00/00. application.
[series]: Darker Than Black
[character]: November 11
[character history / background]:
Ten years ago, the world changed. Strange Gates opened in South America and Japan, and the real stars disappeared from the sky, to be replaced by false ones that represented the other change: people with supernatural powers and an eerie lack of human conscience now walked the earth. The expected happened: governments and organizations vied with each other over information about these Gates and control of contractors, the people with powers. They covered up the existence of contractors in the eyes of the general public, even while using them amongst themselves.
Five years ago, for reasons unknown, a fifteen hundred kilometer area of land surrounding Heaven's Gate in South America simply vanished from the map during a war surrounding said area. Anything physical that attempted to enter it was just repelled. This was in the middle of a war over the Gate, and not only was it a disaster of the highest order, but it made all the changes that much more difficult to cover up. But still the existence of contractors was reduced to rumors and hearsay.
So it's been since then, with all governments on edge, and the organization of Pandora took control over researching the remaining Hell's Gate in Tokyo.
Flash back. Before the stars changed, a boy grew up in England. He had a normal upbringing and a normal life. He did well in school, because he was very clever indeed, but good conscience and all the regulations of society prevented him from really making that cleverness work for him. Before the stars changed, that boy became a man who worked for the British government. He was a valued public servant, because he was smart and good at getting things done, but he never really did anything interesting. There was just not much chance, in a well-ordered society.
After the stars changed, that man walked home in the rain without an umbrella and wondered why he'd bothered following all those rules and all those niceties for so long when he could have been doing so much more. He stopped in an alleyway and reached up to touch the rain. It froze in a fountain around him, and with his keen and newly-freed mind, he wondered what else he could do with this power...
After the stars changed, a lot of contractors went rogue. But this man didn't. As a contractor, he was free from the usual human quirks that got in the way of rational decision-making, such as temporary thrill-seeking or a conscience. He decided that he had no experience going rogue and would probably be caught attempting it. He decided that it was in his best interest to continue to serve his country, but to make them a new offer, one that would make far more efficient use of his new abilities and be much more interesting and fulfilling for him.
He became one of the first contractors to offer their services to a national intelligence agency, and, in time, one of the best. What he was called before no longer mattered. He became November 11, the top field agent of MI6.
The truth is, all of that about the boy who grew up in England and the man he became is speculation, save for the very last sentence. We know nothing about November's past before the Gates opened and the stars changed--not even his real name. We only know what happened afterwards.
November 11 may have been the first, but he certainly wasn't the last. Shortly afterwards, he was joined by codename February, a woman whose contractor abilities he never did find out; April, a contractor who could control weather (quite handy to have around when making it rain allowed you to wreak all kinds of havoc); and July, a young boy who was one of that peculiar subset of contractors known as "dolls" who performed as passive mediums with (supposedly) preprogrammed personalities, sending out observer spirits through a particular material (in July's case, glass) to any other instance of that same material in the world.
All went well until the war in South America broke out. The UK was in the thick of things, and to make it worse, February had defected, taking with her a good chunk of information to a mysterious organization known only as the syndicate. Then the disaster surrounding Heaven's Gate occurred, as described above, and the war ended for lack of anything to fight over.
The contractors employed in Britain's intelligence agencies would spend the next five years playing catch-up to undo the damage February had done when she turned traitor. November 11 was their top agent, but he wasn't exempt from this.
Which brings us roughly to the present day, or at least to where things started getting interesting again. An assignment led the trio of MI6 operatives from eastern Europe to Hell's Gate in Tokyo, and there two things of note happened.
The first was that November 11 met Kirihara Misaki, the regional chief of police for contractor-related matters. This didn't seem particularly important at the time--after all, contractors don't form attachments to people, do they? The second was that the group ran into trouble with the same mysterious organization to which February, now codenamed Amber, had defected to. After that, they were assigned to stay in Tokyo and attempt to learn more about this syndicate for a while.
For a time, nothing came of that--until, out of the blue, Amber showed her face again. It turned out she had turned her back on the syndicate as well and now led a mysterious group called Evening Primrose, which was wreaking havoc all around Tokyo for reasons unknown. One of the explosions they'd caused had left April badly injured, and while as a contractor he was technically supposed to feel nothing about this, November 11 was actually rather displeased by it. They wanted him to join up. He refused. Thanks to July's help and Misaki's timely intervention, he nevertheless managed to get out of the situation intact--and then go and take out the contractor responsible for the explosions.
But that left far too many questions for November to be satisfied. Why had Amber left the syndicate? Just what was the syndicate? What was Evening Primrose's real goal? Eventually, he decided that he needed to take matters into his own hands to find out. To make sure his investigations wouldn't bring harm to his partners, he cut ties with April and July and vanished from MI6's watchful eyes. A peculiarly uncontractor-like sentiment urged him on to make contact with Kirihara Misaki and warn her one last time of the dangers that lay ahead. Then he took Evening Primrose up on their offer this time and went to find out what they knew.
In short order, he found out three things: Evening Primrose opposed the plans of the syndicate; the plans of the syndicate were to wipe out every contractor in existence; and the syndicate had its agents everywhere, including in MI6. In fact, their mole in MI6 was his direct superior.
Actually, he found out four things. When he asked Amber to prove that she could see the future as she claimed she could, she told him that shortly after he left this place, he was going to die.
Which made a few things crystal clear to him.
One was that Evening Primrose had never really needed him. He was only there to prove by his demise to someone else, someone more important, that Amber's powers were genuine. He was not the hero of this story.
Two was that he hadn't just been taking a calculated risk, as he'd thought, when he'd dove deeper into his investigations of Evening Primrose and the syndicate. He'd been setting up his own fall. He knew full well that confronting his superior about the syndicate would lead to his death. But if he turned his back on the matter and decided to save his own skin, he'd be abandoning every contractor in the world.
So November 11 accepted that he was only a minor character after all, and one doomed to die at that. He left Evening Primrose's headquarters and confronted his superior with the evidence he'd found, all with a smile on his face. To his credit, he managed to take out not only his boss but a squad of machine-gun-wielding bodyguards as well and still have enough time left afterwards to give Misaki a final call warning her that he might have gotten her in trouble as well before his injuries finished him off.
[character abilities]:
Standard Contractor Benefits
As a contractor, November 11 is clear-headed and far less susceptible than most to the influence of normal emotions on his judgment and actions. He also has a small bonus that non-contractors don't have: should a passive medium or "doll" arrive from his world, he'll be able to see the ghostly forms of the observer spirits it sends out. This isn't relevant unless a doll shows up, though.
It's also implied pretty heavily that contractors can take more punishment than ordinary people and shrug it off or at least stay on their feet for longer. November himself has casually shrugged off a knife wound to the arm, woken up after an explosion he was barely shielded from and completely kept his cool, and walked away from being on the wrong end of four machine guns--not very far, but he kept his composure the whole way. If the last example is anything to go by, it's less about actually being able to withstand greater injuries and more about being able to function despite them better than a normal human would.
Freezing Water
Simple enough, right? November 11 can turn water into ice. This may seem like kind of a loser power at first glance, and in the hands of someone with a less sharp and creative mind, it probably would be. It's not, though. Because he can turn any water into ice, so long as he's touching it or some other water connected to it. Any water, or anything with enough water in it. He has been known to grab someone's hand and freeze all the moisture in their lower arm solid, ripping it right off. A frequent tactic of his is to wait for someone to step into a puddle, then freeze a bridge of ice through the puddle, up through the moisture in their shoes, and around their lower legs, preventing them from moving away (this probably wouldn't work if someone had really well-insulated boots, but it seems to work on normal boots just fine). He also freezes water in just about any form, from rain to coffee to falling liquor, into sharp shards and throws them at people, impaling them. This is his favored killing method, actually, even though it's possible to entirely freeze someone's body to kill them instead. It's just so much more stylish, and as a bonus, in most weather the evidence melts.
Note that if you can completely break (not just fragment or crack) or melt some of the ice November has frozen, all the ice past that point away from him immediately melts. So if he has you in the usual leglock, your best bet is to abruptly blow up or melt part of the bridge of ice leading to your feet, at which point your legs will go back to normal and you can run. Or retaliate, if you prefer. Another caveat is that unless it's actually very foggy or raining, he can't pull moisture from the air to form ice, despite being able to freeze liquids like coffee--whatever he's freezing needs to be currently in liquid form and have a pretty high water content.
Despite being in a different world, November still has to pay his price at some point soon after using his ability: smoking a cigarette for an amount of time proportional to how much he used his power. In the midst of combat he can delay the compulsion to do so, but only for a matter of minutes or at the very most a couple hours or so. Eventually, he will simply be compelled to smoke, even though he hates it. If he is somehow prevented from doing so, he will lapse into considerable mental and physical pain until the need is addressed. In addition, sustained use of his power will eventually run him up against a limit until he pays his price and waits a while.
[character personality]:
As far as most normal humans who know about them are concerned, contractors are beings free of any morality or conscience--some even say they lack human feelings. This isn't entirely true. Among contractors themselves, different definitions hold sway depending on who you ask. November 11's definition of a contractor is simple, or at least it was: they are people who act only in their own best interest at all times, in a thoughtful and rational manner, unhampered by the usual restraints on self-interest and reason, both those considered "good" by society (such as conscience and loyalty) and those considered "bad," such as spite and cowardice. This is ultimately his guiding principle, or so he said.
Let's fall back for a moment and look at how he presents himself to the world. Here, too, the principle of rational self-interest holds. It doesn't make good sense to be surly or ill-mannered to people; it only makes social interactions more difficult as time goes by. So November is, when possible, a pleasant man. He's not overly helpful or kind, because that would divert excess energy from his own interests and those he's pursuing, but he's polite (in a no-nonsense and self-serving way) and, when he feels it behooves him to get to know someone, friendly. On the other hand, it's irrational to get too invested in other people, especially those he won't be working with for extended periods of time. So despite being pleasant, he tends to also be reserved. Amidst his general airs of ease and sociality, it's easy to miss at first that he tends not to hand out information about himself beyond a name (false), a job (also false), and a preference for the non-smoking section (true).
This isn't to say that he doesn't have his quirks, and they too usually become apparent before long despite his practiced spy's art of being forgettable. As far as he's concerned, even these quirks are rational things. For example: there are relatively few socially acceptable ways to test people's reaction to outrageousness and keep himself entertained in the process. One of them is to tell bad jokes. So that's what he does. It gets old after a while (read as: fast), but he keeps doing it, more because it amuses him than because he expects it to amuse other people. It also reinforces his harmless image, keeps people at arm's length, and lets him judge how they react to the unexpected. He wins all around. In addition to this, he very much enjoys playing the dashing gentleman, right up to flirting suavely with women who interest him. It's an act, a private joke as bad as all the others he tells, designed in the same way to get the proper reactions out of the people around him.
You may have noticed by now that there's something that doesn't play a part in November 11's behavior and personality, and that's the conventional definition of a conscience. He feels no guilt for the things he's done as MI6's top agent. Guilt is an irrational, socially-induced emotion. If it makes good business sense to kill someone, he'll do it and be completely unfazed afterwards. If he objects to an abhorrent act such as torture, it's solely because he doesn't believe it accomplishes anything worthwhile. Behind the suave accent and mildly charming smiles, he is not a nice or good man by most definitions. He doesn't care. He no longer has the ability to care about such trivial things as what society labels good and evil.
When it amuses him to do so (and when he's already been found out anyway), November may complain about being a contractor, about how harsh it is that he has to pay an unwanted price which he detests for his ability. This, like so much else he says, is a complete lie (except for the part about disliking the price he pays in return for his power; he really does hate smoking). The truth is, he enjoys being a contractor. He's proud of it. As a rational being with a superhuman ability, he has opportunities he never had before. Emphasis on the rational being part. Anyone could pick up a gun and shoot someone. November is only different in that he impales people with icicles instead. As nice as it is to have a useful power, it's much more useful to be able to operate calmly and rationally when ordinary human beings would be surrendering to their emotions. He doesn't have anything against normal humans, mind you--he's just glad he's not one of them anymore.
Of course, the truth is that even contractors have emotions and, if they're not careful, can let those emotions drive them. They're just much better at avoiding it than normal humans. Socially and emotionally, they become clean slates when they become contractors, and it's difficult to write on those slates again, but it's not impossible. November 11 is no exception, and despite what he professes to the contrary, he's quite aware of it. For most of his life as a contractor he was able to largely ignore it. It didn't matter that despite contractors' supposed inability to form attachments, he had a fondness for his partners. It didn't matter that he got mad when they got hurt, or that he found himself honestly drawn to Kirihara Misaki and her noble but outmatched struggle against the corruption of the powers that be. He could deal with those feelings, accomplish his goals, and serve his own interests at the same time, so it didn't bother him.
For the most part, he was quite self-aware about all this, even if some of it he'd never admit to other people. But he never really stopped to think about the linchpin on which he hung all his rationality and supposed self-interest. As implied before, it was--and in a way still is--a peculiar mix of pride and duty. Even as a contractor, he couldn't live for nothing but self-gratification; there was just no point to it, and in any case base pleasures never particularly appealed to him on a deep level. So instead, without really realizing it for the longest time, he lived for the sake of his proud professionalism, his conviction that he could and should be the best contractor he could be, perennially both clever and stylish in his own special way. November 11 didn't have the same principles as an ordinary human, but he had principles all the same. He simply centered his world on them so much that until his pride was challenged it never even occurred to him to think of them as anything but self-interest.
But November was an active, persistent secret agent in a world full of conspiracies and the aforementioned corruption. Eventually, doing the rational thing by his unspoken principles was going to run up against doing the self-interested thing. He found himself faced with a choice: become complicit in a plot to destroy all contractors, or go down fighting that plan. When given that choice, rather than turn his back on reason and his own people or go into denial, he chose to accept that sometimes, even in a rational, amoral worldview such as his own, one had to make decisions that went against one's own benefit for the sake of greater purposes. There was no such thing as a coherent worldview that was both completely rational and completely self-serving. He accepted that, and he sacrificed himself.
Quite reasonably, he never expected to have to deal with the emotional consequences of making that decision, at least not for more than a last few minutes. So the City complicates things for him. He now has to live with the realization that he's willing to do things that run counter to his own best interests if he believes he has to, and that that doesn't always work with his proud image of the ever-rational, eternally self-interested contractor. He's not too worried about it, though. After all, he's always known and accepted that he had that unreasonable streak within him, no matter what he said to anyone else. He just never had to acknowledge it quite so drastically before. Given a chance to live on in some form after doing so, he'll gladly take it without making an existential fuss. That wouldn't be rational, after all.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: End of episode 22.
[journal post]:
[ voice ]
[There's the sound of running water close by, along with the rustle of leaves. Someone is posting from within Xanadu.]
I know plenty of people had the motive to kidnap me, but I didn't think any of them would actually go through with it.
[It's a new voice. A beat. When he speaks again, he sounds remarkably calm for a new arrival.]
I'm kidding, of course. I haven't the faintest idea why I'm here. Why doesn't someone on this "Network" fill me in?
[third person / log sample]:
Serendipity of some kind--fortunate or otherwise, he wasn't entirely sure--meant that the building that had until Amber and BK-201's spectacular display just now been Evening Primrose's headquarters was only a few blocks from the place November 11 had stored his files before leaving for the American embassy earlier in the day. The same day, he had to remind himself; he wasn't usually prone to such human foibles, but he'd have to forgive himself at the moment for thinking that it felt like so much longer ago.
As it happened, the place in question was not a storage facility or even an office building of any sort. That would be too obvious, and even before he'd had no intention of leaving any clues of his presence in obvious places. If MI6 wanted to find him, they would have to work for it; anything less would be below his dignity. Instead, that morning he'd made his friendly and apologetic way into a small and unobtrusive restaurant next to an equally small and forgettable museum and earnestly explained to the owner that he'd found out too late that the museum in question didn't allow writing materials to be taken inside the exhibits, and its bag check was full; he'd come back and buy a meal later if only they'd hold onto this binder, thank you very much. It was a silly tourist thing to do, and he'd played the part of the silly tourist as much as he would allow himself, although he refused to go so far as to mangle his Japanese for it.
When he returned to the restaurant, he was missing his usual shades and felt a little bit naked without them. That was another irrational human thing for him to be feeling, but he supposed he could spare the indulgence. It turned out humans and contractors had some things in common after all. The fear of death was among them. It was a good thing contractors were so much better at controlling those embarrassing things they had in common with ordinary humans. Still, something must have been showing as he leaned over the counter to reintroduce himself, because the waitress who'd been tasked with holding onto his things gave him a concerned look as she approached. "Ah, mister--" (She used the actual word. With the briefest, tamest flash of wounded pride, he wondered if she thought he was American.) "There's no need to be prying, of course, but is everything all right?"
He gave her a sad and crooked smile. "Haven't you heard the saying? Bad news ages a man."
"I'm sorry," she stammered, quickly holding out the binder.
Even without the shades to hide his eyes, it was easy for him to let that serious expression melt into something charmingly amused. "You shouldn't be, since I'm just kidding. Everything's fine, of course. Thank you very much for watching my things. I think I'll come back here for that soup in the future--" Something too hopeful in the waitress's expression stopped him. It would be unnecessarily cruel to make her worry when he didn't appear again, wouldn't it? There was no need for that. It accomplished nothing. "Or rather, I'd like to say that, but I'm leaving the country tomorrow and I don't know when I'll be back. Why don't I recommend this place to my friends instead?" That was a more harmless lie, and it cost him nothing to make it.
What he was going to do when he returned to MI6 headquarters would cost him a lot more. The voice of the woman he'd known as February (practically a child now; was that her price? It was a shame he'd never get to find out for sure, but that knowledge fell to someone else, someone with a larger role in this to play) ran again in the back of his head. Shortly after you leave this place, you die.
He took the soup he'd ordered to keep his promise respectably back to a table, although he wasn't hungry, and opened his files. He wouldn't have access to a computer and printer before he got back to MI6 headquarters, and even if he had, using them and exposing himself to the grid would be an unnecessary risk. So he neatly wrote down the last threads of information he'd discovered on the final pages of the binder and arranged the papers carefully. After all that effort, he thought to himself, he would have to be terribly careful with those files. It would be such a shame if they got blood on them in the end.
November allowed himself a private grin, because that was really a terrible joke. Whatever was of value in those files would get covered up by the syndicate long before it propagated out of the ranks of MI6. He knew that now. Still, taking care of it was only the professional thing to do.
He closed the binder and, before he could put down his pen, found himself looking at the napkins on his table. He let his smile fade, because it occurred to him that if he were a less reasonable man, he might resort to scribbling last messages on those scraps of paper. Fortunately, he was a contractor, and he knew there was no point in doing so. April and July would understand what he was doing, because they knew him, were his friends even if he were to graciously deny it. And there was no one else he needed to explain himself to.
No, that was another lie. He'd gotten awfully used to telling them, hadn't he? Well, it only made sense. But he couldn't afford them now. The truth was that he'd need to say something to Misaki, something to warn her not to get in as deep as he was and meet the same fate. Why did he care? Should he even bother questioning it? She wasn't a friend, but he'd managed to become irrational about her too. Shame on him, and at the same time not. It didn't matter if he had some small attachment to a human woman. He could still finish his job with style and dignity.
But he'd find a way to warn her.
November 11 stood up, pausing only to leave a nice tip by his untouched meal. He had an appointment of his own making to reach. It was unfortunate, but he didn't see any need to regret it. He was doing the rational thing--it just happened that in the end, that wasn't always the same as the self-interested thing.
[character]: November 11
[character history / background]:
Ten years ago, the world changed. Strange Gates opened in South America and Japan, and the real stars disappeared from the sky, to be replaced by false ones that represented the other change: people with supernatural powers and an eerie lack of human conscience now walked the earth. The expected happened: governments and organizations vied with each other over information about these Gates and control of contractors, the people with powers. They covered up the existence of contractors in the eyes of the general public, even while using them amongst themselves.
Five years ago, for reasons unknown, a fifteen hundred kilometer area of land surrounding Heaven's Gate in South America simply vanished from the map during a war surrounding said area. Anything physical that attempted to enter it was just repelled. This was in the middle of a war over the Gate, and not only was it a disaster of the highest order, but it made all the changes that much more difficult to cover up. But still the existence of contractors was reduced to rumors and hearsay.
So it's been since then, with all governments on edge, and the organization of Pandora took control over researching the remaining Hell's Gate in Tokyo.
Flash back. Before the stars changed, a boy grew up in England. He had a normal upbringing and a normal life. He did well in school, because he was very clever indeed, but good conscience and all the regulations of society prevented him from really making that cleverness work for him. Before the stars changed, that boy became a man who worked for the British government. He was a valued public servant, because he was smart and good at getting things done, but he never really did anything interesting. There was just not much chance, in a well-ordered society.
After the stars changed, that man walked home in the rain without an umbrella and wondered why he'd bothered following all those rules and all those niceties for so long when he could have been doing so much more. He stopped in an alleyway and reached up to touch the rain. It froze in a fountain around him, and with his keen and newly-freed mind, he wondered what else he could do with this power...
After the stars changed, a lot of contractors went rogue. But this man didn't. As a contractor, he was free from the usual human quirks that got in the way of rational decision-making, such as temporary thrill-seeking or a conscience. He decided that he had no experience going rogue and would probably be caught attempting it. He decided that it was in his best interest to continue to serve his country, but to make them a new offer, one that would make far more efficient use of his new abilities and be much more interesting and fulfilling for him.
He became one of the first contractors to offer their services to a national intelligence agency, and, in time, one of the best. What he was called before no longer mattered. He became November 11, the top field agent of MI6.
The truth is, all of that about the boy who grew up in England and the man he became is speculation, save for the very last sentence. We know nothing about November's past before the Gates opened and the stars changed--not even his real name. We only know what happened afterwards.
November 11 may have been the first, but he certainly wasn't the last. Shortly afterwards, he was joined by codename February, a woman whose contractor abilities he never did find out; April, a contractor who could control weather (quite handy to have around when making it rain allowed you to wreak all kinds of havoc); and July, a young boy who was one of that peculiar subset of contractors known as "dolls" who performed as passive mediums with (supposedly) preprogrammed personalities, sending out observer spirits through a particular material (in July's case, glass) to any other instance of that same material in the world.
All went well until the war in South America broke out. The UK was in the thick of things, and to make it worse, February had defected, taking with her a good chunk of information to a mysterious organization known only as the syndicate. Then the disaster surrounding Heaven's Gate occurred, as described above, and the war ended for lack of anything to fight over.
The contractors employed in Britain's intelligence agencies would spend the next five years playing catch-up to undo the damage February had done when she turned traitor. November 11 was their top agent, but he wasn't exempt from this.
Which brings us roughly to the present day, or at least to where things started getting interesting again. An assignment led the trio of MI6 operatives from eastern Europe to Hell's Gate in Tokyo, and there two things of note happened.
The first was that November 11 met Kirihara Misaki, the regional chief of police for contractor-related matters. This didn't seem particularly important at the time--after all, contractors don't form attachments to people, do they? The second was that the group ran into trouble with the same mysterious organization to which February, now codenamed Amber, had defected to. After that, they were assigned to stay in Tokyo and attempt to learn more about this syndicate for a while.
For a time, nothing came of that--until, out of the blue, Amber showed her face again. It turned out she had turned her back on the syndicate as well and now led a mysterious group called Evening Primrose, which was wreaking havoc all around Tokyo for reasons unknown. One of the explosions they'd caused had left April badly injured, and while as a contractor he was technically supposed to feel nothing about this, November 11 was actually rather displeased by it. They wanted him to join up. He refused. Thanks to July's help and Misaki's timely intervention, he nevertheless managed to get out of the situation intact--and then go and take out the contractor responsible for the explosions.
But that left far too many questions for November to be satisfied. Why had Amber left the syndicate? Just what was the syndicate? What was Evening Primrose's real goal? Eventually, he decided that he needed to take matters into his own hands to find out. To make sure his investigations wouldn't bring harm to his partners, he cut ties with April and July and vanished from MI6's watchful eyes. A peculiarly uncontractor-like sentiment urged him on to make contact with Kirihara Misaki and warn her one last time of the dangers that lay ahead. Then he took Evening Primrose up on their offer this time and went to find out what they knew.
In short order, he found out three things: Evening Primrose opposed the plans of the syndicate; the plans of the syndicate were to wipe out every contractor in existence; and the syndicate had its agents everywhere, including in MI6. In fact, their mole in MI6 was his direct superior.
Actually, he found out four things. When he asked Amber to prove that she could see the future as she claimed she could, she told him that shortly after he left this place, he was going to die.
Which made a few things crystal clear to him.
One was that Evening Primrose had never really needed him. He was only there to prove by his demise to someone else, someone more important, that Amber's powers were genuine. He was not the hero of this story.
Two was that he hadn't just been taking a calculated risk, as he'd thought, when he'd dove deeper into his investigations of Evening Primrose and the syndicate. He'd been setting up his own fall. He knew full well that confronting his superior about the syndicate would lead to his death. But if he turned his back on the matter and decided to save his own skin, he'd be abandoning every contractor in the world.
So November 11 accepted that he was only a minor character after all, and one doomed to die at that. He left Evening Primrose's headquarters and confronted his superior with the evidence he'd found, all with a smile on his face. To his credit, he managed to take out not only his boss but a squad of machine-gun-wielding bodyguards as well and still have enough time left afterwards to give Misaki a final call warning her that he might have gotten her in trouble as well before his injuries finished him off.
[character abilities]:
Standard Contractor Benefits
As a contractor, November 11 is clear-headed and far less susceptible than most to the influence of normal emotions on his judgment and actions. He also has a small bonus that non-contractors don't have: should a passive medium or "doll" arrive from his world, he'll be able to see the ghostly forms of the observer spirits it sends out. This isn't relevant unless a doll shows up, though.
It's also implied pretty heavily that contractors can take more punishment than ordinary people and shrug it off or at least stay on their feet for longer. November himself has casually shrugged off a knife wound to the arm, woken up after an explosion he was barely shielded from and completely kept his cool, and walked away from being on the wrong end of four machine guns--not very far, but he kept his composure the whole way. If the last example is anything to go by, it's less about actually being able to withstand greater injuries and more about being able to function despite them better than a normal human would.
Freezing Water
Simple enough, right? November 11 can turn water into ice. This may seem like kind of a loser power at first glance, and in the hands of someone with a less sharp and creative mind, it probably would be. It's not, though. Because he can turn any water into ice, so long as he's touching it or some other water connected to it. Any water, or anything with enough water in it. He has been known to grab someone's hand and freeze all the moisture in their lower arm solid, ripping it right off. A frequent tactic of his is to wait for someone to step into a puddle, then freeze a bridge of ice through the puddle, up through the moisture in their shoes, and around their lower legs, preventing them from moving away (this probably wouldn't work if someone had really well-insulated boots, but it seems to work on normal boots just fine). He also freezes water in just about any form, from rain to coffee to falling liquor, into sharp shards and throws them at people, impaling them. This is his favored killing method, actually, even though it's possible to entirely freeze someone's body to kill them instead. It's just so much more stylish, and as a bonus, in most weather the evidence melts.
Note that if you can completely break (not just fragment or crack) or melt some of the ice November has frozen, all the ice past that point away from him immediately melts. So if he has you in the usual leglock, your best bet is to abruptly blow up or melt part of the bridge of ice leading to your feet, at which point your legs will go back to normal and you can run. Or retaliate, if you prefer. Another caveat is that unless it's actually very foggy or raining, he can't pull moisture from the air to form ice, despite being able to freeze liquids like coffee--whatever he's freezing needs to be currently in liquid form and have a pretty high water content.
Despite being in a different world, November still has to pay his price at some point soon after using his ability: smoking a cigarette for an amount of time proportional to how much he used his power. In the midst of combat he can delay the compulsion to do so, but only for a matter of minutes or at the very most a couple hours or so. Eventually, he will simply be compelled to smoke, even though he hates it. If he is somehow prevented from doing so, he will lapse into considerable mental and physical pain until the need is addressed. In addition, sustained use of his power will eventually run him up against a limit until he pays his price and waits a while.
[character personality]:
As far as most normal humans who know about them are concerned, contractors are beings free of any morality or conscience--some even say they lack human feelings. This isn't entirely true. Among contractors themselves, different definitions hold sway depending on who you ask. November 11's definition of a contractor is simple, or at least it was: they are people who act only in their own best interest at all times, in a thoughtful and rational manner, unhampered by the usual restraints on self-interest and reason, both those considered "good" by society (such as conscience and loyalty) and those considered "bad," such as spite and cowardice. This is ultimately his guiding principle, or so he said.
Let's fall back for a moment and look at how he presents himself to the world. Here, too, the principle of rational self-interest holds. It doesn't make good sense to be surly or ill-mannered to people; it only makes social interactions more difficult as time goes by. So November is, when possible, a pleasant man. He's not overly helpful or kind, because that would divert excess energy from his own interests and those he's pursuing, but he's polite (in a no-nonsense and self-serving way) and, when he feels it behooves him to get to know someone, friendly. On the other hand, it's irrational to get too invested in other people, especially those he won't be working with for extended periods of time. So despite being pleasant, he tends to also be reserved. Amidst his general airs of ease and sociality, it's easy to miss at first that he tends not to hand out information about himself beyond a name (false), a job (also false), and a preference for the non-smoking section (true).
This isn't to say that he doesn't have his quirks, and they too usually become apparent before long despite his practiced spy's art of being forgettable. As far as he's concerned, even these quirks are rational things. For example: there are relatively few socially acceptable ways to test people's reaction to outrageousness and keep himself entertained in the process. One of them is to tell bad jokes. So that's what he does. It gets old after a while (read as: fast), but he keeps doing it, more because it amuses him than because he expects it to amuse other people. It also reinforces his harmless image, keeps people at arm's length, and lets him judge how they react to the unexpected. He wins all around. In addition to this, he very much enjoys playing the dashing gentleman, right up to flirting suavely with women who interest him. It's an act, a private joke as bad as all the others he tells, designed in the same way to get the proper reactions out of the people around him.
You may have noticed by now that there's something that doesn't play a part in November 11's behavior and personality, and that's the conventional definition of a conscience. He feels no guilt for the things he's done as MI6's top agent. Guilt is an irrational, socially-induced emotion. If it makes good business sense to kill someone, he'll do it and be completely unfazed afterwards. If he objects to an abhorrent act such as torture, it's solely because he doesn't believe it accomplishes anything worthwhile. Behind the suave accent and mildly charming smiles, he is not a nice or good man by most definitions. He doesn't care. He no longer has the ability to care about such trivial things as what society labels good and evil.
When it amuses him to do so (and when he's already been found out anyway), November may complain about being a contractor, about how harsh it is that he has to pay an unwanted price which he detests for his ability. This, like so much else he says, is a complete lie (except for the part about disliking the price he pays in return for his power; he really does hate smoking). The truth is, he enjoys being a contractor. He's proud of it. As a rational being with a superhuman ability, he has opportunities he never had before. Emphasis on the rational being part. Anyone could pick up a gun and shoot someone. November is only different in that he impales people with icicles instead. As nice as it is to have a useful power, it's much more useful to be able to operate calmly and rationally when ordinary human beings would be surrendering to their emotions. He doesn't have anything against normal humans, mind you--he's just glad he's not one of them anymore.
Of course, the truth is that even contractors have emotions and, if they're not careful, can let those emotions drive them. They're just much better at avoiding it than normal humans. Socially and emotionally, they become clean slates when they become contractors, and it's difficult to write on those slates again, but it's not impossible. November 11 is no exception, and despite what he professes to the contrary, he's quite aware of it. For most of his life as a contractor he was able to largely ignore it. It didn't matter that despite contractors' supposed inability to form attachments, he had a fondness for his partners. It didn't matter that he got mad when they got hurt, or that he found himself honestly drawn to Kirihara Misaki and her noble but outmatched struggle against the corruption of the powers that be. He could deal with those feelings, accomplish his goals, and serve his own interests at the same time, so it didn't bother him.
For the most part, he was quite self-aware about all this, even if some of it he'd never admit to other people. But he never really stopped to think about the linchpin on which he hung all his rationality and supposed self-interest. As implied before, it was--and in a way still is--a peculiar mix of pride and duty. Even as a contractor, he couldn't live for nothing but self-gratification; there was just no point to it, and in any case base pleasures never particularly appealed to him on a deep level. So instead, without really realizing it for the longest time, he lived for the sake of his proud professionalism, his conviction that he could and should be the best contractor he could be, perennially both clever and stylish in his own special way. November 11 didn't have the same principles as an ordinary human, but he had principles all the same. He simply centered his world on them so much that until his pride was challenged it never even occurred to him to think of them as anything but self-interest.
But November was an active, persistent secret agent in a world full of conspiracies and the aforementioned corruption. Eventually, doing the rational thing by his unspoken principles was going to run up against doing the self-interested thing. He found himself faced with a choice: become complicit in a plot to destroy all contractors, or go down fighting that plan. When given that choice, rather than turn his back on reason and his own people or go into denial, he chose to accept that sometimes, even in a rational, amoral worldview such as his own, one had to make decisions that went against one's own benefit for the sake of greater purposes. There was no such thing as a coherent worldview that was both completely rational and completely self-serving. He accepted that, and he sacrificed himself.
Quite reasonably, he never expected to have to deal with the emotional consequences of making that decision, at least not for more than a last few minutes. So the City complicates things for him. He now has to live with the realization that he's willing to do things that run counter to his own best interests if he believes he has to, and that that doesn't always work with his proud image of the ever-rational, eternally self-interested contractor. He's not too worried about it, though. After all, he's always known and accepted that he had that unreasonable streak within him, no matter what he said to anyone else. He just never had to acknowledge it quite so drastically before. Given a chance to live on in some form after doing so, he'll gladly take it without making an existential fuss. That wouldn't be rational, after all.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: End of episode 22.
[journal post]:
[ voice ]
[There's the sound of running water close by, along with the rustle of leaves. Someone is posting from within Xanadu.]
I know plenty of people had the motive to kidnap me, but I didn't think any of them would actually go through with it.
[It's a new voice. A beat. When he speaks again, he sounds remarkably calm for a new arrival.]
I'm kidding, of course. I haven't the faintest idea why I'm here. Why doesn't someone on this "Network" fill me in?
[third person / log sample]:
Serendipity of some kind--fortunate or otherwise, he wasn't entirely sure--meant that the building that had until Amber and BK-201's spectacular display just now been Evening Primrose's headquarters was only a few blocks from the place November 11 had stored his files before leaving for the American embassy earlier in the day. The same day, he had to remind himself; he wasn't usually prone to such human foibles, but he'd have to forgive himself at the moment for thinking that it felt like so much longer ago.
As it happened, the place in question was not a storage facility or even an office building of any sort. That would be too obvious, and even before he'd had no intention of leaving any clues of his presence in obvious places. If MI6 wanted to find him, they would have to work for it; anything less would be below his dignity. Instead, that morning he'd made his friendly and apologetic way into a small and unobtrusive restaurant next to an equally small and forgettable museum and earnestly explained to the owner that he'd found out too late that the museum in question didn't allow writing materials to be taken inside the exhibits, and its bag check was full; he'd come back and buy a meal later if only they'd hold onto this binder, thank you very much. It was a silly tourist thing to do, and he'd played the part of the silly tourist as much as he would allow himself, although he refused to go so far as to mangle his Japanese for it.
When he returned to the restaurant, he was missing his usual shades and felt a little bit naked without them. That was another irrational human thing for him to be feeling, but he supposed he could spare the indulgence. It turned out humans and contractors had some things in common after all. The fear of death was among them. It was a good thing contractors were so much better at controlling those embarrassing things they had in common with ordinary humans. Still, something must have been showing as he leaned over the counter to reintroduce himself, because the waitress who'd been tasked with holding onto his things gave him a concerned look as she approached. "Ah, mister--" (She used the actual word. With the briefest, tamest flash of wounded pride, he wondered if she thought he was American.) "There's no need to be prying, of course, but is everything all right?"
He gave her a sad and crooked smile. "Haven't you heard the saying? Bad news ages a man."
"I'm sorry," she stammered, quickly holding out the binder.
Even without the shades to hide his eyes, it was easy for him to let that serious expression melt into something charmingly amused. "You shouldn't be, since I'm just kidding. Everything's fine, of course. Thank you very much for watching my things. I think I'll come back here for that soup in the future--" Something too hopeful in the waitress's expression stopped him. It would be unnecessarily cruel to make her worry when he didn't appear again, wouldn't it? There was no need for that. It accomplished nothing. "Or rather, I'd like to say that, but I'm leaving the country tomorrow and I don't know when I'll be back. Why don't I recommend this place to my friends instead?" That was a more harmless lie, and it cost him nothing to make it.
What he was going to do when he returned to MI6 headquarters would cost him a lot more. The voice of the woman he'd known as February (practically a child now; was that her price? It was a shame he'd never get to find out for sure, but that knowledge fell to someone else, someone with a larger role in this to play) ran again in the back of his head. Shortly after you leave this place, you die.
He took the soup he'd ordered to keep his promise respectably back to a table, although he wasn't hungry, and opened his files. He wouldn't have access to a computer and printer before he got back to MI6 headquarters, and even if he had, using them and exposing himself to the grid would be an unnecessary risk. So he neatly wrote down the last threads of information he'd discovered on the final pages of the binder and arranged the papers carefully. After all that effort, he thought to himself, he would have to be terribly careful with those files. It would be such a shame if they got blood on them in the end.
November allowed himself a private grin, because that was really a terrible joke. Whatever was of value in those files would get covered up by the syndicate long before it propagated out of the ranks of MI6. He knew that now. Still, taking care of it was only the professional thing to do.
He closed the binder and, before he could put down his pen, found himself looking at the napkins on his table. He let his smile fade, because it occurred to him that if he were a less reasonable man, he might resort to scribbling last messages on those scraps of paper. Fortunately, he was a contractor, and he knew there was no point in doing so. April and July would understand what he was doing, because they knew him, were his friends even if he were to graciously deny it. And there was no one else he needed to explain himself to.
No, that was another lie. He'd gotten awfully used to telling them, hadn't he? Well, it only made sense. But he couldn't afford them now. The truth was that he'd need to say something to Misaki, something to warn her not to get in as deep as he was and meet the same fate. Why did he care? Should he even bother questioning it? She wasn't a friend, but he'd managed to become irrational about her too. Shame on him, and at the same time not. It didn't matter if he had some small attachment to a human woman. He could still finish his job with style and dignity.
But he'd find a way to warn her.
November 11 stood up, pausing only to leave a nice tip by his untouched meal. He had an appointment of his own making to reach. It was unfortunate, but he didn't see any need to regret it. He was doing the rational thing--it just happened that in the end, that wasn't always the same as the self-interested thing.