vildiur_rp Application
OOC:
Name: Zoharial
Personal LJ: akakuro-sama
Email: yami_no_antares@yahoo.com
Timezone: GMT -5 hours (Eastern Standard Time)
AIM/MSN/YIM: RedandBlack394 (AIM)
IC:
Character name: Gauron (birth name and other aliases not given)
Fandom: Full Metal Panic!
Point of Origin: Immediately after the first season (approximately mid-August, 2001).
Appearance: 1; 2; 3
His height and weight aren't listed in the official materials, but I put him at 6'4" and 215 lbs. My pet theory is that he is ethnically mostly of mixed Khmer and Ainu stock, which I use to explain his dark skin, greenish eyes, and slightly caucasoid features, though in the past I've also played him as having some Slavic blood.
In addition to the facial scars visible in these images, his hair is concealing an especially prominent scar across his scalp (from the head injury that necessitated most of his frontal bone being replaced with a titanium plate - his hair is always a little too long because it wouldn't completely hide the scar otherwise), and he'll also have a scar about three inches long at the upper edge of his left zygomatic bone (that is, just below his left eye) when he enters the game. There are no official sources that chart his body scars, so I'll be making them up as it comes up. I'll also be editing this entry to keep a running tally of them.
Background: Wikipedia Page; World Info
From what he remembers and has been able to piece together about his early childhood, he was born in Japan, though his family moved to Cambodia when he was very young - his parents were medical aid workers. After his parents were killed in an air raid by the U.S. when he was around seven or eight, he ended up being taken in by a local Khmer Rouge cell. The group he joined were very active in their insurgency, as well as being renowned for the brutal efficacy of their methods - their commander would later go on to hold a high post at Tuol Sleng. However, child soldiers were usually kept in the rear, and it was a year before Gauron made his first kill - he accidentally murdered a prisoner during an interrogation. Even as young as he was, he realized that he loved the feeling of taking another human life - even then, the sense of power and control it gave him was addictive. Even more than that, though, the first time he killed was the first time the world made sense to him. If death wasn't some powerful, mysterious force, but something so human and petty even a child could cause it, he had nothing left to fear, and in his fight against the world, the playing field had suddenly leveled out.
From then on, Gauron was determined not to be left to guard the supplies - he honed his marksmanship, his close combat skills, his wits and tactical sensibilities; anything that would give him the chance to participate in the group's sorties against the enemy. Back in those days, he still believed in the Khmer Rouge, and that dedication, along with his superiors' fondness for him, kept his budding brilliance and too-logical mind from attracting the kind of negative attention it otherwise might have, under such an anti-intellectual regime. Instead, he was held up as an ideal example of just why the Old People were so superior to their urban counterparts.
When the resettlements began, he was transferred to a squad more active in moving the urban populations to what became known as the Killing Fields, and later, in guarding them. Gauron was happy with the post; or, at the very least, he was never wanting for people to kill, which meant more or less the same thing to him at the time.
However, in that place, his bloodlust wasn't extraordinary. All his fellow soldiers had to become equally vicious, equally detached from the lives they were ending, just to cope with their duties. Thus, his superiors didn't notice the level of depravity that came more naturally to him than the others, and instead found themselves noticing, among other things, his unusual aptitude for battle tactics - and an increasingly conspicuous knack for leadership. He was made a training instructor for other child soldiers by fifteen, though at eighteen, he was back on the lines again when the Vietnamese invaded.
[everything beyond here is almost completely headcanon] Gauron's unit was captured after they ended up in far heavier combat than anticipated and their request for reinforcements was denied; Gauron himself was tortured for information. Rather than breaking him, however, the torture only brought home to Gauron what he had suspected all along - namely, how pathetic the Khmer Rouge's ideology really was. It wasn't like ideology really made a difference, though; all that mattered was one's own strength and will, though that only mattered for a fraction of an instant, in the grand scheme of things. The only real truth was annihilation, and Gauron embraced it. Others might say that the torture completely warped what few parts of his mind had ever functioned normally; Gauron has always maintained that it granted him enlightenment. In the end, he learned how to transcend even physical pain and weakness; the guards hadn't expected him to be able to fight back at all by the time they dragged him out to execute him, much less that he would be able to overpower them and escape.
Gauron abandoned the Khmer Rouge, fleeing to Thailand instead after he escaped. He eventually ended up involved in illegal weapons trade, and about a year and a half after he left Cambodia, he met the man who would become the closest thing to a mentor he's ever had.
An ex black ops agent, said man decided one easy way to cut costs and close loopholes before a mission was to betray Gauron's crew once they had delivered the goods. He wasn't paying nearly enough attention to Gauron, probably figuring he was just some wet-behind-the-ears young thug who wouldn't pose any threat; however, the mistake was made abundantly clear when the shooting ended. Gauron was the only one of his crew still alive, and he had a gun to the man's head; after Gauron had successfully negotiated his escape, though, the two of them got to talking.
By daybreak, Gauron had found a brand new line of work.
The two of them spent the next eight years working together, during which time Gauron's newfound mentor taught him the more refined tools and strategies he'd need as a top-notch mercenary and assassin. In the end, though, the pupil surpassed the master, because the master's skills had begun slipping; Gauron put pressure on his mentor to retire, but he was having none of it (just as Gauron had had none of his mentor's attempts to instill him with some semblance of a moral compass over the years). Things didn't end well: when Gauron's mentor finally did end up botching a mission, he did it so catastrophically that Gauron was almost killed in the process. He still has a titanium plate in his skull as a result of the incident that ended the mission.
At the very least, his mentor had the decency to see to it that Gauron received proper medical treatment, and that his criminal exploits remained well-hidden for the time being; however, that didn't stop Gauron from seeing him as a potential threat - not just to Gauron, but to himself as well. Gauron didn't go gunning for him because he wanted revenge - in his own twisted way, just the opposite: it wasn't just to protect himself, but to give his former mentor a far swifter and more merciful death than the one he'd probably meet with out in the field. Gauron never believed in revenge or grudges anyway, which was why his mentor never saw it coming and never suspected who it was when Gauron shot him in the head at a hundred and fifty meters. The whole incident only reinforced Gauron's lack of compunction about killing when he considered it necessary, and it taught him never, ever to hesitate or make exceptions.
As it turned out, though, Gauron's mentor had done him one last good turn: he had recommended Gauron to Amalgam, an elite mercenary organization with ties to terrorist organizations, weapons manufacturers, and the hard-line factions of governments all over the world. Among other things, the organization specialized in field-testing new weapons - and creating wars to test them in as necessary, especially when the need coincided with the political intentions of their other backers - as well as pioneering new forms of weaponry based on the so-called "Black Technology" (technology produced by the "Whispered," who are essentially the in-world equivalent of technomancers). In some circles, they're known as the world's hatchet men; Gauron's mentor had expected his protege to fit right in, though in the end, it wasn't quite that simple - Gauron found his niche as more of a satellite to the organization.
In the years since then, he's done a lot of work - some of it more tangentially related to Amalgam's goals than the rest - most of it in southeast Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa, though he's also coordinated with forces as far afield as South America. Somewhere along the way, he "converted" to Islam, for the sake of making the networking aspects of his job easier - though he's anything but devout, and when other Muslims aren't looking, he really only uses it as an excuse to avoid drinking, because he hates the effects of alcohol.
For one of his earliest missions with the organization, he was deployed to China, to further inflame the civil war there and demonstrate just what Amalgam's forces and products were capable of. Though Amalgam had agents on both sides, Gauron was sent to South China, which, while it had been getting the worst of the war up until that point, still had greater financial resources available, due in part to covert U.S. backing. With an endless supply of state of the art weapons to show off (though not directly to the buyers, due to his comparatively low rank at the time and the fact that his attitude tended to rub people the wrong way), Gauron proceeded to indulge himself - though he waged one of the most inspired irregular campaigns in Chinese history, he ended up being reassigned because of the brutality of his methods.
However, he took a little piece of South China with him when he left: a pair of orphaned twin girls, about five years old, whom he'd found among a brothel's merchandise. Their village had been wiped out by another Amalgam unit - this one led by a former death squad commander called Gates - and something about them reminded him of himself, so he decided to take them in. He was just as terrifyingly efficient at training child soldiers as ever, and it wasn't long before the girls started taking active - even important - roles in his missions; they were eager to learn, at first because Gauron had promised them that with his training, they would never have to let anyone hurt them ever again.
However, their relationship with him and their reasons for their loyalty soon became much more complicated. Because of the nature of Gauron's work, his girls grew up in an extremely isolating environment, and they came to love him almost obsessively. Though Gauron knew better than to get too attached to anything or anyone in his life, he still adored his girls, and they became the only ones he was ever able to trust implicitly. [headcanon ends here]
Six years ago, Gauron went to Afghanistan just ahead of the Soviet reinvasion, to scout out the guerrilla forces in the region, alert them to what was to come, and establish training camps; this wasn't done out of any sympathy to their cause, but rather, to make the Soviet invasion more difficult so that, among other things, they'd be forced to funnel more money into weapons and mercenaries from Amalgam. He never intended to stay - once the Soviet offensive gained momentum, the plan had always been to let them buy him out.
It was during his time as a training instructor at one of the guerrilla camps that he came across a child soldier called Kashim. When Gauron spotted him, he was disposing of the bodies of the Soviet soldiers he had killed, and for a moment, it was like looking back in time; everything about the boy reminded him of himself, and he was immediately taken with him. He especially liked the look in the boy's eyes - they were completely devoid of any sign of indecision or suffering, and reflected no hint of moral judgment on the act of taking a life. The boy was such a stunning and unexpected find that Gauron immediately tried to win him over, pointing out that Kashim's faction had recently lost a number of battles and were running low on supplies, whereas he was facing no such hardship and could secure the boy anything he wanted. However, he was thwarted by the one trait Kashim possessed that Gauron never had: a sense of loyalty. However, Gauron never forgot the encounter, and hoped that Kashim would survive long enough for him to get another chance to try to make the boy his.
In the meantime, however, he had more immediate business to attend to. He and the twins managed to stall out the Soviet invasion, which had been progressing more rapidly than expected despite well-coordinated Mujahideen resistance, by assassinating a few key military leaders on both sides before they finalized their defection to the Soviets. It was after this that Amalgam began to take notice of the girls' terrifying skill, and they were requested for missions of their own; though they were initially reluctant, Gauron encouraged them to go. However, he might have wished he hadn't when, a few months later, he encountered Kashim again.
The boy was still running with the Mujahideen, and still as deadly efficient as ever; unlike last time, though, he and Gauron were now enemies. And unlike last time, Gauron was fully prepared to go after him. It even looked like he might succeed in gaining exactly what he wanted, thanks to the defection of another child soldier from Kashim's faction - this one, a tactical prodigy named Zaied. He was even able to tell Gauron how the patrols were scheduled, so that he could isolate Kashim by wiping out the base camp while he was away from it.
The situation was complicated, however, by another defection, this one from Gauron's side - that of Major Andrei Sergovitch Kalinin, who was a former ally of Kashim's and had once saved the boy's life; he didn't trust Gauron, and definitely didn't like where his plans were headed, so he left to try to save Kashim once more. Gauron sent a force out to try to neutralize him, but Kalinin managed to lure them into an ambush and kill them; he didn't make it back in time to warn the guerrillas of Gauron's impending attack, but he was able to link up with Kashim afterward and lay plans for revenge against Gauron.
It proved to be easier than they expected: Gauron wasn't about to let either one of them get away so easily, and two weeks after the attack, they managed to isolate him from the rest of his "hunting party" and lure him into an ambush. Kashim shot him in the head, and, thinking they'd killed him, the two fled the area and eventually made the crossing into Pakistan.
In reality, however, they had no way of knowing that a shot between the eyes at that distance and angle wouldn't kill Gauron - they didn't stick around long enough to realize that the bullet had just skipped off the titanium plate in his head and knocked him out cold. Thus, Gauron lived to fight another day, though the scar ensured that he'd always have something to back up his story about the most recent time he cheated death.
By this time, the war was winding down beyond even Amalgam's capacity to prolong it; the remaining Mujahideen resistance proved easy enough to crush, and the Soviet occupation was successful. Zaied was unable to leave at the time that Gauron was transferred out of the country; however, they decided to work together if their paths happened to cross again (and, indeed, Gauron would look him up three years later when he was returning to Afghanistan and building a crew for smuggling nukes into the country).
After the war, Amalgam and the Soviets had something entirely different in mind for Gauron. As one of their most cunning and adaptable agents, he was reassigned to tracking down Whispered for the Soviets' military development programs; he was also promoted within Amalgam, though he still refused to involve himself in the organization's internal politics - not the most advantageous move for him because, during the same time frame, the political situation within Amalgam had been changing rapidly.
As the Whispered known as Mr. Silver began gaining power within Amalgam, tensions grew between him and Gauron. While Silver had a great deal of respect for Gauron's ability, it soon became apparent that their ideological differences were irreconcilable (Silver wanted to establish a technological utopia; Gauron thought, to put it in the mildest possible terms, that that was bullshit) - and because Gauron refused to act the part of Silver's trained tiger, he would have to be eliminated. The situation was uncomfortable at best, both of them knowing what would have to happen, but reluctant to make the first move - Silver, out of his respect for Gauron, and Gauron, out of the knowledge that even if he murdered all of its other top-ranked members (no mean feat itself), there was no corner of the earth where he could permanently hide from Amalgam and that it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to try.
At that point, the diagnosis of the leukemia that would have cost Gauron his life within two years was a blessing to both of them.
It took the burden of having him assassinated off of Silver, because he figured Gauron would self-destruct long before the cancer killed him. He could give him free rein until then, knowing that he wouldn't care anymore about Silver's plans. And for Gauron, there was something uniquely thrilling about being sentenced to death but being able to dictate the terms on which it came; with the end so close at hand, he no longer cared about consequences, or restraint, or even his own reputation. As he had little restraint to begin with, and embraced both life and death with great enthusiasm, the result was terrifying.
At first, he carried on as before, seemingly unchanged by the news, while he tried to formulate a plan for the best way to meet his end. However, on one of his Whispered acquisition missions, he encountered what only he would consider a stroke of good fortune. He encountered Kashim again, though the boy now operated under the name Sousuke Sagara.
When Sousuke defeated him in battle, Gauron was finally certain of exactly how he wanted to die. A murder-suicide with Sousuke - with his Kashim - would not only get the job done, but completely satisfy Gauron's warped sense of aesthetics as well. Of course, if he could kill as many people and cause as much destruction as possible in the process, that was only a bonus. Several months later, it seemed as though he might finally get his wish when he managed to hijack a nuclear submarine used as a mobile base by the division of the organization Mithril that Sousuke served in. Gauron's original objective was to bring the submarine and the two Whispered aboard back to Silver intact, but Sousuke's interference ultimately made that impossible, so he switched to his backup plan - using his mecha's self-destruct sequence to sink the craft and kill everyone aboard. In the end, though, Sousuke thwarted him in that too; at the last possible moment, he managed to eject Gauron's mech from the submarine.
Gauron was able to protect himself from the self-destruct using the machine's Lambda Driver; whether that was what flung him from his own world, or whether it was purely coincidence, he isn't quite certain, though he suspects the latter. If it had been an effect of the Lambda Driver, the wreckage of his mecha probably would have appeared with him when he... arrived at the edge of the Habakkuk Foundation's quarantine zone Montauk-1 Allende-18 (M1-A018) - formerly Seattle, Washington - in 1978. (Continued in the section on how he'll be joining the game.)
Personality: Supposing he's not your enemy, at a first encounter, Gauron seems easygoing enough: he's almost always smiling; though he doesn't take crap from anyone, he's very hard to truly anger, doesn't hold grudges, and genuinely lacks the capacity for hatred; and he's extremely adaptable, always finding ways to come out on top no matter what life throws his way. Under that laid-back exterior, however, he's a monster through and through.
Gauron also completely lacks fear or mercy. He's extremely casual in his brutality, and won't hesitate to kill even someone he values personally if he considers it necessary (not that he has problems with killing for any reason - it's one of his favorite parts of his work). His personal philosophy is thoroughly nihilist - he believes the universe is devoid of inherent meaning and that the only real truth is annihilation; however, the conclusion he follows that line of reasoning through to is that there's no reason not to enjoy life on one's own terms (and his terms happen to involve killing people and blowing shit up for a living - he's a mercenary, though his job description tends to be more along the lines of "terrorist for hire"). To him, fear is is nothing more than a useless, irrelevant animal vestige, and anyone who allows it to influence how they live their life deserves to die like an animal; to him, they're nothing but weaklings and cowards. He's violently in love with life, and believes in living every moment of it to the fullest, including the last - he's never expected to die a natural death, and he figures that if he dies the way he's lived, he'll be able to dictate the terms on which it comes, though death doesn't seem to be in any hurry to collect him: there have been at least five occasions on which he should have died, and probably would've if he were anyone else, but he's still going strong.
He's very astute and perceptive in general, and a decent judge of character and ability in particular (though contempt for his enemies occasionally leads him to underestimate them); between knowing how to manipulate people and good old-fashioned blackmail and bribery, he can find allies anywhere, and keep them for as long as he needs them. The consensus among those who have voluntarily worked for him is that he knows how to strike a good deal and treats his employees fairly. However, he won't let anyone give him a hard time, and he always makes sure they know who's in charge - and if you cross him, you'd best take the opportunity to apologize sincerely when he gives it to you.
Skills/Powers: Gauron has no superhuman powers, though his uncanny luck might come close. Everything else is just a matter of toughness, cunning, long practice, and a combination of neurochemical imbalances and mild brain damage that add up to a mind that, while unquestionably sick, is much more resilient than a normal person's. He's extremely skilled at hand-to-hand combat (though he seldom shows it off when he isn't piloting his mecha - shooting people is more practical); he's highly intelligent (though that gets him into just as much trouble as it gets him out of, because that and his natural skill with the Lambda Driver tend to make him arrogant) and extremely logical; he's multilingual (he's most comfortable with Cantonese, but he also speaks Khmer, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Farsi, and Pashto fluently, he can get by pretty well in Dari, Spanish, and Russian, and he knows the basics that are relevant to his trade in a dozen more); and he has the capacity to completely override the effects of pain and exhaustion for hours at a time, to the point of pretty much shrugging off anything that doesn't damage an important organ or blood vessel, snap a bone clear through, or completely sever a muscle group or major nerve (for example, in canon, he takes a 9mm round in the shoulder and doesn't even care). He's also preternaturally skilled at remaining clear-headed even in bizarre or stressful situations, making him extremely resistant to disorders like solipsism syndrome.
What is your character bringing to the table?: Gauron's spent most of his life in war zones in the third world, so he's been cut off without supplies in climates far more unforgiving than the island's. Combine that with the fact that many of the island's edible flora are staples of the cuisine he grew up eating, and he's going to have no difficulty surviving and teaching others to do the same (though he might be a dick about the latter, because he views a lot of the skills he has as common sense and anyone without them as probably too dumb to live). He'll also be able to provide the rest of the crew with combat training - something about which he'll be less of a dick, because it's a regular part of what he does for a living. Furthermore, he's well versed in irregular warfare (both in the more traditional sense of guerrilla warfare, and as a terrorist), which is a discipline that will be extremely useful in keeping the crew safe, especially while their numbers are still few: it emphasizes not just tactics for overcoming stronger and better-armed forces, but how to avoid their notice entirely until an opportune moment, and using the terrain for survival outside of battle as well as in it.
Also, he's surprisingly good at organizing and planning ahead - it's easy for him to look at a situation, see what needs to be done, make a plan, and assign duties and goals toward accomplishing it. Additionally, a large part of the reason why he's survived this long is that he knows a lot about establishing security and emergency response protocols (something else he considers plain common sense), so he's going to have a lot to contribute when it comes to planning expeditions to chart the interior of the Sophie Basana, and later, when it comes to making it a livable space while the more scientifically inclined characters try to work out how to gain control of the craft's travel between universes.
While Gauron's got a fair amount of engineering know-how, it runs toward extremely practical things like weapon and vehicle maintenance and water distribution systems (e.g. irrigation, plumbing, etc.). While it's not totally outside the realm of possibility that he might be able to get the Sophie Basana's air and water filtration systems and the hydroponics bay in working order if he can find the maintenance specs and diagrams for them, he's likelier to be in charge of finding the necessary materials for doing that; on the other hand, figuring out the more complex aspects of the craft's operation would be far beyond him.
Gear: Full Foundation level 2 contingency gear - that is, his uniform, full body armor, a visored Telekill alloy-lined helmet with tightbeam communications (i.e. it allows electronically amplified telepathic communication between teammates, but filters out psychological effects generated by external sources - however, for some reason it doesn't work against those created by the Sophie Basana), AK-47 rifle with seven 20-round magazines, SIG P220 HKF (in its world, the first P220 variant to incorporate a Picatinny rail, and the only one constructed entirely of non-ferromagnetic materials; it's chambered for the .45 ACP round) with nine 8-round magazines of Hydrashok hollowpoints and one of silver bullets, Straker officer's knife (Bowie-pattern, 17" overall length, 7" of which is its unusually thick hilt - the unusual dimensions are because the hilt conceals a cutting laser with a battery life of about three minutes), expandable baton, eight grenades (three fragmentation, two anti-ecto, one EMP, one white phosphorus, one flashbang), nuclear/biological/chemical contamination detection paper, skin and weapon decontamination kits, gas mask, and water purification tablets; the Sophie Basana's hangar contains a number of mecha from his world, but the only ones its security system will permit him direct access to are one Plan 1056 Codarl, one Codarl-M (the mass-produced version of the 1056, with a weaker Lambda Driver but improved heat dispersal systems) one Plan 1058 Codarl, and one ZY-98 Shadow.
How will you be bringing your character into the game?: As alluded to in the Background section, he'll be joining during the plot Out of the Jamjar and Onto the Creepypasta Platter. His reality-manipulating weapon (the Lambda Driver) actually did flip him into a parallel universe closely related to his own, due to its own effects combining with an unstable patch in the fabric of reality; the reason why none of the machine's wreckage accompanied him on the trip was probably because he was only using it to protect himself, rather than trying to hold the mech together against its own self-destruction.
Though what was left of his mech was presumably left in his world, the injuries he sustained in its self-destruction remained - numerous deep wounds, including one just below his left eye that would have cost him the eye, had he not been immediately acquired by the Habakkuk Foundation's operatives and given medical treatment. That treatment came at a price, however - because of how he'd arrived, for the first three months of his stay, he was classified and experimented on; as he learned, he wasn't the only one to arrive from another world and end up in the quarantine zone.
Even the experimentation, as it turned out, was proof of Gauron's amazing good luck: to prolong his lifespan as a test subject, one of the early experiments performed on him was with a substance known as HKN-500, which caused the spontaneous disappearance of his leukemia. When it was determined that he had no particular physical, temporal, or physiological differences from the humans of the universe he had arrived into, he was originally going to be destroyed, as he had no further use as an experimental subject; however, during his captivity, he actually managed to bond with one of the ranking scientists on-site, Dr. Kamadecoco. Being a sadistic nihilist herself, she took a liking to his crazy ass, and despite the injuries, property damage, and substantial inconvenience his escape attempts had caused, managed to provide him with the opportunity to talk M1-A018's chief of security into reassigning him as a containment specialist. Ordinarily, the Foundation's security protocol would have prohibited this, but more strange and dangerous objects were cropping up in the city by the day; it should have been reclassified as a Montauk-2 class quarantine zone, but even the Habakkuk Foundation's seemingly limitless resources were being stretched too thin to properly handle all the places where the world's laws of reality were fast becoming mere suggestions. Any new resources they could acquire went into stopping the spread of Kardec-group quarantine zones, so M1-A018 was left to function with the personnel and resources they had; Gauron's military background, combined with the fact that he was someone who didn't exist in this world, made him a suitable candidate for having the rules bent in his favor - if one could call it that, with the kinds of hazards his new occupation entails.
He encountered one of the worst of those hazards not long after he was upgraded to containment. When signs manifested that presaged the reappearance of one of the most dangerous entities known to the Foundation - an uncontainable Kardec-group atemporal known formally as HKK-4 and colloquially as the Slenderman - his team was one of the ones assigned to contain it. Gauron backed his then-commander in requesting the use of a classified Allende-group item to fight it; however, the request was denied. When they were deployed to the still-inhabited city of Tacoma, where the Slenderman had appeared on the grounds of a local middle school, the results were predictable.
There was another minor containment facility in Tacoma, built around the immovable HKN-113 ("the Feinberg cage"); remembering HKN-113's effects, Gauron rallied the few other operatives who had survived the initial clash with the Slenderman, and put together a strategy for leading it into what was their best chance at a successful ambush. There were only four of the nearly fifty operatives originally deployed left alive by the time they managed to lure it into and activate the Feinberg cage. Because of its atemporal nature, none of them were sure whether the device's ability to all but stop the flow of time within the "cage" would actually stop the Slenderman. However, it turned out that the effect did interfere with its ability to manifest; it disappeared upon the activation of the stasis field, and hasn't been seen in the nearly four months since the incident.
Following the debacle, Gauron returned to M1-A018's command center and murdered the Foundation official responsible for denying his team access to the artifact they had requested. Given the extenuating circumstances, Gauron's superiors decided to let him off with a slap on the wrist - he was pulled from the field and placed on desk duty for the better part of the next month, though most of the paperwork he was given pertained to reallocating resources toward what would become the containment team that Gauron would lead, when he returned to the field.
However, reassigning Gauron to serve any bureaucratic function was possibly one of the worst moves they could have made. As his mentor had been a spy whose major tactics were geared to the conditions and technology available during the 1970s, Gauron had little trouble exploiting the opportunity to obtain more information about the overall state of the world beyond the carefully government- and Foundation-controlled media he was permitted access to. Using mainly "social engineering" techniques, he was able to gain access to sensitive Foundation records, and discovered that, no matter how they tried to spin their information, the world was still falling apart - in places, literally - and no one knew why. Since then, Gauron's efforts to find a way back to his world (or into any world whose existence isn't similarly compromised) have been far more intense and systematic. He hasn't mentioned any of this to Dr. Kamadecoco, though he hasn't been going out of his way to keep anything from her, either. Despite the fact that they've been living together for the last five months, they still maintain a level of distance - Gauron, because that's what he always does, and she allows it because she figures certain boundaries aren't worth pushing, given the job's high mortality rate; he's never even told Kamadecoco his real name, just as she's never told him hers.
If you're joining with or because of a friend, do you plan to import CR?: N/A
Third Person Writing Sample: Feeling as tense and ill at ease as he had today was a rare thing for Gauron.
Before the attack by HKK-4, sure, he'd had the nightmares, the same as everyone else, but even then, his mind had rebelled against the unease and gone into tactical mode, planning for the battle ahead; if he had to attribute his survival to anything other than pure dumb luck, it would've been that. This time, though, the restless tension wouldn't be shrugged off. It felt like something big was about to happen, and accompanying that feeling was a greater sense of detachment from this world than he'd felt since he first arrived.
He'd been equal parts pissed off and relieved when HKA-17 breached containment; it was a distraction from trying to pull together that vague unease into something that might help him determine his course of action, but maybe that distraction was just what he needed. It put him into battle mode, forcing him to think of nothing more than the present, one moment at a time - because if he didn't, HKA-17 would have killed him.
This time, though, there had been no casualties, at least not on the containment team. HKA-17's behavior seemed less aggressive than he remembered, but ultimately, that was the Foundation scientists' call to make. Either way, the battle had left him feeling much more clear-headed, and he'd recalled that Dr. Kamadecoco had been in charge of the experiments that were being run today on HKA-17.
He'd wondered if she'd survived; if she hadn't, he supposed that meant the house was his now. However, she had made it through the containment breach with only minor chemical burns, though she still had to go through decontamination, and it had been a few hours before she was cleared to leave. However, the wait hadn't dulled the certain enthusiasm they both shared after being in mortal danger; it wasn't the first time he'd felt compelled to make a lame joke about how she must really have a thing for being stripped naked and hosed down by guys in hazmat suits, and the only reason she didn't have his pants undone before they were even through the security checkpoint was because she only had one hand to work with.
They'd kept the party going when they'd gotten home, breaking only briefly for dinner - and even that had been less because they were tired or hungry than because they'd needed an excuse to move it back to the bedroom.
Eventually, they'd worn themselves out - or Kamadecoco had, anyway. After all the years Gauron had spent taking the midnight watch when he and the Xia twins were operating together, there was no way he was getting to sleep just yet, though he stayed still as she settled herself in on the other side of the bed.
Once he was sure she was fast asleep, he got back up, trailing his fingers lightly over her artificial left arm - she'd lost the original heading off a containment breach by HKK-39, and there were few things sexier than a woman who'd earned her scars - and made his way to the bathroom.
He didn't feel any sleepier after showering; he was tired, but without anything else to distract him, that odd sense of unease was starting to creep back in. He padded out to the living room and flipped on the TV. He could at least get a chuckle out of the smokescreen stories on the late-night news and trying to pick out which tenth of it was inspired by actual events. He grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch, but lay down on the wood floor - with the noise and light dulling his other senses, force of habit dictated that he stay where he could feel the vibrations from anything approaching.
"...ther news, the Jiu family's incarceration has led to increasingly violent protests, despite their confirmed status as cannibals - known in some circles as 'eaters of the dead,' or simply 'eaters.' Despite the accusations against them of distributing human meat to unsuspecting locals, demands for their release have continued, and in some areas, the National Guard has had to become involved." The program cut away from the attractive young blonde reporter to the supposed protests.
Gauron smirked when he recognized the footage - it was from one of the food riots in Mississippi back in August after HKA-61-2 (known to the public as "Hurricane Zadok") had required the largest quarantine operation in the history of the U.S., not the protest against the Jiu family's incarceration, which he knew for a fact had been barely newsworthy even on a slow day. The Foundation's L.A. outpost had had their hand in this too, making sure the Jius were only eaters and not something worse.
The manipulation in the piece was only slightly subtler than the communist propaganda Gauron had grown up with, and the message was clear: You can't even trust each other, because who knows who among you might be a crazy cannibal sympathizer? You can only trust your government. Yet, he had no doubt it would accomplish its purpose. Westerners had this weird love of total paranoia and of judging themselves as superior to their peers, and the news stories that followed only continued to feed the same inclinations.
He had no idea when he'd drifted off, but it was still dark when he awoke - not that that mattered. What did matter were the instincts screaming at him that he had to get to the quarantine zone, now. He didn't question them - just changed into his uniform and got on the road. If it turned out to be nothing, it wasn't like he'd have to justify his being there early to anyone, after all. Since the Slenderman incident, he'd carefully built up a reputation as M1-A018's golden boy, to make it easier for him to hunt through Foundation records for anything that might present him with a way back to his world, or at least out of this one.
The lights from the few patches of civilization along his drive into town reflected orange on the low-hanging clouds, but the containment zone itself was pitch black - infrared bulbs had been installed in the few streetlamps the Foundation kept lit. If there had been anything truly disastrous going on, there probably would've been a few specks of light reflected from between its derelict skyscrapers, and Gauron was starting to feel like he'd let himself get paranoid over nothing when the sky lit up in laser green.
It wasn't a bomb blast: by the time he'd pulled off to the side of the road in preparation for the shockwave, the sky had gone pitch dark again, and aside from a distant rumble of thunder, the air was still. It was only seconds before the radio crackled to life; he listened for a few minutes to get an idea of the situation before tuning it in to his team's channel and passing the order along to any of them who were listening. "This is Demon's Jaw to Whimsical. I need you to check in now, because we're slated to take the field in an hour."
As it turned out, none of Team Whimsical had broken protocol to switch off their home radios; a few of his team sounded groggy and more than a little pissed off - and, in at least one case, potentially hungover; one of his fire teams wasn't supposed to be on tomorrow - but he didn't even have to ask twice for all of them to call in. "A massive new object has just appeared within the quarantine zone. According to preliminary descriptions, it's saucer-shaped, with three towers in excess of twelve hundred feet in height. Its boundaries are at Simms, Torrance, Sunderland, and Warwick." The rough quadrangle indicated the streets, though Sunderland and Torrance were also undercut by unnatural subway lines in those areas - originally, Seattle's commuter rail had only taken up 65 miles and four stations; the spontaneous appearance of the additional 237 miles of track and nineteen stations that, while their placards served to differentiate them, were identical in layout not only to each other, but to several quarantined light rail stations in Europe, had been one of the initial events that had led to tacit government condonement of and CDC complicity with the Foundation's decision to evacuate the city. Because of the effect they even had on Foundation personnel after they'd been shut down, they'd been given, in addition to their number HKA-119-B, the informal name "Dionaea."
Gauron started wondering whether the structure that had suddenly appeared within the city might somehow be their fruiting body. Then, he drove faster.
Name: Zoharial
Personal LJ: akakuro-sama
Email: yami_no_antares@yahoo.com
Timezone: GMT -5 hours (Eastern Standard Time)
AIM/MSN/YIM: RedandBlack394 (AIM)
IC:
Character name: Gauron (birth name and other aliases not given)
Fandom: Full Metal Panic!
Point of Origin: Immediately after the first season (approximately mid-August, 2001).
Appearance: 1; 2; 3
His height and weight aren't listed in the official materials, but I put him at 6'4" and 215 lbs. My pet theory is that he is ethnically mostly of mixed Khmer and Ainu stock, which I use to explain his dark skin, greenish eyes, and slightly caucasoid features, though in the past I've also played him as having some Slavic blood.
In addition to the facial scars visible in these images, his hair is concealing an especially prominent scar across his scalp (from the head injury that necessitated most of his frontal bone being replaced with a titanium plate - his hair is always a little too long because it wouldn't completely hide the scar otherwise), and he'll also have a scar about three inches long at the upper edge of his left zygomatic bone (that is, just below his left eye) when he enters the game. There are no official sources that chart his body scars, so I'll be making them up as it comes up. I'll also be editing this entry to keep a running tally of them.
Background: Wikipedia Page; World Info
From what he remembers and has been able to piece together about his early childhood, he was born in Japan, though his family moved to Cambodia when he was very young - his parents were medical aid workers. After his parents were killed in an air raid by the U.S. when he was around seven or eight, he ended up being taken in by a local Khmer Rouge cell. The group he joined were very active in their insurgency, as well as being renowned for the brutal efficacy of their methods - their commander would later go on to hold a high post at Tuol Sleng. However, child soldiers were usually kept in the rear, and it was a year before Gauron made his first kill - he accidentally murdered a prisoner during an interrogation. Even as young as he was, he realized that he loved the feeling of taking another human life - even then, the sense of power and control it gave him was addictive. Even more than that, though, the first time he killed was the first time the world made sense to him. If death wasn't some powerful, mysterious force, but something so human and petty even a child could cause it, he had nothing left to fear, and in his fight against the world, the playing field had suddenly leveled out.
From then on, Gauron was determined not to be left to guard the supplies - he honed his marksmanship, his close combat skills, his wits and tactical sensibilities; anything that would give him the chance to participate in the group's sorties against the enemy. Back in those days, he still believed in the Khmer Rouge, and that dedication, along with his superiors' fondness for him, kept his budding brilliance and too-logical mind from attracting the kind of negative attention it otherwise might have, under such an anti-intellectual regime. Instead, he was held up as an ideal example of just why the Old People were so superior to their urban counterparts.
When the resettlements began, he was transferred to a squad more active in moving the urban populations to what became known as the Killing Fields, and later, in guarding them. Gauron was happy with the post; or, at the very least, he was never wanting for people to kill, which meant more or less the same thing to him at the time.
However, in that place, his bloodlust wasn't extraordinary. All his fellow soldiers had to become equally vicious, equally detached from the lives they were ending, just to cope with their duties. Thus, his superiors didn't notice the level of depravity that came more naturally to him than the others, and instead found themselves noticing, among other things, his unusual aptitude for battle tactics - and an increasingly conspicuous knack for leadership. He was made a training instructor for other child soldiers by fifteen, though at eighteen, he was back on the lines again when the Vietnamese invaded.
[everything beyond here is almost completely headcanon] Gauron's unit was captured after they ended up in far heavier combat than anticipated and their request for reinforcements was denied; Gauron himself was tortured for information. Rather than breaking him, however, the torture only brought home to Gauron what he had suspected all along - namely, how pathetic the Khmer Rouge's ideology really was. It wasn't like ideology really made a difference, though; all that mattered was one's own strength and will, though that only mattered for a fraction of an instant, in the grand scheme of things. The only real truth was annihilation, and Gauron embraced it. Others might say that the torture completely warped what few parts of his mind had ever functioned normally; Gauron has always maintained that it granted him enlightenment. In the end, he learned how to transcend even physical pain and weakness; the guards hadn't expected him to be able to fight back at all by the time they dragged him out to execute him, much less that he would be able to overpower them and escape.
Gauron abandoned the Khmer Rouge, fleeing to Thailand instead after he escaped. He eventually ended up involved in illegal weapons trade, and about a year and a half after he left Cambodia, he met the man who would become the closest thing to a mentor he's ever had.
An ex black ops agent, said man decided one easy way to cut costs and close loopholes before a mission was to betray Gauron's crew once they had delivered the goods. He wasn't paying nearly enough attention to Gauron, probably figuring he was just some wet-behind-the-ears young thug who wouldn't pose any threat; however, the mistake was made abundantly clear when the shooting ended. Gauron was the only one of his crew still alive, and he had a gun to the man's head; after Gauron had successfully negotiated his escape, though, the two of them got to talking.
By daybreak, Gauron had found a brand new line of work.
The two of them spent the next eight years working together, during which time Gauron's newfound mentor taught him the more refined tools and strategies he'd need as a top-notch mercenary and assassin. In the end, though, the pupil surpassed the master, because the master's skills had begun slipping; Gauron put pressure on his mentor to retire, but he was having none of it (just as Gauron had had none of his mentor's attempts to instill him with some semblance of a moral compass over the years). Things didn't end well: when Gauron's mentor finally did end up botching a mission, he did it so catastrophically that Gauron was almost killed in the process. He still has a titanium plate in his skull as a result of the incident that ended the mission.
At the very least, his mentor had the decency to see to it that Gauron received proper medical treatment, and that his criminal exploits remained well-hidden for the time being; however, that didn't stop Gauron from seeing him as a potential threat - not just to Gauron, but to himself as well. Gauron didn't go gunning for him because he wanted revenge - in his own twisted way, just the opposite: it wasn't just to protect himself, but to give his former mentor a far swifter and more merciful death than the one he'd probably meet with out in the field. Gauron never believed in revenge or grudges anyway, which was why his mentor never saw it coming and never suspected who it was when Gauron shot him in the head at a hundred and fifty meters. The whole incident only reinforced Gauron's lack of compunction about killing when he considered it necessary, and it taught him never, ever to hesitate or make exceptions.
As it turned out, though, Gauron's mentor had done him one last good turn: he had recommended Gauron to Amalgam, an elite mercenary organization with ties to terrorist organizations, weapons manufacturers, and the hard-line factions of governments all over the world. Among other things, the organization specialized in field-testing new weapons - and creating wars to test them in as necessary, especially when the need coincided with the political intentions of their other backers - as well as pioneering new forms of weaponry based on the so-called "Black Technology" (technology produced by the "Whispered," who are essentially the in-world equivalent of technomancers). In some circles, they're known as the world's hatchet men; Gauron's mentor had expected his protege to fit right in, though in the end, it wasn't quite that simple - Gauron found his niche as more of a satellite to the organization.
In the years since then, he's done a lot of work - some of it more tangentially related to Amalgam's goals than the rest - most of it in southeast Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa, though he's also coordinated with forces as far afield as South America. Somewhere along the way, he "converted" to Islam, for the sake of making the networking aspects of his job easier - though he's anything but devout, and when other Muslims aren't looking, he really only uses it as an excuse to avoid drinking, because he hates the effects of alcohol.
For one of his earliest missions with the organization, he was deployed to China, to further inflame the civil war there and demonstrate just what Amalgam's forces and products were capable of. Though Amalgam had agents on both sides, Gauron was sent to South China, which, while it had been getting the worst of the war up until that point, still had greater financial resources available, due in part to covert U.S. backing. With an endless supply of state of the art weapons to show off (though not directly to the buyers, due to his comparatively low rank at the time and the fact that his attitude tended to rub people the wrong way), Gauron proceeded to indulge himself - though he waged one of the most inspired irregular campaigns in Chinese history, he ended up being reassigned because of the brutality of his methods.
However, he took a little piece of South China with him when he left: a pair of orphaned twin girls, about five years old, whom he'd found among a brothel's merchandise. Their village had been wiped out by another Amalgam unit - this one led by a former death squad commander called Gates - and something about them reminded him of himself, so he decided to take them in. He was just as terrifyingly efficient at training child soldiers as ever, and it wasn't long before the girls started taking active - even important - roles in his missions; they were eager to learn, at first because Gauron had promised them that with his training, they would never have to let anyone hurt them ever again.
However, their relationship with him and their reasons for their loyalty soon became much more complicated. Because of the nature of Gauron's work, his girls grew up in an extremely isolating environment, and they came to love him almost obsessively. Though Gauron knew better than to get too attached to anything or anyone in his life, he still adored his girls, and they became the only ones he was ever able to trust implicitly. [headcanon ends here]
Six years ago, Gauron went to Afghanistan just ahead of the Soviet reinvasion, to scout out the guerrilla forces in the region, alert them to what was to come, and establish training camps; this wasn't done out of any sympathy to their cause, but rather, to make the Soviet invasion more difficult so that, among other things, they'd be forced to funnel more money into weapons and mercenaries from Amalgam. He never intended to stay - once the Soviet offensive gained momentum, the plan had always been to let them buy him out.
It was during his time as a training instructor at one of the guerrilla camps that he came across a child soldier called Kashim. When Gauron spotted him, he was disposing of the bodies of the Soviet soldiers he had killed, and for a moment, it was like looking back in time; everything about the boy reminded him of himself, and he was immediately taken with him. He especially liked the look in the boy's eyes - they were completely devoid of any sign of indecision or suffering, and reflected no hint of moral judgment on the act of taking a life. The boy was such a stunning and unexpected find that Gauron immediately tried to win him over, pointing out that Kashim's faction had recently lost a number of battles and were running low on supplies, whereas he was facing no such hardship and could secure the boy anything he wanted. However, he was thwarted by the one trait Kashim possessed that Gauron never had: a sense of loyalty. However, Gauron never forgot the encounter, and hoped that Kashim would survive long enough for him to get another chance to try to make the boy his.
In the meantime, however, he had more immediate business to attend to. He and the twins managed to stall out the Soviet invasion, which had been progressing more rapidly than expected despite well-coordinated Mujahideen resistance, by assassinating a few key military leaders on both sides before they finalized their defection to the Soviets. It was after this that Amalgam began to take notice of the girls' terrifying skill, and they were requested for missions of their own; though they were initially reluctant, Gauron encouraged them to go. However, he might have wished he hadn't when, a few months later, he encountered Kashim again.
The boy was still running with the Mujahideen, and still as deadly efficient as ever; unlike last time, though, he and Gauron were now enemies. And unlike last time, Gauron was fully prepared to go after him. It even looked like he might succeed in gaining exactly what he wanted, thanks to the defection of another child soldier from Kashim's faction - this one, a tactical prodigy named Zaied. He was even able to tell Gauron how the patrols were scheduled, so that he could isolate Kashim by wiping out the base camp while he was away from it.
The situation was complicated, however, by another defection, this one from Gauron's side - that of Major Andrei Sergovitch Kalinin, who was a former ally of Kashim's and had once saved the boy's life; he didn't trust Gauron, and definitely didn't like where his plans were headed, so he left to try to save Kashim once more. Gauron sent a force out to try to neutralize him, but Kalinin managed to lure them into an ambush and kill them; he didn't make it back in time to warn the guerrillas of Gauron's impending attack, but he was able to link up with Kashim afterward and lay plans for revenge against Gauron.
It proved to be easier than they expected: Gauron wasn't about to let either one of them get away so easily, and two weeks after the attack, they managed to isolate him from the rest of his "hunting party" and lure him into an ambush. Kashim shot him in the head, and, thinking they'd killed him, the two fled the area and eventually made the crossing into Pakistan.
In reality, however, they had no way of knowing that a shot between the eyes at that distance and angle wouldn't kill Gauron - they didn't stick around long enough to realize that the bullet had just skipped off the titanium plate in his head and knocked him out cold. Thus, Gauron lived to fight another day, though the scar ensured that he'd always have something to back up his story about the most recent time he cheated death.
By this time, the war was winding down beyond even Amalgam's capacity to prolong it; the remaining Mujahideen resistance proved easy enough to crush, and the Soviet occupation was successful. Zaied was unable to leave at the time that Gauron was transferred out of the country; however, they decided to work together if their paths happened to cross again (and, indeed, Gauron would look him up three years later when he was returning to Afghanistan and building a crew for smuggling nukes into the country).
After the war, Amalgam and the Soviets had something entirely different in mind for Gauron. As one of their most cunning and adaptable agents, he was reassigned to tracking down Whispered for the Soviets' military development programs; he was also promoted within Amalgam, though he still refused to involve himself in the organization's internal politics - not the most advantageous move for him because, during the same time frame, the political situation within Amalgam had been changing rapidly.
As the Whispered known as Mr. Silver began gaining power within Amalgam, tensions grew between him and Gauron. While Silver had a great deal of respect for Gauron's ability, it soon became apparent that their ideological differences were irreconcilable (Silver wanted to establish a technological utopia; Gauron thought, to put it in the mildest possible terms, that that was bullshit) - and because Gauron refused to act the part of Silver's trained tiger, he would have to be eliminated. The situation was uncomfortable at best, both of them knowing what would have to happen, but reluctant to make the first move - Silver, out of his respect for Gauron, and Gauron, out of the knowledge that even if he murdered all of its other top-ranked members (no mean feat itself), there was no corner of the earth where he could permanently hide from Amalgam and that it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to try.
At that point, the diagnosis of the leukemia that would have cost Gauron his life within two years was a blessing to both of them.
It took the burden of having him assassinated off of Silver, because he figured Gauron would self-destruct long before the cancer killed him. He could give him free rein until then, knowing that he wouldn't care anymore about Silver's plans. And for Gauron, there was something uniquely thrilling about being sentenced to death but being able to dictate the terms on which it came; with the end so close at hand, he no longer cared about consequences, or restraint, or even his own reputation. As he had little restraint to begin with, and embraced both life and death with great enthusiasm, the result was terrifying.
At first, he carried on as before, seemingly unchanged by the news, while he tried to formulate a plan for the best way to meet his end. However, on one of his Whispered acquisition missions, he encountered what only he would consider a stroke of good fortune. He encountered Kashim again, though the boy now operated under the name Sousuke Sagara.
When Sousuke defeated him in battle, Gauron was finally certain of exactly how he wanted to die. A murder-suicide with Sousuke - with his Kashim - would not only get the job done, but completely satisfy Gauron's warped sense of aesthetics as well. Of course, if he could kill as many people and cause as much destruction as possible in the process, that was only a bonus. Several months later, it seemed as though he might finally get his wish when he managed to hijack a nuclear submarine used as a mobile base by the division of the organization Mithril that Sousuke served in. Gauron's original objective was to bring the submarine and the two Whispered aboard back to Silver intact, but Sousuke's interference ultimately made that impossible, so he switched to his backup plan - using his mecha's self-destruct sequence to sink the craft and kill everyone aboard. In the end, though, Sousuke thwarted him in that too; at the last possible moment, he managed to eject Gauron's mech from the submarine.
Gauron was able to protect himself from the self-destruct using the machine's Lambda Driver; whether that was what flung him from his own world, or whether it was purely coincidence, he isn't quite certain, though he suspects the latter. If it had been an effect of the Lambda Driver, the wreckage of his mecha probably would have appeared with him when he... arrived at the edge of the Habakkuk Foundation's quarantine zone Montauk-1 Allende-18 (M1-A018) - formerly Seattle, Washington - in 1978. (Continued in the section on how he'll be joining the game.)
Personality: Supposing he's not your enemy, at a first encounter, Gauron seems easygoing enough: he's almost always smiling; though he doesn't take crap from anyone, he's very hard to truly anger, doesn't hold grudges, and genuinely lacks the capacity for hatred; and he's extremely adaptable, always finding ways to come out on top no matter what life throws his way. Under that laid-back exterior, however, he's a monster through and through.
Gauron also completely lacks fear or mercy. He's extremely casual in his brutality, and won't hesitate to kill even someone he values personally if he considers it necessary (not that he has problems with killing for any reason - it's one of his favorite parts of his work). His personal philosophy is thoroughly nihilist - he believes the universe is devoid of inherent meaning and that the only real truth is annihilation; however, the conclusion he follows that line of reasoning through to is that there's no reason not to enjoy life on one's own terms (and his terms happen to involve killing people and blowing shit up for a living - he's a mercenary, though his job description tends to be more along the lines of "terrorist for hire"). To him, fear is is nothing more than a useless, irrelevant animal vestige, and anyone who allows it to influence how they live their life deserves to die like an animal; to him, they're nothing but weaklings and cowards. He's violently in love with life, and believes in living every moment of it to the fullest, including the last - he's never expected to die a natural death, and he figures that if he dies the way he's lived, he'll be able to dictate the terms on which it comes, though death doesn't seem to be in any hurry to collect him: there have been at least five occasions on which he should have died, and probably would've if he were anyone else, but he's still going strong.
He's very astute and perceptive in general, and a decent judge of character and ability in particular (though contempt for his enemies occasionally leads him to underestimate them); between knowing how to manipulate people and good old-fashioned blackmail and bribery, he can find allies anywhere, and keep them for as long as he needs them. The consensus among those who have voluntarily worked for him is that he knows how to strike a good deal and treats his employees fairly. However, he won't let anyone give him a hard time, and he always makes sure they know who's in charge - and if you cross him, you'd best take the opportunity to apologize sincerely when he gives it to you.
Skills/Powers: Gauron has no superhuman powers, though his uncanny luck might come close. Everything else is just a matter of toughness, cunning, long practice, and a combination of neurochemical imbalances and mild brain damage that add up to a mind that, while unquestionably sick, is much more resilient than a normal person's. He's extremely skilled at hand-to-hand combat (though he seldom shows it off when he isn't piloting his mecha - shooting people is more practical); he's highly intelligent (though that gets him into just as much trouble as it gets him out of, because that and his natural skill with the Lambda Driver tend to make him arrogant) and extremely logical; he's multilingual (he's most comfortable with Cantonese, but he also speaks Khmer, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Farsi, and Pashto fluently, he can get by pretty well in Dari, Spanish, and Russian, and he knows the basics that are relevant to his trade in a dozen more); and he has the capacity to completely override the effects of pain and exhaustion for hours at a time, to the point of pretty much shrugging off anything that doesn't damage an important organ or blood vessel, snap a bone clear through, or completely sever a muscle group or major nerve (for example, in canon, he takes a 9mm round in the shoulder and doesn't even care). He's also preternaturally skilled at remaining clear-headed even in bizarre or stressful situations, making him extremely resistant to disorders like solipsism syndrome.
What is your character bringing to the table?: Gauron's spent most of his life in war zones in the third world, so he's been cut off without supplies in climates far more unforgiving than the island's. Combine that with the fact that many of the island's edible flora are staples of the cuisine he grew up eating, and he's going to have no difficulty surviving and teaching others to do the same (though he might be a dick about the latter, because he views a lot of the skills he has as common sense and anyone without them as probably too dumb to live). He'll also be able to provide the rest of the crew with combat training - something about which he'll be less of a dick, because it's a regular part of what he does for a living. Furthermore, he's well versed in irregular warfare (both in the more traditional sense of guerrilla warfare, and as a terrorist), which is a discipline that will be extremely useful in keeping the crew safe, especially while their numbers are still few: it emphasizes not just tactics for overcoming stronger and better-armed forces, but how to avoid their notice entirely until an opportune moment, and using the terrain for survival outside of battle as well as in it.
Also, he's surprisingly good at organizing and planning ahead - it's easy for him to look at a situation, see what needs to be done, make a plan, and assign duties and goals toward accomplishing it. Additionally, a large part of the reason why he's survived this long is that he knows a lot about establishing security and emergency response protocols (something else he considers plain common sense), so he's going to have a lot to contribute when it comes to planning expeditions to chart the interior of the Sophie Basana, and later, when it comes to making it a livable space while the more scientifically inclined characters try to work out how to gain control of the craft's travel between universes.
While Gauron's got a fair amount of engineering know-how, it runs toward extremely practical things like weapon and vehicle maintenance and water distribution systems (e.g. irrigation, plumbing, etc.). While it's not totally outside the realm of possibility that he might be able to get the Sophie Basana's air and water filtration systems and the hydroponics bay in working order if he can find the maintenance specs and diagrams for them, he's likelier to be in charge of finding the necessary materials for doing that; on the other hand, figuring out the more complex aspects of the craft's operation would be far beyond him.
Gear: Full Foundation level 2 contingency gear - that is, his uniform, full body armor, a visored Telekill alloy-lined helmet with tightbeam communications (i.e. it allows electronically amplified telepathic communication between teammates, but filters out psychological effects generated by external sources - however, for some reason it doesn't work against those created by the Sophie Basana), AK-47 rifle with seven 20-round magazines, SIG P220 HKF (in its world, the first P220 variant to incorporate a Picatinny rail, and the only one constructed entirely of non-ferromagnetic materials; it's chambered for the .45 ACP round) with nine 8-round magazines of Hydrashok hollowpoints and one of silver bullets, Straker officer's knife (Bowie-pattern, 17" overall length, 7" of which is its unusually thick hilt - the unusual dimensions are because the hilt conceals a cutting laser with a battery life of about three minutes), expandable baton, eight grenades (three fragmentation, two anti-ecto, one EMP, one white phosphorus, one flashbang), nuclear/biological/chemical contamination detection paper, skin and weapon decontamination kits, gas mask, and water purification tablets; the Sophie Basana's hangar contains a number of mecha from his world, but the only ones its security system will permit him direct access to are one Plan 1056 Codarl, one Codarl-M (the mass-produced version of the 1056, with a weaker Lambda Driver but improved heat dispersal systems) one Plan 1058 Codarl, and one ZY-98 Shadow.
How will you be bringing your character into the game?: As alluded to in the Background section, he'll be joining during the plot Out of the Jamjar and Onto the Creepypasta Platter. His reality-manipulating weapon (the Lambda Driver) actually did flip him into a parallel universe closely related to his own, due to its own effects combining with an unstable patch in the fabric of reality; the reason why none of the machine's wreckage accompanied him on the trip was probably because he was only using it to protect himself, rather than trying to hold the mech together against its own self-destruction.
Though what was left of his mech was presumably left in his world, the injuries he sustained in its self-destruction remained - numerous deep wounds, including one just below his left eye that would have cost him the eye, had he not been immediately acquired by the Habakkuk Foundation's operatives and given medical treatment. That treatment came at a price, however - because of how he'd arrived, for the first three months of his stay, he was classified and experimented on; as he learned, he wasn't the only one to arrive from another world and end up in the quarantine zone.
Even the experimentation, as it turned out, was proof of Gauron's amazing good luck: to prolong his lifespan as a test subject, one of the early experiments performed on him was with a substance known as HKN-500, which caused the spontaneous disappearance of his leukemia. When it was determined that he had no particular physical, temporal, or physiological differences from the humans of the universe he had arrived into, he was originally going to be destroyed, as he had no further use as an experimental subject; however, during his captivity, he actually managed to bond with one of the ranking scientists on-site, Dr. Kamadecoco. Being a sadistic nihilist herself, she took a liking to his crazy ass, and despite the injuries, property damage, and substantial inconvenience his escape attempts had caused, managed to provide him with the opportunity to talk M1-A018's chief of security into reassigning him as a containment specialist. Ordinarily, the Foundation's security protocol would have prohibited this, but more strange and dangerous objects were cropping up in the city by the day; it should have been reclassified as a Montauk-2 class quarantine zone, but even the Habakkuk Foundation's seemingly limitless resources were being stretched too thin to properly handle all the places where the world's laws of reality were fast becoming mere suggestions. Any new resources they could acquire went into stopping the spread of Kardec-group quarantine zones, so M1-A018 was left to function with the personnel and resources they had; Gauron's military background, combined with the fact that he was someone who didn't exist in this world, made him a suitable candidate for having the rules bent in his favor - if one could call it that, with the kinds of hazards his new occupation entails.
He encountered one of the worst of those hazards not long after he was upgraded to containment. When signs manifested that presaged the reappearance of one of the most dangerous entities known to the Foundation - an uncontainable Kardec-group atemporal known formally as HKK-4 and colloquially as the Slenderman - his team was one of the ones assigned to contain it. Gauron backed his then-commander in requesting the use of a classified Allende-group item to fight it; however, the request was denied. When they were deployed to the still-inhabited city of Tacoma, where the Slenderman had appeared on the grounds of a local middle school, the results were predictable.
There was another minor containment facility in Tacoma, built around the immovable HKN-113 ("the Feinberg cage"); remembering HKN-113's effects, Gauron rallied the few other operatives who had survived the initial clash with the Slenderman, and put together a strategy for leading it into what was their best chance at a successful ambush. There were only four of the nearly fifty operatives originally deployed left alive by the time they managed to lure it into and activate the Feinberg cage. Because of its atemporal nature, none of them were sure whether the device's ability to all but stop the flow of time within the "cage" would actually stop the Slenderman. However, it turned out that the effect did interfere with its ability to manifest; it disappeared upon the activation of the stasis field, and hasn't been seen in the nearly four months since the incident.
Following the debacle, Gauron returned to M1-A018's command center and murdered the Foundation official responsible for denying his team access to the artifact they had requested. Given the extenuating circumstances, Gauron's superiors decided to let him off with a slap on the wrist - he was pulled from the field and placed on desk duty for the better part of the next month, though most of the paperwork he was given pertained to reallocating resources toward what would become the containment team that Gauron would lead, when he returned to the field.
However, reassigning Gauron to serve any bureaucratic function was possibly one of the worst moves they could have made. As his mentor had been a spy whose major tactics were geared to the conditions and technology available during the 1970s, Gauron had little trouble exploiting the opportunity to obtain more information about the overall state of the world beyond the carefully government- and Foundation-controlled media he was permitted access to. Using mainly "social engineering" techniques, he was able to gain access to sensitive Foundation records, and discovered that, no matter how they tried to spin their information, the world was still falling apart - in places, literally - and no one knew why. Since then, Gauron's efforts to find a way back to his world (or into any world whose existence isn't similarly compromised) have been far more intense and systematic. He hasn't mentioned any of this to Dr. Kamadecoco, though he hasn't been going out of his way to keep anything from her, either. Despite the fact that they've been living together for the last five months, they still maintain a level of distance - Gauron, because that's what he always does, and she allows it because she figures certain boundaries aren't worth pushing, given the job's high mortality rate; he's never even told Kamadecoco his real name, just as she's never told him hers.
If you're joining with or because of a friend, do you plan to import CR?: N/A
Third Person Writing Sample: Feeling as tense and ill at ease as he had today was a rare thing for Gauron.
Before the attack by HKK-4, sure, he'd had the nightmares, the same as everyone else, but even then, his mind had rebelled against the unease and gone into tactical mode, planning for the battle ahead; if he had to attribute his survival to anything other than pure dumb luck, it would've been that. This time, though, the restless tension wouldn't be shrugged off. It felt like something big was about to happen, and accompanying that feeling was a greater sense of detachment from this world than he'd felt since he first arrived.
He'd been equal parts pissed off and relieved when HKA-17 breached containment; it was a distraction from trying to pull together that vague unease into something that might help him determine his course of action, but maybe that distraction was just what he needed. It put him into battle mode, forcing him to think of nothing more than the present, one moment at a time - because if he didn't, HKA-17 would have killed him.
This time, though, there had been no casualties, at least not on the containment team. HKA-17's behavior seemed less aggressive than he remembered, but ultimately, that was the Foundation scientists' call to make. Either way, the battle had left him feeling much more clear-headed, and he'd recalled that Dr. Kamadecoco had been in charge of the experiments that were being run today on HKA-17.
He'd wondered if she'd survived; if she hadn't, he supposed that meant the house was his now. However, she had made it through the containment breach with only minor chemical burns, though she still had to go through decontamination, and it had been a few hours before she was cleared to leave. However, the wait hadn't dulled the certain enthusiasm they both shared after being in mortal danger; it wasn't the first time he'd felt compelled to make a lame joke about how she must really have a thing for being stripped naked and hosed down by guys in hazmat suits, and the only reason she didn't have his pants undone before they were even through the security checkpoint was because she only had one hand to work with.
They'd kept the party going when they'd gotten home, breaking only briefly for dinner - and even that had been less because they were tired or hungry than because they'd needed an excuse to move it back to the bedroom.
Eventually, they'd worn themselves out - or Kamadecoco had, anyway. After all the years Gauron had spent taking the midnight watch when he and the Xia twins were operating together, there was no way he was getting to sleep just yet, though he stayed still as she settled herself in on the other side of the bed.
Once he was sure she was fast asleep, he got back up, trailing his fingers lightly over her artificial left arm - she'd lost the original heading off a containment breach by HKK-39, and there were few things sexier than a woman who'd earned her scars - and made his way to the bathroom.
He didn't feel any sleepier after showering; he was tired, but without anything else to distract him, that odd sense of unease was starting to creep back in. He padded out to the living room and flipped on the TV. He could at least get a chuckle out of the smokescreen stories on the late-night news and trying to pick out which tenth of it was inspired by actual events. He grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch, but lay down on the wood floor - with the noise and light dulling his other senses, force of habit dictated that he stay where he could feel the vibrations from anything approaching.
"...ther news, the Jiu family's incarceration has led to increasingly violent protests, despite their confirmed status as cannibals - known in some circles as 'eaters of the dead,' or simply 'eaters.' Despite the accusations against them of distributing human meat to unsuspecting locals, demands for their release have continued, and in some areas, the National Guard has had to become involved." The program cut away from the attractive young blonde reporter to the supposed protests.
Gauron smirked when he recognized the footage - it was from one of the food riots in Mississippi back in August after HKA-61-2 (known to the public as "Hurricane Zadok") had required the largest quarantine operation in the history of the U.S., not the protest against the Jiu family's incarceration, which he knew for a fact had been barely newsworthy even on a slow day. The Foundation's L.A. outpost had had their hand in this too, making sure the Jius were only eaters and not something worse.
The manipulation in the piece was only slightly subtler than the communist propaganda Gauron had grown up with, and the message was clear: You can't even trust each other, because who knows who among you might be a crazy cannibal sympathizer? You can only trust your government. Yet, he had no doubt it would accomplish its purpose. Westerners had this weird love of total paranoia and of judging themselves as superior to their peers, and the news stories that followed only continued to feed the same inclinations.
He had no idea when he'd drifted off, but it was still dark when he awoke - not that that mattered. What did matter were the instincts screaming at him that he had to get to the quarantine zone, now. He didn't question them - just changed into his uniform and got on the road. If it turned out to be nothing, it wasn't like he'd have to justify his being there early to anyone, after all. Since the Slenderman incident, he'd carefully built up a reputation as M1-A018's golden boy, to make it easier for him to hunt through Foundation records for anything that might present him with a way back to his world, or at least out of this one.
The lights from the few patches of civilization along his drive into town reflected orange on the low-hanging clouds, but the containment zone itself was pitch black - infrared bulbs had been installed in the few streetlamps the Foundation kept lit. If there had been anything truly disastrous going on, there probably would've been a few specks of light reflected from between its derelict skyscrapers, and Gauron was starting to feel like he'd let himself get paranoid over nothing when the sky lit up in laser green.
It wasn't a bomb blast: by the time he'd pulled off to the side of the road in preparation for the shockwave, the sky had gone pitch dark again, and aside from a distant rumble of thunder, the air was still. It was only seconds before the radio crackled to life; he listened for a few minutes to get an idea of the situation before tuning it in to his team's channel and passing the order along to any of them who were listening. "This is Demon's Jaw to Whimsical. I need you to check in now, because we're slated to take the field in an hour."
As it turned out, none of Team Whimsical had broken protocol to switch off their home radios; a few of his team sounded groggy and more than a little pissed off - and, in at least one case, potentially hungover; one of his fire teams wasn't supposed to be on tomorrow - but he didn't even have to ask twice for all of them to call in. "A massive new object has just appeared within the quarantine zone. According to preliminary descriptions, it's saucer-shaped, with three towers in excess of twelve hundred feet in height. Its boundaries are at Simms, Torrance, Sunderland, and Warwick." The rough quadrangle indicated the streets, though Sunderland and Torrance were also undercut by unnatural subway lines in those areas - originally, Seattle's commuter rail had only taken up 65 miles and four stations; the spontaneous appearance of the additional 237 miles of track and nineteen stations that, while their placards served to differentiate them, were identical in layout not only to each other, but to several quarantined light rail stations in Europe, had been one of the initial events that had led to tacit government condonement of and CDC complicity with the Foundation's decision to evacuate the city. Because of the effect they even had on Foundation personnel after they'd been shut down, they'd been given, in addition to their number HKA-119-B, the informal name "Dionaea."
Gauron started wondering whether the structure that had suddenly appeared within the city might somehow be their fruiting body. Then, he drove faster.