TITUS GRACCHUS
Age: - 37
Appearance: -
Personality: - Afflicted with an excruciating, pus-weaping lesion in the right leg,Gracchus has become short tempered and irritable. The veteran legionnaire is prone to erratic and fitful bouts of rage, oftentimes upending tables he had been diligently working at, or striking out at muted guards keeping his watch. Gracchus' near twenty years with the legion have left him bitter and jaded, the enthusiasm and sense of purpose that had been imbued in him at the assimilation of his subsistent tribe reduced to a flicker as the Legion beat a bloody and endless path through the wastes, spilling blood and purchasing nothing with the boon of that sacrifice. However, his nihilism, tempered by his open handedness, perceptiveness, and his enduring capacity of mercy, have left him quietly hopefully that this new project might finally fulfil all the Legion had promised.
Backstory: - Like many accomplished Legionnaires, Gracchus met the coming of the Legion as much with quiet, purposeful hope as with revulsion at the loss of his tribe. Truthfully, he had taken some small comfort in huddling around his tribe's campfire, soaking in primitive tales of an old world of excess and of plenty; where men needn't scrape through baked, dusted earth to find sustenance, but were liberated, to have purpose and meaning and consequence.
Gracchus found in the Legion, and its virtues of self-sacrifice, service and aversion to slothfulness, a sense of purpose he never could in his Liberty, and threw himself into the legion's brutal training almost with glee. To him, the scrap for survival with his tribe was never freedom, and very soon, he became to see eye-to-eye with Caesar, that the tribes the Legion conquered, destitute as they were, were really being saved by being absorbed into Caesar's war machine.
As soon as he was trained, aged, due to his profligate upbringing, twenty-one years old, he begged his superiors to place him under the command of Maxentius, by far the weakest and most bundling of Caesar's Centurions, and one he could easily surpass. After six years in his employ, the Centurion finally stumbled. On campaign in Utah, chasing down a particularly vicious chapter of the 80's tribe, Maxentius lead his column into a snare. Those Legion that survived the 80's crazed hacking were dragged back to their camp, no doubt to be used as trophies, or, in somewhere as desolate as southern Utah, as sustenance.
In desperation, Gracchus reached out to his guards. These, it seemed, were the most diminutive of the tribe - the party that had defeated Gracchus' collumn had worn ornaments from all corners of the wasteland, road signs, shawn strands of tyre, Brahmin skulls, anything that smacked of the abstraction of the old world, to befuddle and awe those the tribals encountered. The guards wore few or no such ornaments, and manned their post inside the blasted-dry-brick and iron walls of a hardy petrol-station; one which had stoically whethered the storms of as many as the seventeen nuclear warheads which had left black scars on the turf of the surrounding land. They were the runts, the outcast, the kind who picked at the scraps around the campfire, carried the equipment, enabled the glories of their bretherin.
Gracchus turned this bitterness to his advantage. Night by night, he told the guards his story, how the Legion had found him as diminutive as they, of how it lifted men from the dung of sustenance and gave each a purpose. Pretty soon, he stirred the same fire of purposefulness in the guards as Gracchus once felt himself, and, not three weeks after his capture, in the frigid night of the Utah plains, Gracchus eloped the camp with twenty-three of the 80s, and two whole crates of pristine old world fire-arms at his back.
On his return to Flagstaff, those Legion that had survived with Gracchus bore him in on their backs, hailing him with chants of Centurion before placing the bloodstained helm of the fallen Maxentius on his brow. Caesar, hearing the chants, invited Gracchus to an audience, formally bestowing on him the mantle of Centurion, and command of the 80s he had lead to the Legion. Gracchus' heraldic feat reminded Caesar of his own triumph among the blackfoots, and, with many successes in the field, Gracchus and Caesar cultivated a much more mutualistic relationship that most legionnaires could have ever hoped for or imagined, driven by their shared vision of a unified, virtuous and altruistic wasteland.
For many years, Gracchus was elated, his private hopes for the Legion were realised and reciprocated by its leader, and he would be his loyal disciple until the time of his demise. That was, until Gracchus first ran across the brutality of Legatus Lanius, who put to the sword any he chose, sometimes the weak, sometimes the sick, and sometimes those he deemed a sporting kill. In Lanius, there was nothing but mettle, he gave his men no purpose, only fear. Gracchus was fascinated and disgusted by him, both. In him, he saw all of the raw viciousness of the legion, a viciousness Gracchus had condoned and enabled for years, in the pursuit of some nobler goal. To Gracchus, the painful truth came worryingly into view - was his hope for the legion just a facade, an academic contrivance between he and its naive leader? Did it breed and cultivate monsters like Lanius, and was he destined to take control of the Legion entire?
It was this desire to outdo Lanius, to prove, dialectically, his mistake, that lead to Gracchus crippling. At Hoover Dam, Gracchus charged his men through the tunnels with abandon, desperate to end the battle and claim the human spoils before they could meet with Lanius' eager sword. But, in doing so, he threw tactics to the wind. Neglecting his scouts, he met a fierce wall of fortified NCR, and a ranger, one with a card marked for the Centurion at the head of this mad charge. The ranger placed two shells into Gracchus' leg and knee-cap before the snare Lanius had devised enclosed and overwhelmed him. Gracchus was crippled. After months, he could shuffle, limp at best, the uppermost of the wounds wept and opened periodically, and his waking hours were spent nose-deep in healing powder, or else blinding agony.
In Lanius' vision for the Legion, Gracchus would have been left to the one element left in the wasteland, but Caesar was more pragmatic. Recalling the rousing young man who had rallied so many "warriors" to the Legion's cause, he gave Gracchus and his men the greatest of tasks the legion would face, to mould Vegas and its citizens into a nova roma as its Praetor. Gracchus is simply unsure if he still has the belief, or the heart, to do so...
Clothing/Equipment: Studded Vexalarius armour plating, a small 80s-highway symbol affixed to one of the discs, bronzed calf and wrist-plates fashioned from gas-station metal, a helmet of blue-dyed plumage made from old wire-brushes, and a thick blue Cape. Also carries a pair of sunglasses, and other standard legion-issue equipment, like healing powder.
Weapons: Machette affixed to his right-hip. Revolver by left hip, sparingly loaded, as he rarely fights.
Role within Society: Urban Praetor
Special: Strength 3, Perception 7, Endurance 6, Charisma 9 , Intelligence 9, Agility 1, Luck 5
