Name: Harry Baker
Nickname: Crime Wizard, Wizard, The Wizard, various Wizard-related epithets
Age: 40
Gender: M
Ethnicity: British Thug
Physical Description:Harry Baker is a burly, hard-nosed bruiser, the sort of glowering, red-knuckled ex-skinhead you expect to see tearing up soccer stadiums or glassing people in the pub. What hair he now has is prematurely grey and his skin is covered in tattoos -- once purely the kind of lowbrow gangland trash you'd expect from a hooligan of his caliber, now outnumbered by random occult symbols copied from alchemical texts, the Key of Solomon or some random Thelemite coloring book.
In his new career, he wears a blue smoking jacket sewn with glow-in-the-dark moons and stars, an
actual wizard hat, a pair of 1980s wraparound shades, and a patterned, stand-in thug bandana somewhat pointlessly disguising his features. He also sports a number of heavy rings set with various runes and symbolically significant stones. While their magic powers are up for dispute, the rings are heavy enough to double as bone-cracking knuckledusters, and when it comes to conflict, Baker is never far from his roots.
Skillset:- Occult knowledge: Okay, well, yeah, this one's kind of useless. But if you need the stars consulted or a curse lifted, he'll do it for a cig and a beer.
- Crime Wizard: while Baker is never safe from the snickering cries of "Yer a wizard, 'arry!" he is still a career lawbreaker with a savage criminal mind, and has pulled off a string of successful hits, robberies and getaways even after his transformation into a laughing stock.
- Battlemage: A veteran of armed, unarmed, military and low-down dirty combat, Baker can fuck up just about anyone or anything -- Neon or no Neon.
History:Let's get this out of the way: Harry Baker was
always a piece of shit. His father was a working-class arsehole and his mother was a forgettable, chain-smoking hag. There's no secret origin or 'sympathetic villain' angle. He was bigger, stronger and meaner than everyone around him and he learned life's lessons accordingly. The. End.
He's ex-British military, for all that he didn't stay in the forces long, and he was a piece of shit there, too. When he was deployed to some of the worst fighting in the Middle East and most of his platoon came back with PTSD, Baker came back with illegal souvineers and a couple of new friends. Friends with a special club they thought Harry would be a good fit for. And they were right. Before long, Baker had moved house and become an upstanding and valued member of the Hringhorn Brotherhood, your everyday, run of the mill right-wing nationalist group -- a polite name for a legitimized gang of gay-hating, ultra-racist neo-nazi extremists. Like everyone with a street-level agenda, the Brotherhood was determined to crack the Neon sequence and get hold of a stable supply of every psychopath's favorate new wonder drug. Baker wanted first in on that little number, and like a true fucking idiot, he tested every remotely promising batch on himself.
The first time round, it didn't work. It didn't work the second or third times, either. It didn't work so many times that Baker's brain chemistry pickled like an egg and he is now bat-fucking insane.
it was after his last trip to Yinfu privatized correctional facility for robbery and aggravated assault that Baker finally saw the light. You know the story: Some people get Jesus. Some turn to Allah. But Baker? Baker got
magic. Instead of religious pamphlets, some joker smuggled in a bunch of Crowley, the Golden Bough and that joke paperback copy of the Necronomicon, and Baker devoured it all, experiencing one lunatic epiphany after another.
Harry Baker is now a magician. He has cast aside his former goals and repudiated his old allegiences, much to the anger and embarrassment of his former Hringhorn comrades-in-arms, who want to see him erased from the public eye for good. Meanwhile, the man himself only gets bigger and louder, pulling off daring raids while releasing manifestos, videos and youtube broadcasts that resemble terrorist statements more than enlightened sermons of arcane knowledge. He has a gang of his own, if you can call it that: a trio of violent lunatic bikers wearing black leather and skull-painted motorcycle helmets that he calls -- and I swear to god, I couldn't make this up -- the
Darkwraith Covenant.Psychological Profile:As the saying goes:
"Plus ça change." Despite his dimestore apotheosis, Baker remains a basic, violent, amoral thug, now with a newly minted and increasingly undeserved superiority complex topping it off. He wants to advance his goals, but nobody's quite sure what those actually are. The one positive aspect to this landslide of human failure is that Baker is no longer racist or excessively homophobic, instead looking down on the unenlightened, non-magic practitioners, and people with weak auras. "Looks like a fuckin' dishrag, mate." That sort of thing.
Powers: Chaos Magick -- Baker's experiments with Neon have left him... kind of a little fucked up. His genetic code looks like the back of a cereal box. You could make turpentine out of his blood plasma.
The fact is, when Baker takes Neon,
real Neon, nobody knows what it's going to do to him. Nobody. Not even Baker himself. It's
always different. That makes him unpredictable, and it makes him dangerous. If he juices up, stand the fuck back.
Especially if it looks like it isn't working.
(OOC note: In keeping with the spirit of CHAOS MAGICK and to avoid any possibility of powergaming, the effects of a Neon hit on Baker will be determined by Howler or a random delegate of his choosing. Embrace the wheel.)