Post by DON BRENNAN on Oct 5, 2010 2:58:52 GMT -5
Don Brennan
IN-CHARACTER
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FULL NAME: Don Brennan
NICKNAMES: N/A
DATE OF BIRTH: 21/3/1954
AGE: 56
SPECIES: Human
ABILITIES: None, although plants do tend to die from being in the same room as he is, and lights appear to dim when he's nearby.
FANDOM: "The Salvation War"
PERSONALITY:
Don is, perhaps, best characterised by his apparent lack of personality. As anyone who has ever spent any time with Don will testify, he has very little in the way of emotions. So far no one outside of work, and even then very few, people have ever heard him speak in anything bar a flat monotone, even when he's telling jokes. To just about everyone, Don has no personality.
In truth, though, Don does have a personality, it's just that he hides it under layers of logic. Part of this is because he was never very good at relating to people in the first place, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that his job for over 25 years was to target nuclear weapons so as to inflict the maximum damage on the enemy. As some of these plans involved end game scenarios with the nuclear weapons being used to try and wipe out the civilian populations of the enemy, this emotional detachment was vital to his job.
Despite the logic and emotional detachment, Don is still human. As previously hinted, he does have a sense of humour, albeit a very dry one, he enjoys de-constructing scenarios in order to find out what went right or wrong, and he can understand human emotions, even relate to them. He experiences fear, angry, jealousy, etc, just like the rest of us, however he has learned how to suppress these so that he can help others make the difficult choices in life. There are times, though, when these emotions do come through, it's just that it takes a nuclear explosion and the realisation that millions might have to die before the war ends for Don to show anything.
HISTORY:
Don was born into a typical American family. His father worked in an office and his mother was a stay at home mum. They weren't rolling in money but, despite having three children to support, the family wasn't exactly poor either.
Growing up, Don never quite seemed to be able to connect with people very well. It wasn't that he didn't want to, it was just that a lot of what people did didn't make much sense to him. He never worked out why people lie over simple things or why others might get angry at those things. He was, his parents agreed, old before his time. As a result of this, Don did quite well at his studies. He was never quite at the top of his class, but he was only a few spots below.
Over time, he developed an interest in war. Well, it wasn't so much about war as how war was waged. It wasn't the fighting and the adrenaline that he was interested, it was the tactics and strategies that he was interested in. Still, there was more to it than that. Don grew up in an age where the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present, and the sheer power of the weapon was incomprehensible. So, naturally, Don decided to comprehend it.
He worked hard at school and then went to Harvard to study nuclear science. He wasn't the only one attending the course who was interested in nuclear bombs, but he was one of the very few who was more interested in the strategies involved in using them than in how they worked or how they were made. That information was just a means to an end.
Following graduation, Don applied to one of the few civilian companies who consulted with the military on "targeteering", or the art of knowing where to send nukes and how many/how powerful they should be in order to neutralise the enemy's ability to fight back. This is the job that he has held for over 25, probably closer to 35, years. Companies have lost their tenders and new ones have been hired but, thanks to the small number of people with his expertise, Don has always remained.
Then came "The Message", in which God told all of humanity that no more humans would get into heaven and that they were all to lay down and die. While a good many people did, the majority did not and so Satan declared war on humanity in order to gain their "souls". Humanity fought back and, as they breached Hell, Don was presented with some opportunities that he had never been given before, such as working out a plan to kill Satan, with both nuclear and non-nuclear options to be presented. Fortunately for the demons, the non-nuclear plan was used.
Later, Don calculated the best time and place to hit the Angelic army with a thermonuclear device. This was also one of the few times that he ever showed emotions in public, giving General Petraeus a sad smile as he told him that, if the nuke had been used on the Eternal City as opposed to the army they would be looking at four times the casualties.
Shortly after the surrender of Heaven, Don was transported Terra.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:
Don examined the photographs for the tenth time. They had been taken by a team sent to check the levels of radiation at ground level, and the story they told would be horrifying to most people. To Don, a professional Targeteer, they were fascinating. He had seen the results of previous nuclear initiations but there was something different about seeing the effects on real, live targets. More importantly, the targets weren't human.
At the absolute centre of the blast was a pool of cobalt blue water, although it had darkened somewhat thanks to the "black rain", a combination of carbon and dust trapped in water droplets, which had diluted it partially. Surrounding this pool of water was 1.6 miles of cracked, green glass. Once that glass had been soil, plants and living creatures. The heat from the initiation had melted and fused them all together.
Around the plain of glass was blackened Earth. Close to the glass there was not much to see, but further out you could see carbonised wood, flaming trees and, at first glance, what appeared to be logs. Horrifically, those logs were second-lifers, or else angels, who were encased in the burnt remnants of their skin. And many were still alive. The unnatural healing powers that both species possessed were keeping them alive until radiation poisoning killed them.
Still other pictures showed what radiation sickness did to angels and second lifers. While the second-lifers were loosing hair at an alarming rate, but the angels were sprouting tumours all over their bodies, to the point where they were completely unrecognisable.
Turning to look at the remnant of the mushroom cloud, Don tried to imagine what it would have been like if they had been forced to use another device, this time on the city. The blast and fallout probably wouldn't have affected more than a single one of the blocks within the massive city, but that would have equated to over a million dead and, given these pictures, it was likely that public opinion would soon turn and angels would go from worse than demons to being pitied, and questions would be raised about the Human Expeditionary Army's use of force.
Don didn't trust Michael, or any of his co-conspirators for that matter. He couldn't put his finger on why, but he just didn't trust Michael. Still, Michael had certainly prevented a lot of deaths, and it was up to the politicians to decide what to do with him. Politics wasn't something that Don had much interest, or say, in, so he shut that out of his mind and began to consider the implications that the angels' sensitivity to radiation.
Still, thinking, he stood and found himself standing in the middle of a forest.
The first thing that Don did was make a hurried, but economical search for a portal. Finding none, he stayed where he was, considering the problem. This wasn't heaven, portals didn't work between one location and another within a plane, and the place was too pleasant for Hell, which meant that he was either on Earth or another of the bubble worlds. That didn't really concern him, since kitten or one of the other sensitives would be able to make contact with him.
No, what struck Don most was that whoever had snatched was not only capable of opening portals without a nephilim or Universe 2 native, but that they did not have to be present at the site of the portal and could snatch someone and close the portal so quickly that it was as though it never existed. Doubtless he was going to be debriefed for days once he was extracted.
But that wasn't what he should be thinking about right now. Whoever had taken him was likely to be nearby and would be coming to collect him soon. He needed to hide and escape.
And so, just ten seconds after arriving in Terra, Don Brennan found himself putting everything he'd learnt from conversations with military personnel into use.OUT-OF-CHARACTER
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NAME/ALIAS: Call me Don, let's just keep things simple.
AGE: 18
ROLEPLAY EXPERIENCE: No idea. Four, maybe five years. My memory is a little dodgy.
CONTACT: PM
FUN FACT! I can barely remember what I had for breakfast most days.
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