[i]Still[/i] a work in progress I'm afraid. Rest assured however that I'm definitely still interested and invested, I'm just... trying to take sleep whenever I can find it. Which isn't terribly often. Sorry again folks.

[hider= Work In Progress]
[hr]
[center][h1]Samuel [color=lightblue][b]'Sharp'[/b][/color] Swinston[/h1][/center]
[hr]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/eZWOGZV.jpg[/img][/center]
[hr]
[center][h3]"Stopping power is a myth until we start talking about landmines. Speaking of which, [color=lightblue]don't touch my stuff."[/color][/h3][/center]
[hr]

[indent][color=lightblue]Known Aliases:[/color] 'Sammy'; 'Sharp'
[color=lightblue]Age:[/color] 38 Years
[color=lightblue]Gender:[/color] Male
[color=lightblue]Sexual Orientation:[/color] Heterosexual
[color=lightblue]Ethnicity:[/color] White British[/indent]

[hr]

[indent][color=lightblue]Appearance Details:[/color] The former staff sergeant sports a tall and wiry athletic build, standing at about 6"0, bound with deceptively dense muscle and sinew. His hair is dense, thick, and untidy, dotted with streaks of grey and white. His eyes seem to dart constantly between any company he keeps, the door of the room they're in, and his own gun.

[color=lightblue]Tattoos, Piercings, Scars, Other:[/color] The left side of his face and head is peppered with streaks and dots of scar tissue from a fragmentation grenade explosion at medium range some years ago. His left arm bears a MARCO Security Solutions division tattoo, complete with regiment name, rank and serial number, and medical identifier - to be specific, the original insignia is a kite shield of blue and white, bearing a black sword crossed with a black hammer in front of it, all upon a field of cross-hatching. It used to glow thanks to implanted NanoLEDs, but no longer, as the entire design has been crossed out with a pair of scars inflicted with a kitchen knife. The term 'EOD' is still identifiable, however. His right arm is also tattooed with a full sleeve of cultural design, utterly covered with the intricate interlocking branches of an oak tree in an old celtic design. In minute text between some of the branches text in Welsh can be seen. Even Sharp doesn't know what it says. The area around his ID tag has been mutilated during several tampering attempts, and is now a mangled mess of purplish scar tissue that he is barely able to hide with makeup during his brief trips into Eden.

[color=lightblue]Brand/ID Tattoo Placement[/color]: Left wrist, integrated with the regimental sleeve tattoo of the MARCO Marines. Notably, it is surrounded by scar tissue left over from tampering.

[color=lightblue]Assets and Bank Account:[/color] Disseminated throughout a number of small private accounts with various different smaller banks, a grand total of 3000$ worth of currency can be found. A further $3K is stored in secure, intricately and paranoiacally trapped lockboxes, buried (or sunk into water) in a variety of discreet locations in Korven. In some of these lockboxes additional assets such as fake IDs or weapons can be found, but that's hardly reliable. For a lot of this, Sharp wasn't sober - either hopped up on combat stims, or in the depths of the paranoia. There may honestly even be boxes he doesn't remember and didn't record, containing money that is entirely lost to him.[/indent]

[hr]

[indent][color=lightblue]Gang Affiliation:[/color] Sharp takes exceptional care to avoid antagonising either of the gangs, or being seen as favouring one or the other, at all. For him, the Kings are too overtly violent and unpredictable - even if this, in its own way, made them all [i]too[/i] predictable - to be around. Their constant displays of bravado, their concept of face and honour and standing, it makes them prone to acting irrationally and finding people to blame. People like Sharp. The Pure are almost - but only almost - worse; their religious fanaticism and their obsession with subtlety make them equally dangerous and potentially much harder to plan for, and their involvement in the trade of humans, in part or in whole, is more than even Sharp will tolerate.

[color=lightblue]Occupation:[/color] Former MARCO Security Solutions explosive ordinance disposal specialist - informally, the MARCO Marines - and currently a private detective of sorts operating in both Korven and Eden (the latter more limitedly) out of a ramshackle office in the inner part of the Korven sanction. Nobody ever visits this office, of course, as it is wired to all fuck with explosives. After all, they're probably still looking for him, there's no way they don't know he survived.

[color=lightblue]Sanction:[/color] Permanent residence(s) in Korven, limited operations in Eden, under a false name and identification.

[color=lightblue]Favorite Season:[/color] Early autumn. The growing smell of decay and the increased rainfall, paired with decreased temperature leading to reduced diffusion of particulate matter through the air as a result, means that tracking via olfactory and thermal detection is more difficult. If you can't be tracked, you can't be found, killed, dismembered, and disposed of.[/indent]

[hr]

[center][h3][color=lightgreen] - Intelligent - Perceptive - Insightful -[/color]||[color=red]- Distrustful - Paranoid - Violent - [/color][/h3][/center]

The former EOD Staff Sergeant Samuel Swinston is a pale shadow of his former self, half consumed by paranoia and fear, the remaining half kept from decay and destruction by nothing more than the breadth of a hair and the abuse of copious chemical stimulants; now known primarily as Sharp for the quickness of his mind and the nature of afflicted existence, stripped down to a ragged edge from the person he used to be. Even his bed is practically wrapped in tripwires - a holdover from the days where a smartly placed claymore was all that came between his life and a knife at night. In spite of all this, however, Samuel is still a genuinely bright and intelligent man, educated too. He thinks quickly and sees more than he lets on, drawing conclusions and working with them like a flash of lightning, sifting lies from truth and connecting the dots of the plot behind the plot. Apart from that, there is only the rare turn of compassion or generosity to show you that Samuel Swinston still exists as anything other than a legal name. Sharp is his name now. 

On a psychological level, Sharp suffers intensely from survivor's guilt and PTSD.

[color=lightblue]Likes and Dislikes:[/color]
[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Likes:[/color]
[list][*] Safety
[*] Caffeine
[*] Nicotine - but never through cigarettes or flavoured vapes, they smell too much, it lets people know you're there.
[*] Adderall, ritalin, et al.
[*] The rain, and the quiet. Thunderstorms too, ironically, but only when the thunder is more like a distant rumble. It's like white noise, it helps him take his mind off of... well, everything. It just keeps things under wraps.
[*] Tea
[/list][/list]

[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Dislikes:[/color]
[list]
[*] THE ENEMY
[*] MARCO corporation and their various lackeys. They have eyes, they have eyes and they're always watching, just waiting for you to slip up. You slip up and then suddenly you're covered in your best friend's blood, ears ringing and your face stinging. Some of them - though only a few of them - might even remember what his face looks like. He still has nightmares every night, every single night.
[*] The taste of watermelon. He's only actually had it once, but it wasn't sweet enough for him.
[*] Overbrewed tea, or tea with too much milk. Or milk. It isn't really milk.
[*] Being lied to.
[/list][/list]

[color=lightblue]Hobbies and Interests: [/color]
[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Electronics and electrical engineering[/color]
[list] 
[*] While it isn't much more than a hobby in passing at this point, Sharp found his skill with booby traps plateauing and started to pick up hobbyists manuals on the electrician's trade. They were surprisingly hard to find, as not many people want to go through an apprenticeship with no job at the end of it, but he has his contacts and he got his hands on them eventually. Now he's gone through his entire home with a fine toothed comb, looking for bugs. He found one once and rewired the receiver to pick up a pirate radio station broadcasting nothing but erotica from the 1980s. It was very amusing, and mostly by accident.
[/list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Demolitions and explosives[/color]
[list]
[*] Another thing that Sharp finds oddly satisfying is the careful mixing of chemicals to produce exceptional booms. This he figured out mostly from his secondary education in Eden. It simply wasn't worth the risk of asking about, even in the shady environment of the Korven underworld. What he enjoys most is actually the weighing of individual ingredients and components more than the mixing or the results - nice, full, round numbers.
[/list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Journal writing[/color]
[list]
[*] It's really more like reconnaissance notes, but Sharp keeps a journal. It's written in code, which itself is coded twice further, but it genuinely contains his deepest thoughts and innermost feelings. This is where those fleeting reflections of the original Samuel Swinston most frequently show themselves, even if most of it is still detailed notes on the passers-by of his flat and office.
[/list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Instant meals, takeaway food, and coffee left two minutes too long to be adequately hot or fresh[/color]
[list]
[*] It's weird, you know. You stay on stakeout for too long, you follow marks too far, and you leave your home behind entirely... and eventually you simply forget what food you cook yourself tastes like. Or what food cooked [i]for[/i] you by family tastes like. Eventually you become a sort of connoisseur of mediocrity and consumerism, learning the intricate differences between one questionable kebab and another, the delicacies of one brand of instant 'coffee' and another, the safer places to eat and the more dangerous food poisoning-y ones. It's a sad twist of reality, because when he lived in Eden good food and real cooking was actually his hobby there too - only he was the one doing the cooking, with real, hydroponically grown ingredients. Now he finds that anything he used to love turns his stomach and makes him upset. It's been years since he had tomato soup. It was his favourite food.
[/list]
[/list]

[color=lightblue]Small Biography:[/color] Samuel Swinston was born in the urban core of Baruel, in the heart of Eden, to a loving family as their second child of four. For Eden they were not well off, living a comfortable but stressed and cramped life in a home slightly too small for all of them, but well appointed and supplied nonetheless. Sam did not want for nothing, but was satisfied with what he had and lived a happy life. Despite the stereotypes of sibling relationships he also got along well with his brother and two sisters, developing close bonds with them and learning to easily enjoy their company in the downtime they had - and when the time came, he would follow his older brother's example and step into the MARCO Security corps as a tactical strike officer. Where the beat cops of MARCO are more like calmer SWAT, and the SWAT of MARCO are like poorly trained commandos, the TSO make up for it; they're given advanced and varied training in both sides of their job, police work and active combat, they're equipped with some of the best MARCO has to offer... and most importantly, they're all ready and willing to give their lives for the corporation, some of them even excited at the prospect. Their indoctrination is all but absolute, being groomed for the Tactical Strike Office since before their standard education certificate exams, being taught that MARCO is the last bastion of Order, Peace, and Purpose in the postmodern world after that, even being told that to die in service is an end to your life above all others, the surest way to guarantee your place in the halls of fame and the minds of the people. Sam took to the indoctrination for sure - but he was nothing compared to his brother. Stephen Swinston was a radical young man his entire life and everybody knew he would go far one way or far the other - a radical subversive, or a radical supporter - and it just so happened that he went in what everyone thought was the 'right' way. In his spare time his favourite topic of conversation was the duty they had to MARCO, the gifts MARCO had given them, and what they would do to the people threatening MARCO.

Immediately after that, his next favourite topic of conversation was craft beer, and girls. His brother always had the nicest smile. The squad had taken bets, they all reckoned he would settle down and get married first out of all of them.

Sam was put under his brother's command when he graduated from the MARCO Security Protocol academy, and served there first as a trooper and then as his brother's First Officer for a total of 7 years. It was a long and distinguished career that saw their squad go from reactive work to proactive work very quickly. Eventually they were selected to undertake support operations for the Clandestine Operations Office - which is to say, spy work - but the first blow came before even that.

There was an armed robbery ongoing in the outskirts of Eden, a few blocks in from the boundary keeping Korven out. Six suspects, four armed with long bludgeoning weapons, one armed with a machete, and the leader armed with what seemed to be a homemade shotgun from intelligenec reports at the time. The job they were trying to pull - snag some valuables from a luxury vendor and pull back into Korven before anyone showed up - had gone wrong before the police were even called, when one of the store workers had tried to pull a taser on their assailants and had her hand cut off for her trouble. Intelligence also suggested that these men were members of the Kings, which in conjunction with the fact that a civilian had already been maimed, and that some mid-level manager had a personal interest in the plae, meant that SWAT wouldn't cut it and the TSO were being deployed. Their squad was made of ten men, four going in with riot shields through the front door, two coming in from the roof, and the remaining four split between the side entrances.

Sam had been expected crazed killers, torturing their hostages, painting themselves with blood, killing indiscriminately and too drugged up to care about anything but hurting people... and instead, when he came in through the roof, he found two of them weeping and holding eachother, paralysed by fear. They were brother and sister, it would later turn out, and they weren't members of the Kings [i]or[/i] the Pure. The sister had been the one to overreact when her brother was tazed, and she had swung without thinking - she hadn't even really taken the hand off, that had been another misreport (accidental or otherwise) by the scouts. They'd just panicked. They were just people, they were only doing this because they were starving. All of this didn't occur to Sam until later, however, and they killed them both in cold blood.

The fight lasted less than a minute after entry. The only serious resistance came from the guy with the shotgun, which turned out to be a prop without ammo that he just tried to use as a club. All six of their broken and perforated bodies were dragged into the street and laid out like meat, and that's when Sam started thinking, at long last finally thinking. These people had at their oldest been no more than 20, their youngest no more than 15, and his brothers in arms had slaughtered them - [i] he had slaughtered them, like they just didn't matter. [/i]

He tried to shower it away and he couldn't. Scrubbing couldn't get the dirt out. Drinking did.

In a weird subversion of what you would expect a rational man to do when confronted with the moral darkness of his life, he threw himself deeper into his work and clung onto his brother's strength even harder. He woke up every morning with their faces - broken and fractured and pulped as they were, stained with tears and blood - fresh in his memory, clearer than anything else he had ever seen, and then he went to work and trained harder than any man had ever told him he could. He went from a fine point to a razor's edge, with a quick trigger finger and a mind like cut glass - Sharp, and Clear. As his team matured and passed the trial by fire customary for their kind, they began to specialise as individuals too - Stephen, his brother, took advanced training in negotiation and leadership, the Koslov twins took marksmanship and sniper school classes, Brigitte decided she really liked the riot shield and started practicing at what they called 'Dynamic Battlefield Alteration'.

Sharp, as he'd started getting called, was getting knee deep in demolitions and bomb disposal. His superiors reckoned he had the nerve for it and in the beginning they were completely correct.

But he never forgot the Outskirts Six, and it kept happening, not just to people from Korven. He grew hard and cold, the easy charisma and intuitive, empathic personality being washed out of him like colour from a painting. His mind became calculating and flint - but through it all, regret and fear began growing.

With the regret and the fear, there finally came the idea - what if I tell my brother? I have to tell my brother. He needs to see, he would want me to make him see what we're doing. He's a good man, he deserves to be free of this, if I feel like I do then how must he be feeling? I can't let him be alone in this, we have to get out. It's our duty now to abandon our cause, that's all the duty we have. We have to get out.

Before they could get out though, they were pulled deeper in.

The Spy work they did mostly consisted of armed support and heavy hitting for a group of intelligence operatives on the barest outskirts of Korven, in the shittest and darkest corners of the un-city, doing some real shady shit for some shadier people. Their official area of operations was normally limited to Eden when they were functioning as a police unit, which meant that they were acting illegally as cops, or above the law as something else. Sharp, not being stupid, was not under the illusion that the police had [i]ever[/i] been under the power of the regular law, and similarly was not constrained by the belief that they were anything more than disposable, deniable assets at this point. His training as an explosives officer was instrumental to the operations they were undertaking - namely, demolishing a slum block suspected to house a drug lab exporting into Eden as part of the token efforts by the police to control the drugs crisis, burying everyone inside it with the building. This was the kind of thing that would be attributed to the lab itself suffering a catastrophic mixing failure, or something like that, and it was part of a larger series of sting-and-boom operations in the same few year span, but while undercover in Korven he kept his eyes open and started seeing what the people there would do if they realised what was going on. They would do the same thing plenty of the folks in Eden would do in the same situation.

They'd tear MARCO apart, staff included.

MARCO had to know this. They were idiots sometimes, but they knew their shit - after all, even if they somehow lacked a particular expertise they could just hire it in. This then led Sharp to believe that in the name of information quarantine, his own squad would be on the chopping block - or under the burning rubble, as it might be - as soon as the op was over. In a stroke of mixed luck, the squad believed him when he broke down and told them - and in a stroke of undeniably poor luck this then led the rest of them to the natural conclusion of confronting their Intelligence Operative handlers.

This didn't go well.

[hr]
[hider= Flashback to the Burn]
"You must think we're really stupid if you think we haven't seen what happens next, [color=lightblue]spy boy[/color]." Stephen growled, hand reflexively bound to the matte polymer of his sidearm, tucked into a concealed holster in his jeans.

"I dunno what you're talking about mate. [color=lightblue]We stick together[/color], your kind and ours." Their covert colleague retorted, his eyes bloodshot in the yellow glow of the basement lighting. They'd been using the place as a meet spot for the past week and Sharp had a feeling this guy was allergic to it. The spy was a thin, sallow man with filthy blonde hair and stained teeth. Some of it was a disguise. All of it was disgusting.

"Don't lie to me any more than you have. Eden would [color=lightblue]burn[/color] if Korven figured what we were doing here, so you're [color=lightblue]burning us[/color] before we can leak the secret." Stephen snarled back at him, pressing on the conversation. They had the spy outnumbered three to one in this, Stephen, Sam, and Brigitte, with the twins upstairs with the Spy's other mates and the other half of the squad across town. If it came to a fight, one of the squad might take a bullet or a knife wound assuming the guy was faster than they expected or he got the first move in, but he would go down sure as shit.

The spy inhaled sharply when Sharp took a menacing step forwards with fury in his eyes and an improvised dagger.

"Fuck! [color=lightblue]Fuck[/color], fine! Yeah we did! We had instructions to [color=lightblue]burn[/color] the team at the end of the op or if you started [color=lightblue]getting paranoid[/color] - clearly I waited too fucking long!"

Stephen punched him in the mouth with a wet crunch, sending the operative to the dirty brick floor and knocking off his fake nose. Sharp hadn't noticed that one.

"You're gonna call it off, tell them we're too useful and that we can be trusted, and then we're gonna hit the last spot and head back to Eden for pink gin and lemonade, [color=lightblue]alright[/color] handsome?"

"Jesus, are those teeth real? I was hoping they were the fake bit." Brigitte chimed.

"Sure, but it's not me who makes the call. It's gotta be done with my whole team. It's an [color=lightblue]anti-subversion measure[/color] - hey, don't hit me again, please."

[color=lightblue]Sharp's hair stood on end.[/color]

"What?" Sharp muttered, the prickling on his neck keying a realisation.

"What." Stephen replied, louder, not taking his eyes from the folded form of the spy on the floor.

[color=lightblue]"What?"[/color] The spy added.

"That doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't even need to vote on it, you'd just give the signal - and what if some of you got killed? The whole process doesn't make any sense for burning a team... [color=lightblue]unless[/color]..."

The spy's eyes widened, the stain of pain in his expression giving way to a similar realisation.

"Unless it didn't matter what we said. Unless they were gonna [color=lightblue]burn us all anyway[/color]."

"They've probably had a team on hand the whole time," Sharp began, "we've been being watched the whole op, we just didn't think to look for other spies like us because we figured nobody from Korven was gonna be on our level."

As the tension reached fever pitch a wave of [color=lightblue]'oh fuck'[/color] crossed the room.

"[color=lightblue]They were always planning to kill us all[/color]."

"We've gotta get everyone out of here, both our teams need to bug out right fucking now, we can head for the edge of the city and see if working for the gangs will get us anywhere in terms of a bolt hole." The Spy began climbing to his feet. "Guys, I'm sorry about our differences, but we're gonna have to work together if we want to-"

The floor above them exploded into action, the harsh rattle of gunfire raking the room and the screams of their cohorts getting torn up piercing the air.

[color=lightblue]"Fuck!"[/color] Somebody screamed. Sharp doesn't remember who.

[/hider]

[hr]

The fight didn't last long. A strike team from the TSO had been called in to launch an assault on a building in Korven where a rogue TSO squad had been hiding out and collaborating with members of the Pure and a bunch of ID chip smugglers, and they'd been the scapegoat. The Koslov twins and the pair of spy-types upstairs had gone down in the first wave of gunfire, riddled with holes with only enough time to turn their heads to the door in surprise when they heard the guns cocking. Stephen caught a bullet in the leg when the strike force started shooting blind through the floor and into the basement, and when the spy boy made a run for the back door he ended up literally being hit in the face with a frag grenade - the same one that gave Sharp his facial scars and probably killed Brigitte. The poor spy was blown to pieces, absorbing enough of the blast that it didn't kill the rest of them outright. Sharp had the good sense to fall back into a corner and play dead, but Brigitte was actually dead, and Stephen was going to try and fight it out anyway. The strike force came in and killed Stephen personally, but evidently fell for Sharp's play despite the noise he made when his brother bought it.

Or maybe they thought he was gonna die anyway when they brought the building down on him. It didn't quite work.

He managed to recover the go-fund for the operation and transfer it to a new bank account he opened with a fake ID, putting what was left over into dead drop boxes wired to fuck with frags and HE grenades. Once he had a small safehouse up, he got to work trying to remove his own ID chip and scratching out the old regimental tattoos he'd been left with. If he could help it, he wouldn't have traitor ink in his skin.

A year passed. He was living in body, but dead in heart and dying in mind. The TV held a memorial service for his squad, claiming they were all killed in a counter terror operation, even going so far as to hold a funeral with what looked like real bodies in the coffins - and the real Sam had gone down into the ground with them when they did. His neighbours knew him as Sharp, and in truth everything other than Sharp had been torn out of him when his brother got double tapped, and they brought the building down on top of the still-moaning Brigitte and the rest of the squad. His depression and his guilt ate him away from the inside as he gradually became obsessed with the idea that MARCO might know he's still alive, and come to finish the job. Sometimes he still has idle one sided conversations with their ghosts, while he works on his gun or checks the traps in his flat, telling them all about how he wouldn't let MARCO take him too. The paranoia was like a cancer, robbing him of his personhood and making him violent.

After a while and having burnt through most of the spy cash on stimulants and illicit homecooked explosives, he got it through his head that he would need to work at some point, and he went back to the only thing he'd ever done well.

Technically, he's a private detective. Really, he'll do most things if it pays well. He won't let the bad guys get him, even if he doesn't have anything to live for other than spiting them any more.

He just doesn't realise they'd forgotten him as soon as his brother died.

[hr]

[color=lightblue]Family Members:[/color]
[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Parents:[/color]
[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Jack Swinston[/color], 64, his father, who had believed his sons to be dead for the past seven years and only been over it for a month.
[*] [color=lightblue]Maria Swinston[/color], 62, his mother, who still thinks that at least one of her sons is alive and will never know the truth
[/list]
[/list]

[list]
[*][color=lightblue]Siblings:[/color]
[list]
[*] [color=lightblue]Hazel Swinston[/color], 34, his immediately younger sister, who studied law and still writes to Stephen and Sam in her diary
[*] [color=lightblue]Ruby Swinston[/color], 21, who has tasted HALOs and heroin at the same time, and wants to be writer
[/list]
[/list]
[hr]
[color=lightblue]Relationships:[/color] (Update this as the role play goes on! Good things and bad things. If your husband cheats on you with the bitch from the slums, you’re not going to be such a loving and doting wife anymore- or perhaps you are? Friends, alliances, enemies will be created)
[hr]
[/hider]