[@DruSM157][@Gowi]

[hider=CS APP][center][b][h1][color=2F4F4F]Malcolm Kincaid[/color][/h1][/b]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/QYgvbHh.jpg[/img]

[b][i][color=2F4F4F]“Boy, I’m giving this ‘pacifism’ thing a real, hard try, but you [b]are[/b] sorely testing my resolve.”[/color][/i][/b][/center]

[color=2F4F4F][b]NAME[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Malcolm Kincaid[/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]ALIAS[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Malevolent Mal Johnson, Kingmaker[/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]GENDER[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Male[/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]SKILLS[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][list][*][i][b][u]Point this end at the thing you want to die:[/u][/b] Mal’s lived the kind of life were a man gets himself very familiar with firearms, or he gets himself killed. Over the years he’s picked up a few fancy tricks, though it’s worth pointing out that he is far from a quickdraw artist, or sharpshooter supreme. His preference in violence has always been of the ‘up close and personal’ variety, and this shows in his less than stellar skills when it comes to handling a gun.[/i]
[*][i][b][u]Built to last, with the scars to prove it:[/u][/b] Simply put, there ain’t no way that Mal is ever being mistaken for anything other than a violent bruiser. He stands at a respectable 6’3”, with a breadth of shoulders that just can’t be supplied by reading books, hands the size of shovels, and boasting neck muscles that a prize-winning bull could be proud of. Moreover, it’s more than obvious to the casual observer that he’s weathered more than his fair of storms in the past. His nose is a broken mess, his face bears the kind of scarring one would expect to find on a butcher’s chopping block, and somewhere along the line his right ear has been almost completely removed, leaving little more than a nub of gristle in its place. It ain’t the kind of face that has an easy time making friends, but it is the type that declares to all who lay eyes upon it [i]‘don’t fuck with this guy’[/i], with remarkable aplomb.[/i]
[*][i][b][u]“Fuck Queensberry, you’re playing by my rules now.”:[/u][/b] Much of Mal’s late adolescence and early adulthood was spent in the underground fighting rings of New Rojas. Being strong, tough, fast and vicious, it didn’t take him long to claw his way to the top of the fighter’s food chain. After that he spent years as Robert Prince’s favourite muscle, bodyguard, enforcer and leg breaker, roles he took to with an apparent grim gusto. Over the years he’s proven himself to have a real talent for violence, one that, until only recently, he’s had no issues with displaying. When Mal fights, it ain’t pretty. But it sure is effective.[/i]
[*][i][b][u]Not as stupid as he looks:[/u][/b] You know that old dichotomy about being ‘street smart, not book smart’. Well Mal is most certainly the former rather than the latter. He doesn’t know his letters, would look at you blankly if you asked him to calculate seven times seven, and has no idea what gravity is beyond it being the thing that keeps him falling off into the sky, but the man doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to criminal scams or rackets, having been a’part of so many. Of special note is his ability to read people, and accurately identify their current emotions, and even their intentions, through facial and body cues. When you’ve spent the last ten years bodyguarding a fella who half a city want dead, you learn to tell when a stranger’s frown means he’s packing heat and means to offload a couple rounds into your boss’s chest, or if he’s just sulking cause he’d been caught cheating with the nanny by his missus that morning. It ain’t an exact art, and he’s far from infallible in his estimations, but he’s been right more often than he’s been wrong. [/i][/list][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]PERSONALITY[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Based on his ill-reputation and brutish appearance, many would figure Malcolm Kincaid to be little more than that in personality: a brute. In some ways that is a very fair and accurate assumption. In others, it is most unkind. For example, it is true that Mal enjoys a good fight. However, it is not the violence itself that he enjoys, but rather the occasion to test himself against another able-bodied opponent, the chance to strive for victory, the prospect of displaying his physical superiority, not just to his foe but to himself. He feels this is a far more valorous reason to enjoy fighting than simply for a love of carnage, but he has never corrected those who view him as bloodhungry, for no other reason than those misconceptions fed into his already impressively dark reputation. Simply put, folk’s initial impressions about Mal are oftentimes correct, but usually for all the wrong reasons, and he merely chose to let them continue misbelieving.

Also, contrary to popular opinion, he does, in fact, have a heart. He does feel for the innocent families he has destroyed, or the poor and needy that he has put the squeeze on to wring out those last few coins they owed Robert Prince, the people he’s hurt and the crimes he’s committed. It’s just that his upbringing had taught him that the strong do what they must to remain strong, and the weak suffer what they have to, and him taking pity on all those who cry [i]‘please not me’[/i] ain’t gonna change nothing for no one. Nothing in life is easy, so the quicker you harden yourself to it, the better.

In keeping with this, his moral compass is more than a little skewed. The complete ins and outs of Mal’s own code is mostly a mystery, even to him, subject to the whims of his own moods and needs at the time, though there are two special constants: A man never harms a child, and nor does he force himself upon a woman. Those where the two lessons that Violet Kincaid instilled into him, and those are the two lines he said he would never cross. Everything else, well that’s fair game. If a man’s strong enough to do a thing, well then he can do it, though only if another man ain’t strong enough to stop him.

… Or at least those are the justifications that he has been using for so long. Now, since setting out on a path to betterment, he ain’t so sure that those reasons hold that much water anymore. It might just be age – he’s only 36, but damn if he doesn’t feel older – but that conscience seems like it’s getting heavier and heavier every damned day.  
[/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]HISTORY[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Who were Malcolm Kincaid’s parents? Well, truth is he doesn’t rightly know. They were both long gone before he was even able to walk. He ended up being raised by his grandmother, a tough old bitch named Violet Kincaid. Violet had claimed on numerous occasions to have lived through the cataclysm that had destroyed the Old World, though whether that was true or not, Mal wasn’t sure. What he did know was that Violet was prone to telling some damn unbelievable stories about the time before, about a world that had been infected with rot and sickness, populated by weak men and degenerates, which deserved nothing better than to be burned clean. Violet was of a mind that this new world was better, where the strong could lay claim to whatever they could hold onto, and the meek made themselves content with that which they deserved: nothing. She imparted these beliefs onto young Malcolm, and encouraged him to become the kind of man who wouldn’t inherit a place in this new land, but would actively carve himself off a piece.

In Violet’s defence, Mal may have taken her lessons about ‘strength’ a touch too literal, and decided what made that mark of a great man was how girth his arms were, how hard his fists, how much a beating he could take and keep getting up to hand one back. Or maybe that was exactly what the old boot had meant. By the time Mal was old enough to think to ask for clarification, she had already passed, victim to old age. Another relic of the Old Times, lost to history some said. Though not many. She didn’t have many friends, and those she did have weren’t the types to waste time on poetry. It didn’t matter anyway, Malcolm wasn’t concerned with what he had lost. He was more interested in what he could gain. With the eagerness of a twelve-year-old who figured he had figured out the secret to success, he left Violet’s small steading in the Jefferson farmlands to make his way to New Rojas, there were he would make his fortune.

It didn’t take him long to get involved with the fighting rings the city was infamous for, falling in with fight promoter and trainer Joseph ‘Big Murph’ Murphy, who took one look at the strapping farm lad and decided that there was more than a touch of untapped potential there. For the next four years Mal was trained in the art of pugilism, before Big Murph finally decided that the young man was ready for a taste of the action. Mal got hammered something awful in his first proper fight, though earned respect with the meagre crowds for his willingness to take a punch if it meant he got to hand some hurt of his own back out, earning himself the byname [i]‘Malevolent Mal’[/i] for the mile-wide mean streak that he seemed to have. 

That first fight was just the beginning though, igniting in Mal a passion to show everyone just how tough he could be. In his mind if the secret to success in life was being strong, then surely it could only swing in your favour if everyone knew you were the strongest one going. He took every match he could, sometimes fighting three nights a week, making a Big Murph a pretty penny while also catching the eyes of several notable city gang bosses. The fighting circuit had long been a talent pool for the local criminal elements to recruit their muscle, and so by the time Mal became the underground fist-fighting champion of New Rojas at age twenty-three, he was a damn hot commodity. Of all the offers of employment that came his way, it was the one from up and coming gang boss Robert Prince which caught his attention.

Prince, ostensibly a young landowner and philanthropist from a moderately wealthy family, was, and still is, a hugely ambitious loan shark and property tycoon who had concluded that a man could make more money in a month from illegal means than he could in a year from legal ones. His raw cunning, business acumen, and cut throat ruthlessness had allowed him to carve quite the criminal empire in New Rojas, though his rapid ascent had attracted numerous powerful rivals. Knowing that he couldn’t continue to grow without some muscle to back up his brains, he reached out to Mal. The young Kincaid was entranced with the charismatic Prince, drawn to his similar philosophy that ‘the strong do as they must, the weak suffer what they have to’. More than that, he was attracted by the opportunity to hitch his wagon to Prince’s when he was beset on all sides by enemies and obstacles, by the potential respect and glory that would be his when he had helped Robert conquer them all.

Together the two young men fought to secure their place in the criminal society of New Rojas, Mal quickly becoming Robert’s iron fist, earning himself a hard-won reputation for savagery and brutality against all those who would cross his boss and friend. Ironically his stature is in some ways greater than Roberts, as Prince spent many thousands of dollars in PR campaigns to keep up his façade as a well-meaning man of the people, only interested in the betterment of New Rojas. Mal seemed so integral to Robert’s rise in power that it became a common joke that he was the [i]‘Kingmaker’[/i] who would give Prince the throne of New Rojas. Not a very funny joke, right enough, but a joke nonetheless.

Things seemed good for a long time, until Robert ordered Mal to kill a woman, a young singer named Brenda Green that Prince had been sleeping with behind his wife’s back. While Mal had some misgivings about killing a woman, he complied, reasoning that the Green’s choices had led to this, not his. However after the deed was done Mal discovered that Brenda had been pregnant with Prince’s child, and that was why Robert had him kill her, as if it was discovered that he had fathered a bastard out of wedlock it could destroy his reputation. Mal was infuriated. He didn’t kill children, that was one of his only two rules, and Prince knew that. He stormed towards his old friend’s house, intent on having a reckoning with him. However upon arriving he was attacked by Prince and several of his other men, and in the resulting shoot out Mal accidentally killed Prince’s wife. In the confusion he fled, knowing that even he would have little chance standing against his former-friend in his own city, not with all the many and influence at Prince’s fingertips.

After some soul searching, and a long month sequestered in a rural church, Mal has decided that a life of violence has brought him nothing but pain and misery, and perhaps the path of pacifism may bring him something of substance. He’s not sure he believes that really, but he’ll try anything once, and it’s not as if he has much else to lose. With nowhere else to go, he has trekked a long way to Blackfinger hoping to make himself a new start. 

Why Blackfinger? Well he’s hoping it’s far enough away from New Rojas that no one recognises him for that two-thousand-dollar bounty that the city has on his head for the murders of Brenda Green, Michelle Prince, and near countless other. If not? [/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]INVENTORY[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][list][*][i][b][u]Triple barrelled shotgun:[/u][/b] As mentioned above, Mal ain’t no legendary gunslinger. He prefers to get in close and hurt the other guy bad before they can do the same to him. The shotgun suits that preference down to the ground, and the wide spread goes some way to making up for his deficits in the ‘aiming’ department too. Win-win.[/i]
[*][i][b][u].45 long barrelled single action colt:[/u][/b] Even a poor gunman needs to have some kinda iron hanging off his hip, even if it’s just to flash and rattle when he’s trying to look tough.[/i]
[*][i][b][u]Hatchet:[/u][/b] A mean little hatchet with a wicked sharp blade. Mal far prefers this little beauty to any paltry knife. To his mind it’s far more versatile – for both legal and illegal needs – and almost as easy to conceal. Besides, he’s found that nothing says [i]‘you been talking when you shoulda been listening’[/i] quite like a hatchet to the face.[/i]
[*][i][b][u]Cigar pouch with three cigars:[/u][/b] When a hounds done good you give it a treat, right? Robert Prince used to give Mal all kinds of treats. Money, drink, women. All that’s gone now. All except these three last smokes. Mal tells himself he’s saving them for a special occasion, as they’re just too good to be wasting, and he’s unlike to ever get his mitts on their calibre again. Just what that special occasion is, well he doesn’t rightly know. He reckons he’ll recognise it when he sees it.[/i][/list][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]REASON FOR VISITING[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][i]Mal ain’t so much visiting as he is looking for a place to put down roots, a special somewhere where he can make a real try at being that [i]‘better man’[/i] that the priest told him he could become. Blackfinger seems as good a place as any, and is hopefully far enough away from New Rojas for him to be safe from the long reach of Robert Prince.[/i][/color][/indent]

[color=2F4F4F][b]RELATIONS[/b][/color]
[hr][hr][indent][color=gray][hider=Horse]Mal’s mule. He calls her horse. It’s a complicated relationship they have.[/hider]

[i]Everyone else Mal ever knew he left behind in New Rojas. He’s hoping they’ll stay there.[/i][/color][/indent] 
[/hider]

Sorry if the history seems a little rushed. Closed the CS on Sunday night and must not have saved it, so I had to do it all from scratch again, and as the history is always my least favorite part of any CS, it suffered the most. Still, we got there in the end. If anything needs changing/clarification, please let me know.