OOC Information:
Name: James
Age: 23
AIM: nathander2007
MSN: N/A
Y!M: N/A
E-MAIL: jhr061000@utdallas.edu
IC Information:
Name: Spades Slick
Fandom: MS Paint Adventures - Homestuck
Timeline: While fucking around with timelines during his fight with Sawbuck and Crowbar of the Felt
Age: Unknown, but we can assume several hundred years
Appearance: Spades is a Dersite, which means he looks more or less humanoid, although many of his physical features are obscured by his black carapace. He’s about the height of an average human male and appears to be of average build. He also has a scar across one of his eyes, though which eye this is depends on how his sprite is currently flipped.
Spades dresses in film noir style similar to a mobster from the 1920s, wearing business-esque clothes under a trench coat and hat.
Abilities:
Like everyone from Homestuck, Spades Slick possesses an inventory system. Unlike most of the others, however, his (and the rest of the Midnight Crews system) isn’t based around a sylladex, but slots. Spades has five slots meant to carry weapons, which he can switch between at any time, and one slot for items. His item slot is always occupied by his Deck of Cards, which can be transformed into his Warchest, a large chest which he keeps several other possessions. His Warchest currently contains a Back Up Hat, a Crosbytop Computer (which confuses the hell out of him), a Spades Key/Rules for Blackjack Card, assorted weapons that he doesn’t have equipped, and two Scotty liquorish dogs. At the time, he also has Crowbar, a member of the Felt, jammed in his Warchest but I would assume Crowbar wouldn’t be making the trip with him. He also has Die’s Voodoo Doll, which has a pin in it for every member of the Felt and Midnight Crew that, when removed, kills the person the pin represents.
Among the weapons Spades has, most of them are mundane but have unique names, such as the Bait and Switchblade, Occam’s Razor, Rapier Wit, and The Saber Rattler. He also has a copy of Snowman’s Cigarette Holder/Lance, though this is mundane aside from the fact that it’s incredibly well made. The only item with a special property he has at the moment is Crowbar’s Crowbar, a crowbar that can destroy items that have time-travel/warping properties.
As a fighter, Spades is brutally skilled, especially with bludgeoning weapons and bladed weapons. He demonstrated this skill during his fight with the some of the members of the Felt, a rival gang, where he decapitated three members in one swing. That being said, since he really isn’t supernatural, he’d probably rate a 4 on the fight scale like the rest of the Midnight Crew and Jack Noir does without his ring.
Personality:
Spades Slick is not a nice person. As the archagent of Derse, it was his job to try and win the war with Prospit, Derse’s rival planet, as well as answering to the Black Queen, who he hated. On the ruined planet of Alternia, where he’d eventually be exiled, Spades essentially created and runs the reformed civilization there, that he crafted in the image of a Noir film. In both cases, Spades shows himself as an incredibly cruel, merciless, and calculating being. His first and foremost desire is to exert control, first in showing that no one controls him but himself and secondly in having others answer specifically to him. And anyone who tries to take either of these away from him, either by expecting to attempt to command him or by disobeying him, can expect to be taken care of by the Dersite and his crew.
While Spades usually flexes and shows his power through acts of physical aggression, prefer to make sure his opponents can never come back because they’ve been deep-sixed, he’s demonstrated that he’s capable of using subterfuge and playing politics to get what he wants, although he only ever seems to do this is outright aggression simply has no chance of getting the job done. An example of this would be the alliance he formed with Karkat Vantas during the trolls session of Sburb/Sgurb, where he formed a plot with the young troll to find a way to banish and exile the Black Queen by sabotaging her prototyping ring, which was advantageous for both parties involved. Really, Spades just enjoys crushing his enemies, and if he can’t do it through the preferred physical means, he’ll do it through subtler ones if that becomes possible.
Along with his cruelty and exceedingly violent tendencies, Spades is also incredibly impulsive. He does what he wants whenever he feels like it, and will stop doing it the moment it no longer provides him with any interest. This tends to lead to some incredibly childish behavior, such as one moment where he pretended his Cast Iron Horse Hitcher was a real horse and, using Snowman’s Lance, pretended to joust. While he usually doesn’t seem to give much thought to these random outbursts (and he doesn’t, to be fair), he is self-conscious of them and at least tries to do them in private when given the chance. Which isn’t to say he hasn’t been caught on multiple occasions. This also includes the horrible, horrible puns that Slick is notorious for that he constantly tries to crank out as one liners. Despite being god-awful at them, he doesn’t seem to understand the idea of giving up on them.
Despite all this, it is possible for Spades Slick to care about others, or at least tolerate them. He’s exceedingly loyal to his crew and, while he most likely wouldn’t bat an eye if any of them died, he himself would never intentionally betray them or permanently hurt them (though temporary is just fine). This goes along with the idea that Spades will do what he likes when he likes and will stop doing it when he no longer wants to. The fact that he continues to hang around with his crew and work with them suggests something more then him using them just for their utility.
The same would, in an odd way, appear to apply to the troll kids who he helped during their sessions and proceeded to observe later when he found himself stuck in Lord English’s Vault. While he appears to profess a complete hatred for them, there are indications he seems to actually at least somewhat care about them or at least what they’re doing (as observed by the fact that he continues to observe them). This applies especially to the trolls leader, Karkat Vantas, who seems to idolize Slick. In turn, Slick does sympathize and empathize with Karkat, if not seeing him as a sort of surrogate son. Of course, Spades Slick being who he is, he would never express this in any relevant or decipherable way to anyone but himself, one of these ways apparently being the fact that Spades doesn’t fatally stab Karkat despite apparently using Karkat as a pin cushion whenever he likes.
History:
Once upon a time, twelve stupid alien teenagers decided to play a game they didn’t grasp the full gravity of. This game was called Sgurb and the purpose of the game was to erase the current universe and create a new one, governed over by the players who went through the game that would rule the new universe they created as gods.
And in this game there were two planets: the planet of light, Prospit, and the planet of darkness, Derse. These two planets were constantly at war with one another, which they fought on a third planet known as Skaia, or the Battleground. Overseeing this war was a king and queen on both sides, and working under the king and queen to command the troops for the sides was an archagent.
And the archagent of Derse was a rather violent, unhappy fellow named Jack Noir, and he hated his job. That isn’t to say he didn’t enjoy warfare, he loved it. And it isn’t to say he disliked commanding the battalions of the Dersian army, because he loved that too. But what Jack Noir didn’t like was royalty and having to work under them, and especially working under the Black Queen, who loathed him as much as he did her. This was no particular secret about them. Jack, when he wasn’t attending to the affairs of the Dersian military, would spend his time drawing rather unflattering pictures of the “bluh bluh huge bitch”, while the Black Queen would force Jack to wear colorful, jester-like clothing as a means of causing him shame and embarrassment. Jack hated the Black Queen, and dreamed of the day he’d no longer have to deal with her. He didn’t just dream about it, but conspired with some of his fellow agents: the Courtyard Droll, the Hegemonious Brute, and the Draconian Dignitary, to eventually find a way to get rid of the Black Queen.
And do you know what? Eventually, Jack did. Once the alien children, or trolls, began to play their game, he came up with a perfect idea involving subterfuge, treachery, and sabotage that would lead to the downfall of the Black Queen. Jack would eventually go to meet Karkat Vantas, the troll’s leader and diaper ass cry baby extraordinaire, who agreed to help flesh out Jack’s plan to sabotage and, ultimately, exile the Black Queen, a deal that would be beneficial to both parties: Jack and his fellow officers because they hated the Black Queen, and to the trolls because the Black King and Queen served as the final bosses of their game, and exiling the Queen would mean they would need to only deal with one boss. And so, for once, all seemed like it was going Jack’s way.
And then, Jack and the agents who had helped in his rebellion were exiled, courtesy of the Black Queen who had her own favored member of the trolls that she had begun to contact. And so, for centuries, Jack and his fellow agents wandered the ruined planet of Alternia, where the trolls had originally come from, which was now little more then a desert.
Then, one day, Jack had an idea. Who knows exactly how he came up with it, but considering Jack it was probably a product of his boredom and no longer wanting to just have to look out over desert. Jack decided that he wanted to build a city, and so that’s exactly what he and the other agents did. It started small, and probably not very quick due to Jack’s constantly shifting attention span, but it grew. And grew. And soon other people came to it. And soon the city turned from a small little patch of land in the desert to a sprawling metropolis the likes few others have seen, crafted in 1920s-30s noir style.
And it was Jack’s city. His and his fellow agents, and they’d be the ones to run the show. Jack would come to take the moniker Spades Slick, and his crew took the name of the Midnight Crew, and that’d be a name everyone in that city knew. Thing is, not everyone gave it the respect it deserved. Among these were a rival gang known as the Felt, run by a mysterious, and powerful, individual known as Lord English, and whose membership included the exiled Black Queen, now operating under the name Snowman and blessed with being part of the fabric of space-time, making her impossible to kill.
Needless to say, Slick was not pleased. So one night he and the crew hatched a plan to raid Lord English’s mansion, killing the Felt gang members and robbing English blind. At first, the mission went well: the Midnight Crew proceeded to devastate the Felt on their own turf. Things got a bit hairier for Spades when he ran into the Felt member Sawbuck, however. The Felt each possessed a time travel gimmick, and Sawbuck’s was that whenever he wounded an opponent or he himself was wounded, Sawbuck and his opponent would jump to a random place in the time line. And it’s during this fight that Spades is taken from.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
The smell of cigarette smoke and whiskey was, if asked, one of the few things Spades Slick really cherished. They were gritty sensations, and by god if grit wasn’t something he could get behind and love. Even better when it was the first thing in the morning.
He rubbed his brow a minute before finally taking a swig of the alcohol, enjoying the burning sensation in his throat. Last night had been an utter bitch. Some little band of assholes had thought it would be just a delightful idea to try and steal from one of the warehouses of illegal black market merchandise the Crew kept. Spades supposed there was no real reason for it to be illegal; after all, he could damn well make legal whatever he wanted in this city. But he had to admit, the idea of still doing dirty business just appealed to him. It was the kind of shit any mobster worth his fedora was supposed to do. Spades could swing with that.
Spades could also swing his Cast Iron Horse Hitcher hard enough to bust open the heads of some of the little fucks who’d tried stealing from him. He allowed himself a small grin at that. Stupid motherfuckers certainly wouldn’t be trying that again. Doubted they’d ever hear from them in any way, either - it’s kind of hard to talk from the bottom of a reservoir.
And that’s what you get. For trying to take something that isn’t yours. For trying to take something that was his. This was his town, and that included everyone and everything in it. It was his turn to goddamn call the shots, but he wasn’t going to do any of that royalty bullshit. Just good old ruling through fear. Yeah. Entirely different from what Snowman had been doing.
That bitch. And here he had thought that once he’d exiled her ugly, bitchy ass, he’d never have to deal with her, or see her again. But no, of course not. He had to go and get exiled himself, on the same planet with her. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if he could’ve just killed her but of course misery had to keep company so she had to be, of all things, immortal as well as being on the same planet. It was a beautiful slap in the face and utter bullshit all at the same time. There had to be some way to fuck her over, to get her out of his way entirely so he’d never have to see her or waste time thinking about her ever again. But how? No matter what the fuck he did, she always screwed him. Always found some way to outmaneuver him, even when it looked like he’d fucking beaten her. He’d fucking beaten her! He had! Why was she able to turn being disgraced and exiled into a victory?! How the fuck was that fair?
The glass of whiskey soon found itself sailing through the air before smashing against the wood tiled wall of Spades room. The chair Spades had been sitting in soon found itself joining the chair. The desk would have too, but Spades wasn’t so insane as to try and fling that piece of shit. So he simply toppled it over.
When he was finally done, the room was a mess, broken glass and wood littering the floor, a small covering of feathers from one of Spades pillows. Spades himself was breathing slightly more raggedly then usual. Not really because of the physical exertion, but from trying to push the bitch out of his mind before he went on another tear.
He went to his closet to get his coat and hat and get dressed. He had some business to attend to; some protection money was due today, and he aimed to collect it. Especially in his current mood. It’d be good for him, to have something that could scream as a target.
With a collected, if somewhat quick walk, Spades exited the room, locking the door behind him.
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
[Hello everyone, enjoy a snarling, entirely black face looking at you through a video feed.]
Oh, well, fucking wonderful. Yes. This is exactly where I was hoping I’d get transported next: fuck all whitewash land. I don’t know where your fat ass has managed to scurry off to, Sawbuck, but you damn well better believe it isn’t going far.
I guess you could say that when I find you, the fat is..
[Spades pauses for a minute, looking to the side and mumbling to himself. He seems to be trying to find just the right words to say.]
No, it’s…
I guess your…
[And then he just snarls, nearly throwing the communicator away but then remembering he kind of needs it.]
FUCK!.
Look, whatever. The point is, there’s no real use in hiding, you fat sack of shit, because we’re just going to play another round of “spin the time-line bottle”.
Or, heh, stab the bottle, I guess, would be better.
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.