[WAR] Role Play: Terminus (Sign-Ups)

[Death's Spook]

Warning: Long *** background is long.

Name: Alastair Harper

Gender: Male

Age: 21

Team: Team Awesome

Appearance:

Everything about Alastair looks absolutely disarming. He is large, standing about two meters tall, but while he isn’t overweight, he clearly has a bit of pudge to him, making his face look more babyish. His wide eyes are a soft gray, and his shock of dark auburn hair often threatens to cover his eyes. When he smiles, he dimples, and the world seems to light up around him. His skin is a healthy olive tone, slightly darker because of exposure. He wears a loose gray hoodie that still fails to completely cover his arms, and a relaxed pair of jeans. However, the gray hoodie manages to conceal some of the best modern (and hidden) body armor money can buy.

Personality:
Everyone’s first reaction upon meeting Alastair Harper is “Oh my God, he’s so nice!” Each interaction after that only reinforces this impression. Anyone who cares to look deeper will find a very loving and caring soul, one that looks out for everyone and is filled with compassion. People and Pokemon tend to trust him implicitly, and he returns their trust with a level of care and kindness that would make even the most bitter cynic smile. His level of caring for others combined with his powerful position has led to him becoming a focal point in Johto politics, as very few want to hurt him, both out of personal desire and out of self interest.

However, very rarely does anyone notice that the man with the heart of a saint also has the mind of a brilliant commander. Alastair has a gift for tactical thinking on and off the battlefield. He can read people extremely well, to the point where it’s usually a pointless endeavor to try to lie to him. While he’s not vicious about it, he knows exactly how to position his pieces so that they best suit him in combat. But he really shines when it comes to inventing new tactics. Combining Brine with Rain Dance to make salt water fall from the sky, clearly attempting to bait someone into a bunch of Spikes only for them to avoid it by tripping a more hidden Stealth Rock instead, tuning the frequency of a Bug Buzz to precisely shatter certain materials are not even the beginning of what he can invent on the spot in the battlefield or in the broader context of manipulations. When diplomacy doesn’t work, there’s violence, and when violence fails, there’s diplomacy, and when both are unavailable there’s an ability to BS his way out of situations with both improvisations and plans within plans within plans.

However, if one manages to pierce through his kindness and his deceptions and his kind deceptions, they might be able to see a hint of a pain and sorrow so deep it could drown the world. Alastair, despite being friendly and benevolent, does not trust anyone. He uses his lies to shroud himself from even the people who should be closest to him, always wary and watching. He may smile to your face, but he always has a knife positioned near your back, even if he doesn’t intend to use unless he learns that you’re trying to hurt him first. It’s messed up, he knows it’s messed up, and his inner practicality and his innate goodness have been warring with each other to yield an impossible guilt. For though he apparently has it all, there is /something/, a secret or circumstance, that has clearly deeply affected his life, and it is clear to any who seem him in earnest battle that he has /experience/ with life or death circumstances. Though he is benevolent no matter how deep you peel back his facades, it is increasingly clear that he is nowhere near being merely the naive rich boy most people assume him to be.

Background:

Alastair would argue his story began not when he was born, but when he was seven years old. Though he will never say what happened that made him mark it as the first significant event of his life, it has just as clearly deeply affected him and caused a significant amount of distance between him and his parents, his mother in particular. Though it was never overt enough that Alastair could call her out on it, his mother began to abuse him: not physically, but emotionally. Subtle put downs, lauding his accomplishments just a little less, focusing on his flaws just a little more, pressure that Alastair could never actually qualify, give a name. Alastair grinned and beared it, never telling Oliver and especially never telling Lance how much it bugged him. Though Alastair began to grow distant from his parents, he never once deviated from Lance. For though Alastair was very friendly and he had people at his school he could hang out with, Lance was the only person he saw as being absolutely on his side, and so Alastair took every bit of care to be friends with and protect his older brother.

So, to cope with the stresses of home, Alastair threw himself into his school work, his companions at school. He grew an extraordinarily thick skin and /learned/. He pulled off excellent grades in school, and he had a charisma that made him seem likable to nearly everyone he met. He was already perceptive, and with his growing leadership talent, he began to learn the ins and outs of social interaction as well as foster a slowly but surely growing amount of academic knowledge. Combined with just who his family was (and the money that entailed), Alastair was shaping up to become a very powerful person before he had even turned ten.

And of course, that attracted the attention of “Uncle Van”, aka Giovanni.

You see, Giovanni was beginning to grow old, and while Lance was in position to take over the company, Alastair appeared to Giovanni as being far more suitable to take over Team Rocket, especially since Giovanni’s son Silver was far less impressionable and far more dangerous to attempt to use in Giovanni’s opinion. But Giovanni worried about Alastair’s “softness”, i.e. the fact that he actually gave a damn about others. So, in attempts to see what Alastair was really made out of, Giovanni began to arrange “incidents”.

Starting with Alastair turning ten years old.

Traps began to suddenly and inexplicably spring around Alastair, forcing him to use cunning and strength and cunning to get out. Fights would erupt and people would choose him as a target, forcing him to either attempt to defuse them or flee very quickly. Even people at school were encouraged to make Alastair’s life unpleasant, forcing him to use an already growing social ability to leverage them into social non threats. These incidents began to really hit their stride about six months after they started, when Alastair stumbled on Team Rocket starting up a Pokemon mill filled with exotic Pokemon from Hoenn and Unova. A ten year old Alastair hardly fancied getting into a huge fight with Team Rocket, and instead managed to discreetly free a pair of Pokemon, a Snorunt and a Larvesta, to present as evidence for the authorities to come swarming in.

Thankfully, the direct evidence right in front of police’s faces combined with the fact that they were getting this evidence from the son of some of the most powerful people in world managed to spur them to act extremely quickly. The responsible members of Team Rocket were put away with extreme prejudice, and pretty much all of the Pokemon who were captured to be used there were checked and released back into their natural habitats.

All except the Snorunt and Larvesta whom Alastair removed directly. The both of them were young and had lost their parents in the process of being captured, so not only did they have nowhere to go, they latched onto Alastair and refused to be separated from him. At first, the police were worried about the complications of this (after all, they were both rare Pokemon not native to Johto), but Alastair managed to point out that his family easily had the resources to take care of them both 5 times over without missing anything from their enormous fortune. Of course, the police needed to talk to a legal guardian, so Alastair both made sure they did not talk to his mother and called Lance ahead of time so his big brother could help convince Oliver with Alastair. After that incident, Alastair doted on the pair as much as he could. But the “incidents” only increased in number and severity, and so he was made to train them so that the three of them could survive the increasingly nasty situations.

Alastair trained his Pokemon very well, of course, but he hardly had the luxury to just sit around in between incidents, hoping he would stay alive the next time they happened. The incidents gave him an advantage of being owed lots of favors, and he knew that they happened too often and in far too quick succession to be coincidental. So he began to leverage his growing amount of power into discreetly attempting to figure out who was the cause behind these events.

The same day he found out about “Uncle Van” was the same he “spontaneously” decided to go on a Pokemon journey. He felt bad about leaving a returning Lance behind, but decided that self preservation was more important than guilt. Of course, he made sure to stay in contact with Lance, but it wasn’t the same.

His journey made him a fair amount of friends, including a trainer named Lenore. He built up a reputation as being powerful in both position and combat, using his powerful Pokemon extremely creatively to devastating effect. Both before and after the fall of Harper industries, he’s had his fingers in all sorts of pies, from the stock market, to the police, to the underworld, and he’s been worrying Giovanni with his competence. After the death of Mary and Oliver, he returned to Goldenrod with Lenore in tow (hired as a bodyguard for Lance), fighting a war that is secretly on two fronts, not one.

Pokemon:

Froslass (Onna, F)
Honchkrow (Simurgh, F)
Garchomp (Behemoth, M)
Volcorona (Abaddon, M)
Starmie (Leviathan, n/a, referred to as M)
Roserade (Kodama, F)

Other: n/a

[Lord Celebi]

Welcome to the RP, Death's Spook.