Jack Murphy

What stands out about Jack Murphy? An easier question might be "What doesn't stand out about Jack Murphy?". For starters, his hair is grey, despite his evident youth. His face is all angles; sharp, intense eyes, a pointed nose, a sharp chin. The straight lines are emphasized by two pairs of whisker-mark tattoos on his face, drawn such that they call attention to his yellow irises, cat-slitted because of a genetic trait his family was known for, back when people in Zhadrah still cared about things like that. His hair falls down to his shoulders in an unkempt cascade that has more effort put into it than is readily evident; none of the hair gets into his face, because he makes certain to keep it out of the way.

Jack's normal clothing consists of all black. When possible, he favors a trench coat or duster, but in times of the year where heat is too intense he will stick to T-shirts and the like. He wears a silver necklace with a small tribal crest on it, though he normally keeps it tucked into a coat if he wears one. His arms both bear black flame-like tattoos that cover the hand and forearm, the manmade tattoos matching the intricate symbol on his torso where he was marked by Acrimony. When on the job or in close proximity to it, Jack wears the typical penguin suit mandated by the casino he deals at.

Jack Murphy is a manipulative son of a gun. That's the core of his being right there. Whatever he does, it's to cause a chain reaction that benefits him in the long term. He plays speed chess with the people around him, and as long as he's doing it right, they're usually none the wiser. A nudge here, a couple well-placed suggestions there, and eventually it comes back to him in the form of some benefit or another. Sometimes it's more immediate: a couple small suggestions get a man with a passing resemblance to himself to walk past a certain place and take the heat meant for Jack. Sometimes it's long-term; buying some drinks at a bar, leaving a good impression, then the mark sees his cool drinking buddy from last week at a border checkpoint and waves him in with the minimum inspection.

If we're being entirely honest, Jack Murphy doesn't like himself all that much. His self esteem had a few pretty strong hits over the years, and he's new to having a form of power, of control. He spent a couple decades being one of the more helpless people in Zhadrah. It's not the kind of thing you just blink and get over the second you have a bit of power of your own.

Jack gets his thrills from playing the odds. After all, what good is being able to mess with people if you don't use it to take some chances? That said, part of what he enjoys so much is being able to stack the deck through preparation and skill. He doesn't like fair games; he likes making people think they're playing a fair game while he manipulates the whole thing behind his back.

REquired: 3 likes and 3 dislikes. one goal and one secret. more are allowed of course.

LIKES:

• Gambling
• Fish
• Cats
• Cooking
• Payback

DISLIKES:

• Being one-upped
• Dogs
• all Cereal
• Law Enforcement
• Incompetence

GOALS & SECRETS:

• goal:::  Jack wants to gain enough personal strength, in the form of money or power, to impose some sort of order on Zhadrah and use that order to take revenge on the agents of chaos that made his life hell.
• secret::: Jack doesn't like anyone to know his past. Where he comes from, what life was like for him, and most importantly how weak he was before, how he was on the bottom of the food chain for so long.