Full Name: Field Supervisor Canvas Fajaar
Nicknames/Aliases: Knight Canvas Shearwater
Age: 30
Gender: Male
Gift: Mental redirection (see skills)
Loyalty: Liberty, performing a long-term undercover operation in Erubesco as a Liberty Espionage Field Supervisor.
Description: Features of blended Middle Eastern and European heritage: Hazel-green eyes; dark tan skin; thick black hair and brows; straight, long nose. 5'10", lean, quick to smile. Neither excessively attractive or unattractive, he has a real, comfortable face, like your next-door neighbor or your best friend's big brother.
Personality: Canvas is flirtatious, borderline rakish, and full of double-entendres, but his bark is much worse than his bite on that front. Though firmly loyal to Liberty, at the end of the day he feels more at home undercover among the small luxuries and lavish impracticalities of Erubesco; he believes in equality, but he sure likes indulging in individuality.
Skills: Canvas's suggestion Gift allows him to deflect suspicion, unwanted questions, or even open hostility by verbally redirecting a conversation. If, for example, an Erubescan casually asked him about his whereabouts and he couldn't answer because he was conducting Liberty business, Canvas could simply give a phony answer, then ask an unrelated question about pizza and utterly derail the person's train of thought. If the suspicion/redirection was minor, the subject likely won't remember or care that he or she had a question at all. If Canvas redirects a more severe concern, especially if a potent emotion is involved, the subject may gradually remember the concern and require more redirection. His tactics are more effective if the redirection is smooth and causes the subject to land on an appropriate attention replacement.
"Canvas you are shady af. How come I keep seeing you near the data centers?"
"I was just on my way to the elevator. But know who else is shady? That Lawrence guy."
"...Yeah, he's always seemed kinda off."
"You should keep an eye out for that dude."
"Yah will do."
"Nice haircut btw."
"Oh, thanks."
He also, of course, has basic hand-to-hand and firearm combat training.
Weaknesses: Combat: While Canvas can redirect to distract opponents to some degree, his Gift isn't as useful in a fight.
If he pressed, he would probably qualify his fondness for nice, sparkly, Erubesco-esque things as a weakness.
Brief History: Canvas breathed Liberty culture since birth (his English mother and Iranian father were staunch believers), yet Canvas was always a bit more playful and devil-may-care than your average, model-citizen Libertian; he simply came out of the box that way. Canvas's early trainers and teachers put his propensity for mischief and theatricality to good use by setting him on track to become a spy. He has maintained his alias at Erubesco (a Knight with an affluent background and high social connections) for five years, where he manages other infiltrators. He occasionally returns to Liberty bases to brief and train new Agents.
Nicknames/Aliases: Knight Canvas Shearwater
Age: 30
Gender: Male
Gift: Mental redirection (see skills)
Loyalty: Liberty, performing a long-term undercover operation in Erubesco as a Liberty Espionage Field Supervisor.
Description: Features of blended Middle Eastern and European heritage: Hazel-green eyes; dark tan skin; thick black hair and brows; straight, long nose. 5'10", lean, quick to smile. Neither excessively attractive or unattractive, he has a real, comfortable face, like your next-door neighbor or your best friend's big brother.
Personality: Canvas is flirtatious, borderline rakish, and full of double-entendres, but his bark is much worse than his bite on that front. Though firmly loyal to Liberty, at the end of the day he feels more at home undercover among the small luxuries and lavish impracticalities of Erubesco; he believes in equality, but he sure likes indulging in individuality.
Skills: Canvas's suggestion Gift allows him to deflect suspicion, unwanted questions, or even open hostility by verbally redirecting a conversation. If, for example, an Erubescan casually asked him about his whereabouts and he couldn't answer because he was conducting Liberty business, Canvas could simply give a phony answer, then ask an unrelated question about pizza and utterly derail the person's train of thought. If the suspicion/redirection was minor, the subject likely won't remember or care that he or she had a question at all. If Canvas redirects a more severe concern, especially if a potent emotion is involved, the subject may gradually remember the concern and require more redirection. His tactics are more effective if the redirection is smooth and causes the subject to land on an appropriate attention replacement.
"Canvas you are shady af. How come I keep seeing you near the data centers?"
"I was just on my way to the elevator. But know who else is shady? That Lawrence guy."
"...Yeah, he's always seemed kinda off."
"You should keep an eye out for that dude."
"Yah will do."
"Nice haircut btw."
"Oh, thanks."
He also, of course, has basic hand-to-hand and firearm combat training.
Weaknesses: Combat: While Canvas can redirect to distract opponents to some degree, his Gift isn't as useful in a fight.
If he pressed, he would probably qualify his fondness for nice, sparkly, Erubesco-esque things as a weakness.
Brief History: Canvas breathed Liberty culture since birth (his English mother and Iranian father were staunch believers), yet Canvas was always a bit more playful and devil-may-care than your average, model-citizen Libertian; he simply came out of the box that way. Canvas's early trainers and teachers put his propensity for mischief and theatricality to good use by setting him on track to become a spy. He has maintained his alias at Erubesco (a Knight with an affluent background and high social connections) for five years, where he manages other infiltrators. He occasionally returns to Liberty bases to brief and train new Agents.
Full Name: Tobias (Toby) Schippers
Nicknames/Aliases:
Known in Erubesco as one of the "Ashland Slashers," or occasionally "The Grim Brothers" (according to a few tabloids fond of puns).
Known in Liberty as "Class 8 hostiles" - in other words serial killers, or simply "The Schippers brothers"
Various Wasteland settlements have names to reference Spire and his brother - "Humanity's Avengers," "Blood Brothers," or the "Lennie" to Spire's "George" (based on relative intelligence assumptions which Toby does not really appreciate).
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Gift: Toby can sense others' abilities, down the nuance and intensity. This ability also allows him to identify approximate location/distance of Gifted in a broader radius than the average sensory Gift. More recently, a long repressed but out of control empathy ability manifested. Toby can not only detect others' emotions, but feel them himself - along with their pains, sensations, and to some extent, their intents.
Loyalty: His brother, Spire. The fallen human race. And now the Wanderers.
Description: Pleasant, gentle features. Dimples. Wavy mouse-brown hair. Tall, lean. Often seen in argyle sweatervests. His most memorable feature is not visual, but auditory: his crippling stutter.
Personality: Mild and unobtrusive. Quiet, largely due to aforementioned stutter, which makes him come across as a shy, simple-minded guy. Not so. Toby's mind is a lot quicker than his tongue, and he loves reading old, human-written literature.
Pretty nice guy for a former serial killer, honestly. Though far from squeamish, he takes no particular pleasure in bloodshed; killing was only a duty for him. This conflict of lifestyle and disposition (not to mention a longstanding underlying belief that as one of the "Cursed" Gifted, he is inherently evil) leads to bouts of melancholy. Top that with an extra order of guilt.
Skills: Decent hand-to-hand fighter. Deadshot with virtually any firearm. His ability to predict the approach of other Gifted, as well as identify their nature and mood, makes him a valuable strategic asset.
Additionally, Toby has some medical training, though his apprenticeship was interrupted when his (human) tutor was killed, and much of his subsequent knowledge came from books or the trial and error of the various wounds he and his brother have picked up.
Weaknesses: Well. Toby's Gift isn't exactly a show-stopper in combat. And then there's the part where he can't carry a conversation and spends a lot of t--a lot of time t--trying to avoid saying any plosive c--consonants.
He is still kinda racist against Gifted. He's working on that.
Brief History: (See Spire's history)
Other:
Hel loves Spire but...doesn't exactly respect her "Uncle Toby," so Toby is pretty much terrified of her 80% of the time.
Though both factions have retrieved security footage of both brothers' faces, and while many people would have heard the nicknames of the killers (especially in Erubesco, where they love their sensational news, and in certain areas of the Wastelands where they have made a pretty nasty mark), Toby and Spire are not so well-known as to be recognized on sight by most citizens or even many military personnel.
Full Name: Spire Schippers
Nicknames/Aliases:
Known in Erubesco as one of the "Ashland Slashers," or occasionally "The Grim Brothers" (according to a few tabloids fond of puns).
Known in Liberty as "Class 8 hostiles" or simply "The Schippers brothers"
Various Wasteland settlements have names to reference Spire and his brother - the Erubesco nicknames along with "Humanity's Avengers," "Blood Brothers."
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Gift: Causes others' Gifts to rebound upon the user. Spire must have eyes on the target and sufficient concentration. (In other words, if Spire uses his ability on someone who can light people on fire, they're gonna catch themselves on fire.)
Loyalty: His brother, Toby, and more recently, Hel, the child who ended up in his unlikely care (played by VitoftheVoid). Traveling with the Wanderers for Toby's sake and for the safety in numbers.
Description: Pearl gray eyes, angular features, longish dark hair, stubbled, tall. Fond of peacoats with lots of pockets for lots of blades.
Personality: Sadistic, manipulative, superficially charming, and sarcastic. Any psychologist would diagnose him with ASPD in a heartbeat. Killing may be a duty for Toby, but for Spire, it's a pleasure.
Skills: Strong, with street-smart combat experience. Very handy in a knife fight or unarmed combat, decent shot with a firearm. Due to his Gift, the stronger the opponent, the more violent the taste of their own medicine... the more virtually unbeatable he becomes in a one-on-one match, turning the tables on usually devastatingly powerful Gifted.
Weaknesses: Offensively, must have sight of and attention on a single target, making group fights problematic. His fondness for cutting things can also put him in dangerously close quarters with Gifted whom he might more safely take down from afar. Additionally, weak or nonviolent Gifts will not be as affected by Spire's ability, again flipping the tables - weak Gifted will usually fare better against him.
Brief History: Growing up in a system of bunkers in the Ash among some of the last humans, Toby and Spire's non-Gifted family raised the brothers to believe in a cause: the inherent evil of the "Cursed" after the genocide of the human race. Spire's abilities had their first chance to manifest when he was eleven years old, when some Ashland bandits snuck into the compound. The violent and antisocial precursors he had exhibited as a child suddenly made sense to the humans; it wasn't his personality, or some trick of brain chemistry - he was simply one of Them. If his predisposition loaded the chamber, his environment from then on pulled the trigger. Despite the mistreatment and disgust from several of the humans, they let Spire stay - and they let him fight when they had to defend themselves, honing his taste for the whole knifey thing.
When the younger Toby began to show signs of a sensory Gift, Spire, surprisingly protective, kept the child's a secret to protect him from the mistreatment. Faction Gifted later killed off their human family.
For years, Toby and Spire were mission killers. At least they could be monsters who took down other monsters. That's how Spire convinced Toby. They spent several years picking off Ashlanders and occasionally venturing into Wasteland settlements--blending in for more extended stays--or even small faction towns with the IDs taken from the corpses of previous victims.
Things changed when they went after the Wanderers. Their plans to approach the Wanderers with hostility crumbled when a faction attack forced them into an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend situation. Furthermore, after both Schippers' lives were saved by members of the Wanderers, right in the midst of Toby having a moment of doubt about the inherent evil of the Wanderers, his long-latent empathy Gift surfaced, perhaps spurred into fruition as a side-effect as another Gifted's neutralization wore off. He could no longer hurt them without hurting himself - and he didn't even want to, because some of the more generous members of the group not only saved Toby's life when he was injured, but wanted to give the brothers a chance, even though they knew their past and their intent. For Toby, things began to change.
Spire was not happy with this setup, but he went along with it. But gradually even Spire began to have almost positive feelings about some members of the group - the fact that Montana fought alongside non-Gifted humans in years long past gave him an odd respect for the regenerator... Not to mention that he owes Soren, Clockwork, even Drake (despite the fact that Drake despises him) and others for saving his little brother.
But if anything threw Spire's boomerang bigotry off balance, it was the chance acquisition of a tiny but dangerously powerful red-headed girl named Hel. Somehow Spire got attached. Maybe it was because she was attached to him - she liked that he hated people she hated, and something about her bio-psychic connection had caused her to see an event from a long time ago that led her to believe Spire was someone to befriend (she saw her mother, Kora Norrevinter, free Spire from handcuffs and give him a weapon; Hel conveniently missed the bit from just before, when Spire was smooth-talking the rashly courageous woman into taking him in a fair fight, or the bit right after, where Kora snapped his arm like a pencil and he stabbed her in the abdomen. Or that other time when they tore each other to shreds and Spire probably only lived because Toby bounced a bullet off Kora's skull. She didn't catch that bit, either. Spire hasn't bothered to fill Hel in on the details of that particular rivalry).
Hel was a Cursed, even if she was a tiny one. But by now, months later, Spire has stopped pretending not to care about the girl.
They make an odd family.
Other: The longer he goes without a chance to kill a clear-cut enemy of the Wanderers, the more the other Wanderers start to look like appealing targets, and the more he starts daydreaming about how he might slaughter one without the rest of the group suspecting him. Too bad for him that Dawn can read minds.