Harlequin

Name Remy Bernard Shaw

Position Passenger-That-Was

Basic Info
Personality
History

Character Information

Gender		Male
Place of Birth		Upper Farrside (a district of Farr Point), Muir, Qiang Long System (Blue Sun)
Age		23

Physical Appearance

Height		5’11”
Weight		144lbs.
Hair Color		Dark Brown, wavy and unruly. It hangs well down the sides of his face, in his eyes and at the collar of his jacket
Eye Color		Dark Brown; “Coffee”
Physical Description		Harlequin has the air of a broody but bemused, walking sex. Something about him is charged, alluring, but also seething with a barely veiled frustration- maybe even anger. He is restless, almost like his body wants to reject the world itself. He is twitchy of fingers- fiddling and spinning styli, pens, probes, knives with confident dexterity- and calculating in eyes, always watching. He has a degree of natural athleticism and grace buoyed by a youth involved in ballet and gymnastics. But the war has taken away that childhood affectation, replacing it with a prosthetic limb, scars and lean times on the Rim. Harlequin is still a looker- dark eyed, a mop of full, dark brown hair, a moody expression with an irreverent tilt of a smile when the world is being ironic. He is still graceful. But his obviously cybernetic left, lower arm- normally disguised in a glove and in the sleeve of a leather jacket- hints at war trauma. What were once the soulful and warm eyes of Remy are a shadow of that coffee-copper naivete. Harlequin looks at the world with ennui, sometimes contempt and with something callous. He wants to see elements of this world burn and that cold cast of a gaze is usually at Alliance holdings, Alliance cronies, Alliance personnel. It is a personal grudge. He is almost nihilistic in air. Harlequin dresses in a lot of blacks- black leather, black vests, black pants- with a splash of color beneath or as a lining. His stylishness assures the cut of his clothes accentuates his physical assets. He is also fond of face masks and hoods to obscure his features. He likes plunging necklines with a readily shown chest. On him is always his gun belt and a sawtooth-spined tactical knife- his favorite knife. He also has his ever-present English parasol.

Family

Personality & Traits

General Overview		An ENTP/INTP on the Meier-Briggs personality archetypes. Remy is not the same boy that most would remember as the adolescent class clown and an avid dancer. There are nuances of that person recoalesced into this adult’s agenda. The adult Harlequin is somewhere between an antihero and a true villain- albeit an amiable one- who acts with a twisted code of honor. Whether he is an outlaw or hero is a matter of perspective, but he cares very little about what most people would label him. Harlequin is both waggish and restless. Drink, fuck, be a pain in the ass to the Alliance at every turn. Take nothing seriously. Is it a mask or something more central to himself? It’s hard to tell. He is a wry, sarcastic person and clearly both intelligent and observant. He can be blunt and flippant about some things which seems to be a smokescreen to his true intentions.
Strengths & Weaknesses		+ Original + Quick Thinking + Charismatic + Analytical - Insensitive - Dissatisfied - Boredom - Argumentative Harlequin dislikes the heat of the noonday sun as its quite a rare thing on Muir (and it turns the air muggy and hot). He tends to carry an umbrella to block it as often as he blocks the rain. He’s fond of the understated, cane-style English umbrellas but occasionally mixes it up with Chinese parasols. He has a fondness for hooded attire and may wear a mask in high-tech zones to prevent facial recognition tech- among a plethora of other pieces of technology on his person he may use as well. Harlequin is deeply paranoid about his own information and what he puts out there that could be traceable. He prefers to act through proxies and aliases with any kind of transactions, also favoring the cryptocurrency markets for their untraceable qualities. He feels no compunctions about stealing the data of another person (preferably Alliance) and modifying it for temporary use. Signature Style: Harlequin is still looking for a “signature” to finish what he considers elite work. Emulating some of the greats like Mr. Universe and The Shadow, Harlequin has dabbled with calling cards and signatures. He only uses them on something he feels he executed flawlessly. In the past he’s used a sad clown and a menacing clown (he is unaware of the fact that the image of this clown is from an Earth That Was movie known as “IT”). With his most recent fondness for Les Misérables, he’s been drawn to an icon of a downtrodden-looking child with the Tricolor.
Favorite Quotes		Hurt the Alliance: Get Rich: Make a Splash, Then Disappear:
Hobbies & Interests		Ciphers: Data Backup: Hacktivism: Gaming: AI Design: Music: Vice: Killing grief and trauma in self-destructive ways seems to be something Harlequin does when he feels inert and incapable of affecting a situation detrimental to himself. Shots? Yes. Whores? Yes. Drugs? Sometimes. Harlequin understands some of these things are non-productive to his goals, but he loses faith as much as anyone else could. He does these things to fight the restless boredom and hatred he feels about the world. Les Misérables:

Personal History

On Earth-That-Was, Remy’s ancestors would have been a mix of Hungarian, French, Romi, Spanish and Jewish.

Harlequin, born Remy Bernard Shaw on the planet Muir, is the eldest and only remaining son of Colonel Mercy Shaw and musician Bernard Shaw, who died before The War. Mercy led a unit of Irregulars known as Mercy’s Mudlarks in the Unification War, a tenacious band of marines known for clever- and brutal- amphibious assaults on the Alliance.

Remy’s two younger sisters died in suppression attacks on Muir near the end of the conflict. In that same bombardment, Remy lost his left arm at the elbow. He subsequently had it replaced with a biosynthetic limb, but it still occasionally causes him pain and phantom tingling.

MUIR COLONY

The planet Muir, terraformed in the 30’s and located around Blue Sun, is named appropriately after the Scottish word for Moorland, or Sea; Muir has plenty of both. It is a desolate beauty of paludal seas, salt marshes, turfy rolling hills, crags and stony, eroded tors. Most of the planet’s 3.5 million live around Farr Point, the colony’s capital. For a colony on the Rim, Farr Point feels well-planned, organized and somewhat modern, if not particularly towering. Farr Point is very diffused: it is strangely non-dense for a city with greenbelts and parks throughout. The city covers most of Cape Farr which in turn juts out into a complex and craggy series of inland seas, an area that could house three times the population and still feel comfortable.

With a desolate but beautiful, inhospitable climate, Muir is prone to a near-constant wind, frequent drizzle, and thunderstorms. The people of Muir have turned to an indoor culture of arena sports, movies, and other entertainment. Some hardy rural types raise highland cattle in the rolling plains west of the city, and these cattle barons have enormous tracts of land like cattle raising was done in Old Australia. But the bulk of Muir’s economy rests on the twin pillars of mining for rare earth elements, and the entertainment industry.

Muir’s high-tech alignment comes from its mining industry of “rare earth elements” useful in the Alliance’s tech and communications industries and it is a direct feed into a “gamer culture” on Muir. At its worst, Muir is a gaudy, neon-bathed place with all the charms of a shopping mall, prone to the covetous greed of the mighty cred. Drugs and porno are locally produced and easily obtained for the Muir masses to consume; a cheap way to blot out their intemperate climate and relative distance to the Core.

However, at its best, Muir is technologically innovative and has cultural aspects that honor old traditions found on Earth That Was. Poetry- both recitation and crafting- is considered creative, be it beat or rap poetry, Haiku or Limerick. Highland Dance and Ballet are appreciated. Irreverent standup comedy pokes fun (sometimes edgily) at the Alliance and the Browncoats.

The Pub is the center of social life on Muir though what is a pub, a shopping center, a strip joint and a movie theatre is oddly conglomerated as one thing in some areas of Farr Point. Traditions now long obscured, including an odd parade of constables ushering people out of the Pub District at 1am- the Tattoo- are still practiced.

Muir is not a Scottish monolith, but it does have some Scottish cultural aspects. As a small colony with an urban lean, it is somewhat of a polyglot. English and Chinese, and the Sino-Anglican Pidgin language are most common here. There are several localized Scots-Gaelic and Welsh loan words in street slang- called Sraide- while the upper crust of society prefers French. There are some Turkic loanwords because a chicory version of Turkish coffee is the go-to morning jolt on Muir.