Here is background fluff on the character I was thinking of playing, who goes by the handle "Forty." elf / aspected summoner (thunderbird shaman) / 12 dice for pistols and unarmed combat, 11 dice for spirit stuff, 16 dice for intimidate.
First things first: Sample IC answers to “Why do they call you ‘Forty’ anyway?”
- I said “I don’t care if I get forty years, I’m glad those pigs burned.”
- According to the cops I threw a forty-ouncer of moonshine at one of their cars, and when the lightning hit it blew up. The court said that was truth, so it must be, right?
- I was so good at getting things to slide along that a chummer started calling me ‘WD-40,’ got shortened to Forty soon enough.
- Year I was born, chummer. Reason enough. (note: actually born in 2014)
- We all gotta be called something. Why do they call you Drek-head? And hey, guess what, I got forty more answers just like that.
- It’s what I scored on an IQ test. Guess I shouldn’t have cheated off your Momma’s sheet.
- I was part of a gang when I was young, called ourselves the forty thieves, after Ali Baba and all that. Gang broke up, but people still called me by the name.
- I found this old forty-four calibre pistol, what I used to shoot at the cops that took down my boyfriend. The ‘four’ got lost somewhere—lot of things get lost in prison.
- When I was young they wanted me to play basketball. Coach could never remember my name and yelled at me by my jersey number. Somehow it stuck.
- Last two digits of my juvie file number, I was in so much they got to remembering it.
Born when they still called her an ‘UGE baby’ instead of an elf, she grew up as wild and violent as the times. A psychologist said something about borderline personality disorder and possible schizophrenia, but when her mother got laid off in the crash there was no money for Forty to keep seeing that nosy old bat. But Forty did learn from that experience to stop talking about the colors around people’s heads and how the world talked to her sometimes.
She loved birds, storms, and defying authority, and she managed to combine them all one stormy night. She broke into a pet store to free the birds and other animals, then lit the place up. Cops cornered her in her boyfriend’s squat, boyfriend got shot trying to protect her, then lightning started roaming around the cops and things started blowing up. The cops had their explanation, but she knew that the storm had answered her call for help. Back then they weren't so familiar with magic to be looking for it from just another barrens rat.
She was given a life sentence, and thrown in an institution for violent meta-humans – mostly orcs and trolls driven half-mad by their goblinization. She didn’t have their muscle, but she wouldn’t back down, she was fast, and she quickly learned to be a nasty fighter -- although this ruined any chance at early parole. When she was allowed out in the yard she’d make ‘sacrifices to the air’, which didn’t do anything to reduce the number of fights she was in.
Eventually prison got less violent and so did she, gradually becoming less fey, and better able to use her “killer’s stare” to head off fights before they began. And she began to figure out to sometimes get the world to come and talk with her, for all that it didn’t like how prison felt. She certainly knew to keep that quiet, but sometimes the voices would help her get things done that would have been hard for anyone else to do.
Thanks to the Lawrence Act of 2065, her life sentence was capped at forty years, and she was finally released. Forty found Thunderbird remembered her, approved of who she had become, and was still willing to send help when she called. She moved in with her sister --once an idealistic graphic artist, now a BTL junkie -- and tried to stay out of trouble. But she wasn’t much good at avoiding trouble, being starving poor sucked, and she decided to seek out more remunerative forms of trouble. Fortunately she’d made some contacts over all those years in prison, who knew people who could use her skills.
