Doris Badenov

Concept: Drag Queen turned Hunter

AKA: Jordan Michaels

Desc: Mid thirties, kind of shy and unassuming. A little overweight and wildly self-conscious about it. Not much of man by the light of day, but once he’s got his hair on, and is zipped up. Well. downright buxom, and weirdly enough super-confident and funny.  Almost as if turning into a sweet bird of paradise throws some internal switch in his head. Blond hair that is thinning a bit, Needs glasses to read, but almost never wears them. While he does have a little bit of a stomach, he’s got good muscle tone nearly everywhere else.  Has that weird thing of eating tiny amounts of food eight times a day. Tans whenever he can.

History: Jordan got lucky. Well, as lucky as a gay kid can ever get. School was a hellish minefield for a gay introvert, and naturally, he suffered as many do. But when it came time to tell his parents, They had already figured it out. the fact that his mother had found his secret stash of make-up and it was larger than his sisters was kind of a clue. They still loved him, although, as they said, they were very sad that he wouldn’t providing them with grandchildren.  Of course, they dumped all THAT pressure onto his sister, which, although she loves him, she kind of resents. It tends to come out about once a month usually in a drunk call around 2AM. Ah well.

Jordan, like many young creative introverts, tried out theater. Don’t kid yourself. There are a LOT of introverts who go into theater. Acting is just one way that painfully shy people have of drawing you into their world, maybe there, they have a little more control.  Some introverts decide that maybe theater is just the best way to develop a fantastic disguise.  In any case, Jordan is a good actor, but he is much more at home as an entertainer. At least there, he can put his hair and make-up skills to use, and he won’t have to “Play Straight” and kiss a lot of women.

At some point along the line, Jordan decided that Drag was for him. he CAN dance, and he’s a pretty good singer too. (His Edith Piaf impersonation is to die for.)  He’s likable. Razor sharp and funny on stage. Shows up on time. Doesn’t drink until the performance is over and rarely, if ever, throws shade. “Doris Badenov” is like his super-hero identity. He feels like she gives him permission to the person he’d truly like to be.

And you know, he probably would have been perfectly happy to grow into a bitter old queen sometime down the road had it not been for the Vampire.

You hear whispers sometimes of that kind of thing going on. Usually, you chalk it up to too much wine or weed-induced paranoia. If you believed ANY of the stories that some have told, you’d think that the tiny tiny strip of gay bars was some kind of prime feeding ground. But Doris didn’t believe in any of that crap.

Then one night, as he was trying to negotiate that little hump of the door frame at the stage entrance with his rolling case, He saw a dude biting another dude on the neck. Normally, that sort of thing would inspire a bit of envy. not fear. Until the bite-y guy leaned back and Jordan got a good look at his face. Got a good look at his eyes.

And the vampire saw him.

Things happened very quickly after that. The bitten guy got shoved aside as the vampire rushed Jordan. But there were a couple of things that worked against the vampire that night. 1) Jordan had been training in Judo since he was eleven. and 2) The 9-inch stiletto heels he was carrying in his other hand made a good impromptu stake.

After the vampire had been dispatched, head sliced off with the blade of a borrowed paper slicer from the office of the club, Jordan went home, cracked open a bottle, called in sick to work, and drank himself to sleep.

He waited for a week. Expecting that the other shoe would drop and some blood-sucker would come after him. The bitten guy seemed to have no memory of the incident when he ran into him again 3 days later.  But then, as he had said. “I’d had a lot to drink.”

Once you know that vampires aren’t weed inspired bullshit, you can’t exactly shut your eyes to the problem anymore. And Jordan’s awareness grew, that the problem was kind of pervasive in his little community.

The one thing,that has maybe kept him alive is that the next time he saw something going wrong and stepped in to try to stop it, he was dressed as Doris, and for some reason, “Doris” was not having it.  Did you know that a lighter and hairspray can be made into an impromptu flamethrower? It’s totally true.  The second vampire did NOT know that shit.

Attitude: “Look Darling. All I'm saying is that we have enough problems with fucking cops and homophobic frat boys, not to mention drama within our own community for ANY one of us to go around unguarded on any given night.  I’m not saying you have to buy a gun or anything like that. Just...Just keep your eyes open. Will you? For me?”

Skills: As mentioned, Jordan is skilled in judo and seems to have a knack for improvised weaponry. His hair and make-up skills are such that he actually has the tools and talent to be a true master of disguise. Which is good because so far, those vampires who have taken an interest can’t seem to get an idea of who they are dealing with exactly.  In fact, the word is that there is a GROUP of homosexual men and women who may be fighting back against the vampires. So far, no Hunter group has exactly twigged to what’s going on, and they, were they keen to recruit Doris, would run up against the same problem. You might consider giving Jordan “Unseen Sense (Vampires)” so that he has a slight edge.  One thing that is eventually going to be a problem is the fact that Jordan knows exactly fuck-all about vampires beyond what he’s seen in the movies.  So far, that’s been enough. One night, it’s not going to be.

Gear: Rarely performs anywhere without the rolling case of DOOM, which in addition to carrying all the make-up, toiletries, and wig. Also now houses some vampire staking stakes that he got from a friend who works on the ren-faire circuit. The BIG can of aqua-net with a push-button butane lighter duct taped into place, and a taser disguised as a cell phone, bought from some mail order outfit. Jordan has taken to making sure that Doris’s hair is now done up with some kind of thing that can be used to stab someone if push comes to shove. When Jordan is just being Jordan he is rarely without his smartphone, He’s gotten pretty adept with the camera on that thing and has gotten pretty good at taking surreptitious pictures. Many of them turn up on his Facebook; some reveal vampires and are naturally saved for intelligence gathering purposes. Some have revealed even odder things...Jordan is wondering what kind of fucking rabbit hole he’s fallen down. Which explain the flask he’s taken to carrying everywhere too.

Home: Jordan’s apartment is a source of near-constant stress. He has a one bedroom place in a building that is 20+ years old and not in the nicest neighborhood. The super is a creep and getting him to fix anything is like pulling teeth. That said, Jordan keeps the place clean, and he’s not been sharing it with anyone since Ramon fucked off to work the cruise-line. Anyone coming after him though will have to contend with the fact that it would be nearly impossible to do without being seen, and that the Apartment building’s neighborhood watch is, to put it mildly, hair trigger. As I said, the neighborhood isn’t very nice.

Circle: Jordan doesn’t have a lot of friends. Some people he works with at the insurance agency. a few good friends from college and that’s about it. DORIS, however, is much beloved, at least in her community and Jordan may not necessarily realize how many people do care about him. Who knows, it might the difference between life and death some night. Doris has a dot or two of Fame and Barfly, naturally.

Story Uses:

“Oh no. I’m not going to scratch your eyes out. YOU ARE.”

Naturally, the inability to feed in the rack without consequences of a somewhat fatal nature... is going to be a rude shock.

“Don’t worry Sugar. They won’t see me coming...”

Doris will make an excellent addition to a hunter group who is okay with her uniqueness. Naturally, the more Church-y operations won’t take her in, but some of the others certainly would. Ashwood Abbey would appreciate her for her sheer novelty alone. It would, however, take them a while to begin treating her like a real person...

Connections:

*Knows  Darla Grumman but then who doesn't know Darla. She's a dear. Fixes things. Can't get the scumbag super to do it. So I call Darla. Can't stand that woman of hers, though.

*Met that nice cop Detective Bela Janofski once while he was working on a thing involving a pair of boys I knew who got murdered in the park. He was very polite. Maybe the most polite cop I ever met.

*I went to Elementary school with the Hernandez Sisters and they introduced me to Rachel Schwartz. Occasionally, I do Cabaret gigs at Caligari's. Love those girls.

Don Francis Xavier Pentangelli

Concept:Mafia Boss (Old School)

Desc: A fringe of white hair atop a head that has seen and done a lot.  The wrinkles are earned and so are the scars. The eyes betray an intelligence that would curdle most souls. While the Don can still get around with just a cane, He’s using the little motorized chair more and more. At home, he gets more done in his Pyjamas than most people manage in a week. When he goes out, though, he is immaculate in his tailored suits. He favors dark purple for ties. He still cuts quite a figure for a man of 68.

History: Born and raised in America. Came up in a rough neighborhood. His father worked in a junkyard and his mother took in neighbor’s washing to have enough money to send Francis and his brothers and sisters to Catholic school. There comes a point in a young man’s life where he looks around and decides he wants more.  The question is, will he work for it, like a chump...Or will he take it from someone else?
   To give Francis his due, He worked for a few summers at his dad’s junkyard to save up money to go to school. But then the war came along, and so did the draft.  Francis went overseas and what he saw and did there, well. let’s just say that when he came home, he had a different attitude about the sanctity of life, and a few new skills related to the formation of that attitude. (To this day, The don never goes anywhere without a straight razor on his person.)
Francis had grown up around goombahs all his life. Knew them. Went to pre-school with some of them, so when he came home, he reached out to a number of those guys, and after a little talk went into La Famiglia and never looked back.
Francis is smart. Moreover, Francis is JUST paranoid enough to be ultra-careful, but not so paranoid that he isn’t functional. As I say, Francis has seen some stuff.  You don’t generally get to be the head of a mafia organization without some supernatural prick pulling the strings behind the scenes. But Francis managed it. He probably wouldn’t have if he were still in Jersey. Or New York, or Chicago.
   He does this by insulating himself well. He’s also learned a thing or two about counter-intelligence. Most supernatural critters can’t get within 600 yards of him.  Well, that’s not true entirely.  But the ones who would be able to get near him are not usually the ones that you have to worry about. It’s the ones with the powers to affect the mind and the heart, that scare Francis.  And he keeps a close eye on those guys that are part of his inner circle for signs that someone might have gotten next to them. And while he’s not exactly pleased about it, He’s made certain strategic alliances with the Vermillion House to provide himself some supernatural insurance.  Mind you, those people are still degenerate freaks, but they do understand a thing or two about influence peddling.

Attitude: “This is all well and good. But the question remains...What to do about the future?  La Cosa Nostra is waning in power and influence. There’s a whole generation of dumb fucking kids who think they’re going to take over when the time comes but don’t know shit about the world. Don’t know shit about business. and DON’T FUCKING KNOW SHIT about how to comport themselves. Dominic is only about half as smart as he thinks he is.
Joseph is far too hot-headed. Leo’s a faygeleh. The only one of his offspring who takes after him at all is Angelica, and I don’t care how smart she is, no gangster is ever going to take orders from a girl.  Not to mention, most of his guys, they’re mostly in their 40’s and 50’s. They’re all like a bunch of old cats anymore.  Not lean and hungry like they used to be.  You know who’s hungry anymore?  Those Vietnamese gangs. Those triad boys.  The Russian guys who seemingly are without fucking number...or any sense at all. THOSE guys are hungry.  How can I hand off power and responsibility to some Kettel One swilling, duck-face-selfie-taking shmuck who thinks he knows some stuff because he’s seen “The Godfather.”

And those supernatural people...THEY don’t ever seem to get old...do they?”

Skills: Back in the day, Francis was pretty handy with a knife. Still is. But he’s old now, and slow. Should that CHANGE for any reason, like say...Becoming a vampire or stumbling on a blood-bathing ritual, or some other means of mystical rejuvenation. Well. some of those combat skills are going to get dusted off. As it is, the only things that still get a regular work out are his persuasive skills and his tactical thinking. He’ll have high socials and a damn high number of dots in ALL of the social skills. (yeah. even Animal Ken, He loves his dogs.)  He has decent dots in academics with some specializations in Tactics, and business. Most of this is reading he’d done on his own.  He never did get to go to college.

Gear: Beyond the aforementioned straight razor, The Don never carries a weapon on his person. He is rarely without his little flip phone. although one of his people usually has a smartphone at the ready, just in case. He has a little Filofax notebook and a zebra 750 fine point. The notebook is in Italian and is in some kind of homebrew code.  Even so, Don Pentangelli rarely puts anything in it that is actually incriminating. The Zebra is made entirely of steel and could probably kill a guy if you cared enough. The don is also never without at least one roll of Butter Rum Life Savers. He also tends to carry an iPod full of opera music. (“Sue me. I know it’s a cliche, but I visited La Scala back in the old country and they made a believer out of me. What can I say?”)

Home: While there is a very nice home in Florida which the family visits at the worst of the winter weather. The Don’s compound sits on a hill with a narrow road going up to the house itself. Some have found, to their shock and amazement that trying to beard the lion in his den is a bad bad mistake and he’s got enough ammo and supplies to wait out an extended siege. He’s even gone in for hidden rooms, an escape door built into the back of a grandfather clock. hidden passageways and architectural gingerbread designed to hide weapons, or even occasionally a sniper.

Circle: But none of that makes Don Pentangelli a dangerous man. The man has a truly dizzying amount of influence.  It works like this. He’s got his capos.  Each of those guys is a retainer. A retainer with a crew of their own.  and each guy on that crews kicks up power, money, and influence to the man at the top.  So the Don has his hands effectively into anything his boys can get him into. Not to mention the Don’s own personal power. There are many people, Entertainers, Judges, legislators who PERSONALLY owe Don Pentangelli.  Some owe the entirety of their success to him and others merely owe him for specific things he’s done for them.  Not to mention that resources 5 and a small army of people who are willing to commit violence on your behalf tends to get things done.  The Don’s reach is long and pervasive. Certainly not as long as the Vermillion House, but since he’s willing to trade favors with them...
Additionally, it should be noted that he’s been giving money and arms to a few hunter cells. Occasionally, some supernatural becomes a pain in the ass and needs to be removed. A simple request and a packet of information on the target and the problem gets handled.  The Don has always been careful to make certain that the information in the packet is as accurate as possible, He’s always clear as to what is KNOWN and what’s just speculation.  and he ends each report with the admonition that nothing in the report is false, but not all of it may prove to be true. Some hunter groups pay attention to that admonition. Others...Well. Not so much.

I should take a moment and talk about the various rackets that the Don’s family is involved in:
*Loan Sharking/Juicing
*Sports book
*high-end Bordellos
*Informal betting clubs (Which is a nice way of saying floating poker games.)
*Stock manipulation and the occasional bust-out scheme  (A bust out scheme is where the mob gets control of a business and then runs up huge bills buying equipment which goes right out the back door to be re-sold until the original owner is finally told, to simply declare bankruptcy.)
*The Family still has the occasional hand in murder for hire, but still won’t deal with drugs due to the Don’s distaste.

Story Uses:
*”This man will not listen to reason.”
While Don Pentangelli is not unwilling to deal with supernaturals, he usually does so at a remove. Over the phone, through intermediaries, on one memorable occasion, via carrier pigeon.  So it’s not impossible to get connected and possibly get him to do things for you...for a price.

*”You have an interesting little set-up here. But I’m afraid you’ve made a slight mistake. Easily fixed my friend. You need to let me wet my beak.”
If you move into some criminal activity, especially something in the Don’s territory or in his bailiwick, You might get visited and certain considerations will have to discussed.  Unless you have a way to keep the Don out of your business, you may end up having to kick up to the old man.

*” Bring me the fuckers head.”
Francis is not one to lose his temper very often. But on those occasions when it does happen, he will attack on every front at once, Michael Corleone style. No place will be truly safe.  Not only will he comes after you with his soldiers, not only will he send the hunters and move his considerable influence to get at you, but he’ll call in his markers with other supernaturals. Better start clenching.

Connections:
*Russell Schwartz of Caligari's is a friend from the old neighborhood. Occasionally he stops into the club and he and the old man shoot the shit. The rest of the people in the club love it because the mob guys tip great. if something bad were to happen to Russell...It might be a bad thing for the perp involved. Just saying.
*While they've never actually met, the Don has Dr. Ronnette Franklin in his Rolodex. A few of his boys have needed impromptu patching.
* The Don occasionally enjoys taking in an evening watching the fights that Big Dan Tarleton runs. He's talked with him about the possibility of taking his organization to the next level.
*If he ever gets wind of Bryson Import/Export he'll want to wet his beak. This won't go well for them.
*The family taxes have been handled for years by Victoria North of Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North and Dean    

Clarinda Hale

Concept: Professor of Linguistics

Desc: Lately she’s got big old Samsonite bags under her pretty blue eyes but that doesn’t make them any less arresting.  She’s in her early thirties and lean as a rake. Practically lives on yogurt, granola, and Turkish blend coffee. Runs every other day. high Slavic cheekbones paired with an expressive mouth and olive complexion. Her hair is naturally curly, but she often irons it so she can tie it back. Great smile even if she doesn’t seem to do it a lot these days. On the tall side. Healthy, if stretched a little thin.

History: Clarinda story really starts with her parents Esperanza and Mikhail Ostrokov.  Esperanza and Mikhail met on an operation in Afghanistan. The operation went south, but the partnership did not and over time they would find opportunities to work together in various picaresque places fighting Yankee capitalist oppression. 

Mikhail got selected for a deep cover mission, and while Dzherzhinsky Square had a bride all picked out for him, He didn’t like her...and he was senior enough as a field operative to suggest a replacement.
So. eventually Mike and Rita Hale snuck themselves across the border, made contact with a man who provided necessary ID and funds to get set up, and then they settled into a quiet humdrum suburban existence. Rita was somewhat skilled as a dancer (and also a martial artist) and she eventually opened a school enabling her to make contact with bored upper-class housewives. Mike, was a skilled pilot and was in demand for charter flights.
    Over time, It became clear to them, that while there was SO much wrong with the American way of life, it was, in its own way, seductive. And each time the KGB made contact...There was a bit of clenching, worrying about losing the life they had worked so hard to build together. This got worse when Clarinda came along.
    At first, the idea of a child was just cover. Never mind that Mike and Rita had become perhaps overly fond of one another, but the child was, of course, a way of blending in.
As Clarinda puts it, “I had no way to know just how messed up my childhood was. It wasn’t until I hospitalized a classmate for snapping my bra strap, that I began to understand that I wasn’t really like other kids".
     Clarinda grew up with a pair of spies, gone helicopter parents, watching over her.   Mike and Rita realized that the KGB might use Clarinda as a way of ensuring their compliance and that cost them a good deal of sleep.  As a result, Clarinda is a skilled camper, mountain climber, can hit a target at 100 yards, and live off the land damn near indefinitely.
   Additionally, she grew up in a household where she learned to speak English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. and this led to her bewildering facility with languages. She has a real gift and it has only gotten stronger as she’s matured.  She has a flair for dead languages and a near endless understanding of dialects for the living languages she speaks. She’s writing a book on languages and the mental modalities that shape them.

Eventually, the Soviet union collapsed, and their handler died of old age and the call never came really. So, at one point, Mike and Rita came in from the cold. They had help from an old nemesis from back in the old days and eventually settled in as naturalized American citizens.
 
Clarinda’s not a full doctor or anything like that. But she is a full professor at the local university and this is where her current problems start.

Supernatural creatures can be remarkably sneaky and yet also have huge blind spots. A vampire was needing a translation of something in Etruscan and after some searching around online found someone who could do the work.  Naturally, he was pretty careful to erase her memory of their interactions.  But, the translation work itself...No. he didn’t remove that. After all, that would have taken HOURS of time to erase completely.

Now that’s bad enough, but when another vampire or mage friend runs across something in Aramaic that wants deciphering, then the original guy says something like, “Hey go see my girl Clarinda. She’ll fix you right up.”

And of course that asshole tells two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on...
Now. Clarinda is missing classes that she’s meant to be teaching because she’s tired all the time, and thinks she’s having a nervous breakdown and is having episodes of missing time... All because supernatural creatures can’t be bothered to compare notes about this sort of thing.

Not to mention, some of the things she’s been translating have been giving her nightmares...
Mike and Rita have noticed that something may be wrong, but no one seems able to figure out what.  However, it’s only a matter of time before some shmuck with fangs, fails to do a complete job and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Attitude: “I love the work. Maybe one day I'll get a nice cushy gig at the UN. But honestly, my favorite part is the research into how a language becomes what it is. What causes it to crystallize in the way it does. The only real drag now is that since my parents came in from the cold, I can’t travel anymore without jumping through a dozen damn hoops. I think some yo-yo at Langley suspects I want to defect. *Prolonged Yawn*  Sorry about that."

Skills: Clarinda is a bit of a mixed bag. Dots in Athletics for sure and a few in Survival as well. Quite a few in Academics as you’d imagine. Able to shoot (but not likely to have shooting related FS Merits) and a capable combatant in Capoeira (So is her mom.) This would make her an interesting gal all by itself if it weren’t for the truly mind-shocking number of dots sunk into language skills.  Just assume she’s got a nodding familiarity with any language that your plot requires and you won’t be far off the mark. She could also likely take off or land a plane in a pinch. Clarinda is such a language nerd that she listens to books and podcasts in other languages and occasionally rotates them around onto anything she feels she’s getting rusty on.   She’s on an NSA watchlist because of this, but they HAVE figured out that she’s relatively harmless. Any kindred who figures she'll be easy to erase for knowing too much is going to pull a huge amount of notice from NSA, CIA, and FBI Counterintelligence. Not to mention her pissed off spook parents.

Gear: Never without her little survival cord wristband, which has a tiny compass and a tiny knife inside. She also carries a steel Kubotan on her keyring which she is very capable with. Has a smartphone. It won’t be of any use to you unless you can read Cyrillic.

Home:Clarinda, like most professors, is poor as a church mouse and furnishes her entire apartment in books. When she goes for her doctorate, she likely won’t have to make a single trip to the library. She’s not a hoarder. I mean there ARE flat spaces that aren’t taken up with books, but on the other hand, most of those are in the bathroom and kitchen. She has an aversion to cooking and is hoping to meet a nice student of Culinary Arts who doesn’t mind the occasional camping trip.  She has a box under her bed with 500 bucks in various foreign currencies, an ID proudly proclaiming her to be Leah Silverman, a Glock 9, and a knife made of hardened plastic. There is also a key to the family cabin and a silent whistle which will get the attention of a mountain lion that Mikhail has been making friends with over the years.

Circle: Clarinda dates some. But unless you’re multi-lingual too it can be a real turn-off. She has friends in a number of departments on campus and has even told a few of them a little bit about her past.  Her friends are a little worried that she’s not sleeping well and that the dean of the linguistics department loves her, but not teaching her classes is putting her on thin ice. Clarinda also has a few people she knows through her parents and while she NEVER wants to go into espionage, the stories they tell ARE fascinating, and horrifying, and funny.  Sometimes all at once.

Story Uses:
* “Wow...I didn’t think this dialect actually existed...Where did you find this?”
Ok. it’s fairly obvious that Clarinda is the sort of person you want to bump into when you got pottery shards with squiggles on them or when you got 30-year-old KGB documents up from the bottom of the sea. Would it surprise you to know that she’s got a little cryptography? It wouldn’t?  Good. It means you’ve been paying attention.

*” Madre...I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I should see a doctor?”
There’s nothing physically wrong with Clarinda and eventually a decent doctor will tell her so. Sooner or later, someone might suggest a psychiatrist and while Clarinda will be resistant at first, eventually, she’ll go talk to someone she knows in the Psych department.  When that guy/gal uses hypnosis to uncover what’s been happening, it will likely crack the already overburdened wall in her mind and she will remember EVERYTHING.  I pity the poor supernatural creature who tries to put the whammy on her after that.

Connections:
*Got her ID from Clavo Hernandez, of course. They dated some but never gelled well with his friends from the old hood. She was weird about taking the gangsters seriously. She couldn't do it really. She grew up with people who are incredibly dangerous. It has that effect when someone's trying to act all hard.
* Dr. Dennis McMurtry is the old nemesis who helped Mike and Rita come in.  "Uncle Dennis" is across the quad from Clarinda and is usually good for dinner on those rare occasions when Clarinda desperately needs a steak and a baked potato the size of your head. Uncle Dennis has turned into a kind of mentor for Clarinda. Although he refuses to help with her romantic life. That would be...complicated.
 

T.C. Mitnick

Concept: Black Hat for hire.

Desc: Terribly near-sighted. Overweight. He has a bit of a neckbeard. Although against the stereotype, He tends to dress well enough. He is scrupulously clean and does not smell at all of cat-pee.  He’s got good teeth which he takes care of and his breath is always nice.  His hair is short-ish by choice and reddish-brown. His gaze tends to wander because his mind tends to wander when people are talking to him.  He falls down a bit on the introvert side and talks little until he warms up to you, then, his brain is like an unleashed torrential storm.  He has a touch of Aspergers. (His girlfriend has it worse than him.) 

History: For the first 3 years of his life, Templeton Christopher Mitnick was more or less non-verbal. His parents were afraid that he was never going to be functional. But as they got him involved with some occupational therapy and some special schooling that they really couldn’t afford, he began to open up a bit. By the time they got him enrolled in actual public school he was verbal enough to get around and be functional.  And everyone relaxed a bit.  

   Although he was a voracious reader, he still wasn’t much for talking. He became fascinated at an early age with the family computer. (The first one they had, he ended up taking apart. It was never exactly the same afterward.) But after that, he began to get the idea that knowing how to program a computer was a lot like knowing how to cast spells in the fantasy novels he liked. Being a programmer was a lot like being a wizard.  And being a wizard was something that he coveted. No one talked to a wizard like they were stupid.

T.C had trouble in school. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. He was. He wasn’t able to focus on things that didn’t interest him. He also didn’t have a lot of friends. Most of the other kids thought he was weird, and even the couple of friends that he did have had trouble keeping up with his grasshopper-like brain. He was something of an underachiever at anything that didn’t involve math or computers. Often, the parents had to curtail his computer time in order to get his English and history grades up.

    T.C. got a scholarship to go to a technical school. He’d always been a machine at standardized testing and was able to simply crush both the ACT and the SAT. Once there, and on his own, and in his element for the first time in his life, he blossomed. 

     T.C. didn’t really get into professional hacking because he’s evil or even because hacking is illegal and therefore forbidden and fun.  It’s just that he’s always been interested in systems and taking them apart and putting them back together. He has to, occasionally stop himself, from fixing the vulnerabilities that allowed him into the systems in the first place.  

It’s just that, maybe the kid played a bit too much Cyberpunk or Shadowrun.  Something about the “Romance” of the hacker in those settings appealed to him and that probably would have faded after he got bored with it...Until he discovered that you could make ridiculous amounts of money doing it.

    He’s got a job working at Allied Business Data, working as a tape operator in their ancient tape machine facility. Cutting edge server tech, cheek by jowl with tape machine readers and reel to reel readers.  To date, he has never ever used any of the data that flows through the facility. Most of it is useless for the purposes of industrial espionage.   He works this job on the overnight because it requires 0.15% percent of his actual personal energy.  He spends much of his workday internet chatting and snacking, with the occasional catnap.  His co-worker Parikh does much the same.

     However, the one thing that his job at ABD does give him is a certain amount of anonymity. ABD is a large company, used to be huge and multi-national, back when huge multinational computer companies were a thing. He uses his access to borrow vast amounts of computing power for hacking and code-breaking. And in fact, TC found some useful tools in those old mainframes from when ABD had government contracts.  He’s improved on them since.  The very few times that they’ve been able to trace a signal back, they discovered that the hack came from “North Carolina”.  That’s as specific as they can get.  Part of the NC mainframe has an actual splice into the trunk lines there.  

Industrial espionage is nice and all, and the money is good, but it’s never steady.  And TC is just paranoid enough to expect that “Mr. Johnson” is always going to try to screw him on the deal.  This is why he is careful to never meet clients in person.  It’s also why he’s usually more interested in local and municipal systems. That money is a lot more steady. He’s got tools that can slot a new ID into the computers all over town and he’s got a co-op deal with a guy that makes fake ID’s that brings in steady money.  It’s nice knowing that if you need to leave the country, you’ve got papers that will get you out and money stowed in offshore banks. It brings a certain amount of bulletproof chill. 

Back in the day, he used to hustle hacking jobs at a place called the Donut Hut.  Now he pays a younger kid to do the hustling and pass the interesting work up the chain to him.  Much of the rest of his clientele comes from fellow black-hats looking to trade for something or looking to unload work that they themselves can’t do. 

Attitude: “Hrmph. Well. I like the challenge.  The money’s nice. *Wanders away if there are no more questions.*

Skills: Yeah. This guy is going to be loaded up on Intelligence, Wits, and Resolve. In roughly that order. He’ll have the kind of dots in Computer that you normally only see in an antagonist. He’s got a couple of dots in investigation because he always says that in order to be good at being a criminal you have to learn to think like a cop.  His social dots are, as you can guess, somewhat anemic, but he’s got a small amount of streetwise, and he can LIE on the phone like a virtuoso. If you have the Carthian Movement book there is a social merit called “Coder Clique” that is perfectly apt for TC. It gives him 9 again on any computer based roll. it comes from contact with a social coterie of fellow hackers and as long he’s part of the community he gets to use the advantage. 

As you may imagine, T.C. is pretty useless in a fight. He has no training, although he’s got several weapons.  He’s easily winded and a bit chickenshit. Fights in the schoolyard never went well for him.  But, on the other hand, He might just able to hack police and military drones. So there’s that.

Also: He can speak Japanese.  He just got annoyed with subs on his anime.

Gear: This part is going to be a bit complicated. So strap in. TC has four main tools that he uses in his work. His base station “O-Katanna”,  his laptop, “Wakizashi” and his phone, “Tanto”.  Each is networked to one another, and there are a number of preset hacks that can be triggered by voice commands on the phone. Each of the machines is tempest hardened and the basement of his house has an ingenious back-up system. The back-up system is in a small closet that's wired with a small amount of plastique. Anybody poking that is in a for a rude shock. Tanto is the most free of any kind of hacking stuff. But it can connect to the other systems by voice or text and initiate all sorts of mischief.  T.C. fourth main tool is a virtual system that he built that he calls “Ghostwheel”  Ghostwheel has been seeded into dozens of places.  Its compressed package will fit on a 10 gig thumb drive, but he likes having it in lots of places, each with its own skype number.

His laptop bag also has two spare phones, a taser, power bars, gum, 6 thumb drives, and a tiny tool kit.

Home: T.C.’s actual home that he shares with Suzanne, is fairly spacious, and in a quiet neighborhood. He doesn’t know his neighbors AT ALL.  Neither he nor Suzanne are interested in yard work or indeed, the out-of-doors either in the practical sense or even as a concept. There is a grill out on the back deck, but it’s been used all of twice and will likely rust away before it gets used again.  While the house itself is spacious, Both T.C. and Suzanne are borderline hoarders, especially when it comes to books. Nearly every flat surface that isn’t in the kitchen  has books on it.  The only exception being the Dinner Table.  The DT, as they refer to it, is not for dining of course, but for RPG games. Granted, a number of their friends have children now and so getting together for a game is not as easy as it used to be. Many times, they have to be satisfied with Skype or Google Hangout. But still, it’s a rule of the house not to clutter up the DT. T.C. and Suzanne have separate bedrooms, as they both snore, have personal space issues, and work weird hours. Which is not to say that they don’t get it on, it’s just that they tend to sleep alone.

Suzanne has crippling allergy issues when it comes to pets, like hives and throat closing up issues. So they have fish in tanks.

In addition to this place. T.C. also owns a houseboat under another name.  They’ve been on it all of twice. He maintains it because they might need to get out of town or some half-assed escape plan he’s concocted like that.  Each time they took the houseboat out, they got terrible sunburns.

Circle: T.C.’s circle of personal friends is kind of small. Even among fellow nerds and geeks, he can be a bit of an acquired taste. Beyond his gamer group, and his co-workers he doesn’t have much going on socially... Online, however, is a different story. T.C. comes out of his shell there and is known in the hacker world to be pretty fucking good at what he does.  He doesn’t bill himself as the internet equivalent of El Cid, Batman, and Kung-Fu Jesus all rolled into one, but he’s got a good rep and is known to be willing to trade for things and expertise he doesn’t have. (Expertise in government systems, government strong crypto, and anything involving particularly abstruse mathematical constructs.)  He has the expertise, but not necessarily the empathy to participate in Anonymous, but occasionally pitches in on some projects just to keep his hand in.

Story Uses:

T.C.’s obvious uses as an Ally/Contact/ Mentor/ Retainer/ Whatever are obvious. He can also make a decent antagonist if hired by the right sort of people.  

What gets interesting, is what might happen if T.C. gets found out, and then is forced to scramble. If he has enough time to group call, all of the seeded versions of Ghostwheel and say or text, “Initiate the Omega Protocols”

Well. things in your city, possibly even the whole state...are going to get REAL jacked up.

Connections:

*Like many people who fancy themselves the smartest guy in the room, T.C. is a fan of stage magic and has been to Caligari's more than once. Not that he's a regular, but he does like to go and so does Suzanne. The only person he's talked to there at all was Deondre Washington. But Deondre would probably recognize him.

*Aldous Church has a working relationship with him online. While Aldous can respect a man who protects his anonymity professionally, he has pieced together that T.C. lives in this city and is into nerd culture. Finding him, should it become necessary, might not be as hard as T.C. would like. Aldous often requests background information on targets. Pays extra for crash jobs.

Clavo Hernandez is naturally, T.C.'s ID guy.  Weirdly, the two are good friends in the way that people who are VERY dissimilar can be. Clavo has also put T.C. in touch with Alejandro Dean from Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North and Dean

*DJ RazorBurn from The Caboose used to bully T.C. in school when they were both children.  This may explain why his bags get searched every single time he travels and why he gets audited every other year, and similar problems like that.

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."

Dmitri Garrett C.P.A.

Concept: Forensic Accountant

Desc:  Sharp clear blue eyes are the first thing you notice about Dmitri. His skin tone leans towards olive and he still keeps his black hair putting green short out of habit. His normal attire is a business suit, although he has a way of wearing them that still suggests that he was in the military. His shoes are always well cared for. sharp operators can tell that he is wearing an armpit holster. He has a booming laugh.

History: Dmitri is a genius. No seriously. He’s terribly terribly smart. 180 IQ.  and he absolutely murdered the ASVAB. The idea was to enlist in the military and get them to pay for college.  Being the sort of fellow he was, He went for the Air Force. He wasn’t necessarily interested in being career military, but he thought the idea of being a pilot was going to be awesome on a resume and might parley into interesting opportunities after college. Basic training came along for him right about the time he was starting to fill out and he found himself in tip-top shape for the first time in his largely bookish and introverted life.

And then he washed out of the pilot program.  It wasn’t even his fault really. He had a nice feel for it and nobody spent more time in the simulator getting it down, but he had some sort of weird inner ear thing that totally wrecked him every time he went up in a real bird. It nearly got him killed.  The base doctor had to break the bad news to him. He was never going to be a pilot.

Afterward followed a period of deep depression, drinking, and some sexual irresponsibility.  But out of that deeply unpleasant time, he met Mary-Anne and Mary-Anne got him going back in the right direction.  She could see that he had potential, even if it wasn’t potential pilot. 

The Air Force, for its part, knows that lots of people wash out of the pilot programs and need somewhere else to go. The Air Force, like all branches of the armed forces, has need of lots of different types of people. Now certainly Dmitri wasn’t liable to be slinging hash in the mess hall, with a brain like his, even though he seemed to be trying to kill as many of his brain cells as possible. So, his C.O. sat down and tried to figure out what to do.  

And that’s how Dmitri ended up as a forensic accountant.  Somebody has to crunch numbers and handle accounts payable and accounts receivable.  This can be occasionally ticklish and complicated when things are being paid for as black budget items. Like the occasional 500 dollar toilet seat, which is really hiding some kind of bribe money for a C.I.A. operation. Money still has to be properly accounted for, even if it’s supa-supa classified and stuff.  Dmitri felt like he was being punished for the first week of his new assignment until he walked into his C.O.’s office having noted a discrepancy of several thousand dollars and a possible narrative of exactly where the money went.  Captain Armitage went a particular shade of purple, bade Dmitri sit down and then had his receptionist call the Pentagon, where the captain ended up chewing out some guy on the phone for a good 20 minutes.  Dmitri was impressed with the Captain’s skillful use of invective and simply hoped he too was not going to be on the receiving end of it. After slamming down the phone, the Captain took a steadying breath, and then a beaming smile broke across his face. “Damn, Garrett. I knew you’d have a talent for this stuff.  I do so enjoy being right. Have a cigar son...”

And from that moment on, it was a different world.  Dmitri Garrett LOVED solving problems and untangling mysteries. It just never seemed like that kind of thing to him, and now...Well. he couldn’t get enough. He stopped drinking. He stopped eating too much and jumped back into PT, although his current assignment didn’t exactly warrant it. He made an honest woman of Mary-Anne. and he mustered out after 4 hitches with a full-ride to the college of his choosing. He was able to get into an ivy league school and scored an internship with a CPA firm.  Of course, after a month, it was clear that they had very little they could actually teach him, and the man who owned the firm tried to convince Dmitri that there wasn’t a thing they could do to shorten the internship really... Until Dmitri made it very clear exactly how much work and responsibility he had already taken on, and how he was sure that some other firm would be more than happy to allow him to intern for THEM.

Dmitri got hired on part time around his class schedule and began rat-holing money away for the house that he and Mary-Ann were going to buy.

He’s a little older now. a little grayer. Still fit as a fiddle. Has his own firm.  It’s small because he’s not interested in being someplace or owning someplace huge. He enjoys training new talent and his interns go on to become serious accountants in lots of places. His eldest daughter is in junior high now(“Sharper than her old man, and prettier than her mom. Don’t know what I'm going to do.”) and the youngest almost has his college paid for. 

But it’s not necessarily all beer and skittles.  Dmitri’s skills and talents are such that people come to him to find out things, like a private dick who works with numbers. This occasionally makes him enemies, which is why he's taken to running a couple of boxes of ammo through that piece every other week. Some of these people are freaks.  There was a guy who attempted to jump him one night and in the ensuing scuffle, Dmitri was SURE he’d shot the guy, but the guy ran and Dmitri gave chase, but as soon as he turned a corner, found the guy gone.  But that was a year ago and nothing else has come of it.  So far, the other shoe hasn’t dropped.

Attitude: “I think it was John D. McDonald who said that the essence of detective work is to ask questions and then figure things out. And then ask some more questions and figure more things out...and that when someone tries to kill you, it means you’re getting close.” *He smiles*  “We try to figure it out before it gets to that. Our clients are usually pretty happy. and to date, we remain un-killed.  My wife doesn’t think that joke is funny at all. Maybe I should stop telling it...”

Skills:  Stacked up mentals and 3 or better in physicals. Granted, he’s never going to be Mr. personality or be able to lie his way out of a wet paper sack. Almost all of his social dots landed in Composure. He never going to be good at Poker but he can clean up at blackjack.  Academics and science are pretty strong and a few good dots in computer and investigation. He’s in great shape and can use the gun pretty well. Fleet of foot and strong back would not be out of the question.

Gear:Has a Mac-air which he links up to his iPhone. He’s got a tiny multi-tool on his key ring, and his wallet is a slim leather affair.

the gun is a simple Sig Sauer 9mm with Glaser slugs (Glasers are a form of frangible round that make much larger exit wounds) 

Home: He got a nice place in the upscale burbs. The wife and kids live there and there is a fairly nice subscription security system on the place. Two car garage. They’ve got a nice pool too.

Circle: Dmitri knows most of his neighbors (although it’s Mary-Anne they all like) He’s got a number of clients who think he’s a damn miracle worker. He’s got Air Force buddies still and a few of them have wrangled the occasional contract for his firm. There’s also a bit of an informal accountant grapevine, so if he’s got any dots of contacts, that’s where they’ll be.

Story Uses:

“Yeah. You were right to bring this to me. These numbers aren’t right at all.”

There’s really only three ways to use Dmitri.

1) Looking into your affairs. (Which is likely to be a disaster for you.)

2) Looking into someone else’s affairs at your behest. (Which is likely a disaster for someone else... Unless they kill him.)

3) A super-normal guy and maybe Mary-Anne is the one with the freakish skeletons in the closet.

Connections:

*There is a small private detective agency that occasionally requests a financial run-down on private individuals, nothing illegal mind you, just enough intel to develop a background picture. Dmitri has only met the man once or twice, but the work is decent pay and is mostly the sort of thing that can be farmed to the interns. What Dmitri doesn't know is that the man is Aldous Church.

* Alejandro Dean, of Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North, and Dean occasionally has work for Dmitri but there are times when the work is redacted to such a degree that Dmitri often feels like he's shooting in the dark. If Dmitri knew WHY, well.  He might have to disappear.

*He's occasionally caused a few troubles for members of The Vermillion House but nothing that's ever really stuck or troubled a member of the inner circle. If that were to happen, The cops would raid his office and discover that it was the internet hub for a child pornography ring.

*Patricia "Carnie" Pitt met him in passing once at the courthouse, where he was giving testimony. While she thinks he's kind of cute in a Rain-man sort of way, the line on the business card that caught her attention was "Forensic Accountant". That's the sort of thing to be filed away for a rainy day.