OOC: Application
This is the application I used for Shaw.
Also of interest is the previous Shaw player's application, referenced here.
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME:
Sebastian Hiram Shaw
CODENAME:
The Black King
ALIASES/NICKNAMES:
Sebastian is -not- called Bastian.
SPECIES:
Homo sapiens superior
GENDER:
Male
AGE:
53 (January 1, 1953)
** Note: This is a change. The old Shaw was exactly ten years younger
than this application, something that will be corrected by retcon and
a general note about 'changes' shared with the MUSH population. Why is
he ten years older? Well, a few reasons - first, his history is very
compact, with Shaw earning his millions by the age of 20. Second,
ascending the throne in his mid-30s seems quite young. Third, he's
always felt like he's -played- older - and fourth, aging him
accelerates the time he's going to die, and makes mortality more
imminent. It consequently becomes a larger motivating factor.
ORIGIN:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
* Note: Shaw is - for reference - a third-generation immigrant; his
grandfather was Jacob Shaw, who emigrated from England following World
War I.
ORGANIZATION:
Hellfire Club, Inner Circle
POWERS:
Much has been written by the previous Shaw's player about the
biological basis, et cetera, for Shaw's powers. I'm not a biologist,
and I'm dubious about science as applied to mutation, regardless.
In short, though: Shaw absorbs kinetic energy directed towards him;
that energy is swiftly metabolized and used to fuel enhanced strength,
speed, and stamina. He can absorb only so much kinetic energy before
he reaches his maximum and begins to bleed off - and once he's at his
maximum, he starts taking real damage.
What does this mean? It means that punches and other blunt blows
thrown at Shaw literally stop dead, losing almost all momentum when
they hit him. Similarly, Shaw is able to handle full-body contacts
like falls, being hit by cars, and other blunt trauma with little
effect. He also has a limited ability to absorb other forms of energy,
though he is much less efficient at processing them into his power
reserves. His power is reflexive; it merely happens, and Shaw has no
influence on the how or when.
More complicated questions come when we consider thrusts with a
pointed weapon, slashes with sharp weapons, and bullets. The easiest
to account for are slashes; slashing at Shaw will lacerate flesh,
leaving surface wounds, but won't penetrate particularly deeply due to
his absorption of the force behind the blow. Bullets and thrusts,
however, are more immediately difficult; they apply substantial
pressure to a single point, and while they are fundamentally no
different than a punch Shaw's power isn't able to cope quite as well
with such pressure. Both bullets and stab wounds are likely to
penetrate skin by an inch or two before Shaw's mutation slows them
enough to be harmless. In the case of bullets, this is not very
noticable; in the case of a knife, the person stabbing Shaw may very
well realize that something strange is going on.
Shaw -does- bruise, but not easily; the blow needs to be of sufficient
force to override his mutation's ability to compensate, so that a
bruise forms even if much of the energy has been leeched away to fuel
Shaw's mutation. When he is at his peak, he is as strong as ten men,
has superhuman speed and reflexes, and has powerful reserves of
stamina. He is, however, at a dangerous level, as too many more
absorbtions will push him over his limit, causing him to start
becoming really hurt.
Additionally, the nature of Shaw's mutation makes him more prone to
violence, lust, and all the animal urges when he has absorbed a
charge, and too much exertion at peak levels can cause physical
complications up to and including blackout. The mutation does not
function while Shaw is unconscious, and he bleeds off energy during
that time.
Finally, Shaw's mutation is killing him. This has already manifested
in an occaisonal gout, but his internal organs and bodily structures
are not suited to maintaining the charge developed by his mutation. On
the outside, he has perhaps a decade or so to live, and - everyone
says - his death will be far from pleasant, as his body more or less
fails systematically suddenly over the course of months.
**Note: Nothing in this description of powers should be a change or
alteration to the way Shaw's powers were described by his previous
player.
HISTORY:
Shaw is a third-generation immigrant, born in Pittsburgh to a
steelworker father and a sickly mother who was born-again following
the stillborn birth of what would have been Shaw's younger sister.
Shaw has no other siblings, though he is possessed of a single set of
first cousins on his father's side and an enormous extended Pittsburgh
family on his mother's side. He also has some second cousins still in
England.
His youth was rough; his father was abusive, his mother unstable, and
his mother's suicide when Shaw was 14 left him without any sort of
maternal influence. He failed to graduate high school; he was
estranged from his father - and by 23, he was making money hustling
pool. He had several run-ins with the law, including a felony charge
that didn't stick and two misdemeanors that did. 23 proved to be a big
year, as he was reconciled (briefly) with his father before the elder
Shaw died of stomach cancer, and shortly afterwards he was set upon in
a bar, triggering his mutation.
Discovering he was a mutant caused Shaw to reevaluate; he started
attending community college, then the University of Pittsburgh,
putting what was always a powerful mind to work in engineering. An
idea for a gyroscope came to him in a dream; he patented it in his
senior year, and when he graduated he had money from selling the
patent to the DoD and a great many job offers. The jobs were turned
down; the payoff from that first patent (used in guided munitions)
became seed money for Shaw Industries, which began as an engineering
firm selling designs to DoD and began to vertically integrate. By the
time Shaw was in his mid-30s, the defense boom of the 1980s had become
very good to him, and Shaw Industries was a major player in the
defense world.
The fall of the Soviet Union did not come as a surprise; Shaw
Industries had diversified, and at the age of 40 Sebastian Shaw was a
billionaire. It was on his 40th birthday that he received his
invitation to the Hellfire Club - offered on the pretext of a
'discovered legacy' - and it was two years after that that Shaw was
tapped to become Paris Seville's Black Bishop. It is during this
period that he cultivated his appearance as an anti-mutant bigot; the
first stirrings of mutation were beginning to come through the
populace, and Shaw took steps so that his attitudes (and his hidden
secret) would be unquestioned when mutants really hit the public eye.
Ned Buckman tumbled down a year later - 1996, amidst a presidential
election - and Shaw was Black King. Two years later, and a young Emma
Frost became his protege; on the eve of the millenium, she became his
White Queen. Paris Seville lasted little more than a month before she
met her end on Valentine's day, and Emma and Shaw ruled together for
the next four years. Things went well, for a time, but as Emma began
to flex her wings there was the start of discord and acrimony. It was
ignored, politely, and in 2003 Shaw even handed more power over to
Emma, only to find that when he wished to resume the reins in the
summer of 2004 they were not there for him to take. A fight ensued;
Emma began to plot with Warren Worthington - and just before
Christmas, the White Queen's hitman made Shaw disappear.
He was thought dead, but after a week of hellish confinement he
escaped to Pittsburgh, licking his wounds before a return to New York
and his throne. Cat and mouse with the White Queen began again -
sparring over Wide Awake, the nascent Sentinel program - until Shaw
queened Jean Grey, and Emma's response let slip the Dark Phoenix,
devastating the Inner Circle in her wake.
Now, the club is struggling to recover, and as Emma shows throat as
the government lunges for Wide Awake, Shaw sees an opportunity again
to act. The Circle was White when he returned, Black in Jean's
acendance, White in the wake of her destruction - but now, perhaps, as
Circles turn it might become Black once again.
**Note: The age thing is the most substantial departure here from the
previous Shaw's interepration of the character; also, the timeline has
been fiddled with a little bit, so that Shaw becomes rich later. These
things seem to me to just be sensible.
PERSONALITY:
Shaw's personality is importantly reflective of his mutation: when his
back is to the corner, he tends to fight hard, fast, and dirty; when
he is on the top of his game, unthreatened, he grows complacent and
teeters before the fall. Even more so, his essential drives - his lust
for power, for control - are killing him, and it is sometimes a game
of dice to wonder if it is his mutation or his need for dominance that
will destroy him first.
Shaw is strength in velvet. Hustling pool - or people - is about
subtlety, and the Black King is a manipulator nonpareil. He is an old
hand at gauging people, discovering their limits, and then pushing
those limits to break and remake them; sometimes overtly, as he did
with Jason or (much earlier) Emma, but most often in the tiniest of
ways, through pawns and puppets and social cues. Shaw's chief delight
is control, and he achieves it not with great pushes from the front or
rear but with a thousand tiny nudges from the sides, relegating his
own personal strength to the final shove at the precipice.
More than being a villain, Shaw delights in the image of villainy; as
much as he could be said to be cut from Milton or Marlowe's cloth,
he's cut himself from that cloth in a deliberate construction and
facade of the person he wants to be. At the end of the day, there is a
part of Shaw which is ashamed of where he came from, and there is very
much a part of Shaw that teeters on the brink of madness - seed
planted by parents and brought to fruit by Queens black and white -
but he conceals and constrains all these things in a gentile mask of
royal dignity. It's when that mask slips - when rage and violence
escapes - that Shaw is the closest to descending into a pit or prison
of his own devising.
Perhaps as product or precursor of his self-made diabolical image,
pride walks hand in hand with Shaw as one of the defining elements of
his psyche: he believes he is the best (better, more powerful) than
those around him, he belives in a sense of desert that applies
exclusively to him - he sees himself as royalty, and this is in turn
reflected outside in a powerful charisma that screams Shaw's existance
as a man of wealth and taste.
Genteel, powerful, manipulative, arrogant - dominant and controlling -
and beneath it all, a mad, black heart that cries mother-rage,
mother-lust, and Oedipal anger. Shaw craves control, savors power, and
bottles up whatever angry, primal fears remain with overweening pride.
**Note: Shaw's personality is intended to evoke the Shaw I've come to
know from reading the previous Shaw's logs, but with greater ambition,
a more dominant personality and a pair of important additions - first,
a more defined lust for control, and second, a more defined tendency
to lose control once he has it. This, particularly, is intended to set
up a cyclical cycle with Emma where Black and White wane and wax in
power.
MISCELLANEOUS:
I have some further ramblings about the Shaw family in my head, and
more thoughts about his history and his corporate holdings; for the
sake of brevity, however, I won't commit them to paper. I do, however,
intend to represent that Shaw maintains some connections among the
seedier side of life, largely through double-blind arms trade - a
neccessity to survive in the weapons business in the 90s - connections
that can hopefully then be employed to good plot purpose. I also
imagine that I'll cultivate a stable of NPCs as time goes on; Shaw is
the Black King, a puppet-master, and there are things that should be
better handled by pawns than the king himself. Importantly, however,
those pawns will have strings leading back to their master so that
they become RP- and plot- enhancing rather than detracting.
Also of interest is the previous Shaw player's application, referenced here.
CHARACTER'S FULL NAME:
Sebastian Hiram Shaw
CODENAME:
The Black King
ALIASES/NICKNAMES:
Sebastian is -not- called Bastian.
SPECIES:
Homo sapiens superior
GENDER:
Male
AGE:
53 (January 1, 1953)
** Note: This is a change. The old Shaw was exactly ten years younger
than this application, something that will be corrected by retcon and
a general note about 'changes' shared with the MUSH population. Why is
he ten years older? Well, a few reasons - first, his history is very
compact, with Shaw earning his millions by the age of 20. Second,
ascending the throne in his mid-30s seems quite young. Third, he's
always felt like he's -played- older - and fourth, aging him
accelerates the time he's going to die, and makes mortality more
imminent. It consequently becomes a larger motivating factor.
ORIGIN:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
* Note: Shaw is - for reference - a third-generation immigrant; his
grandfather was Jacob Shaw, who emigrated from England following World
War I.
ORGANIZATION:
Hellfire Club, Inner Circle
POWERS:
Much has been written by the previous Shaw's player about the
biological basis, et cetera, for Shaw's powers. I'm not a biologist,
and I'm dubious about science as applied to mutation, regardless.
In short, though: Shaw absorbs kinetic energy directed towards him;
that energy is swiftly metabolized and used to fuel enhanced strength,
speed, and stamina. He can absorb only so much kinetic energy before
he reaches his maximum and begins to bleed off - and once he's at his
maximum, he starts taking real damage.
What does this mean? It means that punches and other blunt blows
thrown at Shaw literally stop dead, losing almost all momentum when
they hit him. Similarly, Shaw is able to handle full-body contacts
like falls, being hit by cars, and other blunt trauma with little
effect. He also has a limited ability to absorb other forms of energy,
though he is much less efficient at processing them into his power
reserves. His power is reflexive; it merely happens, and Shaw has no
influence on the how or when.
More complicated questions come when we consider thrusts with a
pointed weapon, slashes with sharp weapons, and bullets. The easiest
to account for are slashes; slashing at Shaw will lacerate flesh,
leaving surface wounds, but won't penetrate particularly deeply due to
his absorption of the force behind the blow. Bullets and thrusts,
however, are more immediately difficult; they apply substantial
pressure to a single point, and while they are fundamentally no
different than a punch Shaw's power isn't able to cope quite as well
with such pressure. Both bullets and stab wounds are likely to
penetrate skin by an inch or two before Shaw's mutation slows them
enough to be harmless. In the case of bullets, this is not very
noticable; in the case of a knife, the person stabbing Shaw may very
well realize that something strange is going on.
Shaw -does- bruise, but not easily; the blow needs to be of sufficient
force to override his mutation's ability to compensate, so that a
bruise forms even if much of the energy has been leeched away to fuel
Shaw's mutation. When he is at his peak, he is as strong as ten men,
has superhuman speed and reflexes, and has powerful reserves of
stamina. He is, however, at a dangerous level, as too many more
absorbtions will push him over his limit, causing him to start
becoming really hurt.
Additionally, the nature of Shaw's mutation makes him more prone to
violence, lust, and all the animal urges when he has absorbed a
charge, and too much exertion at peak levels can cause physical
complications up to and including blackout. The mutation does not
function while Shaw is unconscious, and he bleeds off energy during
that time.
Finally, Shaw's mutation is killing him. This has already manifested
in an occaisonal gout, but his internal organs and bodily structures
are not suited to maintaining the charge developed by his mutation. On
the outside, he has perhaps a decade or so to live, and - everyone
says - his death will be far from pleasant, as his body more or less
fails systematically suddenly over the course of months.
**Note: Nothing in this description of powers should be a change or
alteration to the way Shaw's powers were described by his previous
player.
HISTORY:
Shaw is a third-generation immigrant, born in Pittsburgh to a
steelworker father and a sickly mother who was born-again following
the stillborn birth of what would have been Shaw's younger sister.
Shaw has no other siblings, though he is possessed of a single set of
first cousins on his father's side and an enormous extended Pittsburgh
family on his mother's side. He also has some second cousins still in
England.
His youth was rough; his father was abusive, his mother unstable, and
his mother's suicide when Shaw was 14 left him without any sort of
maternal influence. He failed to graduate high school; he was
estranged from his father - and by 23, he was making money hustling
pool. He had several run-ins with the law, including a felony charge
that didn't stick and two misdemeanors that did. 23 proved to be a big
year, as he was reconciled (briefly) with his father before the elder
Shaw died of stomach cancer, and shortly afterwards he was set upon in
a bar, triggering his mutation.
Discovering he was a mutant caused Shaw to reevaluate; he started
attending community college, then the University of Pittsburgh,
putting what was always a powerful mind to work in engineering. An
idea for a gyroscope came to him in a dream; he patented it in his
senior year, and when he graduated he had money from selling the
patent to the DoD and a great many job offers. The jobs were turned
down; the payoff from that first patent (used in guided munitions)
became seed money for Shaw Industries, which began as an engineering
firm selling designs to DoD and began to vertically integrate. By the
time Shaw was in his mid-30s, the defense boom of the 1980s had become
very good to him, and Shaw Industries was a major player in the
defense world.
The fall of the Soviet Union did not come as a surprise; Shaw
Industries had diversified, and at the age of 40 Sebastian Shaw was a
billionaire. It was on his 40th birthday that he received his
invitation to the Hellfire Club - offered on the pretext of a
'discovered legacy' - and it was two years after that that Shaw was
tapped to become Paris Seville's Black Bishop. It is during this
period that he cultivated his appearance as an anti-mutant bigot; the
first stirrings of mutation were beginning to come through the
populace, and Shaw took steps so that his attitudes (and his hidden
secret) would be unquestioned when mutants really hit the public eye.
Ned Buckman tumbled down a year later - 1996, amidst a presidential
election - and Shaw was Black King. Two years later, and a young Emma
Frost became his protege; on the eve of the millenium, she became his
White Queen. Paris Seville lasted little more than a month before she
met her end on Valentine's day, and Emma and Shaw ruled together for
the next four years. Things went well, for a time, but as Emma began
to flex her wings there was the start of discord and acrimony. It was
ignored, politely, and in 2003 Shaw even handed more power over to
Emma, only to find that when he wished to resume the reins in the
summer of 2004 they were not there for him to take. A fight ensued;
Emma began to plot with Warren Worthington - and just before
Christmas, the White Queen's hitman made Shaw disappear.
He was thought dead, but after a week of hellish confinement he
escaped to Pittsburgh, licking his wounds before a return to New York
and his throne. Cat and mouse with the White Queen began again -
sparring over Wide Awake, the nascent Sentinel program - until Shaw
queened Jean Grey, and Emma's response let slip the Dark Phoenix,
devastating the Inner Circle in her wake.
Now, the club is struggling to recover, and as Emma shows throat as
the government lunges for Wide Awake, Shaw sees an opportunity again
to act. The Circle was White when he returned, Black in Jean's
acendance, White in the wake of her destruction - but now, perhaps, as
Circles turn it might become Black once again.
**Note: The age thing is the most substantial departure here from the
previous Shaw's interepration of the character; also, the timeline has
been fiddled with a little bit, so that Shaw becomes rich later. These
things seem to me to just be sensible.
PERSONALITY:
Shaw's personality is importantly reflective of his mutation: when his
back is to the corner, he tends to fight hard, fast, and dirty; when
he is on the top of his game, unthreatened, he grows complacent and
teeters before the fall. Even more so, his essential drives - his lust
for power, for control - are killing him, and it is sometimes a game
of dice to wonder if it is his mutation or his need for dominance that
will destroy him first.
Shaw is strength in velvet. Hustling pool - or people - is about
subtlety, and the Black King is a manipulator nonpareil. He is an old
hand at gauging people, discovering their limits, and then pushing
those limits to break and remake them; sometimes overtly, as he did
with Jason or (much earlier) Emma, but most often in the tiniest of
ways, through pawns and puppets and social cues. Shaw's chief delight
is control, and he achieves it not with great pushes from the front or
rear but with a thousand tiny nudges from the sides, relegating his
own personal strength to the final shove at the precipice.
More than being a villain, Shaw delights in the image of villainy; as
much as he could be said to be cut from Milton or Marlowe's cloth,
he's cut himself from that cloth in a deliberate construction and
facade of the person he wants to be. At the end of the day, there is a
part of Shaw which is ashamed of where he came from, and there is very
much a part of Shaw that teeters on the brink of madness - seed
planted by parents and brought to fruit by Queens black and white -
but he conceals and constrains all these things in a gentile mask of
royal dignity. It's when that mask slips - when rage and violence
escapes - that Shaw is the closest to descending into a pit or prison
of his own devising.
Perhaps as product or precursor of his self-made diabolical image,
pride walks hand in hand with Shaw as one of the defining elements of
his psyche: he believes he is the best (better, more powerful) than
those around him, he belives in a sense of desert that applies
exclusively to him - he sees himself as royalty, and this is in turn
reflected outside in a powerful charisma that screams Shaw's existance
as a man of wealth and taste.
Genteel, powerful, manipulative, arrogant - dominant and controlling -
and beneath it all, a mad, black heart that cries mother-rage,
mother-lust, and Oedipal anger. Shaw craves control, savors power, and
bottles up whatever angry, primal fears remain with overweening pride.
**Note: Shaw's personality is intended to evoke the Shaw I've come to
know from reading the previous Shaw's logs, but with greater ambition,
a more dominant personality and a pair of important additions - first,
a more defined lust for control, and second, a more defined tendency
to lose control once he has it. This, particularly, is intended to set
up a cyclical cycle with Emma where Black and White wane and wax in
power.
MISCELLANEOUS:
I have some further ramblings about the Shaw family in my head, and
more thoughts about his history and his corporate holdings; for the
sake of brevity, however, I won't commit them to paper. I do, however,
intend to represent that Shaw maintains some connections among the
seedier side of life, largely through double-blind arms trade - a
neccessity to survive in the weapons business in the 90s - connections
that can hopefully then be employed to good plot purpose. I also
imagine that I'll cultivate a stable of NPCs as time goes on; Shaw is
the Black King, a puppet-master, and there are things that should be
better handled by pawns than the king himself. Importantly, however,
those pawns will have strings leading back to their master so that
they become RP- and plot- enhancing rather than detracting.