{Application - Sojourner}

[bladework]

OOC:

PLAYER NAME: Relia

AIM (optional): LoreleiY

IC:

CHARACTER NAME: Song Se-Jin

DISPLAY NAME: Billy Rocks

CANON: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

CANON POINT: After his death near the end of the movie.

AGE: Mid-40s

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Standing at 5’10” and impressively physically fit for his era and occupation, Billy Rocks defies any of the petite and slight descriptors he’s been given: he has a quiet, fadeaway stature that sticks in the eye and the mind but not in the reality of it. The mind frequently recalls Billy Rocks as being short and delicate — he is neither. What he is is a lurking, slouching shadow, a wary creature that slinks low in the grass. Billy is still, silent, and frequently unanimated, affecting postures and mannerisms that encourage the eye to slide over him and onto more fascinating pastures. He prefers watching to being watched.

He’s accustomed to drawing enough attention to himself as it is. Billy, of Korean descent and living in the 1800s American Southwest, is not the sort of gunslinger most people he encounters are expecting. Moreover, in addition to being an unusual sight, it happens that he’s also an easy one on the eyes: Billy’s appearance is neatly kept, he has a handsome, elegant face, and he dresses to subtle expense. While he avoids bright colors or flashy metal that might draw attention to himself, he wears clothes with costly, quietly patterned fabrics, good snakeskin boots, and well-tailored jackets. He doesn’t like people to notice he puts in the effort, lest they find him up-jumped (in their estimation), but he does put in the effort.

Billy has brown-black hair, worn long and usually twisted up into a loose bun at the back of his head, secured with a hairpin or tucked under a hat. Worn loose, the longest sections would nearly brush his shoulders. His eyes are a deep, inky brown, watchful and stoic — capable of expressing a wide range of emotion on occasion or conveying a remarkably blank, unreadable poker-faced affect the rest of the time: he’s in the habit of receiving more information than he projects.

A frequent hand-to-hand fighter, Billy usually sports fingerless gloves inset with brass knuckles — but more notable is his custom-made gun belt, which sports a pistol in a single right-hand holster and slots for several bullets, as well as specially-designed holsters for about ten distinctive knives of various designs and lengths.

HISTORY:

Billy Rocks has never led a particularly comfortable life. Born to a Korean family who moved to China, Song Se-Jin was accustomed, from a young age, to feeling foreign wherever he went. Although he and his family were never fully accepted as members of the community, their lives were passably comfortable, for a time. Unfortunately, Se-Jin’s youth was a dangerous time in China; his parents were killed in the violence of the Taiping Rebellion. Se-Jin, an orphan with no family or prospects, was compelled as a late teenager to take a questionable contract of indentured service and seek out his fortunes in America, as a laborer on the Pacific Railroad.

His life in America was little improvement. Public sentiment toward Asian ‘coolies’ was overwhelmingly negative, and people like Se-Jin — or, as his masters haphazardly renamed him, Billy Rocks — were treated little better than slaves, subject to back-breaking labor and exhausting hours.

Still, with nothing else to turn to, Billy quietly bore the name as well as labor, dedicating himself to it and letting it make him sturdy and strong. Still Korean, Billy remained something of an outsider among his fellow Chinese laborers, not quite a full member of their community, left mostly with their reserved friendship and his own fierce pride. He got along poorly with his masters at work, racist and powerhungry; Billy had difficulty ignoring their cruel humor and insults as well as might have been wise, and earned the negative attention of two of them in particular.

Billy’s circumstances — alone, indebted, and at the social outskirts of a laborer’s community — made him vulnerable. His life of labor and his naturally elegant features made him uncommonly easy on the eyes. His keen sense of dignity made him appealing to the sort of person who takes pleasure in attempting to break something strong-willed. None of this added up well for Billy.

And, ultimately, none of it added up well for the two men who assaulted him, either. A week after their attack, both men were found stabbed to death — and Billy Rocks was gone.

Now with a bounty on his head, Billy Rocks fled hastily south, where he lived for some time on the run from the law. This was difficult going for Billy, who tended to stick out like a sore thumb wherever he went, and he wasn’t ultimately able to lay low forever. Eventually, bounty hunters came after him, forcing Billy to get rid of them one way or another — and one day, when Billy was already in the middle of an everyday brawl with a pack of generally belligerent, anti-Asian assholes, along came bounty hunter Goodnight Robicheaux. And Billy’s life, for reasons he couldn’t remotely understand, changed.

Rather than attempting to bring Billy in, Goodnight took a chance on him, and eventually the two unlikely men began traveling together and became friends. Goodie, a popular and well-known Civil War veteran, had the idea of gambling on Billy’s preternatural speed as a prizefighter. Billy was skeptical that this would work, but soon found that Goodie was as good as his word: with Goodie by his side, Billy was able to exist within the world he occupied without being shut out just by being Korean. People didn’t want to deal with Billy Rocks, but they were all too eager to please charming and dangerous Goodnight Robicheaux, Antietam’s notorious Angel of Death.

They became a good team, with Goodie smoothing the way for Billy to be a successful prizefighter in a white world, and Billy looking out for the lingering effects of Goodie’s trauma from his time in the war. Still capable of interacting with local Chinese communities, and more comfortable among them, he was able to get access to opium to help keep Goodie from being overcome by his many inner demons.

To Billy, who’d lived a lonely and largely friendless life, Goodie was as bright and brilliant as the sun, warm and vibrant. Billy was infatuated — and in time, his business partner became his romantic partner, as well. The two were an incredible and successful team, and for some time, they made a fairly excellent living travelling the American southwest and profiting from Billy’s prize fights in quick draw competitions.

Until Sam Chisholm. Chisholm, an old friend from Goodie’s past, sent men to summon Goodie to help him with a dangerous job: the defense of a small mining town called Rose Creek, where Chisholm’s enemy Bartholomew Bogue was menacing the townspeople. Seven people against dozens and dozens, the odds were dismal — but Goodie and Billy went anyway. In the end, the seven men succeeded in saving Rose Creek and defeating Bogue: but not before Billy and Goodie lost their lives, dying together in a hail of gunfire.

PERSONALITY:

Billy Rocks is a hard man to get to know. To strangers and to people he distrusts, he’s taciturn, grim, and largely anti-social — a man of few words. This is, unfortunately, most people: Billy doesn’t know many people, and doesn’t usually get to know them, either. He comes from a time and place where most of the people he meets don’t take well to Asian gunslingers, or Asian anything else. Most of his interactions with strangers, in his mind, have been roundly unpleasant. He has a great deal of difficulty trusting people. He has even more difficulty socializing with them. Self-conscious about his foreignness as well as his English (despite his English being, in fact, quite good), Billy — a habitually quiet man in the first place — has trouble making idle conversation.

Once he opens up, though, he’s a man of wry humor and sharp honesty, soft and steadfast. Billy rarely makes commitments to other people, but if he does — overtly or just implicitly — he’ll keep his word, come hell or high water. He is, above all else, incredibly proud. He holds his head up high in the face of the censure of others, and he’s not above answering insults to his honor or his name (or Goodnight Robicheaux’s) with lethal force, if it comes to it. It’s not in him to grouse or complain, or to admit to weakness: if he’s got the flu, he’ll be the last person to mention it, and if he’s frightened or depressed, these are emotions he keeps to himself and his shot glass.

To his loved ones — a currently small category consisting of just his long-standing romantic and business partner, Goodnight Robicheaux — Billy is first and foremost a protector. He’s a guardian, a provider, and a caretaker, whatever he thinks a situation calls for, and he does all this as urgently and readily as breathing. Goodie’s reputation is Billy’s reputation, Goodie’s safety is Billy’s safety, and Billy is quick to interfere, in one way or another, if he catches even the slightest whiff of someone giving Goodie a hard time. He’ll go to any lengths to make sure Goodie has access to the medicine that he needs. Goodie, in Billy’s estimation, can take care of himself except when he can’t — and when he can’t, Billy’s there to take care of them both. That dedication is a strong motivator. Billy, who normally tends toward silence and self-sufficiency, and avoids being a burden on anyone, has no such qualms when he’s acting on Goodie’s behalf. Billy will hazard a thousand awkward conversations with irritating strangers or bear the racism of a thousand thousand white men if it’s for Goodie’s sake; and though he doesn’t enjoy it, he doesn’t question it, either.

In fact, Billy also relies on Goodie a great deal. Goodnight Robicheaux, for all his own hangups, is Billy’s guide and chaperone in the world, the man that keeps him out of trouble and clears the path for Billy to follow in his wake. He’s gregarious and social, and protects Billy from being socially overwhelmed. He’s keenly attentive to slights directed Billy’s way, and frequently cuts them off at the pass before Billy can even recognize the insult. What Billy doesn’t like doing, Goodie has no trouble with. And Goodie, for his part, spares Billy’s pride by never making an issue of it. They take care of each other. Billy Rocks, without Goodnight Robicheaux, is a very difficult man to get to know . . . but then, who and when is Billy Rocks without Goodnight Robicheaux, anyway? Where Goodie goes, Billy goes. They’re inseparable. Even on Sojourner. Even in death.

ABILITIES: Billy Rocks is not a man of many talents — not by his own estimation, anyway. According to him, he is a man of one talent: and that talent is in being faster than anyone else. To be fair, he is exceptionally fast — it’s just that a speedy reaction time, with a gun or with a knife, is not the sum total of Billy Rocks’s existence, regardless of his own opinion.

Physically, Billy is in excellent physical shape for his forties, athletic and creative in combat: he moves with fluidity and grace, and attacks with precision. He’s an experienced combatant, and it’s difficult to say where he best excels — put him in a fistfight and he’ll hold his own with vicious grace, hand him a gun and he’ll knock down targets at record speed — but his own preference, by far, is in the simplicity and versatility of knifework. The old adage cautions against bringing a knife to a gunfight; but this old adage appears not to have reckoned with Billy Rocks.

Less superlatively, Billy has a few other skills worth mentioning. Like any good Western drifter, he’s a very experienced card player and (if one counts it as a skill) boasts a high alcohol tolerance. He can ride a horse comfortably, cook basic survivalist meals, and roll his own (opium) cigarettes. He speaks Korean, Mandarin, and English fluently (although his English is accented).

POSSESSIONS: One pistol, about two dozen bullets, and one dozen knives of varying lengths, the majority of which are worn on his gun belt.

ANYTHING ELSE: Nah.