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—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————name. James Richard Amson
aliases. Kagaku-sha / The Chemist — As a chemistry graduate of Queen Mary University of London, he became involved with the Japanese criminal underworld on his first tour there, conducting cooperative research. Now, owing them a debt, he helps them produce narcotics and drugs for international distribution. They call him The Chemist, because that's precisely what he is.
sex. Male
Age 27
occupations. Aside from working with the crime family to produce drugs, he maintains his daily appearance as a researcher for the international pharmaceuticals firm, GeneSynth.
height. 6"1
weight. 153lbs
body type. Sinewy and toned, but not exactly strong. Due to his cycling habits, his legs are well developed, and he looks good - but he's light by nature, and appears skinny.
strengths. - He forms interpersonal bonds well, enabling him to gain the trust of others, or diffuse unstable individuals with a higher rate of success than average.
- He is an intelligent and analytical person, capable of discerning patterns not immediately visible to most - especially when his specialist subject, Chemistry, is involved.
- Though it has its drawbacks, his pupils do not constrict properly, and overdilate in darkness, granting him a modicum of nightvision.
weaknesses. - Well, for one thing, he's white. He sticks out like a sore thumb in Japan - and his Japanese is poorly accented too. By no means is he likely to blend in with any community but an almost exclusively immigrant one.
- His pupils, due to a genetic defect, are too wide and do not constrict properly. He has decent nightvision as a result, but experiences reduced visibility in bright daylight and is easily blinded.
- He's not terribly fit. By no means is he incapable of running for his life, but he's also no athlete and would be easily outpaced by any experienced assailant.
skills. - From his time with chemistry students, in a central London university, he still has an absurdly high alcohol tolerance - especially considering that the Japanese often has lower tolerances than Europeans anyway.
- Because of his background in chemistry both legitimate and otherwise, he can synthesise a number of basic painkillers and medications from basic ingredients. This also extends to poisons, drugs, explosives and the like. Most of it is quite dangerous to do without specialist equipment, however.
- He can handle a gun, courtesy of his time with the local criminal underworld. He's not an excellent shot, however, and has no real skill with long guns.
- Surprisingly, he is an excellent cook.
personality. James is a generally well meaning, polite, and friendly individual, making him both more trusting than is beneficial, and more persuasive than isn't. He has no particular mental illness, or pathological tendency for conflict, but tries to be funny frequently and usually fails. He usually puts it down to social differences in comedy, however - the British sense of humour is internationally reknowned for being... rather odd. Other than that, there's nothing remarkable about him. He scares just as easily as the next person, and has no particular favourite foods, drinks, or activities that he's ever likely to enjoy again, now that he's a wanted man.
backstory. James Richard Amson was one of the best. He hadn't always been, but that was how he'd turned out on the day he graduated from Queen Mary University of London with a Master's Degree in Chemistry.
Having put the work in, having found his heart in science, and having met someone fantastic to share his life with, he had absolutely no reason to not be the best he could be. He was happy, safe,
fed, and in an intellectually stimulating environment. All his needs were taken care of. He was good, and he graduated top in his class. Now, this is the kind of thing that makes a guy a shoo in for the most exciting research programs there are, and he went on to spend two years with his own professors, developing anti-cancers. While he was with them, they were able to produce and replicate three promising new drugs to test, one of which went on to commercial production within the next two years - which is how he got to Japan.
As it happens, that drug that made it to production ended up proving 130% more effective than the next best on the market, with half of the negative side effects of its predecessor - and it was primarily due to his and two other recent graduates' input. In the world of science, this usually has the easily predicted effect of setting private corporations after you; sure enough they were, all three, hired within a month of this drug going into public use. The very company they'd received half their funding from in the first place promised to give them levels of funding never before seen, and a state of the art facility in the land of the Rising Sun. One of them had been Japanese anyway, so she took the offer as a way to move home with a pay rise, but for the first year of their employment there the other two lived very insularly, within the small English speaking community that had grown up around the lab. They learnt Japanese slowly in between hours in the lab, and enjoying the lavish lifestyle of a high level corporate researcher.
And, as all things lead on to more things in turn, this was how he became involved with producing drugs. You see, the local dark economy had taken to using tutors and translators to reach the immigrant communities, in search of individuals with useful skillsets. James was one of these individuals, and although he hates to be called greedy...
The money they were promising was fantastic, and absurd. It would give him opportunities he'd never had before. It would let him move back to England and be with his girlfriend not just as a successful chemical professional, but as a man with the ability to set something up that would look after them both forever - their own company, generating its own profit. They could own their own home, full stop.
No mortgage or anything.
It was too good to be true.
Which is why it wasn't.
For the final year of his time there, he slowly came to realise that he was under the very real threat of murder should he not deliver, continuously, a stream of narcotics. He was perfectly capable of it,
yes, but when he began to see the effects of his work on the local community - teenagers trying to deal with exam stress ending up in hospital, overdosed on his pills, the homeless living only for their next hit of something he'd put into a syringe for them only a week earlier, and the decadent wealthy in his own community, snorting compounds that should never have existed - he thought again.
When he saw his colleague - the other student he'd graduated with, the one he'd had to learn Japanese with - overdose and barely survive at a party, on only her first hit, he thought again.
When it hit him, what his lover, Jean, would think of him now, he thought again.
He sabotaged the production facility, puncturing the feeder tubes and loosening screws in the reaction vessel to fill the whole warehouse with flammable, toxic fumes. And then he lit a candle at the far end of the building, and ran.
The next day, there's a remarkable hole in the pseudo-cartel's production network... and his last reliable contact has informed him that there's an eraser hit on him.
All he could think was that he'd done a good job of it- and that he was lucky they had no idea about Jean.
extra. He has a steady relationship with a woman named Jean, who lives in England and so far remains unknown to the people he is running from. He uses burner phones to contact her occasionally, to let her know he is alive - but he only ever leaves a single message with each phone, and destroys them afterwards.
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