(no subject)
(( OOC: And now, in lieu of more productive things like room-cleaning... an attempt at getting Johnny's history in writing. Mind you, since he's a supporting character, a lot of this is me having fun figuring out who he is based on what I've seen of him. And you can bet I'll edit it as I think of things to add. ))
Johnny Destiny was born Johnny Fanatella, in Chicago, Illinois, on October 8, 1935. He grew up in an apartment barely big enough for him and his parents - his mother was a waitress in a small greasy spoon, and his father worked as a butcher in a shop downtown. The Fanatellas did well enough for themselves, all things considered. However, Johnny was prone to taking long walks around the city after school, so that he didn't have to stay cooped up in the apartment. He loved the (fresh?) air, and interacting with the people around him. He was a born people-watcher from the start, and when the inclement weather imposed on his daily sojourns, he would sit at the kitchen window and watch the street below. Through the years, he became quite an expert on who came and went where, and with who - even if he didn't necessarily have a name to put with every face.
This ability came in handy for him one day, when he was helping his father rearrange the butcher shop. Two men from a local mob faction entered, in hot pursuit of an embezzler. They had heard a false tip that the man was being hidden in the shop, and were ready to tear it from ceiling to floor to find him. Johnny, however - by now fourteen, and nearly taller than his father - kept his wits about him, and asked the men what their quarry looked like. Within minutes, he'd been able to recall seeing him elsewhere in the city - saving his father's shop and quite possibly their own skins.
Johnny's memory for faces made a deep impression on the thugs - so deep that they started coming to him on the street and asking him for tips on other people's whereabouts. Though he knew that he was causing trouble for whoever he decided to rat on, Johnny also reasoned that, in the long run, he was helping a lot more people by sparing the disturbances searching for them might cause his little corner of the Windy City. And just a few months later, he found himself at the desk of their boss, Lou Fratello, accepting a position as a number-runner and informant. His mother had little good to say about the development, until Johnny started bringing home his share of the payroll, and moved them to a slightly better apartment - and a more comfortable life.
Chicago treated Johnny well - everyone seemed to know his name, and he had become fast friends with several of Lou's men. The first two he had met took him under their pinstriped wings, and showed him the ropes. But Johnny shied away from the more violent machinations of the mob, feeling that any knowledge he could come to posess, if wielded correctly, could be much more devastating to a man's life or career than his fists or the barrel of a gun. What he really latched on to in his new habitat was the gambling.
Gambling, the way Johnny saw it, was uncannily lifelike, no matter what the game. Poker, craps, blackjack ... it was all about how things came and went, how they interacted. Numbers moved just as fluidly as the people he'd tracked through the streets of Chicago all his life, and yet there was also an inherent sense of dignity to the sport ... a decorum that people held. Even when arguments broke out over hands dealt or a bum roll, in the end, it all came back down to fellow players, to cameraderie. From the cards to the chips to the players, it all seemed to intertwine, and Johnny reveled in it. When Lou expressed interest in optioning land for a casino, he leapt at the chance to help - especially since Fratello had set his sights on the next Big Thing, both in gambling and in organized crime: Las Vegas, Nevada.
Upon arriving, Johnny set about getting to know people - but it didn't seem quite the same. The streets were new, as were the faces ... Vegas simply wasn't his oldstomping grounds in the least. That didn't stop him from attempting to do Lou's business for him, however: he quickly found the ideal spot for a casino, off the edge of the road that would become the infamous Sunset Strip. At the time, however, the tribe of Paiute Indians who owned the land were not exactly ready to sell ... nor were they impressed by the charisma and charm of some fast-talking shyster from Chicago. Undeterred, Johnny kept going back - and found himself getting to know a handful of the tribal members. Armed with his new knowledge of their ways - knowledge that, unbeknownst to him, was the tip of an iceberg - he called Lou and gave him a message: this was the night. He was going to make one last shot at acquiring the land for him, and it wouldn't fail.
However, that evening, over a meal with the tribal elders and their families, Johnny looked around them and saw what he'd missed: community. He saw faces that were becoming more and more familiar, living on paths and ground that were just as well-tread as the streets he'd come from. Over a round of stick games with the tribal elder, Johnny had been intending to try and bet the elder a piece of the tribal land ... but at the last moment, changed his bid. He told the elder everything, and said that if he lost, he would leave Las Vegas and tell Lou to find another place to build his casino. However, if he won ... he would ask for the chance to be forgiven.
The elder agreed, and the game began in earnest. Paiute stick games are a variation of the old "guess which hand it's in" trick ... and though Johnny's heart had softened toward the tribe, he was still as shrewd a gambler as ever. Grinning, he barely said a word over the course of the game, choosing instead to distract the elder by staring straight into his eyes, disarmingly honest .... as he carefully let the game-stick he held change hands. In the end, he had won.
Impressed by Johnny's cunning, the elder told him that he had, indeed, won the tribe's forgiveness. However, he had also tried many a time to trick them, and as such, his reward would be befitting of a trickster. He then told Johnny one of the spirit tales he had become so accustomed to hearing during his time with the tribe - one of the trickster spirit, Coyote, and how he had come to create fortune for the people of the earth. Johnny had, of course, heard the coyote tales before, and asked carefully why he was being told them a second time.
Smiling, the elder gestured to the desert around them, and then added a new branch to his tale. All the spirits and magic of the earth, he informed the gambler, ran through the earth like veins of gold run through rock. The Paiute's campsite lay on a place where one of those lines ran particularly thick and wide, and the spirits were strong there. Those whom they chose were gifted with certain powers, in accordance with their own animal totems. And if Johnny wanted to be accepted by the tribe, and forgiven, then he had to be willing to bear a burden, a penance of sorts.
He would have to be bound with the spirit of Eta'a, the coyote.
Johnny, never being one to welch on a marker, agreed, and paid his ante. The preperation for the binding ceremony took days, during which the elders walked with Johnny through the desert, and taught him whatey could of the ways of Eta'a. However, they left much of it for him to discover on his own - the elder realized that while Johnny was a very sociable person, he still had quite a length of road to walk on his own before he could become a man.
"You will walk with Eta'a", he told Johnny, "and he will show you how to make your peace, and the peace of others. And you will share this land with him."
The ceremony was bright, yet shadows lurked at the edge of every flickering flame. The ceremonial drinks and herbs were passed around the circle of elders, and at last to Johnny ... who was hardly accustomed to their effects. Intoxicated, he fell into a trance, and to this day remembers little of what happened. He awoke back in his hotel room in Las Vegas, returned by the Paiute in his sleep, and went about trying to find a new job for himself - he had thought it all a dream, until Lou called to tell him that, as he had failed the deal, he was no longer welcome in Chicago.
For several years, Johnny thought the binding to be more of a curse than a blessing, working small jobs in the casinos that began to steadily rise along the Strip. As gambling brought more and more people to Las Vegas, the Paiute tribe began to dwindle, until the elder's son called Johnny to him, and told him that he needed his help. The Paiutes were to sell the land, and they wanted Johnny's help in deciding who to sell it to. The land ended up as the site of the Stardust casino... but Johnny wasn't there for the groundbreaking.
He left the Sunset Strip and walked - not with the Paiute, but on his own. And when he had walked long enough, seen enough of his soul to know what it was, and where it needed to be, he returned, just in time for the casino's grand opening.
As soon as his feet hit pavement, he began to feel a thrumming, the electricity of Las Vegas surrounding him and filling him with its energy. The crowds of people swarmed around him, and he felt as though he could sense what they needed, what they had come for. What he, himself, had come for, and what every soul before and since has gone to Las Vegas for: fortune. A little good luck.
Stepping into the Stardust, Johnny's eyes fell on a man at a blackjack table, the dealer setting down cards one by one. Almost as if by intuition, Johnny's eyes came to rest on a card, and he glanced at the shabbiest, most hopeful-looking player present. That one, he thought, his voice a whisper, even in his own mind. He needs to win.
No sooner had the player in question revealed his cards than the table broke out into cheers. Spurred by an odd sense of intuition, Johnny went from table to table, roulette wheel to one-armed bandit to crap shoot. The luck followed him, padding on quiet paws, until he realized, slowly, that he and Coyote had finally come to their agreement.
The luck didn't follow him any more - he was luck, and it moved in him and around him. Every face he saw became familiar, every step he took as natural and as well-worn as the streets he'd walked in Chicago. There wasn't a soul he couldn't level with, couldn't speak to comfortably.
The longer Johnny stayed in Vegas, the more he became a fixture - and somehow, the spirits favored him. Decades passed, and he looked just as young as he had the day he returned to the Stardust from the desert. People came and went, and each of them who had even a passing glimpse of him, experienced the touch of his serendipity, began to craft rumors. He became more than just a good luck token. Several people began to say that he was Destiny himself. The thought struck Johnny so whimsically that he adapted it as his moniker, and he's been Johnny Destiny for decades.
As the city has grown, Johnny has grown with it - he almost considers himself a kindred to the spirit of Las Vegas, and thinks of it of his home much more than he ever did Chicago. Though he feels most in his element there, he has been known to travel, and is more sparked by the interactions and connections forged between other human beings than by the things in Sin City that tend to bring them together.
So if Johnny Destiny ever sits down next to you and says hello - consider yourself lucky. It's not his ego ... eventually, you really will be.
Johnny Destiny was born Johnny Fanatella, in Chicago, Illinois, on October 8, 1935. He grew up in an apartment barely big enough for him and his parents - his mother was a waitress in a small greasy spoon, and his father worked as a butcher in a shop downtown. The Fanatellas did well enough for themselves, all things considered. However, Johnny was prone to taking long walks around the city after school, so that he didn't have to stay cooped up in the apartment. He loved the (fresh?) air, and interacting with the people around him. He was a born people-watcher from the start, and when the inclement weather imposed on his daily sojourns, he would sit at the kitchen window and watch the street below. Through the years, he became quite an expert on who came and went where, and with who - even if he didn't necessarily have a name to put with every face.
This ability came in handy for him one day, when he was helping his father rearrange the butcher shop. Two men from a local mob faction entered, in hot pursuit of an embezzler. They had heard a false tip that the man was being hidden in the shop, and were ready to tear it from ceiling to floor to find him. Johnny, however - by now fourteen, and nearly taller than his father - kept his wits about him, and asked the men what their quarry looked like. Within minutes, he'd been able to recall seeing him elsewhere in the city - saving his father's shop and quite possibly their own skins.
Johnny's memory for faces made a deep impression on the thugs - so deep that they started coming to him on the street and asking him for tips on other people's whereabouts. Though he knew that he was causing trouble for whoever he decided to rat on, Johnny also reasoned that, in the long run, he was helping a lot more people by sparing the disturbances searching for them might cause his little corner of the Windy City. And just a few months later, he found himself at the desk of their boss, Lou Fratello, accepting a position as a number-runner and informant. His mother had little good to say about the development, until Johnny started bringing home his share of the payroll, and moved them to a slightly better apartment - and a more comfortable life.
Chicago treated Johnny well - everyone seemed to know his name, and he had become fast friends with several of Lou's men. The first two he had met took him under their pinstriped wings, and showed him the ropes. But Johnny shied away from the more violent machinations of the mob, feeling that any knowledge he could come to posess, if wielded correctly, could be much more devastating to a man's life or career than his fists or the barrel of a gun. What he really latched on to in his new habitat was the gambling.
Gambling, the way Johnny saw it, was uncannily lifelike, no matter what the game. Poker, craps, blackjack ... it was all about how things came and went, how they interacted. Numbers moved just as fluidly as the people he'd tracked through the streets of Chicago all his life, and yet there was also an inherent sense of dignity to the sport ... a decorum that people held. Even when arguments broke out over hands dealt or a bum roll, in the end, it all came back down to fellow players, to cameraderie. From the cards to the chips to the players, it all seemed to intertwine, and Johnny reveled in it. When Lou expressed interest in optioning land for a casino, he leapt at the chance to help - especially since Fratello had set his sights on the next Big Thing, both in gambling and in organized crime: Las Vegas, Nevada.
Upon arriving, Johnny set about getting to know people - but it didn't seem quite the same. The streets were new, as were the faces ... Vegas simply wasn't his oldstomping grounds in the least. That didn't stop him from attempting to do Lou's business for him, however: he quickly found the ideal spot for a casino, off the edge of the road that would become the infamous Sunset Strip. At the time, however, the tribe of Paiute Indians who owned the land were not exactly ready to sell ... nor were they impressed by the charisma and charm of some fast-talking shyster from Chicago. Undeterred, Johnny kept going back - and found himself getting to know a handful of the tribal members. Armed with his new knowledge of their ways - knowledge that, unbeknownst to him, was the tip of an iceberg - he called Lou and gave him a message: this was the night. He was going to make one last shot at acquiring the land for him, and it wouldn't fail.
However, that evening, over a meal with the tribal elders and their families, Johnny looked around them and saw what he'd missed: community. He saw faces that were becoming more and more familiar, living on paths and ground that were just as well-tread as the streets he'd come from. Over a round of stick games with the tribal elder, Johnny had been intending to try and bet the elder a piece of the tribal land ... but at the last moment, changed his bid. He told the elder everything, and said that if he lost, he would leave Las Vegas and tell Lou to find another place to build his casino. However, if he won ... he would ask for the chance to be forgiven.
The elder agreed, and the game began in earnest. Paiute stick games are a variation of the old "guess which hand it's in" trick ... and though Johnny's heart had softened toward the tribe, he was still as shrewd a gambler as ever. Grinning, he barely said a word over the course of the game, choosing instead to distract the elder by staring straight into his eyes, disarmingly honest .... as he carefully let the game-stick he held change hands. In the end, he had won.
Impressed by Johnny's cunning, the elder told him that he had, indeed, won the tribe's forgiveness. However, he had also tried many a time to trick them, and as such, his reward would be befitting of a trickster. He then told Johnny one of the spirit tales he had become so accustomed to hearing during his time with the tribe - one of the trickster spirit, Coyote, and how he had come to create fortune for the people of the earth. Johnny had, of course, heard the coyote tales before, and asked carefully why he was being told them a second time.
Smiling, the elder gestured to the desert around them, and then added a new branch to his tale. All the spirits and magic of the earth, he informed the gambler, ran through the earth like veins of gold run through rock. The Paiute's campsite lay on a place where one of those lines ran particularly thick and wide, and the spirits were strong there. Those whom they chose were gifted with certain powers, in accordance with their own animal totems. And if Johnny wanted to be accepted by the tribe, and forgiven, then he had to be willing to bear a burden, a penance of sorts.
He would have to be bound with the spirit of Eta'a, the coyote.
Johnny, never being one to welch on a marker, agreed, and paid his ante. The preperation for the binding ceremony took days, during which the elders walked with Johnny through the desert, and taught him whatey could of the ways of Eta'a. However, they left much of it for him to discover on his own - the elder realized that while Johnny was a very sociable person, he still had quite a length of road to walk on his own before he could become a man.
"You will walk with Eta'a", he told Johnny, "and he will show you how to make your peace, and the peace of others. And you will share this land with him."
The ceremony was bright, yet shadows lurked at the edge of every flickering flame. The ceremonial drinks and herbs were passed around the circle of elders, and at last to Johnny ... who was hardly accustomed to their effects. Intoxicated, he fell into a trance, and to this day remembers little of what happened. He awoke back in his hotel room in Las Vegas, returned by the Paiute in his sleep, and went about trying to find a new job for himself - he had thought it all a dream, until Lou called to tell him that, as he had failed the deal, he was no longer welcome in Chicago.
For several years, Johnny thought the binding to be more of a curse than a blessing, working small jobs in the casinos that began to steadily rise along the Strip. As gambling brought more and more people to Las Vegas, the Paiute tribe began to dwindle, until the elder's son called Johnny to him, and told him that he needed his help. The Paiutes were to sell the land, and they wanted Johnny's help in deciding who to sell it to. The land ended up as the site of the Stardust casino... but Johnny wasn't there for the groundbreaking.
He left the Sunset Strip and walked - not with the Paiute, but on his own. And when he had walked long enough, seen enough of his soul to know what it was, and where it needed to be, he returned, just in time for the casino's grand opening.
As soon as his feet hit pavement, he began to feel a thrumming, the electricity of Las Vegas surrounding him and filling him with its energy. The crowds of people swarmed around him, and he felt as though he could sense what they needed, what they had come for. What he, himself, had come for, and what every soul before and since has gone to Las Vegas for: fortune. A little good luck.
Stepping into the Stardust, Johnny's eyes fell on a man at a blackjack table, the dealer setting down cards one by one. Almost as if by intuition, Johnny's eyes came to rest on a card, and he glanced at the shabbiest, most hopeful-looking player present. That one, he thought, his voice a whisper, even in his own mind. He needs to win.
No sooner had the player in question revealed his cards than the table broke out into cheers. Spurred by an odd sense of intuition, Johnny went from table to table, roulette wheel to one-armed bandit to crap shoot. The luck followed him, padding on quiet paws, until he realized, slowly, that he and Coyote had finally come to their agreement.
The luck didn't follow him any more - he was luck, and it moved in him and around him. Every face he saw became familiar, every step he took as natural and as well-worn as the streets he'd walked in Chicago. There wasn't a soul he couldn't level with, couldn't speak to comfortably.
The longer Johnny stayed in Vegas, the more he became a fixture - and somehow, the spirits favored him. Decades passed, and he looked just as young as he had the day he returned to the Stardust from the desert. People came and went, and each of them who had even a passing glimpse of him, experienced the touch of his serendipity, began to craft rumors. He became more than just a good luck token. Several people began to say that he was Destiny himself. The thought struck Johnny so whimsically that he adapted it as his moniker, and he's been Johnny Destiny for decades.
As the city has grown, Johnny has grown with it - he almost considers himself a kindred to the spirit of Las Vegas, and thinks of it of his home much more than he ever did Chicago. Though he feels most in his element there, he has been known to travel, and is more sparked by the interactions and connections forged between other human beings than by the things in Sin City that tend to bring them together.
So if Johnny Destiny ever sits down next to you and says hello - consider yourself lucky. It's not his ego ... eventually, you really will be.