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[lastdecember]

User Name/Nick: Joe
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: Plurk: notJoe
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a

Character Name: Nicholas D. Wolfwood
Series: Trigum Maximum
Age: Uh... this is a complicated question for this character. He's probably about 20, but looks 40.
From When?: End of manga volume 10, right after he dies.

Inmate Justification: He’s stopped killing people by the time he dies, but he hasn’t yet accepted that violence isn’t the answer. He’s also incredibly self-isolating, in large part because of all the blood on his hands, and so without intervention he’d turn into a very lonely, bitter person.

Arrival: He is not here voluntarily! He's happy to not be dead, don't get him wrong, but nobody asked him if he wanted to be resurrected.

Abilities/Powers: At full strength Wolfwood is Winter Soldier strong -- he could punch through a brick wall or throw a motorcycle. I'm happy to nerf this strength down if needed.

His other superpower is his rapid healing. He's been surgically modified to heal faster than a normal human (broken bones heal in days instead of months), and he also used to have a magic potion that would allow him to heal any kind of damage. He doesn't have the potions anymore, and if needed I'll take away his quick healing too.

Beyond superpowered stuff, he's been trained extensively in combat so he's an excellent fighter, and his aim with any firearm is unmatched.

Inmate Information: Wolfwood was orphaned at a young age, and is shown to be a compassionate (if somewhat rough around the edges) as a kid. Around age 12 he’s taken by a cult and trained to be an assassin. He’s also subjected to medical experimentation that prematurely ages him, so by the time we meet him in canon he’s barely 18 but looks like he’s in his early 30s.

As part of his training, and then on assignment after that, Wolfwood has killed a lot of people. It’s heavily implied that he killed other children during his training, and given that the cult he’s working with is an apocalypse cult that sees humans as trash, it’s easy to assume that he’s killed non-combatants (including children) since then.

About age 18, at the end of his training, Wolfwood shoots his mentor (codenamed Chapel) and steals the man’s identity. He takes an invitation issued to Chapel to travel to a little town for a meeting with the other leaders of the cult. Wolfwood’s plan is to kill them, and prevent the cult from taking any more children and turning them into monsters like he is. However, when he arrives the other assassins there are terrifyingly strong, and the man the cult is built around (Millions Knives) is basically a god. He can’t do anything but stand back and watch as the friendly idiot (one Vash the Stampede) he met on the road transforms into a nightmare, and in the ensuing fight there’s such a big explosion that a new crater is blasted into one of the moons.

Wolfwood is then sent by Millions Knives to track down Vash and drag him back to Knives’s base. It takes him two years to find the man, and then they travel together for about a year. At first, the plan is simple enough – he will deliver Vash to Knives, and they’ll fight and kill each other. But as he and Vash travel together, he gets to like Vash against his better judgment, and so by the end of the journey he’s wracked with guilt for his part in Vash’s certain death. He’s spend his entire ‘adult’ life doing awful things to keep himself alive, though, so in the end Vash is a prisoner and Wolfwood is back under the boot of his (surprise!) not-dead mentor, Chapel.

All the moral gains of the past year are washed away as Wolfwood is forced to return to killing, and even worse, into helping to steal the power and water generators from town after town, condemning the residents there to certain death. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people die because of him during this time, while a good man is tortured. This guilt eats at Wolfwood until he can’t bear it any longer and he breaks Vash out of prison, nearly dying in the process.

As soon as he’s recovered from his injuries Wolfwood leaves again without telling anyone where he’s going. Knives’s ship has been seen turning toward the orphanage Wolfwood was raised in, so he goes alone to defend the place. Vash chases after him, but Wolfwood’s mortally wounded before Vash can arrive. During this fight, Wolfwood allows himself to be grievously injured so that the man he’s fighting – who, it turns out, is a little boy named Livio he’d known from the orphanage years ago – can have the time he needs to come to his senses. He saves Livio, and lives just long enough himself to have a touching final moment with Vash, where absolutely nothing of consequence is said.


— Protective: He's a human shield, by choice. His entire life has been sacrificing himself to protect others -- as a young child he took on babysitting responsibilities in the orphanage he was raised in, then he was taken by a cult and trained to be an assassin. He murdered his instructor in part to protect the kids at the orphanage from having to follow in his footsteps. While traveling with Vash he argues with the man constantly about keeping himself safe, and kills people several times to protect Vash and others. His entire story arc is putting himself in danger to save others, up to and including his death, protecting the orphanage from the cult who originally made him an assassin.

— Pragmatic: There's not a lot of hope in Wolfwood's worldview, but this just means that he can make hard decisions when everyone else around him is struggling to accept what has to be done. He's very much a glass half empty kind of person, who sees things "as they are", rather than as they could be. A bad person should be killed, in his view, rather than risking them causing more pain in the future, and he's willing to be the one to do the killing.

— Big brother: Even as a child, Wolfwood was a caretaker for the littler kids. He was denied a childhood himself, and so it's important to him that kids get to be kids -- he wants to protect them from danger, but also, to a degree, from responsibility. Childhood, to Wolfwood, should be a time of playing and goofing off, and children should be protected from seeing the cruelty of the world for as long as possible.

— Pessimist: Both hopeful and a pessimist? It's true! He really wants the world to be a better place and to believe in the best of people, but deep down he doesn't think that's possible. He thinks that most people are selfish, violent, and cruel, and he also believes for a very long time that people can't change. Vash changes his mind on this eventually, but not entirely – Wolfwood stops believing that everyone is awful as deserving of their fate, but he still thinks that some people don't deserve forgiveness.

— Violent: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Wolfwood doesn't have a hammer but he does have a really big gun. His response to most difficult situations is to shoot his way out – this is what he was trained to do by the Eye of Michael, and it even bleeds over into his personal life. When arguing with Vash he very often yells and hits him, sometimes with significant violence (he knocks Vash down more than once during an otherwise rather mild argument).

— Self-loathing: Wolfwood is a bad person who has done bad things, and he doesn't think that his hands can ever be clean again. Even though so many of the things he's done have been things he didn't have a choice in (being raised in a cult to be an assassin meant that he's been killing for a very long time), he still believes that he had a choice in the matter. He could have refused to kill. He could have run away. But he chose to stay, and stay alive, because he was afraid to die. This choice stained his soul, and he'll carry the guilt forever.



Path to Redemption: Wolfwood’s biggest issue is that he sees both himself and the world is the bleakest possible light. Life sucks, he’s a monster, but dying means the end of everything so it’s best to claw with tooth and nail for every miserable second of living available. He needs to find joy, or at least a kind of contentment, and he has to accept that he can be redeemed for his past sins. He’s terrible at working as part of a team (he’ll take orders, but that’s not the same thing at all) and that’s something he’ll need to correct as well.

His tolerance for awful shit is pretty high, so he’ll accept (for a given definition of the term) that he’s in a kind of purgatory where he can’t leave until he improves himself. He’s not a team player but he’s also not a rebel, so he’ll mostly keep to himself, at least to start.

The breaches are going to freak him right the fuck out.

For wardening, he’s not a talk therapy kind of guy. He needs to be shown a better way to be, and that’s going to take time and patience from somebody that Wolfwood respects. He won’t respond well to a gentle touch or a lot of talk about feelings. Put him in situations where he gets to be the hero without hurting anybody, or where he’s able to solve problems with his brain and/or heart instead of his fists. It'll help that he wants to graduate! He wants to be raised up to warden status so that he can leave the barge and return to his world and his responsibilities there. But it's going to be a difficult road to that graduation, because he really doesn't see any value in himself other than a brute object that others can use to cause pain.

He's going to need a job, and I'd love it if one could be assigned to him. He could do any of the non-specialist jobs (he can cook and clean) and he technically does have training as a pastor.

History: https://trigun.fandom.com/wiki/Nicholas_D._Wolfwood

Sample Network Entry: So we're dead? Is that true?

[ The man's voice is low, and a little gravelly, with a hint of a rough rural accent that will be familiar to nobody on the ship. He doesn't sound worried, per se, but he's definitely agitated. Angry, perhaps? ]

Is that what we're supposed to be buying here, that we're all dead? That this is some kind of damned underworld barge, sailing us through the afterlife towards our redemption? Ha!

[ There's the unmistakable sound of a lighter being sparked, and the crackle of paper as a cigarette's lit. ]

I've bought into a lot of bullshit in my life, but this? This is asking too much. Nobody's spending the time and effort to raise a couple of bastards from the dirt without demanding something in exchange, so whoever's in charge here, consider this your engraved invitation. Why are we really here?

[ And then, a little wearily: ]

Who's the enemy?


Sample RP: He jerks awake with a snort, and for a long moment Wolfwood just lies on that narrow motel bed, staring at the cracked plaster ceiling, waiting for his memories to catch up. He doesn't recognize this room but that's hardly a surprise -- every motel room looks like every other room after awhile, one sun-bleached set of curtains the same as the next. It's quiet, though, which is a nice change. It's daytime, but not stiflingly hot, even without any breeze coming from behind the closed curtains. With no smoke or dust on the air all he can smell is dried blood, which isn't nearly as nice... but it's not unusual, either. He's used to waking up with the stink of death in his nose, used to feeling the crunch of dried blood -- and sometimes worse -- as he shifts and feels his jacket pulling. He and death are old friends, so he doesn't...

I made a friend.

Panic spikes his heartbeat as Wolfwood sits bolt upright, pawing at his chest for signs of injury, fingers knotting in the worn material as he remembers the terrible feeling of his heart stopping.

He's supposed to be dead. Isn't he? He doesn't want to be dead, didn't want to die, but he remembers fighting against the heaviness of his breathing and the shadows clawing at the edges of his vision, remembers the fear when the pain grew unbearable and the worse fear when the pain stopped. He remembers that moment of hope, when everything he'd ever wanted was offered to him, and the bottomless grief as he felt it being pulled away. It happened. He died. He's dead.

Dead, and resurrected once more.

With a whoop Wolfwood launches himself out of the bed, and say hallelujah, it's true! He's got no injuries, not a single one. Sure, his suit's a ruined mess, but that's no matter. He's mended it before and so he pays the dried blood and flapping bullet holes no mind in the slightest as he heads for the door. He did it! That fucked up serum dragged him back from the brink one final time -- he's alive! He's alive!

"Oi, Spikey!"

The door to a previously unoccupied cabin on level 3 bursts open, and Wolfwood makes it three exhuberant paces into the hallway before his surroundings register. This isn't any motel he's ever seen before. Behind him is an ordinary motel room door, with ordinary dusty furniture, but this hallway is luxurious in a way he's never seen before. This isn't a rich man's house, or the ship that called itself the Village, or any other place he's ever seen or imagined. This isn't familiar, at all.

And it's right about then that he realizes that his shoulder holster is empty. He's unarmed.