capeandcowl app: Luck Gandor
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Abby
JOURNAL: joiedecombat
IM: AIM: Joie de Combat
E-MAIL: abbykat at hotmail dot com
RETURNING: Yes; Jonah Matsuka (coffeematsuka)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Luck Gandor
FANDOM: Baccano! (anime/light novels)
CHRONOLOGY: Shortly after the end of the fourth light novel, Drugs & the Dominoes.
CLASS: Anti-hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: Montresor, an alias he'll use when doing shady business with unsavory people he'd rather not be connected with in his daily life, because the Poe reference amuses him.
ALTER EGO: Luck Gandor. What job he actually ends up in will probably depend on roleplay, but in any case he'll supplement his income by killing drug dealers and taking their money.
BACKGROUND:
Note: I am using the timeline from the novels. It's the same as in the anime except for the 1932 arc, which is covered in the novel Drugs & the Dominos.
Luck Gandor is the youngest of the three Gandor brothers, born into a Jazz Age Mafia family. Their father had been given control over the organization from his own boss, who was only looking for a convenient sucker on whom to unload a piece of territory hemmed in by much larger and more powerful families, but in spite of this Mr. Gandor worked hard to hold onto what he'd been given. The end result was that he died of exhaustion and overwork by the time Luck was entering his teens, and Luck's oldest brother Keith took over the business. Luck was a Mafia executive by the time he was no older than fifteen.
Well aware that he'd received his standing purely by family connections rather than by any merit of his own, Luck threw his efforts into proving that he deserved it. He exerted himself to fit the role of a sharp and ruthless mafioso, firmly repressing his innate kindness in order to make sure that nobody could look down on him as being "just a kid."
It worked. Fast forward about four years; by 1930 the Gandor family was still a small organization but firmly-established in their part of New York City. Though Keith was the boss, Luck served as the "face" of the family - partly of necessity, since Keith never spoke aloud if he could help it and Berga was more inclined to do business with his fists, but by the time he was nineteen, Luck's efforts had paid off well. Cool-headed and well-spoken, he'd developed a reputation for brilliance and the respect of many in the world of New York's organized crime.
In November of 1930, two things of particular note happened. The first was that several of the men in the Gandors' employ were viciously gunned down at the organization's own headquarters by a two-bit petty crook named Dallas Genoard and two of his friends.
The second was that, at a party celebrating the promotion of Luck's childhood friend Firo Prochainezo into the Martillo camorra family, everyone present - including not only Firo, Luck, and both of his brothers, but also all of the Martillo family's executives, several of their enforcers, and a pair of oddball thieves who'd joined in the festivities mostly by accident - unwittingly drank some of the Grand Panacea, an elixir of immortality developed by the alchemist Szilard Quates.
The elixir rendered everyone who drank it immortal, impervious to age or disease and capable of recovering from any injury - a fact that none of them were aware of until a brief back-alley scuffle saw Firo and Luck and Luck's brothers shot down by Dallas Genoard and his cronies only to get right back up again, puzzled but otherwise none the worse for wear. As Dallas has also been dosed with the elixir - albeit an incomplete version which didn't grant him freedom from age - the Gandors couldn't kill him, so instead they took their revenge by stuffing him into a weighted oil drum and dropping him into the Hudson to spend the next seventy years or so drowning until he finally expired of old age.
And business more or less went on as normal.
Over the following year, the Gandors came into conflict with the much larger Runorata family over the drugs the Runoratas were selling on Gandor turf. The primary instigator of the conflict was Gustavo Baggeta, a big, mean, ambitious thug of a man who went so far as to send a drugged-up goon to assassinate Luck in the middle of a bookstore on Gandor turf.
Luck got better, but that was beside the point.
The Gandors, rather than get further embroiled in a turf war, called in their own personal redheaded stepbrother, Claire Stanfield - better known as the assassin called Vino - to help clean up the mess. The whole business ended in a showdown at the Daily Days newspaper office in January of 1932, during which Luck succeeded in talking most of Gustavo's mooks into abandoning him and then beat the hell out of Gustavo with a chair in retaliation for the Gandor family businesses and employees he'd attacked.
In the process he ended up rescuing Dallas Genoard's little sister Eve, and preventing her from blowing Gustavo's head off for murdering her father and her brother Geoffrey. He finished the job himself, gouging open Gustavo's throat with the jagged bones of his own shattered arm. In the aftermath, he went as far as to give Eve the location where her brother and his friends had been dumped, telling her that if she ever felt that Dallas's suffering was enough to make up for the lives of the Gandor men he'd killed and for Luck's own anger, then she could do whatever she wanted... and warning her not to say anything else to him about it.
And business more or less went on as normal again.
PERSONALITY:
Luck does not come across as a Mafia wiseguy. He's educated and very well-spoken, generally inclined to be polite even when he's telling someone that he has absolutely no use for them. Even in his own time he came off as a bit old-fashioned, holding himself to an Old School standard of business and behavior that many other mafiosos of the time had begun to abandon. He may be a criminal, but he is honest in his business dealings and treats those who do business with him fairly just as long as they deal fairly with him; he finds violence against women reprehensible, and is absolutely loyal to his family and his family's organization.
That last in particular is a key element of Luck's character. Family is everything to him, and the prosperity and well-being of his family influences every decision that he makes. This extends not just to his brothers by blood but to anyone he perceives as being a part of his family, whether they're officially adopted, unofficially adopted, or just people who work for him. The best way to make an enemy of Luck for life is to try to hurt someone he feels responsible for. Mess with Luck himself and he may very well be inclined to let it go. Mess with his family and he will kill you.
Luck is a self-controlled person; he rarely loses his cool, and usually comports himself with class regardless of circumstances. Even when he's angry - even when he's absolutely furious - it's a cold fury, and he exerts every effort to keep control of himself. When business calls for him to have someone tortured or killed, he does it calmly and ruthlessly.
In spite of this, the people who know Luck best are apt to say that he's really not cut out to be a mafioso. He exerts himself to be cool and ruthless in order to make up for the fact that he's never cared for violence and his natural inclination is to be considerate of and sympathetic to others, a quality that would be an exploitable weakness in his kind of business and which therefore he refuses to indulge very often. He has a thoughtful, even philosophical bent that may seem rather incongruous in a Mafia executive, and a sense of self-awareness that makes him for the most part fully conscious of his own weaknesses.
POWER:
Luck is immortal. He will never age past nineteen; he is immune to any kind of poison or illness. His body is no stronger or more resistant to injury than any other person's, but no matter how extensive the injury, it will heal completely, leaving him as good as new. Some rather creepy people in his world did extensive experimentation on this particular brand of immortality in an effort to figure out the limitations of it, and as far as anyone was ever able to determine, there are none - even if he's burned to ash or completely dissolved in acid, he'll simply squidge back together again. It still hurts, though.
There's only one way that Luck can die: if another person who received this kind of complete immortality from the Grand Panacea were to place their right hand on his head, they could, if they wished, "eat" him, completely absorbing his body and gaining all of his knowledge and skill in the process. It's really gross to watch. Luck can also do this to other immortals, if any from the same canon happen to show up, but given its permanence, in practice I don't imagine it will ever come into play.
People who have received immortality from the Grand Panacea can also share their memories and thoughts with one another without eating each other. The process is similar; they simply place their right hand on the other immortal's head and will them to receive whatever information they want to transfer.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[video]
[The video feed is of a table in a standard MAC apartment, and a fox-eyed young man in a suit sitting at it with his hands folded in front of him, wearing a faint, calm smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.]
I'll spare everyone the customary questions, I think. I've spent the past several days investigating this "network" of yours, and I believe I understand at least the gist of the situation I'm in.
Allow me, then, to introduce myself. My name is Luck Gandor, formerly of New York City - which I understand that this place is not, similarities notwithstanding.
I'd like to be able to say it's a pleasure to meet you all, but given the circumstances I hope you'll forgive me if I can't. I have family and responsibilities that I'm obligated to in my own place and time. But in any case it seems that I have no choice but to go along with all of this for now... although I can't imagine thinking of myself as any kind of "hero," whatever that machine says. I'm only a businessman.
So that's that. It's a very unusual city you have here... I think it's going to take some time for me to adjust. Things here are quite different from what I'm used to.
Well, I suppose we'll see.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
The oil drum sank quickly into the murky waters of the Hudson, and with it the muffled sounds of Dallas Genoard's shouting voice also vanished. It sent up a froth of bubbles for a little while, but those petered out soon enough, and then there was no trace remaining at all.
With that, Luck thought, last night's business was finally over with. If he'd had the choice, he might have preferred to simply put a bullet into Genoard's head, but it would have accomplished nothing. They had no way to kill Genoard that would take - save perhaps one, and neither Luck nor either of his brothers had cared to seriously consider the possibility of doing to him what Firo had done to the old man.
Stupidity might be catching.
Instead, Dallas and his idiot cronies could spend the next seventy years or so drowning at the bottom of the river, their punishment for the four Gandor family men that they'd murdered. If there was a harsher sentence that the brothers could have condemned them to, Luck couldn't think of it... but his anger still remained, burning cold and fierce and unabated. Dallas Genoard and his friends could spend eternity in darkness, choking on the river until the end of the world, and Luck's anger still would not go away.
Bad enough that four of their people had been gunned down in their own organization's headquarters - that sort of thing had to be punished quickly and without mercy or everyone would see that you couldn't protect your own even on your own ground - but if it had been just that, then Luck could have been satisfied. He'd known those men; had known their names, where they were from, their tells when they played poker. He'd known them and they'd worked for him and they'd died because of it, and no amount of revenge would make up for that.
It would have to do.
Luck stood at the riverside and watched the water move.
Soon enough there would be other work to do, the ramifications of the previous night's events to consider. Eternal life. The idea didn't seem to have quite sunk in yet, the reality of it hard to grasp even after he'd been riddled with enough bullets to kill half a dozen men and had gotten up from it without a mark on him except for the holes in his suit. As he thought about it now, it didn't seem as though anything much would change. Business would still need to be done. The people and the businesses that paid their share to the Gandor family would still need to be protected. It would be no good if he let the loss of the need to fear death dull his edge and make him soft; even if he had changed, the world that he did business in had not.
Anyway it hardly mattered, Luck thought. Fifty years or five hundred years; however long he lived, Luck's responsibilities would be to his family.
Presently, turning the collar of his coat up against the bite of the January wind, he turned away from the river and started for home. There was work to be done.
NAME: Abby
JOURNAL: joiedecombat
IM: AIM: Joie de Combat
E-MAIL: abbykat at hotmail dot com
RETURNING: Yes; Jonah Matsuka (coffeematsuka)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Luck Gandor
FANDOM: Baccano! (anime/light novels)
CHRONOLOGY: Shortly after the end of the fourth light novel, Drugs & the Dominoes.
CLASS: Anti-hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: Montresor, an alias he'll use when doing shady business with unsavory people he'd rather not be connected with in his daily life, because the Poe reference amuses him.
ALTER EGO: Luck Gandor. What job he actually ends up in will probably depend on roleplay, but in any case he'll supplement his income by killing drug dealers and taking their money.
BACKGROUND:
Note: I am using the timeline from the novels. It's the same as in the anime except for the 1932 arc, which is covered in the novel Drugs & the Dominos.
Luck Gandor is the youngest of the three Gandor brothers, born into a Jazz Age Mafia family. Their father had been given control over the organization from his own boss, who was only looking for a convenient sucker on whom to unload a piece of territory hemmed in by much larger and more powerful families, but in spite of this Mr. Gandor worked hard to hold onto what he'd been given. The end result was that he died of exhaustion and overwork by the time Luck was entering his teens, and Luck's oldest brother Keith took over the business. Luck was a Mafia executive by the time he was no older than fifteen.
Well aware that he'd received his standing purely by family connections rather than by any merit of his own, Luck threw his efforts into proving that he deserved it. He exerted himself to fit the role of a sharp and ruthless mafioso, firmly repressing his innate kindness in order to make sure that nobody could look down on him as being "just a kid."
It worked. Fast forward about four years; by 1930 the Gandor family was still a small organization but firmly-established in their part of New York City. Though Keith was the boss, Luck served as the "face" of the family - partly of necessity, since Keith never spoke aloud if he could help it and Berga was more inclined to do business with his fists, but by the time he was nineteen, Luck's efforts had paid off well. Cool-headed and well-spoken, he'd developed a reputation for brilliance and the respect of many in the world of New York's organized crime.
In November of 1930, two things of particular note happened. The first was that several of the men in the Gandors' employ were viciously gunned down at the organization's own headquarters by a two-bit petty crook named Dallas Genoard and two of his friends.
The second was that, at a party celebrating the promotion of Luck's childhood friend Firo Prochainezo into the Martillo camorra family, everyone present - including not only Firo, Luck, and both of his brothers, but also all of the Martillo family's executives, several of their enforcers, and a pair of oddball thieves who'd joined in the festivities mostly by accident - unwittingly drank some of the Grand Panacea, an elixir of immortality developed by the alchemist Szilard Quates.
The elixir rendered everyone who drank it immortal, impervious to age or disease and capable of recovering from any injury - a fact that none of them were aware of until a brief back-alley scuffle saw Firo and Luck and Luck's brothers shot down by Dallas Genoard and his cronies only to get right back up again, puzzled but otherwise none the worse for wear. As Dallas has also been dosed with the elixir - albeit an incomplete version which didn't grant him freedom from age - the Gandors couldn't kill him, so instead they took their revenge by stuffing him into a weighted oil drum and dropping him into the Hudson to spend the next seventy years or so drowning until he finally expired of old age.
And business more or less went on as normal.
Over the following year, the Gandors came into conflict with the much larger Runorata family over the drugs the Runoratas were selling on Gandor turf. The primary instigator of the conflict was Gustavo Baggeta, a big, mean, ambitious thug of a man who went so far as to send a drugged-up goon to assassinate Luck in the middle of a bookstore on Gandor turf.
Luck got better, but that was beside the point.
The Gandors, rather than get further embroiled in a turf war, called in their own personal redheaded stepbrother, Claire Stanfield - better known as the assassin called Vino - to help clean up the mess. The whole business ended in a showdown at the Daily Days newspaper office in January of 1932, during which Luck succeeded in talking most of Gustavo's mooks into abandoning him and then beat the hell out of Gustavo with a chair in retaliation for the Gandor family businesses and employees he'd attacked.
In the process he ended up rescuing Dallas Genoard's little sister Eve, and preventing her from blowing Gustavo's head off for murdering her father and her brother Geoffrey. He finished the job himself, gouging open Gustavo's throat with the jagged bones of his own shattered arm. In the aftermath, he went as far as to give Eve the location where her brother and his friends had been dumped, telling her that if she ever felt that Dallas's suffering was enough to make up for the lives of the Gandor men he'd killed and for Luck's own anger, then she could do whatever she wanted... and warning her not to say anything else to him about it.
And business more or less went on as normal again.
PERSONALITY:
Luck does not come across as a Mafia wiseguy. He's educated and very well-spoken, generally inclined to be polite even when he's telling someone that he has absolutely no use for them. Even in his own time he came off as a bit old-fashioned, holding himself to an Old School standard of business and behavior that many other mafiosos of the time had begun to abandon. He may be a criminal, but he is honest in his business dealings and treats those who do business with him fairly just as long as they deal fairly with him; he finds violence against women reprehensible, and is absolutely loyal to his family and his family's organization.
That last in particular is a key element of Luck's character. Family is everything to him, and the prosperity and well-being of his family influences every decision that he makes. This extends not just to his brothers by blood but to anyone he perceives as being a part of his family, whether they're officially adopted, unofficially adopted, or just people who work for him. The best way to make an enemy of Luck for life is to try to hurt someone he feels responsible for. Mess with Luck himself and he may very well be inclined to let it go. Mess with his family and he will kill you.
Luck is a self-controlled person; he rarely loses his cool, and usually comports himself with class regardless of circumstances. Even when he's angry - even when he's absolutely furious - it's a cold fury, and he exerts every effort to keep control of himself. When business calls for him to have someone tortured or killed, he does it calmly and ruthlessly.
In spite of this, the people who know Luck best are apt to say that he's really not cut out to be a mafioso. He exerts himself to be cool and ruthless in order to make up for the fact that he's never cared for violence and his natural inclination is to be considerate of and sympathetic to others, a quality that would be an exploitable weakness in his kind of business and which therefore he refuses to indulge very often. He has a thoughtful, even philosophical bent that may seem rather incongruous in a Mafia executive, and a sense of self-awareness that makes him for the most part fully conscious of his own weaknesses.
POWER:
Luck is immortal. He will never age past nineteen; he is immune to any kind of poison or illness. His body is no stronger or more resistant to injury than any other person's, but no matter how extensive the injury, it will heal completely, leaving him as good as new. Some rather creepy people in his world did extensive experimentation on this particular brand of immortality in an effort to figure out the limitations of it, and as far as anyone was ever able to determine, there are none - even if he's burned to ash or completely dissolved in acid, he'll simply squidge back together again. It still hurts, though.
There's only one way that Luck can die: if another person who received this kind of complete immortality from the Grand Panacea were to place their right hand on his head, they could, if they wished, "eat" him, completely absorbing his body and gaining all of his knowledge and skill in the process. It's really gross to watch. Luck can also do this to other immortals, if any from the same canon happen to show up, but given its permanence, in practice I don't imagine it will ever come into play.
People who have received immortality from the Grand Panacea can also share their memories and thoughts with one another without eating each other. The process is similar; they simply place their right hand on the other immortal's head and will them to receive whatever information they want to transfer.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[video]
[The video feed is of a table in a standard MAC apartment, and a fox-eyed young man in a suit sitting at it with his hands folded in front of him, wearing a faint, calm smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.]
I'll spare everyone the customary questions, I think. I've spent the past several days investigating this "network" of yours, and I believe I understand at least the gist of the situation I'm in.
Allow me, then, to introduce myself. My name is Luck Gandor, formerly of New York City - which I understand that this place is not, similarities notwithstanding.
I'd like to be able to say it's a pleasure to meet you all, but given the circumstances I hope you'll forgive me if I can't. I have family and responsibilities that I'm obligated to in my own place and time. But in any case it seems that I have no choice but to go along with all of this for now... although I can't imagine thinking of myself as any kind of "hero," whatever that machine says. I'm only a businessman.
So that's that. It's a very unusual city you have here... I think it's going to take some time for me to adjust. Things here are quite different from what I'm used to.
Well, I suppose we'll see.
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
The oil drum sank quickly into the murky waters of the Hudson, and with it the muffled sounds of Dallas Genoard's shouting voice also vanished. It sent up a froth of bubbles for a little while, but those petered out soon enough, and then there was no trace remaining at all.
With that, Luck thought, last night's business was finally over with. If he'd had the choice, he might have preferred to simply put a bullet into Genoard's head, but it would have accomplished nothing. They had no way to kill Genoard that would take - save perhaps one, and neither Luck nor either of his brothers had cared to seriously consider the possibility of doing to him what Firo had done to the old man.
Stupidity might be catching.
Instead, Dallas and his idiot cronies could spend the next seventy years or so drowning at the bottom of the river, their punishment for the four Gandor family men that they'd murdered. If there was a harsher sentence that the brothers could have condemned them to, Luck couldn't think of it... but his anger still remained, burning cold and fierce and unabated. Dallas Genoard and his friends could spend eternity in darkness, choking on the river until the end of the world, and Luck's anger still would not go away.
Bad enough that four of their people had been gunned down in their own organization's headquarters - that sort of thing had to be punished quickly and without mercy or everyone would see that you couldn't protect your own even on your own ground - but if it had been just that, then Luck could have been satisfied. He'd known those men; had known their names, where they were from, their tells when they played poker. He'd known them and they'd worked for him and they'd died because of it, and no amount of revenge would make up for that.
It would have to do.
Luck stood at the riverside and watched the water move.
Soon enough there would be other work to do, the ramifications of the previous night's events to consider. Eternal life. The idea didn't seem to have quite sunk in yet, the reality of it hard to grasp even after he'd been riddled with enough bullets to kill half a dozen men and had gotten up from it without a mark on him except for the holes in his suit. As he thought about it now, it didn't seem as though anything much would change. Business would still need to be done. The people and the businesses that paid their share to the Gandor family would still need to be protected. It would be no good if he let the loss of the need to fear death dull his edge and make him soft; even if he had changed, the world that he did business in had not.
Anyway it hardly mattered, Luck thought. Fifty years or five hundred years; however long he lived, Luck's responsibilities would be to his family.
Presently, turning the collar of his coat up against the bite of the January wind, he turned away from the river and started for home. There was work to be done.