Mask or Menace App

[meancuisine]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Polyserena
AGE: 28
JOURNAL: polyserena
IM / EMAIL: violetsquirrel at gmail
PLURK: polysymphonic
RETURNING: Played briefly a couple of years ago

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Eliot Spencer AKA Mr Punchy
CHARACTER AGE: Mid 30s
SERIES: Leverage
CHRONOLOGY: During the break between s4 and s5
CLASS: Vigilante. Reformed bad guy?
HOUSING: Please assign somewhere!

BACKGROUND:
The rich and powerful take what they want; the Leverage team steal it back for you. Whether it's lost reputations, priceless artifacts, even an entire country once, this 5-person crew of criminals make sure that people who've been screwed over by the system get back what they've lost and the ones doing the screwing get what's coming to them. Each member of the team is more or less the best in the world at their specialty, and Eliot's speciality is being really good at hitting people.

He mostly gained that skill from a stint in the army (black ops) which in turn became a stint as a mercenary, which ended up with him acting as the right-hand assassin of one of the most evil guys in the world. For most of this time he was pretty dead inside, although he had some ups and downs - we know that at one point he learned to cook and more importantly to use cooking as a method of self expression and feeling his feelings, but this was before he ended up working for the evil guy so it obviously wasn't a complete fix.

In any case, he eventually ended up deciding to get out of the murdering people game entirely and took up retrieval work instead as something which suited his skills while letting him get away without necessarily hurting people. Effectively, he hired himself out to fetch things for people, whether it be stolen artwork or kidnapped children. Eventually he ended up hired to do a job with a team, despite his protests that he works alone. By the end of the job they all had more money than they knew what to do with, so they decided to use their skills to help those in need.

Aside from Eliot, the team consists of a cat burglar, a grifter to draw marks in, a hacker to get the crew info and take care of security and a mastermind whose job it is to make sure that the crew achieve their goal. And as for Eliot, his job is actually a little more complicated than just hitting people - he acts as something of a secret secondary leader of the team. If the mastermind's job is to make sure the job gets done no matter what, Eliot's job is to make sure that his crew get out in one piece no matter what. When he takes over command, you know the shit's really hit the fan. His first priority is always to get his people out alive, and he can get a little frustrated when they insist on diving into danger to help the client instead of taking his escape route.

His other main role on the team is to be underestimated. People tend to look at his role as the muscle and hear his accent and dismiss his intelligence, which is always a mistake. He's very good at playing a slightly dim, honest, naive guy who's easily taken advantage of, and the team uses that frequently to feed information to marks in a way they won't question.

From a social point of view, the crew is his family. If the mastermind and grifter are the parents and the hacker and thief are the kids of the crew, Eliot is something of a slightly older cousin/nephew. He can relate to the "kids" on their level but also sees himself as absolutely equal to the "parents" of the team. They're his people and he'll protect them with his life, but he also does keep himself one step removed from them.

PERSONALITY:
Despite his generally violent and chaotic past and frequently angry and violent present Eliot is pretty internally stable. He knows who and what he is and he's accepted that he's beyond redemption. All he's looking to do is to just do some good while he's still alive to do it. As a result, he's generally quite affable and friendly with people, at least until they do something to irritate him. Even then it's usually surface irritation, quick to fade and not really affecting his relationships in the long-term. He enjoys screwing with people and generally being a bit of an asshole but only with people who can take it without being really hurt by it, or terrible people who deserve it.

On jobs Eliot’s a loyal and (usually) reliable member of his crew. He does occasionally get a little bit too involved in the roles he's playing, but for the most part he'll stick to what he's meant to be doing. The other time he’ll stray from the plan or disobey orders is in order to protect innocent lives, especially children. He also hates using guns, presumably because it’s far too easy to kill people with them and he has enough memories of doing that already. Generally he tries not to kill people unless necessary, and he’s good at making sure it’s unnecessary.

That said, he takes a far too practical approach to life to angst about his past. He accepts the things he’s done and that there’s nothing he can do to change them. He’ll never be able to forget the people he’s killed but he doesn’t let that stop him from getting on with his life and protecting people in the present as much as he can. He’s also at peace with his own violent urges, especially when he can take them out on people who deserve it. He might have a deep-seated need to beat people up but there’s no reason to beat himself up about it or pretend anything else is the case. Eliot knows that in a lot of ways he’s harder than most of the rest of the crew but he sees it as an opportunity to do things so that they don’t have to.

And he frequently does. He’s the one who gets sent into the most dangerous and potentially traumatic situations and he does so without complaint as long as he feels like he’s not being taken for granted. He’d much rather it was him than any of the others because generally no matter how bad it gets on jobs he’s been through worse in the past. He also tends to keep his problems to himself since he figures he can handle it and he doesn’t want to burden his friends.

The one exception to Eliot’s view that things are best brought into the open instead of being left unsaid are the times he’s killed people. He values his friendships and as a result is very wary of said friends finding out too many details about his past. He knows that they know he’s been involved in some terrible things and if asked directly he’d tell them because he’s a straightforward kind of person and they have a right to know. His compromise has been to ask them not to ask him because he doesn't want to have to tell them.

POWER:
Eliot is a human from a canon with no magic/superpowers, although one might be forgiven for thinking otherwise after seeing him fight.

Power's he'll gain on entry:

Healing factor - He won't regenerate limbs but anything short of that will heal itself up. Minutes or seconds for minor wounds up to hours for major injuries. Can still be killed by the usual things that would kill a person immediately.

Rage strength - The angrier he is, the stronger he gets! More likely to affect him in his daily life full of irritations than during fights because he's generally very controlled and calm about fighting.

Distinctive intuition - He'll get flashes of knowing things about people, especially related to any military history or combat skills, but only be able to explain how he knows this by pointing out that something about them is very distinctive and gives them away. E.g. "How did you know that guy pilots a giant robot for the government back home?" "He has a very distinctive walk." This is basically his superpower in canon, I'm just updating it so that he can tell things about people when he has actually no experience with their particular world's version of their job.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
Here

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
This isn't the worst situation Eliot's ever been in. If he's honest, it isn't even in the top 10 worst situations that start with waking up disoriented in an underground facility that he's ever been in. What it is, though, is unnerving. He's woken up before with marks on him that he doesn't know how he got, but those marks have never been a glowing tattoo with words that seem designed to mock him. Or someone he used to be, a long time ago. Registered hero, that's what that 18 year-old kid thought he was gonna be when he signed his life away.

The words he hears from the military personnel who speak to him do nothing to put him at ease. He's had dreams like this, but he knows he's not dreaming now. In those dreams he believes he can be a hero, do it all over again from the beginning and this time do it right. He's under no illusions about that right now. So if he's not dreaming, what is this? He's put marks in stranger positions than this for the sake of the job, but he's no mark. What would be the point of conning him? What's the ultimate goal here?

For now, he plays dumb with them. He's good at that. Keeps his eyes soft, his head slightly lowered, does as he's told and doesn't question. Let them wonder if they have the wrong guy, don't give them any useful feedback. If this is some esoteric attempt to break him, he'll find out soon enough. If it isn't... well, letting them think he's harmless might let him get away sooner.

FINAL NOTES:
Amongst his other talents, Eliot is an accomplished chef who sees food as an artform and uses cooking to express himself. He's also a pretty great singer (although he suffers from a bit of stage fright).