@TokyoPewPew Do you think the pawnbroker that Joe is looking for (Aloysius) is the same as Fong's pawnbroker?
Crikey I need to read before asking haha
Crikey I need to read before asking haha
@JFK By staggering coincidence I already had a "Lou the info broker daylighting as a pawnbroker" in my notes. So when you namedropped an Aloysius (an old Occitan form of cognates Ludwig/Chlodovicus/Hlodowig) I thought it was funnier to merge the two concepts than to declare one canonical while discarding the other. Thus, different sects of the city referring to the same guy by several different forms of Lou.
Here's to hoping Dolores will run into one of the other characters 😀
For your consideration:
Title☞ He was a bully hiding behind a police badge, stacking up illicit cash and enemies he knew wouldn't dare touch him, but now that he's off the force, he has no friends, no steady income, no restraints, and plenty of foes. Name☞ Michael “Mikey” Dambrauskas Age☞ 43 Sex☞ Male Business☞ At this moment, Mikey has no full time employment. He still has some part time work as a security guard at the rougher bars around town, but that isn’t enough to pay his mortgage. When he was a cop, he had some good sources of extra dollars, seizing cash from people that looked like they were up to no good, making drugs go missing from the evidence locker, collecting a “good will donation” from local businesses that either wanted more or less attention from the cops. If you knew him well, then for the right price he’d giving you a tip off when police action was on the way or a peek at some files, for real pals he’d have a conversation with someone who needed a bit of a reminder (no actual violence unless they were dumb enough to take a swing at a cop). A few times, when he spotted something real juicy in a store window, he’d come by at night and do a nice smash and grab followed by fencing the goods. Not much of that money was saved up, because whenever it was good, it was time for sports bets, rounds of beer for the boys, and some gifts to make him look like a bigshot with the ladies. Savvy☞ Mikey knows how to fight and how to shoot, those were the only police skills he actually liked practicing. He certainly isn’t beating anyone in a footrace or wowing people with his deductive skills. He also likes to drive his car fast, it’s one of the pleasures of being able to talk his way out of a ticket. He’s gotten good enough at it that if he didn’t know to handle it he would’ve killed himself long before now. He’s also got some skill at making fake paperwork because he has had to make a lot of BS look right over the years, he’s not a master forger that could copy difficult things, but if you need a backdated report, Mikey is your guy. Mikey’s not a skilled analyst, and his eye for when someone is lying is far worse than he thinks it is, but the one talent he does have in the psychological department is knowing how to make a threat in a way that people take seriously. Lastly, he likes to fish, hasn’t come in handy yet but he wouldn’t give it up for anything. Ruin☞ If you ask Michael if there was any positives to growing with eight siblings, he’d tell you one thing: you learn to protect your stuff. That came in handy on his street in the southside of Chicago, where business was settled with fistfights, and if you could fight, then there would always been plenty of business that needed settling. Right and wrong were relative things, what Mikey learned quick was to sense an opportunity, whose bike you could steal, which stores you could shoplift from, and who was better off not being messed with. Life was about walking the fine line between being a bitch and being a big enough problem that someone decided to deal with you. On a whim one day after high school, when he was getting tired of waiting for a job with the pipefitters union that his friend swore was coming, Mikey put his application in with the Chicago Police Department.
Could he do well on the written test? No. But what they thought about him was that he had the mind of a cop. He had a way of just looking at someone and deciding if they were up to no good. How often was he right? That’s the best part, it didn’t matter for the Chicago PD. Those years taught him skills he’d rely on for the rest of his life, he knew when to beat someone within an inch of his life and when to almost burst into tears about how it was all just self defense, when to decide someone was the kind of person that belonged on this street and when it’d best to give em a forceful reminder that they didn’t. Some would call him a bully, but that’s what made him so natural at it: in Mikey’s mind, he wasn’t a bully, he just had an eye for who needed fixin’ and the power to do it, and the world would be in shambles without guys like him.
In normal times, it would all be smooth sailing, he just had to suck up to the right people and avoid any foul-up that would make the papers, but this was Chicago in the 60s. Even when social unrest had them short-staffed, they were always wary of putting Mikey on a riot detail because deescalation wasn’t a word in his vocabulary. Then came the day when he had to explain why he thought it was a good idea to put a bullet through the back of the head of an unarmed activist. Mikey walked into that meeting all confident, he had spent all night concocting a story, but Mikey’s last 45 minutes as a Chicago Police Officer would be spent having the lieutenant scream at him before ripping the badge straight off his uniform.
The next day Mikey took a road trip to hit up every town between Minneapolis and Chicago large enough to have their own force. He gave them all the same pitch: he was a tough Chicago cop, so tough he could just breathe and see the crime rate drop as small town punks went pale, and he was looking for a place with a slower pace of life and people with their head on straight. It took him hundreds of miles on his Dodge Polara before he hit 𝙼𝚒𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚘𝚘𝚗𝚊 and they bought into what he was selling. He quickly learned the rules: Don’t touch anything related to the steel mill, keep punks out of the nice part of town, and always have some quick arrests happen if people got feeling uneasy.
Mikey had a good thing going, he learned which hoes were worth asking for freebies, which hustlers were dumb enough to keep cash on them that he could skim whenever he picked them up, which business owners would be willing to give a few extra dollars to a hardworking officer, and which people were the ones he could arrest whenever they needed someone to stick on a crime and needed someone plausible to arrest. The worst thing about life his in Wisconsin was that people would sometimes hassle him for being a Bears fan. When the economy got tough and the layoffs began to mount, Mikey didn’t worry, he noticed that the extra cash he took in was a little lighter, but his gun and badge were just as heavy as ever, and all of the people he ticked off just accepted him as a fact of life.
One day the chief called the whole department into one room, and the ones who read the paper already knew what it was about. Mikey didn’t and did his best to hide his bewilderment when they told them how many officers would have to be cut from the force for budgetary reasons. The atmosphere changed that day, because everyone knew whose name was going to be top of the chopping block. No matter how much he intimated that he had dirt on others, it was an empty threat; maybe be some others weren’t on the up and up, but there was no doubt who had the most to lose if someone started looking into police affairs. So Mikey has to start thinking about what he's going to do when he is no longer an officer. Is he gonna actually worry about how he’s gonna pay the bills, keep himself out of jail, and deal with the years of blowback that’s gonna be coming once the crooks realize he can’t back up any of his threats anymore, or is he just gonna go fishing and ignore the storm brewing in his life? Cred☞ "What good things can I say about Mikey? He's never gonna rat on me the chief cuz I know he's done worse, he's good for picking up tabs after work when he's in the mood, and I can bet he'll be ready to kick down a door and check my six if I tell him there's police action needed. What bad things can I say about him? Don't me started."
"Mikey's the kind of cop we need. I show him some money as a sign of respect and he makes sure any shoplifters know they'll be on crutches for weeks if they try my store. Only questions he asks is if I got the cash and who needs a lesson."
"First lesson for crime reporters around here is to never believe a word Mike Dambrauskas says. If you want be a pulp novelist then go ahead, ask him about Chicago and he'll give you so much bullshit you could make a whole series out of it, but I'm printing the news not some 25 cent paperback. The moment you fact check his stuff you'll see everything he says comes straight from his head where he's some kinda hero who can do no wrong. Don't confront him about nothin' neither, that won't go well for anyone."
"There is no such thing as a one time transaction with Mikey, if he figures out someone is good for money once, he’s gonna keep coming back again and again. Best you can do if you've got a racket and need his help is never let he know how good the money actually is, because he'll want more."
"Fuck Mikey. Don't matter how much you pay, don't matter what he did in the past, if he's feeling the heat or mad about something he'll lock you up or beat the tar out of you in an instant. Flipping on him won't scare him either, he's lyingest sonuvabitch north of the state line, but when it comes to court they all act like that uniform means something and he'll get damn creative with his story on the stand."
"Why ain't nobody ever laid a hand on Mikey? Because no matter how many times he backstabs someone, people know how the pigs are. Go after one of their own while he's still with 'em and they'll bring down hell on you. Nobody wants to throw their life away to because they got wronged by Mikey Fuckin' Drambrauskas, it's like setting your house on fire because a you can't get that mouse infestation out." Ilk☞ THE ACTION IS THE JUICE, COULD'A HAD CLASS
Hey! Sorry if this seems like a redundant ask but I was just checking if this was still accepting Character applications, it says apply on the forum but I just wanted to make sure.