Project 99: Meet Flak

Trying to branch out into more character design, here's the WIP for the first Operator on the team I'm showing off: Charles-Caesar "Flak" Barròn. Chuck-C's a heavily augmented machine gunner and rocket trooper, a beast of a man who's me attempting to answer the question "Hey what if Sundowner from Metal Gear Rising was a goodhearted, humble, well adjusted person despite his circumstances."

"Who occasionally still bellows I'M FUCKIN' INVINCIBLE!!!"

Enjoy

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The product of one of the roughest places in the North American EconoZone, Chuck-C grew up at the center of a junkyard that stretches for a hundred kilometers in all directions. A place of sandstorms tainted by flakes of rust and chrome, where gangs frequently exhibited higher ethics than the cops, and corporate death squads loudly conducted a war for the one of the planet’s largest reserves of scrap metal, life was not easy for any member of the Barrón family. They’d not been longtime residents of Stockton as of Charles Caesar’s birth, having been punitively transplanted from the Los Angeles MPC 5 years prior due to a family member’s felony conviction forfeiting their residency subscription. Severely injured in a scrapslide in his teenaged years, one of the few survivors out of dozens killed, Chuck-C’s only chance for survival was offered by the Consortium: augmentation into a cyborg, in service to the One Civilization. His family assumed he’d be getting a job as a heavy lifter, to work in the local yards; he was made into a Hoplite-class combat cyborg instead, and rapidly pressed out of his testing phase into service as part of House Varlyne’s hostile takeover of House Syrithe. Whether it was a lie or clerical error, his family never knew where he wound up, and he has yet been able to reestablish contact with them.

Framed for an execution of surrendered Syrithe nobility that he had no part in, Chuck-C quickly taught his treacherous masters the folly of trying to calmly pin a crime on a man with a rocket launcher in his left arm and better knowledge of how to maintain and modify his cybernetics than they did. Fed up with being told his lot in life by officers in softly-padded trousers, and that he should be happy that he was even able to walk ever again, he raised his arm against them, and let them see how little control their failsafe remotes had on him. Then he smeared them across the walls with a Shrieker rocket, set on airburst- two Lord-Knights, one doormat of a Baron and a Varlyne Count, “all ripped to shop rags” in his own description of what he claims is his ‘best shot’. His act of self-defensive retaliation quite literally shocked onlooking comrades into a state of mutiny, some coherent mass panic, that if the Nobility were turning on Chuck, they’d be turning on all the rest of them for sure. Led from the front by a man with Hell in his hand, the mutineers were able to bloodily wring their transport ship out from their masters’ hands, pointing the way to the nearest Jump Point to cross the arms to the Freelands. The rest of the fleet didn’t even realize what was happening before it was too late- the nobles Chuck-C had blown away made sure to kill comms before pulling their dirty deed.

Taught by both his parents and his siblings from his early childhood that decency and dignity were things you could exhibit regardless of circumstance, the man that would take the callsign of FLAK-11 exhibits a number of rough edges, haunted by bad memories from his life even before his near-fatal maiming and days as a legalized murderer, and yet despite it all, he exhibits a great empathy and compassion for others. He made an earnest attempt at a more civil life, seeking trade education in mechanical engineering, but ultimately felt like “a tank driving on mainstreet, what with all the deactivated combat augs hanging off” him. His capacity for great love and understanding, however, is counterbalanced by an intense mental focus, an unbreakable belief that 1. Evil Is Real and 2. He’s Here to Kill It. He is compartmentalized to the point of emotional rage and conflict after action (monitoring is advised), but his resolve while on operations is akin to a frozen explosion: a roaring ball of demolishing fury, shaped in a useful direction, held at safe ready by sheer positive character intangibles. Perhaps most indicative of his personality, Flak has stated in interview, that if there’s one thing that he knows in a philosophical sense, it’s that “freedom hurts, but at least you can make it the sort of hurt that’s exciting.” His grin was very genuine as he said it.