Feb. 5th, 2017

INFO

Feb. 5th, 2017 02:54 am
blackhat: (Default)
INFO

Visual: About 5’9” and in his 60s, jackrabbit lean with a horseshoe of grey hair and a gaunt, weathered face. His eyes are pale blue, a little too finely attuned to feel friendly despite the laugh lines grooved in hard around his mouth. He’s usually clean-shaven, and awfully spry, if a little stiff in the knees.
Fashion: Wears a lot of charcoal and black, with some middling grey mixed in for good measure. Civvies typically consist of bespoke suits with designer accents, on the understated side of affluent. His Westworld getup consists of a black jacket layered over a black vest and trousers, with a grey shirt and ascot underneath, all variously textured for contrast’s sake. He has black boots and leather gloves to go with it. And a cowboy hat, of course.
Accent: A vaguely cinematic drawl. He sounds Texan.
Arms: Bowie knife and a modified LeMat 1861 revolver, with a spare barrel and cylinder assembly that he keeps on his belt. At times where subtlety is an issue, he might be packing less conspicuous heat.


POWERS

Bulletproof: General resilience to catastrophic injury/intense trauma, all around making him hard to kill short of a concentrated, deliberate effort at close range (ie bullet to the head at point blank range, knife through the throat, grenade blast, etc). He’ll still feel pain and take damage, but some will be bled off into sputters of smoke and some will simply be soaked without crippling him. He might survive a punch from a gorilla, but not from a god.

Side effects include some strange biological/elemental crossover into the smoke power -- blackish, tarry blood, sizzling, maybe sparks on impact or burning castoff spatter if he’s gored deep or hit hard enough. The harder he takes the hit, the more dramatic the effect.

This doesn’t entail a healing factor, but his bones will be hard to break, he’ll be resistant to blunt force and physical/concussive shock, and wounds that might otherwise bleed him out might be stoppered up enough with nasty, cauterizing tar blood enough for him to walk (or smoke) away to get sutures.

Bullets don’t bounce off him -- they just don’t penetrate the surface or fully transfer their energy into causing injury. The impact is more akin to being struck by non-lethal ammunition. He might shrug it off while he’s in good condition, but if he’s already had his ass beat, the cumulative effect is likely to be more staggering.

Smoke Form: Sublimation into oily black smoke at will, or on hair trigger reflex at things like loud noises or sudden impacts. The smoke can be very dense, lending him a nearly normal, solid appearance, or disperse into a barely detectable haze.

When he reforms it’s in a rush of localized heat that brings sparks and embers back in with him, and may start small fires. He’s capable of flushing in and out of this form very quickly, providing the illusion of teleportation. Provided he has a solid handhold, he can even take people and things with him. The limit for transport is ballpark around the mass of a single human being, and it’s not a pleasant process for the passenger -- a whole lot of disorientation that ends in a surge of choking heat.

Losing some smoke to the wind or an hvac will not see him returning to tangibility with missing limbs -- this power isn’t an exact molecule-for-molecule process, and there’s often castoff smoke around if he’s going at it rapid fire.

In smoke form, his senses are altered, more concerned with the audiophysical than the visible, in terms of dimensions and movement. He can eavesdrop creepily, and probably will, but he can’t see light or read passed notes.

For his last trick, upon reforming, he can either stick with what he was wearing when he vanished or respawn in his man in black getup for dramatic effect. This might also happen if he gets rocked to the point of reverting to default. Like sort of a scooby doo thing when you pull the mask off the janitor, only with punching.

Updates: expanding this one to cover more in the way of reflexive transference, wherein being struck by a killing or otherwise crippling/crushing blow is likely to be soaked in whole or in part by sublimation. He might stop a bullet in its tracks via the above physical resistance, or it might punch in part of the way through flesh and zip the rest of the way through smoke, limiting the damage.

The more forceful and concentrated the trauma, the more likely the some of the damage is to be siphoned off into smoke that then flushes back in whole.

At the same time, the more of a prolonged beating he takes, or the more tired/drugged he is in general, the harder and more unpleasant it will be to flash into smoke completely to maneuver and escape, which is something he’ll have to learn the hard way.

Adding on to him being able to transport objects with him, he’ll be able to transport just pieces or parts of a target with him. Early on this is liable to be largely accidental -- getting thrown into a wall and taking part of it with him, for example. Eventually he’ll get enough of a grasp on it to do weird, more creative stuff like taking the arm off an assailant or relieving a car of a tire. The exposed edges of anything spliced in this way will be cauterized and charred.

Companion Horse: Just like a regular horse, but actually a robot. It’s a big ol’ quarter horse and it’s black. If killed, the horse will respawn in full tack near the man in black after a few minutes if it can safely do so without clipping through obstructions or crushing anyone to death. The corpse will slowly burn away into smoke once it has respawned. If the companion horse is killed twice in rapid succession, it will respawn in exactly one hour. If it’s killed again after that, it will cease respawning for twenty-four hours as a lesson to the man in black that he should take better care of his companion horse.

If the man in black travels any significant amount of distance instantaneously (ie teleportation), the horse will undergo a similar process to respawn near the man in black. It is unclear if the horse is actually teleporting or being duplicated and destroyed every time it appears.

He can summon/spawn the horse to his position at will, but cannot willfully prevent the horse from respawning, save in 24 hour increments by deliberately killing it three times n a row, if he ever figures that out.

If someone is riding the horse at the time it respawns, they will not be brought along with it, but they probably wouldn’t want that anyway.


PERMISSIONS

IC

These are guidelines for the curious -- I’m pretty receptive to plotting and/or rolling with things as they arise.

Physical Affection: Believe in my dreams.
Violence: Yes please.
Injury/Death: I’m most likely game if it makes for good story. For death I’d definitely like some communication about intent and possible outcomes, even if it’s something that arises in the moment.
Hacking: Half-assed efforts might draw the eye of Sauron. He’s pretty tech-savvy.
Telepathy/Manipulation: He doesn’t like having his strings pulled but I don’t mind.

OOC

Backtagging: Yes/usually not further back than a month or two. I tend to want to start up a more current thread around that point.
Threadjacking: Go for it.
Contact: PM or add me on Plurk (hackfraud).

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The Man in Black

February 2017

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