holster on back of belt).
Perks: Rapid Reload, Gunslinger and Quick Draw.
Tagged Skills: Guns, Speech, Unarmed, Repair and Medicine.
Weak Skills: Explosives and Science.
Any other info not included in the above: Julie Farkas (The leader of the FotA in Freeside/New Vegas) is his sister.