MERCH!

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Aldous Church



Concept: Interrogator/Torturer for Hire

Desc: Middling tall with a tendency to loom. Pale and pasty. Eyes like two piss-holes in the snow. Hair running to white. Long tapered fingers with immaculate nails. (He’s a little vain about them.) Tends towards charcoal gray or black suits. Never wears a tie. suspenders, no belt.  He speaks with a cultured British accent (which is fake) and usually in a low monotone. A great deal of this façade he presents is towards a calculated psychological effect. (Both for clients and subjects) Always carries a little pocket-knife. razor keen and very old.

History: The first thing you have to understand is that the CIA never employs people like this...Directly.  Aldous was the only child of a pair of outback rednecks with a strong streak of survivalism and religious hysteria.  Fate does like her little jokes.  Aldous grew into his teens to discover that his intellect was four times as strong as either of his parents. His will was twice theirs, and he was apparently born without a full complement of emotions. Still, when he thinks of home, he focuses on the good times. That one time when he went hunting with father and killed and dressed the entire buck at age 10,(Father was so proud) and the night he slit both of their throats and set the farmhouse on fire.
     Aldous enlisted in the army. He learned a number of useful things there.  It turned out he had some skills and a certain outlook that fit a certain profile for certain types of very very very black bag operations. As it happens, he was right on the verge of being sent to Leavenworth when the people from Langley turned up and said, “We’ll just take this problem off your hands.”
    Aldous wasn’t the sort of fellow to really understand, or feel gratitude, but he was also smart enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth.  And in truth, The CIA was just the kind of intellectual stimulus he felt like he needed.
   In fact, he was a bit sad when the operatives came around to kill him but didn’t bother to hit back. He allowed them to think he was dead and then hung out his shingle as an “Interpersonal Information exchange facilitator”
    Now he makes 6 figures a year and gets to torture new and interesting people.

Attitude: Everything breaks eventually. But there’s no need to go right for nail clippers on a person's eyelids. Sadism is all well and good for amateurs but if you want to be a professional in the field, you have look at each subject as an intellectual puzzle to be solved.  Once you’ve begun with full-on physical torture, you cannot, of course, throttle back to simpler interview techniques. So, as long as time is not a pressing factor,  Aldous will start simply.  A simple interview using time-tested interrogation techniques. Then proceeding to chemical interrogation techniques. Civilians simply don’t have the training to withstand much of that at all.  The rare professional is treated to extended sleep deprivation, electrical shocks, and then on to grimmer and more permanent methods.

Skills: Aldous’s understanding of anatomy, interrogative medicine, and psychology is well founded on deep reading and experience in the field. Also, Aldous recognizes that many people under actual torture will confabulate and as a result, he’s become quite adept at recognizing the tells for lies. If you lie to him in your initial interview, he’ll know, and then it will be ON.  Additionally, He’s skilled with hand to hand weapons, and as a result of his upbringing, quite capable of disappearing into a forest and killing anyone who comes in after him. He’s also fluent in French, German, Russian, and is working on Semitic languages at the moment. 

Gear: Aldous has a mobile phone that he normally keeps wrapped in tin foil. He is partial to a black Filofax and a Zebra 750 pen. ("You could kill someone with one of these. If you cared enough.") He keeps a handcuff key on his keyring as well as a set of nail clippers (The nail clippers are used for intel gathering in the field.) He also possesses a glass knife. flat on one side and heartbreakingly sharp. custom made for him by the same Inuit tribesmen who chip glass scalpels for eye surgery. Totally invisible to metal detectors and normally taped to his left leg if he's expecting trouble. The blade itself is only about 2 inches long and about a thumb-width wide. The same sort of style of blade that Italian noblemen used to duel with and inflict dozens of mortal wounds within a short amount of time.


Home: About a year ago, Aldous bought a private jet. it has three sections, The forward section allows his team to travel with him to various ports of call in relative comfort. The second section is where Aldous resides on a semi-permanent basis. Although he does own a cabin way up in the hill country somewhere, He only visits that place maybe twice a year. Barrister bookcases hold his library in place during flights with turbulence. (Although the glass panes have been replaced with Lexan)  The aft section of the plane is Aldous operating theater and is heavily sound-proofed and window free. The door has a magnetic lock.


Circle: As you can imagine, Aldous's circle of Allies and Contacts isn't very large. He's not particularly friendly and people aren't exactly rushing to tell him things in order to curry favor. He IS a card in a Rolodex for many people who live in a shadowy world filled with shadowy acts. But it's not as if Aldous himself is going to be able to reach out when HE needs information or favors. Aldous is mostly okay with this. He was always something of a lone wolf.

Story Uses:

*”The knife has told me that our time together will be SPECIAL.”
Being subjected to Aldous’s non-existent mercies is not going to be a day at the beach for anyone, but it’s likely to be especially grim for any supernatural caught in his grip. The main reason why is, because you know something that someone else wants to know rather badly, and being supernatural, you have resources that even highly trained operative don’t possess.  Rub some paint stripper on a person’s nipples and he’s likely to tell you everything he knows, but most supernatural critters don’t have the same fear of permanent damage that regular mortal folks possess.  Not only that, but supernatural subjects fascinate him. No two subjects are alike in this regard and they are an endless source of what can only be classified as “Wonder” for him. In fact, he rarely bothers with mere human subjects anymore, often leaving them to his interns.  

Yes. That’s right. You heard me right. Aldous has interns and a well-paid staff of  mercenaries. All of whom have been carefully vetted by him and are at least as emotionally empty as he. There was a streak there where it became distressingly common for clients to receive the intel they’d paid for, and then decide to turn around and try to get rid of the interrogator. Adjustments had to be made.

* Kiss or Kill
The CIA seems to go back and forth on whether Mr. Church is an embarrassment to the agency that needs to be liquidated or whether he’s a contractor they’d like to have back on the “unofficial” payroll. Occasionally, people can get caught in this spook-show cross-fire. For his part, Church wouldn’t mind going back to work for the Agency, but he’d want more money and he knows that working for them would mean constant checking up on them. Spooks. You just can’t trust them.

* “Aldous, I need your velvet touch here...”
While Aldous makes a good old enemy or a good new enemy, for some types of characters, he’d make an excellent Ally. People need professional “Peelers” all the time and the business keeps Aldous hopping.  Frankly, he could fly all over the middle east picking up business wherever he goes.

Connections:

Dr. Dennis McMurtry is liable to be the only person who's actually seen this guy's face. That was a long time ago. He was a different man then. It's not likely that Dennis will be on the phone to Aldous anytime soon, but he might recognize the guy by description and/or Modus Operandi.
The Vermillion House is likely to have Aldous in their Rolodex. He'd be the kind of guy that would have a standing invitation to attend one of their parties.  Aldous isn't a fan of their particular brand of decadence, but he does attend at least once a year so as not to offend a paying client.

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