Post by aardvarklord on Mar 7, 2015 2:20:07 GMT -5
Character Name:
Damien Xo
Nickname(s):
"Murphy"
Race:
Human
Sex:
Male
Age:
19
Birthplace:
Slippery Stone, a now-dead settlement a ways upstream of the Potomac
Height:
5'4"
Weight:
135 lbs
Eye Color:
Blue
Hair Color:
Black
Hair Style:
Tight ponytail
Facial Hair:
None
Skin Color:
Slightly tan
Build:
Small and lean, but well-muscled
Distinguishing Features:
Short stature, Phoenix tattoo on his chest eerily reminiscent of the Talon Company emblem, Regulator badge
Profession:
Regulator and general bounty hunter.
Skills:
Firearms, subterfuge, survival
Training:
Home training of various sorts, father taught him swordsmanship, otherwise just the hard knock life.
Other Abilities: Startling knowledge of mirelurks, knows a few tricks for purifying water, very good at spotting traps (such as mines and bear traps).
Apparel:
An NCR ranger-like armor set spliced together from pieces of Talon Company combat armor and a regulator coat. The Talon Company emblem has been covered with a phoenix.
Weaponry:
Marksman rifle partially made from a Type 93 Chinese assault rifle (calls it Old Crow), MP40 SMG, Chinese officer's sword (with many notches on its scabbard), survival knife
Other Equipment:
Assorted survival gear; lots of Rad-X, Radaway, and substances he uses for purification; jar for fingers; food; surviva
Affiliation:
Regulators, sympathetic to Brotherhood of Steel and its allies.
Religious Belief:
Agnostic
Sexual Preference:
Heterosexual
Relationship Status:
Single
Personality:
Murphy is the sort who prefers to speak softly and let his actions carry him rather than say anything loud. He's not trying to put on any sort of bravado or keep up a mysterious appearance, in fact quite the opposite: he thinks that acts of bravado are imbecilic and tends to let people think he's just a young boy. He tends to prefer either being alone or in small groups, though he at least will join any conversation he's brought into--though he tends not to go out searching for them. He's not a very passionate fellow or someone who will laugh easily, more often he'll just give a soft smile or quietly stare off into space. He finds his family history disgusting, and wants nothing to do with it, more often going by the name of his childhood hero and leaving his true name for trusted friends. He's keenly interested in pre-war history and would very much like to get a chance to visit the Smithsonian, though he's not too savvy on deep urban fighting so he stays out. Has a deep, seething hatred for Talon Company, and if he sees one of them he will hunt them doggedly until they either find a shelter he can't assault or they're dead; to the point he notches his sword's scabbard for every Talon he kills.
Damien Xo comes from a peculiar village on the banks of the Potomac River called Slippery Stone. This town was fairly large and was something of a fishing settlement, particularly renowned for its talent at farming and hunting mirelurks, almost unique in how well it copes with something which is usually the bane of other towns. These fearsome creatures were the town's lifeline, and when Damien came to be, he always assumed that he would always be a mirelurk farmer. His father was a Chinese fellow whose family had been in the area originally, something which he always thought peculiar considering the history of the region, but didn't think about it until later. His mother was a ferocious woman who had some manner of history behind her eyes and a fearsome drug habit, mostly consisting of Psycho--how she'd managed to stop for the time it took to have him, he would never know. Actually, he wasn't certain that she did, because Damien was born prematurely and even when he became an adult he would never become particularly tall or beefy. His mother disappeared after he turned five, leaving him to be raised by his father, which was a traumatic thing for the child, but in some ways was something of a relief considering how she acted. He was taught many things, from how to properly wrangle lurks, how to shoot a gun, how to go unnoticed by raiders and critters alike, how to clean the Potomac waters, how to dress a wound, but beyond these important things, he was also taught history. His father's family had a long history of collecting old books and they were a source of a great deal of young Damien's learning, though his father was far from gentle in what he showed and would display some fairly gruesome examples of humanity's brutality. His favorite book growing up was an autobiographical work called "To Hell and Back" about a fellow named Audie Murphy, supposedly the most decorated American soldier in history and someone who, ironically, was quite vocal after his war against the government. Also, perhaps part of the reason Damien liked Audie so much was that he was so short, like him.
Life went pretty normally for fourteen years, discounting the lack of a mother, but as he read more and more about history, he began picking things up that threw up red flags, particularly the persecution of Chinese Americans. When he asked his father about it, he was evasive, and it left him scratching his head. In the end he would never get the answer directly, though thanks to some poor word choices from his father he was able to piece together the truth: he was descended from Chinese spies. However, before he could work up the guts to ask his father about this, his home town would be attacked. He had been out with his good friend (and crush), Laura, trying to track down something which had been attacking their school of 'lurks (a deathclaw, for those interested) when gunfire and explosions sounded from the direction of home. They came back pretty quickly, but before they could even get close to home the gunfire would go quiet. They sprinted home as fast as they could, their weapons held high, expecting to find the enemies still present. Instead they found nothing but burnt-out buildings and corpses, amongst them Laura's parents and two people with black combat suits and white crow markings... but no sign of his father. That night the two teens buried the dead and debated on where to go with their tattered lives, getting into rather heated arguments throughout. Laura just wanted to just pick up the shattered pieces and find a new home, talking in particular about making a trek into the Capital Wasteland and finding a home in the fabled beached aircraft carrier. Damien though... he wanted to take those shattered pieces and shove them up these mercenaries' asses, make them pay for all of the pain and suffering they'd caused. In the end they couldn't decide, but since the tracks went towards the capitol, he agreed to join her in making the trek down the Potomac until she was someplace reasonably safe. It was a long, grueling journey, during which Damien was forced to kill a person for the first time--a raider specifically--but with his father's rifle and great grandfather's sword, he not only found it reasonably easy, but, strangely, satisfying. He liked killing the raider, it brought him the satisfaction of knowing that he would never hurt anybody again. Of course, the fact that he seemed to delight in it so much frightened Laura more than she already had been.
Eventually the two would separate at Megaton and bid curt farewells, but Damien was far from done. He began asking around about those black-armored mercs, and discovered that they were Talon Company, a group which usually were difficult to find unless you pissed off someone with a poor moral standing, unless you wanted to take on their fortress. Disappointed that he would need to become the hunted, he nonetheless started taking oddjobs here and there, hunting critters for meat here, a few raiders to kill there, honing his skills and preparing himself for when the Talon Company either took notice of him, or he stumbled onto one of them. It would take a while for him to actually get their attention, but eventually he would discover that a famous slaver was making a trek to Paradise Falls with merchandise, and would take the opportunity to ambush his convoy, killing the man and his personal guards and successfully freeing about half the slaves (the rest perished). This got him just the sort of attention he wanted, and soon the fifteen year old boy would find himself on a hunt with about a half dozen Talon goons. It was exhilarating, not because it was a firefight, but because it was more of a hunt, a two-day game of cat-and-mouse as he gradually picked them off one-by-one. However, the last one left was different--he didn't run or hide, or even try to find a position, he dropped his gun and raised his hands up in surrender... and it would be when the man turned towards Damien that he saw that it was none other than his father. He told the man to approach within a certain distance, but he never showed his face, and began interrogating him at gunpoint, occasionally checking for reinforcements in case he was stalling. He confronted him about the destruction of their home, and he found out something ridiculous: his father had betrayed the town because one person had learned his great grandfather's secret, and had paid to keep them all quiet. The man was crying with guilt, but at that point he didn't care anymore; he put a bullet in his father's head. Not long after that, Damien would spot his mother amongst the ranks of some other Talon Company troops some distance away--he wasn't able to hit her, but now he knew for a fact where she had gone to.
He was livid, he was horrified that his parents were such horrid excuses for life. It was a hardening experience, and something which encouraged him to become less engrossed in his work... yet at the same time he found himself encouraged to continue it, to keep bringing the murderous slime of the wasteland to justice. He soon began calling himself Murphy, after his childhood idol in an attempt to distance himself from his family's past, and would continue utilizing this sniper technique against raiders, mercs, and slavers alike, all the while utilizing the same old converted marksman rifle. Just before his seventeenth birthday he would be tracked down by the Regulators and offered a place in their ranks, something which he would gladly accept. Since then Murphy has found himself called in on many fronts, even assisting the Brotherhood of Steel fight the Enclave, picking off officers and technicians before the knights and paladins swept in to remove the power armored soldiers. He continues to use his special hunting tactic against his quarry, and even the Enclave have a bounty on him simply thanks to how slippery he is, but nobody has ever gotten close enough to realize that the famed hunter of the wastes is the same tweenage-looking kid having difficulty getting onto the bar stool.
