Master Bruce — Roleplayer Guild

Matthew M. Murdock  ♦  Defense Attorney, Private Practice  ♦  Hell's Kitchen, NYC, NY
C H A R A C T E R   C O N C E P T:

"For we walk by faith, not by sight."
2nd Corinthians, 5:7

Blinded in an accident as a child, Matt Murdock developed superhuman senses that allowed him to function with keen skills and reflexes. But when his father was murdered by a low-level gangster for refusing to throw a boxing match, Murdock's gifts were tempered by rage and a need to fight injustice. Studying law per his late father's wishes, Matt passed the bar and joined his best friend Franklin "Foggy" Nelson in opening a defense firm for the downtrodden in Hell's Kitchen, New York. Unable to quell his need to fight criminals, Matt also began operating as a masked vigilante by night - gradually shaping himself from an anonymous warrior into a figure to be feared by the underworld. Adopting the guise of the devil himself, Murdock became The Man Without Fear... Daredevil.

Both within his masked identity and outside of it, Murdock's amassed a wealth of enemies over the ten years he's been in operation, from the bloodthirsty Owl and disturbed Purple Man to the deadly assassin Bullseye. But one figure stands high above the rest as a foe in Murdock's contention: Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin of New York. Throughout their storied rivalry, Murdock and Fisk have been locked in a moral chess battle as Daredevil tirelessly works to dismantle The Kingpin's seemingly insurmountable empire. Fisk has in turn frequently targeted Murdock's loved ones and tried to destroy his life from every level systematically. Murdock has risen above every attempt much stronger, ready to fight another day, but the result has often been a stalemate that sees no certain end.

For now, they're forced to co-exist. Fisk knows Daredevil's true identity, while Murdock is slowly gathering evidence against Kingpin, unable to make a definitive move without jeopardizing everyone in his life. It's a cycle that has been simmering for years and is likely to reach it's boiling point soon - both are simply awaiting the first move.

C H A R A C T E R   M O T I V A T I O N S   &   G O A L S:
As a fan, I've read every Daredevil run in the comics since the early 2000's - some as recently as this week, others in my early teens. Despite being a popular character, he still feels like an unsung gem in the superhero pantheon for his catalogue of stories without any real dips in quality. So there's alot of material to pay homage to, which is what I intend to do in this game: tell a story of this seasoned crimefighter, with a rich history behind him, at a crossroads with an enemy he's never been able to master. Whether that's The Kingpin or his own soul is another question entirely.

C H A R A C T E R   N O T E S:
The accident that blinded him gave him complete mastery over his remaining senses. With training from a mysterious warrior named Stick, he combined a formidable prowess in combat with the ability to focus his senses into an inner radar, feeding him information about the world around him that few would be able to percieve. 

His notable enemies besides Kingpin include The Owl, Typhoid Mary, the ninja cult known as The Hand, The Gladiator, and especially Bullseye, who murdered both Elektra Natchios and Karen Page, Matt's greatest loves. Elektra eventually returned through ritual magic - Karen didn't, and the five years since have remained bitter for it.

His truly close allies at this point consist only of Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, his long-term business partner, and Sister Maggie, his formerly estranged mother. The relationship with both is complicated, as Matt's personal relationships always tend to be.

S A M P L E   P O S T:
Twenty blocks.

That had always been deeply overwhelming to him. Even as a young boy, before that life-altering accident had changed everything, he would look at the perpetual sea of buildings ahead of him and quietly marvel at the impossible scope. His mind would race ahead of his eyes and try to place a story to as many of them as he could - and within his limited imagination, some of the buildings housed just everyday people, others were home to cops and firefighters. Some of them even housed bad people, who hurt others just for fun. That was the prism from which little Matt Murdock saw the full spectrum of morality. There were the good, normal people, the people of authority, and the bad. The naive kind of thinking that was born out of religiously watching Saturday morning cartoons and being slowly read passages of the Bible by his concussion-addled father. Some days, he still yearned for that innocence. 

Others still, like this one, reminded him of a cold hard reality. That there was still a degree of the innocent and the guilty, yes, but that the court of law was always going to favor those who better understood it's fragility over those who didn't. Who could mend and manipulate a set of rules that books and declarations had decided were the cornerstones of society. Whenever Matt had decided to honor his late father's wishes and study law as his major at Columbia University, a large part of his goal in undertaking such a difficult trade was to usefully challenge the ideas of black-and-white that he'd held onto. The kind that told him that because the courts and a judge had decided there was only circumstantial evidence, the murderer of Battlin' Jack Murdock couldn't be held. And that because it was the law, he had to accept that.

He never could. Try as he might, it gnawed at his soul. He'd confessed it to his priest when looking for absolution. He'd alluded to it in discussions with his best friend, the man who would become his law partner, when looking for rationality. He even had long, drawn-out arguments within the confines of his own mind when looking to talk himself out of doing something stupid with his life. And yet when push came to shove, he readily - easily - chose the path that he'd been looking for every reason to avoid. The path of blood and pain, the road of darkness and suffering. The place that would continually break him down until, Murdock feared, there'd be nothing left. Because there was no other choice. Because at the end of the day, no matter how many years had passed - no matter the contradictory fact that his sight had long since been taken from him - he was still gazing up at an unforgiving sea of twenty blocks ahead. Trying to discern which parts of them were safe and needed saving.

Which was why he found himself on a rooftop at four in the morning. For weeks, he'd been working a tenement case involving a landlord that had steadily increased rent to a couple of Hispanic descent. The man had given them every excuse in the book - that they were late with payments in the past, that their credit was declining, that a filing error had led to an overcharge. All of it was a series of lies, and the burden of proof had been on Matt to contextualize why the landlord in question, who had a history of suing tenants out of their savings with the interesting pattern of none of the defendants being white, could easily be countersued for perjury if his clients had the money to facilitate it.

An open and shut case. In law, the approximate number of those wasn't easy to determine. Had Matt wanted to wager a guess, he'd have gone for thirty percent. But this case qualified, and he felt like if this were under normal circumstances, the nature of the case's transparency could allow him to breathe easy. Yet right now he found himself somersaulting over ledges, swinging across increasingly wide gaps, feeling the brittle cold air sink into his skin like sulfuric acid eating through a wall. He wasn't just stressed about the case, he was so stressed about it that he'd gotten out of bed the night before the court date to put on a crimson blanket of armor and wade through twenty-degree winds at high speed - anything to distract himself.

Then he heard it. About seven stories below him. Hard for him to single out the noise in between a bevy of ringing phones, car horns and tires squeaking across the pavement from blocks away, and voices from every direction, but his ears always perked up whenever he heard this distinct noise: bones crunching into bones. Someone was viciously beating into someone else, and the faint scent of copper filled his nostrils the second that he turned his head. 

Spilled blood.

"---gonna teach you to come into this neighborhood. This is my turf, you hear?! You hear me, you stinkin'---"

Matt's fist clenched tightly around the billy club. The aggressor's voice was the loudest, but he could also hear muffled cries. Whispers, telling someone else to "keep quiet" if they "wanted to walk away". It was all that he'd needed to hear to transition his trajectory downward. He'd wanted a distraction, and an assault in progress had made him curse that desire. Because he knew that right now, the boy who'd seen the world in black-and-white would have to step aside.

Time to let the Devil out.

Even though this is probably one of the incalculable games I've ran that have reached this conclusion, I feel like with this one I should say something in regards to how my participation ended. Or at least elaborate a bit more, since I've already said a little. 

My personal experience with the game started off very positively and I felt creative juices flowing for my characters that I hadn't felt in years. In the past few games, I was usually a post or two in before I'd get creatively spent and be forced to either drop or ghost with the faint hope that the drive would return. It used to vex me, but recent experience has illuminated a huge part of why it happened: medication. This past summer, a change in doctor left me without access to a certain medication that I'd been taking for a couple of years for anxiety, to the point that it took about two months to get put on something else. Within that two month period of being cold turkey, the idea for this game came about and I readily dove into it. 

What I didn't realize was that anxiety meds = hampered creativity for writing, at least in my case, and the minute that I was back on them was when I couldn't continue. It's like a part of my brain is locked off, and despite my want to do creative writing - any creative writing, even out of the game - I just can't access that while on this. I attempted to get back on the horse with Superman and with Hulk, and even heavily contemplated a new app just to shake the cobwebs off. Nothing came of any of it. A huge disappointment for me, but it's also not really something I can do anything about.

I'm not trying to make an excuse, as this is still something I'm trying to understand about myself. The simple fact is that it sucks and I wish it were different. The game suffered because (at least mostly) the GM is responsible for a general liveliness that I couldn't sustain. Which is where @Sep's contributions were absolutely essential and kept the thing running way longer than it probably could've lasted with me alone. His enthusiasm for the game from day one was palpable, and there were many, many chats between us where he would share ideas and listen to mine. It was really cool to be on that side of it, and I just want to thank him for being with it as long as he was. Without Sep, there'd have been no game.

I never stopped watching the game's progress and reading posts. All of you have been delivering absolute top-tier content in the IC and I salute it as some of the best writing I've had the pleasure of being amongst in awhile. It ended too soon, but not for lack of quality.

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