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The former EOD Staff Sergeant Samuel Swinston is a pale shadow of his former self, half consumed by paranoia and fear, the remaining half kept from decay and destruction by nothing more than the breadth of a hair and the abuse of copious chemical stimulants; now known primarily as Sharp for the quickness of his mind and the nature of afflicted existence, stripped down to a ragged edge from the person he used to be. Even his bed is practically wrapped in tripwires - a holdover from the days where a smartly placed claymore was all that came between his life and a knife at night. In spite of all this, however, Samuel is still a genuinely bright and intelligent man, educated too. He thinks quickly and sees more than he lets on, drawing conclusions and working with them like a flash of lightning, sifting lies from truth and connecting the dots of the plot behind the plot. Apart from that, there is only the rare turn of compassion or generosity to show you that Samuel Swinston still exists as anything other than a legal name. Sharp is his name now.

On a psychological level, Sharp suffers intensely from survivor's guilt and PTSD.

Likes and Dislikes:

• Likes:
  
  • Safety
  • Caffeine
  • Nicotine - but never through cigarettes or flavoured vapes, they smell too much, it lets people know you're there.
  • Adderall, ritalin, et al.
  • The rain, and the quiet. Thunderstorms too, ironically, but only when the thunder is more like a distant rumble. It's like white noise, it helps him take his mind off of... well, everything. It just keeps things under wraps.
  • Tea

• Dislikes:
  
  • THE ENEMY
  • MARCO corporation and their various lackeys. They have eyes, they have eyes and they're always watching, just waiting for you to slip up. You slip up and then suddenly you're covered in your best friend's blood, ears ringing and your face stinging. Some of them - though only a few of them - might even remember what his face looks like. He still has nightmares every night, every single night.
  • The taste of watermelon. He's only actually had it once, but it wasn't sweet enough for him.
  • Overbrewed tea, or tea with too much milk. Or milk. It isn't really milk.
  • Being lied to.

Hobbies and Interests:

• Electronics and electrical engineering
  
  
  
  • While it isn't much more than a hobby in passing at this point, Sharp found his skill with booby traps plateauing and started to pick up hobbyists manuals on the electrician's trade. They were surprisingly hard to find, as not many people want to go through an apprenticeship with no job at the end of it, but he has his contacts and he got his hands on them eventually. Now he's gone through his entire home with a fine toothed comb, looking for bugs. He found one once and rewired the receiver to pick up a pirate radio station broadcasting nothing but erotica from the 1980s. It was very amusing, and mostly by accident.
• Demolitions and explosives
  
  • Another thing that Sharp finds oddly satisfying is the careful mixing of chemicals to produce exceptional booms. This he figured out mostly from his secondary education in Eden. It simply wasn't worth the risk of asking about, even in the shady environment of the Korven underworld. What he enjoys most is actually the weighing of individual ingredients and components more than the mixing or the results - nice, full, round numbers.
• Journal writing
  
  • It's really more like reconnaissance notes, but Sharp keeps a journal. It's written in code, which itself is coded twice further, but it genuinely contains his deepest thoughts and innermost feelings. This is where those fleeting reflections of the original Samuel Swinston most frequently show themselves, even if most of it is still detailed notes on the passers-by of his flat and office.
• Instant meals, takeaway food, and coffee left two minutes too long to be adequately hot or fresh
  
  • It's weird, you know. You stay on stakeout for too long, you follow marks too far, and you leave your home behind entirely... and eventually you simply forget what food you cook yourself tastes like. Or what food cooked for you by family tastes like. Eventually you become a sort of connoisseur of mediocrity and consumerism, learning the intricate differences between one questionable kebab and another, the delicacies of one brand of instant 'coffee' and another, the safer places to eat and the more dangerous food poisoning-y ones. It's a sad twist of reality, because when he lived in Eden good food and real cooking was actually his hobby there too - only he was the one doing the cooking, with real, hydroponically grown ingredients. Now he finds that anything he used to love turns his stomach and makes him upset. It's been years since he had tomato soup. It was his favourite food.

Small Biography: Samuel Swinston was born in the urban core of Baruel, in the heart of Eden, to a loving family as their second child of four. For Eden they were not well off, living a comfortable but stressed and cramped life in a home slightly too small for all of them, but well appointed and supplied nonetheless. Sam did not want for nothing, but was satisfied with what he had and lived a happy life. Despite the stereotypes of sibling relationships he also got along well with his brother and two sisters, developing close bonds with them and learning to easily enjoy their company in the downtime they had - and when the time came, he would follow his older brother's example and step into the MARCO Security corps as a tactical strike officer. Where the beat cops of MARCO are more like calmer SWAT, and the SWAT of MARCO are like poorly trained commandos, the TSO make up for it; they're given advanced and varied training in both sides of their job, police work and active combat, they're equipped with some of the best MARCO has to offer... and most importantly, they're all ready and willing to give their lives for the corporation, some of them even excited at the prospect. Their indoctrination is all but absolute, being groomed for the Tactical Strike Office since before their standard education certificate exams, being taught that MARCO is the last bastion of Order, Peace, and Purpose in the postmodern world after that, even being told that to die in service is an end to your life above all others, the surest way to guarantee your place in the halls of fame and the minds of the people. Sam took to the indoctrination for sure - but he was nothing compared to his brother. Stephen Swinston was a radical young man his entire life and everybody knew he would go far one way or far the other - a radical subversive, or a radical supporter - and it just so happened that he went in what everyone thought was the 'right' way. In his spare time his favourite topic of conversation was the duty they had to MARCO, the gifts MARCO had given them, and what they would do to the people threatening MARCO.

Immediately after that, his next favourite topic of conversation was craft beer, and girls. His brother always had the nicest smile. The squad had taken bets, they all reckoned he would settle down and get married first out of all of them.

Sam was put under his brother's command when he graduated from the MARCO Security Protocol academy, and served there first as a trooper and then as his brother's First Officer for a total of 7 years. It was a long and distinguished career that saw their squad go from reactive work to proactive work very quickly. Eventually they were selected to undertake support operations for the Clandestine Operations Office - which is to say, spy work - but the first blow came before even that.

There was an armed robbery ongoing in the outskirts of Eden, a few blocks in from the boundary keeping Korven out. Six suspects, four armed with long bludgeoning weapons, one armed with a machete, and the leader armed with what seemed to be a homemade shotgun from intelligenec reports at the time. The job they were trying to pull - snag some valuables from a luxury vendor and pull back into Korven before anyone showed up - had gone wrong before the police were even called, when one of the store workers had tried to pull a taser on their assailants and had her hand cut off for her trouble. Intelligence also suggested that these men were members of the Kings, which in conjunction with the fact that a civilian had already been maimed, and that some mid-level manager had a personal interest in the plae, meant that SWAT wouldn't cut it and the TSO were being deployed. Their squad was made of ten men, four going in with riot shields through the front door, two coming in from the roof, and the remaining four split between the side entrances.

Sam had been expected crazed killers, torturing their hostages, painting themselves with blood, killing indiscriminately and too drugged up to care about anything but hurting people... and instead, when he came in through the roof, he found two of them weeping and holding eachother, paralysed by fear. They were brother and sister, it would later turn out, and they weren't members of the Kings or the Pure. The sister had been the one to overreact when her brother was tazed, and she had swung without thinking - she hadn't even really taken the hand off, that had been another misreport (accidental or otherwise) by the scouts. They'd just panicked. They were just people, they were only doing this because they were starving. All of this didn't occur to Sam until later, however, and they killed them both in cold blood.

The fight lasted less than a minute after entry. The only serious resistance came from the guy with the shotgun, which turned out to be a prop without ammo that he just tried to use as a club. All six of their broken and perforated bodies were dragged into the street and laid out like meat, and that's when Sam started thinking, at long last finally thinking. These people had at their oldest been no more than 20, their youngest no more than 15, and his brothers in arms had slaughtered them - he had slaughtered them, like they just didn't matter.

He tried to shower it away and he couldn't. Scrubbing couldn't get the dirt out. Drinking did.

In a weird subversion of what you would expect a rational man to do when confronted with the moral darkness of his life, he threw himself deeper into his work and clung onto his brother's strength even harder. He woke up every morning with their faces - broken and fractured and pulped as they were, stained with tears and blood - fresh in his memory, clearer than anything else he had ever seen, and then he went to work and trained harder than any man had ever told him he could. He went from a fine point to a razor's edge, with a quick trigger finger and a mind like cut glass - Sharp, and Clear. As his team matured and passed the trial by fire customary for their kind, they began to specialise as individuals too - Stephen, his brother, took advanced training in negotiation and leadership, the Koslov twins took marksmanship and sniper school classes, Brigitte decided she really liked the riot shield and started practicing at what they called 'Dynamic Battlefield Alteration'.

Sharp, as he'd started getting called, was getting knee deep in demolitions and bomb disposal. His superiors reckoned he had the nerve for it and in the beginning they were completely correct.

But he never forgot the Outskirts Six, and it kept happening, not just to people from Korven. He grew hard and cold, the easy charisma and intuitive, empathic personality being washed out of him like colour from a painting. His mind became calculating and flint - but through it all, regret and fear began growing.

With the regret and the fear, there finally came the idea - what if I tell my brother? I have to tell my brother. He needs to see, he would want me to make him see what we're doing. He's a good man, he deserves to be free of this, if I feel like I do then how must he be feeling? I can't let him be alone in this, we have to get out. It's our duty now to abandon our cause, that's all the duty we have. We have to get out.

Before they could get out though, they were pulled deeper in.

The Spy work they did mostly consisted of armed support and heavy hitting for a group of intelligence operatives on the barest outskirts of Korven, in the shittest and darkest corners of the un-city, doing some real shady shit for some shadier people. Their official area of operations was normally limited to Eden when they were functioning as a police unit, which meant that they were acting illegally as cops, or above the law as something else. Sharp, not being stupid, was not under the illusion that the police had ever been under the power of the regular law, and similarly was not constrained by the belief that they were anything more than disposable, deniable assets at this point. His training as an explosives officer was instrumental to the operations they were undertaking - namely, demolishing a slum block suspected to house a drug lab exporting into Eden as part of the token efforts by the police to control the drugs crisis, burying everyone inside it with the building. This was the kind of thing that would be attributed to the lab itself suffering a catastrophic mixing failure, or something like that, and it was part of a larger series of sting-and-boom operations in the same few year span, but while undercover in Korven he kept his eyes open and started seeing what the people there would do if they realised what was going on. They would do the same thing plenty of the folks in Eden would do in the same situation.

They'd tear MARCO apart, staff included.

MARCO had to know this. They were idiots sometimes, but they knew their shit - after all, even if they somehow lacked a particular expertise they could just hire it in. This then led Sharp to believe that in the name of information quarantine, his own squad would be on the chopping block - or under the burning rubble, as it might be - as soon as the op was over. In a stroke of mixed luck, the squad believed him when he broke down and told them - and in a stroke of undeniably poor luck this then led the rest of them to the natural conclusion of confronting their Intelligence Operative handlers.

This didn't go well.

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The fight didn't last long. A strike team from the TSO had been called in to launch an assault on a building in Korven where a rogue TSO squad had been hiding out and collaborating with members of the Pure and a bunch of ID chip smugglers, and they'd been the scapegoat. The Koslov twins and the pair of spy-types upstairs had gone down in the first wave of gunfire, riddled with holes with only enough time to turn their heads to the door in surprise when they heard the guns cocking. Stephen caught a bullet in the leg when the strike force started shooting blind through the floor and into the basement, and when the spy boy made a run for the back door he ended up literally being hit in the face with a frag grenade - the same one that gave Sharp his facial scars and probably killed Brigitte. The poor spy was blown to pieces, absorbing enough of the blast that it didn't kill the rest of them outright. Sharp had the good sense to fall back into a corner and play dead, but Brigitte was actually dead, and Stephen was going to try and fight it out anyway. The strike force came in and killed Stephen personally, but evidently fell for Sharp's play despite the noise he made when his brother bought it.

Or maybe they thought he was gonna die anyway when they brought the building down on him. It didn't quite work.

He managed to recover the go-fund for the operation and transfer it to a new bank account he opened with a fake ID, putting what was left over into dead drop boxes wired to fuck with frags and HE grenades. Once he had a small safehouse up, he got to work trying to remove his own ID chip and scratching out the old regimental tattoos he'd been left with. If he could help it, he wouldn't have traitor ink in his skin.

A year passed. He was living in body, but dead in heart and dying in mind. The TV held a memorial service for his squad, claiming they were all killed in a counter terror operation, even going so far as to hold a funeral with what looked like real bodies in the coffins - and the real Sam had gone down into the ground with them when they did. His neighbours knew him as Sharp, and in truth everything other than Sharp had been torn out of him when his brother got double tapped, and they brought the building down on top of the still-moaning Brigitte and the rest of the squad. His depression and his guilt ate him away from the inside as he gradually became obsessed with the idea that MARCO might know he's still alive, and come to finish the job. Sometimes he still has idle one sided conversations with their ghosts, while he works on his gun or checks the traps in his flat, telling them all about how he wouldn't let MARCO take him too. The paranoia was like a cancer, robbing him of his personhood and making him violent.

After a while and having burnt through most of the spy cash on stimulants and illicit homecooked explosives, he got it through his head that he would need to work at some point, and he went back to the only thing he'd ever done well.

Technically, he's a private detective. Really, he'll do most things if it pays well. He won't let the bad guys get him, even if he doesn't have anything to live for other than spiting them any more.

He just doesn't realise they'd forgotten him as soon as his brother died.

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Family Members:

• Parents:
  
  • Jack Swinston, 64, his father, who had believed his sons to be dead for the past seven years and only been over it for a month.
  • Maria Swinston, 62, his mother, who still thinks that at least one of her sons is alive and will never know the truth

• Siblings:
  
  • Hazel Swinston, 34, his immediately younger sister, who studied law and still writes to Stephen and Sam in her diary
  • Ruby Swinston, 21, who has tasted HALOs and heroin at the same time, and wants to be writer

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Relationships: (Update this as the role play goes on! Good things and bad things. If your husband cheats on you with the bitch from the slums, you’re not going to be such a loving and doting wife anymore- or perhaps you are? Friends, alliances, enemies will be created)

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Name: Alan Grant
Nicknames/Alias: Speedy
Age: 40 years old
Gender: Male
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual
Ethnicity: White

Appearance Details: Alan commutes around looking dirty and his eyes are often dilated or constricted depending on the last drug he used. He's white guy, and he carries around 190lbs. and he is a little over six foot tall. His fingers are toasted from using drugs, and his fingernails are not well taken of, and neither is his arms or his legs. He shaves sporadically, has decayed teeth, and steals clothes and shoes when it's necessary.

Tattoos, Piercings, Scars, Other: He has indents on his hands from fighting, and a few tattoos; most recognizably. a tattoo that says SPEEDY on his neck that is in generic tattoo ink.

Brand/ID Tattoo Placement: Behind his ear
Assets and Bank Account: Owns an ugly, outdated red coup
Affiliation: He works for both. Alan will beat up someone, he will steal to get his ends, and some people say he would kill for a big enough payday. Most of his work involves buying drugs, then turning around and conning some money back.

Occupation: Drug addict

Sanction: Korven
Favorite Season: Fall

Personality: He doesn't take care of his health, and this leads to people shooing him away. Besides his body odor, he is a thief and a ruffian, but he's the friendliest guy you'll ever meet. He doesn't go over the top, and he comes up from the bottom only to visit. He does have to start the day with drugs or alcohol, and he also has to lay down being a little drunk or high.

Positive
He's old, he knows it all
He's friendly
He will get you high

Negative
He's an addict
He's a criminal
He doesn't care who he hurts

Likes and Dislikes: He doesn't like authority, he likes getting wasted, he likes driving around, he likes chasing women, he likes to fight, he does not like gangs but they afford him his wants and needs
Hobbies and Interests: Driving around, dumbly wondering if he could get a bona fide job, reading for a little bit of time, callisthenic exercise, listening to beats, slowly learning how to work on a car

Small Biography:
The world has come to an end, and recovering alcoholic has found Eden again.

Getting there wasn't hard. It was 20 years ago when he made it to Korven. It was a lot nicer than what it is today, basically because corporate land jobs consumed every thing anyone had, even their identities. It was the apocalypse, but the money and the assets which could have been saved and allotted were taken way. And, everybody was handled like police dogs. They had a tattoo placed behind their ear, and the ones doing it to them were thought to be evil, perhaps conducting stem cell biology, or maybe they were pedophiles. But it was all put up or shut up. You did labor all day, and you received rations.

Family Members: Long gone