|: The Last Voyages Application : It's a Blindfold, Kick Back Type of Game :|

[andyougoleft]

(Probably not necessary, but uh.  Spoilers throughout the application for Lucky Number Slevin.)

User Name/Nick:  A.J.
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM:  surfaceshine
E-mail: surfaceshine @ yahoo.com
Other Characters:  Dean Winchester (surfaceshine ) and Ben/X5-493 (warisart )



Character Name:  Slevin Kelevra / Henry Mason
Series:  Lucky Number Slevin
Age: Roughly early 30s
From When?: From the close call in Yitzchok's apartment; for game requirements, I'm going to say Goodkat did not show up in time to save him from being shot.



Inmate/Warden: Inmate.  Slevin can be a good person, and some of the time he is.  The rest of the time he's the protege of a world class assassin known to be the "guy you call to do the jobs no one wants" and spends his life planning to kill literally everyone who had a hand in killing his family, including their families.  He even helps kill people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to get the job done, and endangers the life of the woman he comes to love by involving her on the fringes of his revenge scheme.  To a lesser extent, he seems to be an elaborate liar and violently reckless, though the former is more a side effect of his chosen profession and the latter is almost laser-focused on this one final job.  Reinforcing that it's not something a healthy member of society resorts to can only be helpful.  Also, he should probably find something to do with his life that isn't contract killing.



Abilities/Powers:  While there is little enough background in the movie itself for what happens between age nine and adulthood, just from the scenes shown in the movie and basic logic it can be assumed that Slevin has many of the abilities of a world class assassin since that's who he was raised by and that's what's required to pull off the plot of the movie.  He handles firearms, including handguns and sniper rifles, with ease and precision, knows at least very basic hand to hand and defense including quite a few ways to kill people both armed and unarmed, and has a good grasp of tactics and assessing combat situations.  As he was also successful in completely erasing his identity as Henry Mason, he'll also probably have some forging and technical skills.  Mostly, though, he relies on his charisma and quick thinking, and overall he is baseline human with no special powers besides a fast, smart mouth and the ability to hold a grudge into eternity.



Personality:  Perhaps the first thing anyone notices about Slevin is that he is really too intelligent for his own good; this is also the truest thing about him no matter how one knows him.  While his common sense seems to be lacking, his wit is quick and his mouth is quicker, and he misses very little in conversations and the area around him.  He uses this cleverness most obviously to crack jokes and deflect questions he doesn't want to answer, but beneath that, he also has used it to become the trusted partner and sole protege of one of the assassin world's heaviest and most feared hitters.

     The second strongest part of his personality is the angry, ruthless grudge that motivates him to make every decision he's made to date.  He holds a grudge from childhood to adulthood and instead of letting it go or attempting to go through official, socially accepted channels, Slevin chooses to become an assassin and kill the people who wronged him personally, and he doesn't care who he has to go through to do it.  The ruthless, calculating part of him is mostly well hidden and seems to be mostly focused on The Boss, The Rabbi, and the people surrounding them; but he is callous and careless with most other people he meets as well, refusing to get attached and able to kill them without thinking twice about it if they become inconvenient or he deems it necessary in pursuing his goals.  This includes: Nick Fisher because he needed a name and a body for his setup, Yitzchok and The Boss's  Son because he wanted to make their fathers feel what he did when he lost his entire family, a pair of bookies to get "an answer to a question"  aka Nick's name, and at least a dozen hired men that were probably bad people but hadn't really done anything to him except guard his targets.

     The down side to both his intelligence and his anger is that, combined with a small but strong impulsive streak, it makes him reckless.  It doesn't happen to him often but he does sometimes make snap judgments based on emotion, such as falling in love with Lindsey after knowing her for only 48 hours, or allow himself to be distracted, such as leaning over  Yitzchok as the plan is coming together and failing to notice the gun that, for the purposes of this game, will actually kill him (in the original timeline, Goodkat had to show up and save him by shooting Yitzchok).  He is also given to mouthing off when it would be wiser to be obedient or silent, creating elaborate, over the top lies when a simple story would do, and using creative ways to kill people rather than adopting his mentor's much more straightforward, no muss no fuss attitude.  He also fails, in the end, to think through his master plan to save Lindsey's life and had Goodkat not had mercy a second time, it would have cost them both their lives.

     Slevin is capable of being very charismatic and warm, capable of interacting with people so they trust him and feel comfortable around him and won't perceive him as a threat.  He can't exactly be said to care about most other people but he does find interacting with them interesting, and enjoys the company of other intelligent individuals who are passionate about something.  The charisma comes in handy because he is also a born and bred con artist, skilled at threading just enough truth into his lies that people rarely fail to believe him.  While he is capable of caring about people - he has a solid partnership with Goodkat and ultimately saves Lindsey at considerable risk to himself and his longest standing relationship - but again, his focus is very narrow, limited to one or two close people and he really doesn't care about the rest.   He genuinely loved his father and his mother, which is why grief over their loss and anger over their deaths has turned him into the man he is during the events in New York.

     Most of Slevin's life has been focused on this one single task: kill the men who killed his parents after taking everything from them.  He is fearless in the pursuit of things he believes in, willing to take physical abuse and risk his life to see it through, and has a steady hand and a cold pokerface when necessar but always fails to take the long view of his actions.  He is committed to it and to doing it thoroughly and well, but when he meets a girl he could fall in love with and his plan is near its end, he's willing to cut ties with everything he's known so far to take a chance on getting to live that life with her.  Slevin is driven by emotion tempered by intelligence, competence hindered by arrogance, and absolutely loyal to the very, very few people he lets into his confidence; the rest of the world, he could not care less about as long as it leaves him alone. 


Barge Reactions: Slevin's first course of action at waking up in a strange place, with his history and occupation, is going to be to research it as much as humanly possible by whatever means he has available to him.  As this will include the network and a wealth of knowledge to be gained from the introductory posts of other inmates, reaction posts to events, and even graduation and pairing announcements, Slevin will pretty much educate himself on what's going on and have most of his reactions in private.  He will ultimately decide that he's an inmate, he has no way of reliably faking being a warden, and he can't escape until he's paired and has graduated, so he will immediately resort to his default friendly persona and wait to be paired before making his assassin-y move to keep his true identity from being exposed.

     As for the actual Barge and its inhabitants themselves, well.  Confused, naturally, and disbelieving because that isn't the world he inhabits, and probably kind of a jerk depending on who approaches him and how.  He'll probably take a few ego hits because he's used to being the biggest and baddest around and that's simply not the case here, but he will eventually come to grudgingly accept his lot as a means to an end.  That's what he's good at, after all.  (Also he's not sure who this asshole is calling himself James Bond, but it's not James Bond, okay.)



Path to Redemption: Slevin - or rather, Henry - needs to come to the realization that while what happened to his parents was terrible and he has every right to be upset, he is going about it in the wrong way.  Shutting down, disengaging from society, and deciding that it's okay to kill everyone in his path to the people who killed HIS parents for making an unfortunate mistake and being in the wrong place at the wrong time is not a healthy way of coping.  That will be the big issue, and involve addressing his grief over their loss and his outrage over the circumstances, but to a lesser extent he should also probably work on how easy he's come to be able to lie to anyone's face, and how all his skills are currently geared towards contract killing. 


History: (CW: Mobster violence) In 1979 at the Aqueduct Racetrack in New York, Max Mason made an unfortunate bet with the wrong bookie on the wrong race.  He laid twenty thousand dollars on a horse he'd heard had been shot up with steroids, and when the horse instead collapsed and he lost the bet, he could not pay the two new gangsters in town to whom he now owed the money.  Angered over someone trying to cheat them on a "doctored" horse, The Rabbi and The Boss decided to make an example of Max: they killed his bookie, beat him severely, and left him tied to a chair to suffocate with a plastic bag duct taped over his head.  Simultaneously they sent a man to shoot his wife in their apartment, and kidnapped his nine-year-old son, Henry, from the car where Max had left him waiting during the race to have him disposed of off-site.  The man that drew this last job was a man known only as Mister Goodkat.

     Instead of killing Henry, though, Goodkat instead loaded him back up into the car and drove away from New York City, which they stayed away from for two decades.

     The movie does not include what happened in the intervening years, so this part is only headcanon, but seems pretty logical to me given both Slevin and Goodkat's personalities and actions: Goodkat at least tried to dump Henry off somewhere to be raised by someone normal, who weren't world class assassins.  Henry, too practical and intelligent for his own good, argued his case to stay with Goodkat, and ultimately succeeded.  Goodkat proved to be remarkably stable due to the care he took with preserving his own anonymity, and placed a lot of stock in a good education and self discipline.  He also, at Henry's willing and enthusiastic urging, taught his new partner quite a deal about the world of contract killing and how to get by in it, and found himself a capable, trustworthy companion that could easily manage distracting targets while Goodkat took them out.

     Back to canon, now, and jump forward to New York City twenty years later:  The Boss and the Rabbi have parted ways after they tried to kill one another at some point in the interim and now live in mortal fear of each other, never leaving their respective penthouse suites and having agreed not to try to kill each others' sons.  However, someone shot the Boss's son outside of his hotel, and now the Boss has hired Goodkat to kill the  Rabbi's son, Yitzchok, without making it look like a job.  Goodkat in turn goes to the Rabbi and tells him about the contract, and that the Rabbi will pay him double to not do it, and to kill the Boss instead.  To accomplish this, Goodkat tells both men he will need to use an intermediary and that they will need to deal with him for Goodkat:  Nick Fisher, a man unfortunate enough to be in debt to both men, and whom Goodkat and Henry have actually killed for a later purpose.  Playing up a case of mistaken identity and calling himself Slevin Kelevra, Henry manages to get the Boss to charge him with killing Yitzchok to pay off Nick  Fisher's $96k debt, and the Rabbi to charge him with paying off Nick Fisher's $33k debt (ostensibly for Goodkat, for "personal reasons").  He is now free to come and go through both men's operations as he pretends to be an oblivious civilian with a smart mouth caught in the middle.

     The first person Slevin meets upon moving into the recently deceased Nick Fisher's apartment, though, is Nick's neighbor, Lindsey.   She's quirky and intelligent and barges right into the apartment to borrow a cup of sugar, and things go from there:  she knows Slevin isn't Nick and furthermore that Nick may be in trouble, and she moves in and out of Slevin's life trying to figure out the crime while he looks on in bemusement and, occasionally, plays devil's advocate to her Columbo-inspired investigation.  Slevin falls for her very quickly and when her investigation leads her to snap a picture of Goodkat with her camera phone, and Goodkat in turn says she has to be killed because she knows what he looks like, he ultimately chooses her over Goodkat.  He tells her how to fake her own death and meet him at the airport, then goes to finish off the plan already set into motion.

     As part of the plan for killing Yitzchok - and faking his own death as Slevin, using the body of Nick Fisher - Slevin has agreed to a date with him and to meet him at his apartment.  Slevin shoots Yitzchok and then waits for Goodkat to arrive with Nick's body, talking to him quietly and failing to notice that he isn't, yet, dead.  When Slevin is distracted by Goodkat's arrival, Yitzchok makes his move by drawing a concealed pistol, and shooting Slevin.



Sample Journal Entry:

     Um. Hi. I think there's been some kind of mistake? Can someone tell me how to get back to New Jersey?  I mean, I love what all has been done with the place, very Master and Commander meets Alcatraz, but I don't even jay-walk. 

    Is this about the parking tickets?  I spoke with a very nice woman at the DMV named Susie that I already explained: I didn't realize that street was cordoned off for the Arch Magistrate's 96th Surprise Birthday Party, I just thought my neighbor was drunk again and messing with me because he thinks I'm Jewish.  I don't understand either, see: drunk.


Sample RP:

     He wakes up and he's not at all sure where he is or how he got here; he doesn't know where Goodkat is, where Yitzchok is, or what happened.   He's still wearing the Boss's suit and shoes and his own wristwatch, but his gun is missing, his car keys are gone, and he's never seen this room or the bed he wakes up in.  The utilitarianism of it sends a cold chill down his spine but when he reaches for the memories he's missing, the headache living in his temples throbs to life and he's suddenly aware of a sharp, deep pain in his chest more than the rising, firmly denied wash of confusion and fear trying to take hold of him.

     Looking down, there's what is unmistakably a bullet hole in the fine charcoal silk of the dress shirt and the black dinner jacket over it; similarly, there is unmistakably blood soaked into the material surrounding it, and it hurts like he's been shot.  He knows how that feels, and he can't believe he actually forgot that unless it's some side effect of the blood loss.  But when he probes deeper there's only a puckered scar and the pain, and he has absolutely no explanation for it, nor why apparently he has a new gunshot wound he doesn't remember receiving or healing, but his nose is still tender and bruised where it was broken twice in the past two days.

     He glances out into the hallway first, cracking the door just enough to get a good view at all the other doors lining it, but closing it again quietly when he doesn't recognize the location or the two people he caught a glimpse of in it.  He turns his attention on the dresser, next, and it's while he's digging out clothes that he inexplicably recognizes as his own that he finds the device.  It doesn't take him long to figure out how to work it and when he sees that it's a connection to the internet, he immediately sets to work typing, reading, and investigating.

     Well, not the internet, but an internet anyway, and what he finds doesn't make any sense at all, on any level.  In fact the only part of it that does make sense is that since he doesn't remember having any conversations about deals or a Barge, he must classify as an inmate; there's always that risk, in his profession, though he'd never imagined it was a serious one for him.  That's for losers, people who aren't good enough, but he's always good enough.  In addition, no one seems to think there's a way to escape except for graduating, and that can only be accomplished with the aide of a warden.  That warden will get a file, an inexplicably complete file, but in the meantime no one will know anything he doesn't tell them.  Not for sure.

     Well, that's business as usual, anyway.  He'll confirm the "no escape" thing for himself before he believes it, but in the meantime it would be easier to be Slevin instead of Henry for as long as the ruse will hold.  He's good.  He can make it take a while.  He'll have to be careful - people who claim to have been killed here don't seem to stay dead, and he'll need to confirm or deny that before he makes any moves himself and accidentally gives himself away.  Those are all details.  They require information to hone and classify, and that, too, is business as usual.

     Because he's not staying here.  He's so close, Goodkat will be looking for him and Lindsey will be waiting for him, and he's not staying.  It's time to go to work.
 

Special Notes:  None.