expi app

[checkout]

Player: Laura
Contact: jojoveller
Age: 30+
Current Characters: Junpei coolerjunpei and Octavian manifestering
here it is....my third character slot

Character Name: Havemercy
Character Canon: another oc from me
Canon Point: After the disappearance of his youngest brother.
Age: 34

Crime: attempted murder

Background: my info post... shorter? version:

Havemercy is (not legally, anymore) a member of the ruling merchant royalty family in control of Paragon Station, a space station orbiting Saturn's moon Enceladus. His family have controlled the station, which functions as its own city-state as well as interstellar trading post and pit stop, for many generations; Havemercy himself was the heir after his older brother abdicated to leave and get married, and then Havemercy also abdicated, as the whole family including himself agreed that he wouldn't be a good choice for the role of state leadership.

This is as a young adult; as a child Havemercy is his mother's favorite until her suspicious and untimely death when he is about 6 years old, after which he chafes childishly against his new stepmother and step- and half-siblings until he leaves the station to devote himself to a life of religion on the nearby moon, in honor of his devout mother. He's good at remembering all the lines but he doesn't have any passion for it, and after an incident during which he attempts to poison his stepmother (for she killed his mother, and he has found out but the evidence is not solid enough to convince his father or a court) but accidentally nearly kills his younger half-brother Augustine, he quits the religious acolyte life and returns to the station full time. Augustine is left sickly and physically fragile for life after the near-death poisoning; this will haunt Havemercy forever, although he never intends to own up to his guilt.

After this spectacular failure, he takes up doing whatever sounds interesting at the time. He runs through a handful of careers this way, finding none of them fulfilling and no real innate talent for any of them either; he's passable, decent maybe, but he lacks the dedication to keep on with anything. This lasts for a number of years, during which he abdicates his family standing but remains on the station, to keep an eye on his stepmother and younger siblings. Her, in case he needs to try another assassination; them, in case she tries to kill another family member to advance her favored son.

After a while Havemercy settles on working as the head librarian/archivist of the station's, you know, library/archive. This suits him: it's in the background, it's not that hard, it's not going to lead to a horrible crisis that ruins his life and shatters his integrity forever if he reshelves a few books incorrectly. Over the years he's garnered a reputation as the station's information broker, too; his previous authority from his family status gave him lasting ties to station security and more classified information than most people have, and again: anything that might point a finger at his stepmother's misdeeds is helpful. He's waiting. Most recently his youngest brother, Leopold, has been mysteriously kidnapped off-station, and while Havemercy has always assumed Leopold was the child for whom his stepmother would sacrifice the rest, he still has to wonder. He is just about to start a very secret little investigation when he will instead wind up in Expi.

Personality:

Havemercy is a good person burdened with the weight of his family's various corruptions. If he could have his way he would live a quiet life without having to be mixed up in politics at any time, although even after abdicating rights to his family's rulership, he continues to get mixed up in it. Havemercy's loyalty to his family is motivated by love and vengeance, as he believes his stepmother is the source of every family problem. He choose to ignore the way this obsession has corrupted his own behavior, because how could his mistakes be worse when she is so horrendous? She probably killed his mother! He's justified!

So the family situation is bad. Havemercy keeps tabs on his family and people around him, leaning into hyper-vigilance when it comes to his siblings, convinced that his stepmother cares only for Leopold, the youngest, and is willing to murder her way through the rest of them for the sake of Leopold's future as ruler. This extends to anyone close to him; the people around him get weaved into his net of obsessive watchful attention, out of fear of losing someone again.

But sometimes Havemercy isn't on his obsessive path. He's made himself a niche on the station as the archivist and also an information broker for those others who come and go, and his library employees are his own cherished family. He's kind and generous and fiercely protective of all of them, in part due a subconscious need to keep someone safe, after what's happened to his biological family over the years.

He prefers to maintain a persona of a regular, casual guy, who doesn't have fingers in every pie and definitely wouldn't arrange a hit on anyone who threatened his family or employees. It sometimes works; given the open secret nature of his status as the information broker, people do know he's not as careless and lazy as he chooses to appear, but it still manages to take some off guard. In his day-to-day he does his best to keep it casual and lighthearted, although it's not hard to clue in that he's keenly paying attention to everything (and everyone) around; he collects information and studies people out of habit and paranoia. Not to say that he can't be lighthearted for real, or that he's constantly behind a smokescreen, but it comes and goes. He's pretty easy to rope into a scheme as a result, although he's very aware of his limitations, mostly physical.

The fact that he wants to live a quiet life isn't disingenuous, he's simply in the process of arranging all the pieces so he can relax for real one of these days. Sure, he has a vicious streak, completely capable of using people as tools and plotting a murder, but it's not all the time. He considers himself to be not a very good person at all, but that doesn't mean he's actively trying to change. Once he can assure the permanent safety of his loved ones, the end will justify the means. Clearly nothing is his own fault, and he harbors no guilt for anything at all.

He does, though; he harbors an obscene amount of guilt, all stemming from a botched assassination attempt on his own stepmother in his youth. He missed, and his attempt to poison her instead found Augustine, his younger brother; hasty intervention stopped Augustine from dying but left him prone to illness and physically feeble, and though Havemercy's hand in the affair has never been discovered, he has been actively and subconsciously trying to make up for it ever since. Unfortunately these methods of his contradict: he wants to live quietly, uninvolved in dirty business, but he continues to deal in secrets; he wants to protect Augustine and Leopold from their mother, but he wants to keep his distance to avoid another mistake. Even in his daily life he pretends he's average, not skilled at any one thing, such that even he will one day believe he's incapable of doing big things. What happened to Augustine haunts Havemercy; he's ruined and his soul is a tar pit, but he won't back down now.

Ultimately, Havemercy is a man who lives in his own head. He did one big thing years ago and it hangs heavy around his neck, forcing him to overthink and avoid and not progress at all. He is the sole bulwark against the treachery of his stepmother, a position he assigned himself, and he lives suspended in guilt and half-measures after royally screwing up the first time he really tried to make a meaningful change.

Abilities: Librarian tasks and lying. Nothing supernatural to speak of. He has a higher-than-average knowledge of plant/chemical compounds that could kill a person, and he has a pretty keen attention to detail, but only from years of practice.

Inventory: A notebook and a few pens, an ID card, a key ring of physical keys and "fob" style digital keys, a photo of his mother in a locket, a paperback novel.

Samples: tdm thread | another thread | and another | his whole-ass tl just in case

Questions: nope