Sorry I've been out, snow knocked out my internet, so I didn't have much to do but work on backstory, which now looking at it seems excessive.
Player ID: Ebinthetropics
Name/Title: Jack Kenning AKA Mac Donaldson
Age: 40
Sex: Male
Psychic Ability: Retrocognition
Occupation: Nominally: English/Cantonese tutor at University of Hong Kong. In actuality: Cat Burglar.
Current Residence: Hong Kong
Colleges, Degrees: none.
Birthplace: San Francisco
Characteristics:
STR: 12
CON: 12
SIZ: 12
DEX: 14
APP: 7
INT: 12 (Idea - 60)
POW: 11 (Luck - 55)
EDU: 18 + 2(age) = 20 (Know 99 )
Qi points:0
Sanity: 55
Phobia/Mental Disorder Type(s): Currently none.
Maximum Sanity: 99
HP: 12
MP: 11
Damage Bonus: 0
Wealth: 9
Clothing: black single breast suit with bright blue tie and black Homburg hat. All a little worn, but clean. 5'10" tall, 170lbs, grey hair ever since 1906, and grey eyes, which some people find off-putting.
Background: Mac Everitts was born to Samuel and Jill Everitts in January 1879, in downtown San Francisco. Sadly, Mac's mother passed away during the birth. When he was 6, his father became schoolmaster of the newly formed Chinese Primary School. Mac's dad had learned some Chinese in the navy years before, and no other teacher cared for the position. In order to keep an eye on his son, Mr Everitts enrolled Mac in his school. Going to an otherwise all-Asian school made him an outcast to other white kids his age, but Mac made the best of things, building friendships with a few pupils at his school, and over the years he developed a fluency in Cantonese both from the classroom instruction and interaction with his classmates. He never fully felt like he fit in however.
Tragedy struck when Mac was 16. His father died in a cholera epidemic. His future uncertain, Bernard Jenkins, a never-before-met uncle on his mother's side, came forth to take him in. Bernard was a bachelor from Atlanta, but moved to San Francisco to take care of his nephew. (In reality, the Atlanta police had begun to suspect Bernard, and his brother-in-law's death was a wonderful reason to leave town.)
Bernard, it seemed, had a habit of taking off in the middle of the night only to return several hours later. One evening, Mac followed him, watching his uncle head down an alley in a well-to-do section of the city, climb a drain pipe, and enter a second story window. Bernard climbed out ten minutes later, began climbing down, and met his nephew waiting for him at the bottom of the pipe. Startled, he rushed them home, where he and Mac argued for about an hour and a half. At the end of the argument, Bernard, amazed at his nephew's ability to trail him unnoticed through the city streets, and his own lack of desire of trying to keep his activities a secret any longer, had agreed to teach Mac in the ways of burglary.
Bernard and Mac left San Francisco in a fortnight, and began traveling across the cities of America, spending several months in each, posing as father and son. They'd stay in the lower priced hotels, days spent with Bernard teaching Mac how to pick a particular padlock or how to tell real jewelry from paste. They would only burgle about once a month, the other nights spent finding a target, examining the location for the best ways in, and learning their targets' routines. Mac loved this life, the thrill of the score, the hidden double life. The appeal of burglary was that no one got hurt except in pride and in the pocketbook, and as long as he burgled the rich, who often have an excess of both, Mac didn't mind. In fact, with the loss of his parents, he thought he was owed something. Between 1902 and 1905, they traveled abroad to English speaking countries and territories (mostly because Bernard didn't know, and wouldn't be bothered to learn, any foreign languages) and looted the wealthy there.
Having amassed a small fortune over the years, especially from several large scores in Bombay, Bernard retired in late 1905 to the Caymans. Mac moved back to San Francisco working as a low-level clerk during the day to keep up appearances. After keeping low for several months, he began scouting a target in March, 1906. On April 17, he waited for dusk, then began his journey to the old mansion in Pacific Heights, owned by a bank president. The job went poorly, (fatally, even). Wanting to distance himself from what he thought would have been certain jail time or even execution, and not knowing his crime was about to be covered up by one of the worst modern disasters, Mac gathered as much of his stashed savings as he could and fled town the next morning on a dawn merchant ship to Honolulu. That morning, April 18, 1906, was the date of the San Francisco Earthquake, which killed over 3,000 people and demolished 80% of the city between the quake and the resulting fires.
Upon learning of the tragedy on his arrival in Hawaii, he decided his stay in the States was at an end. He read that his former neighborhood of Chinatown was completely destroyed. This would be a great opportunity to start anew. He headed to Hong Kong, where his knowledge of Cantonese and talents in larceny could be put to good use.
Adopting a new name, and expertly weasling his way through customs, Mac Everitts, now Jack Kenning, soon found work translating periodicals and news reports between English and Chinese. After a year of this sort of work, Jack answered a newspaper ad asking for a Chinese-language tutor for the son of a British businessman. Maintaining the veneer of a "humble tutor", this led to a series of recommendations for tutoring those well-to-do Brits and their children who wished to become somewhat familiar with the language of the local population, and thus a familiarization with the comings and goings of potential targets. Eventually, in 1913, he came across the radar of a professor of medicine at the newly formed University of Hong Kong, as a tutor for his own children. The professor, impressed with Jack's teaching methods and aware that many students were having difficulty in the foreign land, talked with administrators into establishing a semi-official post in the university for Jack for people looking to bone up on the local language and culture. Jack accepted, relieving him of the need to continually look for private tutoring to maintain his facade.
He burgles now only three or four times a year, mostly private residences, the occasional business, taking only cash, coins, jewelry if it could be easily picked apart into separate jewels or melted down, and other items that wouldn't directly tie him to a particular crime should he be caught, and stores the loot in bank safety deposit boxes throughout the city. He stays away from opium because it makes him groggy and too loose-tongued. He is not a young kid anymore, the strain of living a double life is getting to him, and the gradual rise of electronic security systems is complicating his occupation. Jack packs a pistol these days as his memory of that terrifying night back in 1906 keep popping up ever increasingly in his dreams, and he doesn't want to go through... that again, if he ever did the first time. He doesn't like firearms, but he likes the idea of dying even less. He estimates that he'll be able to retire in five years or less to somewhere warm, like his uncle did. Anywhere but San Francisco....
Dark Secrets: The night of his first solo burglary in San Francisco, his observations had led him to believe the house would be vacant. The bank manager would go out with his girlfriend each Tuesday, spending the evening at her place.
That night however, he came back earlier while Mac was still in the banker's bedroom. Quickly hiding in a closet, Mac waited as the banker came upstairs and got undressed. "Let him go to bed, I'll leave when he's fully dozy," he thought. He didn't go to bed, however. Through a barely cracked closet door, he watched the banker draw a chalk circle on the floor. Then, the banker headed to the closet, and was startled to find someone inside. The banker screamed at Mac in a language he wasn't sure he'd ever heard before. There was a scuffle of grabbing and pushing. Mac had never learned to fight, and the banker's strength was too much. If Mac hadn't slipped on the piece of chalk in the middle of the room, he likely wouldn't have made it. The sudden loss of balance combined with his attacker's momentum, however, and Mac watched the banker sail over him. Upon hearing the skull of the banker crumble on the walnut corner of the bed, Mac threw up. The banker lying in a heap on the floor like a sack of flour, limbs askew, Mac began to fully grasp what had just happened. He had committed felony murder. Heart racing, shock beginning to take hold, he didn't know what to do. It was probably the shock, too, which made him believe that he the banker then stood up, forehead caved in four inches. The shock probably made him think that the banker kept talking in that weird language as he walked toward him. The shock probably responsible for his own hand grabbing a small gold candlestick with a lit candle from the dresser and throw it at the banker (why would you call that thing a banker? Bankers' eyes aren't squishing out from their cracked skulls) weak as his arm was. And surely the shock was responsible for making Mac think the
banker human moNster caught fire as soon as the candle touched it, burning as if it was paper or straw or leaves, right?
The shock began to leave as he ran out of the house by the back door, and by the time he was at the end of the alley, he was certain the whole affair had ended with the impact of the furniture.... because it had to have been shock.... that's the only thing that makes sense.....
Skills (Non-default skills BOLD, Professional Skills ITALICS, Hobbies preceded by a DOT. Checked skills followed by a *):
Accounting (10%):
Algebra (30%):
Animal Training (10%):
Anthropology (01%):
Archaeology (01%):
Art (05%):
Astronomy (01%):
Back Stabbing (40%):
Bargain (05%):
Biology (01%):
Boxing (01%):
Charm (15%)
Chemistry (01%):
Climb (40%):
•
Conceal (15%): 30
Cooking (50%):
Craft (05%):
•
Credit Rating (15%): 30
Cthulhu Mythos (00%):
Disguise (01%):
Dodge (DEX x 2): 28
Drive Auto (20%):
Drive Horse-drawn carriage (10%):
Electrical Repair (10%):
Electronics (01%):
Fast Talk (05%): 80
First Aid (30%):
Folk Lore (01%):
Geology (01%):
•
Hide (10%): 50
History (20%):
Hunting (15%):
Jump (25%):
Law (05%):
Library Use (25%):
•
Listen (25%): 75
Locksmith (01%):85
Lovemaking (25%)
Mechanical Repair (20%):
Medicine (05%):
Natural History (10%):
Navigate (10%):
Occult (05%):
Other Language(01%)(Cantonese): 60
Own Language (EDU x 5%): 99
Persuade (15%):
Pharmacy (01%):
Photography (10%):
Physics (01%):
Pilot (01%):
Psychoanalysis (01%):
Psychology (05%):
Qi Cultivation (00%):
Qi Manipulation (00%):
Ride (05%):
Sneak (10%):85
Spot Hidden (25%): 85
Swim (25%):
Tarot Reading (05%):
Throw (25%):
Track (10%):
Wrestling (CONx5):
Hand-to-Hand:
Fist/Punch (50%):
Grapple (25%):
Head Butt (10%):
Kick (25%):
Kung Fu (must be used in tandem with Qi Manipulation and Qi points):
Kung Fu: Flying Darts (00%):
Kung Fu: Iron Fan (00%):
Kung Fu: Iron Fists (00%):
Kung Fu: Iron Body (00%):
Kung Fu: Iron Staff (00%):
Kung Fu: Light Body (00%):
Kung Fu: Mantis Reflexes (00%):
Kung Fu: Monkey Leaping (00%):
Kung Fu: Monkey Pivot (00%):
Kung Fu: Poison Palm (00%):
Kung Fu: Thunder Palm (00%):
Kung Fu: Ugly Stick (00%):
Weapons:
Gim Dual Edged Sword Use (01%):
Handgun (20%): 67
Knife (25%):
Lasso (01%):
Machine Gun (15%):
Nunchuck Use (05%):
Rifle (25%):
Shotgun (30%):
Stick wielding (60%):
Dao Broadsword Use (01%):
Katana Sword Use (01%):
Equipment:
An umbrella, everyday, because you never know.
A leather briefcase with the following:
A rolled-up set of lockpicking tools including a small hammer, chisel, prybar, a variety of small picks, and a small collection of skeleton keys.
In his jacket pocket:
A Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless Type II in .380, 3 magazines containing 22 rds.
In his pants pockets:
A pen.
