Larry grew up in a small rural community where little ever happens. The kind of place where everyone knows each other and deviation is shunned. Unfortunately he was "the weird kid" growing up: he was too distracted to do well in school, he had trouble getting along with the other kids and most normal sports and pastimes couldn’t hold his attention. The closest thing to normal came in his early teen years when his uncle Teddy brought him along hunting. Larry would never be much of a woodsman but he took to marksmanship like a fish to water.
Teddy taught Larry other things too. A frontier-spirit twinned with a strong respect for the edifice of civilization and human achievement. Teddy had been an astronaut - although he’d never been fortunate enough to go into space - and he filled Larry’s head with stories and ideals. He taught Larry his bright-eyed brand of fulminaturgy, teaching him that the gun was the tool of civilization that embodied the steely resolve required to further its highest ideals and progress. Around the fourth or fifth beer this talk would resentfully turn to the underfunded nature of the space program and generally spurious attributions of social decay.
Eager to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, Larry discovered a savant’s grasp of physics. His parents and siblings were puzzled and a little embarrassed by the extent of his new nerdish obsession but were mostly just happy to see him coming into his own. His grades improved dramatically and he graduated with a significant scholarship that would allow him to study aeronautical engineering at college. Family tragedy killed that dream.
His father shot and killed Teddy in an unspecified, drunken argument (Larry has long suspected he was the subject but his mother passed from a stroke without confirming it and the one time time Larry saw his dad in prison he refused to discuss it) and he was needed back at home. At first this brief imposition was a few days to organise the particulars his shell-shocked mother was too traumatised to handle and his sister too young. That stretched into a couple of weeks taking care of them and trying to keep the family scrap business from falling apart. Then he ended up taking a semester off, lost his scholarship on a resulting violation and, well, in small-town life time sometimes has a bad habit of getting away from you.
Larry runs the scrap business that belonged to his father and his sister works in town as a hairdresser. He never married (she did, briefly, to a philandering school teacher) or had children and his mother passed a few years ago. He doesn’t talk about his father or what happened, it’s something everyone in the community knows about but leaves well enough alone. Larry seems committed to living out the rest of his life in the place he grew up with only his dog for company, having abandoned his dreams.
For a while this might have been true but the spark never really left him and it was an autobiography of Gerard Bull, the obsessed genius assassinated while constructing a gigantic “supergun” intended to launch Iraqi satellites into space, that relit the fire. As though it had been made just for him, the narrative of recapturing spaceflight through the iconic mechanical representation of the firearm enchanted him. Daydreaming back-of-the-envelope scratchings became trips to the library and measuring materials in the scrap yard. The idea of building his own space-gun straight out of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon has gone from idle fancy to full blown obsession. If Larry weren’t an adept this secret project would only be a dangerous fool’s errand. With the ability to manifest his will through the lens of "The Gun" and the obsession that requires, it is a distantly tantalizing, terrifying possibility.
STATS
Personality: Easy going and loquacious on the outside, maybe a little bit lonely. On the inside he’s constantly chiselling away at the problem of his new life’s work, everything else is a distraction. He is riddled with anxiety over the things that might go wrong or stop him before he finishes. Get too close without earning his trust and this paranoia might spill out into the open.
Rage: Fat cat politicians strangling the rest of us for short term personal gain.
Noble: Human endeavour.
Fear: Being “wrongly” outed as a dangerous crank (Isolation).
Obsession: Repurpose the gun as a symbol of the human spirit and achievement.
Wound Threshold: 50.
Space-Obsessed Artillerist 70% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Provides Firearm Attacks, Unique - Can build and operate artillery.)
Fulminaturgy 45%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Scrap Merchant 40% (Substitutes for Status, Substitutes for Lie, Substitutes for Notice.)
Shock Gauges
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