Your Name: Alex
Age: 42
How did you find us?: Dharke on RPG-D.
Name: Liam O’Rourke / William Drake / Bill
Nickname/Alias: “Demolition Man”
DOB: 1975ish
Gender: M
Human Type: Civilian
Job: Handyman (or some similar sort of building/hands-on trade if it makes for more rp connections)
Appearance: Face Claim: Damian Lewis
Strengths: Bill is smarter than he appears or likes to let on. He augments his his ingenuity with a thorough grounding in physics, metallurgy, and chemistry, along with years of practical hands-on experience, making him a highly innovative engineer. When it comes to people, though ... perhaps not so much.
Physically, Bill is very fit and strong and still possesses much of the agility that served him well working on the high iron. He's a fairly good brawler, though he has no formal training and is hampered by the fact he takes no pleasure in hitting people.
Weaknesses:A naturally kind person to begin with, Bill feels a lot of guilt for the harm that he caused and tries to atone for it by helping people. He will even risk his ‘cover’ if the need is great enough.
Thanks to an old bullet wound that was never properly treated, Bill has a bad shoulder. He has great difficulty reaching for things above him with his left arm and even a relatively weak sudden blow or wrench may actually dislocate it.
Bill has some dangerous and unpleasant enemies in the IRA. He's also being sought by the police but, ironically, only for the killing of Padraig, since -- while they know Liam O'Rourke/William Drake was the Demolition Man, they don't have enough hard evidence to prove it.
Personality: Bill is very quiet and reserved. Some of this is due to his need to not attract attention, but in large part it comes from having his passionately-held and unquestioned convictions kicked out from under him. Where once he was a zealot untroubled by doubts, now he stops and questions the morality of everything. Black and white has become a myriad of shades of grey, making him somewhat hesitant and indecisive while he sorts out what’s the right thing to do (and why). Once he resolves the question, though, his underlying need for
some surety in his life makes it very difficult to shift him.
Likes:[list]* Enya/Clannad/Loreena McKinnett/Celtic Woman/etc.
* Building things with his hands
* Dogs
* Hot dogs
* Ireland
Dislikes:* Cruelty (especially to animals)
* Sloppy workmanship
* Broccoli
* Rap ‘music’
History:Liam O’Rourke was born to impoverished parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the early days of the Provo IRA. When he was 10, his mother and father discovered that he was falling in with a bad crowd (in the person of his best friend Padraig, a hot-headed and reckless youth), so they sent him to live with his aunt’s family in the States.
Liam was at first angry and resentful, but he wasn’t by nature a sullen child and he was smart enough to recognize the futility of railing against something beyond his control. It helped that he genuinely enjoyed living in America (and that his aunt’s family was comfortably well-off). He settled in and his greatest difficulty soon became learning to speak without the brogue that made his words almost incomprehensible to non-Irish ears.
When Liam was 12, his uncle Ben, a very successful contractor, brought him along to a building site. The boy was instantly fascinated, especially by the controlled implosion that dropped the old building, and even more so by the demolitionist who made it happen. The demolitionist, a gruff old retired Marine named Sinclair, took a liking to the boy as well and took him under his wing. An expert at his trade, he made Liam his unofficial apprentice and the bright young man soaked it all up (along with principles like honor and loyalty). Liam also began working around the building sites when he wasn’t at school. At first he just ran minor errands, but as he grew older, bigger, and stronger, he took on more adult responsibilities. Puberty saw him sprout like a weed and the physical labor brought him an impressive set of muscles.
It was at 16 when Liam's life changed, and not for the better. It began when his father died of lung disease brought on by working in the mines and his mother, her own health frail, gave up and passed away two days later. Returning to Northern Ireland for the funeral was an unpleasant shock. Time had blurred his memory not just of the poverty he'd been born into, but of the humiliations big and small he'd seen his father forced to endure. Padraig, grown into a ruthless Provo, was there and missed no opportunity to fan the spark of resentment into a flame (followed by stoking it with liberal quantities of Bushmill's). A pact, and a plan, was born.
Still a minor, Liam happily agreed to be adopted by his uncle, acquiring both the last name of Drake and American citizenship. Pretending to lose interest in demolitions but expressing a desire to follow his uncle into the construction business, he threw himself into learning all he could about it and, after high school, followed up by enrolling in a prestigious technical college. There, he broadened his knowledge into fields such as metallurgy and chemistry, architecture and physics, even an arson investigation class, all ostensibly in the name of building better, safer buildings. After college, he convinced Ben that he wanted to open a branch of the business in Northern Ireland.
At first, it all went well. Armed with the good name of Drake Construction and speaking idiomatic American English without a trace of an Irish accent, his true agenda went unsuspected. Even when new, precision bombs began showing up and knocking down Orangemen buildings, his absence of any apparent interest or training in explosives protected him. For a few years he was able to live a double life, William Drake making a successful go of the Irish branch of Drake Construction by day, even as Liam O'Rourke was the bomb-maker nicknamed "Demolition Man" by night. His renewed friendship with Padraig, though, wasn't destined to last. They'd grown too different. Still holding to many of the principles Sinclair had taught him, Liam picked his targets and made and dictated the placement of his bombs with exacting care. Always property, never people. Padraig, far more bloodthirsty, grew steadily more frustrated with what he saw as Liam being over fastidious. Hints went nowhere. 'Accidentally' putting a bomb in the wrong place led to a scant few injured victims -- and a flaming row. Finally, Padraig tried to force Liam to act as the executioner of a suspected informer, even to the point of claiming the informer knew Liam's name. Still, Liam not only couldn't bring himself to shoot a helpless man, but tried to stop Padraig from doing so, either. A fight over the gun ensued and lifting I-bars won out over hoisting pints. Liam was wounded in the shoulder but Padraig was hit in the chest and killed.
Horrified, disillusioned, and frightened, Liam fled. The truth would come out, he realized. His adoptive family -- and Sinclair -- would disown him. The IRA would kill him. And he figured the English police would imprison him, at best. He didn't even dare risk seeking out a doctor and so his shoulder healed badly. Still he began calling himself Bill and kept on the move, trying to come to terms with what he had done and hoping to find some atonement. Finally, he found his way into first Scotland, picking up work as a day laborer or handyman wherever he could. Most recently, he ventured into England, fetching up in a little town known as Killamarsh.
