User Name/Nick: Rei
User LJ:
magdaleinaAIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo
E-mail: weirdophreak17@yahoo.com
Other Characters: The Marquis de Sade, Mozenrath, Reaver, Frances Owens
Character Name: Henchman 21 (Real name Gary -- he is also entertaining using the code name "Viceroy")
Series: The Venture Bros.
Age: 28
From When?: Post-Season 4. Gary has left the employ of the Monarch, having decided that he likes the Venture family and their friends, and having found that being around them and working with Sphinx has done more to help him resolve his issues than anything else. This is before the "From the Ladle to the Grave: The Story of Shallow Gravy" special where he is interviewed while wearing the Sphinx uniform and identified as "Viceroy".
Inmate/Warden: Warden -- despite having come here initially as an Inmate, 21 has in the last half-year become, as Shore Leave so eloquently stated, a "good guy", and it has nothing to do with who he works for or whether he views himself as a henchman or a soldier; he did the job he had and as he became better at it a lot of his most important decisions were based on good motivations -- he became a better henchman so that he and no other henchman should die needlessly or unprepared for what they were about to face. He chose to reveal his attraction to Dr Mrs the Monarch because (while he was drunk) he felt she was being underappreciated and mistreated. As he became more dangerous and more capable of killing, he started making more choices not to kill, restricting such maneuvers behind a strict code of honor. As it is, his capabilities as a leader and strategist, and just a normal, likeable guy, make him the perfect candidate to rehabilitate an Inmate. He turned a rag-tag joke of an army under the Monarch into a deadly, and more importantly confident force. He taught them self-defense, and he taught them to be something other than cannon fodder. As he has finally come to accept that the Monarch was a bit crazy and completely beneath him, he has become a more responsible human being and come to have more realistic expectations for the world around him and how this business of heroes and villains should be run. The wisdom he can impart to an Inmate involve self-confidence, the ability to transform oneself (as he himself was an ineffective butterball geek before, and has turned himself into the formidible badass that every geek always dreamed of being), loyalty, and personal honor.
Item: A Venture Industries wrist communicator.
Abilities/Powers: Alas, 21 possesses no real super powers. However, if you ask him, he might tell you that he knows the Force.
Besides that, before the death of his best friend, Henchman 24, the only thing that 21 seemed to have going for him, in terms of his usability as a henchman, was what the Monarch referred to admiringly as “the perfect mix of expendability and invulnerability that makes a perfect henchman”. When 24 was killed, the doughy, lovable geek that was 21 started to vanish. In the year following, he rigorously trained himself and completely re-trained the rest of the Monarch’s crew, fashioning them into a deadly mobile force - largely in the hopes that no one ever need die because of his cowardice and inexperience again.
He has become a formidable hand to hand combatant, capable of holding his own against Brock Samson and providing a sufficient challenge for the OSI agent known widely as the best. He has also joined forces with operatives of the covert group known as Sphinx (made up of defected OSI agents, including Samson and numerous others), and has shown himself to be not only capable but equally matched by the lot of them. His knowledge of guild and henchman protocol has gone from almost nil to outstanding, eclipsing even the Monarch's in certain areas, and he has become very well versed in the use of henchmen-designated equipment and gadgets. His technological prowess stemmed largely from a sense of comfort around computers that is evident in the amount of time he spends on it when he’s not working in even the earliest parts of the series. Out of this and his new persona, he appears to have developed a fairly decent knack for hacking - at least talented enough to secure classified information from rival villains. He displays especial cunning and bravery when his leader is faced with a crisis, and his skill and efficiency before leaving the Monarch earned him the rank of 1 - though he refused to change his number. Other Henchmen considered him a legend, referring to him by names such as “Two-ton Twenty-one” and “General 21”. Since leaving the Monarch, he still intends to call himself 21, as he considers his number the mark of a Henchman, which he view as a bad thing. He will continue to serve someone in some capacity, whether it's the Monarch, OSI, or the Guild, and he will be their most loyal and the best. He knows better than anyone that every hero and villain is only as good as their henchmen.
Personality: 21 is a geek. There really is no getting around this. Whether it’s comics, music, television, books - he seems to speak out of a rather extensive lexicon of trivia that in any other world might seem completely useless and somehow in this one can rank him among the lowest of the losers to the height of affluence and badassery, depending upon the subject. For a man his age, he has a rather extensive toy collection - generally there for display but he has been convinced once or twice to take them out and play with them. His water-cooler conversations with 24 tended to revolve around bizarre debates involving figures from pop culture or history - the likes of which are generally completely useless to have, but he takes to them and all conversations with other people like them with academic seriousness. He sees references in just about everything he sees and does, and the trouble with this is that it can sometimes distract him at a point in time when he really should be protecting himself or someone else.
Despite being kidnapped into the business of henching, 21 had always been relatively happy with his job until his recent decision to depart. It is quite possible that being a geek has simply placed him on a level where he considers such work - from the mundane to the sinister - to be like living the movies and comics that he so adores. Conversations between himself and 24 during the series confirm this view. In “Tears of a Sea Cow”, they both recognize how easily they surpass certain obstacles and survive the un-survivable and refer to themselves as being like “series regulars”, and when sent on a stealth mission with another Henchman in “The Lepidopterists”, they spend much of their time unsettling their coworker by essentially establishing that he’s a red-shirt, doomed to die (and they seemed to be right at the time), while they would suffer none of the typical consequences. These aren’t acts of fourth-walling on the part of the writers - 21 has never acknowledged an outside audience, but rather seems to consider himself both part of the action and part of the audience on his own.
This probably accounts for the weird sense of moral detachment he seemed to have about everything included in his work as a villain. The Monarch’s cocoon was a place where his fellow Henchmen died in droves on pretty much a weekly basis, where enemies were often kidnapped, tortured, even killed, and this is work that he and every Henchman actively took part in day by day. He’s not as jaded to menacing things as say, Dr Thaddeus Venture, but there’s almost nothing he has to regularly do that really phases him. To him, even now that he's left the Monarch, it’s just part of the job. The Monarch wanted him to kill, and often he did it (with greater frequency he'd begun to let people slide - secretly, if he felt he could get away with it). In the past, when he was less capable, he attempted to kill simply because he could think of nothing better he could do, and then he thought nothing else of it. As he's become more experienced he's come to view himself as in less of an "us or them" position, so he feels less inclined to act on such impulses. However, Sphinx and similar organizations, though not criminal, tend to also kill indiscriminately when it comes to allies versus enemies.
Among other things, 21 for a long time harbored a deep sense of guilt over the loss of 24. However, despite blaming himself for 24s death, he had a list of people he held responsible for the crime - which included (in order) The Venture Bros, Brock Samson, The Moppets, a Shape-shifting Nightshade, Suicide, and Happenstance. (No one has any idea how he planned to avenge 24 against the last two.) He'd gone to multiple sources hoping to find someone who can bring his friend back to life, with no success. He had kept 24’s charred skull and to others appears to talk to it when he’s alone. However, the audience was clued in to the fact that he may well have been haunted by 24’s ghost, who had been especially helpful in aiding 21 - as he can see things that 21 does not, such as warning him about armed men in his vicinity. It was left in the air whether 24 was a figment of his imagination, a coping mechanism for dealing with his loss, and as yet the audience is still left questioning this. However, 21 now fully believes 24 was just in his mind all along, has buried 24's skull at the site of his death, and is moving on without him.
21 utterly worshipped the Monarch. He thought him the genuine article when it came to archvillainy; he doesn’t hate Dr Venture because he’s been assigned to hate him, and despite numerous failures or slipups, he plays his part passionately. 21 and 24 had been the most consistently loyal to the Monarch from the beginning, seeming to be the ones that always survive and always expect him to have his next great plan in the works at all times, and are therefore mobile and prepared to rejoin him. There are times when 21 and the Monarch, following 24’s death, appeared to connect on a friendly, casual level - in the sense that if they weren’t both wearing butterfly costumes they might be the sorts to actively hang out with each other as friends. Prior to 24’s death, this was further shown in that 21 tended to address the Monarch less as a leader in the military sense and more like the leader of the pack - the eldest, most experienced and knowledgeable among a circle of friends.
Following 24’s demise, 21 channeled his grief into turning himself into a more legitimate servant of the Monarch. The Henchman in the cocoon are now combat ready and deadly, and his influence has even improved their performance in menial jobs, such as cooking. When working, he was professional, ruthless, and completely business-minded - seen often acting as the Monarch’s personal bodyguard. There are really only two things that seemed to cause him to slip out of this persona: random geeky debates among the Henchmen that resembled the ones he used to have with 24, and the Monarch’s wife, Dr Mrs the Monarch, whom he held a crush on until he left their employ entirely, growing sick of the both of them. Continued disregard of the safety of the Henchman and keeping them underequipped began to weigh on 21 and the other Henchmen, who respected his continued proposals for improvements to the lair, their uniforms, and their weapons -- all denied. Over time his devotion to the cocoon became just as much about loyalty to his coworkers as to the Monarch and his wife, and he began to resent their mistreatment -- even at Dr Mrs The Monarch's behest staging a strike. He became more outspoken about these issues, and eventually started to form something of a friendship with Dr Mrs the Monarch, or so he thought. When he felt he had earned some higher respect in the Monarch's eyes, he began to question his loyalties when, after going to the Venture compound to bury 24's skull, he found he was more supported and respected by his supposed enemies than he ever had been by the Monarch. When he suggested he was not interested in arching to the Monarch at a party for the Venture Brothers, and the Monarch threw a tantrum, insisting he couldn't be making his own decisions to think like that, he finally lost it and declared himself finished with the both of them. He confessed that he and the Monarch's wife had shared a brief intimacy and became offended when she tried to lie about it. When she and the Monarch baited and called him a loser and a baby for quitting, he resolutely told them to fuck off and stormed out. Enough had been enough, and this perfectly illustrates how he feels about them now. He has outgrown the Monarch's operations, and he's smart enough to understand he was not properly appreciated and, despite all his objections, really was one of the good guys.
21 has been to the Barge before, and he will remember having been. Despite never graduating he will view his time here previous very fondly, and even credit his experiences as partial inspiration for the changes he made in life (even if he'd already started to make those changes himself, and he really did not remember the Barge until he finally returned to it). He likes the notion of becoming a Warden, and he will very likely take this job very seriously, in his own way. Protecting his Inmate will be just as much about his own actions as teaching his Inmate to protect themselves, as well. He may or may not don Jedi robes once or twice and be very "Obi-Wan Kenobi" about his duties, or try to be. Sometimes he will see where his training as a soldier and a leader of soldiers may come in handy, especially when he has to be firm and be the one with the pants on. He's no longer afraid of fourth walling people -- he doesn't think it will ruin their timelines, now. He is delicate about it, usually, just because it is still disorienting for some, but really, he's still totally excited to see all these familiar characters floating around him.
History:
Wiki Link 21 visited the Barge briefly, and while there largely kept a tally of all the fictional characters he recognized, asked silly questions (who would in in a fight between Christopher Lee and Sean Connery?), and annoyed his Warden, Severus Snape, with is odd complacency. He made several friends, and overall was way happier than any Inmate in their right mind ought to have been. His visit to the Barge was brief, only spanning perhaps a month, where he experienced the Kissing Town port, and becoming a woman for a few days.
Sample Journal Entry: I kinda expected to see my old bunk back at the Monarch's place when I got here, but this is much nicer, Admiral. Kudos to you!
I cannot believe I'm back. Seriously -- I am so, so fucking stoked. You guys have no idea. I mean, I haven't thought much of this place in the six months I've been gone, because I kinda forgot about it over time, but even 24 wouldn't believe me when I told him about it. Imagine a figment of my imagination telling me the rest of you were exactly that. It was totally insane.
The best part? I'm a Warden now! No graduation necessary; I did that part on my own!
Is Snape still here?
I asked the Admiral to give me a copy of my updated file so he could see my progress. No more henching, not for the bad guys anyway! No angel on my shoulder required, either! I was still kinda messed up about some things in my life even after I left here, but I got it all in order on my own. I'm in the best shape of my life, I've got real friends, and before I start probably the most epic job ever, I'm gonna see if I can't balance out my karma a bit more here with you guys!
...So why's the main deck look like a survival horror video game?
Sample RP: (Old Sample RP, if you need a new one I can write it; the entry above is new though!)
What 21 was doing in the pub at present was what he would have called “nursing a scotch”, but he’d taken a sip and absolutely hated the taste of it. However, he wasn’t alone in the room and didn’t want to put it back or just throw it out. Besides, he felt certain it made him look interesting. What dark, philosophical things must that person be thinking? they probably wondered while he stared into his glass.
It was so totally Humphrey Bogart. He was tormented. He had a story, but it was only the sort of tale he was willing to tell a genuine bartender, and seeing as how he had to stand behind the counter, say “what’ll it be?” - to himself - and pour his own glass, he figured he’d keep it quiet for tonight.
He subtly glanced toward the one other person in the pub, saw they were distracted by their own drink, and he quickly dumped the contents of his glass into the sink, then tipped the glass back like he’d just taken a huge gulp. He swallowed believably and uttered a low, satisfied sigh.
Smooth.
Mods, ignore the rest of this for application purposes, his fourth wall permissions originally went in this post.
21 is an enormous pop culture nerd monster. So I'm making fourth wall permissions for him here for anyone that wants to plot anything in particular or who absolutely does NOT want to be fourth walled. He'll actually try hard not to do it, though!