[hider=Super Secret Spellslinger] [b]Tag:[/b] Super Secret Spellslinger [b]Name:[/b] “Upswing” (callsign) / Callum McCarthy (birth name) / various cover identities [b]Age:[/b] He doesn’t like to say, but he’s probably somewhere in his early-to-mid-thirties. [b]Gender:[/b] Male [b]Nationality:[/b] DSR - the northeastern parts, judging by his accent. [b]Craft:[/b] Upswing’s a rather bog-standard illusionist; he can manipulate light and sound to create false images, or to disguise himself and others. Still, the talent has its uses. Imagine this, if you will: you’ve parachuted into the Holy Nation two months ago to teach the local partisans how to build bombs and fight dirty. Apparently, they’re not too good at it, since you and a few others get captured and driven out into the forest to be shot. As you’ve just finished digging your own grave on the roadside and the Kalanis are raising their rifles, two machine-gunners start raking the road from a nearby ridge. Some of the Kalanis dive for cover; some others try to return fire, but the gunners keep shooting. By the time they realize that there aren't really any gunners at all, they’re dead, because you realized that first and grabbed one of their guns. Your bullets are still very real. [b]Vessels Carried:[/b] Madness Grenade - Upswing learned some funny stuff in Section Seven; one of the things he learned was how fond his own country’s intelligence agency was for psychoactive substances. The Madness Grenade is of his own making, consisting of an empty L83 smoke grenade filled with powdered devil’s trumpets and an aerosolizing agent, with a shitload of mana infused into it. When it goes off, anything that breathes in the hazy pink fumes instantly experiences the full effects of severe datura intoxication, and then some; simply put, they go mad as a hatter. Not the best thing to have happen to a room of heavily-armed men, eh? [b]Channels Carried:[/b] Silenced Firearms - See below. Night Ranger Armor - A half-joking name Upswing gives his getup, the so-called “Night Ranger Armor” consists of a 6B3TM-01 ballistic vest, armored greaves, SSh-68 helmet, new-gen NVGs (the single most expensive piece of equipment in Upswing’s possession), and GP-7 gas mask, all of it painted a shade of green so dark it’s damn near black. None of this sounds particularly stealthy, until you realize that the light curves around it. Upswing’s illusionist Craft has infused his armor, giving it a sort of active camo that muffles his movements and makes him damn near invisible in low-visibility conditions if you don’t know to look for the subtle ripples in the air where he moves. [b]Appearance:[/b] All things considered, Upswing doesn’t look half-bad for a merc. He’s six foot three and built like he was born with dumbbells in his hands, but he’s clean-shaven and he’s got a youthful, almost childish face on his head, like the young, dumb soldier he once was never really left. He’s very Celtic, with a face and build like a Scotsman and hair and eyes like an Irishman. He’s almost always smiling, and his green eyes sparkle with what might very well be genuine mirth, though whether he’s laughing with you or at you is sometimes hard to tell. His pointed nose is a bit crooked, like he’s gotten it broken a few times too many, and he has a long, vertical knife scar that starts below his lip and ends just below his right eye, but he doesn’t have the marks of a fighter otherwise. His ruddy brown hair is worn in a side part, and he’s rarely seen without a cigarette either in his mouth or between his fingers; he’s got the sort of constitution that’s common to people from his home region, where you down a pack of cigarettes and a fifth of whiskey a day and still live to age 90. He prefers khaki clothing, a military habit, and keeps himself meticulously, even obsessively groomed and clean; his breath is actually pretty good, for a smoker. [b]Bio:[/b] Upswing’s persona, at least the persona that he chooses to show, is a jesting one, prodding and joking, sometimes testing the patience of those around him. He’s got a heavy Scottish accent, and seems to lean into the hard-drinking, swearing, fighting stereotype of the northern parts of the DSR. He’s patently intelligent, but he doesn’t always apply it in a fully optimal way, opting instead to prod further at his colleagues. Of course, that’s the facade he chooses to show. He can be a swaggerly, arrogant American, or a blue-blooded Briton straight from Oxford, or a native Polavian who just happens to have a muddy ethnic background; Section Seven does that to you, makes you able to switch up on a dime like that. If you know him, really know him, you’ll know that most of what he shows is a ruse. Callum McCarthy never really left the world of that small town in the DSR, where what you had, what you deserved, was defined by what you could fight for. He’s not necessarily self-interested or evil—you don’t get far in S7 if you are—but he is deeply amoral, highly analytical, and a little sadistic, with a love for violence that not much else can really satisfy. Simply put, he’s a man who’ll never really be comfortable without blood on his hands. [b]History:[/b] Callum McCarthy is a name not many people know outside of a small town in the northern reaches of the DSR. If you ask about him there, you’ll get a lot of hostile looks and not many answers. “He’s a jailbird,” they’ll say, “killed a man in cold blood ten years ago. ‘Ye must be one too if ‘ye knew ‘im.” Of course, that’s not true, but it’s not like Mr. McCarthy himself makes any attempt to dispel the rumors. He was born there, the eldest son of a washed-up beat cop and a waitress from the single diner in town, with two other children to the family. From the beginning, Callum’s life was a hard one; something about the hormones of pregnancy had awakened something in his mother, and she became prone to severe manic episodes, sometimes verging into full-blown psychosis. Once, she locked the whole family in the house and stayed up for three days straight, gun in hand, because the house next door had been playing a detective drama on the TV too loudly and she thought the crime scene camera SFX were stalkers taking pictures of her through the windows. His father wasn’t much better. Everyone drank in that small town; when the winter was too cold and dark to go out, there wasn’t much else to do. Callum certainly got a taste for whiskey a long while before he should’ve. The problem with his dad, and most men in town, however, was that he didn’t stop drinking come summer. When he was drunk, which was often, it didn’t take much to set him off, and he’d beat his wife and his kids come sunrise and sunset. When Callum was six, his mother ran away, her two younger children in tow. His father didn’t try to chase her down; their marriage was long over, anyway. Callum grew up with half his family missing; last he heard from his mother or his siblings, he was sixteen and she’d just moved in with her newest boyfriend, the second that year. She swore up and down that this time, it would work; she even yelled at Callum when he insisted it wouldn’t. They parted on bad terms, and Callum never saw her again; he wouldn’t be surprised if one of those men killed her. Meanwhile, the home front was as normal. His dad would punch him, Callum’d punch back, and Callum would lose, with an extra arse-whoopin’ for fighting. Still, he fought, because it wasn’t in his nature not to, and it was just damn fun to do. He learned to hide his bruises under his shirt—what kid didn’t?—to fight as schoolboys did, to lay out the bullies. He was getting very, very good at the last part. His father may have been a cop, but he was getting older and Callum was getting bigger. When he was sixteen, his father came home raging drunk one night and opened up the assault, like he always did, with a haymaker slap straight to his son’s face. For the first time, Callum didn’t take it or try to dodge, but he caught his father’s hand. And then Callum [i]beat the shit out of him.[/i] There was never a fight in that household again. Callum left as soon as he could to join the marines. His father died not long after; he’d been driving drunk. Callum didn’t bother with the funeral; he needed out of that place. It was in basic that he earned the nickname “Upswing,” later his callsign; he got the name after he accidentally sucker-punched his drill instructor on the second day of boot camp when the guy woke him up. He took the five hundred pushups and demeaning nickname on the chin, though, and when it became clear how hard of a worker he was, “Upswing” became a much more welcoming title. He excelled in all things military; he had the body of a brute, but the level-headed mind of a true soldier, even if he didn’t always show it. SPECFOR was thus a natural progression. The DSR has long since lost track of how many little brushfire wars its troops are committed to, so there’s always a need for some hardened door-kickers. Upswing got a few tours under his belt, honorable service, all, but his service attracted his higher-ups’ attention. He was a natural leader, and seemed to love educating his fellow soldiers in tactical discipline on his own time. Thus, he was offered a deal: Callum McCarthy would vanish, and Upswing would be dropped off behind enemy lines to educate the enemies of the DSR’s enemies in the way of war. If you ask Upswing why he took it, he’ll tell you that Callum McCarthy was a scrappy little runt from parents that didn’t want him in a town that was all too eager to wash its hands of him. Thus, Callum McCarthy, the hardened spec-ops man, was implicated in a fragging incident at his base camp and sent to a military prison for the rest of his life; Upswing, however, began a new career in an agency whose official name he can’t legally disclose, called Section Seven by its members. He killed men there, same as the military. He nearly died; it was in Section Seven that his Craft emerged, poofing himself out of existence to escape a rival paramilitary’s firing line. He trained good men and watched them die. He trained evil men who happened to be on the right side of history and watched them do evil, evil deeds; he would be wanted for even worse atrocities than he’s wanted for today if the DSR was willing to admit its hand in them. It was no difference to him. He didn’t believe in the DSR’s civilizing, democratizing mission, not really; it was just one war after another for a man who craved war. That’s why he left, ultimately. He wanted war, sure, but he could get it in the private sector just as easily, and with better pay to boot. So he hung up his hat and, after a few non-starter jobs in other PMCs, found his forever home as an instructor in Reactor Private Security Services. He was a teacher, mostly, but the sort of teacher that beats trainees’ arses, and when his work assignments took him into the combat zone, as they so often did, who could blame him for picking up a gun to defend himself, eh? In truth, he was doing no less fighting there than he was in Section Seven, with the same workload of advising on the side. He was just fine with that. ‘Course, he’d hardly been in four years when it all went to shit. First, the whole CEO debacle, then the shitshow in Medil. Upswing was there when it went down; he killed more men in a three-week campaign than he did in the entirety of his time in military and government service. He took bullets and shrapnel for the company; he got into knife fights for it. Hell, he’s half sure he shot down a [i]helicopter[/i] with his rifle at one point. That’s how he knew it wasn’t personal when Reactor let him go, because he’d be hard-pressed to find a man who fought harder for its success in Medil. There was simply nothing left to work for. The international courts of law were quick to issue warrants for Upswing’s arrest, though they never pinned the name Callum McCarthy to him; he’d worked for Reactor under a different name, and he was quick to get a wholly new one once the warrants went out. Still, he couldn’t change his face so easily, so he called up some outside connections from his time in S7 and bought some post-Cold War surplus gear and a ride to Polavia in a shipping container with his severance package. [b]Weaponry (including Channels):[/b] For regular use: AS-Val - A light assault rifle chambered in 9x39mm cartridges, the AS-Val is notable for its integrated suppressor and ability to mount a variety of sights on its top Picatinny rail. While suppressors don’t usually make gunshots as quiet as they do in the movies, Upswing’s rifle has been enhanced with sensory-suppressing magic, making it produce effectively no sound or muzzle flash when firing. PB - This long, integrally-suppressed pistol, based on the Makarov, is one of Upswing’s channels, with the same effects as above. For long-range engagements: SVD - A common Eastern Bloc DMR/sniper rifle, the semi-automatic SVD uses a fully-powered rifle cartridge with excellent range and muzzle velocity, and its ability to mount a range of different sights makes it a popular choice among Polavian big-game hunters. [b]Other gear/weapons/equipment:[/b] KA-BAR - This iconic combat knife has been used by the armed forces of the DSR for decades; it’s a staple of the civilian market, as popular with survivalists and backpackers as it is with cutthroat commandos. 3x RGO - The RGO hand grenade is a defensive grenade designed by the Eastern Bloc, with a powerful fragmentation jacket. The things are cheap and easy to find, as thousands were pilfered by corrupt logistics officers or stored in partisan caches before the fall of the old Polavian regime. 2x Madness Grenade - See above. Helmet Radio - A useful piece of equipment, allowing communication mid-combat. [b]Other useful information:[/b] Upswing did a spot of boxing as a kid, and still enjoys the sport. It’s a good way to earn some money on the side, after all. [b]Likes[/b] Whiskey—the shittier, the better Fighting in all its forms Joking Hanging out, which hopefully includes all of the above [b]Dislikes[/b] “High society” and decadent lifestyles Snakes Modern art [/hider]