To all the world Alistair is the same Councilman Callaghan they see at the meet-and-greets and see in the little election flyers- warm, full of humour and empathetic as all get out. He's what they call a "people person" in the "job requirements" for service industry hell holes flipping burgers and making coffee.But underneath the gloss is a sense of dogged, earnest do-gooderism. Give Al an injustice or just a damn inconvenience, especially if the "little guy" is getting the short end of the stick, and he'll burn the candle and both ends, working doggedly to make it right. This comes with a sometimes black and white sense of morality, and a real rigid stubbornness.
Oh and ah, ya didn't hear it from me but I hear, in private, the guy has a nasty temper. One of the guys down at Plumbing Local 158 said he got a wrench hurled in the general direction of his head a couple of times when things weren't quite going Al's way
Al has friends in high places, low places and lower-than-low places. His years in the LA community have left him a pretty hefty contacts book, only enhanced by taking his first rung of political power. Word is if you need something or someone, Al ain't a bad guy to have on the other end of a telephone
Al likes to say he was raised in "the corpse of the American dream". Lorain, Ohio is a shell of its former self and the land bears the marks of the Ford Plants and Ship Building Companies that once made it hum and thrive with life. In some ways, Al maybe does too. He grew up in that ghost of a town raised by his father after his mother died in a robbery at a young age. Al's father was a complicated man,still nursing a wound from his days as a troop in the Grenada invasion ("no one remembers that damned war now, but I sure as hell do" he'd say) primarily with a prescription of Hiram Walker triple distilled. The living was alright, a UAW and a military pension made sure of that, but Al felt a sense of ringing loneliness drifting around that decaying town. He turned into a teenage tearaway with ripped shirts, long died hair and clothes that smelled of stale beer. Everything was going just great until Al's father decided he needed "straightening out" and got him a job in a nearby meat packing plant.
Al went along with it, figuring the couple of paychecks he might get before he went and got himself fired would make for a mighty bender or two. But to his shock, and despite it all, the young man thrived in the new environment. With his new co-workers, who came from just across the street, or out-of-state or even out of the country, he got on like a house on fire. Soon enough he was wheeling around in a forklift, unloading trucks and shooting out bawdy jokes that always got the whole plant floor guffawing. It was here, shoulder to the wheel with his peers, that Al finally began to feel at home in his emptying city.
But Al was his father's on after all and before long he could no longer make do with wise cracks about the endless days, back breaking intensity and paychecks that hardly covered the gas for the journey there and back. One day he began organising and, with nearly preternatural speed and efficiency he was linking arms with the whole plant floor and marching on the boss. 18 days of sit down wildcat action ensued and the boys cracked open a bottle of single malt just for Al when they won. But then he got called into the supervisor's office...
Al had been expecting a slap on the wrist. Hell in his gut he was even prepared for a firing. What he got was something else
entirely.It started with quizzical questions:
"There's men have been down there for years without a peep...and you've got them smashing machines inside a fortnight?"
"There's lazy old drunks that never cared for anything except Milwaukee's Best and colour TV they're whole lives..and they look like they'd take a bullet for you?"
"Half of them don't even speak English!"
And then the FAMA man with the glasses showed up and after that everything was different for Alistair Callaghan.
He fell in working 'Delt' jobs around Ohio with the promise that Deltahumans got paid big money for specialist jobs. What he arrived to all over was a raw deal, working the empowered to the bone in exchange for a pittance. And of course once the boss got wind that he couldn't fly or lift 10 tonnes or shoot laser beams he became a far less attractive proposition. So he hooked up with the "Deltahuman Association for Real Equality [DARE]" a new organisation of Deltahuman workers engaged in activism to protect the empowered from exploitation. He became the youngest branch president in the history of Ohio and toured his state helping the empowered to know and defend their rights with legal cases and negotiation. And...well once in a while if a new construction site got melted and leveled by some stray laser eye-beams when the boss was uncooperative..well that was just one of those accidents of nature, ya know?
One day the Great Lakes reggional President of DARE brought the 26 year old Alistair into his office and put an interesting proposition in front of him. There was a serious position opening up in LA's FAMA office relating to Deltahuman Welfare. Counselling Delts, giving them legal advice, negotiating on behalf of Delt workers. For Al it was a chance to make his mark on one of the largest cities and states in the country, not to mention it wouldn't be a bad item on the old resume for his planned political career. Swapping his ghost town for the bright lights and endless sunshine of LA, Alistair took the offer.
The next couple of years were rewarding but a hell of a grind. Watching guys who could lift bulldozers over their head break down crying in your office because they don't know if they can keep the lights on this month..well that's a hell of a thing. But showing up outside a utility company with a bunch of pissed off Delts screaming and picketing so that guy can keep his air conditioning running..well there was just nothing like it. And when the rumour went out that a seat on the LA city council was opening up, and from the resiggnation of anti-Delt maniac Mike Christman no less, well it couldn't have been more perfect. And the day Alistair arrived at the office, carried by Deltahuman Joltin' Joe, a speedster who Al had helped out with some loanshark issues when he first moved to LA, everything seemed just damn perfect.
Then the incident happened. Now the levers of power that Al knew have slipped like sand between his fingers. He's the master of a system that now lies in tatters at his feet, the remnants of the council now hanging only like a thin vapour in the areas between armed FAMA checkpoints. But Al has always been a guy to build his castle out of rubble and desolation...
As mentioned Al clings to an old order desperately and is running out of traditional allies. He's going to have to learn how to build new and strange alliances, and maybe become a little more comfortable with solutions that might be less than totally to his liking
