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 Pistol     Basic Medical Equipment     Tent           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, premium marijuana, 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 Atlanta, Georgia, far enough for a modicum of freedom, not far enough to break the ties that bind, 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 Peach I flowed into the tech side of the business smooth as warm molasses out of a jar.

Anyway, I was away from the Bayous in Denver for my uncle's 2nd marriage. I was staying with said uncle, Jean Valjean, up in Denver when the shit, and I don't mean the good variety, hit the fan. I lost my husband, Patrice, in the fighting. I carry his wedding ring and mine on a silver chain around my neck. I'm not married no more, but it's not something you just let go.

The family tree goes all the way back to Marseille. It just can't end here. It just can't. Guess I should go back on Tinder.. unless it's been burned to the ground.

 

Edited May 4 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

Rolling 1d6 three times on the Scientist Table..

Tent, Pistol, Basic Medical Gear

Edited April 29 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Essence]

The one thing I've noticed and pondered on a lot when it comes to Fleur is her implied complexity; she definitely comes across to me as the type of Survivor that never believes in pure absolutes given her ingenuity, but constantly makes deals and 'contracts', evidently from both her family business and how she survived them before the outbreak, which I find interesting since she keeps herself firmly more in a 'behind-the-scenes' background player role in the social dynamics that she keeps finding herself in. I imagine she just adopts both a pragmatic and realistic view of things: she's smart, she knows she's smart, she knows that the others know that she's smart, and she believes that she can't (or won't) do much else - so she thinks that her survival is dependent upon people believing that their survival is dependent upon her, at least from what how I understand it so far.

If that's the case, I love the dynamic this establishes between others in the group and her ego 😈. I'm interested in hearing on some times in her past (or anxieties that she may have regarding now) on that status of being 'invaluable' being threatened?

Out of everyone from her 'backwater' Créole crime family, Fleur seems to have been the only one who's college educated and, based on how she writes on them, is definitely the most 'book-smart' out of everyone. What was her time like at university / community college and what did she study? Chemistry, Engineering / Automotive Technologies? Did she like it and the level of independence she sort of got from her family? Would she ever want to make her way back to Louisiana to find them again?

She's clannish, but has she ever felt trapped in her family dynamics and wanted better things for them, or did she appreciate the status quo and her lot in life at that time? How also has she been dealing with the death of her husband in a more internal scope and has this affected her behavior much? What was Patrice like and how does she choose to remember him?

Mechanically she looks good! Don't forget you also get one Scavenged item from a 3d6 roll!

Edited May 3 by Essence (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

I've been around boys all my life, no surprise that I liked things they liked, stands to reason. I was the only daughter in a family with four brothers, all older than me. Family being catholic, the oldest boy in our family, Jaques, or Jack as folks called him, was only five years older than me. My mother ran off when I was two years old, maybe on account of being worn out, from us kids. So, I was left to run wild with my brothers until I was fifteen when my Aunt Estelle came to stay. It was her that put a veneer of the feminine on me, taught me how to dress.. wrap boys around my little finger. It was her that taught me that the worst thing a man could experience was to feel useless, and that it was a woman's role to give him a sense of purpose, his role... which at its fundamental level was making sure his woman was safe.

So, I've been a boy's girl, a tomboy, for as long as I can remember. Men are simple, reliable, easy to figure out. Men are what keep the hyenas out of the cave. They get the women on the lifeboats and go swimming with the iceberg. Women are like Machiavelli on steroids a lot of the time. Don't get me wrong I'm Machiavellian too, but I see myself in the 'behind every great man, you'll find.." role.

It was Aunt Estelle who insisted I get schooled in the big city, raked Papa over the coals about it. "Education is the only thing stopping you from being chattel..", she told me, "So make sure you're grossly overeducated". I had to ask what chattel was. When I found out I decided that would never be me. It was my Scarlet O' Hara 'I'll never go hungry again' revelation.

So, off I went to the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the best Engineering schools in the US. It's a discipline that, even now, is mostly male, which suited me fine. In Nursing I'd have killed someone. I wanted to go to MIT, but my Papa was adamant that I go somewhere where we had family. My second cousin, once removed, was in Atlanta. Her husband was vice-president of a machine tool factory there, making the machines that make other machines. When you know the machine that makes the machines that make the things. You learn a lot about the whole process and all the things in that process. Anyway, I argued that a company full of men could be risky. Papa just laughed and said "..they'd be taking their lives in their hands" and said that I wouldn't have to wait tables for some extra cash.

So, there I was studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering by day and working part time with lathes, grinders, you name it. I got enough to get a car, which.. surprise, surprise.. I got cheap and fixed up.. with a little help from my boyfriend at the time, Emilio, good catholic boy.. 6'3'' and a Ju-Jitsu trainer... makes you feel safe.

I graduated and while I was vaccillating about going home or not. I'd just got an offer from a robotics company but then I got the call. The family business was having to relocate a lot of the growing space, for reasons related to law enforcement, and it was every hand on deck. Family comes first. I returned home, pining for Emilio. I didn't pine long. Home was where I met Patrice, a friend of my brother Jacque's from his time in Louisiana State Police SWAT. I know.. my brother in SWAT, go figure. Patrice was like something out of the song Copperhead Row. His family had been bootleggers a generation or two past. He too was six foot and then some. Soft spoken, impeccably mannered with a gentlemanly air, he came across as a man from an earlier generation... called me Ma'am for the longest time. Funny thing, he was from Atlanta, and we lived about a mile from each other when I was at school. Strange world isn't it? Anyway, Patrice joined the the family when we got married.. he was already in the family business.

Back home I got some looks from the girls at the class reunion. They seemed to think I was towing the patriarchal line, a traitor to feminism. Truth be told with Papa getting older it was me that was running the business. Jaque either listened to me, or when I knew he'd balk, I talked to Patrice and Patrice would talk to Jacque and sure enough Jaque would come to me for a second opinion. So, I brought the business into the 21st century. I was studying chemical engineering at that point in lieu of a phd or a career. It wasnt so bad.

The cops can't find a genny, if there's no genny, no paper trail for diesel. It's an extra ten solar panels on a roof, a battery bank hidden in a wall. Batteries don't need exhausts, don't make noise. Most people don't understand that things that used to need big obvious things to supply them could be instead supplied by new tech, which is smaller, subtler and harder to spot. A single sensor can cut demand for water, for nutrients, by a third. Automation also separates you from the location for longer periods of time. The marijuana business is grow in secret, monitor in secret, don't leave a trail. It's an invisible enterprise.

When the shit hit the fan Patrice did what he knew his duty was, which was to keep me alive, even if it cost him his life to do it.. which it did. He did his job and I failed in mine. 'My' job was to make sure whatever fight he got into, he'd win. It was my responsibility to keep him alive.. make all the right moves. So, yes I'm in mourning and afflicted with survivor guilt, not that I'd change places with him. I wake up in a cold sweat, struggling to catch my breath, the sound of his screaming in my ears. I don't have a man in my life at the moment and when that's the case I don't do well. You know the joke, the best way to 'get over someone' is to 'get under someone'. In my case it's true. Don't get me wrong.. I'll always love Patrice, but life goes on. I keep his wedding ring on a silver chain around my neck. So, he'll always be with me. The way things are going could be that ring will have a lot of company in the future.

Edited May 4 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

In the last couple of weeks.. there was a small group of people who invited me into their well... 'hole'. They couldn't get their generator to work. I told them what I needed to make it work. One guy put a gun to my head. First he demanded I make it work. I clued him into the possible. Then he demanded I go and get the parts. The bastard reminded me of Tim Robbins in War of the Worlds, you know the one that Tom Cruise has to beat to death in the basement. Tom Cruise, bet that fruit loop Maverick is alive somewhere.. the last real movie star? Anyway, unhinged men like that scare me. I need a protector, someone who will make folk think twice about coming at me, until I get a chance to sell my wares... specifically how I can improve their chance of surviving until the next day. The world is full of stuff that could work, but doesn't. Something either works or it doesn't. I'm good at flipping that switch.

Anyway, I very carefully told him I could do that, but if I got ate they'd be in the dark 'in perpetuity' and to forget about the well pump. So, he went out with another guy. He became a banquet for something hungry, cry me a river. The other guy came back with something similar to what I needed.

I made it work. The other guy, the one who'd not pressed a revolver to my temple. kissed me, reflexively apparently, apologized for 'Tex' and then asked me to marry him. See, people want the things they used to rely on before 'The Stumble'. I can often get it for them. I guess that makes me a pusher to addicts in withdrawal. Yeah, the Stumble, we're down but we're going to get up faster than Bruce Lee.

By the way.. you know what marijuana is useful for? PTSD. PTSD relief, I'm telling you it's a growth industry.

They had a little girl with them.. no relation to them. She couldn't have been more then twelve. She watched everything I did with the genny, held the torch.. asked questions all the time, wide eyed... smart questions, no BS. She reminded me of.. well.. me. I asked her to come with me.. make the tribe bigger, be my paduan. She didn't bite. She liked the woman who'd grabbed her and ran with her, more than she trusted me, for all her fascination.

That was a mistake little Megan... Megan.. does that mean 'me again'. Anyway, hope we meet again and you choose better next time.

Edited May 4 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

12 hours ago, Essence said:

Mechanically she looks good! Don't forget you also get one Scavenged item from a 3d6 roll!

Where do I find the table for this?

[Starhawk]

On 5/3/2024 at 1:10 PM, Essence said:

I imagine she just adopts both a pragmatic and realistic view of things: she's smart, she knows she's smart, she knows that the others know that she's smart, and she believes that she can't (or won't) do much else - so she thinks that her survival is dependent upon people believing that their survival is dependent upon her, at least from what how I understand it so far.

If that's the case, I love the dynamic this establishes between others in the group and her ego 😈. I'm interested in hearing on some times in her past (or anxieties that she may have regarding now) on that status of being 'invaluable' being threatened?

Yeah, Fleur's made a life out making others think she's indispensable. She watched how her father, with calculation, took advantage of other people misfortunes to build his status in the community, build loyalty. He did this by 'selflessly' intervening to help them out of the holes they found themselves in. She never could decide whether he was calculating or selfless. She wondered whether it was intent to keep people in the dark on that score... so he'd get the best of both worlds.. gratitude mixed in with respect, even a little fear.

There can only be one King, there can be no doubt.

He, in effect, became the locals welfare net, the wellspring of community prosperity. He'd tell Fleur tales, perhaps spurious, of how the Yakuza in Japan would protect the locals from rapacious nobles. When outsiders injured folk in his community, in his fiefdom, he went after them. 'His' people got to 'see' Papa LeBlanc's good side and 'hear' rumors of his bad side.

 

[Starhawk]

I wonder what would convey the Patrice/Fleur thing..

How Patrice felt about Fleur.. is the song Mid Air

This speaks of a man who is slightly melancholy, moved more to pity than laughter, laying eyes on the woman 'he's going to marry' for the first time.

How Fleur felt about Patrice is a poem..

No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive...

Putting aside all the tech, all the calculation, Fleur is still very much a woman from a bygone romantic age. She's politically liberal but a throw back when it comes to the roles of men and women.

So, their relationship wasn't something fiery, it was something deep, dark and powerful, communicated with looks and glances across crowded rooms.. that for them contained precisely two people.

 

[Essence]

On 5/3/2024 at 12:03 PM, Starhawk said:

Where do I find the table for this?

You can find the tables in the Appendix for TWDU RPG! Just a 3d6 to get your item, since you're not making an actual scavenging roll.

Also, thank you again for all the detail and for answering my questions! Definitely gives me a better understanding of Fleur

 

[Starhawk]

Yeah, I probably went overboard..

[JagrHunter]

Nope, was very well written

 

[Starhawk]

Scavenged Item roll..

Packages of instant noodles and water bottles (two rations)

Edited May 8 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

Fleur's impressions of other members

Fleur, who sees most things in terms of how she can make herself universally indispensable, gives the impression that she knows what she's talking about, but her sultry voice and equally sultry underwear choices lends pragmatic sexuality undertones to it all that she seems almost naively unaware of. She sells herself on her nonce and tech savviness, not on her body.. which is just for fun. She tends to see people in a system thinking style of 'how they can be useful to her and how she can be useful to them' because she likes to get shit done.

Hyori: Fleur considers Hyori to be her competition for 1st place in the 'one we need to keep alive' competition. She's delighted that Deano's inclusion in the group might mean Hyori never needs to go out. Fleur ardently believes that her being in close proximity to a doctor, another provider of something folk desperately need, is no bad thing. Fleur looks foreward to wiring up an operating theatre for her. Fleur's medical pack has a wide range of marijuana seeds. She hopes to get more in order to stock a living apothecary.

Shepherd (Anchor): Fleur sees in Shepherd someone who is going to have to pivot, his goal of ecological restoration being solved now that the world's human virus has been itself near-virused out of existence. She wonders if she can guide that pivot to some extent. She sees someone who could, if it came down to it, get her across country, for example to a nuke plant that needs to be permanently powered 'down' before it goes in the opposite direction. She sees in him someone whose 'get shit done attitude' mirrors her own. She seeks advice from him on her relationship with James

James: Fleur sees in James their Face man. Fleur believes a woman needs to know her limitations and in her case emotional manipulation, bargaining and the like is not something she's ever done. For her emotional manipulation is pulling the zip down on her jumpsuit to reveal a hint of lace. She'll need someone to front her operation and James fits the bill. She figures he'll need something to sell and the fruits of her labor would fit the bill. She hopes he'll be able to drive the price down on things they have to barter for. So, James for President. James is also the one she'll rely on as their recruitment specialist. Even so she engages in 'trust but verify' with regards to him, seeking out Shepherd for a second opinion.

Emilie: Fleur sees Emilie as their driver, the one who drives what she, Fleur, fixes and/or rebuilds. Fleur needs materials to work and Emilie seems like the one who'll bring it home to Mama as it were. Fleur is happy to maintain, and if need be, ride in Emilie's ride, the company's get away vehicle, which she considers the second safest place to be, outside of the haven. In relation to her Fleur wonders where the snowploughs are to be found. Electric drive has better acceleration. Fleur secretly wishes she were more like Emilie.

Dino: Fleur sees Dino as the expendable Hyori, not that anyone is expendable. Still, he also seems to her to be the closest thing they have to a soldier, a wall separating her from a world of pain. So, she's determined to keep that wall intact. She'll eagerly supply him with killing equipment and build bunkers for him. Should she get hands on night sights, bullet assembly presses, explosives and the like she'll be his caretaker for them.

 

Edited May 12 by Starhawk (see edit history)

[Starhawk]

Fleur's basic medical equipment includes several bags of Marijuana seeds, different varietes, including the low THC one with high CBD scores which treats seizures and reduces PTSD symptoms. This variety is called 'Charlotte's Web'. She also has varieties used for pain control.

 

[Starhawk]

Fleur's NPC is ... drum roll...

 

Arman Khosla