[hider=Hog]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/Lh88RH2.png[/img]

[b]Name:[/b] Hog
[b]Race:[/b] Super Mutant
[b]Gender:[/b] Male
[b]Age:[/b] 150-Something

[hider=SPECIAL][b]Strength:[/b] 9 (7+2)
[b]Perception:[/b] 6
[b]Endurance:[/b] 9 (7+2) 
[b]Charisma:[/b] 4
[b]Intelligence:[/b] 6
[b]Agility:[/b] 6
[b]Luck:[/b] 4
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[hider=Perks and Traits]
[b]Praise the Unity:[/b] You are a Gen 1 Super Mutant made in the pits of Mariposa. You get an additional +2 to your Strength and Endurance and are immune to the effects of radiation. Unfortunately, you gain a +1 in DC in all interactions that involve humans and human NPCs are more likely to act negatively towards you. Seriously, dude, look at your skin, look at your lips!
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[hider=Skills]
[b]Athletics[/b] 2
[b]Barter[/b] 2
[b]Guns[/b] 3 (1+2 Tag)
[b]Guts[/b] 2
[b]Medicine[/b] 2
[b]Repair[/b] 3 (1+2 Tag)
[b]Stealth[/b] 2
[b]Survival[/b] 2
[b]Unarmed[/b] 3 (1+2 Tag)
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[b][u]Personality[/u][/b]

A cursory assessment of Hog would not place him that far away from your average Super Mutant. With his bark-like voice and inhuman looks, one would perhaps not be blamed for thinking him not privy to the intricacies of civilized behavior at first glance. However, appearances can be deceiving, as Hog himself is all too aware and cautious about – as a result, he is deliberately and visibly gentle and kind, a behavior nurtured to find acceptance in the communities of the Wastes. Should he consider you an agreeable party, first contact with him is usually hospitable and improvised in ways that would prove him useful and harmless. The back and shoulders are hunched, the movement slowed. Words are chosen to imply softness of soul. Token amounts of necessities are offered. A look is offered into faulty machinery. All the evidence is presented for the onlooker to believe that hostility is not necessary.

However, beneath the facade of gentleness and simplicity, Hog is an educated, opinionated and jaded creature, although this quality seems to have manifested itself as distance rather than resentment or cruelty in his behavior. More than a hundred and fifty years roaming the lands has weathered the mutant in flesh and soul alike and as such, he has come to view humans as too hedonistic and short-sighted to produce anything but misery for themselves, not unlike animals – pets, in his words. Nonetheless, not being able to content himself with solitude has led him to seek communities in which he can belong and perhaps provide some degree of reason and stability, while keeping enough distance to shield him emotionally from what he thinks will be their inevitable and sad demise.

Should one somehow form a closer bond with him, Hog tends to drop pretensions of the gentle giant, save for the token offerings, and provide instead a steadfast if occasionally witty companion who is willing to fight and hurt for his convictions. Despite an appearance that would imply very much otherwise, Hog can be surprisingly sensitive on an emotional level when with those he feels an affinity towards. When hurt, the monstrous part of his Super Mutant nature shows itself the strongest as he tends to react violently and vindictively in such situations. More than one community has met its end at the hands of Hog for having wronged the wrong pet.

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[b][u]Background[/u][/b]

Mariposa. That is the first thing Hog remembers. In the dim corridors of the military base was where he was first shaped and given purpose. To fight in the name of Master, of Unity. Armed with weaponry scavenged from the stocks of the compound, he like countless others was set out into the world to find souls worthy of ascending their humanity. He remembers his training with the gun, his yet virgin skin being first touched by the scorching sun, his forays against weak and strong men. He remembers when an armor-piercing round from his gun first pierced the softer abdomen plating of a Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel and spilled the man’s blood and guts and hydraulic fluid all over the desert, the red-black concoction sizzling and smoking as it heated up on the hot sands. He is not proud of those days, but they too were his days nonetheless.

He was not there for the death of the Lieutenant or the Master, he and his cohort having journeyed too far in their quest to provide specimens for their growing army. He remembers the news hitting them hard, too hard. A couple of them sitting dumb and unable to process the possibility, their squad leader weeping and sounding like a dozen animals being butchered – the first time he heard one of his kin cry. He remembers realizing there that not all they had been taught was true. Contention brewing in their hearts from then on. Suspicion. Selfishness. His squad dissolves bit by bit. A deserter there, one executed there. He decides to take the former route, suspecting that otherwise he will end up in the latter. He remembers taking the gun. It has stayed with him since.

He wandered the Wastes from then on, deciding to avoid most company after getting shot at during approach the third time. Making little sense of the world around him, he sought knowledge, seeking insight into the ways of man. He scoured markets, libraries, teaching himself how things worked. Machines, the men that made the machines, the men that made the men. After some years, with new understanding, he sought more nuanced ways of contact, such as rigging up a large picket sign on which he painted “I COME IN PEACE”. It was a slight improvement. Cautious contact with wandering parties eventually led to trade, and gradually, some semblance of acceptance. When he saved a trading caravan from a bighorner stampede via a generous administering of canister shot, their relationship even turned into one of gratitude.

Not long afterwards he was employed. It was with this caravan that he learned firsthand how men behaved. Their likes, dislikes. Their humor. Although a strange and barely tolerated sight in many communities, proper application of his expanding knowledge of human society slowly built a niche for him. As a force multiplier of his own, he provided a means for his caravan master to expend less on security, a fact which he quickly realized and used to increase his pay. As his financial position improved, he even went after certain luxuries to elevate his status. A hat. A pistol. A holster. An overcoat. It reached a point where whores in more destitute communities began hitting on him, which once caused such outrage that the town militia nearly run them out of town. Slowly and surely he made a name for himself in the Klamath-Oregon circuit.

Good times, he learned, were not everlasting. His first employer was killed in an ambush by the Jackals. While they paid dearly for it, a despondent Hog was still left aimless and took to drifting between towns until he was befriended by an innkeeper, though in a few years he too was killed in an altercation. Hog decided to stay around the inn nonetheless, for the sake of his late friend’s daughter and her wellbeing, though she would be consumed by her own vices. Outlasting his companions became a pattern and after some decades Hog grew tired of it, retreating to the wilderness of Idaho. Years spent in quietude taught him many valuable lessons, the most important being that despite his best attempts, he was still a social creature. Having grown tired of dog keeping, he wandered south once more, to a changed landscape. A world reconnecting, regrowing. Pretensions of statehood, civilization.

This time around, Hog decided to bond with communities, not singular people, reckoning them less likely to meet a sudden end. His skills made him useful to whichever community that would accept him, and he found that while his considerations regarding communities seemed to be correct, they were far more likely to fall victim to change. Sometimes for the better, often for the worse. Hysteria. Vice. Greed. More than once did he find a people worthy of cooperation to be worthy of reprimand, or worse. He came to tolerate this fact, gradually, but never did find his peace with it, becoming a drifter between communities, relying on the faults of memory to wash away the unsavory details of a place when in another. This went on for a while, although at some point, he found himself tired even with the land itself. The plains. The vastness of it all. Perhaps it was this that drove him to Hawaii. Perhaps it was a desire to begin again. Whatever the reason may be, he is on his way. Woe betide any who’d dare to stop him. 

[hr]
[b][u]Equipment[/u][/b]

The single most distinctive piece of equipment that Hog carries with him is what he simply calls the gun, a single shot, sliding breech anti-materiel rifle repurposed from an M61 Vulcan barrel. He does not know whether it was a pre-war invention or something come up with by the smiths of the Master’s army, but it has proved its worth by having served reliably over the course of Hog’s long and storied life. The years have taken its toll on the gun – its rifling is all but gone thanks to a lack of suitable ammunition driving Hog to build or commission reloaded, handmade cartridges, and more than a hundred years against the elements has nicked it in many a spot. Even though it no longer boasts its former range, the gun still functions as smoothly as the day when Hog first laid hands on it and is certainly his most prized possession.

Besides that, he carries a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver in a cross-draw holster, although this is mostly a status symbol, as he usually resorts to his “power fist” when unable to wield his 20mm – a massive brass knuckle on whose business end is written the word “POWER” in large, faded letters. Besides those, a suspended tool belt, and the clothes on his back –specifically chosen to both be comfortable, durable, and respectable– he carries a large rucksack filled with supplies, tools for his repair work, a heavy-duty multitool, and some miscellaneous trinkets.
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