(W.I.P.) Barney Marsh

[IamLEAM1983]

Name: Barney Marsh
Age:
Gender: male
Species: Servitor

Strengths: before his supernatural abilities are considered, Barney's time-honored sleuthing skills have to be taken into account. Hope has its fair share of independent investigators and private eye agencies, but Barney is perhaps the oldest active P.I. in town – oftentimes operating in the margins of the HPD and Shield's jurisdictions. If a client would rather certain cases remained private and well away from the public eye, his services come complete with an extra layer of secrecy that couldn't be afforded by leaving the matter in publicly-sanctioned hands.

On the other hand, this means Barney's methods can sometimes prove to be unconventional. Without a code of ethics to stick to or any sort of personal deontology to mention, he's free to take to his accepted cases with much hard-boiled immediacy as you'd imagine. Things might have gotten a little more tight since the Vienna Accords were ratified, leaving him unable to skulk around Sandhill as much as he's used to, but his brass knuckles and fairly raw and dirty fighting skills still see some use.

Concretely, this makes Barney out to be a physical opponent who lacks in finesse but makes up for it in pig-headed endurance. Brass knuckles and a Smith & Wesson Chef's Special tend to be his scrappier tools of the trade, alongside the expected notepad and mechanical pencil. Having taken more than his fair share of beatdowns in the past, he's not afraid to leave unsuspecting mooks a wide margin. That is, as long as he gets to pull it away from them at the last possible second. Thankfully, his first notable ability includes a slow, if effective set of regenerative capabilities. Loosened teeth grow back over a few days, black eyes take a few hours, and anything life-threatening can be expected to heal in weeks, provided the required medical attention is on offer.

Otherwise, his species is notable for its rather Eldritch ability to use any source of water, natural or man-made, as a thoroughfare. Essentially able to dissolve himself into any puddle, clothes and all, he then gains the ability to control the patch of water he's invaded, or to hitch a ride within bigger currents – from sewer mains to the Hillard, and even some of the close currents that surround the isles. As could be expected, he becomes impervious to physical harm if allowed to exist in liquid form.
Weaknesses: of course, anyone who takes weeks to regenerate is still perfectly vulnerable. He's well aware that any goon worth its salt would only need to wound him sufficiently to stick him in Intensive Care, at which point they'd have days to stroll in, concealed carry in tow, and dispatch him. Even without that in mind, his vital organs are still very much vital, with any sufficiently disabling hit resulting in assured death.

If all this means he's built up a resistance to pain, being a bit inclined to push on despite serious injuries means you're doing yourself more harm than good. If the paycheck ever gets replaced with duty or basic personal morals, then Barney is more than happy to wade through a hail of bullets to see his case through. Tickle that supposedly absent ethical bone of his, and you just might end up with a man-shaped fish's worth of private-eye moxie waiting to redecorate your face. If you're a good shot, this might be more of an opportunity than a threat.

Beyond the fact that sticking his controlled water sources under intense heat could get rather bad, Marsh's earned reputation is also something that needs to be considered. The more classically belligerent in Hope might hold their tongues and their trigger fingers for certain members of the force, but they won't if all you've got going for yourself is a laminate from your associated department. Barney's weird enough to give pause to the newbies around Sarvin, Weasel or Jimmy's gangs, of course, but the more wizened ones aren't likely to shy away from attempting to kick his ass out of whatever controlled public place he happened to stroll in. Marsh has more pull than your average cop in the seedier corners around town, but he also doesn't have the luxury of backup or legal recourse.

To be clear, Marsh isn't only a freak in the eyes of many, he's a freak and an asshole. Having a history of bringing his hard-nosed approach to spontaneous interrogations or casual info-fishing, he tends to rub the wrong people in town in all the wrong ways.

Sometimes, that's actually a plus. Being a little scrappy, he appreciates being forced to loosen a few tongues by showing that he isn't just an overgrown tuna with an attitude. Most of the time, however, he gets by thanks to his ability to keep on ticking after taking one heck of a licking. It goes without saying that he has virtually no pull in Hope's polite circles, and virtually gets along with absolutely nobody on the force.

His one virtue, in this regard, is that he gets along with some of the worst people in town – along with the helpful exception of Sophia. Some people compare him to someone who'd be stuck in Thomas Quint's shoes and who'd manage to actually be of some help while still being in a generally unenviable predicament.

Appearance: the Squids like to believe they have the monopoly on abject slavery in the twenty-first century, and any Amnesty International representative would be right to contest that fact by mentioning that slavery is still an ongoing problem in the Age of Information. The truth is that the Others aren't entirely forthcoming with their supposedly favored sons, and have also bestowed rare honors on the rare strain of particularly vile mermen and other sea-based Theriomorphs. That honor happens to be the undocumented species referred to as Servitors, in a few obscure texts related to some of Sarvin's ancestors.

To put it simply, a Servitor is a humanoid fish, a sentient beast of burden for the cold and dark parts of the ocean the Squids only travel into with armed retinues. Something like the Indian Untouchables in Finfolkaheem, they typically aren't abused, so much as they're simply taken for granted. Born out of the marked bloodlines of traitors to the cause or defectors, these fish-based humanoids have no common genetic root – and no common genetic factors or traits.

Barney's unlucky parents were a sea lion selkie and a merman who'd both taken to Providence, Rhode Island, in the centuries past, in the hopes of starting anew after a dissapointing turn in the last legs of Sarvin's active rule. Things didn't quite pan out for the Marshes, as later discovered and bastardized by a certain author...

Barney's face has a somewhat “anglerfish-alike” quality to it, with a large maw filled with hundreds of quill-like teeth and fairly distant yellow eyes that owe their lack of a fish-worthy stare to how luckily expressive the rest of his face happens to be. Still forward-facing, they tend to constantly look out to the world under a surly mein. That wide maw of his controls the rest of his emoting, with smiles looking perennially sarcastic – and even slightly worrying once the knuckle dusters come out. Pouts look especially mean on him, and even the most tranquil of resting expressions packs a kind of involuntary surliness. Half of it all is attributable to his career and life story, half of it comes from his genes.

Most of that seems like it's projected forwards a bit, and is delineated by equally wide lips, dark blue on his otherwise sea-green scales. They look as though he used to have quite the iridescent hide, but decades of land-lubbing office hours have robbed him of anything approaching a trout-like sheen, making his scales appear dull and lifeless. The effect is lessened once he gets wet, but only to a degree. Otherwise, something like an anglerfish's lure tends to dangle down in front of his face like a loose hair bang that'd somehow have gone radioactive, and usually packs a weak and fairly useless amount of bioluminescence you'd only notice in pitch-black environments.

Below the neck, a fairly round and compact build is visible. His proportions are standard in comparison to human expectations, but something about his hips and feet tends to indicate he's not built for anything we'd consider sleek and athletic. Tightly-packed flesh seems to be his standard, not so much in order to evoke obesity or lack of care as to suggest high levels of stamina. His species, on the whole, would usually appear in ways indicative of a propensity for physical work. Local commenters would say Barney is built for bar fights, back-alley brawls and other ridiculously unfair altercations. At five feet five for a fairly solid two hundred and thirty pounds, Barney does look like the tough cookie he needs to be. Idiots make the mistake of considering him fat, and typically find themselves on their ass a few moments later.

As thug-like as he might physically be, however, he does pack some detail work. Light green webbing extends between his fingers and toes, and he lacks traditional ears – instead relyying on a pair of what resembles an axolotl's gills. Tiny bristles react to every change in surrounding air pressure – translating them all into audible sound.

His sartorial code goes with the territory, for the most part, with jacket-less suit ensembles looking like they haven't seen the laundromat in months, and his seemingly permanent raincoat nearly always slick with the water of some nearby puddle or leaky faucet. He quite visibly carries with him entire weeks' worth of denied fatigue, dark bags and droopy eyelids only accentuating the general sour dispositions he seems to radiate.

Outlined below, you'll see just how his appearance comes with some expectations regarding his behavior. His voice, chiefly, nearly always defeats the nightmarish expectations of some unfortunate thugs who haven't lived long enough to have heard of the one the Commission refers to as “the Fish”.

Far from gurgles or other watery pops and trills – unless when critically injured – he typically sounds like a somewhat younger Clint Eastwood, and packs the ordnance he'd need to make for a timely Dirty Harry impersonation.
Behavior: tourists tend to digest the oddities presented by Archie, Zebediah Buck or even Sophia fairly quickly, but few are those who expected to find something like Barney on a Sandhill corner. As far as the Accords, the modern era's understanding of magic and Darwinian evolution are all concerned, walking fish-men should most definitely not exist. The problem is, Barney certainly does exist; he just tends to fly under the radar on normal circumstances, which suits him just fine.

Basing themselves off The Creature of the Black Lagoon or other Z-Grade maritime horror stories, people tend to expect either a snarling creature covered in scales and loose kelp and algae, or an equally snarl-prone Deep One-alike walking straight out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. What people get is someone who's seen so much of what makes this city such a terrible place to live in that they come across as extremely human and extremely capable; if extremely world-weary.

On the other hand, he also doesn't quite wax Romantic about the futility of fixing anyone's supernatural problems, and he doesn't quite sing his personal woes in any way that would make Zebediah Buck proud. He has ample reason to, but he seems to have taken to things in a way that opposes the local alcoholic lich's leitmotiv. Recognizing some serious fatherly stubbornness in himself, he'd much rather prove the Universe wrong about how worthless he would appear to be – preferrably by punching the next inhuman whatchamacallit in the nose.

The end result is a kind of “Bogartian” take on an immortal being's expected soliloquies. Being more than a little booze-prone like any decent hard-nosed private dick, even his deepest fit of drunken sorrow feels gritty and contained, more contemplative than self-destructive. Having enough professional integrity to stay sober while on the clock, Barney generally tends to come across as a guy who knows far more than his simple and usually profane lexicon lets on.

All the same, there's also long stretches where his brain isn't exactly given cause to be put to good use. Like any P.I., he subsists off a diet of lost items, unfaithful husbands and wives or ground-level B&E cases that are kept on the down-low because of some dangerous mob connection. When none of this comes a-calling, he's stuck filing for unemployment checks. His hours are long and fairly barbarous, he has to charge fairly severe rates in order to make ends meet – with the end result being someone who's forced to live off a diet of erratic sleep hours and far too many junk food stops. The end result is a kind of perpetual bedraggled surliness, his sometimes surprisingly bright little nugget of a brain fighting past exhaustion to hammer in the nail on the coffin of a case Kulich and Archie snubbed.

Being a bit on the crass side and being utterly unafraid to get in people's faces, Marsh has obviously understood that antagonism gets you somewhere in ways that are sometimes faster than a carefully cultivated friendship. In regards to Shield, however, his antagonism is less professional and more personal. Very much the self-made type, Archie's strict countenance rubs him the wrong way, along with the retinue's general confidence in their teamwork. Being more of a lone wolf, he keeps his eyes on several potentials in which all of Holden Hall's collective efforts could be rendered moot.

Professionally, he'd respect each and every member of the force – superhuman or otherwise. Personally? Well, there's nothing he quite likes as much as being on-site before the boys in blue, there to drop a used notepad in the hands of a bewildered detective with a fairly sharkish and satisfied smile. His own caseload sometimes putting him at odds with Shield's approaches or team-based workload-sharing, he sometimes has ample time to show up at the climax of an investigation, snarky grin firmly stapled in place and a non-verbal “Toldja so...” playing on his face.

As could be expected, he has some strong opinions on people, but knows to keep them to himself if these people are visibly trying to do good. He certainly knows what it feels like to have to work past and through a preordained destiny, and he knows how ungrateful that can be. It won't stop him from landing a few bar-side barbs at Drake or Jenkins, amongst others, but he shouldn't be expected to seriously impede their work.

The only case in which a reversal of the above occurs is when Sophia is concerned. Gruff respect is extended her way, largely thanks to the fact that she was one of the first few to stop him from slipping into cloying self-pity and to spur him into making something of himself.

Goals: to keep going, simply enough. Barney isn't like most immortals, in that he probably won't ever be in Wyvern's sights in regards to his financial compliance. He'd very much like to have a steady year, for once, instead of having to postpone his two rents every three to four months. Unless being pathetically broke becomes a criminal offense, he isn't likely to ever see the same administrative drudgeries as the local dragons or vampires.

If anything, he doesn't intend to lay down and die no matter how dire the situation might happen to be, and he expresses absolutely no curiosity in regards to his origins. His parents told him to leave the matter be, he suffered for long enough as a result of his childhood years and adolescence spent questing around for answers – and he now has been well and thoroughly dissuaded from poking in the matters of the Finfolk, purported dead gods from other realities, or other affiliated individuals.

History: