Round 10.2, Part One [Rasputin the Translator v. Time to Die]

Hey folks,

Sorry for the turtle-esque crawl that this round is starting to resemble. My excuses are a) spending the last few days with a friend before she flies back to the U.K., and b) discovering, on Saturday morning, that our car up and fucking died. Just would not start.

We went to a dealership and got a new one (and I literally mean new, which was pretty weird in itself -- we're not "new car" people.) and got a great deal on it, too. (It's a "Regal Blue Pearl" 2006 Subaru Forester, for those that care.)

So that's been occupying my time and mind these past few days, and the David Lee Roth-style air splits that I expected this round to metaphorically approximate hasn't come to pass. In fact, I still feel a bit distracted, but Spitball! shall not be denied. As a compromise, I'm going to post one of the character bios today, and the other bio probably tomorrow sometime.

Oh, yeah, the bios. As I hinted earlier, this round is going to be a little different than previous rounds. I was so happy with Burley's character bios for the Round Ten, that writing two completely different ones, while potentially educational, seemed like a complete waste of time. I discussed this with Burley over iChat, and decided that I could instead write two bios of supporting characters (since we're gonna need to know about them as well).

Time to Die
In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman--his wife--faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It's a race against time, with one nearly resourceless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

Character Sketch: James Crowley Okkervil
Relationship to Story: Antagonist

James C. Okkervil was born into an upper middle-class home in upstate New York, the son of an aerospace worker who, when James was less than a year old, changed his life radically when he divorced his wife and married his male co-worker. James lived with his dad and new partner rather uneventfully, going to an expensive private schoool, getting good grades, and visiting his mom weekly, until her untimely death in a traffic accident. But then, when he was nine years old, he watched as both his male parents quickly succumbed to cancer. (James would learn, much later in life, that his parents were exposed to chemicals and heavy metals during their time there.) His grandmother, whom he’d never met, flew in to take him back to Florida. She told little Jim that they died because they were wicked people, and were punished for their sinful lifestyle. Jim didn’t know what this meant at the time; all he knew was that his parents were loving people, and treated him well. But their names were never to be mentioned in his new home. Instead, he had to quickly adapt to his new family – his grandmother, cold and avaricious, his grandfather, humorless and prone to violence towards Jim, and his new brothers and sisters, adopted children with severe disabilities. This was hard for Jim – being the only “normal” kid, forced to take care of his incontinent siblings, and constantly avoiding the wrath of Grandma and Grandpa.

However, one of these children was Roscoe. Roscoe had muscular dystrophy, and was confined to a wheelchair. Despite (or perhaps because of) being bound to a wheelchair, Roscoe had quite a mouth on him, which got him into all sorts of trouble – although never with Grandma and Grandpa, who were always indulgent with their “gifts of love”, as they called their adoptees. They became friends -- Jim took an immediate liking to Roscoe, with his penchant for insults, and Roscoe liked how Jim wasn’t afraid to dish it back to him. They also protected one another – Roscoe from those who would pick on him (or those angered by his incessant abuse), Jim from the worst excesses of his grandparents.

When the floods came and Florida became a small island, Jim and Roscoe, now fourteen, used the ensuing panic and confusion to separate from the rest of the family and make their way up north towards New York, with a vague plan to become musicians – this despite neither of them having ever touched an instrument in their lives. The journey was difficult, but they eventually made it, although they were now penniless and homeless.

On the brink of starvation, Jim and Roscoe met a kid, nicknamed Sticks, who, despite being about ten years old, had the demeanor, the world-weariness of someone four times that age. Sticks rescued them and took them back to a hidden shelter in the Bronx. There, Jim and Roscoe met The Neon, a loose confederation of homeless and orphaned children that provided shelter and support to each other. Although The Neon were bound together by their physical circumstances, they were bound together another way as well. Over the years of surviving on the streets and witnessing terrible violence, the Neon developed a bizarre cosmology that explained their lives in terms of a war between outnumbered angels and overwhelming demons, with no help from an absent, cowardly god.

At first, Jim, older than most of the Neon, didn’t believe these stories, and merely did his part to help this community to survive. Then, about a year after coming back to New York, his Grandma and Grandpa tracked him and Roscoe down, intending to bring them back home. Although old, Grandma and Grandpa were still strong and quite capable of using force to bring Jim back. And while The Neon that were present outnumbered the grandparents, they found the pair terrifying, and thought them to be demons. Faced with going back to live with these tyrannical guardians, Jim took the first step on a path that would define the rest of his life: he would kill in order to survive. He stabbed Grandma and Grandpa to death, and with the help of the Neon, disposed of their bodies. Up until that point, Jim was something of an outsider within the Neon; now, he was a warrior and a demon killer. At the same time, this marked the falling-out between him and Roscoe, who, after a year on the streets, was ready to go back.

This event would set the stage for the next five years of his life, as Jim would now be known as simply Okkervil. Due to the worsening economy, the ranks of the Neon swelled, and Okkervil organized them into something more like a gang. And as the Neon came to rely on Okkervil more and more for leadership and protection, Okkervil responded by using the Neon’s mythology as a pretext for branching out into petty crime -- after all, it’s not wrong to rob a demon. During this time, Okkervil would find himself in situations that forced him (in his view) to kill to protect his charges – people who would expose the Neon’s operations, people who would take away the kids from him, people who challenge him. That last one would be his downfall, and his ultimate heartbreak: He discovered that Roscoe was going to turn him in, and Okkervil, by now used to doing whatever necessary to survive but long past the point of having to do it personally, had him killed by the Neon.

Unfortunately for Okkervil, Roscoe secretly kept evidence of the Neon’s crimes, and they came to light. The gang was dismantled, and Okkervil was tried and sentenced to spend the rest of his years at the Wellington Planetary Correctional Facility. He’s spent two years in the Well so far, and already is feared and respected by the other inmates. He’s also quietly spreading the Neon Cosmology amongst the prisoners, and attempting to unite disparate factions under his own leadership. Everything was going to plan – until the guards got a little too rough with Jackie J, and the prison exploded.