OOC
GAME: Crossover
DESCRIPTION:
DATE: November 2008
PB: Jeremy Irons
JOURNAL: clocking
IC
Comic Character.
Name/Alias: William Tockman (The Clock King)
Universe: DC
Powers: Impeccable sense of timing, in addition to being able to see precisely 4.6692 seconds into the future. It's not good for much on the grander scale of things, but means he's frankly quite unreal in close melee combat, and a chillingly good conductor.
Status: Private, but with a distressingly uncontrollable tendency to let other DC villains know. Call it the supervillain's urge to pontificate.
Character.
Name: Daniel Fitzgerald Ward
Age/Birthdate: 60 / October 1st, 1948 (LIBRA)
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Occupation: Orchestra conductor, concert pianist and violinist.
Appearance: Sombre and grey-haired, Daniel cuts the image of an old and dignified gentleman — which he is, of course. He dresses extremely meticulously and with careful, almost mechanical attention. His hair is brushed, his face always neatly shaved, his shirtcuffs fastened, his suits pressed and ironed and entirely devoid of lint. It's a far advance from his family past, which is decidedly more humdrum and ordinary, but Daniel works hard on his appearance partially in order to dispel the memory of his dull origins.
PB: Jeremy Irons
Personality: Above all else, Daniel Ward is calm, sedate, and dignified. Years of experience and age have turned a gawky, tweedy adolescent into a refined and cultured gentleman, if a tightly-wound one. His ability to relate with other individuals has been hampered by the strict and ordered workings of his clockwork mind; Daniel enjoys precision, accuracy, and the sweet sound of adagios — not the seething chaos of immature humanity. Which isn't to say he doesn't know passion; no, he's had his own share of a sticky, messy past, and has long-composed grand concertos in his head. But instead of a genuinely warm compassion towards the average Joe Schmoe, the man is automatically dismissive — possibly even arrogant and aloof.
There's no doubt that despite his social hangups (and after all, aren't the greatest geniuses recluses?), Daniel is immensely intelligent. He speaks in an abrupt staccato, and his lofty and elegant voice is tempered by a deep-rooted impatience urging to move on to bigger, better, more important things. And people. His workings are subtle; his attitude withdrawn; his greatest habits intellectual ones. He instinctively gravitates towards other great minds and withdrawn personalities, and despite his accumulated wisdom, rarely decides to share or lay himself on the line for others. Somewhere deep down, he is still driven by that selfish self-preservation of a villain. After all, his alter ego long ago learnt the danger of being self-sacrificing. So where William Tockman's life fell down around his ears, Daniel Ward is remorseless to keep his own relentlessly in check.
Unlike a solid percentage of the community's younger population, Daniel isn't a hothead. He's much more like a slow-moving avalanche; not because he's mentally or verbally slow (quite the contrary), but because he is immensely careful. He plods. He's slow to rouse to anger, and even slower to calm once he's actually, god forbid!, gotten going. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Daniel's had six decades to perfect his own personal art of self-restraint; he doesn't rise to the bait and will usually restrain inflamed emotions or sudden temper, particularly on such a trivial medium as the journals. Very little surprises him anymore. He can be solid and dependable as a rock once you gain him as an ally — a source of immovable, weary strength — but until that point, he keeps himself to himself.
Instead, he is composed of strict self-regimen and a tongue-in-cheek touch of irony; he's had a shade of black, morbid humour ever since his incarnation kicked in. Daniel's humour is characterised by its arch, dry quality. He's not quite as obsessive compulsive as William, but he does like clocks and timepieces both for their elegance and their complicated workings, in addition to their precision and predictability. The Clock King once orchestrated symphonies of chaos in Gotham; Daniel has mostly retired the criminal flair for now, but likes to think Tockman wouldn't be entirely disappointed with where they've ended up.
History: Daniel's had a hard time of it, but as a result has emerged leaner, more weathered, and (somewhat) none the worse for wear. As a young man, he was used to giving himself away by degrees, and today he still finds that people affix themselves to him like limpets, either for his wealth, his influence within musical community, or just for advice and some wisdom. Though distant, he'll sometimes be coerced into begrudgingly helping others. Aside from that, however, it's clear that the man prefers a role on the sidelines. Even in his youth, he was clandestine and discreet, usually tongue-tied rather than gregarious and outgoing. Today, that quiet streak has evolved into being outright aversive to trust and sometimes even cantankerous, having been repeatedly burned in the past.
Life generally took a shat on him in his early 20s, right before the comic manifested: his wife divorced him, taking the son (who to this day refuses to speak to his father), and his sister died after a long and arduous fight with illness. The Wards were wretchedly poor and simply didn't have the money for lengthy hospitalisation. Daniel had been chipping away at a bachelor's in electrical engineering, having taken to it like a fish to water, but his entire degree was contingent on scholarships.
After the death of his sister, William Tockman woke up in full force.
Talk about irony? With both men grieving the loss of a sister — which they both saw as unnecessary, unfair, and wholly unavoidable had they been able to sort out these baser considerations like, well, cash.
So he sorted it out. He spent the rest of his degree nursing a certain project on the side, which culminated in a successful (enormously succesful, in fact) bank heist precisely thirty-five years ago. He meant for it to be just the one, but having attained the skills, insight, and criminal panache to pull off robberies via the Clock King, Daniel… found himself doing it again. And then again.
And again.
He accomplished them alone and his heists were, in terms of functionality and bare-bones efficiency, beautiful. No brute force, no violence, but instead they relied upon impeccable timing, careful planning for contingencies, and applied exercises in statistics and probability. That string of bad luck and a slew of accidents in his personal life led to Daniel compensating professionally, financially, and criminally. He used the money to put himself through musical conservatories and craft an education for himself — an artistic one this time, with the opportunity to delve into music and emotional expression rather than engineering or watchmaking.
Dan kept up the life of unsolved crime for ten years, and to this day still has the subway/bus/train schedules of New York pretty much memorised. But Daniel eventually hung up the metaphorical cowl when he turned thirty-five, and has been carefully living off the wealth ever since. He didn't do anything as foolishly reckless as buy a mansion/penthouse apartment/Porsche, and files some of the excess income as the result of casino gambling — but suffice it to say, Daniel treats his friends to a great many restaurant dinners and he's never strapped for cash.
After becoming independently wealthy and turning to music, years passed and eventually Daniel found himself drawn to the world of symphonic orchestra. His identity as the Clock King led to him practically being a human metronome; he has an absolute rock-solid sense of timing and place, and it served him well with the grand piano and his drift towards conducting. The identity grants him a well of bitterness to boot, over the effect that bad timing and ironic fate had in the life of William Tockman. The Clock King was a failboat villain, for the most part; trying to look after his sister, he went wrong for all the right reasons, and had destiny shaft him instaed.
By virtue of his age and not knowing his identity, a few eyes have glanced in Daniel's direction over the years for DC leadership — particularly right after Martin died — but he has constantly shied away from the responsibility. If pressed, he attributes it to a certain trend of humility. Actually, he's just wary of anyone doing a too-thorough background check.
In what would be yet another example of good timing in Ward's life, he and Miranda Turlington — Poison Ivy — noticed the rumblings of trouble and skipped town before the earthquakes hit. They were safely gone for the entirety of the disaster and its riotous aftermath, but came back once the troubles had settled down. Upon return, Daniel made a large charitable donation to the Crossover rebuilding effort; the new administration is aware of his contribution, but the regular reincarnated populace is not.
Since parting with that sizeable amount of cash, his mental cogs have started turning.
Plot ideas: RETURNING TO A LIFE OF CRIME. I always planned for him to get back into robbing banks, particularly to help propel Miranda's ecoterrorism. BUT ALSO, GURLZ, if I don't go through with a sixth char for shadowycorp — maybe he could be a recruit for the company? Maybemaybe?
Trivia:
- Keeps at least three fake IDs in his home at any given time, along with a small cache of cash. Likes the freedom of having an escape plan.
- About twenty years ago, had a hot and heavy fling with Miranda Turlington after she was coming off her husband's death and he was starting to have second thoughts about this 'no more life of crime' thing. The end result was that Daniel took up the eco-terrorism habit for a while, pooling resources and abilities with his new-found compatriot, but they eventually parted ways.
- Likes health food. Has a black belt in karate. To be honest, he's largely modelled on Carl Gugasian (full story here).
soundtrack
"commissioning a symphony in c"; cake
so you'll be an Austrian nobleman
commissioning a symphony in C
which defies all earthly descriptions
you'll be commissioning a symphony in C
with money you squeeze from the peasants
to your nephew you can give it as a present
this magnificent symphony in C
you'll be commissioning a symphony in C
[…]
it has a melody both happy and sad
built on victorious known triads
"armchair apocalypse"; andrew bird
I sang a song that silence brings, the one that everybody knows
everybody knows the song that silence sings
the song that silence sings and this is how it goes
these looms that weave apocryphal, they're hanging from a strand.
the dark and empty rooms were full of incandescent hands
an awkward pause, a fatal flaw
time is a crooked bow, time's a crooked bow
in time you need to learn to love the ebb, just like the flow.
grab hold of your bootstraps and pull like hell.
'til gravity feels sorry for you and lets you go
as if you lacked the proper chemicals to know,
the way it felt the last time you let yourself fall this low
time, oh time, it's a crooked bow, time's a crooked bow
fifty-five and three days later at the bottom of a gigantic crater
an armchair calls to you, an armchair calls to you and it says that:
Someday, we'll get back at them all, with a pox and a pair of plyers.
As ancient sea slugs begin to crawl between the ragweed and barbed wire.
oh no, you didn't write, you didn't call
it didn't cross your mind at all
through the waves of AM squall,
you couldn't feel a thing at all.
you're fifty-five and three days too old
fifty-five and three days too old
time…
resources
http://www.toonzone.net/anbat/btas/tck.html, "this tightly-wound little man", "stunted personality working that clockwork mind": "Like Riddler and Penguin, the Clock King is a villain of the head, marked and moved by his intelligence rather than his passions. Like them he is dry, ironic, intellectual. […] Partially because, although his actions are directed toward revenge, he does not let his end encumber his means. He is wise enough to retreat when the odds grow too great; he is so utterly remorseless that he dares not risk any setback that might prove permanent. When he closes a door, it's because he knows where there's a window open.
More important, he makes of his obsessive nature a servant and not a master. He likes clocks not in themselves but only for the precision and predictability they represent; he fetishizes efficiency for its utility. His mastery of minutiae and detail enable him to pull off remarkable stunts and effortless escapes without resorting to the gadgets, muscle, or "black magic" of the Joker or the other members of the Rogues Gallery. […] Still, a bit more ingenuity could have gone into the plot, more than just some haywire traffic signals and misdirected trains. A man of this ability should be able to conduct a symphony of chaos had he the city's computers under his fingers."
http://www.thegraphicweekly.com/archive/archive-artsy/artsy013108.html
http://67.220.225.100/~oboe3583/ambache/conductor.htm
http://www.cso.org/main.taf?p=1,1,4,8
http://www.expertvillage.com/video/110094_what-are-orchestra-conductor-cues.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/guide/conductor/
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/Apr08/Drone_Butterworth.htm
http://www.newwinnipeg.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=2213
http://www.jackboulware.com/writing/historys-unsolved-heists/
