Stephen H. Stuart

Character Name: Stephen Henry Stuart

Nickname(s): Steve, Stevie Boy

Race: Ghoul; Caucasian

Sex: Male

Age: 254

Birthplace: Washington D.C., U.S.A.



Height: 6'1

Weight: 179lb

Eye Color: Grey, though the white of the eye of very bloodshot

Hair Color: What remains of it has been singed grey-green

Hair Style: Tufts scattered across the scalp

Facial Hair: Due to his less-severe mutation, he retains part of his moustache (though it is tinged in colour)

Skin Color: Steve was tanned during his human years, and it has faded nowadays, despite his less-severe mutation. From years of smoking and drinking, it has been tinged yellow and given slightly red areas due to higher blood pressure.

Build: Not very strong, but for Steve his speed has what has kept him alive more than anything

Distinguishing Features: Nicotine Breath, Nicotine Odor, Constantly seems to be smoking cigarettes, Scotch-Stained Teeth, Raspy Voice, Boston-esque Accent



Profession: Journalist and News Anchor (pre-war, formerly), Scavenger/Survivor/Mercenary/Conman (post-war)

Skills:

Speech, masterful
Sneak, extensive
Guns, moderate

Training: Although he has received little formal training aside from basic schooling, higher education and his experience working as a journalist, he has spent his life in the wasteland honing certain skills and learning how to survive. His silver-tongue makes him a crafty conman and has saved his sore-ridden skin more times that he remembers, and his ability to keep quiet has only gotten better due to having to hide from enemies. Basic survival skills like scavenging and exploring have also been learned over the years.

Other Abilities: Knows how to cook and how to mix drinks, but other than that none

Apparel: Dirtied Pre-War Shirt /w Torn Brown Tie, Stained Brown Slacks, Black Loafers, Brown Braces, Brown Fedora, Beige Coat

Weaponry: .38 Calibre Revolver, Rusted Butcher's Knife, Sawn-off Shotgun and anything he can use from the environment

Other Equipment: Leather Suitcase, .38 Calibre Rounds (24), 12 Gauge Shotgun Shells (10), Several Rusty Cans of Food, Flask of Water, Bottle of Scotch, Stimpaks (2), Med-X



Affiliation: Capital Post (pre-war), No-one (post-war)

Religious Belief: Anti-theist

Sexual Preference: Heterosexual... though his partners don't always have to be conscious... or alive.

Relationship Status: Single

Personality: Stephen has always been sociable and a good listener, even a young age. It was also from a young age his obsession with the paranormal and secrets came to be, sparking his later career, in which most of his reports consisted of conspiracy theories, rumours or just articles about serial killers/career criminals. In terms of relationships, Stephen wasn't good at keeping love interests due to his commitment issues and difficulty staying interested in the same person for a while, hinting at a mild form of ADHD. His career and life have made him a sarcastic cynic, but a strangely optimistic and comic one. His fame and his position gave him a form of megalomania, and he can sometimes lose it completely and explode in rage.



Stephen Henry Stuart was born to a conservative family in Washington D.C., who were definitely not the kind of people who should have had children. They were fairly poor, and his father worked a cutthroat job which caused him to spend long periods of time away from the family and his mother was too busy raising his older brothers and shunning his younger brothers to care too much. His childhood wasn't bad, and he found solace in reading books as a child and kept himself busy as he grew older by getting a job delivering papers, which his father admired considering that he saw most American children as lazy and without common sense.

Unlike his other siblings, he focused at school and was an impressive writer, thinker and speaker. Instead of dropping at 18 and getting a job, he got himself into Howard University after taking out a loan from the bank and taking a generous amount out of parents bank account, in which he studied politics, sociology and journalism. Unlike his brother George who was conditioned to hate his country and family out of circumstance. He was fighting a different kind of war to his brother; a war on ignorance, social injustice and the thirst for sensationalist news articles (as well as a variety of serious ones...). Stephen hated it because his knowledge made him cynical, his cleverness unkind. It wasn't long before he got a job as a reporter for the Capital Post, reporting low-level news for the inner pages of the paper. However, he got his big break when he was able to get the inside story on a recent string of murders happening in a local hotel, which lead to a promotion.

Seeing as his boss saw he had a knack for gossip and sniffing out a good story, it wasn't hard for him to climb up the payroll, reporting on such incidents like the Nuka-Cola Bottling Plant in which a worker was driven to suicide, the Giddy-Up Buttercup Park in which the ashes of dead were being scattered and Infamous Copycat murders in the vein as the "Pint-Sized Slasher". It often took some skulking around to get some of his info and some of his sources were illicit-but-not-illegal, but even so his employer was pleased (though he probably wouldn't have been if he was aware of the amount of dead hookers buried in the woods by Stephen...). However, it wasn't all that easy, as one time was caught breaking into classified set of Nuka-Cola data files and was sentenced to 2 years in prison. After his release, it was difficult for him to continue working as a journalist, and so, after a few months of chain smoking and "sleeping on it", instead became a news anchor for a large national news station, in which he gave a non-bias view on certain events from America and beyond (though, of course, they weren't too willing to hire him due to his social status, but Stephen had a way of getting through to people... especially when he had spent the last 3 months digging up dirt on people who worked at the station so he knew his "resume" would check out). He was a well-known face at that point, appearing every day and night on television screens across America.

However, Stephen later received some news of his own. His eldest brother had committed suicide upstate the following year, and he went to visit his family, whom which he stayed with for the next two weeks up until the funeral before returning to D.C.. Bad weather had caused the roads to become treacherous, and so he had to stop at a motel for the night. So, the next day, he went to head out to his car after finishing his breakfast, but something made him stop. An ungodly flash of light begin rolling across the nearby hills, seeming to destroy everything in it's wake. Luckily for him, it was less intense by the time it reached Stephen and he was able to take cover in the motel. Before he left, he searched for any useful items, taking the manager's .38 revolver and a bottle of scotch out to his car. It still worked, though hardly since the tired hard partially melted. After a difficult drive away from the motel in the infamous "Purple Car", he made to the outskirts of the city and, seeing how it looked more dangerous than anywhere outside the city, turned around and headed back to the motel, which became his residence for a while.

He encountered several other ghouls during his time at the motel, acting as a pseudo-hotel manager and occasionally receiving "business", as it were, taking supplies in return for refuge and not getting shot in the face. His car was used to go out scavenging till it became too damaged to work again. The amount of people at the motel was substantial now, around 10 ghouls were living there and it became a small base of operations for a while; a retreat for those experiencing the nuclear winter wonderland that was D.C. at the moment. The motel became more fortified as the years went by, and it actually seemed safe for a while; he was surrounded by survivors and was kept safe from the environment and it's predators by the motel. However, eventually it was caught in a radioactive storm and was damaged heavily, caused them to all have to move on. They decided D.C. might have been cleared out now, and might have more survivors and supplies... but that was, mostly, a pipe dream. The trip to the outskirts of D.C. was hard enough, what with the large number of raiders and predators stalking their route. The metros were safe for them, however, as the ferals left them alone, and the city streets had few dangerous creatures that couldn't be avoided. The city centre was rampant with chaos, though there was one thing that stood out amongst the destruction.

A ghoul. Standing outside the museum of history. Another lone wanderer, or the gatekeeper of the higher society that had hoped to find? Stephen and his group approached the ghoul, and inquired about her presence... and their pipe dream was a reality. There really was refuge in D.C., even if it wasn't big, it was safe and self-sufficient. Many of the pre-war ghouls knew of Stephen H. Stuart due to his appearances in the news, both as an anchor, journalist and convict. Underworld, as it was called, became his new home for foreseeable future, and he settled in quite well. It was here, however, that he began to feel the need to acquire currency in this new world he was living in, and he began working with a local town drunk as a con artist for a while, tricking unsuspecting visitors of the town into giving them their money, whether that was through selling them a worthless item for hundreds of caps by spotting it in a display case, having the drunk come over and examine it and exclaim "Even though I'm inebriated right now, I recognise this piece, worth quite a lot before the war... something about it being found in some African country... some say it brings immense good luck to whoever owns it" or something along those lines, or whether it meant getting them drunk and flat out robbing them.

Disagreements led to the drunk's untimely demise in a toilet cubicle later on, and lead to the caps that were once his being pocketed by Stephen. He made sure the cover his tracks, and took a leave of absence for a few weeks following his death. By the time he returned, the town had shunned him, some calling him a murderer and others an unfeeling bastard. Nevertheless, there was nothing to convict him, and although he never quite got accepted again, the notion passed. His new status as a demi-social pariah is what inspired him to spend most of his time away from Underworld, scavenging and exploring, trying to get a feel for the events happening in the wastes, whether that meant the Enclave-Brotherhood war or the disarming of the bomb in the town of Megaton. The wasteland was his oyster once more, as he felt free to explore it.

Currently, he remains this way, scavenging what he can, exploring where ever possible and meeting as many new people as possible to keep life interesting and balanced (and occasionally so he could stab them to death and sleep with them)...