Neil O'Connor [Needs Revision]

Character Name: Neil O'Connor

Nickname(s): Neil of the Dead Men

Race: Ghoul; Caucasian

Sex: Male

Age: 246

Birthplace: Deal, Kent



Height: 6'0

Weight: 179lb

Eye Color: Dark Green

Hair Color: The remainder of it is a mixture of black, dark grey and white

Hair Style: Messy and unkempt, and mostly short due to radiation having caused a lot of it to fall out.

Facial Hair: Hasn't had facial hair since before the war, due to it never growing back

Skin Color: Neil's skin colour is tinged spring green, and the exposed and decaying muscle tissue is singed black-blue

Build: In his human years, he was a built rather muscularly due to his years in hard manual labour, but ghoulification and age in general have made him a bit more on the lightweight side nowadays.

Distinguishing Features: Aside from being a ghoul with a deep voice who smokes too much, nothing in particular stands out about Neil (although his ghoulification may seem a little less severe than other cases).



Profession: Miner (formerly), Career Criminal (formerly), Leader of the Dead Men of Deal (currently), Member of the Red Liberator's Crew (currently)

Skills:

Guns, extensive
Lockpick, masterful
Unarmed, extensive
Melee Weapons, moderate

Training: Neil went to a particularly rough state school, and was lucky to even come out with the ability to read and write due to the school's poor funding and lack of qualified teachers. Work-wise, his job on required that he carry heavy equipment, use heavy equipment and transport coal in carts or using industrial machinery; nothing he learned there is useful outside that job, and was learned on the job itself. As a career criminal later in life, however, his natural technical prowess came into the fore when he began picking locks, and over the years both before and after the war his skill with a screwdriver and bobby pin are still one of the sharpest you'll ever find.

Other Abilities: Immune to and healed by radiation.

Apparel: Neil sports an old thick brown leather jacket (either done up or left open depending on weather), a dirty old miner's vest with many holes, a pair of grey workman's jeans, some very told tough stitched leather gloves and a pair of steel-toe-capped boots, as well as an old grey trilby from time to time.

Weaponry: Lee Enfield Rifle No. 5 Mk. 1, with a strap so it can be carried easily, and a Smith & Wesson Model 1899 Military & Police, kept down the back of his trousers. In terms of melee weaponry, he has a bloodied Cricket Bat which he occasionally takes out with him.

Other Equipment: Old Green Duffel Bag, Bottle(s) of Neutrona Nebula, Several Rusty Tins of Food, Cartoon of Cigarettes, Rusty Old Cigarette Lighter, An Old Pocket Watch



Affiliation: Red Liberator's Crew

Religious Belief: Atheist

Sexual Preference: Heterosexual

Relationship Status: Single

Personality: Neil, despite his ignorance, can be a rather interesting person. Morally, he's rather ambiguous; he'll kill for protection or food, and sometimes just for the sake of it. Politically, he's rather apolitical and only fights for the Dutch Prince out of hatred for the government and for the Royal Family, showing anarchistic tendencies but with no real inspiration or reasoning for them. His character can seem sarcastic and cynical at times, blunt and brash at others, and occasionally even quiet and shy. One of his worst traits is his anger; Neil doesn't do half-measures, and so when he does get angry it can be a rather terrifying display.



Neil O'Connor was born to a family descent from a mixture of people; Irish immigrants and midlands dwellers, but despite his Irish ancestry, he was only Irish in name and nothing more. The coastal town of Deal where he grew up was notorious poor and downtrodden, a town who living off of old maritime glory, renaissance history and the spirit it once had when it was a major seaside tourist attraction. Neil's father was a miner in the local Betteshanger colliery, and Neil himself was destined for the same fate due to the environment he grew up in and almost impossibility to overcome the meritocracy of his class. School, Neil later looked back on with hindsight, was actual just a microcosm of some of the young offenders institutes he would later visit; the lack of funding and poor attention given to the board of education made it impossible to actually learn anything, and even the students who could and had a keen interest were cut down by the uniform nature of the school's regime. Learning to read and write was about all Neil managed to learn, which was pretty good considering.

After leaving school at sixteen, he was immediately put to work in the mines. The labour was hard, the hours long and injuries and even deaths weren't uncommon. It hardened Neil in many ways, physically but also mentally. Working there made him hate his country and his class, even though he was ignorant to most of these concepts. It wasn't long before friends of his, tarnished with the same brush (or miner's pick as it were), began taking on a life of petty crime, and Neil soon followed to his mother's dismay. For offenses such as petty theft, joyriding and vandalism, he was put in a young offender's institute in Borstal. It was a tough, grueling place; if adult prisoners were given the same treatment, they'd likely collapse under the pressure. The staff was rather small and had a variety of nasty characters amongst them, all of whom seemed to enjoy the plight of these young men. Neil began as a small fish, overshadowed by slightly more accustomed thugs or crooks, but after taking some time to settle in it wasn't long before he realised they were just as naive and scarred as he was. After a massive fight in the Wreck Room, he earned himself the title of "The Daddy", as they said, but in other words he was the top dog, the boss man, even if they were all petty thugs.

Time inside seemed the fly by, what with there being little to worry about in a prison full of teens and young adults. Upon release, he was put on probation for six months and was reassigned back to working in the mines. For a while, he accepted his fate as a working-class miner, but this acceptance was short-lived (probably a few months). Putting bread on the table didn't seem like much comfort when his heads were blistered and hard, his back was aching and his muscles were becoming torn. He quit working in the mines, and, with the help of his friends, became involved with some more serious criminals in the area who were operating as part of a larger group from the East End of London, seeing as the sleepy seaside town was perfect to commit crime without detection. His first assignments from this group consisted of burglaries and armed robberies, rather basic stuff. Each job was risky, and his pay seemed unfair a lot of the time, but it was a damn sight better than working in the mines. As he got older, he started to work as a driver for larger jobs all over the county and even up in London itself eventually, driving away from crime scenes, driving more powerful members around; anything that involved being behind the wheel of a car. It wasn't glamourous, but all the boot-licking he was doing earned him a lot of money in tips and such. Every now and then, he'd sent money home to his family anonymously, seeing as they didn't want anything to do with him following his stint in Borstal. On the side, he also did various oddjobs which usually required breaking into someone's home, stealing a specific item and then getting away.

Eventually, he became romantically interested with a girl working in one of the boss' clubs. Neil wasn't much of a charmer, but both of them were infatuated with each other at first glance practically. He began spending a lot of time with her, and this almost began impeding on his work. The driving became more frequent, harder and more dangerous. After he found out his new fiance was pregnant, he asked that he be given a less important job. The boss reluctantly put him on some simple door duty for a while, and he was there to see his first child be born. It changed him, inside, and he wanted to put the criminal life behind him for a while (after all, he was about thirty at this point). The boss was particularly angry at this, and it seemed Neil was trapped in this life now. Soon after the birth, he was put back on the driving jobs. Neil only saw one way out, at this point; his boss would have to die somehow. Neil, while driving him to a meet-up, purposely drove out in front of a truck at a specific moment so that the back of the car would receive the power of the collision. The boss died, and Neil spent a month in hospital.

But he wasn't free, oh no. The rest of the gang heard rumours that the crash looked not in the least bit like an accident. With no where else to turn, he went with his family to the police and gave up information on certain gang members in return for his and his family's safety. Most of the key members of the gang were put away for a long time, and Neil was placed back home in Deal which was deemed secure seeing as there was no-one from the gang who could harm him, and they were safe... at least, up until the Great War. Atomic fire ravaged the landscape and broke civilized society. Neil began to succumb to the effects of radiation, and became a ghoul thereafter, although his wife and child were unlucky enough, or maybe luckily enough, died of the radiation poisoning. The harsh environment of the post-war world was gritty and cold, and Neil began to shift from a reformed criminal back into his old self. For about a year, he suffered a breakdown in response to the death's of his family members, and killed all he met. But, it wasn't long before he accepted their deaths and moved on, learning to live in this dark new world.

Other ghouls in the old coastal town hard began to band together and form a group, having taken their arms from the local military barracks in the area of the town known as Walmer. They didn't have much, but they were organised. Neil recognised some of them as his childhood friends, and others as acquaintances he knew from having lived in the town for so long (many of them being ex-military men stationed in the local barracks, and some just ordinary townsfolk). The group took over the seafront, utilising the Time Ball Tower a sniper's nest and the old 16th century Tudor maritime fortification (Deal Castle) as their main base due to it's strength and resistance to the horrendous storms that followed in the coming years. The group spread further into the town, fortifying the stronger buildings and over time creating flood defenses to combat the radioactive storms that plagued the town.

Neil, being one of the oldest members, became the defacto leader of "Dead Men of Deal", as the group became known, having his old friends and the oldest members of the group be his lieutenants as it were. Nearby towns such as Sandwich and Margate were scavenged heavily, and eventually they had scav-raids go down as far as Brighton sometimes, often encountering raiders or mutated creatures on the way. The group flourished, surprisingly, and Deal has been home to their group for a long time. They had numerous wars with raider factions from nearby towns and even a group from the government was spotted spying on them seeing as they'd gained so much attention after building a gigantic wall, fortifying the old castle and barracks and practically reshaping the entire coastal town. However, more recently, the Dead Men was contacted inadvertently by a pirate-esque group on a vessel named the "Red Liberator". The collapsing jetty at the end of Deal's massive leisure pier made a fitting place to hall anchor for the group it seemed, despite the weathered, decaying state of the old concrete wreck. The leader of this crew, some Dutch Prince, introduced himself to Neil and the group, stating his business and attempted to further his cause by asking if the group, being rather heavily fortified and organised, would ally themselves with him and be ready to fight with them when the time was nigh. Neil agreed, seeing as he hated both the Royalists and the Government as a whole, and would fight for anyone that hoped to bring them down. The Dead Men of Deal became allies with the Red Liberator's Crew therein... but, Neil was rather fascinated. Despite the astonishing setup he had in his hometown, he longed for some adventure in this new world, as he'd never really been on a ship and had never really been out of the county. Neil left a trusted lieutenant of his in-charge, a man named Ray Scarman, and asked if he could join this crew on their journey. He and three other ghouls from the town were assimilated into the ship's crew, and he and they promised to return once they'd taken down the enemy forces, presumably the government Neil assumed.

Currently, he is a member of the Red Liberator's crew and is a valued member amongst their ranks.