Character Creation - Fleur LeBlanc

[Starhawk]

 

		Name:	Fleur LeBlanc
		Archetype:	The Scientist
		Description	She has that DNA from all over look. When she speaks, you can tell she's from New Orleans or thereabouts, on account of using the word Chere, with everyone. She doesn't look tough.
Anchor (PC):		Drive:	I will save us all.
Anchor (NPC):		Issues:	Morally flexible. = Saving us all always comes at a cost.
Notes:

ATTRIBUTES AND SKILLS
2	Strength	4	Agility	5	Wits	2	Empathy
1	Close Combat	1	Mobility	2	Scout	0	Leadership
1	Endure	1	Ranged Combat	2	Survival	0	Manipulation
0	Force	1	Stealth	3	Tech	0	Medicine

Talents Talent Notes Handy With a little time and some tools, you can repair most things – even if you don’t have the right parts. You also get +2 to Tech when you repair things as a project.

Health (Stress: 0) 3. Unharmed 2. Bruised   1. Battered   0. Broken   Conditions:

WEAPONS Damage Bonus Range Pistol (Glock) 2 +2 Short                                 ARMOR Protection Penalty None

GEAR (Encumbrance Slots: ) Gear Slots Bonus Flashlight     Basic Medical Equipment                 Stored Gear Location Tiny Items

Background

Word on the Bayou was that if the distant red neon was shimmering in the heat and it was too hot to sleep, you could follow the sound of a jukebox coming from up the levee and then hang a right at Nick's Cafe. Keep shuffling your feet for a spell and you'd come to Madame X, where you'd find something for every indulgence. If you then found you were not in the mood for depravity, you could do worse than simply listen to Blues guitar while you smoked some of Louisiana's finest THC, courtesy of the LeBlancs.. allegedly, and sampled the Absinthe, once again courtesy of the LeBlancs.. allegedly. Absinthe when drunk in large quantities has a hallucinogenic properties. Mixing THC with Thujone the active psychotropic in Absinthe sometimes takes people places they didn't want to go.

While her brothers went in for what she wittily described as 'steer punching', more precisely the punching necessary to steer those asking too many questions to healthier pastures, Fleur busied herself with the technical side of the business, namely production line management and product development. Something of a wiz at fixing things, she's survived by being too useful to kill and using her nonce to figure out ways to go out less.

She's technically adroit, pragmatic to the core and morally flexible. Unsurprisingly, given her origins, she's clannish through and through. Living alone would eat through her faster than the walkers would.

Fleur is neck deep in the 'if you get me 'A', I can build 'B' for all of us' business.

 

Life 'was' easy. The family had the wares to sell and loyal customers we'd helped through thick and thin, the sticky and the smooth rolling. Pere had kept us out of the Meth business and the cocaine airstrip enterprises too. We were small enough that there were always bigger fish for the Feds to go after, while local law were some of our best customers. Cousin Jean called the strategy sticking to our lane and not getting greedy. Francine joked that we were Warren Buffets of the County, what with having a stake in this place and that establishment... thus way more trouble than it was worth to root out. Pere joked that what we had going would survive the end of the world.

My part in this comfortable rocking chair of a life was the technical stuff. Pere had insisted I go to college in New Orleans, a day's drive south. This on account of how my favorite uncle had been Claude, who'd taught me how to break an engine down when I wasn't tall enough to sit in the driving seat and see through the windshield at the same time. Claude said I had a knack for it. So, on returning from the Big Easy I flowed into the tech side of the business smooth as warm molasses out of a jar.

Of course Pere hadn't figured on the dead rising and the levees breaking. Thing about the walkers is they don't need to breathe and they can walk through waist high water without ever getting tired. So, the rocking chair on Copperhead Row became the abbattoir of Cajun Catastrophe.

Pere always said it was up to the men to guard the cave entrance while the women and kids snuck out the back of the cave... men as the sacrificial speedbump. So, I reckon there's not one of our men still breathing.

As for me, when I got clear of the Blood Bayous, the Lethal Levees, I took up with the biggest, meanest protector I could find who kept the walkers and the ferals off me while pimping out my tech skills to the survivors. We made our way north away from the flooding, up the Mississippi to the Missouri and from there to the Ozarks. My third protector, and my third husband too, Hal Holcombe, got killed a couple of days ago.. rearguard action. So, I now carry three wedding rings on a necklace like a jar of dog tags, a roll of honour, the pale ring around my wedding finger will fade in a few days, waiting for the time when it pales again.

The family tree goes all the way back to Marseille. When the shitstorm subsides a bit, I'll come off the pill.

It just can't end here.

 

Edited April 2 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

Gear.. roll a d6 three times.. So that's a pistol, a flashlight and basic medical gear.

Edited March 15 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

I don't see stuff about guns and such or skill descriptions. I've done as much as I could though. :)

[Laird_Thorne]

Looks good. I'll get the details on weapons, etc up before too long.

Sounds like a heck of a last six months for Fleur. :) How do you see her developing in the aftermath of everything in two years if she survives?

[Starhawk]

Yeah, Fleur's not hanging around. She's trying to pack as much living as she can into her life, on account of it likely being very short. It's easy to imagine her fixing a car, a generator, pulling solar panels off a roof on her way north out of flooded lands.

As to development.. she's a visionary, like her dad. "Come up with an idea, make it work, grow it fast, spread the wealth, while doing everything possible to avoid boom and bust'. I see her kinda like an urban planner who can fix a car. She's not the tip of the spear.. more like someone who would do the math on how to turn a narrow alleyway into a crowd control horror story of the 30 people crushed in stampede sort, except redirecting that to become a zombie trash compactor. She lives in a workshop when she's not pointing out what to 'acquire' and where to 'acquire' it from.

Folk are going to need refrigeration for medicine, power for tools, radios. I also see her picking up every book she can and putting it somewhere dry and airy.

She won't negotiate with people, but she might whisper what to negotiate for. She won't fight on the front line, but could set up a fall back position that's lethal.

Edited March 16 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Laird_Thorne]

Is there anything that would make her want to stay put with a group? :)

[Starhawk]

She's clannish but can't take care of herself. She's more resource than fighter.

She also fits in well with the current PCs. Jaxon is quite literally a brother replacement. I get the feeling that she'd get along well with Cadence Sawyer too, though only from looking at the photo and the motivations. You couldn't slide a razor between her "I ruthlessly protect the group" and Fleur's "Morally flexible I can protect us all". Deano's "hard to trust strangers", plus the likelihood that he's got the 'the important thing is the man next to you' is synonymous with her clannishness. She'll grudgingly respect Cassius as the group's lawkeeper, though there may be discussion about what that new law might be, since she's way more communitarian than capitalist.. 'spread the wealth'. Cassius might look askance at her background in the weed business, then again no-one ever died directly from a weed overdose. She'll be in complete accordance with Alexander's 'start again' drive.

I am wondering whether medical gear could include a wide variety of marijuana seeds, all the way from high THC to low THC (for epilepsy and the like).

Edited March 17 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

Pondering other things..

 

Edited March 17 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Laird_Thorne]

12 hours ago, Starhawk said:

She's clannish but can't take care of herself. She's more resource than fighter.

She also fits in well with the current PCs. Jaxon is quite literally a brother replacement. I get the feeling that she'd get along well with Cadence Sawyer too, though only from looking at the photo and the motivations. You couldn't slide a razor between her "I ruthlessly protect the group" and Fleur's "Morally flexible I can protect us all". Deano's "hard to trust strangers", plus the likelihood that he's got the 'the important thing is the man next to you' is synonymous with her clannishness. She'll grudgingly respect Cassius as the group's lawkeeper, though there may be discussion about what that new law might be, since she's way more communitarian than capitalist.. 'spread the wealth'. Cassius might look askance at her background in the weed business, then again no-one ever died directly from a weed overdose. She'll be in complete accordance with Alexander's 'start again' drive.

I am wondering whether medical gear could include a wide variety of marijuana seeds, all the way from high THC to low THC (for epilepsy and the like).

Sounds good to me. Hmmm.... Call it an "Natural Medicines kit" but it would have the same +1 to Medicine skill. An advantage is that resupply might be easier to find or even grow?

 

[Starhawk]

When coastal Louisiana went underwater, FEMA, the unsung heroes of Hurricane Katrina were even less use than before. I figure this was on account of them being eaten an' all. In this time boats were made out of gold, metaphorically speaking. Robert, pronounced without the 't' at the end, came and found me and got me on his. He plucked me off a willow over a torrent, cutting off the green fingers on the freeboard of his little barge with a fireaxe. He'd been courting me for a spell, so I trusted him, on account of him telling me he was a smuggler an' all. Wasn't but a day later we came across a bridge connecting water with water. There was a Jeep on it, with a rope tied to it, said rope hanging over the water. On the end of that rope was Harrison Patterson, newly out of the seminary... Catholic of course. God was looking out for Harrison right enough; since the walkers, clearly not rope savvy, kept falling past him into the current, even as their numbers were replenished by the contents of the river. Ever see the river scene in War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise? Anyway, Harrison dropped down into Robert's barge. Robert took it as a sign of providence and offered to make an honest woman out of me. I said yes, figuring that marrying my savior was adding something when I'd lost everything. Harrison married us. So, that was husband number one. Mrs. Robert 'Noah' Shackleton. One of the foul hands Robert hacked had a gold band attached to it.

Barges not being sailboats, we refuelled the barge as we headed north into more sparsely populated regions. Every stream and tributary was feeding walkers into the mud of the New Orleans delta. Anyway, the Mississippi is dotted with many such waterside refuelling stations. We got jumped at one by a bunch of heavily armed Wendy's staff. Maybe they saw a new franchise opportunity? They were after our barge, without us included, obviously. They in turn got jumped by Jack Turner and his two mates Isaac and Merle. So, in the end I survived, but Robert didn't.. he took a knife to the gut and passed on. I was inconsolable, but Jack pulled out all the stops to cheer me up. We got married and on the back of that 'the competition for the girl', in other words me, ended. So now I was Mrs. Jack 'Machete' Turner.. married three weeks, widowed a week, married again. I figured at this rate that I'd beat Elizabeth Taylor's tally of a 8 by a dozen before I was thirty. Jack was called machete on account of him being a dab hand with a machete.

Anyway, there was a dispute before we got halfway to St Louis, Isaac secretly wanted me for himself, and so Jack got an icepick that made his ears burn... like in the song whatever happened to Leon Trotsky? A day later, Merle avenged the murder of my man, by strangling Isaac in his sleep. There were ten of us at that point, and nine of us fed one of us to the Mississippi.. because no-one felt safe with Merle around. That was four months after the Fall.

A couple of days out from St. Louis we pulled up to a river buoy with three guys clinging to it. The shore on both sides was filled with a stadium's worth of zombies, moaning and wailing. One of the three was Mike 'Madhatter' Murphy, a walking talking symbol of irish humor. Him and his Boston mates were loaded down with pistols, rifles and such.. all of which were heavily used in the days that followed. Things went swimmingly for a spell. I'd set up a still at this point and we'd looted everything I needed to make Poitin. Do you know where the word honeymoon comes from? It's said that when vikings got married, the parents of the happy couple would gift them with enough mead, made from honey, for them to be absolutely smashed for the space of a month.

Anyway, the Argonauts, for such we called ourselves, got well and truly smashed one night and so the merry widow woke up with another ring on her finger. I was now Mrs. Mike 'Madhatter' Murphy. Father Harrison got into the habit of calling me Lucrezia at this point, joking about how anyone who got into bed with me didn't last long... premature decapitation. I was also jokingly referred to as the Black Widow. I preferred Lucrezia though.

All this lasted to the outskirt of St Louis, five and a half months after the Fall, when we ran aground on a low sandbank and got overrun by Walkers from the shore. Of the Argonauts only me and Polly Tully, whom everyone called PolyTunnel, escaped. Everyone else died in the fighting. Polly and I struggled ashore still wearing our life preservers.

I've always known how to sneak around, it's a family tradition. So Polly and I skirted St. Louis heading West, since the bridges to the East Side were over-run by walkers or predators. Grid had been down for months at this point, so we crossed rivers on power lines, since the bridges were the worst.. choke points. Power lines generally led into empty, well emptier, places.

So married three times in six months, still breathing.. with three rings on a silver chain around my neck. Polly died in the wilderness. I figure she ate something she shouldn't have. I told her she should only eat what I gave the green light to, but some people don't listen and I ain't no doctor.

Gotta say, I'm getting accustomed to the new life. You know what the Chinese say.. "May you live in interesting times."

Edited March 19 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Laird_Thorne]

Very nice. :)

[Starhawk]

Fleur's Suite

I reckon everyone imagines a montage for their character in different ways and yeah, for me, no-one does Montage music like Morricone, may he rest in peace. This one sticks.. most of the tunes have a low tragic bass at the bottom of them. Some tunes are romantic, some jaunty, some laments.

My montage would be a series of reminiscing scenes..

A barge on the Mississippi, floating past gutted towns in the dark of 'no more lights' with Fleur lying on the roof next to her husband of the time (there's been three so far), looking up at the Milky Way, passing a bottle of moonshine back and forth between them, while running her fingers through his mop of hair, displaying her childlike 'just lean into it' 'no regrets' personality. The juxtaposition of human emotion atop utter ruin, like a flower growing in the wasteland.

Her husband of the time, holding her hair out of the way, while she throws up into the river, having overimbibed, while he chuckles ruefully. In between bouts she comes out with barf jokes.

Her husband laughing out loud, head thrown back, as she tells some extremely off colour joke.. which she later confesses to her priest, while holding her crucifix.

Her tongue sticking out of her mouth while she fixes something that can't be fixed with a screw driver, a pair of pliers, some bubble gum and a hairpin.

Her taking the ring from off her dead husband's finger and looping it into the silver necklace around her neck. All told there are six rings there now, while the pale circle around her wedding finger fades.

Her holding her hand onto a woman's mouth, silencing her, as zombies walk trudge past mere feet away, not pushing her out to use a diversion... because she's the last of someone's line too. [Just came across this in the 3 Body Problem, where it's 'if one of us lives then we all live'.. even if it is memory.

 

The first tune you could call The Fall... this merging into Remembering Sleepy Drunk Slow Dancing when your heart not your head was doing the talking. This merges into the jaunty notes of playing pranks on one's brothers, now dead, and getting thrown into the Bayou. Suddenly into all hell breaking loose with father and brothers fighting with knives and baseball bats 'Swing away Merle' in the house while the women and kids run to the pickup truck. Then the discordant tones of nightmare of the Men are all Gone, as the defences do not hold.. which leeches into the quiet horror of it all.. don't move, stay quiet. Then medicine.. as in the lulls the whisky comes out to combat PTSD in comradely sipping. Into the acceptance that the zombies you kill now are not the friends and loved ones you once knew. You kill them and give them a proper wake.. in memory. Until at the end you are the last one standing of your group, meeting others who the last one standing of their group... each one all that remains between folk whose lives will be remembered and those consigned to oblivion. Into a hand clutching a rosary chain, littered with rings, jacket badges, good luck charms.. a chain of civilian dog tags, a graveyard as jewelry.

 

Edited April 5 by Starhawk (see edit history)