App [Midnight Syndicate]
Jan. 10th, 2016 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thecomplicationsCHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Valentine Wolfe
CANON: Deathstalker
CANON POINT: Deathstalker Destiny, before Constance and Robert’s wedding.
CHARACTER AGE: 31
HISTORY:To start, it’s important to acknowledge that Deathstalker is epic space opera in the 1950’s style (although in came out in the 90’s): events are broad, characters are bigger than life, impossible coincidences happen a lot, and everything is very very bloody and very bloodthirsty.
Valentine Wolfe was born the eldest son and heir of Jacob Wolfe. He has two younger siblings, Stephanie and Daniel. The Wolfes are an old family, one of the first Hundred Families and a part of the aristocracy of the Empire. The Empire is the Human Empire (clones, espers, aliens, and AI are rather conclusively not considered citizens), ruled by Her Imperial Majesty Lionstone XIV, who is known in polite society as the Iron Bitch. Jacob Wolfe is, at this time, one hundred and three years old, and Valentine is a drug connoisseur. It is said that if you can eat it, sniff it, inject it or stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, Valentine has tried it, at least once. And usually he likes it, so he tries it again. The combination of drugs he ingests would likely be toxic to anyone else, but at this point Valentine’s physiology is no longer wholly human.
There’s various squabbling within his family, as Stephanie and Daniel try to discredit him to get their father to disinherit him, but Valentine has a couple of tricks up his sleeve. Some of them relate to battle drugs, or sex drugs repurposed to work in combat, and some of them relate to the fact that he’s actually a highly-trained swordsman. The latter is a very carefully kept secret, and Valentine has had all of his past trainers killed in order to preserve it. In addition, there’s a lot of court politics, as various people try to find favor with the Empress.
The major court dispute that the Wolfe clan is involved in is the bid to produce the new stardrive. It’s based on technology created by one of the alien species, and Clan Campbell has the obvious bid for it, based on their involvement in past stardrive production, but Clan Wolfe is determined to fight for the contract, mostly using political influence. Then Valentine finds out through some of his connections in the clone and esper underground that part of the Campbell’s success with technology has been because of their secret alliance with the AIs of Shub (a sworn enemy of humanity). The Campbells have promised Shub access to the new stardrive in return for Shub’s help in gaining the contract. (Important to note is that Clan Campbell never intended to deliver on this promise, since they considered arming humanity’s enemy a step too far.)
With the help of cyberats (think hackers), Clan Wolfe brings down Campbell tower security, killing most of the major members of the family. This was permitted by the Empress, mostly because she likes to keep everyone on their toes and focuses on conniving against each other. After killing the leader of Clan Campbell, Jacob Wolfe is then delivered a knife in his back, from his son, Valentine.
Valentine then takes over Clan Wolfe, no one suspecting that he was responsible for Jacob’s death. Stephanie marries a man named Michel and Daniel marries Lily, in marriages arranged before Jacob’s death and stipulations in his will as political and financial maneuvers. Valentine’s arrangement had been with Beatrice Christiana, who threatens murder up until the day of the ceremony, then punched out Valentine, kicked the presiding Vicar in the nuts, and ran away to the Sisters of Mercy for sanctuary as a nun. Valentine isn’t overly bothered by this.
Valentine focuses his attention and his newfound popularity with the Empress on attending court, leaving Daniel and Stephanie to take care of overseeing the starship production on the planet of Technos III. The Empress considers Valentine to be something of a court jester, a drugged degenerate who amuses her. That position is useful for Valentine, who has ambitions beyond his current state, and can use the Empresses favor to protect himself against his biggest enemy, Vicar Kassar of the Church of Christ the Warrior (who has problems with Valentine’s degeneracy and his open defiance of Church morality).
Unfortunately for Clan Wolfe, there’s a rebellion in process, led by Owen Deathstalker (after his no-reason-given outlawing by the Empress) and Jack Random (someone with a lot of experience of starting rebellions). They help the people revolting on Technos III, and along with intrigue from Stephanie and Daniel and planted explosives from Lily and Michel, the entire factory is blown up. The stardrive contract is taken from Valentine and given to Clan Chojiro and Stephanie and Daniel are disowned from Clan Wolfe. (Lily and Michel die as part of the whole debacle.)
Valentine recovers politically from this disaster, even though not many people could. Partly it’s because he still has contacts with Shub, giving him greater access to technology that he feeds to the Empire. He is partnered with a man who makes mechanical monsters, and Valentine provides the programming for them, as well as the control. Through a combination of the effects of the esper drug, which gives Valentine a level of telepathy, and Shub-provided tech, Valentine can control these war machines.
In the background, the rebellion started by Owen Deathstalker has turned into all-out war. The Empress sends Valentine and many other troops to Virimonde to defeat David Deathstalker (who came to power as Lord Deathstalker after Owen was outlawed) and his companion Kit SummerIsle (who became Lord SummerIsle after killing first his parents and then his grandfather). Valentine’s orders are to pacify the entire planet of Virimonde, through whatever means necessary.
Valentine takes great pleasure in wiping out everything living that stands before him. Then he returns to the capital planet, Golgotha, in time to see the Empress challenged and defeated by the rebels. He flees, taking up the castle on Virimonde, a planet now devoid of any life save the companions that Valentine brings with him. He starts to produce the esper drug, to satisfy his own need for it and to use it as a path back into power.
In addition, Valentine grows closer to the AIs of Shub. Owen Deathstalker, now an agent of the Empire, which is in the process of becoming a different place in the aftermath of the Empress’ defeat, returns to Virimonde to avenge the dead and to defeat Valentine and bring him back for trial for war crimes. As soon as Owen sees the depth of destruction on Virimonde he recalibrates his goal to be to kill Valentine. Valentine evades capture, however, using a Ghost Warrior, a dead body turned into an agent of Shub, where the dead body happens to be Owen’s ex-girlfriend, to distract Owen.
Valentine goes to Shub and lets them recast him, injecting nanotech to allow him to heal from pretty much anything. He then returns to Golgotha, disguised, to kill Robert Campbell and Constance Wolfe, before they can marry and take the throne as constitutional King and Queen of the Empire. Valentine’s goal is to become Emperor once they are dead, and destroy the Empire from within. (This is the canon point I’m taking him from, before the actual attempt, although it can be noted that Valentine fails when the AIs of Shub turn their back on him and decide to ally with humanity against a greater threat that’s coming, upon the promise that humanity will recognize their intelligence.)
PERSONALITY:
By what accounts there are, he was a normal enough child in school, perhaps even a little quieter than most. As an aristocrat, he went to a special school with other children of aristocrats, and while there was a lot of pressure to fit in and please his father, Valentine didn’t face the abuse that some of the aristocratic children did. Still, at some point he got into drugs and the even-more-intoxicating desire for power, and having tasted it, he never went back. He cultivated in himself an overactive imagination, and partnered with that a desire to try every drug that he could get his hands on, legal or not. Given the level of decadence that the Empire had fallen to, there were quite a variety of options for the legal ones.
His appearance is distinctive, and several seasons out of fashion with the court (where people change skin and hair color as easily as clothing color), but having found something which suits him, Valentine does not change it. When he goes into the underground at some point he washes off his face and ties his hair back in a braid, and he finds it unnatural feeling. The lipstick does a lot to hide his emotions, and Valentine likes it for that.
He is an addict, but (other than the esper drug), Valentine is not addicted to anything in particular. Detox would be a terrible idea, but what Valentine is truly addicted to is the feeling of more, the feeling of transgressing more than he has in the past. When he’s on the battlefield, whether personally or in the form of controlling the war machines, Valentine is an indiscriminate killer. He could single out the people not on his side, but he prefers to sow mayhem in his path and if they don’t want to die, they should get out of his way. He never feels bad about it. He never feels bad about anything, whether it’s betraying someone who trusted him, killing innocents, or getting people addicted to one of his drugs so they’ll be reliant upon him.
Valentine takes care for a while to cultivate his image as someone delicate, someone incapable of fighting. It doesn’t last forever, although it’s a surprise to everyone he reveals it to in the beginning, because Valentine is remorseless about wiping out everyone who could testify as to his ability with a sword, including in particular those who had trained him in it. He is an aristocrat, one of the first Hundred Families, and he has a very deeply engrained arrogance that accompanies that. Whenever he walks out among the ordinary people on Golgotha (before everything goes to shit) he is greeted with space and respect, and Valentine accepts it as his due, without even thinking about it.
He doesn’t shy away from confrontation, although he thinks that the lower classes aren’t worth using clever words on. He makes an enemy of the Church, perhaps because he sees that with the way he acts they’ll never be an ally, or perhaps because it amuses him to make them angry in whatever way he can, without declaring outright war. When he’s engaged, he mocks his fiancee, telling her that he plans to wear white and the veil to the wedding, and that they’ll make beautiful children together, when she says that he’s not getting within six feet of him. (When she calls off the wedding and flees to join the Sisters of Mercy as a nun, Valentine writes her with a bill for the ceremony and a compliment about how sexy her new outfit makes her look.)
In general, Valentine’s actual rooms are relatively sparse. He enjoys comfort, and absolutely wants the highest quality of bed, massager and the like, but he doesn’t decorate his rooms. The more interesting scene is always the one unfolding in his head, and that’s the way Valentine likes it. He’s encouraged himself to be superstitious, because it makes the world more interesting and because it interacts in an amusing manner with all of the drugs that he’s always taking.
In the end, he allies himself with Shub because he loves the concept of the destruction of all of humanity. Even then, what they promise isn’t enough for him, he thinks it would be far more amusing to become Emperor and destroy all of humanity from the inside out. He gives a partial reason for this, at one point, to his brother, that it’s because their father hadn’t accepted him as who he was so he’d decided that all of humanity deserved to burn, but the rest of the reason is that Valentine spurs himself to deeper and deeper depravities.
He doesn’t do so mindlessly. Valentine, for all the drugs he inhales, snorts, and injects, has a remarkably sharp mind. He keeps himself balanced on that edge, where not enough of any particular drug would tip him over as surely as too much would, and he thrives there, where anyone else would have died by now. Valentine has a great ability to be strategic, and if he’d turned his attention to anything other than depravity and destruction he would have been an even more impressive opponent. As it is, although his mind can work on incredibly subtle turns and he did manage to stay on top for longer than he had any right to, his goal was incredibly unsubtle, in the end.
ABILITIES:
SINS & VIRTUES:
Gluttony: He wants to try everything, all the drugs, and indulges in good chocolates as well.
Pride: “I see my condition as a continuing work of art, with drugs the colors of my palette. And every work of art must be seen by an audience to be truly appreciated. Not that most people understand or appreciate the effort and hard work involved in an ongoing performance.”
Greed: When someone kills his pastry chef he acts very possessive, stating that he’s going to have to kill everyone who had a hand in it because Georgios was his. He also wants more and more power.
SAMPLES
Sample 1:
Valentine’s primary goal in this place is power, but his secondary is to find sources of drugs to replace what he had on Virimonde, to find levels of excess to replace what he’d been able to develop on his own. And so, as soon as he’d figures out that the candy is drugged he’s making a concerted effort to work his way through it, to figure out what things do.
He’s gained wolf ears and a tail, yes very ironic, even if he isn’t at all impressed, but the silver and black candy cane has provided a suitable rise in the rate of his heart, a need to do more.
Besides, controlling is a look that’s good on him, he figures, as good as the all-black clothing, pale skin, dark eyes and bright crimson lipstick that makes it so he can only look like he’s smiling. Which is fine with him.
“Here,” he says, voice providing no room for disagreement as he shifts towards his target to keep himself between them and the rest of the room. He’s holding out one of the purple cookies. “Eat this and tell me how you feel.”
Sample 2: Link (yourvalentine is my old account for him)
NAME: Valentine Wolfe
CANON: Deathstalker
CANON POINT: Deathstalker Destiny, before Constance and Robert’s wedding.
CHARACTER AGE: 31
HISTORY:To start, it’s important to acknowledge that Deathstalker is epic space opera in the 1950’s style (although in came out in the 90’s): events are broad, characters are bigger than life, impossible coincidences happen a lot, and everything is very very bloody and very bloodthirsty.
Valentine Wolfe was born the eldest son and heir of Jacob Wolfe. He has two younger siblings, Stephanie and Daniel. The Wolfes are an old family, one of the first Hundred Families and a part of the aristocracy of the Empire. The Empire is the Human Empire (clones, espers, aliens, and AI are rather conclusively not considered citizens), ruled by Her Imperial Majesty Lionstone XIV, who is known in polite society as the Iron Bitch. Jacob Wolfe is, at this time, one hundred and three years old, and Valentine is a drug connoisseur. It is said that if you can eat it, sniff it, inject it or stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, Valentine has tried it, at least once. And usually he likes it, so he tries it again. The combination of drugs he ingests would likely be toxic to anyone else, but at this point Valentine’s physiology is no longer wholly human.
There’s various squabbling within his family, as Stephanie and Daniel try to discredit him to get their father to disinherit him, but Valentine has a couple of tricks up his sleeve. Some of them relate to battle drugs, or sex drugs repurposed to work in combat, and some of them relate to the fact that he’s actually a highly-trained swordsman. The latter is a very carefully kept secret, and Valentine has had all of his past trainers killed in order to preserve it. In addition, there’s a lot of court politics, as various people try to find favor with the Empress.
The major court dispute that the Wolfe clan is involved in is the bid to produce the new stardrive. It’s based on technology created by one of the alien species, and Clan Campbell has the obvious bid for it, based on their involvement in past stardrive production, but Clan Wolfe is determined to fight for the contract, mostly using political influence. Then Valentine finds out through some of his connections in the clone and esper underground that part of the Campbell’s success with technology has been because of their secret alliance with the AIs of Shub (a sworn enemy of humanity). The Campbells have promised Shub access to the new stardrive in return for Shub’s help in gaining the contract. (Important to note is that Clan Campbell never intended to deliver on this promise, since they considered arming humanity’s enemy a step too far.)
With the help of cyberats (think hackers), Clan Wolfe brings down Campbell tower security, killing most of the major members of the family. This was permitted by the Empress, mostly because she likes to keep everyone on their toes and focuses on conniving against each other. After killing the leader of Clan Campbell, Jacob Wolfe is then delivered a knife in his back, from his son, Valentine.
Valentine then takes over Clan Wolfe, no one suspecting that he was responsible for Jacob’s death. Stephanie marries a man named Michel and Daniel marries Lily, in marriages arranged before Jacob’s death and stipulations in his will as political and financial maneuvers. Valentine’s arrangement had been with Beatrice Christiana, who threatens murder up until the day of the ceremony, then punched out Valentine, kicked the presiding Vicar in the nuts, and ran away to the Sisters of Mercy for sanctuary as a nun. Valentine isn’t overly bothered by this.
Valentine focuses his attention and his newfound popularity with the Empress on attending court, leaving Daniel and Stephanie to take care of overseeing the starship production on the planet of Technos III. The Empress considers Valentine to be something of a court jester, a drugged degenerate who amuses her. That position is useful for Valentine, who has ambitions beyond his current state, and can use the Empresses favor to protect himself against his biggest enemy, Vicar Kassar of the Church of Christ the Warrior (who has problems with Valentine’s degeneracy and his open defiance of Church morality).
Unfortunately for Clan Wolfe, there’s a rebellion in process, led by Owen Deathstalker (after his no-reason-given outlawing by the Empress) and Jack Random (someone with a lot of experience of starting rebellions). They help the people revolting on Technos III, and along with intrigue from Stephanie and Daniel and planted explosives from Lily and Michel, the entire factory is blown up. The stardrive contract is taken from Valentine and given to Clan Chojiro and Stephanie and Daniel are disowned from Clan Wolfe. (Lily and Michel die as part of the whole debacle.)
Valentine recovers politically from this disaster, even though not many people could. Partly it’s because he still has contacts with Shub, giving him greater access to technology that he feeds to the Empire. He is partnered with a man who makes mechanical monsters, and Valentine provides the programming for them, as well as the control. Through a combination of the effects of the esper drug, which gives Valentine a level of telepathy, and Shub-provided tech, Valentine can control these war machines.
In the background, the rebellion started by Owen Deathstalker has turned into all-out war. The Empress sends Valentine and many other troops to Virimonde to defeat David Deathstalker (who came to power as Lord Deathstalker after Owen was outlawed) and his companion Kit SummerIsle (who became Lord SummerIsle after killing first his parents and then his grandfather). Valentine’s orders are to pacify the entire planet of Virimonde, through whatever means necessary.
Valentine takes great pleasure in wiping out everything living that stands before him. Then he returns to the capital planet, Golgotha, in time to see the Empress challenged and defeated by the rebels. He flees, taking up the castle on Virimonde, a planet now devoid of any life save the companions that Valentine brings with him. He starts to produce the esper drug, to satisfy his own need for it and to use it as a path back into power.
In addition, Valentine grows closer to the AIs of Shub. Owen Deathstalker, now an agent of the Empire, which is in the process of becoming a different place in the aftermath of the Empress’ defeat, returns to Virimonde to avenge the dead and to defeat Valentine and bring him back for trial for war crimes. As soon as Owen sees the depth of destruction on Virimonde he recalibrates his goal to be to kill Valentine. Valentine evades capture, however, using a Ghost Warrior, a dead body turned into an agent of Shub, where the dead body happens to be Owen’s ex-girlfriend, to distract Owen.
Valentine goes to Shub and lets them recast him, injecting nanotech to allow him to heal from pretty much anything. He then returns to Golgotha, disguised, to kill Robert Campbell and Constance Wolfe, before they can marry and take the throne as constitutional King and Queen of the Empire. Valentine’s goal is to become Emperor once they are dead, and destroy the Empire from within. (This is the canon point I’m taking him from, before the actual attempt, although it can be noted that Valentine fails when the AIs of Shub turn their back on him and decide to ally with humanity against a greater threat that’s coming, upon the promise that humanity will recognize their intelligence.)
PERSONALITY:
The dead man scowled at them. “Turn back. I mean it. I’m not kidding.”Valentine is the villain, the archetypical devil, and it’s a role that he embraces eagerly.
“Oh, shut up,” said Valentine. “I’ve seen scarier things than you in my daydreams.”
“He probably has,” said Hood. “This is Valentine Wolfe. The Valentine Wolfe.”
By what accounts there are, he was a normal enough child in school, perhaps even a little quieter than most. As an aristocrat, he went to a special school with other children of aristocrats, and while there was a lot of pressure to fit in and please his father, Valentine didn’t face the abuse that some of the aristocratic children did. Still, at some point he got into drugs and the even-more-intoxicating desire for power, and having tasted it, he never went back. He cultivated in himself an overactive imagination, and partnered with that a desire to try every drug that he could get his hands on, legal or not. Given the level of decadence that the Empire had fallen to, there were quite a variety of options for the legal ones.
His appearance is distinctive, and several seasons out of fashion with the court (where people change skin and hair color as easily as clothing color), but having found something which suits him, Valentine does not change it. When he goes into the underground at some point he washes off his face and ties his hair back in a braid, and he finds it unnatural feeling. The lipstick does a lot to hide his emotions, and Valentine likes it for that.
He is an addict, but (other than the esper drug), Valentine is not addicted to anything in particular. Detox would be a terrible idea, but what Valentine is truly addicted to is the feeling of more, the feeling of transgressing more than he has in the past. When he’s on the battlefield, whether personally or in the form of controlling the war machines, Valentine is an indiscriminate killer. He could single out the people not on his side, but he prefers to sow mayhem in his path and if they don’t want to die, they should get out of his way. He never feels bad about it. He never feels bad about anything, whether it’s betraying someone who trusted him, killing innocents, or getting people addicted to one of his drugs so they’ll be reliant upon him.
Valentine takes care for a while to cultivate his image as someone delicate, someone incapable of fighting. It doesn’t last forever, although it’s a surprise to everyone he reveals it to in the beginning, because Valentine is remorseless about wiping out everyone who could testify as to his ability with a sword, including in particular those who had trained him in it. He is an aristocrat, one of the first Hundred Families, and he has a very deeply engrained arrogance that accompanies that. Whenever he walks out among the ordinary people on Golgotha (before everything goes to shit) he is greeted with space and respect, and Valentine accepts it as his due, without even thinking about it.
He doesn’t shy away from confrontation, although he thinks that the lower classes aren’t worth using clever words on. He makes an enemy of the Church, perhaps because he sees that with the way he acts they’ll never be an ally, or perhaps because it amuses him to make them angry in whatever way he can, without declaring outright war. When he’s engaged, he mocks his fiancee, telling her that he plans to wear white and the veil to the wedding, and that they’ll make beautiful children together, when she says that he’s not getting within six feet of him. (When she calls off the wedding and flees to join the Sisters of Mercy as a nun, Valentine writes her with a bill for the ceremony and a compliment about how sexy her new outfit makes her look.)
In general, Valentine’s actual rooms are relatively sparse. He enjoys comfort, and absolutely wants the highest quality of bed, massager and the like, but he doesn’t decorate his rooms. The more interesting scene is always the one unfolding in his head, and that’s the way Valentine likes it. He’s encouraged himself to be superstitious, because it makes the world more interesting and because it interacts in an amusing manner with all of the drugs that he’s always taking.
In the end, he allies himself with Shub because he loves the concept of the destruction of all of humanity. Even then, what they promise isn’t enough for him, he thinks it would be far more amusing to become Emperor and destroy all of humanity from the inside out. He gives a partial reason for this, at one point, to his brother, that it’s because their father hadn’t accepted him as who he was so he’d decided that all of humanity deserved to burn, but the rest of the reason is that Valentine spurs himself to deeper and deeper depravities.
He doesn’t do so mindlessly. Valentine, for all the drugs he inhales, snorts, and injects, has a remarkably sharp mind. He keeps himself balanced on that edge, where not enough of any particular drug would tip him over as surely as too much would, and he thrives there, where anyone else would have died by now. Valentine has a great ability to be strategic, and if he’d turned his attention to anything other than depravity and destruction he would have been an even more impressive opponent. As it is, although his mind can work on incredibly subtle turns and he did manage to stay on top for longer than he had any right to, his goal was incredibly unsubtle, in the end.
ABILITIES:
“Now nothing can damage me for long. Age will not wither me, nor time destroy me. I shall live ages, and do terrible things to keep myself amused. If the Devil didn’t exist before, he does now.”Valentine has low-level telepathy, which enables him to cause people not to see him and to protect himself to a certain degree against other people’s telepathy. He has a degree of control over the automatic functions of his body, like his blood and breathing. He is a trained fighter, in combination with using drugs that boost his performance. He also has a very good resistance to becoming addicted to any drugs, due to the fact that he’s been balancing side effects of drugs with other drugs for over a decade. His most important power is a result of the nanotech introduced to his body, which in addition to keeping him from ageing also gives him ridiculous regeneration powers. When a disrupter blast is fired through his chest, obliterating his heart, his body repairs itself. When his arm is cut off, a new one regrows. When his head is cut off, Valentine’s body is still functional and he picks up his head to place it back on his neck and reattach it. As far as capping it, obviously he’s not going to be able to survive absolutely everything in Midnight Syndicate.
SINS & VIRTUES:
Gluttony: He wants to try everything, all the drugs, and indulges in good chocolates as well.
Pride: “I see my condition as a continuing work of art, with drugs the colors of my palette. And every work of art must be seen by an audience to be truly appreciated. Not that most people understand or appreciate the effort and hard work involved in an ongoing performance.”
Greed: When someone kills his pastry chef he acts very possessive, stating that he’s going to have to kill everyone who had a hand in it because Georgios was his. He also wants more and more power.
SAMPLES
Sample 1:
Valentine’s primary goal in this place is power, but his secondary is to find sources of drugs to replace what he had on Virimonde, to find levels of excess to replace what he’d been able to develop on his own. And so, as soon as he’d figures out that the candy is drugged he’s making a concerted effort to work his way through it, to figure out what things do.
He’s gained wolf ears and a tail, yes very ironic, even if he isn’t at all impressed, but the silver and black candy cane has provided a suitable rise in the rate of his heart, a need to do more.
Besides, controlling is a look that’s good on him, he figures, as good as the all-black clothing, pale skin, dark eyes and bright crimson lipstick that makes it so he can only look like he’s smiling. Which is fine with him.
“Here,” he says, voice providing no room for disagreement as he shifts towards his target to keep himself between them and the rest of the room. He’s holding out one of the purple cookies. “Eat this and tell me how you feel.”
Sample 2: Link (yourvalentine is my old account for him)
