cnc app;
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: gabbie
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: supergabbie
IM: -
E-MAIL: -
RETURNING: Norman, Felicia, Electro.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Harvey Dent / Two-Face
FANDOM: DC Universe
CHRONOLOGY: Post-No Man's Land
CLASS: Villain / anti-hero
SUPERHERO NAME: Two-Face
ALTER EGO: Harvey Dent...
BACKGROUND:
Before he was Two-Face, Harvey Dent started from much humbler beginnings. He suffered abuse at the hands of his father, who often used a two-headed coin -- the same one Harvey would later use, having hung onto it for "sentimental reasons" -- to taunt his child by telling him he wouldn't hurt him if it came up tails. This sowed the seeds of several mental and personality disorders within Harvey's mind, that would come further into prominence in his later years.
As Gotham's District Attorney, many years later, Harvey used his talents in profession and his position to go after big name crime lords, ones others had been too afraid to touch -- or couldn't for lack of evidence. The fact Harvey was close with mysterious Gotham vigilante Batman (and with Gotham socialite Bruce Wayne) worked in us favor; Batman provided Harvey with evidence that would help put Sal "the Boss" Maroni, head of one of Gotham's crime families, behind bars. This was occurring around the same time as a rash of serial murders by someone codenamed the "Holiday Killer", for whom Harvey would later end up as a suspect but it wasn't him, so who cares.
He got a lot of heat for his perseverance in this area from the current Police Commissioner -- and suffered, himself, at the hands of gang violence for "sticking his head where it didn't belong" -- and in the area of unearthing the GCPD's corrupt policemen from his friend, then Police Captain, later Police Commissioner, Jim Gordon. However, Gordon was still a friend, and together they put together a small task-force to go after Maroni.
The case ends up in a mistrial, and shortly after Maroni's men start getting killed by a mysterious murderer and Harvey become nearly everyone's main suspect. Except Maroni's. He came to Harvey for protection, knowing he'd be next, and Harvey made a deal that he would protect him in exchange for not only his crime family, but Carmine Falcone's as well. However, things went wrong, acid was involved, and the rest is history. Harvey disappeared for a month, and when he was seen again, he was horribly scarred on the left side of his face, and on his left hand. He committed two murders, killing both his A.D.A and Falcone. He was soon after sent to Arkham Asylum.
He escaped the following year on Halloween, when the Holiday case was reopened in the hopes of going after the rest of the Falcone family. He was also at this time romantically involved with the current District Attorney, Janice Porter. A similar string of serial murders arose, again on holidays, this time targeting cops and using the unifying theme of Hangman puzzles written on Harvey Dent's case files. Two-Face was naturally a suspect, and Porter, working with Mario Falcone (the legitimate son of the Falcone line) put Harvey on trial. Other Arkham inmates interrupted the proceedings and Two-Face escaped, and two days later Porter was kidnapped and brought to him, only to be shot and killed when she said that she loved him. Two-Face and the other Arkhamites went on to kill the heads of four other crime families on Columbus Day. He almost ended up getting killed himself by the Hangman killer (Sofia Falcone), but was rescued by Batman.
Some time later, it was brought to his attention that Batman had taken on a sidekick. Interested in putting the boy to the test, Two-Face kidnapped the judge who had been on the Maroni trial the day Harvey got scarred, and put him and Batman both in nooses, letting Robin decide how the coin flip went. Hoping to save them both, Robin made one call -- then called for a two-out-of-three, saying if good heads came up again, the Judge wouldn't hang. It did. Harvey let the Judge drown, instead, and proceeded to beat Robin to near death with a baseball bat. Two-Face was brought into prison, assuming Robin was dead and happy to confess to his crime. He escaped shortly after.
As a criminal, he always engineered crimes having to do with duality, or the number two, some of them very small to some very grandiose. He became something of a figure for underground crime, but branched out whenever it would suit him (or the coin told him to). After a computer error got him out of prison once again, Two-Face came up with the idea of trying to "duplicate" that error and toy with the legal system. He and his men went on and killed a room full of attorneys, with the intent to continue on with judges, jurors, district attorneys. To further take the law system into his own hands, he made the guilty innocent and the innocent "nonexistent" in the law computers after flipping between repairing it, or making it even more flawed. He captured Robin (Tim Drake) and the man who should have been paroled instead of Harvey, Harvey Kent, planning on killing one or both of them by burying them under papers from the Hall of Records.
Also, at some ambiguous point in canon, Harvey had a clone for about a day named Harvey. Who even knows.
His condition underwent a period a deterioration, prompting him to threaten to destroy half the city, and save the other half. However, due to his mental state, his 'good' side began to underhandedly sabotage the 'bad' side by acting on his own as a vigilante called Janus. While Two-Face tried to blow up half the city, Harvey as Janus disabled the detonators.
Later, an earthquake shook Gotham City, turning it into a lawless pit of chaos; the city was annexed and effectively shut down. Arkham escapees swarmed the city in waves and split it up into sections, and Two-Face became very active in the rising gang scene, snatching up what territory he could. He both worked with the police and worked against the police before the city's rebuild, meeting officer Renee Montoya and developing a slow obsession with her, and making a deal with Jim Gordon and the police to double-cross the Penguin in order to reduce his territory for the police to snatch up. When Gordon later went on to "go back" on their deal (as Harvey saw it), Harvey was furious.
He later kept Renee and her family prisoners for a brief time, and went to Jim Gordon's house, kidnapping him to put him on 'trial' for the things he did during No Man's Land (the aftermath of the earthquake), as well as their involvement with Two-Face himself. Harvey ended up having to act as Gordon's defense, mentally cross-examining himself as both Harvey and Two-Face. Gordon was declared not guilty. Harvey allowed Renee to arrest him, but would later come back to out Renee as a lesbian to the police force (and her family) and frame her for murder -- among other things -- in the hopes that she would realize they belonged together if her world was sufficiently shaken.
(Spoiler: It didn't work.)
Gotham's No Man's Land didn't last forever, however; soon Lex Luthor came to Gotham to rebuild it to it's former "glory."
PERSONALITY:
Harvey Dent had always been a driven man. His strong determination and work ethic brought him onto the Gotham scene as a successful lawyer, then District Attorney. He worked for the people in mind, almost ruthlessly going after anyone he deemed corrupt with little worry toward repercussions. He had a good deal of confidence and a lot of guts, and deemed himself just about as untouchable as the media seemed to consider him. He rattled cages, to say the least.
However, he was not without his dark side, even before his accident. On top of the possible bipolar disorder and the schizophrenia/Dissociative Identity Disorder he had developed growing up, he had and has a hair-trigger temper that could erupt violently. Tied together which his mental disorders, he started to slowly develop another more violent personality. He used his position as District Attorney to channel that anger as suggested by his therapist, punishing guilty men and women. However, this wasn't quite enough. He never could control his temper, and it continued to get worse.
His wife Gilda noticed the changes in Harvey as well. The stress that built and tensions between himself and Bruce Wayne (and Jim Gordon) pushed him towards the edge, and the acid pushed him right off it. As a child he had been obsessed with being "good" due to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father; once he was scarred he realized he was "marked" and the bad wasn't hidden anymore. He would be heads now, not tails.
He believes in Gotham City, and he believes in justice. But he believes in her own justice -- a justice defined by the flip of a coin. Good vs. evil, innocent vs. guilty, black vs. white. The coin is supposed to represent a balanced system, defined by chance and equality -- a sort of compromise between Harvey and Two-Face. As he once said, "The very nature of the law is arbitrary. You've got a better chance of getting justice in this town by, say, flipping a coin, than putting yourself at the mercy of this or any court." (Two-Face: Year One) He of course, took this to an extreme. He became addicted and dependent on his coin flips, almost always relying on the result of the toss to make his decisions. This extends not only for destructive purposes, but also whether or not to save people, whether or not to escape Arkham, any kind of decision. This is why attempts to wean him off the coin in the past -- such as onto dice and tarot cards -- have failed; he became too dependent on whatever he was using for his crutch and got paralyzed with indecision when faced with more choices.
Although he believes in Gotham City and the people of Gotham City once believed in him, Harvey is unable to completely believe in himself and fears failure, thus believes that he needs the coin to make his decisions for him. Despite this, he has sometimes gone against the coin toss, or been able to function without it entirely for a brief time, such as when he worked with Renee Montoya and let her keep his coin for a while. These times are rare, but poignant.
Because of this, his loyalty is very tenuous. He will work with someone if the coin allows it, but if the coin says something different the next time, Harvey will be gone. However, Renee is one of the very few people, if not the only person, that Harvey and Two-Face will listen to and respect; both of them are in agreement that she is someone special. He believes they should be together, even though Harvey is aware of the fact that Renee is a lesbian. His obsession overshadows that knowledge and logic, essentially making it a fact to him without any meaning. ("Yeah, I know all that. I don't see what that has to do with us." - Gotham Central #10) He hears and believes what he wants to hear and believe, vehemently.
His relationship with Batman -- and Bruce Wayne -- is a complicated one. Two-Face blames Batman in part for what happened to Harvey, saying he was betrayed. However, it's actually Robin that's more of a cause of Two-Face's grief than Batman is -- every Robin (save for Stephanie Brown, the female Robin) has given him problems and been the true target of his hate. He is one of the few Gotham criminals who does not usually try or want to seek out Batman's attention.
Most important of all is the nature of his relationship with Two-Face. Harvey does not just have two sides -- he and Two-Face converse with one another, sometimes verbally, sometimes mentally. He talks to himself, and makes deals with himself. Despite his own frequent desires to stop being what he is, inevitably Two-Face pulls Harvey back. Inevitably Two-Face comes back, even if sometimes Harvey is able to make him go away for a time and be the in-control personality; while part of him wants to be free of that life, the other part of him doesn't want to be alone. His coin is often the stabilizer, the insurance that Harvey himself will not disappear with Two-Face taking over completely -- because he has to be equally good as he is evil. It was said once that the coin itself may also be making him crazier, because the scarred side is lighter than the unscarred side, and would likely come up more often than the heavier side.
POWER:
Duplication - Harvey will be able to duplicate any inanimate object by touching it. This does not extend to cloning humans or animals, only inanimate objects. However, he can only duplicate a single object once; e.g. he could duplicate a gun so that there were two guns, but not three guns -- he would have to duplicate a different gun if he wanted more than two.
Impartial Analysis - By looking at something, Harvey can tell exactly what that thing is made of. Again, this does not apply to humans or animals (because well BONES, BLOOD, ORGANS…), but he can look at a shirt and tell what kind of fabric it is, a cake and tell what ingredients went into it, a coin and tell if it's counterfeit and what percentage of what metal went into it, etc. He sees things for what they are.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ Video, but it's dark. DARK LIKE HIS SOUL or just bad lighting. Whoever is talking is standing or sitting in the shadows. ]
"Hero." How many people, I wonder, actually sit and think about what that word means? How many people walked away from here saying "I'm a hero because I do this," "I'm not a hero because I do that," -- plenty, I'm sure, given the orders from the lady upstairs.
I think anyone's gonna tell you a hero's a person who does good things, but those things aren't recognized by everyone. A lot of people think they do good things, because they have something to prove or someone to protect. That's what most people think of when they say hero, ain't it? Someone who has something to protect. Who'll do whatever it takes. Some heroes don't even follow the law. It's not about good or evil. So where's the line drawn? Who gets to decide what is or isn't worth protecting?
[ He pauses, and there's a metal clink noise from the darkness. Might be the dog-tags. ]
I'm not pointing fingers, here. Just thinking aloud. It's an unjust system run by unjust people who threw fairness out the door a long time ago. They decide. Unless you decide for yourself. [ Another clink. ]
So think about what you're protecting, everyone. Think about what or who you're protecting them from. Are you protecting them corruption? From justice? From sin? Are you protecting them from the law? From the people who twist and pervert the law?
[ Another clink. The communicator turns, and half the speaker's face appears from the shadows. It's a handsome face, calm and a bit stoic. He looks at the screen. ]
Are you protecting them from me?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
The sky was pale, the moon a large silver ornament casting light to the clouds around it. Harvey slid his silver dollar out of his pocket, running his thumb along its clean surface. He turned it over, dragging his nail along the tracks of the scarred side. He held it up -- at this distance it appeared just as large as the moon. Side by side, they looked like each face of his silver dollar -- scarred, and clean. Chaos, and order.
He moved his hand so the coin hid the moon. Scarred.
Harvey slid the coin back into his pocket, feeling the other for the weight of the communicator he'd put there. His dog-tags went around his neck so as not to disrupt the symmetry. He'd take care of them later, in a river. Right now all he had available were dumpsters and gutters. Nothing worth surrendering identity to.
The moment he'd heard the Porter address him, Harvey knew he was somewhere interesting. Hero, she'd said; they were trying to keep a city run by order, but not by law. That amused him. It was such a blasphemy to all that he'd once stood for, a city where vigilante justice wasn't just there but it recommended -- but it made it feel like home. It was what he'd grown accustomed to over the months he'd survived No Man's Land. He could flourish in lawless society, even if this city wasn't one. It was teetering the edge, a city ruled by heroes was just asking for the right kind of chaos to arrive and throw it back into balance.
That was how the world worked. Chaos and order.
He pulled out his coin, flicking it lazily into the cool air and smacking it down against his hand upon descent.
This city may not have been Gotham, but it would do.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
IF YOU READ ALL THIS, TWO GOLD STARS. I'm looking at you, Leah.
NAME: gabbie
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: supergabbie
IM: -
E-MAIL: -
RETURNING: Norman, Felicia, Electro.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Harvey Dent / Two-Face
FANDOM: DC Universe
CHRONOLOGY: Post-No Man's Land
CLASS: Villain / anti-hero
SUPERHERO NAME: Two-Face
ALTER EGO: Harvey Dent...
BACKGROUND:
Before he was Two-Face, Harvey Dent started from much humbler beginnings. He suffered abuse at the hands of his father, who often used a two-headed coin -- the same one Harvey would later use, having hung onto it for "sentimental reasons" -- to taunt his child by telling him he wouldn't hurt him if it came up tails. This sowed the seeds of several mental and personality disorders within Harvey's mind, that would come further into prominence in his later years.
As Gotham's District Attorney, many years later, Harvey used his talents in profession and his position to go after big name crime lords, ones others had been too afraid to touch -- or couldn't for lack of evidence. The fact Harvey was close with mysterious Gotham vigilante Batman (and with Gotham socialite Bruce Wayne) worked in us favor; Batman provided Harvey with evidence that would help put Sal "the Boss" Maroni, head of one of Gotham's crime families, behind bars. This was occurring around the same time as a rash of serial murders by someone codenamed the "Holiday Killer", for whom Harvey would later end up as a suspect but it wasn't him, so who cares.
He got a lot of heat for his perseverance in this area from the current Police Commissioner -- and suffered, himself, at the hands of gang violence for "sticking his head where it didn't belong" -- and in the area of unearthing the GCPD's corrupt policemen from his friend, then Police Captain, later Police Commissioner, Jim Gordon. However, Gordon was still a friend, and together they put together a small task-force to go after Maroni.
The case ends up in a mistrial, and shortly after Maroni's men start getting killed by a mysterious murderer and Harvey become nearly everyone's main suspect. Except Maroni's. He came to Harvey for protection, knowing he'd be next, and Harvey made a deal that he would protect him in exchange for not only his crime family, but Carmine Falcone's as well. However, things went wrong, acid was involved, and the rest is history. Harvey disappeared for a month, and when he was seen again, he was horribly scarred on the left side of his face, and on his left hand. He committed two murders, killing both his A.D.A and Falcone. He was soon after sent to Arkham Asylum.
He escaped the following year on Halloween, when the Holiday case was reopened in the hopes of going after the rest of the Falcone family. He was also at this time romantically involved with the current District Attorney, Janice Porter. A similar string of serial murders arose, again on holidays, this time targeting cops and using the unifying theme of Hangman puzzles written on Harvey Dent's case files. Two-Face was naturally a suspect, and Porter, working with Mario Falcone (the legitimate son of the Falcone line) put Harvey on trial. Other Arkham inmates interrupted the proceedings and Two-Face escaped, and two days later Porter was kidnapped and brought to him, only to be shot and killed when she said that she loved him. Two-Face and the other Arkhamites went on to kill the heads of four other crime families on Columbus Day. He almost ended up getting killed himself by the Hangman killer (Sofia Falcone), but was rescued by Batman.
Some time later, it was brought to his attention that Batman had taken on a sidekick. Interested in putting the boy to the test, Two-Face kidnapped the judge who had been on the Maroni trial the day Harvey got scarred, and put him and Batman both in nooses, letting Robin decide how the coin flip went. Hoping to save them both, Robin made one call -- then called for a two-out-of-three, saying if good heads came up again, the Judge wouldn't hang. It did. Harvey let the Judge drown, instead, and proceeded to beat Robin to near death with a baseball bat. Two-Face was brought into prison, assuming Robin was dead and happy to confess to his crime. He escaped shortly after.
As a criminal, he always engineered crimes having to do with duality, or the number two, some of them very small to some very grandiose. He became something of a figure for underground crime, but branched out whenever it would suit him (or the coin told him to). After a computer error got him out of prison once again, Two-Face came up with the idea of trying to "duplicate" that error and toy with the legal system. He and his men went on and killed a room full of attorneys, with the intent to continue on with judges, jurors, district attorneys. To further take the law system into his own hands, he made the guilty innocent and the innocent "nonexistent" in the law computers after flipping between repairing it, or making it even more flawed. He captured Robin (Tim Drake) and the man who should have been paroled instead of Harvey, Harvey Kent, planning on killing one or both of them by burying them under papers from the Hall of Records.
Also, at some ambiguous point in canon, Harvey had a clone for about a day named Harvey. Who even knows.
His condition underwent a period a deterioration, prompting him to threaten to destroy half the city, and save the other half. However, due to his mental state, his 'good' side began to underhandedly sabotage the 'bad' side by acting on his own as a vigilante called Janus. While Two-Face tried to blow up half the city, Harvey as Janus disabled the detonators.
Later, an earthquake shook Gotham City, turning it into a lawless pit of chaos; the city was annexed and effectively shut down. Arkham escapees swarmed the city in waves and split it up into sections, and Two-Face became very active in the rising gang scene, snatching up what territory he could. He both worked with the police and worked against the police before the city's rebuild, meeting officer Renee Montoya and developing a slow obsession with her, and making a deal with Jim Gordon and the police to double-cross the Penguin in order to reduce his territory for the police to snatch up. When Gordon later went on to "go back" on their deal (as Harvey saw it), Harvey was furious.
He later kept Renee and her family prisoners for a brief time, and went to Jim Gordon's house, kidnapping him to put him on 'trial' for the things he did during No Man's Land (the aftermath of the earthquake), as well as their involvement with Two-Face himself. Harvey ended up having to act as Gordon's defense, mentally cross-examining himself as both Harvey and Two-Face. Gordon was declared not guilty. Harvey allowed Renee to arrest him, but would later come back to out Renee as a lesbian to the police force (and her family) and frame her for murder -- among other things -- in the hopes that she would realize they belonged together if her world was sufficiently shaken.
(Spoiler: It didn't work.)
Gotham's No Man's Land didn't last forever, however; soon Lex Luthor came to Gotham to rebuild it to it's former "glory."
PERSONALITY:
Harvey Dent had always been a driven man. His strong determination and work ethic brought him onto the Gotham scene as a successful lawyer, then District Attorney. He worked for the people in mind, almost ruthlessly going after anyone he deemed corrupt with little worry toward repercussions. He had a good deal of confidence and a lot of guts, and deemed himself just about as untouchable as the media seemed to consider him. He rattled cages, to say the least.
However, he was not without his dark side, even before his accident. On top of the possible bipolar disorder and the schizophrenia/Dissociative Identity Disorder he had developed growing up, he had and has a hair-trigger temper that could erupt violently. Tied together which his mental disorders, he started to slowly develop another more violent personality. He used his position as District Attorney to channel that anger as suggested by his therapist, punishing guilty men and women. However, this wasn't quite enough. He never could control his temper, and it continued to get worse.
His wife Gilda noticed the changes in Harvey as well. The stress that built and tensions between himself and Bruce Wayne (and Jim Gordon) pushed him towards the edge, and the acid pushed him right off it. As a child he had been obsessed with being "good" due to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father; once he was scarred he realized he was "marked" and the bad wasn't hidden anymore. He would be heads now, not tails.
He believes in Gotham City, and he believes in justice. But he believes in her own justice -- a justice defined by the flip of a coin. Good vs. evil, innocent vs. guilty, black vs. white. The coin is supposed to represent a balanced system, defined by chance and equality -- a sort of compromise between Harvey and Two-Face. As he once said, "The very nature of the law is arbitrary. You've got a better chance of getting justice in this town by, say, flipping a coin, than putting yourself at the mercy of this or any court." (Two-Face: Year One) He of course, took this to an extreme. He became addicted and dependent on his coin flips, almost always relying on the result of the toss to make his decisions. This extends not only for destructive purposes, but also whether or not to save people, whether or not to escape Arkham, any kind of decision. This is why attempts to wean him off the coin in the past -- such as onto dice and tarot cards -- have failed; he became too dependent on whatever he was using for his crutch and got paralyzed with indecision when faced with more choices.
Although he believes in Gotham City and the people of Gotham City once believed in him, Harvey is unable to completely believe in himself and fears failure, thus believes that he needs the coin to make his decisions for him. Despite this, he has sometimes gone against the coin toss, or been able to function without it entirely for a brief time, such as when he worked with Renee Montoya and let her keep his coin for a while. These times are rare, but poignant.
Because of this, his loyalty is very tenuous. He will work with someone if the coin allows it, but if the coin says something different the next time, Harvey will be gone. However, Renee is one of the very few people, if not the only person, that Harvey and Two-Face will listen to and respect; both of them are in agreement that she is someone special. He believes they should be together, even though Harvey is aware of the fact that Renee is a lesbian. His obsession overshadows that knowledge and logic, essentially making it a fact to him without any meaning. ("Yeah, I know all that. I don't see what that has to do with us." - Gotham Central #10) He hears and believes what he wants to hear and believe, vehemently.
His relationship with Batman -- and Bruce Wayne -- is a complicated one. Two-Face blames Batman in part for what happened to Harvey, saying he was betrayed. However, it's actually Robin that's more of a cause of Two-Face's grief than Batman is -- every Robin (save for Stephanie Brown, the female Robin) has given him problems and been the true target of his hate. He is one of the few Gotham criminals who does not usually try or want to seek out Batman's attention.
Most important of all is the nature of his relationship with Two-Face. Harvey does not just have two sides -- he and Two-Face converse with one another, sometimes verbally, sometimes mentally. He talks to himself, and makes deals with himself. Despite his own frequent desires to stop being what he is, inevitably Two-Face pulls Harvey back. Inevitably Two-Face comes back, even if sometimes Harvey is able to make him go away for a time and be the in-control personality; while part of him wants to be free of that life, the other part of him doesn't want to be alone. His coin is often the stabilizer, the insurance that Harvey himself will not disappear with Two-Face taking over completely -- because he has to be equally good as he is evil. It was said once that the coin itself may also be making him crazier, because the scarred side is lighter than the unscarred side, and would likely come up more often than the heavier side.
POWER:
Duplication - Harvey will be able to duplicate any inanimate object by touching it. This does not extend to cloning humans or animals, only inanimate objects. However, he can only duplicate a single object once; e.g. he could duplicate a gun so that there were two guns, but not three guns -- he would have to duplicate a different gun if he wanted more than two.
Impartial Analysis - By looking at something, Harvey can tell exactly what that thing is made of. Again, this does not apply to humans or animals (because well BONES, BLOOD, ORGANS…), but he can look at a shirt and tell what kind of fabric it is, a cake and tell what ingredients went into it, a coin and tell if it's counterfeit and what percentage of what metal went into it, etc. He sees things for what they are.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ Video, but it's dark. DARK LIKE HIS SOUL or just bad lighting. Whoever is talking is standing or sitting in the shadows. ]
"Hero." How many people, I wonder, actually sit and think about what that word means? How many people walked away from here saying "I'm a hero because I do this," "I'm not a hero because I do that," -- plenty, I'm sure, given the orders from the lady upstairs.
I think anyone's gonna tell you a hero's a person who does good things, but those things aren't recognized by everyone. A lot of people think they do good things, because they have something to prove or someone to protect. That's what most people think of when they say hero, ain't it? Someone who has something to protect. Who'll do whatever it takes. Some heroes don't even follow the law. It's not about good or evil. So where's the line drawn? Who gets to decide what is or isn't worth protecting?
[ He pauses, and there's a metal clink noise from the darkness. Might be the dog-tags. ]
I'm not pointing fingers, here. Just thinking aloud. It's an unjust system run by unjust people who threw fairness out the door a long time ago. They decide. Unless you decide for yourself. [ Another clink. ]
So think about what you're protecting, everyone. Think about what or who you're protecting them from. Are you protecting them corruption? From justice? From sin? Are you protecting them from the law? From the people who twist and pervert the law?
[ Another clink. The communicator turns, and half the speaker's face appears from the shadows. It's a handsome face, calm and a bit stoic. He looks at the screen. ]
Are you protecting them from me?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
The sky was pale, the moon a large silver ornament casting light to the clouds around it. Harvey slid his silver dollar out of his pocket, running his thumb along its clean surface. He turned it over, dragging his nail along the tracks of the scarred side. He held it up -- at this distance it appeared just as large as the moon. Side by side, they looked like each face of his silver dollar -- scarred, and clean. Chaos, and order.
He moved his hand so the coin hid the moon. Scarred.
Harvey slid the coin back into his pocket, feeling the other for the weight of the communicator he'd put there. His dog-tags went around his neck so as not to disrupt the symmetry. He'd take care of them later, in a river. Right now all he had available were dumpsters and gutters. Nothing worth surrendering identity to.
The moment he'd heard the Porter address him, Harvey knew he was somewhere interesting. Hero, she'd said; they were trying to keep a city run by order, but not by law. That amused him. It was such a blasphemy to all that he'd once stood for, a city where vigilante justice wasn't just there but it recommended -- but it made it feel like home. It was what he'd grown accustomed to over the months he'd survived No Man's Land. He could flourish in lawless society, even if this city wasn't one. It was teetering the edge, a city ruled by heroes was just asking for the right kind of chaos to arrive and throw it back into balance.
That was how the world worked. Chaos and order.
He pulled out his coin, flicking it lazily into the cool air and smacking it down against his hand upon descent.
This city may not have been Gotham, but it would do.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
IF YOU READ ALL THIS, TWO GOLD STARS. I'm looking at you, Leah.