Name: Rufus "Roo" Washington
Age: 20
Sex: Male
Ethnicity: African American
Physical Description:Wiry, tightly muscled and about 5'10, Rufus has dark skin and a number of tattoos visible on his fists, arms and in other spots, notably a "BSM" on his neck that stays in place, but changes font every couple of days. His hair is a well-kept fade (yeah, they've got a barber in the place) and he wears a red Chicago Bulls hat that hasn't been confiscated...probably because the Guards at Nellis don't care as much or are just in the dark. Otherwise, he's attired in typical holding camp attire, which means an orange inmate suit. He has cold, hard eyes, deeply set in a face that is young and handsome, but stonefaced and wary.
Skillset:Smuggling, handoffs, observation and other skills that aid a dealer. Roo is now rubbing shoulders with educated people who aren't social services types and is starting to do more reading and learning. In various parts of the camp, yoga, tai chi and other meditative practices are becoming common. He's learning to concentrate and focus, but it's not because he's seeking enlightenment. He's also getting more buff, because there's lots of time in prison and he has been working on fitness for lack of anything better to do.
History:Born on the East Side of Baltimore, Roo came up in a family that had a mother and multiple children by different men and mental illness. She was bounced around from place to place and Roo was bounced around from relative to relative on his dad's side; guy was long gone, incarcerated and then killed inside at Jessup. He went to gritty urban schools where very little was learned except how to defend oneself and walk a certain way to avoid being victimized. Given half a chance, he probably would have been able to channel a natural intelligence or curiosity toward something that society deemed 'productive.' Instead, it was discouraged by pissed off teachers and overreacting authority figures. Much as his relatives tried to shield him from the darker truths of the street, he saw that his grandparents and aunts and uncles, the ones that had actual jobs, were still only scraping by and that there was no stability.
When there were problems at school, he ran afoul, along with some other kids, of the school resource officers who were violent toward the kids. Verbal exchanges escalated into arrest and the juvenile system by 8th grade, Rufus getting shackled and put before a juvie judge and sent to the city juvenile facilities, which were rough and where he was essentially introduced to gang culture. Once out, after a brief stay, he was put into the sort of classes where kids were essentially treated as dangerous from the word go. It was a cycle, and he flushed right down it.
By the time he was 16, he was a part of the Biddle Street Mob, a gang that started to profit from the Mexican heroin hitting the street in greater numbers. It was a way to pay bills, pay for his siblings in various places and give himself something. It was not an ideal way of life, but he did it. He did stints in the juvenile facilities and eight months in Jessup on a weapons charge. He'd done a murder, once, to make his bones and he bolted the dude up in a derelict rowhome. Police suspected but never confirmed and no one was talking because the guy Rooster killed was a witness in another case, out on bail after snitching. Roo was good at what he did, and was running a crew quickly enough because he was always switching up the moves, watching everything and figuring out how to do it just a little better every time.
Emergence drove up the trade, and the gang profited from the sudden shift in attention by law enforcement. Nonetheless, he got caught and put into Central Holding downtown, where he ran afoul of rival members. There was an incident and the two men that were going to fuck him up came out on stretchers; the one that lived ranted and raved about the devil. Roo was shackled, though he'd been a juvenile defendant in Baltimore so that'd happened before, and transported into DHS control. Ever since then, he's been seeing strange script in places, and his tattoos have been constantly shifting color and motif, though he wears long sleeves to try and keep this from being too apparent.
Due to his gang affiliation, he was immediately transferred into Nellis and housed as an alpha class emergent and studied, prodded, and drugged up. The authorities couldn't drag it out of him and he pretended to have no idea how to use it. Instead, he protested that he couldn't make it work consciously and bitched about headaches -- these guards and researchers weren't as good as the CO's at Jessup and City Holding, that knew that everything an inmate said was angled to get them something. These suckers believed it, or they were just too overworked to make Rooster Washington actually crow for them. As more inmates got put into Nellis, he was deemed a lower priority for study, compared to the people who were actually going scaly, turning different colors and growing tails, though the tattoo thing had them all aflutter initially. After a while, the whitecoat fucks found better 'subjects' for their cold attentions.
They're still making him take that pill shit, but he wants a way off it real bad.
Roo is also part of a crew that's keeping the peace in the camp, gang types that know prisons and have a leg up on some of these bougie types that have never dealt with screws and other inmates in this way. But they aren't doing it to make money. They're looking for a way to smuggle in what they need to fight back or figure out ways to do it. They're organizing the meditation sessions and looking for ways to tap the power, but they're also keeping the peace and keeping other groups in line, stopping any revolts and keeping the resistance organized.
There are a lot of college educated successful types in there, and a couple of them are on the inner council on strategy. So's Roo, as an experienced gang member and inmate, a guy that knows how to move shit quietly in and out of prisons and under surveillance in East Baltimore.
Psychological Profile:Roo is definitely a pragmatist. He has his reasons for being a criminal, he is defensive and has a bad attitude toward authority. But he sees clearly. There is power in this place. There is a lot of power, and it's in the mind. Using that, he intends to fight back. Life has always been a struggle for him, but now he has something that the Man doesn't.
The researchers are on the inside trying to study magic under a microscope while the inmates are reaching for spirituality and focusing techniques to channel it. Some Black Guerrilla Family stuff has made its way in from other prisons, some Marxism-Leninism and Malcolm X. Roo is part of a coterie of people adapting that thought process to the current situation, and not all of them are gang types -- some of them are coming from the corporate world of dog eat dog or even the Church with liberation theology. A couple of them are military that ran afoul of the Emergence. It's a meeting of minds from all sorts of places. Roo is definitely in the 'the fuckers with the needles are going to die first' camp, but he's hardly alone. A lot of people are expecting the government to start gunning them down, going by what C-Span is sounding like.
Possessions:- Bulls hat.
- Illegal cell phone, not that he has anyone out there to call. But other people do, so he charges favors for using it.
- A shiv.
- A network of other gang affiliates in the place.
salamimike,
Dane,
ML,
Ohm,
TideTypedWrong
