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[h2]Brooks Lockwood[/h2]
[h3]Basics[/h3]
[b]Name:[/b] Brooks Lockwood
[b]Age:[/b] 54
[b]Gender:[/b] Male
[b]Height/Weight:[/b] 1 meter 80 cm, 102kg
[b](Former) Occupation:[/b] Bootlegger
[b]Appearance:[/b] Brooks has built up muscle from constant labour, but it's padded with a significant amount of fat as well. Despite his imposing figure he tends to hunch a little to make himself seem smaller than he actually is. His hair is fully grey, long and unkempt; his body is littered with various scars, some of them more recent than others. He has age lines on his face and a full beard which is poorly groomed. He has the same hard, greenish eyes as his niece. His clothes aren't anything too specific; he tends to wear simple dark outfits, and errs towards outdoor wear. Sometimes he'll be carrying a backpack.
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[center][h3] Biography[/h3]
Brooks was the older sibling, but he wasn’t the favourite. That reward went to his little sister, and was well-deserved; Louise (or Loulou, in his childhood days) was bright, charming and pretty whilst he still had trouble talking to hia friends. Even though he grew up in her shadow, he was just as ready to dote on her as everyone else. He was doing okay in classes, kept going to soccer practice but wasn’t the best nor the worst player in the team; his childhood was punctuated with the adventures he took by the old quarry with his friends and Louise in tow. They used to make pillow forts during the evenings and watch VHS tapes of their favourite films. His parents were Catholic republicans and he had a nice house with a huge back yard. Things were simple and happy.

It all started to go a bit awry when Brooks reached middle school. Even as a kid he was content when left to his own devices and he missed out on making friends, which pushed him deeper into his own introversion. Meanwhile Louise was starting to get a different sort of attention and the friction started to build up in her own teenage rebellion against their parents. Brooks was often made to pick sides and, fearing the belt buckle, tended to openly support his parents whilst sneaking snacks to his sister’s room after the arguments. They drifted apart as each made their own friend groups and had studies to attend to, but still confided in one another. In particular, Brooks was at a loss on what he wanted to do once he graduated high school. With no clear passion shining through, he was instead gripped by his parents’ glorification of the Vietnam War during his youth and started to edge towards the draft, as it would at least give him some time to figure out what he wanted to do in college.

By this point Louise had only doubled down in her resistance against her parents’ old-fashioned ideologies. She had gotten into the anti-war movement pushed on by the atrocities of the Vietnam war (atrocities which her parents refused to acknowledge), and eventually her party lifestyle started to dip into drugs. Brooks was decidedly anti-confrontational - he had it beaten into him from an early age - and seeing the dysfunction in his home was beginning to alienate him from his family and push him even more into his bubble. When he did eventually admit he wanted to join the army, his parents gushed over him. The sudden swell of attention and pride was intoxicating at first, but his spirits were dampened when Louise turned her back on him with disgust. He wanted to explain that he was just doing it to buy himself some time, but he never knew how to put it into words. They grew apart. Unwillingly, Brooks became the favourite child.

Brooks turned 21 at the cusp of the invasion of Panama and he immediately enlisted. Then he briefly went home to find out that Louise had ran away with her meth head boyfriend. He was sent out to the Gulf War without complaint. The military hardened him and made him stronger, but he was exposed to such nightmarish scenes of civilian slaughter and ill practice that they continue to haunt him more than thirty years later. He never had a very high regard for his fellow man and the experiences that lingered past his military service (which was rudely interrupted by a bullet through the leg, permanently damaging his knee) cemented his general distaste for mankind. Brooks, now the wounded veteran, came back to a listless home. His parents had doubled down hard on Catholicism, adamant that God would protect him out in the deserts and would eventually bring their wayward daughter back to the fold. Their zealotry frightened Brooks enough to push him out of home and into employment on the oil fields and into lumberjacking operations. The long absences from home and the high pay were addictive; most of these jobs were gruelling for their employees because they had family, but Brooks never had much of a quarrel with hard work and a lack of creature comforts.

Eventually Brooks had more money than he was able to spend on his own. Finding a partner and making kids frightened him; he didn’t want a repeat of his childhood. He thought of recontacting his sister from time to time but couldn’t bring himself to face her. All his friends from high school were god knows where, and he wanted nothing to do with the army. At this point he was embittered and jaded, feeling the pangs of loneliness but too nervous to jump back into society properly, especially after 9/11. Instead, he started to look into living out in the country, somewhere in the midwest where nobody would bother him anymore. This interest paired with the gradual accumulation of guilt over his years which manifested in a constant sort of restlessness. He used to be able to satiate it with travel but could no longer live transiently with his knee. He ended up being enamoured with the thought of living off the grid and started to pool his funding into an old cabin in the middle of backwater Iowa. 

Brooks was already well-established in his forest by the time the first wave hit. He subsisted off a mixture of hunting and trading with a nearby small town, giving them venison and scrap metal in return for supplies he couldn’t forage, fish or filter out from his surroundings. He didn’t know what it meant, but what little he got from his trips into town was enough to start work on his very simple underground bunker project - just in case. It was only after the third wave that the fugitives started to trickle into his neck of the woods. The first group of people he came across were a starving family; the father, Nicolas, was capable of abilities Brooks had never even seen before. It frightened him to no end and made him wary, but the sight of their pinched faces and grubby children was enough to allow him to reluctantly shelter them in his home. Soon he experienced a gradual trickle of refugees running for their lives, and hearing their stories brought back unpleasant parallels to his time in the military. Because he hadn’t seen the chaos that mages could inflict first-hand, he was more sympathetic to their cause than the usual citizen.

Unbeknownst to him, his good deeds had made ripples that reached the Violet Underground. Last year he negotiated an agreement; he’d take in mages throughout the year in return for supplies. Soon this elaborated into the collection of mages from difficult situations and he became a newly-hired Bootlegger. Being in contact with these fugitives helped to bring him out of his shell somewhat, though none of it could prepare him for his first ‘real’ assignment with the organisation.

Around fifteen years ago, somewhere in Texas, Louise had a baby. She was in and out of jail for possession of narcotics and, despite her estrangement from her family, she was able to convince his parents to take in the little girl. At this point they had gone off the deep-end and used their pensions to buy an RV, driving up and down Arizona and barely settling as they made a life for themselves in trailer parks. The girl - his niece - was due to manifest her abilities this year. As both a rite of passage and a small mercy for both the teen and Brooks alike, Brooks was assigned to collect her and bring her to safety.
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[h3]Skills and Weaknesses[/h3]
[b]Skills:[/b]
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[*] Survivalist: Since his deployment, Brooks has been living practically off-grid for over a decade. Through sheer experience alone he has become self-sufficient; he tends to hunt and grow his own food, repairs whatever he can and scraps whatever he can't for parts. He's good at cleaning and meticulously organised. His rough lifestyle has helped him develop a self assured demeanor and remain calm under pressure.

[*] Combat Training: Brooks not only went through full military training, he then spent several years in the frontline. For better or for worse, Brooks knows how to maintain and fire rifles and pistols as well as some hand-to-hand combat manoeuvres. He also picked up some more brutal and unsavoury tactics through experience alone. Like riding a bicycle, it's not something one can easily forget how to do, and even now his instincts can lead the way.

[*] Tough: Brooks has not lead an easy life for the past thirty years. He is no stranger to inclement weather, hard work and all manner of injuries, some of which he's sustained in the past two years looking after unstable mages. His knowledge of first aid is rudimentary at best (and falls under the category of a survivalist skill) but his stamina and ability to endure are above average.
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[b]Weaknesses:[/b]
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[*] Isolationist: like his survivalist skill, this is a blanket term that encapsulates a myriad of shortcomings that come with a life of limited contact with the outside world. His social skills leave much to be desired; he's alright in one to one conversations but tends to shut off somewhat in groups. He's out of touch with modern technology, and only has a loose grasp on what's been going on for the past twenty or so years beyond the mage crises. He still drives a stick shift and his repair skills are consequently somewhat dated.

[*] War Wounds: Not all of them are visible, but the main issue seems to be with his knee. It was shattered in the Gulf war and reconstructive surgery could only do so much. He lives with a stiff leg and bad memories, both of which equally affect his quality of life.

[*] No Magic: Brooks is a Mundane; he wasn't affected by the Violet Dawn and consequently cannot cast any sort of spell. In some very specific circumstances he can employ the vehement belief that the FOE use to dispell magic, but only when he genuinely believes someone not to be a threat. As a disillusioned war veteran who secluded himself in the wilderness, these exceptions to the vast majority of potential threats are hard to come by.
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