Picture a halloween pumpkin stuffed on top of a scarecrow. Dress that pumpkin in clothes that wouldn't look too out of place in the american frontier; Khaki-coloured slacks and collared shirt, a dark waistcoat, a hat, a belt with way too many buckles and brass on it, and some sweet leatherette boots. Then run that scarecrow ass-backwards through a hedge and slap a poncho on it. That's Joaoquim. From the glint and glimmer of his off-white permanently grinning teeth to the spikes on his boots, thats him. You could probably stick that pumpkin on a lost and found poster and find him before the day's out.
■ Grinning.
■ Smug.
■ Grinning.
■ Obnoxious.
■ Grinning.
■ Upbeat.
■ Grinning.
■ Devil-may-care attitude.
■ Did we mention he smiles a lot?
Joauquim was born to a reasonably middle class set of people. Not too poor as to not afford travelling, but not too rich as to want to stay where they were, the Calaquereros were exactly the sort of people to seek their life in a new land full of exciting opportunities some 400 years ago. They sailed across great oceans, crossed plains and over mountains, slept under lone trees and over deserts, desecrating and destroying anything in their path, and headed far more south then they'd really intended. Once they'd decided that enough was enough, they'd landed somewhere near Nicaragua, a country with two beachfronts where a quarter of the gross domestic product was bovine meat. The family unpacked, and set to work establishing a ranch.
Casavacía, as the manor house eventually became to be known, was a large, empty house made of strong Carribean Pine. No one in the family cared for it much. Not Emilio Calaquerero, who herded cattle on horseback and shot vermin for fun. Not Cayetano Calaquerero, who preferred knapping stones together on horseback in the open air to standing around inside a dusty old mansion, and certianly not Joaoquim. He inherited his forefathers wiry constitution along with their permanent grins and saddle sores, even if he didn't inherit their nationality - having been born across the border due to a quirk of fate.
Joaoquim grew up as the middle child of three siblings. Their life was about as pleasant as three kids living on a rural farm on a literal beach can be. None of them were ever formerly educated. Most of their lives were involved in the various day-to-day activities of cow breeding, meat packaging, the process of flash freezing, animal husbandry, pretty much everything that could happen from calf to sirloin barring them being taken up in flying saucers.
One technique he's taken pride in mastering is the art of throwing Bolas. It's hardly a weapon as much as it is two big rocks tied together with rope, but there's a certain art to throwing. If you do it right, as Joaoquim discovered, you didn't quite have to throw it as far as you think. With practice, the initial rotational energy of the bolas themselves are enough to propel it anywhere you need them to go. Joaoquim has had 15 years of practice, 8 hours every day to get good at tossing these things, not to mention tying the Monkey fist's knots and making one out of a length of paracord. He personally likes to use just two rocks, and holding the thing by the middle, almost but not quite like the chinese
Meteor HammerJoaoquim might have been around 10 when he first tried to break the fabric of spacetime with his fists. He was bored, and he'd spent way too long trying to coax some lazy cows into switching from this side of the meadow to that, and frankly he would have preferred to lie down on the grass and join them. He'd seen the technique done, of course. Even his little sister was starting to get good at using her hands at an extremely long distance to tip over the cookie jar at the top of the kitchen shelf. He knew the action they'd been doing, and it's not like his family to lie to him en masse like that. He tried mimicking the way they'd been doing it, pushing their hands forward while twisting in the air, like grabbing an invisible door handle. Time after time he couldn't manage it. He ended up grabbed onto his trusty bolas, and tried doing the technique with it in his hands. It worked. He's not really been able to do it without them since, swinging them up to speed before jutting out with his hands as quick as you like. And with the power to shape and bend reality at his fingertips, he put the bolas down and got back to work herding cattle.
Of course, life wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Joaoquim was born at the tail end of a certain conflict involving political coups and deception. Casavacia has been sold off piecemeal to keep the acres of land in backroom deals on both sides, the late Cayetano being a guy who believed in hedging his bets. What would have been enough property to keep with three kids for themselves had become barely enough to support one, and when the eldest son, Joaoquim's brother Mauricio Calaquerero, took over the ranch from his father, he made it very clear to his two siblings that they needed to get a job and move out. The lazy bums.
Joaoquim decided it was better to bite the bullet rather then try and argue the point. The central american beef trade just wasn't what it had been, and while he loved his brother he also knew that love wouldn't put any bread on the table, and for the first time since his great-grandfather before him, traveled south. Unlike his forefathers, he hitchhiked his way down south to the Pampas of argentina - prime cattle country. He's found that the life on the road suits him, and he's only been tied up and left for dead in the desert five times.
The change from a semi-sheltered life to hitching a ride on the open road had been trickier then he'd imagined. For instance, it turned out that not everyone in the world could warp space with their hands. The first time he'd shown that, to a devoutly catholic trucker somewhere west of Lima, he'd been nearly killed and exorcised as a demon. It took a lot of blagging to convince him it was just a trick of the light, and having learnt his lesson, he'd kept the old family trick a secret. Hence the poncho. People don't seem to notice half your arm missing through a hole in space if it's under a cloth.
Mixtape Ghost N