OOC
GAME: MAIMED
DESCRIPTION: A post-apocalyptic socio-political futuristic horror jukebox musical comedy drama.
DATE: June 2008
PB: Will Smith
JOURNAL: stomp
IC
PART II: Character Information
Vital Statistics
FULL NAME: Isaac Warren Stone
AFFILIATION: Rebels. He joined in 2060, which means it's been 15 years on the job.
AGE/DOB: May 19, 2039, making him thirty-six. Taurus; patient and reliable, warmhearted and loving, persistent and determined, placid and security loving. Jealous and possessive, resentful and inflexible, self-indulgent and greedy.
GENDER: Male
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual
OCCUPATION: Cook at Der Waffle Haus. He's the big guy flipping pancakes and waffles in the back, and calming down waitresses whenever they go into stress-induced hysterics.
THEME SONG:
"På ditt skift"; Kaizers Orchestra
"Story of Isaac"; Leonard Cohen
"Murderer"; Wintersleep
RESIDENCE: One of the rooms in the Complex. It was either that or his parents' basement, and he doesn't want to bring hell down on the elderly couple's head more than necessary; so he rooms with the Revolution, where his walls are happily plastered with Bob Marley posters and as many black idols from the previous century as he's managed to learn about via copious research. Barring Oprah. The room's always vaguely messy, his bed unmade, some clothes scattered around; there's far worse rooms in the Complex, after all, and as long as his extensive music collection's organised, he couldn't be happier. The man's CD collection could be worth a veritable fortune on the streets, if anyone could afford it. His paychecks — when they aren't going to rent or keeping himself fed — always go to music.
Appearance
HEIGHT: 6'2"
WARDROBE: At the day job, he wears relatively clean aprons over white t-shirts and comfortable trousers. Off the job, he usually wears long-sleeved shirts and comfortable trousers, with a fondness for leather jackets and belts with absurd buckles. Unlike most rebels, he doesn't wear much colour aside from his one typical rebel-accent, which is red. What? No one ever accused Isaac of creativity. He also wears a wooden charm necklace tucked in under his shirt; it's for good luck.
MISCELLANEOUS: He's got a decent collection of tattoos, but nothing which the aforementioned long-sleeved shirts couldn't cover up, for the sake of keeping up appearances. He has the Taurus symbol tattooed on one wrist, various tribal markings around one upper arm, and barbed wire across the other forearm. They're not particularly symbolic or significant, but he likes having them. It's a small point of rebellion against The Man, if you will. Amongst the usual marks from fights over the years, Isaac also has some nasty surgical scarring on his lower back.
PB: Will Smith
Personality
Direct and to the point, Isaac would really rather not mince words if he doesn't have to. He's the very opposite of verbose, and so each word he delivers will get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. He's not against sharing, but he is against sharing too much — truth of the matter is, Isaac is not a very complicated individual. It's not to say that he's stupid, but he tends to avoid extraneous layers of emotional complexity. He never got off on emotional manipulation, and he has never benefited from purposefully hiding his own genuine self; quite the opposite, his father always reinforced staunch honesty in the face of adversity. Which makes being in the Revolution and hiding his motives from society at large extremely difficult. Some people can cope fairly easily with deception and staying undercover, but even after fifteen years, Isaac's still trying to come to terms with the split. He likes going in with guns blazing. He likes knowing where he is, where he stands, and who he's against. The seedy world of corporate corruption and deceit does not sit well with him. This inherent discontent is what led him to the Revolution in the first place, but these exact same personality characteristics make him uneasy with that double life, no matter how necessary it is.
During the entirety of his teenage and young adult years, he was known in social and occupational circles for his honest and straightforward nature. He was and is a man of few words, blunt to the point of being dangerously confrontational — he'll say it like it is, and has a few scars and broken bones in his past as a result of it. Instead of backing down from a challenge, he will often dig his feet in, as long as he's convinced of his own moral high ground. He'll attack problems in his life like a blunt charge, barrelling straight into them: he's very much a fan of the physical and mental shortcut, and arguably possesses the emotional complexity of a teaspoon. It's unfair to trivialise him like that, though — of course he feels emotion like the rest of us, of course he experiences confusion and doubt. But to the world, Isaac — Stomp — tries to present a steady, unwavering front. He's like a calm rock in the tide of the chaotic and colourful revolution, and a pseudo-older brother figure to anone who'll have him. He still dresses like he still doesn't really want to stand out in the slums, which earns him some arched eyebrows amongst his more radical peers, but he does live in a conflict of ideals. Growing up with a liberal reporter for a mother — who desperately wanted to be outspoken, but couldn't — has left him with some pretty sturdy ideology, if not the same higher education that his parents had. They simply couldn't afford it.
Instead, he's largely uneducated (albeit literate), and relies on persistence to get himself through life — if you fail, try, try again. And if that doesn't work, well, obviously it means you're doing something wrong. He's an open ear for anyone who needs to talk, though an incredibly bad advice-giver. You might get lucky and he'll spout some insightful Stompesque wisdom, but more often than not, he'll say the wrong thing. So he's learnt not to try explaining himself in the first place. He's quiet. He's also a protective force for the younger, more reckless members of the revolution.
And when it comes to rebelling? Stomp's anger is a bit of a slow-moving avalanche, which is precisely what makes him a merciless enemy once you've got him. Shusai has inadvertently tapped into that very rolling anger, spawned by a long-term simmering unhappiness with society's current conditions. He doesn't think the world is cool right now, yo.
Rebel Information
CODENAME: Stomp
DIVISION: Sharpshooters. He shuttled around all the divisions for a couple years in the beginning, before finding a good niche in the Home Guard for eight years. His skills with guns, weaponry and missiles in general is pretty damned good, so he does well enough in the sharpshooters — years of sniping Shusai off the slum borders has worked out in his favour, and he's especially skilled when teamed up with one partner at a time. Isaac's sharpshooting has a tendency to employ some of his old Home Guard techniques, however; he'll gladly take out an enemy with one well-placed shot, but more often than not, he wishes he could pull out a submachine rifle instead. He's hoping to switch back into the HG eventually.
ALIASES: Isaac is, frankly, utter shit at coming up with aliases. He's constantly hitting up the Alias Development division for advice and ideas, and they practically have to hand him the identities handmade, ready-wrapped and idiot-proof — not only is he unimaginative, but deception doesn't come easily to him, and he was never the artistic or creative type. Isaac was practical, good with his hands, and good at sports. His colleagues in A-Dev have had to save him from various disasters like “Adam Smith” and “Jim West”. He can't hide his limited education in his aliases, either, but his most-used ones are:
— Louis Graves: Construction worker. Even quieter than Isaac himself. Arguably to present a fake identity which is taciturn and silent; honestly, though, it's probably just because silence is easier to portray than an entirely new personality type.
— James Elliot: Usually Isaac wears his hair cut short, but James Elliot necessitates a large and flamboyant afro, as well as lots of purple. He's more cocky and confident than usual, and uses this alias to wander into the rather… less tasteful sections of the slums.
History
NPCs/FAMILY MEMBERS: A brief list of your character's close friends, family, and coworkers go here, along with a brief description of each. Feel free to use this as a list of in-game storylines, as well, if you'd like!
— David Stone: Aged eighty, b. 1995. He was 44 when they had Isaac. Ex-pediatrician, now working a menial job at a lower-income high school.
— Laura Halsey-Stone: Aged seventy-five, b. 2000. 39 when they had Isaac. Journalist.
— The ex-wife: Details negotiable!
HISTORY:
Isaac Stone's parents are old enough to have seen Shusai's rise as it came. Worst of all, however, they can remember a time before Shusai and before the bomb that changed everything. They were just teenagers when it happened, and so recall the very early 2000s with a sense of tired nostalgia — they were old enough and smart enough to see the world crumble and conventions get stricter, and they definitely didn't like it. David Stone was a general practitioner (footage of the disease-stricken post-bomb had irrevocably affected the young black man) from a relatively well-to-do family, but after governmental cutbacks, the health system couldn't afford him anymore. He got sacked from the hospital, with no security whatsoever, leaving him poor and destitute and weighing on his wife for support, which was already unusual enough in the Shusai society. Laura Halsey had been a reporter, but fell on hard times after the Cacophany Act (2021-22 — she was 21), which meant being reduced to almost no original thought whatsoever. She fell neatly in line, lips pressed shut, and Laura's scathing, thought-provoking columns turned into trite, pro-government trash. They needed the money and they needed people to stop looking their way, after all. The couple got married as Shusai was on the rise, and the next decade was particularly harsh. They were in their thirties when they finally moved to the big city with the rest of their community in a panicked exodus.
They settled down into a routine in the City. Laura had her computer, where she churned out text after text, and David found himself scrounging for jobs where he could find them, eventually taking up as the medical consultant (not-so-vaguely referred to as the school nurse) for one of those high schools on the edges of Shusai society: too poor to be good, but stable enough to provide some form of health care for their kids. The two of them weren't to have Isaac until much later in life; what with the economic turmoil and societal upheaval going on around them, they'd actually been planning on not having any kids. They didn't want to bring any more people into a nuclear-ravaged USA.
But people started giving Laura Stone curious glances, and her group of female friends started slipping away from her as each of them became pregnant in turn and decided there must be something wrong with her. Pressure gave. Finally, Isaac Warren Stone was born. His parents' finances, already rocky, were made even more unstable by the addition of a child, but at least they regained the attention of their immediate Shusai-supporting peers, struggling to stay on the map of respectability, as it were — but when he was fourteen years old, the housing plan was redone.
The Stones were shafted. The accomodation they'd been promised and promised — they were even some of the first on that goddamn hypothetical list — vanished into thin air, and as it did, they finally admitted defeat and moved out into the slums. Teenaged Isaac went to an even worse high school, where his education deteriorated. When his family started going down that slippery slope into true poverty, Isaac flitted into a neighbourhood gang, which he would remain steadfastly loyal to for the next few years. There were schoolyard scraps and more dangerous fights. He had a late ride into the academy, sponsored by one of his father's old friends (all the adults involved considered it an investment on their part), before he found himself disgusted with the propaganda and better suited doing… well, other things with his life. Laura may have raised her son well, but she didn't raise him capable of betraying himself; he just could not work for Shusai with a clean conscience.
He did, however, marry a Shusai office worker in his twenties. His eventual recruitment and involvement in the Revolution was their downfall, however; she couldn't stand his increasingly secretive behaviour, and had a very good idea of what was going on. Isaac and his wife eventually split, and the man who was known as Stomp moved in to the Revolution's Complex, finally giving up all pretensions of trying to fit in with 'normal life' as the population knew it.
Juggled between the divisions for a while, Stomp put his cooking skills to good use as a Domestic Technician — until he successfully completed weapons training (as opposed to simply brawling with his fists, which he'd been very good at), and could try out for the more combat-based divisions. He found a good place in the Home Guard, and stayed there for eight years, before he was shunted out of it due to a bad injury leaving him bedridden and immovable for a while, fussed over by medics. This is when they transferred him into sharpshooting, figuring immobile shooting did him well enough.
He's getting somewhat better now — the spinal injury was patched up as best as possible by the Revo, but problems still shoot up occasionally when under physical duress. Despite that, though, Stomp is not-so-subtly hinting for a transfer back into Home Guard. He liked it there.
PART III: Plottage — OPTIONAL!
PLOT IDEAS: Interactions with coworkers at Der Waffle Haus. Trying to keep some members of the Revolution somewhat sane. Working his slow fight for ~the cause~, and steadfastly hoping to get switched back into Home Guard — in the meantime, he'll keep happily smoothstomping people with Smooth Jazz. I'm hoping someone might want to pick up his ex-wife (orrrrr one of the existing characters could fill the storyline? I don't know if there's anyone out there who'd fit).
SECRETS: NONE REALLY. HE'S KIND OF AN OPEN BOOK.
