Adrian Lovelock

Name

Adrian Lovelock

Concept

Neat, calculating businessman with a bad limp and a military background

Power

Badass Normal: By spending a Fate Point, Adrian can add +3 to any Physical Defense or Persuasion roll.

Aspects

  • Suffering is Optional: Adrian's war wounds cause him enough pain that he normally walks with a cane. He has cultivated an extremely high pain tolerance, though — enough that he can run and fight like a much younger man (can use his full Athletics and Melee Attack skills), if the need arises. Such feats always cost him once the adrenaline wears off.
  • One of His Own: Adrian is fiercely, sometimes inappropriately, protective of the people he feels responsible for. Anyone wanting to hurt his friends or employees is going to have to go through him first.
  • Reinvented Man: Adrian is or has been the son of a grocer, an army lieutenant, and a successful entrepreneur. He can make himself fit in a wide variety of situations.

Skills

  • Physical Defense: 4
  • Body: 3
  • Mental Defense: 1
  • Mind: 2
  • Athletics: 3
  • Lore: 1 [would be 2 at home]
  • Melee Attack: 3
  • Perception: 2
  • Persuasion: 4
  • Resources: 0 [would be 3 at home]
  • Street Sense:/ 1 [would be 3 at home]

Saved XP: 1
Total XP: 0

Possessions

Heron-headed swordcane
Expensive suit
Triangular red pocket "square"
Wallet containing various Cathesian (useless) monetary instruments, ID cards, a few keys, etc.
Lovelock Enterprises (inaccessible)

Personality & Appearance

Glib and sardonic, incredibly suave when he wants to be, with a facility for subtly diverting questions. Those who breach that outer armor find another layer under it—his biting, sarcastic wit. There are chinks in both those armors, though: ask him about his home and he will talk for hours, lauding Cathes in tones as wistful as they are patriotic.

To those he doesn’t care either for or about, he is by default coolly polite. Those who want his full respect will have to earn it, by some show of virtue or competence. Those who lose his provisional regard, by incompetence or viciousness, earn a calculated dismissal and the sharp end of his tongue.

He’s not terribly imposing physically: about forty, maybe a little older, he’s about 5’8” and all sharp bones. His black hair is cropped short and slicked back, graying at the temples. The neat, close-trimmed beard and moustache set off the sharp nose and hollow cheeks. He wears his impeccable three-piece suits like armor. Although he walks with a cane, it conceals a sword, which he is capable of using to thoroughly deadly advantage. The scarlet handkerchief can inflame his fury, compassion, or spirit of command, depending on circumstances; there’s no magic in it, only memories, but nonetheless it always finds its way to his hand when he needs his courage or leadership most.

Personal History

Adrian Lovelock is not from around here. He was born in Cathes, a nation on the sea, in a world not too unlike ours. As a boy, he helped with the family business and absorbed the value of hard work, enterprise, and responsibility. As a young man he drilled with the Cathesian Home Guard and learned discipline and fierce leadership skill. As an armored-infantry lieutenant, he led a doomed charge into the jaws of a much heavier enemy force, and learned the meaning of fear and courage as he tried to bring his men safe through the meat grinder. As a medical-discharge veteran, he taught himself to walk again, struggling as much with the burns and lacerations as with the inability to tolerate smells of sulfur or roasting meat. As a newly-recovered citizen in fragile health, he wondered what to do with the rest of his life and reinvented himself as an entrepreneur.

Some five years after his discharge, the fledgling Lovelock Enterprises had just started taking off. The market he tapped — trade in certain exotic materials, considered semi-sacred in most parts of his world — was untouched before, and opening it (while perfectly legal and upright) caused no small controversy. Nonetheless, its bounty and Adrian’s business acumen was quickly making him and his investors rich.

As Murphy would have it, that’s when things started going wrong. Cathes’ largest neighbor took on an isolationist policy, slicing a large chunk off the market. A once-fringe religious revival dead-set against Lovelock’s trade began very suddenly to turn mainstream. The upper house of the Cathesian Parliament introduced a bill that would ban the trade entirely, and the Queen herself lent it support. Then, to top it all off, Adrian Lovelock himself disappeared from the face of the planet.

All he remembers about his disappearance is opening the side door to his garage and seeing — something — behind it that shouldn't have been there. He stepped forward and suddenly fell, or flew, or was flung, a very long distance; after that it all goes pretty fuzzy. He wasn’t sure where he was expecting to find himself, but a library wasn’t exactly high on the list…