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TLV Application
Jan. 9th, 2017 03:40 pmUser Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: [Bad username or unknown identity: ”knights_say_nih”]
AIM/IM: UndrwO on Plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Furiosa and Quentin Coldwater
Character Name: Will Blackwater
Series: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Age: Mid thirties
From When?: Midway through the book, right after receiving the news of his new employer.
Inmate: Will Blackwater is an ex member of a PSYOPS team that worked as a contractor for the United States in futuristic South Korea fomenting a rebellion and coup against the state, who then went on to retire and take up work as the right hand man for Arthur Livingston, leader of a criminal empire founded on gambling, drug dealing, and prostitution. Will lived years building himself a terrifying reputation in the libertarian hellscape city Tabula Ra$a, set in a not so distant futures, (ballpark 2035-2045 based on the fact that Will was 22-25 in Korea, has been working with Arthur 10 years, but learned to drive a stick shift primarily when automatic-self-driving became standard in all cars in the year 2020) where police only come to people who can pay highly enough and violence is routine. Will is lethal, ruthless, jaded and unscrupulous. He needs to regrow a conscience.
Arrival: [(INMATES ONLY) -- Above all Will is a survivor, so I’ll test him out as agreeing to come to the barge in order to get back to life.
Abilities/Powers: Human. Military terrifying highly trained ultra hardcore human for a cartoonish canon, but human nonetheless.
Personality: Will Blackwater is an extremely reserved character who keeps a tremendous wall up between himself and the world. He doesn’t mind being mistaken for a bastard; he actively encourages it, in fact, and trades off his reputation as such. It’s useful in his position in the Suits- the name of Arthur Livingston’s special set of employees who exist to make his problems go away. People are so scared of Will in his city that a pickpocket returns his wallet, apologizing and falling all over himself, having not realized it was him. He talks about torture as a weapon in his arsenal for extracting information out of people, and is fluent with all kinds of weaponry. His close colleague describes him as ‘having that weird speech impediment where everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like a threat.’
Most of what we see of Will in action in the story is actually his skills as an expert negotiator. Will is the one who gets on the phone whenever there’s a crisis going on. His most common line in canon is ‘let me do the talking,’ and when he does, he uses a combination of psychological warfare, intimidation, and bald faced lying to bully and manipulate people into doing anything he wants. He’s constantly arranging for people to sit in slightly too low chairs and then standing over them so he looms, or taking matters into his own hands and signing people up for plans that they don’t realize they haven’t agreed to participate in until it’s far too late. He’s an expert at identifying what someone wants- how they want to be perceived, and making that wish line up with his desired outcomes for a situation. His other main tactic is figuring out what someone is most afraid of and tricking them into thinking that it’s come true, since that’s what they’re most likely to want to believe in. Manipulation like this comes as second nature to him.
One of the more distressing parts of Will’s personality is his willingness to launch into negotiations that scare the living daylights out of the people around him. In one of his most striking scenes, his first in the book, the protagonist has a serial killer chasing her down. There’s a bounty on her head for her because they need to scan her brain for ridiculous sci fi plot related reasons, and this bounty hunter is one who likes to eat women alive, so is planning to do the scifi-plot-device thing and then murder her violently. Will gets on the phone with him as a disembodied voice, and tries to buy the man out of killing her. First, he offers the killer millions of dollars in exchange for her life. Then, he offers him millions of dollars, plus one of the sex workers from the criminal enterprise he works for. At last, he offers him millions of dollars if they can just have the girl for the forty eight hours it takes to do the brain scan, promising her back to the serial killer afterwards. “If I was amenable to such an arrangement, I would of course need guarantees that my property would be returned to me at the agreed upon time, and I would need compensation immediately to make up for delaying my gratification,” says the killer. “I would suggest nothing less,” says Will, “how about a nice used Toyota Furia?” Whereupon he runs the killer in question flat over with said car.
From what we see of his moral development throughout the rest of the story, he actually probably wouldn’t have gone through with handing any young woman over to the serial killer if given a choice. Violence, yes, he’s game for- and he doesn’t shy away from torture, but he’s the kind of ruthless jerk that is supporting cast rather than antagonist. He works helping run a criminal enterprise that chews people up and spits them out, and he racks up a sizeable body count, but he isn’t directly involved in graphic violence against helpless people, and if he can do the right thing in the context of also getting his way, he’ll choose to. It’s more that he puts more of an emphasis on the importance of the ‘getting his way’ part of that formula than is strictly decent.
He likes to get the big guns out before necessarily asking politely. Will starts negotiations (what normal people would call ‘conversations’) from positions of power, and gets himself an edge to produce the outcome he wants before ever asking politely or giving people a chance to agree and go along. (His first words in one negotiation; “Now you’re involved; you’re a hunk of meat in a kennel, and if you don’t do what I say things will get bad for you.”) It’s part of what people talk about with regards to his reputation; he tends to leave bitter people behind him wherever he goes, when he isn’t leaving bodies.
Part of him is intensely scornful of the idea of altruism in general- he sees ruthless behaviour as a natural byproduct of living an important or powerful life. The choice for him is between being powerless, and being not a very good person, and he made his choice to never be powerless again a very long time ago.
There is a side of Will that does want to reach out to people. He’s close with his teammates and trusts them completely, routinely says so and demonstrates it by staking his life on trusting them unconditionally. With strangers, it’s much more difficult- with his new employer, he eventually decides he likes her, and so goes to the store and buys a new toy for her cat, unwraps it, puts it in a paper bag, and brings it to her, pretending it was something he just happened to have lying around the house so she may as well have it. This distance is probably the product of a pretty bitter backstory involving abuse, loss, and combat.
Will is also brutally, derangedly determined. He’s the kind of person who trains for hours every day, who was already highly trained, elite and fighting overseas in his early twenties. He talks about the virtue of repetition and practice, the value of locking yourself away from distraction and socialization and just doing something over and over again, devoting yourself to it until it’s second nature.
He's fastidious in his presentation, too, with a touch of old-timey Bond about him. He wears his hair glossed coiffed and glossed back, always wears bespoke suits (usually with a thread of silver running through some portion of the outfit, frequently making people compare him to a robot) and sometimes a classic old gangster hat and overcoat. He has dark hair and bright blue eyes, is extremely pale with sharp features, and he cultivates the terrifying impression he makes carefully. It makes strangers think he doesn’t wear anything other than suits. It makes his close friends want to ruffle his feathers. He’s so serious that he teases pretty easily.
Barge Reactions: Will comes from a pretty flexible canon, where he lives in a kind of hyperspeed Las Vegas equivalent from the future, so he’s an expert at taking things in stride, including magic, superpowers, etc. Meeting other people won’t bother him. Being powerless will- particularly being around characters who are going to be able to see through his manipulative tendencies (so. many. protagonists.) He’ll agree to come to the barge so as not to die, but will be planning to lie and fake his way through a redemption arc, and will take it when he actually can’t and finds himself at a standstill.
Path to Redemption: The first obstacle for Will is going to be getting through his performance as redeeming inmate. It’ll take a very long time for him to a) be outed as not as he seems and b) actually begin to open up when he’s through that part of the breakdown. After that it’s a question of getting to know people well enough to be able to crack his shell open a tiny bit at a time.
Will needs to complete the following steps to graduate;
-Accepting that collateral damage is not appropriate in a business setting, that the bodies he and Arthur left strewn behind them are not an unfortunate accident.
-Accepting that the emotional damage he does to people when he talks to them is real and lasting. He has a 'no harm done unless someone loses an eye' attitude and needs to bring his standards for what constitutes inflicting trauma back down to earth.
-Once he does both these things, getting over the 'every man for himself' attitude that'll still let him see all this and behave the same way for a little while longer on the grounds that it isn't his job to take care of the rest of the world.
Getting to be around people as bright as he is will also be a huge help. He's had too long around brilliant amoral people to the point where he can run rhetorical circles around the people who call him on his shit without actually being right. With good debate partners, plus time and partnership and some practice at the new behaviours, he is redeemable.
History: Will Blackwater is the product of a terribly abusive household from middle America and intense family tragedy. His father was the sort who would beat him with a chain for failing to press his shirts to the man’s standards. His mother committed suicide when he was sixteen. Will left the household not long thereafter, and embarked an a mysterious career that took him to a small unit of military contractors, men who were sent in to work protecting American interests overseas in areas where the country could have no official military presence. By his early twenties he was embedded deep in South Korea, where he led a team whose job was to convince a paranoid leadership that resistance was spreading against them (when in fact the resistance movement was in tatters.) He and his team were captured due to a plan going awry, and spent some time in a POW camp before being freed by Arthur Livingston, who was in the country helping smuggle refugees out of the country who wanted to work in prostitution for him in the United States. Several months afterwards Livingston approached Will’s team to come work for him, and he said yes and came along.
Arthur works in the city Tabula Ra$a, a gangster’s town in Utah where the police force has recently folded up and moved out entirely. It’s called the ‘city of the future’ and it’s a libertarian nightmare comic book cesspool, and it’s nasty and violent and Will takes to it like a fish to water. It helps that Arthur is moving away from being truly evil to being only mostly amoral, making Will’s work all shades of grey and not outright pitch black. He’s highly trained, a little traumatized, lacking a father figure and suddenly given all the leeway and power in the world. It goes well for him, professionally.
Will had a very close relationship with Arthur Livingston. There’s footage of the two of each other joking and laughing together- albeit quietly on Will’s side, being snuck out of him sort of against his wishes by Arthur, who was a charismatic Hugh Hefner type whose outrageousness snuck laughs out of his reserved employee. Will loved him as a father, and supported him in his quest to get out of the trafficking business and into becoming a real estate mogul, but still never quite gave up his willingness to destroy problems rather than solving them.
In the years where he was working for Arthur he met and married a woman, who was killed three years ago during a high speed car chase in the Tabula Ra$a streets, untrained private security goons going after bank robbers. This last loss was a big part of resulted in the ice-man-cometh persona.
At the point where I’m entering him from, Will has spent the last months growing very concerned about his mentor and boss. Arthur has been keeping secrets from him all of a sudden, with increasingly flimsy excuses- and trying to give away his prize possessions, too, for that matter. People with strange enhancements to their bodies have been cropping up all over his city- mostly homeless men who have been experimented on to grant them super powers, and his boss clearly knows something and isn’t talking, and then is murdered suddenly.
When they go to open Arthur’s safe, they discover it’s coded to only be able to be opened by the brainwaves of his estranged daughter, who Arthur has met twice in the last twenty two years. Will, grieving for his friend, goes to collect Zoey to bring her to Tabula Ra$a to open the safe. The errand is complicated by the fact that unknown forces suddenly put a bounty out on her head. Will fends off two separate serial killers before getting Zoey to the mansion, scaring the living daylights out of her and forcing her to unlock the safe. In trademark Will fashion the process leaves her absolutely sure that he’s going to leave her dead in a ditch somewhere the moment he has what he wants from her- which makes it inconvenient that inside the safe is Arthur Livingston’s last will and testament, deeding his entire empire over to Zoey, leaving nothing to Will, demonstrating for once and for all that he didn’t trust him at the end.
Will bursts into hysterical laughter, Zoey understandably fires him on the spot, and he walks out of the mansion to go regroup for the evening (in the book) and in barge-canon, to get hit hard from behind by persons unknown and wake up dead.
Sample Journal Entry: Journal post with Lark
Sample RP: Log with Tommy.
Log with Rey
Log with Eggsy.
Special Notes: Will has a little bit of a meta problem, being canonically into Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, but I'll handle them the usual way.
User DW: [Bad username or unknown identity: ”knights_say_nih”]
AIM/IM: UndrwO on Plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Furiosa and Quentin Coldwater
Character Name: Will Blackwater
Series: Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Age: Mid thirties
From When?: Midway through the book, right after receiving the news of his new employer.
Inmate: Will Blackwater is an ex member of a PSYOPS team that worked as a contractor for the United States in futuristic South Korea fomenting a rebellion and coup against the state, who then went on to retire and take up work as the right hand man for Arthur Livingston, leader of a criminal empire founded on gambling, drug dealing, and prostitution. Will lived years building himself a terrifying reputation in the libertarian hellscape city Tabula Ra$a, set in a not so distant futures, (ballpark 2035-2045 based on the fact that Will was 22-25 in Korea, has been working with Arthur 10 years, but learned to drive a stick shift primarily when automatic-self-driving became standard in all cars in the year 2020) where police only come to people who can pay highly enough and violence is routine. Will is lethal, ruthless, jaded and unscrupulous. He needs to regrow a conscience.
Arrival: [(INMATES ONLY) -- Above all Will is a survivor, so I’ll test him out as agreeing to come to the barge in order to get back to life.
Abilities/Powers: Human. Military terrifying highly trained ultra hardcore human for a cartoonish canon, but human nonetheless.
Personality: Will Blackwater is an extremely reserved character who keeps a tremendous wall up between himself and the world. He doesn’t mind being mistaken for a bastard; he actively encourages it, in fact, and trades off his reputation as such. It’s useful in his position in the Suits- the name of Arthur Livingston’s special set of employees who exist to make his problems go away. People are so scared of Will in his city that a pickpocket returns his wallet, apologizing and falling all over himself, having not realized it was him. He talks about torture as a weapon in his arsenal for extracting information out of people, and is fluent with all kinds of weaponry. His close colleague describes him as ‘having that weird speech impediment where everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like a threat.’
Most of what we see of Will in action in the story is actually his skills as an expert negotiator. Will is the one who gets on the phone whenever there’s a crisis going on. His most common line in canon is ‘let me do the talking,’ and when he does, he uses a combination of psychological warfare, intimidation, and bald faced lying to bully and manipulate people into doing anything he wants. He’s constantly arranging for people to sit in slightly too low chairs and then standing over them so he looms, or taking matters into his own hands and signing people up for plans that they don’t realize they haven’t agreed to participate in until it’s far too late. He’s an expert at identifying what someone wants- how they want to be perceived, and making that wish line up with his desired outcomes for a situation. His other main tactic is figuring out what someone is most afraid of and tricking them into thinking that it’s come true, since that’s what they’re most likely to want to believe in. Manipulation like this comes as second nature to him.
One of the more distressing parts of Will’s personality is his willingness to launch into negotiations that scare the living daylights out of the people around him. In one of his most striking scenes, his first in the book, the protagonist has a serial killer chasing her down. There’s a bounty on her head for her because they need to scan her brain for ridiculous sci fi plot related reasons, and this bounty hunter is one who likes to eat women alive, so is planning to do the scifi-plot-device thing and then murder her violently. Will gets on the phone with him as a disembodied voice, and tries to buy the man out of killing her. First, he offers the killer millions of dollars in exchange for her life. Then, he offers him millions of dollars, plus one of the sex workers from the criminal enterprise he works for. At last, he offers him millions of dollars if they can just have the girl for the forty eight hours it takes to do the brain scan, promising her back to the serial killer afterwards. “If I was amenable to such an arrangement, I would of course need guarantees that my property would be returned to me at the agreed upon time, and I would need compensation immediately to make up for delaying my gratification,” says the killer. “I would suggest nothing less,” says Will, “how about a nice used Toyota Furia?” Whereupon he runs the killer in question flat over with said car.
From what we see of his moral development throughout the rest of the story, he actually probably wouldn’t have gone through with handing any young woman over to the serial killer if given a choice. Violence, yes, he’s game for- and he doesn’t shy away from torture, but he’s the kind of ruthless jerk that is supporting cast rather than antagonist. He works helping run a criminal enterprise that chews people up and spits them out, and he racks up a sizeable body count, but he isn’t directly involved in graphic violence against helpless people, and if he can do the right thing in the context of also getting his way, he’ll choose to. It’s more that he puts more of an emphasis on the importance of the ‘getting his way’ part of that formula than is strictly decent.
He likes to get the big guns out before necessarily asking politely. Will starts negotiations (what normal people would call ‘conversations’) from positions of power, and gets himself an edge to produce the outcome he wants before ever asking politely or giving people a chance to agree and go along. (His first words in one negotiation; “Now you’re involved; you’re a hunk of meat in a kennel, and if you don’t do what I say things will get bad for you.”) It’s part of what people talk about with regards to his reputation; he tends to leave bitter people behind him wherever he goes, when he isn’t leaving bodies.
Part of him is intensely scornful of the idea of altruism in general- he sees ruthless behaviour as a natural byproduct of living an important or powerful life. The choice for him is between being powerless, and being not a very good person, and he made his choice to never be powerless again a very long time ago.
There is a side of Will that does want to reach out to people. He’s close with his teammates and trusts them completely, routinely says so and demonstrates it by staking his life on trusting them unconditionally. With strangers, it’s much more difficult- with his new employer, he eventually decides he likes her, and so goes to the store and buys a new toy for her cat, unwraps it, puts it in a paper bag, and brings it to her, pretending it was something he just happened to have lying around the house so she may as well have it. This distance is probably the product of a pretty bitter backstory involving abuse, loss, and combat.
Will is also brutally, derangedly determined. He’s the kind of person who trains for hours every day, who was already highly trained, elite and fighting overseas in his early twenties. He talks about the virtue of repetition and practice, the value of locking yourself away from distraction and socialization and just doing something over and over again, devoting yourself to it until it’s second nature.
He's fastidious in his presentation, too, with a touch of old-timey Bond about him. He wears his hair glossed coiffed and glossed back, always wears bespoke suits (usually with a thread of silver running through some portion of the outfit, frequently making people compare him to a robot) and sometimes a classic old gangster hat and overcoat. He has dark hair and bright blue eyes, is extremely pale with sharp features, and he cultivates the terrifying impression he makes carefully. It makes strangers think he doesn’t wear anything other than suits. It makes his close friends want to ruffle his feathers. He’s so serious that he teases pretty easily.
Barge Reactions: Will comes from a pretty flexible canon, where he lives in a kind of hyperspeed Las Vegas equivalent from the future, so he’s an expert at taking things in stride, including magic, superpowers, etc. Meeting other people won’t bother him. Being powerless will- particularly being around characters who are going to be able to see through his manipulative tendencies (so. many. protagonists.) He’ll agree to come to the barge so as not to die, but will be planning to lie and fake his way through a redemption arc, and will take it when he actually can’t and finds himself at a standstill.
Path to Redemption: The first obstacle for Will is going to be getting through his performance as redeeming inmate. It’ll take a very long time for him to a) be outed as not as he seems and b) actually begin to open up when he’s through that part of the breakdown. After that it’s a question of getting to know people well enough to be able to crack his shell open a tiny bit at a time.
Will needs to complete the following steps to graduate;
-Accepting that collateral damage is not appropriate in a business setting, that the bodies he and Arthur left strewn behind them are not an unfortunate accident.
-Accepting that the emotional damage he does to people when he talks to them is real and lasting. He has a 'no harm done unless someone loses an eye' attitude and needs to bring his standards for what constitutes inflicting trauma back down to earth.
-Once he does both these things, getting over the 'every man for himself' attitude that'll still let him see all this and behave the same way for a little while longer on the grounds that it isn't his job to take care of the rest of the world.
Getting to be around people as bright as he is will also be a huge help. He's had too long around brilliant amoral people to the point where he can run rhetorical circles around the people who call him on his shit without actually being right. With good debate partners, plus time and partnership and some practice at the new behaviours, he is redeemable.
History: Will Blackwater is the product of a terribly abusive household from middle America and intense family tragedy. His father was the sort who would beat him with a chain for failing to press his shirts to the man’s standards. His mother committed suicide when he was sixteen. Will left the household not long thereafter, and embarked an a mysterious career that took him to a small unit of military contractors, men who were sent in to work protecting American interests overseas in areas where the country could have no official military presence. By his early twenties he was embedded deep in South Korea, where he led a team whose job was to convince a paranoid leadership that resistance was spreading against them (when in fact the resistance movement was in tatters.) He and his team were captured due to a plan going awry, and spent some time in a POW camp before being freed by Arthur Livingston, who was in the country helping smuggle refugees out of the country who wanted to work in prostitution for him in the United States. Several months afterwards Livingston approached Will’s team to come work for him, and he said yes and came along.
Arthur works in the city Tabula Ra$a, a gangster’s town in Utah where the police force has recently folded up and moved out entirely. It’s called the ‘city of the future’ and it’s a libertarian nightmare comic book cesspool, and it’s nasty and violent and Will takes to it like a fish to water. It helps that Arthur is moving away from being truly evil to being only mostly amoral, making Will’s work all shades of grey and not outright pitch black. He’s highly trained, a little traumatized, lacking a father figure and suddenly given all the leeway and power in the world. It goes well for him, professionally.
Will had a very close relationship with Arthur Livingston. There’s footage of the two of each other joking and laughing together- albeit quietly on Will’s side, being snuck out of him sort of against his wishes by Arthur, who was a charismatic Hugh Hefner type whose outrageousness snuck laughs out of his reserved employee. Will loved him as a father, and supported him in his quest to get out of the trafficking business and into becoming a real estate mogul, but still never quite gave up his willingness to destroy problems rather than solving them.
In the years where he was working for Arthur he met and married a woman, who was killed three years ago during a high speed car chase in the Tabula Ra$a streets, untrained private security goons going after bank robbers. This last loss was a big part of resulted in the ice-man-cometh persona.
At the point where I’m entering him from, Will has spent the last months growing very concerned about his mentor and boss. Arthur has been keeping secrets from him all of a sudden, with increasingly flimsy excuses- and trying to give away his prize possessions, too, for that matter. People with strange enhancements to their bodies have been cropping up all over his city- mostly homeless men who have been experimented on to grant them super powers, and his boss clearly knows something and isn’t talking, and then is murdered suddenly.
When they go to open Arthur’s safe, they discover it’s coded to only be able to be opened by the brainwaves of his estranged daughter, who Arthur has met twice in the last twenty two years. Will, grieving for his friend, goes to collect Zoey to bring her to Tabula Ra$a to open the safe. The errand is complicated by the fact that unknown forces suddenly put a bounty out on her head. Will fends off two separate serial killers before getting Zoey to the mansion, scaring the living daylights out of her and forcing her to unlock the safe. In trademark Will fashion the process leaves her absolutely sure that he’s going to leave her dead in a ditch somewhere the moment he has what he wants from her- which makes it inconvenient that inside the safe is Arthur Livingston’s last will and testament, deeding his entire empire over to Zoey, leaving nothing to Will, demonstrating for once and for all that he didn’t trust him at the end.
Will bursts into hysterical laughter, Zoey understandably fires him on the spot, and he walks out of the mansion to go regroup for the evening (in the book) and in barge-canon, to get hit hard from behind by persons unknown and wake up dead.
Sample Journal Entry: Journal post with Lark
Sample RP: Log with Tommy.
Log with Rey
Log with Eggsy.
Special Notes: Will has a little bit of a meta problem, being canonically into Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, but I'll handle them the usual way.
