Birth Name: Wilhelm le Noir
Known to the Alliance as: The Demon Eyed Sniper, ‘ol Demon Eyes
Known to Independents as: Thirteen
Current Cover: Willie Black
Last known military rank: Master Gunner
Age: 36 (Born in2481)
Sex: Male
Home Planet: Persephone is the birthplace of Wilhelm le Noir, but Willie Black’s paperwork lists Whitefall as his place of birth and home of record.
Appearance: Willie has a thick brown mustache, long brown hair and bright red piercing eyes. He is tall and imposing, standing at six feet three inches and weighing in at two hundred and twenty pounds of mostly muscle, from his years in prison. He wears a black cowboy hat, a black duster, a brown leather vest and brown leather boots. The brown belt around his waist holds two holsters which he uses for his revolvers and he sometimes wears a combat sling around his back that holds his shotgun under his duster. The only symbol of his noble heritage that he commonly wears is spurs around his boots.
Personality: Willie Black’s cold and reserved exterior belies a smoldering passion. He speaks slowly and deliberately, until his tongue has been loosened by whiskey among good friends. His voice is deep and carries, even when his words are spare. He makes friends slowly, but once he makes them he is loyal til the end. Conversely he is also bitter and vengeful, never forgetting a grudge. His mannerisms seem intimidating to most people, but they are unintentionally slow.
Personal items: Willie values his cloths and equipment, but doesn’t like to own more than he can carry on his back. He has a single foot locker that he can carry with him if needs be that generally carries his sword, a few changes of cloths, extra ammo and food and a few military knickknacks from his past.
Weapons:
Two Colt Trooper mk. III’s
and a Benelli M3 Super 90 shotgun
And a duelists epee
Character history:
You wouldn’t be able to tell it from looking at him, but Ol’ Willie is from noble stick. His father Sir Ivarr le Noir and his mother, Lady Philippa de Willesford were nobles of the highest caliber on Persephone and that was the problem. Their wealth depended largely upon their popularity and when their son was born blind in both eyes, they realized that they would have to keep him far away from anyone they knew. Even after Doctors at Saint Lucy's hospital on the planet Ariel gave him ocular implants as an infant, they glowed an eerie and unnatural red that his parents were ashamed of.
Young Wilhelm was sent to the core world of Sihnon. There he was raised in a boarding school from infancy onward. As soon as he arrived like the other students, infant Wilhelm was tattooed with the number thirteen on his neck to denote that he was a part of the thirteenth student cohort. There he was taught classical subjects, learning first the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy and then the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Additionally he leaned etiquette and fencing. Wilhelm learned his subjects well and became a competitive fencer, but felt stifled by the environment and rejected by his family, so he started rebelling and acting out.
At the age of seventeen, Wilhelm received the last modification on his ocular implants he would ever need. Shortly thereafter he was kicked out of his the boarding school for rebellious acts and disinherited from his family. That is the day Willie Black was born, Willie being a common nickname for Wilhelm and Noir being French for black. He returned to Persephone and found what work he could as a commoner with no education. In the next year ol’Willie found out that his ocular implants are functionally targeting computers, perfectly interacting with his hand eye coordination and reflexes, making him quick and accurate with a gun at any range. So he began to work as a hired gun, going by the sobriquet of Thirteen.
Thirteen found work in every corner of the verse, toting guns for slavers, pirates and mercenaries. From the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-four he was in and out of prison and experienced the furthest reaches of the verse. As he experienced more of the frontier he came to feel at home there in a way he never did on Persephone or Sihnon. When war broke out in 2506 between the power hungry Alliance that to him represented his parent’s arrogance and sense of eliteness, and the Independent Faction who had come to represent freedom to him, Willie found a more altruistic use for his gun fighting skills.
As a Sergeant with the Independence Irregulators he became a Browncoat. Serving in many of the battles over the next few years he learned how to maintain, fix and fire shipboard weapon systems, maintain, fix and fire mortars and artillery and how to maintain, fix and fire sniper weapons systems. On this long journey he became a Master Gunner, the Browncoat equivalent of what some would call a warrant Officer and a famous sniper among the Alliance forces on Du-Khang. They called him the Demon Eyed Sniper or ol’Demon eyes because his bright red eyes were the last thing many alliance soldiers saw before they got a bullet in the brain.
In May 2511Thirteen was on New Kashmir when the Independence movement received its killing blow in Serenity Valley on the planet of Hera. The Master Gunner and a small band of other Independence Irregulators refused to surrender. Evading capture they slipped through the Alliance net on New Kashmir and wound up on Verbena, in the same star system. Going by Willie Black again, him and his Bushwackers fought Alliance forces who were trying to create a gearshift assembly factory in a planet that had formerly been beyond their authority.
The Verbena Bushwackers adopted black dusters as a way to mourn the failure of the Independence movement, and so were sometimes called the Blackcoats. They were able to disable the plant a few times and murdered a few top executives but were soon caught and either killed or arrested. Ever a survivalist, Willie Black managed to convince the Alliance Forces that he was a lower ranking operative, had not been involved in the prior war of Independence at all and had not killed anybody on the planet Verbena.
Luckily the other Blackcoats were loyal to their Master Gunner and none of them rolled over on him. So Willie Black having convinced Alliance military forces that he was not an enemy combatant got the lightest sentence of all his men, five years of hard labor. Digging ditches and cracking rocks in a top security prison on Persephone, the only way Willie Black entertained himself was being a combatant in underground smokers fights where he would beat the life out of other prisoners in exchange for money and prison privileges which were put up as bets.
Released in 2517, Willie Black convinced the Alliance Prison system to return him to his place of birth in Whitefall, which of course is not the truth. After reaching Whitefall, Willie Black heard of a crew looking for crew members. Trying to find a new place in life, Willie went to see what was up.
Goal: Having his personal belongings brought to Whitefall by friends of the Bushwackers and retrieving them, his primary goal is wine, women and maybe a little song. Willie Black’s secondary goal is to obtain the funds to buy a reliable sniper rifle, since that opens him to a wider array of employment. He also wants to spite the Alliance forces and genuinely aid people in the frontier worlds somehow.
Talents:
* Willie Black's ocular implants allow him to see in the inferred spectrum's, to magnify, to record and replay information in different ways and to connect directly to computer systems.
* Willie Black is a fast draw, an accurate gunman and a very accurate rifleman at any distance.
* Willie Black can maintain, repair, upgrade and fire shipboard weapons systems.
* Willie Black can maintain, repair, upgrade and fire nearly any modular weapons system from mortars, to artillery to machine guns.
* Willie Black has basic military, stealth and survival skills
* Willie Black knows most basic shipboard systems
* Willie Black has a classical education and tends to be smarter than he looks
* Willie Black can read, write and speak English with a Southern and a high noble accept, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek and Latin.
* Willie Black understands the etiquette of nobility
* Willie Black is a professional level fencer, though he doesn’t like showing this skill.
* Willie Black can wrestle and fight at a semi-professional level, something he picked up in prison
Job: Onboard the ship, Willie Black can maintain, repair, upgrade and fire shipboard weapons systems. He can also assist the ships engineer in minor ways.
Loyalties: Being a veteran of the Independent Confederation, Willie Black sees the Alliance as a corrupt and controlling force. He will act against it given the slightest reason or provocation and cooperate with it only for a great amount of wealth or for survival itself.
