Carnival.'s page

A tall, lanky man with a shock of red hair, Carnival is often noted for his perpetual grin an immaculate dress sense. Although not heavily built for his six-foot build, he is in obviously good condition. Anyone seeing him eat a cheeseburger has to wonder exactly how he manages that trick, but...he is.

Oddly for a mercenary, Carnival rarely wears anything remotely resembling military gear. His prefered armour is a modified set of shark armour hidden beneath an immaculately tailored suit, black vest, pants, shirt and shoes with bronze buttons and a bronze coloured tie. And black leather gloves. Over the top he tends to wear a long woollen coat. It’s always good to look good while killing people.

He also wears a pair of mirrored sunglasses, usually tinted blue with side covers. This is for both his comfort and to his eyes which are mildly...draconic. He claims it’s a medical condition, you insensitive ass.

Not surprisingly for someone so pedantic about their appearance he usually smells most strongly of soap and deodorant. He wears his bear long but combed and waxed straight, and has his red hair tied back in a ponytail from the crown of his head. His voice is a reverberant tenor with a thick accent from Northern England.

Of note, however, is that Carnival has tattoos running along his arms, from the right shoulder to his hand and from the left to the elbow. Both take the form of a tree with silver leaves. On the complete one on the left are several names - Martin and Sarah in the roots, Jennifer in the trunk and Jessica in the branches.

It’s difficult to pin down Carnival’s personality, and several psychiatrists have tried. Pedantically neat is not usually a character trait for someone who beats people to mush with their bare hands. Professional behaviour does not mesh with an irreverent attitude and a cocky smirk.

What’s clear to most who know what to look for is that Carnival puts on a show. At least some of his comments, actions and even his neatness is a show. What’s hiding behind it is harder to say. He’s calm, certainly. You don’t get hired on many jobs to do what he does without that. He’s surprisingly good at working with others, using edging one the right side of annoying people into wanting to stab him.

Those who’ve seen him fight suggest that he’s reckless, although that’s not true. He certainly takes pains to avoid being harmed. He’ll calmly fight the monstrous so long as he thinks he can win, and will equally calmly fall back if he thinks he can’t.

The closest anyone has ever got to working him out is by looking into his eyes. They’re weird looking, yes, but there’s very little of anything else in there. Carnival doesn’t care. Not whether he lives. Not whether he dies. For whatever reason he is simply existing, going through the motions until something changes. As to what that is...well, the only hint is when something threatens kids. The fate of those people, human or monstrous, is often best described by ‘bloody smear’. It usually costs a suit.

Very little is known about Carnival. Which is obviously an assumed codename. The truth is that his accent, his looks and his mannerisms should make it easy enough to hunt down some information. But at least part of his pay for several past jobs was to erase those traces. And there are rumours that bad things happen when you stare into Carnival’s past. The most obvious one being you p*** him off.

His accent places him from Northern England - somewhere north of Newcastle, since it isn’t a Geordie accent but a strange mish-mash of Scottish, English and several others - and he’s made several references to the country. His appearance suggests an age range somewhere in the thirties, with young looking forties a possibility.

It’s likely his employers in the Riot Crew know who is, but part of his contract stipulates keeping that information off the record. Still, given that he fights without obvious magic and leaves no trace when he unsummons his forceknuckles, and hits far harder than a human should be able to, means most of his employers have agreed to such eccentricities.

Once or twice when he was drunk, he has let one or two things slip. Something happened. Something bad enough that he doesn’t like to think about it. Something that made him join up with the army to escape. Something that helped him embrace becoming a violent solution to all life’s problems when he found he could kill with few qualms and little remorse.

It was from there that the public persona of Carnival first appeared. A killer, but not indiscriminate - as far as anyone can work out he’s never killed someone that wasn’t either trying to kill his current employers or had done something to meet a fate of having their skull crushed in a back alley.

Over the few years he’s been active among his peers, Carnival has generally gotten a good reputation. If you can tolerate the fact he’s a smart arse you get a decent heavy hitter with a solid head on his shoulders and an ability to literally punch other people’s heads off there shoulder. And he wouldn’t work for anyone who hurt kids. In fact, he turned down several lucrative contracts because of this.

Being in the Riot Crew seems to sit well with him. He hasn’t tried to renegotiate or get more money, certainly, and he likes the work. Or at least as far as anyone can tell he does.

Born Alexander Wood in the little town of Ashington, Northumberland, it’s not hard to see how someone might grow up a little...violent. Angry. The people of Northumberland were not the most liberal of people, and when a kid shows up with the devil’s own eyes on him...well, he better be a big, strapping lad or he’s going to learn the taste of his own teeth soon enough.

Alexander was not a big, strapping lad. And his family was very glad that the NHS Dentistry service was free to use, because he was in there a lot.

Growing up with a daily fear of beatings cows many, makes them humble. It just p****d the prideful Alexander off greatly, both at the bullies who beat him and himself for not being able to fight back. He knew, from his mam’s tales, that his eyes were no devil mark - they were the eyes of a dragon, the Lambton Worm of legend and tale, that had been part of his bloodline for ages passed. That it showed up so strongly in little Alexander was not the best blessing a young boy might want.

The abuse drove him, though. He never got to be big, or at least strapping - but enough viewings of Enter the Dragon gave him an alternative to that. He got fast. He learned martial arts. By high school it was a well-known truth that if you took a swing at Alexander, you would miss and take two shots to the kidneys for your troubles.

He became the Patron Saint of the Downtrodden for his school, at that. Whenever one of his old bullies thought they’d found a new victim they found they were wrong. Perhaps it was gratitude, or perhaps it was a desire for safety, but slowly Alexander got a little group of friends. He even got a girlfriend - someone who thought his eyes were cool, not some terrifying mark of shame.

Hormonal teenagers being hormonal teenagers, Jennifer and Alexander were only 17 when she became pregnant. It wasn’t an ideal situation. There families were less than thrilled. But Alexander was never going to be a scholar of great renown. Jennifer was smarter, though. So he gave up on the idea of A-Levels and left school, getting a job as a tattoo artist. It wasn’t the best money, but again his eyes actually benefited him - many assumed he had them tattooed, which meant he was, in the local parlance, Well’Ard.

And if Fate wasn’t a spiteful ass that’s where it would have stayed - a rough childhood, a young fatherhood and a difficult life, but normal enough. Happy enough. Loved.

But Fate is a spiteful little arse.

You see, Carnival isn’t the first monster to come out of Northumberland. Before him were the Redcaps.

A type of Fae, according to some, and a violent one. The Redcaps get their name from the lovely shade of their hat, which is kept red with fresh human blood. They ambush the unwary in the form of an old man who needs help.

And when Jennifer was taking the six-month-old Jessica to see her grandparents one day, she saw an old man broke down at the edge of the road.

When they vanished, there were a lot of questions. Even with a foolproof alibi so many thought Alexander - a man known for such violence in school - was behind it. When the pair were finally found, brutally killed, weeks later...it got worse.

But Alexander didn’t care. He didn’t care what people thought, he didn’t care what happened. He cared about finding who did it. And killing them. And so he hunted. He searched the road where they’d last been seen, hunted the woods where they’d been found. People started to say it was sick, that he was revisiting the scene of his crimes for a thrill, but they also told the stories of the Redcaps…

It was a long shot - but Alexander was a man with dragon’s blood and dragonic eyes. Maybe other strange stuff was out there. So he looked them up. They matched what he knew. And apparently, you could scare them off with recited scripture. Well, that was nice. But Alexander did not want to scare them off. Oh no.

And so he became bait, hunting endlessly to find the creature. And one day he did. An old man, who needed help, and wanted him to come to a little cabin that Alexander knew hadn’t been there before. So Alexander went. And when the creatures went to crush Alexander’s skull like so many before him...he shattered its nose.

Because mortal strength couldn’t affect a Redcap. But Alexander had more than mortal strength to call on as bands of his own life’s essence formed around his hands that allowed him to beat the Redcap into a thin paste, chanting his lover and his child’s name over, and over, until even his magic gave out and dispersed. He left was left of the Redcap there. It wasn’t a lot.

In fact, Alexander left home completely. Everywhere he looked he saw the ghosts of what had been, what could have been, what should have been. Joining the army was an easy way out - they didn’t give a crap about his eyes if he could shoot straight, take orders and kill things. And he could.

The Her Majesty’s Armed Forces are not without their own knowledge of the magical world, of course, and Alexander was quickly picked up and given some training in...additional skills. Killing werewolves barehanded is challenging, after all.

Once his time with the British Army was up, Alexander left, leaving everything behind. Even hisn name. He chose Carnival out of a sense of bitter amusement and started taking merc jobs that tended to be on the spooky side of things and building a reputation. He didn’t care about the money so much as the chance to stop the things that went bump in the night. When an invitation to join the Riot Crew was extended he jumped at the chance.

1. Carnival is loyal to the Riot Crew. They let him do a job he wants and there’s almost nothing he cares about enough to make him turn. Almost nothing...but his family. An offer to return them to the living…

2. Family history has it that the blood of dragons runs in Carnival’s veins, and is the source of his powers and skills. There’s a good chance that he has some kin that he doesn’t know about, albeit distantly related. And scaly.

3. Carnival left the British Army’s Paranormal on good terms. He has several, for lack of a better word, friends there who might call upon his help occasionally.