"Jack"

[Jack]

Player: 0173

Contact: (PM me)

Intentions: Self-serving


Background
Name: Rufus Connelly

Race: Beastfolk

Species: Kangaroo

Age: 33

Tier: 2


Social
Place of Birth: New Southcrest, Alexandria

Allegiances: The Thunderhead

Aspirations: Break into (and out of) every museum, palace, embassy, ancient tomb, maximum security prison, magically warded stronghold, and anywhere else with a reputation for being impregnable; live out a lifetime of thrilling stories of adventuring for fun and profit; put silly hats on every important monument

Nicknames: "Jack"

Titles: First Mate

Relatives: Family in New Southcrest, Zacchaeus Molehill (mentor)

Significant Other: Captain Baird


Mental
Personality: It's not every farm boy who gets to live their dream of swash and buckle. Jack is the hero of the impossibly romantic (and some might say trashy) adventure novel come to life - the daring corsair; lawless, adventurous, charmingly rough around the edges, just a fraction too depraved for high society; a master of the charm factor, answerable to none but his crew, with an eye for mischief, a comforting drawl and a heart of gold he once purloined from a goblins' cache. He's quite happy with his lot in life. Sometimes, never growing up is a blessing.

Likes: Adventure, larceny, evasion of arrest, jailbreaks, travel, danger, devising cunning plans, improvising on cunning plans, a good challenge, inescapable death traps, sleeping out in the open, trading stories

Dislikes: Law enforcement, babysitting, passively waiting for something to happen

Strengths: The ability to charm the pants off a snake is crucial in any social setting. This is one concept Jack has grasped very well. He can strike up a conversation, entertain, bemuse, flummox, enthrall, negotiate, misdirect... he can talk. He likes to talk. Sharp eyes help him track the details of his surroundings, good for spotting the best valuables and formulating a plan to lift them, or improvising his way out of a tight spot. He's especially good at improvising. After all, it's impossible to thwart a plan that doesn't exist.

Weaknesses: Jack's undying self-confidence poses a significant threat to his own safety. He can't resist a good challenge, even if it gets him in over his head. He possesses a sanctimonious streak that fuels his need to play the hero, and an itchy trigger-fingered mind that demands he get involved in the action. He enjoys practical jokes that come at the expense of others, and he's been known to cross lines for a cheap laugh. While he has decent street smarts, Jack remains a farm boy at heart. The subtleties of politics and global events fly right over his head, and he feels no need to brush up on his knowledge of local current affairs when he'll be gone in a matter of days.


Physical
Major Details: Light brown coat, darker reddish-brown fur in a buzz cut on his head and forming a beard along his jawline, dark grey eyes, athletic build, foot-to-head height of 6 ft 2 in (187 cm)

Appearance: Between his active outdoor life and the youth-preserving boost of his magic, Jack's body is in very good shape. He looks at least five years younger than his actual age, a difference that is likely to grow as the number goes up and he remains in the physical prime of his life. At slightly more than six feet without factoring in his ears, he might look intimidating if he was standing straight. As he usually doesn't need to, he tends to slouch, lean or sit whenever he can, and he keeps a lazy smile on his face to help keep others off-guard. If he isn't required to dress up for a formal event or heist, he likes to keep his clothing to a minimum - he wears an open denim vest and trousers, a grey bandana around his neck and white cloth wraps around his hands and feet.

Natural Abilities: Jack is a good acrobat and swimmer, capable of moving quickly through a variety of urban and natural terrain. He can easily support his body weight with his arms alone, jog for longer distances than the average man in his prime without tiring, and is a well-trained boxer with sharp reflexes and a vicious left uppercut.

Natural Traits: As a male kangaroofolk, Jack has the characteristic long ears, thick tail and large plantigrade feet of the species, and well-built chest and bicep muscles.

Strengths: At a glance, many would identify Jack as a good boxer. He can take or dodge blows as well as he deals them out. Fewer notice that he's good at body language too. He deliberately cultivates a relaxed posture to encourage others to relax around him and lower their guard. His hand-eye coordination and reflexes aren't just good for driving his knuckles into faces - they're useful for more delicate work, such as sleight-of-hand mischief, flinging projectiles with decent accuracy, surreptitiously lifting small objects from deep pockets and picking locks.

Weaknesses: Jack brings nothing but his fists to knife fights. And gun fights. And magic fights. Against opponents who can stay away, and on terrain with fewer features to exploit for cover or counterattacking, he doesn't fare very well.


Magical
Specializations:
- Tier 1: Mental (Obfuscation), Proficiency 2. Jack can conceal himself and others from detection by sight, scent, hearing, technology and magic.
- Tier 2: Physical (Cantrips), Proficiency 2.5. By waving his hands or snapping his fingers, Jack can warp reality on a small scale to produce simple magical effects that last up to an hour, such as levitating a light weight, creating small objects, coloring, cleaning or soiling surfaces, generating faint light and sound, altering scent and flavor, and cooling or heating items.
- Tier 3: -
- Tier 4: -
- Tier 5: -

Visual Display: Red sparks appear around Jack's hands when he uses Cantrips.

Special Abilities:
Tier 0: Enhanced Speed 1
Tier 1: Insight
Tier 2: Alternate Sense: Magic

Bonus Special Abilities:
Enhanced Strength 1, Enhanced Toughness 1

Unique Abilities: -

Strengths: With Obfuscation, Jack can fool electronic sensors and magical wards into ignoring things which should set them off. Turning invisible and muffling his footsteps, hiding obstacles in the environment and concealing metal or weapons have many uses, most geared toward getting past security. His Cantrip magic is versatile and useful for causing a variety of distractions, aiding getaways and providing him with a handy set of burglar's tools. They also make for entertaining party tricks. Because Cantrips are geared toward producing small effects, he can use a large number of them before exhausting his magical reserves, and they leave minimal traces of magical residue in the environment, making them less easy to track.

Weaknesses: The maximum area Jack can cover with Obfuscation is limited by his magical tier. He can circumvent sensors and detection wards if they aren't stronger or too intricate for him, but he can't disrupt them, and objects conjured through Cantrip effects are fragile and fade in a matter of minutes unless sustained. False coins snap when bitten, lock picks and shivs snap if too much force is applied. To levitate objects more than a few feet at a time or induce a significant temperature change, multiple spells need to be cast. His magic is a tool, not a weapon - no solid defensive bulwarks or blazing plasma spheres for him.


Inventory
Mundane: Clothing (see physical appearance)

Magical: -


History
Just another farmer's son. Just one more helping hand in the field and the barn; one more kangaroo folk in New Southcrest, the partitioned land for settlers displaced from what was now called Damian's Isle.

Rufus Connelly didn't mind. There was plenty that needed doing, there were always playmates near his age, and his world was a big open field with rolling plains and a forest that was off limits. There were stories at night, songs and community and family, the occasional confused tourists to point and laugh at behind their backs, and some new farm crisis in the morning that could only be solved through some quick unorthodox ingenuity and a liberal amount of perspiration. It didn't bother him that he never saw the inside of a schoolhouse, and he grew up used to being mistaken for a nonexistent sibling named Joey.

Life was good. It wasn't easy. There was a reason their collective ancestors had demanded to be resettled in this once forsaken southeastern county of Alexandria - Southcresters were renowned for their hardiness, not their sanity. Through sheer bloodymindedness, they had wrestled the land into a sort of begrudging tolerance to farm life, the begrudging aspect characterized by bush fires, carnivorous wild animals and goblin tribes who weren't half as agreeable to their new neighbors. Rufus' first encounter with a gun came when he was nine, and he spent the next month barred from shooting practice after a series of incidents involving ricocheting bullets, fragile objects, the sheriff's badge and an uncle's prized hat.

He drew blood for the first time a year later. Another goblin raid, a few of his uncles injured and some outlying fields razed, but the settlers and local militia banded together as they always did, and the invading forces were thoroughly routed. He got to loot the corpse himself. The few lucky shots that hit had turned his opponent's filthy tunic into an awful mess of blood and fragments of bone, but the handful of gems and coins he scrounged up was worth all the nausea and the weeks of uneasy sleep that followed.

He gathered more, in the years to come. Goblin attacks were sporadic, the time lapse between ranging from weeks to half a year, but there was always the certainty that they would come again. They were driven back each time and preparations made for the next battle. Training and reinforcements were provided by the military, and potential mages spotted and taught by the local Warden encampment to fend off the goblins' own sorcerers, but the cost of victory came heavier, sometimes more often than not.

Rufus was thirteen when he attended his first funeral. The caskets were very tactfully kept shut. He looked back on all the times in his childhood when the adults and most of the grown-up siblings went out early in the morning and returned with somber faces, and realized he'd lost count.

Life was hard. It wasn't bad. Silver linings were more frequent than the clouds. There was still the community and his family. They still had open fields and rolling plains, and songs and stories at night to remember the departed. Embellishment was encouraged, even applauded. Rufus quickly became a master of spinning yarns. One aunt, a disagreeable woman in life, was memorialized for her steadfast defense of a fleeing family with children, and how she went down with six guns blazing - two in each hand, one strapped to each foot. It was complete bullshit, but it was glorious bullshit and even her more estranged relatives approved of the effort. Life was hard-fought, but always worth fighting for.

When Rufus was eighteen, the goblin attacks grew more frequent. Raiding parties grew bigger and bolder, smarter and more organized, enough to pose a threat even to the Wardens. Examining the corpses suggested they were attacking from somewhere within the forest. There was worried talk, and discussions of calling in help from outside - an affront to their pride as a people who could never be stamped out, but worse alternatives loomed real and large. Eventually, they settled for asking an Expert. Rufus wanted to bring the fight to them. Older, wiser heads talked him down for the time being; convinced him to sit on his hands and wait. Contacts had been approached. The Expert would arrive in his own time, precisely when he needed to. It was left to them to hold out until he arrived.

The goblins brought an ogre to their next raid. It mauled its way through the defenders to the village square. Its last victims were crushed by falling rubble as the old town hall collapsed around them. The Connelly farmstead, thankfully abandoned when the attack began, was another casualty - ransacked and burned.

While older and wiser heads fussed and pondered and tried to maintain order, Rufus limped away with all the cartridges he could recover, a small pack of explosive charges, a hunting knife and vengeance on his mind.

Finding the goblin encampment wasn't much trouble. The cave yawned wide, defended by a number of sentries. There hadn't been much interest in concealment.

Not getting caught was harder. He put a foot too close to the cave and magical wards screamed in warning.

Getting in was practically nothing. As easy as a solid club to the skull.

Rufus awoke, bound hand and foot and on his way to a large cooking pot.

The cavern went much deeper than he'd thought, and it was teeming with goblins. Different costumes and styles of warpaint told of multiple tribes setting aside their differences, coming together in a tenuous alliance to make an end of a common enemy. The chiefs waited at a dining table. They didn't get to taste kangaroo very often.

The party atmosphere was alive and jubilant, for anyone who wasn't Rufus. The fire was stoked, the usual ribald comments and jokes in poor taste thrown in every direction.

No one would ever be sure which chief demanded the first bite. Or which one accused the first dissenter and all his tribe of having run from the first crack of the settlers' muskets. Or who threw their goblet at another's nose.

As the chaos grew, no one noticed a few stabs of a knife between goblin ribs. The fight had already sparked before Rufus' guards slumped around him.

A blade slipped between his ropes and they fell in pieces. A hand clapped him on the back. A voice hissed at him to run.

No one saw him stand. He staggered past the few spectators, right before their faces, and they never noticed.

He was halfway out when the explosions shook the cavern.

The only other person to walk out of the wreckage was a tiny, rotund man in a glittering coat and a broad cap with a gaudy yellow feather sticking out of it. Too short for a human. Had to be a halfling. He inspected Rufus for injury, declared him perfectly intact, then punched him across the nose and launched into a blistering tirade against the beastfolk who'd made a blasted mess of his cunning plan. They'd been told to wait, and they should have jolly well waited, not gone haring off for blood when they'd already called him in.

Rufus found his own voice after a minute's shock and began to yell back at the apparent Expert. Cunning plan. Taking his bloody time dragging his fat arse down here, more like, and how many wouldn't have died if he'd moved sooner? The argument quickly turned violent. Fisticuffs were exchanged, Rufus coming out the worst for them, but the halfling had stormed off a good twenty paces from the battered kangaroo before realizing his jewelled dagger had gone missing.

Another short scuffle ensued, and the dagger was retrieved from its thief. Rufus was frog-marched all the way back to town, the halfling somehow maintaining a firm grip on the scruff of his neck, both yelling up a storm.

His family was gathered at the town center, wringing their hands. The halfling shoved him in their direction, tipped his ugly hat to his parents, and spoke. "Sir, Ma'am, your son is officially this town's foolhardiest, most impetuous blockhead alive. May I have the honor of making him my protege?"

They left at dawn the next day, after a night of relief and laughter. A decent story was told on his behalf that made him look somewhat less idiotic than the reality.

Zacchaeus Molehill, the so-called Expert, was a strange little man with a strange sense of humor, occasionally frustrating, but never boring. He was mad enough for a Southcrester, with a penchant for knowing it all and perpetually itchy fingers on the hunt for something to steal. Rufus quickly learned to guard his personal effects, his spare clothing and his underwear, while developing a taste for inflicting the same vengeance on his mentor. Tit for tat was encouraged, failed attempts applauded as a good effort and criticized for obvious mistakes. He forfeited his gun, and the skills to use it. Life should be held in higher regard than the effort to aim and pull the trigger, he was told. More importantly, the skint effort meant that guns were boring.

He saw the world, far greater and wilder than an open field with rolling plains and a forbidden forest. He saw castles, libraries, museums, ruins. He was arrested, frequently. He broke out on his own, roughly half the time. He sent the spoils home to his family, to help them rebuild. He returned in person from time to time, with new stories to tell and new scars to sport.

Then an old friend of the Expert came to town. His ship soared down from the clouds, runed sails billowing under a wind only they could feel, lightning arcing from the main mast. Zacchaeus had called him in, told him a potential new crew member who had exactly the skills they needed.

While Captain Baird dined at the Connelly homestead and spoke with his parents, Rufus, on instruction from his mentor, circumvented the guards, dodged the ship's magical wards and broke into the captain's cabin, on a mission to find out just why he kept it perpetually locked.

It nearly led to a keelhauling for both master and apprentice, but the good captain eventually saw the humor in it and agreed Rufus would be a fine addition to his crew.

He would be their scout. Their master of reconnaissance. Their thief, if need be. Their very own pirate on board a ship that sailed the clouds. It was only fitting he take another name to match his new station in life.

A few were suggested, then written on paper and tossed into a hat. He picked one out himself.

His new name was Jack.

The Thunderhead sailed up and on into the blue. Jack scaled the rigging and watched the ground fall away.

The world awaited, vast, mad, wonderful.

Eight years since. Not a moment's regret.

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