[quote=@Ducksworth]
Throwing my hat in the ring with my sheet now. Hope this is still open :D let me know what you think [@TokyoPewPew]

[hider=The Chase][justify][color=dimgray][h3][table][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Title[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]With a scandal-stained surname and a hunger for velocity, the fallen golden boy now wagers reputation and blood on every score[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Name[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]Gideon Shaw[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row]
[row][cell][right][sup][sup]Face[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup][centre][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019cdf92-8ed7-73fe-8a86-b73baa38ecb7.webp[/img][/centre][/sup][/sup][/cell][/row]
[row][cell][right][sup][sup]Age[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]29[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Sex[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]Male[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Business[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]Shaw doesn’t run rackets. He doesn’t move product, and he doesn’t sit in back rooms counting envelopes. Selling drugs, girls, or guns is dull — business like any other, just darker. The mob thrives on that kind of slow money. Shaw finds it suffocating.  He runs scores. Liquor stores. Banks. Payroll drops. Armoured vans when the timing lines up right. Cash-heavy places with alarms loud enough to wake the block and just enough security to make it interesting. Anything that moves fast and breaks open faster.

Most times he’s the driver. Sometimes he’s the man through the door. He isn’t precious about roles — he just wants to be where the moment is sharpest. He plans enough to survive. Entry, exit, rough timing. He knows the city by instinct now — which streets choke with traffic, which alleys open wider than they look, how long it takes a cruiser to answer a call depending on the neighbourhood. But he refuses to choke the life out of a job with perfection. He tried that once. Clean job. Perfect timing. No alarms, no sirens, no chase. It worked, and It felt dead.

Now, when the crew piles into the car and the engine turns over, Shaw sometimes waits a beat longer than he needs to. Just long enough. Long enough for the alarm to scream. Long enough for the distant sirens to start threading through the streets. Long enough for the tension to tighten in the air. Then he drives, and he drives hard.

He doesn’t engineer the chaos ahead of time — that would make it predictable — but when the moment comes, he pushes it. Red lights taken a little too close. Turns cut a little too tight. The engine climbing toward redline with a cruiser gaining ground in the mirror. That’s the point. The money pays for the next car, the next gun, the next opportunity. But his business is the moment when the bank alarm is screaming, the sirens are closing, and the city becomes a maze he intends to win.

That’s what Shaw sells. Velocity.

Around Shaw, something new has begun to form. A network. Not a family or a crew carved in stone. Just a growing orbit of men who know Shaw can deliver a job clean and pay them properly when it’s done. Some come back for the money. Others come back because the work is fast and loud in a way the mob rarely allows anymore. Some come back because working with Shaw feels like standing too close to a lightning strike, but not everyone is eager about it. A few of them are nervous the first time they climb into the passenger seat. Shaw’s reputation has begun to circulate — not just that he’s good behind the wheel, but that he pushes things right to the edge of where they should be. But he gets the job done, and he pays well. That’s usually enough.

Shaw is not cruel about mistakes. Panic happens. People freeze the first time the sirens get close, the first time the plan stops looking neat. Everyone gets one mistake. One moment where Shaw has to cover for them. One moment where he drags them through it while the city is closing in and the engine is screaming. Just once. Make the same mistake twice and you’re not unlucky — you’re a liability. And Shaw doesn’t carry liabilities.

Cross him outright and it gets worse. The mob prefers quiet solutions: A body in a trunk, A disappearance nobody asks questions about, but Shaw doesn’t operate like that. If you betray him, it’s messy. Maybe you wake up in the getaway car with both knees ruined before the flames take hold. Maybe the car goes into the lake and you’re still inside when it sinks. Maybe he simply opens the door at ninety miles an hour into oncoming traffic and lets it decide your fate. Either way, the message travels faster than the sirens, and after that, nobody mistakes Shaw’s rules again.[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Savvy[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]The Driving came first. Not commuting or Sunday cruising, driving properly — gravel spraying, suspension screaming, the car dancing on the edge of control while the world narrows down to nothing but the next corner kind of driving. Rally was the one thing Gideon ever fought his father for. It wasn’t respectable or productive. It wasn’t the kind of hobby that looked good in a shareholder newsletter. That was exactly why he wanted it. And for a few years he got it. The professional instructors, track time, real cars, and real speed. He learned how to push a vehicle right to the point where traction becomes negotiation instead of certainty.

Then the grades slipped, and the cars disappeared. That was how the Shaw house worked. Perform where it mattered, or the toys went away. Which is how Shaw ended up with an education most criminals would kill for. Private schools. Tutors. Universities where the curriculum wasn’t just classes but expectations. He learned finance because he had to — markets, leverage, corporate structures, the quiet mathematics of power. Not because he loved it, but because Daddy dearest demanded it, because failing meant losing the parts of life he actually enjoyed. It stuck anyway. He understands money in a way that surprises people. Where it moves. How it hides. How businesses look when they’re bleeding and when they’re pretending not to.

Languages were never optional. Italian tutors started young — long before he understood why his father cared about that particular language. Years of dinner-table corrections and overseas summers left him speaking it cleanly enough to pass for a local in the right rooms. Latin came along the way those things do in elite schools — half tradition, half punishment. He never thought much of it, but it stuck just the same.

The last skill came from his father’s attempt at bonding. Gideon Shaw was never particularly close to the man, but there were stretches of time where they would disappear together for hours in the helicopter, lifting off from private pads and drifting over cities and coastlines while his father pointed out landmarks and markets and pieces of the world that were supposed to belong to them someday. He never finished the licensing, of course. He didn’t care to. But he has more than enough hours behind the controls to lift, move where it needs to go, and set it down again without shaking the machine apart. Useful, occasionally, but driving is still better. It always was.[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Ruin[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]You ever hear the saying that money changes people? That’s not quite right. Money doesn’t change you. It just puts fences around the parts of you people don’t want to see. I grew up inside those fences. The kind of childhood where the answer was usually yes before the question finished leaving your mouth. Cars when I wanted them. Tutors when my grades dipped. Summers that happened in different countries because that was where Mom decided that’s where the house happened to be that season.

My father believed in preparation. Legacy. Grooming, and all of that. Private schools. Languages. Finance lessons before I was old enough to drink. Every step of my life mapped like some corporate acquisition. I was supposed to inherit something clean and powerful and inevitable. And for a long time, I believed that too.

Turns out the map had a hole in it. ‘Embezzlement’ is a funny word. Sounds almost academic. Like a mistake made with paperwork instead of something that detonates a life. One day the accounts were there. The next day the investigations were. After that the houses vanished, the cars vanished, the friends vanished. Funny how quickly a network dissolves when the money dries up. Turns out friendship in those circles have a price.

The name stayed, though. “Mr. Shaw’s kid,” Except it wasn’t the kind of name that opened doors anymore. It was the kind people saw before deciding not to return your calls. I tried the straight road anyway. Called in favours. Sent messages to old classmates who’d landed cushy positions in companies their fathers owned. Nothing glamorous, just a place to stand while I rebuilt. Most of them never answered, of course, but one did. He worked in a place that, a year earlier, I wouldn’t have even considered. Middle floor office. Decent salary. Nothing spectacular, but enough to start again at that point. We sat across from each other in a glass conference room while he explained how things worked now. You know, carefully, politely. At one point he sighed and said it to me straight, “Look, Gideon… it’d just look bad having a criminal on the books!” I remember blinking at him. I wasn’t the criminal. My father was. But the distinction didn’t matter to him. Or to anyone else. That was the moment it clicked. Bad blood doesn’t wash out. Once people decide what your name means, that’s the version of you they see forever.

I left his office, got into my car — a real piece of shit compared to what I’d grown up with — and drove without thinking. A cruiser was sitting at the light when I rolled past. And the thought came to me so casually it almost made me laugh. “If they already think I’m a criminal… why keep pretending I’m not?” So when the light turned green, I floored it. I didn’t plan it. It was just instinct. The engine screamed like someone was being murdered, the cruiser lit up behind me, and suddenly the whole city was moving again. Turns, lights, traffic, the old rally instincts waking up in my hands like they’d never left. I lost him for a while. Until I didn’t. Turns out driving fast doesn't mean shit when you don’t know the city yet. Dead-end streets, bad turns, a car that couldn’t outrun much of anything. They boxed me in ten minutes. That was “Gideon”’s last mistake.

I spent a few hours in a holding cell thinking about it. Not the arrest nor the humiliation. The Rush. I asked for the phone, there was one number left from the old world that still worked: The old family lawyer who owed a favour. He got me out the same way he’d probably gotten my father out of things for years — quietly, efficiently, and with a warning rather than time. “This is the last time,” he told me. “Whatever you’re planning to do, do it without my help.” That was fine, though. I didn’t need the help, because somewhere between the sirens and the cell, I’d realised something important. All that privilege growing up? It wasn’t freedom. It was a cage. 

Expectations. Reputation. Responsibility. Every move watched because someday I was supposed to inherit something bigger than myself. But now there was nothing left to inherit, which meant there was nothing left to protect. The rush I’d chased on rally tracks as a kid, the same thing I’d felt again for those ten minutes with the cruiser behind me — I didn’t have to pretend it was a hobby anymore. I could just follow it.

So I started small. My first job was a liquor store. Nothing glamorous. Couple hundred dollars and a terrified clerk staring at a shotgun barrel while I sat behind the wheel. The sirens came faster that time. And, boy, was I ready. After that the jobs got bigger. Banks. Payroll drops. Anything with alarms loud enough to make the streets sing. People started to know the name again, not my father’s. Mine. Just “Shaw.” And that’s good enough.[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Cred[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][sup][sup]“You never told me this job was for Shaw.. Fuck. At least he pays, right?”

“Shaw.. Shaw.. The er.. Rich guy? Got put away for like, stealing pensions or something right?”

“Yeah, he drives good, but what I don’t get is why’s he doing it. Guys filthy rich. Don’t think for a second he ain’t got nothing tucked away.”

“I got a guy who’s got a job going. Bank. Looking for an extra gunman. Guy’s a maniac, but you’ll make more than with any other.”

“The fuck would do this..? Left the getaway car in the middle of the lot in clear view, poor bastard charred down to bone. Can we ID ‘em?”

“Nah, Shaw’s not mob. Mob hate that shit. Too loud and too much attention.”

“I swear to God, he had the Sedan sideways round that corner on 34th. Damn thing felt like it was on rails. He didn’t even leave right away either. Sat there smiling waiting for the sirens, I swear.”

“I heard the Mob tried to recruit him. Make him, you know? Heard he tell ‘em he’s done with Family. I’m not surprised after his Da.”

“Shaw, you devil, what are you doing in here? Didn’t the doorman tell you no dogs allowed?” 

“Baby, you spoil me.. You didn’t have to..”[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][sup][sup]Ilk[/sup][/sup][/right][/cell][cell][sup]☞[/sup][/cell][cell][hider=List of Ilks][indent][indent]

[table][row][cell][right][i][b][sup][sup]THE ACTION IS THE JUICE[/sup][/sup][/b][/i][/right][/cell][cell][sup][sup]What the capos call "caution" you call spinelessness. What's the point in becoming a gangster if people still get to tell you what to do, if you still got to follow the rules, if you can't let loose once in a while? You don't need the money; you're here for the power, the good time, and nothing gets your dick hard like stomping the gas pedal to the floor, squeezing off shots, and watching it all burn, and bleed, and die. Agitator that you are, you can't help but lay waste to your crew's best-laid plans. And you will personally see to it that when all this is over, you and all your accomplices are looking at twenty to life for murder-two. ("But only if we get caught," right?)[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][i][b][sup][sup]I STILL LOVE THE LIFE[/sup][/sup][/b][/i][/right][/cell][cell][sup][sup]Death by a thousand cuts. Gambling debts, drug habits, a need to impress, or plain-and-simple expensive tastes—something, or a combination of things, puts a continual drain on your resources, ever threatening your precious high-roller lifestyle. You don't simply [i]want[/i] the plan to succeed; it has to, or you can kiss the fast cars the slim girls the fat diamond rings goodbye (those and whatever else matters). This addiction will noseblind you to risks the others can smell from three miles off. And where they've hedged and folded and tactically retreated, you'll always—always—gather up your dice to triple down.[/sup][/sup][/cell][/row][/table]

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[/quote]

Good evening, Duck.

1. AI "assistance" is absolutely, 100% forbidden in my RPs.
2. You're a serial ghoster, having played an instrumental role in the deaths of both [i]The Cursèd West[/i] and [i]Redshift Blues.[/i]
3. A character who takes unnecessary risks, provokes the mob, and forgives the mistakes of his fellow criminals, all for the excitement and "chaos" of it all, is tonally a bad fit which will screw with this setting's plausibility and tone. 

For these reasons I will not be accepting this application.

Best of luck finding your fit elsewhere.