Name: Alan Blackwood
Team Role: Brains
Back-up Role: Hitter
Skills, talents and training: Alan has a nearly photographic memory, able to recall intricate facts about things that he read in passing years ago, and he is a voracious reader. His list of skills is incredibly wide-ranging, though there are sometimes gaps in his education due to his mostly self-taught background. He is an ace poker player, has achieved
dan ranks in both aikido and judo, and speaks nine languages if you count Klingon. His current pets include three snakes (one of them poisonous), two lizards and a tarantula.
Record:Considered dangerous and unpredictable. Arrest record for larceny, fraud, breaking and entering, assault and destruction of property, all as a juvenile (records sealed). No adult arrest record, though he is on the watchlist of several Las Vegas casinos. High school diploma, no college record. No military record. Parents deceased, no siblings.
Weakness:Dealing with women.
Personality:Alan is extremely intelligent, but has a manner that's fairly offputting. Though never officially diagnosed, he bears some symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome and other mildly autistic characteristics. Dealing with people, especially those he considers less smart than himself, is not his strongest suit. He does have a sense of humor, though it is somewhat odd and occasionally inappropriate. Once he has grown to respect someone he feels a fierce sense of protection toward them; once he has written someone off it is extremely difficult to get him to reconsider his opinion.
Alan has had few close relationships with other people. His current team is the closest that he has had to a family in years. He is still a virgin at the age of 23. Dealing with women is his soft spot; he has been known to get extremely flustered if placed in very close proximity to the opposite sex, sometimes nearly to the point of violence. Alan's world works best if other people let him do the thinking, and if they simply do as they're ordered. (Over the course of the game this is likely to change; Alan will grow and develop, as all good characters do.)
History:Alan was a wunderkind, a prodigy. In school he didn't use a computer, he
was a computer, digesting and processing information in a way that was sometimes, frankly, scary. He had few friends, and the occasional enemy quickly learned that messing with Alan led quickly to excessive, if non-violent, retaliation. One bully found his father transferred to an Army base in Nebraska. Another developed an intense phobia of spiders after finding his locker, backpack and pillow full of them one evening.
His parents tried to channel him into more acceptable directions by encouraging his study of martial arts. He excelled at aikido and fencing, but the experience did little to win him any friends. Eventually he came to the attention of Basilisk, a government program intended to seek out and train 'exceptional' youths as a feeder program for various covert operations groups. The program itself was a failure; as it turns out, taking a bunch of highly skilled and antisocial teenagers and putting them all in a high pressure environment with access to deadly technology is the sort of thing that only works in movies. The program was scrapped before it graduated its first pupil, though several of the alumnae went on to profitable careers in the criminal services industry.
It took the death of both of Alan's parents to shock him out of his downward spiral. He was living in Vegas, making a living off of counting cards and playing poker, when he heard the news. His mother and father had been killed in a botched raid by agents from the DEA who had been mistakenly informed that there was a meth lab located in their basement. The government was able to avoid paying any restitution, and deigned to even issue an apology after small quantities of marijuana were discovered in the house.
Since then Alan has been on a crusade to help the little guy against the big guy, whether the big guy is the government, corporations, or just plain criminals. He realizes that he has certain advantages, and using them only for his own profit is wrong in some way that he deeply believes, but can't fully articulate logically.
