Paul Smecker Bio and Permissions

[smecker]

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM

Name: Paul Smecker

Aliases: (none)

Age and/or birthday: October 28, 1956; in Taxon he is forty-eight years old now

Fandom/Media/OC?: The film Boondock Saints (only the first one)

Programmed Possession: A personal mp3 player loaded with music

Arrival date: 1 December 2010

I am...: Formerly-FBI genius agent dealing with vigilantes; still snarky.



BODY OF EVIDENCE

Describe your character physically. Paul stands at five-foot-eight and weighs in at a buck fifty; skinny but very toned. He carries himself with physical poise and good reflexes. He has longish hair of a sort of tawny brown and blue-grey eyes. He's always well-groomed, clean-shaven, and manicured. He has a sharp-featured face with city miles on that sucker; he definitely looks his age. He tends to a lot of restless motion-- if there's nothing else he can do, he will busy his hands with a cigarette.

What does your character wear? Paul dresses sharply, although he no longer wears suits as a matter of course. It's usually trousers and a nice shirt or sweater, excellent fabrics, colors that flatter him. ~Quality~, baby.

That covers what they look like. What do they sound like? Paul has a raspy voice from years of cigarettes. It is expressive, and he uses it to great effect when yelling at dumb cops.

Running down the list of the five senses.... smell? Paul smells of his aftershave and hair product, cinnamon or spearmint chewing gum, and cigarette smoke. He may also smell of chemicals, sometimes.

Touch & Taste. Uh, okay there. Paul takes decent care of his skin and person. Normal human blood. Normal human everything.

The fine, fine details: He's got a few scars from life as a big bad FBI agent; there's a knife scar on one rib and a bullet scar on a shoulder. Probably a few other minor ones.

PB differences? Mostly just in wardrobe. Paul dresses more casually than his icons reflect.



BENEATH LE SURFACE

A history of me: AIGHT, WELL. Paul Smecker, only child of a single mother who taught music at a private boys' school in Boston. His mother was a classically trained opera singer who'd boned a music critic on her way to the top, got knocked up, and promptly had her diva career derailed. Paul grew up in a really weird environment in some respects, a poor boy/son of a teacher/bastard raised among the sons of Boston's rich elite, with an intense, angry mother who demanded familiarity with Verdi. To make life weirder, he spent summers with his mother's sister in Atlantic City, who owned a nightclub filled with dancing strippers.

SOMEHOW in all of this he developed a hard-on for justice, and fixed his eyes on becoming FBI. He bugged off to New York around sixteen, worked hard at first the City University of New York and then Columbia and then applied to the NYPD. Paul's been on the accelerated course all his life, in a sense, coupling natural intelligence and talent with a brutal work ethic and thus making everyone else look bad.

During his years at Columbia he met a theatre major named Angela and they became friends, roommates, and eventually husband and wife for convoluted reasons of guilt despite Paul being really extremely homosexual. More on Angela later.

Anyway Paul eventually applied to the FBI, got in, and continued to try and make people look bad, which was a little harder in the FBI but not by much. He spent time in every department of the Bureau, moving from area of expertise to area of expertise, getting promoted and pissing people off and moving around a lot for different postings.

NOT TO SAY THAT NOTHING HAPPENS DURING TWENTY YEARS IN THE FBI, but, essentially, Paul has a really successful career as an extremely sharp and competent FBI agent with a reputation for being a tough-as-hell genius, and this happens until 1998 when, while working in the Organized Crime department of the Bureau, he gets called back home to Boston to look at some dead thugs in an alley. Thus begins the complete fuck-up of his life.

It turns out this is not actually a mob killing, but self-defense from some likeable local boys; Paul solves the case with a swish of his wrists and casual condescension, saunters back to the local PD, and is like, yeah, get me some coffee, bitches.

And then more mobsters start showing up dead.

At first Paul thinks this is a mob war in the offing but as the bodies pile up he begins to be increasingly bothered by the case. When he realizes this is no mob war but those nice local boys waging vigilante warfare on the mob, he is like WHAT THE FUCK DO because ethics and ideals and the law and what he WANTS are all at odds. Quite awkward.

So in great life choices fashion he gets smashed, talks to a priest, and decides to help Irish kids kill people.

As usual, shit starts bad and gets worse-- there's some other really suspect life choices involving a daring rescue in drag that ends in tears and unconsciousness-- but hey things are kind of working out because it turns out the notorious hitman who was supposed to kill the nice local boys is actually their father. Good? Right?

NO because the man's a fucking fanatical nutjob who Paul is intensely uncomfortable working with. The feeling is mutual, and one month after the end of Boondock Saints, Il Duce and Paul Smecker confront each other over a difference in ~methodology~ and Il Duce solves this by shooting Paul in the face (and chest, and belly, and...)

Paul bleeds out in an alley, thus ending and concluding the downward spiral of what was once a nice career. Boom.

Except that he wakes up in Taxon, where shit gets unreal, but, you know, it's better than dead. Except for when he is dead. In Taxon. As happens from time to time.

IN TAXON, Paul has not told anyone about his wacky vigilante shenanigans but Wyatt; Glitch would know something about them from that time that evil versions of Connor, Murphy, and Il Duce showed up in Taxon, but Paul hasn't volunteered information on who they are. Some things don't bear talking about, like that time you betrayed your entire moral philosophy and got killed for it.

Anyway, in Taxon, Paul has met many interesting people and been bitten by many interesting vampires (okay, one), and been dragged out of house and home and killed by zombies, which prompted him to fortify and stock a centrally located building as a safehouse against further fucked-up shit. He's made stabs at investigating What the Shit is going On but mostly..... Taxon represents a second chance for him, one in which he's not elbows-deep in blood and rationalized choices, so despite the frequent horrors of Taxonian existence, Paul's kind of taking things one day at a time and cautiously being happy (this is a first) with one Mr. Cain, and blaring his opera as loud as he fuckin' wants.

Who matters? In Taxon, first and foremost Wyatt. Paul is for the first time in a long time genuinely trying to navigate a serious monogamous relationship. This is frequently a rocky road, filled with cultural clashes for them both, but, well, the sex is good and Wyatt is cute in a cowboy hat, okay?

Beyond that, Paul and Glitch have an in-law sort of relationship, with Paul also trying to adjust to this 'family' thing; Azkadellia gets included in this weird Oz side of the family by extension.

Paul has bantered with Josef, argued with Sherlock (what else is new), and...... damn, I uh, need to get him out of the house more. He doesn't really have a lot of significant CR with many of the current cast, which I need to fix-- he was kinda close to Buffy and Scott, but they're gone now. He also misses Jenny, Godric, and Dawn.

From his 'real life', Paul certainly misses Angela, his sometime wife (it's a long story), as well as having considerably more conflicted feelings about Connor, Murphy, and their father. He even kinda misses those dumb Boston cops.

Personality & Psychology: Paul's psychology prior to Taxon and his psychology now are kinda different things. Back in the real world, you can best define Paul and his actions as "everything is about making a point" to the people around him. As a gay man in a traditionally straight-male-dominated career, Paul has mastered the art of defense-by-offense, of being a confrontational, snarky, in-your-face and in-your-space bastard.

In Taxon there is honestly way less need for that. He's not anyone's boss here, he doesn't need to scrabble by his fingernails for respect from his colleagues, he doesn't need to show anyone up, and he doesn't need to be on defensive all the time. So he's... relaxed, some. The snark is still there, but it's generally less edged, and Paul does a lot more of just (metaphorically) munching popcorn and watching the city and its inhabitants be weird fucks.

Aside from that: Paul is pretty intelligent and insightful, generally speaking, and, in actions at least, pretty decent and moral. He may be a bitchy pain in the ass to talk to some days, and he may not even like you much but if there's a crisis situation, personal feelings get put on hold to help save lives, etc. Unless you're a vampire

Skills, Powers, Weaknesses, and et cetera: Paul has all the skills a trained FBI agent would have, with an emphasis on forensics and deduction more than I-can-kick-your-ass. Not that he's lacking in the ass-kicking arena, he can shoot a gun, he can throw a punch, but he refers to this as "all the macho shit" and it's not something he particularly enjoys or cares about. Mostly, he's a detective, not a SWAT team member. He is a very good detective.

Paul's also a pretty good cook, and he does yoga, and he is pretty well-read as far as general cultural and historical knowledge goes. (One of) his passion(s) is opera music, which he listens to a lot, although he likes music in general. He speaks some German and some Italian, thanks to a lot of opera.

Random pointless things Paul knows how to do: hold the five positions of ballet, play the piano, calculate bullet trajectories, eat with chopsticks, grow an orchid, lecture on the porno industry, clean-the-fuck-out-of-a-house.

Sexytiems: Paul has a high sex drive and is almost exclusively drawn to men. I would say exclusively for all RP purposes; Angela is a backstory exception that had specific reasons for that. That said, while Paul has never been a 'faithful partner' much in his past, he is trying hard for that with Wyatt, and so far, he's keeping it up.

Best way to meet this character: Paul spends a lot of time just wandering around the city exploring and poking at things; if he's not wandering he is either a) at the Birdhouse or b) exercising at the Sanctuary. He also runs in the morning, six a.m. usually, so he's... around. His Taxon 'job' is maintaining the Birdhouse as a defensible point, so he, uh, works from home? He's friendly enough to new people, he'll do the welcome wagon thing if approached, but jadedness from seeing so many people come and go means he doesn't seek them out, either.



PERMISSIONS

This section is to establish a baseline of both OOC permission and IC conditionals for various things that might happen in game. As always, just telling someone to 'talk to you OOC' on any borderline cases is a perfectly vald answer.

THE MIND: Paul's mind can be read, he has no special resistances to this. Thoughts are in italics. His mind is fairly organized, and pretty active and thinky and deduce-y. These are all technical terms.

THE BODY: I am cool with physical harm! If you want stuff to happen, let's talk OOCly.

FUNKY STUFF: Characters can psychically know stuff about Paul, but check with me OOC that you're getting the right stuff for this Paul since he is AU. He has no particular auras beyond 'human'.

PRIVACY: Threadhopping is gravy, unlocked posts are gravy, locked posts talk to me, no he will not hide his position on the map.

SURPRISE!: Paul's pretty alert, but he's also only human. If your character has a superhuman way of being sneaky, it's fine. If they are also only human, I'm probably still fine with it, but run it by me OOCly just in case?



MISCELLANEOUS