| Welcome aboard, me maties! AG is a Pirates of the Caribbean RPG taking place after Curse of the Black Pearl, and incorporating many of the plots of Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, but is not beholden to follow them exactly, or at all. We welcome both Canon characters and Original Characters, and hope you'll consider joining us for some adventure on the high seas. Sign the Articles! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| William Springfield; Marine Private | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: 22 Nov 2008, 09:34 PM (194 Views) | |
| Aztec Gold | 22 Nov 2008, 09:34 PM Post #1 |
Administrator
  ![]](http://209.85.48.14/static/1/pip_r.png)
|
OOC Info Username: Springfield, DeathBlow How did you find out about AG: Augury Have you read the rules and agree to abide by them? Yes. Character Biography Given Name: William Surname: Springfield Nickname: Age: 22 Sex: male Ethnicity: English Country of Birth: England Current Whereabouts: Port Royal Occupation: a private in His Majesty's Marines Former Occupation(s): brewer's apprentice Parents: William and Esther Springfield Siblings: Esther (30), Mary (29), Rachel (27), Deborah (25), Rebecca (18), Ruth (15),Martha (11) Children: one that he knows of Avatar: n/a Description: Springfield stands at roughly average height, with a solid build bordering on stocky. When he is not marching or at the position of attention he carries himself with a kind of lazy, slouching air and rarely stands up straight when there is something on hand to lean against. He has light brown eyes and dirty blonde hair to match which sticks out at absurd angles when it is not matted beneath his wig and tricorn. Springfield is not a quiet man, but neither would he be considered talkative. He is generally honest (with others, if not always with himself) and speaks his mind when he can, rarely taking into account how his words might affect those around him. And, although he is a generally laid back fellow, this lends him a rather brusque manner of speaking which can make him seem standoffish at times. He considers complaining to be, not only his right as a marine, but his duty and does so at every available opportunity. Springfield also has something of a reputation for giving his mates a hard time; usually, this is purely in jest, but the distinction isn't always clear, an ambiguity which has landed him in trouble more than once. He has always had an strong aversion to authority and his time in the marines has done nothing to mollify this. He has few problems with the non-commissioned officers, but with anyone above the rank of sergeant his tolerance rapidly dissipates. This is not to say that Springfield is insubordinate. He may be uneducated, but he is not stupid. Before officers, his expression and manner are studiously bored, but nothing more. Instead, his insolent streak manifests itself among his peers in various forms of mockery. And while some may find his exaggerated imitations of certain personages to be humorous, the potential for his remarks to detrimentally effect morale, has done nothing to endear him to his immediate superiors. However, if Springfield's loyalty to his superiors is somewhat dubious, his loyalty to his peers is unquestionable. He will stand shoulder to shoulder with any man in a fight without faltering, and while he is never the first in a charge, he is almost always one of the last to retreat. Strengths & Weaknesses: Confidence: Springfield is always right. Except in the rare few cases when he is, in fact, wrong. His unflagging confidence in himself allows him to take decisive action when necessary without wasting time contending with self doubt. However his belief that he is always right gets him into trouble when he runs into someone who thinks differently and his unwillingness to accept others' opinions can lead him to make poor decisions. Loyalty: Springfield's loyalty is first to his mates and then to his superiors with the degree of loyalty decreasing as the price of commission increases. This makes him trustworthy to those close to him in rank, but has the potential to cause major conflicts of interest. Education: Springfield is illiterate. He has inherited his father's prejudice against the written word and believes it to be little more than a device invented by the rich to further exploit the lower classes. He is therefore suspicious of anything written and anyone who can read (though he usually gets over the latter fairly quickly). However, he does enjoy using illiteracy as an excuse to completely ignore anything written, especially signs. And this excuse has been successful on more than one occasion, though never twice in the same place. History: William Springfield was born the fifth of eight children. He was the only boy, a fact which is no doubt responsible for his habitual dislike of women. His father could never hold a steady job and what money he did manage to earn, he drank away in any one of the numerous of taverns he frequented. It was left to his mother and older sisters to scrape together money for food and other necessities, and anything left over was carefully hidden to keep it out of their father's hands. A circumstance which, when William the elder was sober enough to get suspicious, resulted in not a few beatings for Springfield's mother as well as any of the children who were unlucky enough to attract their father's attention at the time. The family always seemed to be on the brink of starvation, but somehow managed to avoid any major calamities. The girls were married off as soon as possible in order to decrease the number of mouths to feed and at the age of 15, Springfield was apprenticed to a local brewer for the same reason. He was initially resistant to the arrangement, but once he figured out that being apprenticed to the brewer meant having regular meals, his reservations disappeared. The brewer was a hard master, but the position was not without its perks. The brewer had a daughter. She was not much to look at and Springfield found her irritating most of the time, but this did not keep him from bedding her. However the relationship ceased to be a perk when it became clear that the girl was pregnant and Springfield was faced with the 18th century equivalent of a shotgun wedding. He, of course, had no intention of marrying the girl, but he couldn't stay there and he couldn't go home. There seemed to be only one option open to him. He took the king's shilling and joined the Marines. In all honesty the particular branch of the military had made no difference to him, the Marine recruiter was simply the first he came across. Once officially enlisted, Springfield took an immediate dislike to the chain of command; however its power was rapidly and painfully impressed upon him and he learned to find his own, more subtle ways of dealing with it. His reception among the other recruits was lukewarm. In other circumstances, his sense of humour might have made him popular, but his lack of tact initially cancelled this out. Springfield is a fair sort in that he never holds anyone to a higher standard than he holds himself, but when someone falls short of that standard, he is not at all shy about letting them know. His outspokenness on this point particularly irritated a member of another squad, a private Charles Blackmoore, and a rivalry soon developed between the two. This rivalry eventually developed into a friendship when the two were assigned to the same vessel, HM Sloop Nike. The floating world which was Nike and more so the seeming void which surrounded her, was an awing experience for Springfield who had spent his entire life up to that point, closed in by the streets of Blackpoole, though the dense and crowded atmosphere below decks did remind him somewhat of home. However being in the company of other men instead of packed in with a gaggle of women, was, in his opinion, a considerable improvement. He saw his first action aboard Nike, several skirmishes, but the final conflict was the worst of all. Nike was outgunned and boarded by a larger pirate vessel while escorting a merchant ship, fresh from the Indies. Springfield was wounded twice in that battle, but true to their name, the Nike's crew emerged victorious, though the victory was Pyrrhic. Nike was crippled in the encounter, but the pirate vessel was, if somewhat worse for wear, still seaworthy and so what was left of the Nike's crew was able to fulfill her orders and escort the merchant to its intended port. Once back in Spithead, Nike's crew was dispersed among several other ships in the fleet and it was thus that Springfield came to be assigned to HMS Dauntless. The Dauntless was bound for Jamaica, having been assigned to Port Royal. When they arrived, Springfield found that he and his fellow marines were to be garrisoned in Fort Charles. This was a decided improvement to the cramped quarters of the Dauntless and the potential for easy access to the town and its amenities more than made up for any reservations he might have had. Once he had settled into the daily routine, life at Fort Charles took on a somewhat more permanent feel which he found he liked. Springfield was a creature of habit and as such was not fond of change, and although he rarely thought about his home, he had missed waking up in the same place (geographically speaking) as he had lain down. Life was, if not good, at least stable (aside from the occasional encounter with undead pirates). And then came Becket and the East India Trading Company. What they were doing in the West Indies was anybody's guess, but it was the beginning of the end for the Port Royal garrison. Rivalry between the Port Royal marines and Becket's marines was to be expected, soldiers being by nature rather territorial creatures where outsiders are concerned, but this was compounded by the politics of higher ups. Tensions escalated, goaded by the flogging, Watkins' death, Collins' resignation and the ill-starred Forsythe's decision to put the Port Royal marines to work on the Company barracks. Watkins' death, more than even the flogging, was a turning point for Springfield and for the entire garrison. The conflict suddenly took on a semblance of deadly earnest and became personal to a degree it had never been before. Springfield was one of the men to rush Watkins to the infirmary after he fell off his bunk, one of the men to realize that as he had been ragging on his mate for his groans and grimaces and stint of light duty, he had really been watching him slowly dying. And while he blamed the Company for Watkins' death, his feelings toward his own officers grew increasingly bitter. He did not appreciate the difficult position they were in, nor the fine line they were obliged to walk for their own as well as their men's sakes, he knew only that his mates had suffered and one of them had died and, in his opinion, the officers had simply let it happen. In his better moments he acknowledged his own responsibility in Watkins' death, but with tensions running high it was an easy thing to cast his guilt upon the shoulders of his superiors. It was sometime after Watkins' death, Springfield and Durham were sitting in the King's Shilling, having a quiet ale. Normally the two would be off carousing, but neither had the spirit for it that night. They grumbled about the Company and then Durham began making cracks about the officers, nothing new, especially for Springfield, but somehow it wasn't funny this time. Something in Durham's manner made him uneasy. His mate had something on his mind, but when Springfield snapped at him to quit hedging and spit it out, Durham just got up and left. It was an odd exchange and the more Springfield thought about it, the more he realized Durham had been sounding him out....for something. Just what it was, Springfield didn't know and didn't want to know. Whatever his mate was getting up to, Springfield wouldn't rat him out. It wasn't until it was far too late that he realized that Durham was only a small part of the storm which was brewing over Port Royal. Even once the mutiny started, he still didn't put it together. He forgot all about that strange conversation in the Shilling until Barrett was lying on the ground with Durham's musket ball in his back and then it took all his willpower not to drop Barrett and go tearing off after Durham, bayonet fixed. Springfield was furious and glad to be so, for it kept some of the fear and confusion at bay. Springfield was lucky. He survived the mutiny with only minor physical injuries. He is currently stationed back aboard the Dauntless, having been exiled with the rest of the Port Royal marines, and under the command of the suddenly promoted Commodore St Montgomery. Outwardly, he has become much more cynical, but secretly he still clings to the futile hope that things will somehow go back to the way they were. Sample/Past Roleplay: *****Rated for mature language (if that is an issue, I can edit it)***** "Maury! Can you get me the oil pan?" Gene hollered from where he lay, wedged uncomfortably beneath the small pickup truck. Blinking rust flakes out of his eyes, he shifted slightly, snaking his arm up behind the engine block and feeling around for the filter. "The orange one?" There it was. Gene grasped it and gave it a twist, "Yeah." "Can't." "Why the hell not?" Slowly, Gene continued to unscrew the filter. "I'm using it." "What for?" Gene shouted over the whirring of the impact wrench. The whirring stopped. "What?" "What for?" "To keep the lug nuts in." The filter was getting pretty loose and, angled as it was, some of the oil was beginning to drip out and down the sides. Gene's fingers slipped on the slick surface, "You'll be keepin' them lug nuts up your ass, you don't get me that oil pan," he yelled back, or at least tried to, but was drowned out in the sudden roar of the compressor. "What?" Gene had opened his mouth to shout back when the filter finally came loose. He had not been paying attention and his arm dropped abruptly under the sudden weight, overbalancing the already precariously tipped filter and sloshing its contents onto his face. Spitting out oil, Gene tried to jerk upright, smashing his forehead against the vehicle's frame. "Fucking hell!" He tried franticly to wriggle out from under the truck. "What?" "Maury, get me a rag!" Wiping his face on the sleeve of his coveralls, Gene fumbled blindly for the faucet on the nearby wall. "What?" "Jesus! Is that all you ever fucking say? Get me a rag!" Maury wandered over and promptly burst out laughing, "You want that rag you were using to clean out the intake manifold?" he chuckled. "Fuck you, Maury!" "Alright, alright." Returning with a relatively clean rag, Maury handed it to Gene who by this time was dripping with water and only slightly less filthy. Snatching the rag, Gene began to scrub his face vigorously. When he looked up, Maury was grinning, "I got that last wheel on. You need the oil pan now?" "Maury..." Gene gave up trying to find a suitable comeback and flung the rag at Maury's face. Catching it easily, Maury tossed it back, "You can clean up that mess you made under there." With a baleful glance at his co-worker, Gene knelt down, bending his head under the bumper to inspect the damage. Shit. There was a pool of oil right where he needed to lie to replace the filter. "Next time you need to collect nuts, Maury, use a fuckin' coffee can." Behind him he heard Maury dissolve into another fit of laughter. "You know what I meant!" Gene shouted over his shoulder, but he was half grinning as he crawled back under the truck. |
 |
 
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Original Characters · Next Topic » |
7:46 AM Feb 9
