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Saturday, June 20, 2015

Rory O' Halloran

Concept: Food truck Entrepreneur/Information Broker

Desc: Kind of broadly framed, black hair, thinning on top but still grows out down to his ass.(Normally he keeps it ponytailed) Bright green eyes and dimples.Lantern jaw shrouded in a rakish black beard. One strand of barbed wire tattoo on his right bicep. Wears a Celtic cross pendant on his neck that his mother gave him at his confirmation. Glasses for reading.

History: Rory is a good guy generally. He may drink a little too much, and really, if you’re in foodservice, that’s an occupational hazard.  And every once in a great while, he loses his temper in some raze-the-castle-salt-the-earth manner. But for the most part, he’s very level. certainly more level than his brothers or his sister. If it gives you any indication, he keeps 500 in his bank account at all times just for bail.  To his siblings credit, they’ve NEVER not re-paid him.
    Rory is the eldest, and he was the only one to follow in the family footsteps. His dad had been a full-on chef and had owned his own place before the fire.  After “O’Halloran’s” burned down, the old man was just not the same and a few months later, Pa passed in his sleep. Ma had been gone for years already.  All the O’Halloran children hope that Ma and Pa are together now, wherever they are.
   Rory’s business keeps him afloat. He, His wife Shoshana, his cousin Ciaran, and his eldest boy, Walt, are his solid crew with the occasional friend or family member filling in, or working swing, on any given night. These four are able to feed a couple hundred people out of Rory’s food truck and work like a well oiled machine.  And the business makes money. Not a ton of money, but it does make money. Shoshana is good with the books and has a good head for investment. (Rory breathes a silent prayer that certain stereotypes about Jewish girls turned out to be true.)  And while she’s always saying that they’d have enough money to open a place of their own soon, Rory isn’t exactly keen to be tied down in that respect.
And that’s largely because of his sidelight.
It started small actually. He got approached by a guy, a private dick who needed someone to keep an eye on a place. He’d been a friend of Rory’s brother, Liam.  And Liam, in a moment of drunken satori mentioned that his brother owned a food truck, and that he could maybe park it outside of the place, and keep an eye on it like that.  So, the dick approached Rory, and Rory after thinking it over, said OK, and without telling anyone, installed a hidden webcam and connected it to their mobile hotspot. parked the truck in front of the place for a week, (It was a good spot and made them some fat bank.) and after that, the dick had what he needed and a number of people went to jail. Rory got 2 large for his role in the affair...and decided to go into business for himself.
   He’s had to open a separate account at another bank because the money in the joint account he has with his wife would invite some scrutiny and some questions.  At present, he hasn’t told anybody exactly what he’s doing. And some of the places he’s decided to set up camp in, have been a bit questionable. (Although the truck has developed a bit of a following and people will travel cross-town at times as long as the new location pops up on Facebook.) But so far, he’s managed to hang out his shingle as a freelance surveillance professional and information broker and do so effectively. He’s starting to get a name among professionals and they even have to admit, he’s a hell of cook.
    Of course, This isn’t without it’s perils. Ciaran got his collarbone broken by some mook who seemed to KNOW that the truck was watching him somehow. Also, there have been an occasion or two where the client tried not to pay. Rory collected two of his brothers and his maniac sister and went round there and...well...it’s all very sordid. Let’s not go into it.

Attitude: “Look. I’m not some twinkly eyed fucker with a pig under one arm. I was raised in this country and I talk like an ordinary guy, not some guy hunting leprechauns. But I am proud of my heritage and I’m proud of my family. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, is there?  Maybe I’ve just got a drop of traveller blood in me.”

Skills: Crafts 3+ (Food obviously, but he’s also pretty good at fixing things that are broken in the truck on the fly.) A couple of dots of Investigation, because he’s getting good at it. He got some decent dots in socials as he has to interact with people nearly every night of the world. His upbringing has resulted in brawl 4 along with dots of boxing and brawling dodge. Strong Back would make sense too. He’s got willpower so he doesn’t fly off the handle all that often, but when he does, it is ON.  
And just because he’s pretty smart like that, He’s learned to speak Spanish like a native so that he can communicate with the other food truck guys. He doesn’t have a lot of russian, but he still flirts with the ladies who run the blintz truck. He’s also trying to decide if it’s worth it to learn a bit of chinese too.

Gear: I’ll talk about the Food truck itself below. But first i’ll talk about his personal gear. Rory is a bit of nut for any kind of tool that you can put on a key-ring, as a result, his personal keyring is like a clump of grapes. Every so often he has to go through and prune out the things he doesn’t use all that much just so he can keep putting his keys in his pocket. He normally has his Laptop with him wherever he goes, as it's the de-facto hotspot/sound system for the truck. It also stores his closely guarded family recipes.
He’s also writing a Irish Cuisine blog, which is developing something of a following. The pictures make you hungry.

“Paddy’s Wagon” is a fairly large food truck. It’s back wall is dominated by side-by-side double fry-o-lators and the bonnet vent over top of them.  There are two reach-ins on either side of the fry-wall. Much of the pre-prepped material gets stuck in there.
The front wall is dominated by a long steam table. Under the steam table is a bank of cold storage boxes and almost all of the fish and chips are stuck in there. The steam table is home to about different 8 different soups and chowders. The entire operation is designed to run off of styrofoam bowls, plastic sporks, wax paper for the fish and paper sleeves for the fries.  Coke, not pepsi.
The front wall is also home to three networked webcams that are squirt transmitting their footage back to home-base (The garage/kitchen where the prep-work gets done. Rory has set up a section of the mainframe back there to handle the footage.
Not only has this footage paid the rent on more than one occasion, it’s even helped catch the fucker that stuck a gun in Walt’s face one night.  (That guy got his pelvic bone broken in 3 places. He’s not going to ever be the same.)

Home: Rory, like most people who do what they love, has almost forgotten what home looks like. He’s normally only there to sleep or celebrate the occasional holiday. They’ve got a nice place in the burbs. The downstairs is a large oak-paneled den with it’s own bar set-up. Walt at 14, is already well on his way to being an accomplished mixologist. The two car garage is home to their mini-van and an old 280 Z that Rory is constantly tinkering with. The engine is actually in good shape, but the body is almost 85% bondo. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

Circle: Rory is an outgoing fellow and has a fairly large circle of friends, customers he likes, friendly competitors, and so on. In fact, he’s taken to pointing out to some of the customers if he’s parked across from some of his fellow food truck operators, “Hey, do yourself a favor, go get some of the mexican sausage from that guy over there, and then come back and get some of this soup and dunk it. You’ll thank me later.”  By dint of his friendliness and the fact that foodservice people constantly share gossip back and forth, he soaks up more raw intel on the street than you would even think possible. He’s also gone out of his way to be kind to police, especially his fellow irishmen, and so he’d likely have contacts for both street and police.

Story Uses:
*Rory is a guy with his hook in the water. But he has a couple of things that may be working against him and he’s not realized it yet. Shoshona is onto him. Or rather, she realized he’s gotten a little secretive about certain things, and wonders where some of the money is coming from.  She wonders if he’s gotten in over his head with somebody in the Irish mob. or maybe he’s having an affair. As such, they’re going through a bad patch right at the moment. Rory’s worried about telling her what he’s doing. She already worries enough for three people.

*So far, no one who’s been watched by Rory has exactly twigged, (Except for that one dude that broke Ciaran’s collarbone.) but no one is THAT good or lucky. Sooner or later people are going to put something together because the kind of questions he asks his fellow food truck people can get awfully specific. although he also lays off a bit of cash on them to keep them from blabbing too much.

*Rory’s sister is a werewolf.  He is not aware of this. So there’s that.

*There’s also some question about the O’Halloran fire.  Someone might be able to put together the idea that maybe there was an Irish Ventrue lairing in the sub-basement and the maybe the fire was just to get him, not realizing that it got old man O’Halloran too, just in a delayed sense.  (Ghouls don’t take it well when the domitor dies.)  So if those secrets came to light, Rory would want a piece of whomever killed his old man...God only know who’s responsible... Let’s hope it’s not his sister or her pack.

Connections:
Because of the mobile nature of "Paddy's Wagon" Nearly every single person on Painted Corners can have eaten there. but there are certain special connections:
*Walt O'Halloran has a fairly serious crush of Luna Krummholtz from The Grimoire. She flirts with him shamelessly.
Charlie helped ID a the guy who held up the truck one night. As a result, Charlie is ALWAYS good for a bowl of soup and a sleeve of fries. "Guys sees more than most people think. He used to be an economist. Did you know that?"
Detective Bela Janofski is referred to by the whole crew as "Our Pollack friend". Bela loves the "Paddy Wagon" and does not have a problem with talking about his work-day.
*Dr. Dennis McMurtry once retained Rory in order to help him determine who was committing a string of rapes on campus. "I wonder whatever happened to that guy...But I don't wonder too hard. The old man looked pretty serious. and I get the feeling he was able to handle himself."
*Teflon John Galloway is a regular. "I think he might be a cousin or something. Ciaran's always happy to see him for some reason."

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